American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  He tore a match loose, looked at me out of his bruised sockets. “How much is there to it?”

  “What?” My eyes were watering. I couldn’t believe he couldn’t smell anything. I was afraid to move in case my belt buckle scraped the tab of my fly and made a spark.

  “When I axed you why you stuck on account of Deirdre Fuller, you said there was a little more to it. How much more?”

  “Not much. I’ve got a friend who’s a Detroit cop. He needed the collar.”

  “Far fucking out. Cop in the pocket’s worth two in the bush.” He placed the match against the scratcher.

  “I’m not going to tell him it was me set it up.”

  He looked up, poised to strike. “Why the hell not?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  He relaxed, lifting the match from the scratcher. The joint dangled from the corner of his lip. I sat back an inch, loosening cramped muscles. “Complicated? Shit, what’s complicated about it? You got a cop by the balls, you squeeze ’em for whatever comes out.”

  “My game’s a little different from yours. Like pro ball and college.”

  The sirens changed pitch, whooping as the emergency vehicles left the road and started across the roller-coaster surface of the ancient furrows in the field. He laid the book and the match in his lap and picked up the pistol. “Same game, man. What’s the play?”

  I leaned forward on the balls of my feet. “It’s like you and Elron. Uncool.”

  The ruined face set into a bloody mask. His finger whitened on the trigger. Then it relaxed. He made a chuckling sound in his throat, hawked one clear from the back, and spat a long stream laced with red and yellow. He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing it with blood, and picked up the matchbook. He tore off a fresh match. “Shit. You’re going to die piss-poor and dumb as dogshit.” He struck a flare of white flame.

  I was halfway up at the scratch and spun and launched myself away from the plane as the match caught fire. Then everything was taken out of my hands. A volume of heat and concussed air lifted me higher than I could leap and threw me farther than I could fall. I tucked myself into a tight ball to keep my fractured rib from puncturing my lung on impact and then the earth tilted up on its axis and whacked me on the shoulder and the head and the knee, clawing chunks out of my clothes and hide with the broken ends of cornstalks and sandblasting skin off the heels of my hands as I thrust them out to slow my momentum. But I sped up like a snowball rolling downhill and fetched up against something hard that turned out to be the whole world, on my back with my lungs as flat as empty pillowcases staring at a sky streaked with orange and yellow and billows of black smoke. Something whirled the length of my body, close enough to lift my hair with its slipstream. I found out later it was a landing gear. Then came the rain: dirt and soot and flaming bits that stung when they landed. I flung my arms across my eyes while the pieces pelted me, chuckling, sizzling, and stinging my nostrils with the stench of smoldering rags. There went my last suit. The air was broiling. I wanted to scream but I was afraid if I opened my mouth I’d sear my throat.

  By the time the first ambulance arrived, the air was cool enough to breathe. It smelled like fried liver.

  THIRTY

  Mary Ann Thaler looked jazzed. That was always a treat. “Canadian Customs caught Violet Pershing on the Ambassador Bridge,” she said. “They’re extraditing. I get to help relocate her when she spills everything she knows about Peninsular Realty. You’re looking extra crispy today,” she added.

  “You should see the other guy.” I lowered myself into the chair in front of her desk. The burned spots were healing nicely, but the rib was still giving me trouble.

  “I have, all of them. The coroner’s people had them lined up in a barn in Lackawanna County; what they managed to separate from the nonorganic material that burned with them, anyway. They’ve identified the pilot, who’d just had his license restored after DEA nol-prossed on drug charges—lack of evidence—and Victor Cho, whose prints were on file with the State Department, on the basis of a surviving finger. So far there’s just your testimony about the identity of the others. The one you said was Wilson Watson was close to the center of the blast, and so far there’s no lead on Elron No Last Name.”

  “They met in Jackson. You’ll find him in the records.”

  “Not the general you. Me. As the junior member of the team I get to sort through the dust bunnies in the file room. Watson and his homies served their time before computers.”

  “Wear old clothes. You get used to them.” I took out a cigarette and fished a throwaway lighter from my sport coat, a rusty orange item I’d been shoving around in my closet since it went out of style. The lapels were as wide as French doors.

  “No smoking here.”

  I put everything away. Here was an unventilated chamber on the eighteenth floor of the MacNamara Federal Building in downtown Detroit, with bare drywall and a track light hanging above a desk made of regurgitated material, and it wasn’t even hers. She had it on loan for the conversation from the next head up on the totem pole, who’d inherited it from a Xerox machine.

  “If you’d come to me, I’d have put a tracking device on you and we’d have Charlotte Sing downstairs,” she said. “Instead she flew from Buffalo to Quebec on a driver’s license and birth certificate in the name of Jennifer Yin and vanished in the Canadian northwoods. Judging by how conscientious our neighbors to the north are about keeping terrorists from crossing into the U.S., I’d say she’s sleeping off the jet lag in a country without an extradition treaty right now.”

  “They play good hockey,” I said. “Watson or Elron would have found the tracking device while I was out and buried us both up in Oakland County. Then Madame Sing would be on her way around the world, distributing black market body parts like sugarplums and trading them for fully assembled illegal aliens. I went to John Alderdyce and told him I was a target,” I added. “That was the deal. You wanted him to get the collar and the credit.”

  “On the Fuller murder. Not Sing. Sing was ours.”

  “I said I might have to bring her in too.”

  “I thought you were kidding.”

  I said, “This is a communication problem, and it’s not mine. John put men on me, they lost me in the crush on I-Seventy-Five. It was someone’s responsibility at Thirteen Hundred to notify the feds that Detroit was conducting an investigation that included Charlotte Sing. Someone did, in last night’s News. This morning in the Free Press he didn’t. Which is it?”

  “We’re looking at that. Ever since the Big Shuffle, all the Washington and local agencies have been instructed to cooperate, but you don’t reverse a decades-long game of Hide the Sausage overnight. So far it looks like John went through the chain of command. Whether the broken link occurred down on Beaubien or inside the Beltway is what we’re trying to find out. Congress will probably get involved after the internal investigation finishes, and somebody with his pension securely in place will be retired publicly, and Sing will still be out there, rebuilding her organization stone by stone. Then we’ll have to start all over again.”

  “Job security. Speaking of which, how does John’s stand?”

  “So far it’s standing, no thanks to you. The DPOA has pledged to go to court to block the department reorganization and protect the rank and file from demotions and layoffs. There’s no love lost between the mayor and the Hall of Justice, so the judge will probably issue a restraining order. He’s safe until the city goes in debt another million dollars, which should be about next week.”

  Independence Day had come and gone while I was in the Lackawanna County General Hospital, recovering from burns and concussion, and multiple sprains; you don’t count ribs. I didn’t mind having missed the fireworks. The heat wave had turned into a tide, with no rain on the radar to push it back out, and with the door closed for privacy and no access to the airconditioning ducts the closet felt like a Dutch oven. Not that you could tell it by looking at U.S. Marshal-in-Training
Thaler: Her gray silk jacket and dark blue shirt-and-tie set were crisp and there wasn’t a bead of perspiration in her backswept hair. She wore reading glasses for the benefit of the field reports she had spread out on the desk. That made her the Mary Ann I remembered, a sexy librarian who looked as if she might be persuaded to take out the bobby pins under the right circumstances. So far I hadn’t found them.

  She held up a report. “Last week the CEO of an organ bank in Southfield filed a ten-million-dollar claim with the insurance company because of a faulty thermostat. We’ve got a court order demanding he produce the spoiled inventory. We’ll settle for five years in Milan and evidence of his deal with Charlotte Sing. Ten million, that’s how much your little wienie roast cost the world in transplantable organs.”

  “According to her it was worth more on the black market.”

  “Think you’re a good trade for the potential loss in life?”

  “Somewhere there’s a drunken Swedish industrialist who might ask the same question.”

  “Inspector Alderdyce asked me to call him when I’m through with you. You have some things to talk about.” She took off the glasses, folded and tapped them on the desk. “You can’t tell him about our arrangement. He wouldn’t thank either one of us for making him our favorite charity.”

  “You didn’t have to say it. I wish you hadn’t.”

  “Thanks, Amos.”

  “It didn’t turn out.”

  “Did you really expect it to?”

  “I was in the zone. How’s my credit?”

  “Zero, officially. I’m still on probation. Unofficially, what can I do for you?”

  “If you can spring my Luger loose from the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department, we’re square.”

  She wrote down the particulars, underlining Lieutenant Phillips’ name. “I can’t promise anything, officially or otherwise. We’re not supposed to interfere with the locals.”

  “You can tell them it’s all part of the Big Shuffle.”

  She called downtown, asking for Inspector Alderdyce. She listened, said, “Okay,” and cradled the receiver. “You got a reprieve. He’s out assisting the Grosse Pointe Police in a barricade situation.”

  I said, “I bet I know the address.”

  I couldn’t get within a block of the place. A Grosse Pointe cruiser stood across both lanes of Lake Shore Drive and there were more cars parked in the street and on the lawn of the big house, all official, than when Darius Fuller’s possessions were being auctioned off to pay his taxes. I gave a card to the uniform who came up to my car and asked him to give it to Inspector Alderdyce. He had me spell the name and told me to pull into the curb.

  Ten minutes later he came back and handed me a temporary pass. I snapped away my cigarette butt, clipped the pass to my handkerchief pocket, and made my way through the spectators, sawhorses, yellow tape, and extra personnel to the miniature version of the mansion in the backyard. The local armored squad had set up a firing perimeter ninety feet from the playhouse with shotguns and tear-gas launchers and bulletproof vans. John Alderdyce, wearing formfitting Kevlar under a beige poplin jacket, stood on the lee side of a van in conference with a Grosse Pointe commander with goldleaf on his visor. He broke off when I approached. The commander summoned over an officer in riot gear.

  “Complaint came in from a salesman showing the estate to customers,” Alderdyce told me. “Fuller snapped off a shot from inside when they approached the door. Commander Touhey says he fired wide, but Touhey put a sniper on the roof of the main house to wait for orders. Up here they make an effort to avoid gunning down baseball heroes.”

  I asked if there was a warrant out on Fuller.

  “He has a room in an extended-stay place in Highland Park. We tried to serve it there, but he was out, probably by way of the back as the officers were knocking in front. Shopkeeper down the street from Hilary Bairn’s apartment house came forward,” he added. “He saw Fuller leaving just before we found Deirdre Fuller dead upstairs.”

  “It had to be that,” I said. “Everyone else who looked good for it came up dirty on everything but.”

  “You look like you had fun eliminating them. I heard you found New York a little hot this time of year.”

  “I almost gave up smoking. Then I realized it saved my life. What happens to Fuller?”

  “Deirdre was an accident. You can’t plan a blow like that to be fatal. No jury would give him hard time. But he’s endangering life and property from in there, and he’s not responding to offers to negotiate.”

  “How do you know he didn’t shoot himself or skeedaddle after he potted at the salesman?”

  “He’s in there, all right, and he’s breathing.”

  I didn’t question that, although a defense attorney would have. “What if I go in?”

  “No civilians.” Touhey had dismissed the riot officer. The Grosse Pointe commander was a hunk of weathered driftwood with a long Irish upper lip. “I’m not handing him any hostages.”

  Alderdyce said, “Walker’s not a civilian. He’s barely a citizen. And he’s got a history with Fuller.”

  “So’s his ex-wife. She’s on her way here from California.”

  “He’ll be dead by the time she gets here,” I said. “If your sharpshooter doesn’t get itchy, he’ll do it himself.”

  He chewed on that. “Will you sign a release?”

  “If you like. There’s no one to sue if your guy goes through me to get him.”

  “I know a couple of guys high up in the department who’d recommend you for chief if he does,” Alderdyce said.

  “Don’t threaten me.” Touhey signaled for a bullhorn.

  “Piece.” Alderdyce stuck out his hand.

  I held up two fingers. “Peace, brother.”

  “Stop dicking around.”

  I smacked the Chief ‘s Special into his palm and waited for my introduction to the man inside. No response followed.

  It was like walking ninety feet naked on broken glass. They say it’s the same running to first base. I stopped on the little porch, wiped my palm off on my pants, and tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  “Close the door.”

  It was Fuller, sounding closer to eighty than sixty. He’d picked up a querulous tremor since we’d parted at his house on the lake, but that was natural enough. It seemed like twenty years ago.

  I closed the door behind me. He was sitting on the floor with his back propped up against the far wall, bare now of trophies and pennants. He’d sweated through the black T-shirt he wore, and from the sour air in that shut-up building I figured he’d been sweating through it for days. His slacks were wrinkled and gray stubble sprouted from his chin. A nine-millimeter Beretta lay in his lap, loosely covered by his hand. It was plated in shiny nickel with mother-of-pearl grips, a lady’s weapon.

  “That the pistol you gave Deirdre?” I asked.

  “She gave it back to me a month ago. She wanted to represent the antigun lobby when she got her license. Said it would be a conflict of interest.”

  Not reporting that had helped condemn Bairn; but that was ancient history now. “She give you the watch, too?” He was wearing it on his left wrist, a Rolex with a blue dial and a link band. I’d seen it before.

  “She brought it to me here that day, looking for advice. I called her a stupid little slut, hanging around with a petty thief. That wasn’t the way to handle it.”

  “You think?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. It looked grayer now. “She ran out. I followed her. To apologize. When I saw where she was headed I got mad all over again. I shoved my way in before she could get the door shut. That’s when she said she was going to marry Bairn right away.” He smiled through the stubble. “It takes talent to get a woman madder at you than the guy she was mad at to begin with.”

  “That’s all it was,” I said. “It was the easiest thing to say that would hurt you back.”

  “I thought of that. Right after I hit her. Oh, God.” He covered his face with
his hands.

  I tried for the gun then, but I wasn’t standing close enough and he still had the reflexes of an athlete. He scooped it up and pointed it at me before I made two feet.

  I let the tension go out of my muscles. “That’s the third time this week for me, Darius. It’s losing its effect.”

  He hesitated, as people will even when there’s nothing else left. That gave me the edge. I kicked the pistol out of his hand as he moved to turn it up under his chin. He dived after it, no hesitation now, but I was too sore to get down and wrestle him for it. This time my foot caught him on the shoulder and he fell sprawling.

  That was it for Darius Fuller. A good pitcher knows when it’s time to leave the mound. He lay sobbing on the floor as I walked over and picked up the Beretta. I went back to the door and opened it just wide enough to throw the pistol out onto the grass. The troops moved in then.

  If I had it to do again I don’t know if I’d bother. The Detroit Police, who had jurisdiction in a city killing, put a twenty-four-hour watch on Fuller in holding, and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department took up the slack after he was transferred to the jail to await trial, but by the time the verdict came in he’d learned the futility of pausing even for a second. On the way to his sentencing for involuntary manslaughter, he wrestled his guard for his sidearm. During the hearing that followed, the guard couldn’t testify whether it was his finger or Fuller’s on the trigger when the gun went off.

  Charlotte Sing vanished. The FBI and the U.S. Marshals raided her residences in California and Michigan and the offices of all her known businesses, removed truckloads of files and computers, and secured indictments against more than eighty coconspirators. Treasury froze all her assets. It didn’t do much for the economy, and it didn’t lead to the arrest of the central figure in the investigation, who’d been seen as far away as Nepal, wearing the robe of a Buddhist pilgrim, and as close as Toronto, dressed in the height of Paris fashion. Homeland Security placed her name on the list of international fugitives and advertised a reward of $100,000 for information resulting in her capture.