American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You can get almost anything off the Net. I don’t know how a guy like you stays in business.”

  “You called me.”

  He set down his glass on a shelf, stood twisting his ring for ten seconds, then reached up to lift a trophy off a shelf higher up. I saw the year engraved in brass and a figure sprinting on top. Before the time of the designated hitter he’d come close to leading the American League in stolen bases. He used a pocketknife to unscrew a plate from the bottom and shook a thick roll of bills out into his palm. He replaced the trophy and held up the roll. The outside bill was a hundred.

  “Fifty thousand,” he said. “I squirreled it away where the bloodsuckers couldn’t find it. You said on the phone you’re bonded for up to a million?”

  “The more I screw up, the more I’m worth. Only I’ve never screwed up that way. What makes you think Bairn will take it?”

  He squinted at me as if I’d corked my bat. “You’re pretty quick.”

  I passed on that. “When does Deirdre turn twenty-five?”

  “Two months.”

  “You don’t have to be as good with money as you say Bairn is to know two months isn’t too long to wait for two million. I’ve had my face laughed in before. You might not like it so much.”

  “I know some guys I can call if he does. You might let that slip when you’re negotiating. I’d’ve called them first, only I’d rather be in debt to the government.”

  “He could pocket the cash and elope anyway. Then you’ll have to call your guys and be into them and out fifty grand besides.”

  He took out his wallet again and handed me a folded square of paper. “You’ll have him sign this agreement to stay away from Dee-dee before you give him the money. Then I’ll show it to her. She won’t believe me if it’s just my word, but she’s studying to pass the bar. A signature on a piece of paper means a lot more to her than her old dad’s word. She’ll do the rest.”

  I slid the snapshot inside the fold without opening it. “Is this about your daughter or the two million?”

  “Yeah, you can ask that.” But his face was tight. “There’s two times in your life when money doesn’t mean anything: When you’ve got plenty and when you haven’t got a cent. If I had it, I’d give it to him to get out of her life. I don’t want her to make the same mistake her mother and the others did. Dee-dee’s the only thing I ever did that counted. The rest is just a dusty column in The Baseball Encyclopedia and a cigar box full of trading cards.”

  A bawling, wordless voice drifted in from across the backyard and the other side of the big house, rising and falling like a wood chipper chewing up brush: The auctioneer had taken up his post and started his spiel. I asked Fuller what was stopping him from negotiating with Bairn himself.

  “My face has been in the paper a lot more than yours. If it gets into the scandal sheets I’ve lost her forever. She’ll take Bairn’s side.” He tossed the roll from one hand to the other and back. “You trying to talk yourself out of this job?”

  “I just want to know what the job is. If you said rough him around and I said okay, he’d think he wandered into Baghdad, but I don’t do that sort of work. I’ll be your bag man, but I never split a knuckle on a jaw I didn’t have personal issues with. I’m not one of those guys you can call.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t send for a southpaw when a left-hander’s at bat.”

  “I never really understood that.”

  “Me neither. If Sparky’d left me in in eighty-four the series would’ve been over in four. But you get what I mean.”

  I nodded. I’d heard all the sports metaphors I cared to for one day. “I charge a grand and a half up front. Got that much squirreled away besides the fifty?”

  He slid the big ring off his finger and held it out. I took it. It was heavier than a .45 slug, solid gold or the next thing to it, with a diamond at each of the four points of a diamond shape on the dome. The engraving was worn, but still legible;

  WORLD SERIES

  1968

  “Have it appraised,” he said. “Take what the jeweler says and times it by ten. Don’t hock it. I expect to buy it back when I scrape up the cash.”

  “Is it yours to give?”

  The gray eyes turned to granite. “I didn’t see any of them government suits in the outfield when I struck out Lou Brock.”

  TWO

  AMOS WALKER: Detective

  HEIGHT: 6′ ¾˝

  WEIGHT: 185

  SHOOTS: Right

  BA: .199

  HOME: Detroit, Michigan

  That’s how the trading card would read if they issued them for private investigators. Still a fair figure in the box, a little windworn, with silver tips in his five o’clock shadow. Strictly Flatbush, but when the windage is right and the sun’s where it needs to be he can occasionally clear the fence in left field. And good job, because he runs bases like a three-legged dog. Anyway he hasn’t been traded to Cleveland.

  Hilary Bairn put his business degree to use keeping the books for a medical courier service in Mt. Clemens, a firm that sent frozen eyeballs to Australia and tongue depressers to Kansas City. The building was a Rubik’s cube of aluminum and smoked glass across from St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital. At three minutes past five my first day at work he came off the elevator and went out across the baking sheet of a parking lot with me close on his heels. He had the lease on an orange Aztek, as ugly a piece of transportation as ever fell off the back of a haulaway. I’d gotten its registration from the secretary of state’s office and was parked three slots down from it. I followed him into the street with my air conditioner wheezing a stench of scorched metal. I was in no hurry to make direct contact.

  He was a handsome devil in a carefully dissipated sort of way, hair unbrushed and bleached corn yellow, a tiny loop in his left ear, and stubble on his cheeks and chin. They make razors now that crop off the top layer and leave the rest for seed. He was slender, not tall, in a cellophane-thin double-breasted that flapped unbuttoned when he walked, over a black T-shirt and a thin gold band around his neck. No one can do Euro trash as well as the Europeans, so the effect was slightly Halloweenish; when he parked in the narrow resident lot next to his apartment building and got out, a group of black youths waiting to cross the street swiveled their heads in his wake, smacking one another on the shoulder and grinning fit to split their heads in two. This was downtown, and the fashion cops had infiltrated the last sloppy ball cap and pair of baggy drawers. Bairn spun through the revolving door without appearing to notice.

  I settled in to wait in a fifteen-minute zone across the street. Darius Fuller’s fifty thousand and World Series ring sat in my bank box, a brisk walk from where I was staked out. The reason most private agents charge three days’ pay in advance is it takes at least twenty-four hours to check the client’s story. For all I knew the Hilary/Deirdre romance was a blind to cover the fact I was the mule in a drug deal or a contract killing.

  So far everything checked out. Bairn lived straight up for a fish on the extreme right end of the food chain, but that’s not so hard to do in a plastic society. The credit check I’d run said he’d missed two payments on the Aztek, had paid off his American Express bill on a Discover account, and spent next to nothing on the six hundred or so square feet he rented in a block of Woodward Avenue undergoing gentrification. Detroit had fallen off the list of the nation’s ten most populous cities and landlords were waiving leases and damage deposits right and left just to make expenses. You could live like a king in the Motor City if you could put up with the meth lab in the palace down the hall.

  The fifteen minutes ran out, and fifteen more, and no one rousted me. All four lanes filled with cars making the run home north to the developments and south to Jefferson and the Pointes. A mounted officer clip-clopped up the sidewalk looking for unbuckled seat belts and passed me right by. My guess was he wasn’t going to discourage anyone who’d decided to stay put in town. I busied myself monkeying with the cellular tele
phone I’d bought to replace my electronic pager and the answering service I’d used for twenty-five years. The gizmo came with a forty-page manual translated by someone who’d learned his Japanese in a Greek restaurant and his English in Mexico City. Its nearest relay tower was assembly-required; it stopped sending and receiving signals every time its aircraft light went off and on. I had a two-year service contract.

  After forty minutes all the air had begun to rush out of rush hour, and Hilary Bairn came out of the building jiggling his keys. He’d ditched the suit and put on a pair of pressed cargo pants and those running shoes that wink at you from the heels. When the Aztek nosed out into the uptown lane I turned over the engine and fell in two cars behind.

  Entering westbound I-96 we nudged our way through a knot that had tied itself to observe a motorist changing a tire on the right shoulder and lockstepped through eight miles of barrels and barricades and no construction going on. West of Dearborn Heights we opened up to eighty-five, passing a few and getting passed by a lot. I hung back between eight and twelve car lengths, changing lanes only when it became necessary to avoid crawling up the trunk of a daisy-picker doing seventy. So far as I could tell, Bairn never looked up into his rearview mirror. We swirled down a ramp that turned into a complete circle, coasted into the town of Plymouth, and crept along streets made into tunnels by shade trees past gift and antiques shops and strollers in flip-flops and shorts. It’s a painted-tin community, strictly for the amusement of transients and for commuters from Detroit and the college towns to the west to lay their heads.

  Finally he turned into a square lot next to the Mayflower Hotel, a convincing example of Tudor architecture near the main four corners, and slid into the last slot. I drove around the block and found a spot next to the curb. All the meters had been pulled up by the roots years before to encourage trade. Inside, the chief attraction was the restaurant, cool and timbered and paneled with piano music treacling from the direction of the bar. Bairn was seated in a booth at the back, chatting with a waitress filling his water glass from a pitcher. I went to the bar, took a stool, and asked the chunky party who came up to me for a Corona.

  “Lime?”

  “No, I’m watching my weight.”

  He forged a die-cast bartender’s smile and clunked down a bottle and a glass on a square napkin. Smoke curled from the neck and beads glistened like freshwater pearls on the outside of the bottle. I let the glass stand and drank directly from the source. The cold seared my teeth.

  A few minutes later Deirdre Fuller came in, paused to let her eyes catch up with the light, then smiled and walked Bairn’s way. She wore her straight black hair in a diagonal across her forehead, bending out just below the ears, and a white summer dress that clung to all the hollows and drifted around her knees. Her shoulders and arms and legs were bare, her feet bare in white cork sandals, an even caramel in contrast. She was a living hot-fudge sundae.

  Bairn smiled up from his seat, didn’t rise when she slid in opposite him, and when the waitress returned ordered for himself first. That buried whatever sympathy I might have had for Hilary Bairn. I nursed my beer while they ate and conversed in low voices lost in the rustle as others came in to dine. When the bartender asked if I wanted another I started to shake my head, then caught the movement out of the tail of my eye when Bairn leaned over to take something from a pocket in his cargo pants. I nodded and pushed aside the first bottle, which had grown tepid.

  The something was a small humpbacked box. I seemed to have happened upon a momentous occasion. But the box was too big for an occasion that large.

  He let her open it. It contained a gold watch with a blue dial and a link band, too heavy for the feminine wrist. She snapped the lid shut without comment and slid it into her purse, woven white leather with a rolled handle. The meal finished in silence. When the check came, he paid for it with a card, got up finally to kiss her, signed the receipt, and went out past the bar with her on his arm. A light scent of sweet almonds came behind her.

  I paid for the beers and stood outside the entrance from the parking lot tapping a cigarette on the back of the pack as Bairn and Deirdre separated, he to the left, she to the right, toward an emerald Mini Cooper with a white convertible top. I made up my mind to let Bairn go, trotted to my car, and followed the smaller vehicle. That watch had me curious. Several blocks ahead, Bairn’s Aztek turned onto the expressway headed home, but Deirdre continued past and swung south on Beck Road. Her father had said she clerked in a law office in Westland but kept an apartment in Ann Arbor, where she’d entered the law program at the University of Michigan last fall. She took I-94 west in that direction. She exited in Ypsilanti.

  In Depot Town, a Bohemian neighborhood of pubs and curiosity shops that had sprung up around the old train station, we parked on gravel and I watched her trot around the corner of a pawnshop. I had my hand on the door handle to follow her on foot when she turned in at the pawnshop door. I settled back and cracked a window to smoke.

  Just as I poked the stub out through the crack she came back out, cork heels clocking, both hands on the purse held in front of her and a pinched look on her face. She underhanded the purse into the Mini Cooper’s passenger seat, got in, ground the starter, and sprayed gravel backing around and powering out into the street. The driver of a light pickup chirped his brakes to avoid getting clipped and made a mincing little noise with his horn.

  I didn’t follow Deirdre. Instead I got out and went into the pawnshop. A buzzer sounded when I opened the door. There were bars on the windows and the counter had a steel cage on top with a gate that slid to one side to allow the free exchange of goods and currency. You can tell a lot about an enterprise from its fixtures. This one was tricked out like Jackson State Prison.

  The man behind the counter was a young Arab with a blue chin. I didn’t mess around with a story or the honorary sheriff’s badge. Pawnshop clerks have heard them all and seen every star and shield. I poked a twenty-dollar bill through the cage. He didn’t look at it, only at me. His face assumed a patience of biblical proportions.

  “A light-skinned black woman was just in,” I said. “Buy anything from her?”

  “No.” He snatched the bill from between my fingers before I could exert counterpressure. From there on in it was up to my personal charm—and whatever else I had in my wallet.

  “Why not?”

  He said nothing.

  I blew out air. “You guys. Why do you have to make it a chore? A couple of bars doesn’t make you a hard guy. A monkey’s got those.”

  He reached under the counter and clonked a Glock on top. It had a brushed-metal finish and black composition grips.

  I showed him my ID. “I’m working for her father. Darius Fuller, maybe you know the name. Follow sports?”

  His face changed then. You could have knocked me over with a mortar. It was like watching the toughest head on Rushmore crack a grin.

  “I was in the bleachers when he threw the no-hitter,” he said. “No joke, that was the Fuller Brush Man’s little girl?”

  “If you’d bought the watch you’d have a souvenir.”

  The face shut back down. “The price tag was still in the box. Whoever lifted it was too dumb to tear it in half.”

  I put away the ID folder. “Thanks, brother.”

  “Famous men’s kids. You know?”

  “She wasn’t the one who lifted it. If it makes any difference.”

  He thought about that. “It checks. She seemed madder about it than I was.”

  “Report it?”

  “To who, the police? I reported every funny customer I’d be on the phone all day. I’d report you,” he said.

  I thanked him again and left.

  I drove back to Detroit, stopped in the office to pay some bills and study the cell phone manual again under a bright light, decided that knowing how to retrieve messages wasn’t a high priority in the current business climate, and went home to a sandwich, a drink, two hours of police drama and funny home videos o
f cats on fire, and bed.

  Sleep took its time coming. The Fourth of July was still days off, but that didn’t keep some of the neighbors from test-firing the ordnance they’d smuggled in from roadside stands in Indiana: There were thumps, stuttering strings of firecrackers, and now and then the bass note of a shotgun. I lit a cigarette without turning on the light and blew smoke at a ceiling that glimmered from time to time in the reflective burst of a bottle rocket, wondering if all those stories I’d read and movies I’d seen about misunderstood suitors were full of hooey. The worst part of the work is on some level you always hope the client is wrong.

  Next day I did all the morning stuff, put on my second-best suit, and took my spot in the loading zone across from Hilary Bairn’s apartment house just in time to watch him leave for the office in Mt. Clemens. Then I rode up to his floor in a brass Otis on a smooth new cable and let myself into his apartment with my nifty pocket burglar kit. I wasted time on Bairn’s underwear drawer and medicine cabinet and porno library, then looked at his appointment calendar, fixed with a magnetic strip to the refrigerator in the toy kitchen. He’d drawn a line through his most recent appointment, the day before yesterday:

  2:00 P.M. Sing

  Nothing in Bairn’s profile had indicated any particular interest in music; but in the circles I turned in, Sing meant something else.

  THREE

  Most Detroiters have never heard of Detroit Beach, a quiet little sun-faded community where gulls and sun-worshippers go to avoid the crowds on Belle Isle and at Port Huron. Few of them know they owe the spot to the pioneers who chopped down trees four generations ago to land high-powered boats loaded to the gunnels with whiskey smuggled from Canada; by then the Detroit riverfront was filled with U.S. Coast Guardsmen with their hands out, and nearby Monroe with rival machine-gunners. The balmy days of Michigan are few, and bright umbrellas tend to sprout on every bloody patch of shore.