American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “That leaves the two million and premeditation. The weed slows down your thinking. Some people think that makes it clearer.”

  “Musicians, mostly.” He shook his head. “He never struck me as greedy when he played ball. I remember once the club offered him a hundred grand back when that was money for a professional athlete, and him going through a slump, with a wife and a mortgage and a mother in a nursing home. He turned it down; told them to give him half and save the rest for someone who’d had a better year. People change for the worse when they change at all, but to me that story earns him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I always said you were too softhearted for this job.”

  “Fuck you. I can still take you down for withholding six hours at the beginning of an investigation when they count most. You already missed supper at County. It was corned beef.”

  “I know. The chef could work anywhere if he didn’t keep breaking parole. I still think you’re a pussycat. What’s Bairn got to say for himself?”

  “I’ll ask him when he turns up. He left the office early today and nobody’s seen him since. In this business we call that part of a suspicious pattern. We’ve got a BOLO out on him and his car, an asshole-ugly orange Aztek. Him I like for it,” he said. “He went home, found her waiting to jump him about the stolen watch, and events took their usual course. In those cases we usually find the guy waiting to confess, but not always. Bairn sounds like a runner to me, and a prick to boot. There won’t be a wet eye in the courtroom when he goes down for Man One.”

  “So you figure Deirdre was running a bluff when she told Darius they were getting married right away.”

  “Had to be. She was already pissed off at herself for getting mixed up with a petty thief and a fortune hunter, so she lashed out at the old man when he said pretty much the same thing. Part of being family means knowing just where to hit to cause the most pain. She had plenty of steam left when she confronted the boyfriend and broke off the relationship.”

  “Why Man One? Any halfway decent lawyer can plead a case like that down to second-degree. Bairn was too desperate over his own situation to think before he struck.”

  “We already know he was behind on his rent. I called the MGM Grand and Motor City and Greektown; that’s SOP in this kind of scenario. He’s banned from them all for bouncing checks for his losses. They put collection agencies on him and there are two court orders pending to garnish his wages. His boss at the medical courier place turned him down on an advance. You have to guess he tried his luck with the sharks and illegal clip joints around town, and their collection agencies don’t bother with the courts. I’d say he was desperate.” He drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. “Only thing that keeps this whole theory from being a slam dunk is forensics.”

  I was playing with a cigarette. You can’t smoke there anymore so I hadn’t lit it. I put it carefully back in the pack. “It wasn’t a blow to the temple?”

  “ME’s prelim didn’t find anything to dispute it. She has a contusion in the right place for a cerebral hemorrhage or subdural hematoma, which picks its time according to the force of the blow. Sweepsters came up negative on skin cells on the metal lamp shade and all of the other surfaces she might have come into contact with when she fell or was pushed. A fist might do it, but I’ve never run across a fatal case except once at Joe Louis Arena.”

  “Ring injury?”

  He nodded. “You have to hit hard in just the right spot. Frankly, I don’t think Bairn had the horsepower.”

  “Blunt instrument?”

  “The ME will know for sure when he peels back the flap. Nothing in the apartment tested for the weapon, which meant he carried it away with him. That complicates a plea for second-degree.”

  For no particular reason I thought about a beanball. I recalled Darius Fuller being ejected a time or two for throwing at a batter’s head. I stopped thinking about it. To begin with it was stupid, but I’m also superstitious about cooking up theories against a client in the presence of experienced police officials. They read minds.

  “Did the watch turn up?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see it in the inventory, either from the apartment or at work. His boss let us look. It would more or less make our case if we find it in his possession. She’d likely have had it with her when she jumped him, and it would put him on the scene. That’s if they hadn’t already had that conversation earlier, in which case we can’t even show they fought today.”

  I spread my hands. “Are we good?”

  He said nothing while the rain bucket improvised new chords. Then he opened a drawer and flipped a familiar envelope onto the desk. It made a smack. “We’re good. Until I have to come back to you for what you’re still sitting on.” He watched me pick up the envelope. “You might want to count the bills.”

  “You I trust.” I put it in an inside pocket.

  “You’d be screwing yourself. I slipped in an extra twenty. You won the bet. Mary Ann Thaler called. She got the job. Going to hold hands with snitches for the U.S. Marshals.”

  ELEVEN

  At the end of the first full day on the job I didn’t know if I had one. That added to the exhaustion. I took down the bottle from the cupboard over the sink where it had been cooking all day in the lack of air-conditioning, poured the contents over ice, and watched the cubes on top spontaneously combust in a cloud of steam. The ones on the bottom cracked and shifted like tectonic plates. The liquor tasted like ammonia, but I hadn’t chosen the label for the flavor. In a little while I got undressed, slid between the sheets, and rode the mattress until I slept. My tolerance was on the retreat. One collateral benefit of growing older is it doesn’t cost as much to get drunk.

  In the morning, pooch-eyed and hollow, I filled and turned on the coffee machine and took a tepid shower. It was seventy-five out already and as I toweled off, last night’s dew was lifting outside the window like a glassine curtain. A silver Hummer brumbled past, looking like an Erector Set on wheels; I felt its sonic system under my feet all the way from the upper end of Joseph Campau. Slumming, from Birmingham or Bloomfield Hills or the Pointes. The first month’s payment alone would get you a crib well outside the Detroit zip code.

  It came back the other way as I was dressing. From the bedroom window I could see the driver craning his neck, reading addresses. He hadn’t much to crane. His head in profile sat like Stonehenge square on his shoulders. At the end of my driveway he came to a full stop, then backed up to make the turn. He still managed to bump a rear tire over the curb, leaving a waffle-patterned impression for future paleontologists to puzzle over. For a full minute after he braked, no one came out. The big bass speakers in the back continued pumping, rocking the body on its springs with each downstroke and radiating vibes through the bedrock under Hamtramck and the city that surrounded it.

  I didn’t like it and I hadn’t a gun in the house. The Chief ‘s Special was at the office and I’d left the Luger in the car. A serious oversight, given the turn the case was taking, but I could punish myself for it later, if I lived. When the door opened on the driver’s side and a foot came down—a foot in a size-fourteen boot with flames on the toes, stepping right past the hammered-steel tread for climbing up and down—I went back to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and took the steaming carafe with me when the doorbell rang. Scalding liquid is better than no gun at all, especially if you go for the eyes.

  The eyes would have been a reach. Normal-size doorways would always be a challenge for this one. He wore a gray hoodie sweatshirt—in that heat—with yellow lettering on the front that informed me someone very large had attended the Rhode Island School of Engineering and Design. I couldn’t tell if he was black or white. He had flat features that might have been Polynesian, or the result of some miscue in the genetic code, and his skin was cinnamon. Little patches of scar tissue like tape adhered to the corners of his eyes. His big heavy-veined hands hung at his sides with the fingers curled. His elbows bent slightly; shortening of the tendon
s caused by overtraining with weights. I was going to have to put on a second pot to make any sort of dent.

  One of the hands came up. I stepped back to get a good swing with the carafe, but he was only looking at a scrap of paper stuck between his thumb and forefinger. “Your number’s down.” His voice was shallow and a little high, a waste of all that room in his chest. “Right place for Walker?”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  He chuckled. That floored me. I wouldn’t have thought even a good joke would make it through all that muscle and bone. “Yeah. The girl in the office said you weren’t long on straight answers.”

  “Which girl and which office?”

  “Tracy. ABC Tool and Die?”

  I’d half worked it out before he gave me the name of Wilson Watson’s front in Warren, but I’d wanted to make sure. Watson was a small man physically who liked to surround himself with big men, like Stalin, and had done all his recruiting from the Mr. Universe block at Jackson. Between the weights and the steroids smuggled in by crooked guards, it was a wonder this one hadn’t just pushed down the west wall.

  I said, “I’ve always wondered. What does a tool and die shop do?”

  “I don’t know. I never been inside and neither has Wilson. We can come in, right?”

  He was the least pushy strongarm I’d ever met and the closest to polite. He was a big dog you could lay your head on and listen to its heart thump in its deep hollow chest, that could gobble you up bones and all. “We meaning you? You’re big, but you don’t qualify for a group rate.”

  He turned a quarter inch and made some kind of gesture. I couldn’t see it because he still filled the door. A car door thunked, gravel crunched. The eclipse passed. When his tame elk stepped aside, Wilson Watson hopped up onto the front stoop.

  He was short, a round torso perched on spindles that turned out at the knees, a textbook example of a vitamin A deficiency in early childhood. He wore an eight-ball jacket that made me sweat to look at it, a suede cap with the bill cocked over his left ear, and black leather pants swiped from the fashion department at Toys ‘R’ Us, two hundred bucks of NBA advertising on his feet, which were the largest thing about him and turned out also, anchoring him to the ground. He looked like one of those stuffed lacquered frogs they prop up on their hind legs and sell in souvenir shops, holding fishing poles or strumming little guitars.

  My poker face must have slipped, because a pair of yellow eyes stared up at me from a round puddle of mediumbrown skin with a stringy Fu Manchu moustache and a tiny pubic patch in the hollow of the chin. “The fuck you gawking at?”

  “I just got out of bed. I dreamed the eighties were over.”

  “Funny joke,” explained the big man to the side of the door. “Man don’t know from retro.”

  “Let’s inside. You got Zima?”

  “Scotch and beer,” I said. “I’m not sure about the Scotch. It’s got a Little Rock accent.”

  “That went out with Reagan. Just pour me a cup of shit.”

  I realized then I was still holding the coffeepot. Outside, the Hummer’s speakers were still humping the frame. Between percussions the engine continued to idle. “You should lock up your ride. The neighborhood’s on the downhill run.”

  The big man spoke up. “Wilson’s name’s on the plate. That’s way better than the Club.”

  I stepped out of the path and Watson crabwalked inside, swinging his arms for momentum and setting each foot square with a loud slap. The temperature dropped five degrees as his companion dragged his shade over me, following. The big man swiveled his head from side to side on the way through the living room. “I was wrong,” he said. “The man do know from retro.”

  “It was all new when I brought it home.”

  Watson went straight through to the kitchen, which said something about his background, and sat down in the little breakfast nook. The heavy lifter didn’t even try. He stood in front of the refrigerator, just another major appliance, with his arms bent and the scrap of paper with my address still in one hand. He seemed to have forgotten he had it.

  I plonked a mug down in front of his boss. “How do you take it?”

  “Black as my ass.”

  The big man grinned. “You ask, he’ll show you.”

  I was starting to like him. I asked him what his name was.

  “Ain’t got one,” Watson said. “I never have to call him, he’s right there all the time.”

  “Elron,” the big man said. “My mother was a Scientologist.”

  I said, “I think that’s L. Ron, with an initial. L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. You know he wrote science fiction.”

  “So what? Mohammed wrote poetry.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I studied all the religions, Scientology’s still the best. I knew about L. Ron, so did my mother. Clerk that filled out the birth certificate was a Southern Baptist.”

  I liked him. I wondered where I could hit him that wouldn’t break my hand.

  Watson watched me fill his mug, then get out two more. “Don’t bother watering Elron. He only drinks protein, straight from the jug.”

  “Leetle powdered creamer,” Elron said. “Nondairy.”

  “Sorry. All I’ve got is milk.”

  “That tears up my stomach. Make it black.”

  “You can take pills for that.” I filled the other mugs.

  “I take eighty vitamins a day now. I got to piss sometime.”

  “Just let me know when you two finish fucking so we can talk,” Watson said.

  “Sorry, Wilson,” I said. “I forgot you were there. You want a cruller?”

  “Don’t want no cruller, no bear claw, no fucking Krispy Kremes. Call me Wilson again, Elron’ll sit on your head till it pops. You and I ain’t that close.”

  “Sorry again. I keep forgetting which one goes first.”

  “Neither one. My first name’s Woodrow, but you don’t call me that neither. You want to talk or just go on farting through your mouth?”

  “So talk.” I took a long slug. The caffeine rolled up its sleeves and went to work.

  “Sit down first. When I talk to somebody I look them in the eye.”

  There were several directions I could go with that, but it was too early in the day to have my head sat on by Elron. I slid onto the bench opposite Watson. He sat hunched over the narrow table with both hands around his mug as if to warm them. I seemed to be the only one in the room who sweated.

  “How’s the labor business?”

  “Fuck you care? You belong to a local?”

  “No. The detective trade is strictly right-to-work, when you can get it. I was just filling an embarrassing lull in the conversation.”

  Elron chuckled. He sounded a little like Michael Jackson. I wondered if it was the vitamins.

  “Deirdre Fuller,” Watson said.

  I almost spilled my coffee. It came out “Dee-dee” the way he said it; Darius’s pet name for his daughter. But some people had trouble pronouncing it right. I set the mug down carefully. “She’s dead.”

  “She was dead last night on Channel Four. She was still dead this morning on CNN. I don’t read the papers, but I bet you the short money she’s dead there too. What I want to talk about is why you think I give a shit.”

  “I wasn’t sure, until you showed up here. If you didn’t, you’d be out picketing some gambling hell.”

  “I ain’t got the legs for it. I do give a shit, as it happens, strictly as a fan of her old man’s. It wasn’t for the sixty-eight Series, I’d of hung myself in my cell. It was my one bright light. I was in a bad way that year. The Man took me down for exercising my civil rights.”

  “You torched a Radio Shack with the owner lying inside with a concussion you gave him. Cops checked him into Receiving with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. I didn’t see anything about that in the Constitution.”

  “That was his choice. No one made him be there, sitting on his merch with a
baseball bat across his lap. He was lucky I only hit him with it once. Lots of folks died of dumb that week.”

  “It was going around,” Elron said.

  “Shut the fuck up. You wasn’t even a stain on your daddy’s underpants when all that came down.”

  “The owner was black,” I said. “But I guess some people’s rights aren’t as civil as others’.”

  Watson uncurled a hand from his mug to make an expansive gesture. He had a mermaid tattooed on the heel of his palm. “Over and done and dead. I let go of my anger when my parole came through. They had a honey of a shrink at Jackson. He put me in touch with my emotions. They flew right out between the bars. You read Jung?”

  “Young who?”

  “Carl Jung, you ignorant son of a bitch. Freud was a dirty old Kraut. When he was running around telling everybody they was motherfuckers, Jung was busy discovering the collective unconscious. We all part of the whole, starting with the monkeys.”

  “I thought that was Darwin.”

  “He was an anthropologist. I read everything Jung wrote I could get through the prison library system. I started my own outside. You want to guess how many books been written just about him?”

  “Don’t,” Elron said. “Wilson’s got a warehouse full in Sterling Heights. Costs him fifteen hundred a month just for storage.”

  I said, “You should hang out a shingle. Most cons who read inside come out lawyers. A jailhouse psychiatrist could write his own ticket in this town.”

  “Deirdre Fuller,” Watson said. “Think I had anything to do with that deal?”

  “Which deal, the killing deal or the deal you had with Hilary Bairn?”

  “He tell you about that?”

  I took another pull from my mug. I felt my nerves tamping down. “I know he stumbled into your ATM trap. You sent your boy Esmerelda to talk to him, probably with his famous black toolbox for a visual aid, and Bairn told him about his relationship with Deirdre and the trust fund she had coming. You didn’t believe him, or thought two months was too long, long enough anyway for Bairn to figure a way to cheat you out of whatever cut he offered you. Maybe Esmerelda opened his box, maybe he didn’t, but whatever he did spooked Bairn into trying to raise cash in a hurry to keep him from driving a nail through his hand.