Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 02

by Angel Eyes

  The Herald occupied half the ground floor street frontage of a three-story building between the bank and a meat market and was identified by faded lettering on a plate glass window seven feet high and four feet wide. I pulled into an empty space in front of it and cranked a coin into a meter so old it still took pennies. A partition separated the office from the TV repair shop next door. This week’s issue was in the window and the glass in the door had an amateurish cartoon taped to it of a woman with a camera over her shoulder hurrying out a door over the promise BE RIGHT BACK! I tried the door’s brass handle. It was locked.

  Twenty minutes and two cigarettes later, a wiry, sixtyish woman in a rust-colored pantsuit came clicking down the sidewalk with an early-model Polaroid slung over one shoulder from an elastic strap. She had pure white hair combed into brittle waves and wore glasses with jeweled frames attached to a black cord that went behind her neck. Her tiny feet were encased in brown leather half-boots with square, two-inch heels, which as she approached made her only a foot shorter than I. I looked from her to the cartoon in the window and back to her. It was a fair likeness.

  “You’re Mr. Walker.” The way she said it brooked no denial. She had bright hazel eyes that darted from behind her glasses, and her handshake was firm. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “Depends on what you call long,” I said. “The Count of Monte Cristo wouldn’t have considered it any kind of wait.”

  She produced a key from her purse under the Polaroid and inserted it in the ancient lock. “I had to take a picture of a group of cheerleaders. Those entertainers you see on television balancing spinning plates on flimsy rods never tried to get six high school-age girls to smile for a camera all at once.” She opened the door and ushered me inside.

  The room was narrow, about eight feet by twelve, painted bile-yellow, and made even more cramped by two scarred desks on opposite ends and a black iron safe that didn’t look much older than a Ming vase, although it would be considerably less fragile. A stack of copies of the current edition stood on the near desk, next to a child’s red metal bank labeled DEPOSIT 15¢ PER ISSUE. There was a big square heat register in the floor inside the entrance. Beyond that, an unevenly faded red carpet was just something to cover the broken tiles. The ceiling was eleven feet high. An electric typewriter, the only modern thing in the room aside from the telephone on the far desk, stood on a rickety stand in that corner.

  She charged past me, parked her camera and purse beside the newspapers, and went through a door in the end wall marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. A moment later she came out carrying a black-bound book fully eighteen inches wide and thirty inches long and thumped it down atop the far desk, after first sliding the telephone out of the way. As she was opening it to the page she had marked with a sheet of newsprint, I peeped through the open door at a dusty old platen press.

  “Do you print the paper here?”

  “Not in twenty years.” She found her place on the page and adjusted the book so that it wouldn’t slide off the desk. It contained bound copies of the Herald. “We’re printing in Jackson now, which is one more step away from the paper’s original ideals about remaining local. Next month we’re remodeling the office. The TV shop next door is moving and the partition will come down and we’re going to put up snazzy paneling made to look like wallpaper and drop the ceiling and change the carpet and scrap the Linotype and presses in back. We’ll get rid of the furniture that’s been here for half a century and replace it with vinyl-upholstered chairs and desks that look like folding card tables. The place will be modern and functional and as antiseptic as a dentist’s thumb. I’ve already given notice.”

  “You’re not the owner?”

  She laughed shortly. “This is just a hobby for the owner, who runs a bigger, slicker paper upstate. I’m just the typical town gossip who started with a gloppy column about senior citizens and suddenly found myself the staff writer. Staff writer, that’s what they call me. Takes up less space than editor, bookkeeper, receptionist, photographer, ad manager, and janitor. Pull up a chair.” She sat down behind the desk. Although she had the antique swivel chair screwed up as high as it would go, her shoulders barely came above the edge of the big book.

  The only other chair in the office was a wooden straightback behind the other desk. No one had sat in it for a while. I dusted off the seat with my handkerchief and carried it to her desk and sat down.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” I got out the pack.

  “Go ahead. What do I care if you shorten your life?” She pushed over a cheap tin ashtray and watched while I went through the ritual. When I had one burning: “First, let’s talk about who you really are and who you represent.”

  I gave her my best dumb look. I could have saved myself the trouble.

  “I looked up Michaeljohn International.” Her angular chin and the straight line of her mouth formed a perfect square. “They make the bolts that are used to fasten wooden packing crates going overseas. I wondered why they’d bother to hire an investigator to verify the details in a prospective employee’s application, not being the kind of firm that handles a lot of classified material. Also, no P.I. working for a big company like that is going to make a long distance call from a booth. He’ll make it from his own phone and charge his client as if he’d paid for it on the spot. Then he’ll turn around and take it off his income tax.”

  “You have no reverence for the profession,” I suggested.

  She looked at me levelly. “Eighteen years ago I divorced my husband. I’d hired a private investigator to follow him and gather evidence on the affair he was having with a fellow employee. He got it and sold it to my husband. No, I have no reverence for the profession.”

  “It’s not fair to judge an entire group on the behavior of a single individual.”

  “Maybe not. But I believe in the odds. If the only P.I. I hired in my entire life turned out to be crooked, the chances are that the majority of them can’t be trusted. You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Walker. Who are you and who do you represent really?”

  I leaned forward and tapped my cigarette ash into the tray. Then I remembered that I was still wearing my hat and took it off and hung it on my crossed knee. I’d left my coat back in the city. “What difference does it make? If you don’t trust me you aren’t going to give me the information I’m after anyway.”

  She smiled and reached out to pat my hand. I could have fallen off my chair. “I said I didn’t believe you. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. Your client is none of my business. Like I said, I’m the town gossip.”

  I grinned. “Maggie, you’re priceless.” Her answering smile shone beatifically with the aid of store-bought teeth. “I can give you this much. I’ve been hired to find Janet Whiting. She may be in danger, and the danger may have something to do with her life here in Huron. But it may be tied into a bigger story, and for what it’s worth I can promise the Herald exclusive rights to print it in return for whatever help you can give me.”

  “You’re sweet, but what works with the big city papers holds no water out here. We’re a weekly. Unless the dope gets in just before noon Wednesday we get scooped by every daily in the state. But you can give me five dollars.”

  “Noon Wednesday,” I said, getting out my wallet. “I’ll remember that.” I laid a fin down on the yellowed newsprint in the book. A bony hand scooped it up and deposited it in the flap pocket of her jacket. She saw me watching and winked.

  “The boss needn’t know about it.” Then her eyes dropped to the closely printed page and she ran a long finger down the third column until she reached the bottom. “Hold onto your Victorian values,” she cautioned. “This is juicy stuff.”

  18

  I GOT UP AND PUT my hat down on the chair and walked around to her side of the desk to read over her shoulder. The issue was dated twenty-four years ago. The item she was pointing to at the bottom of the column was less than half an inch long.

  Mr. and Mrs. George Whiting and daughter Jane
t are moving to Detroit this week, where their new address is not known.

  “I see what you mean,” I said, straightening. “My heart’s all a-flutter.”

  She said, “Stop being sarcastic and sit back down.”

  I responded to the authority in her voice, going back to my chair and returning my hat to my knee. I wondered if she had ever taught school. “This better be worth five dollars and the trip out here. What’s written there I knew before I left the city.”

  “I don’t guarantee that what you get will be worth your time and expenses,” she retorted. “Do you, in your line of work? Anyway, it’s a good story. Too bad a family paper like the Herald couldn’t print it.” She swung the big book shut and removed her glasses, letting them dangle at the ends of the cord around her neck. Her eyes looked sharper without them, like unsheathed daggers.

  “My reaction was the same as yours when I saw that personal,” she began. “We still get them, though not as much as we used to, and use them as filler. ‘Minnie Grubb spent last weekend visiting her son and daughter-in-law in Benton Harbor.’ That sort of thing. But that ‘their address is not known’ intrigued me. Why say that? On a small-town paper, when you can’t find something out you just don’t mention it; there’s no sense in advertising your inadequacy. There were two other ‘moving’ items in that week’s issue, and neither of them included an address nor apologized for the omission. Seen in that light, the disclaimer in the Whiting piece took on a special significance, as if it was some kind of snide innuendo on the writer’s part. So I started asking around.

  “I’ve lived here only fifteen years, and I couldn’t find anyone who had been around at that time who remembered the Whitings. Apparently they kept to themselves, because there was nothing about them in any of the other papers I read. As a last resort I drove out to the Methodist Home and spoke to Agnes Gooding. She held down this desk for seventeen years, until she suffered a stroke eight years ago that left her deaf in one ear and confined to a wheelchair. She remembered Janet Whiting very well indeed.”

  She paused. I smoked and waited. When it became evident that I wasn’t going to press her, she continued.

  “Until her husband died and she moved into the village, Agnes lived next door to the Whitings. Janet was a shy girl, rather awkward because she was growing up too fast physically. She loved movies and romantic stories. In those days the old theater was still operating and she went down there every Saturday night. Every week the garbage can in front of her parents’ house was jammed full with trashy magazines—love stories and like that. She probably wasn’t a good student, because with all that dreaming she wouldn’t have had much time for homework. I can’t verify that; fourteen years ago the old school building was gutted by fire and all the records were destroyed. Fortunately, this was stored in a corner where the flames didn’t reach.”

  She extracted a thin volume from the deep drawer of the desk and opened it atop the bound newspapers. For some time she flipped through slick pages covered with pictures of boys in football uniforms and girls in cheerleaders’ sweaters until she came to a two-page spread of inch-square portraits and swiveled the book toward me, placing a finger on a picture in the third row. A plain-looking girl with straight dark hair cut in bangs across her forehead looked back at me with eyes as big as half dollars. She wasn’t smiling.

  You see them in every high school yearbook, the one member of the class who has nothing to smile about. It was just a picture, one millisecond out of a lifetime, but it said more to me than anything else had thus far in the investigation. I said, “She doesn’t look happy.”

  “There’s no reason she should,” said Maggie. “That was taken during her freshman year, the year she left town. Agnes said she tried out once for the cheerleading squad but didn’t make it, probably because she was too gangling to perform the routines. Not long afterward her parents enrolled her in a dancing academy in Ann Arbor, ostensibly to teach her grace. Agnes doesn’t know what the results were.”

  “I do,” I said. “She could dance rings around Travolta.”

  “You couldn’t prove it by me. I’m still coming to the juicy part. You know that she left town with her parents at the age of fourteen. What you don’t know is why.”

  “My information is that the firm her father worked for moved to Detroit.”

  “That much is true. But that wouldn’t have made them move. George Whiting retired the year before.”

  I dragged all the good out of my cigarette and killed the butt in the ashtray. “That I didn’t know.”

  “I said so. Janet wasn’t a particularly pretty girl. She was too tall and hadn’t learned yet how to handle herself. But she had beautiful eyes, according to Agnes. Big, blue, and innocent. Details like that are very attractive to some men.”

  “I’m beginning to get what you mean.”

  “There’s a house out on Pinedale Road,” she went on, ignoring the comment. “It belonged to one of our leading citizens—meaning richest—who died about three months ago. It’s a secluded place surrounded by woods and overlooking a private lake. The owner used to rent it out during the summer to folks from the city.

  “Twenty-four years ago, a man who gave his name as Peter Martin was living there. Fortyish, Agnes said, dark and rather handsome in a brutish sort of way. He was seen in town only once, when he stepped into the hardware store to buy fishing tackle. Janet Whiting happened to be in the store at the same time, running an errand. They were seen talking, and after Martin had made his purchase they left together. The clerk gathered that he had asked her for directions to someplace, and assumed that they had gone outside so that she could gesture.

  “An hour later, George Whiting called the store looking for his daughter. When the clerk told him what had happened, he called the police. They went out to the house on Pinedale, and sure enough, there was Janet. Martin told the officers he had merely invited her over to sample some of the trout he had caught that morning, in return for the help she had given him in finding the place he was looking for. She backed him up, and since she didn’t seem to be harmed they took no further action, just brought her home. A week later Martin went back to Detroit. That might have been the end of it, except that the Whitings left town after another few months. Agnes said that Janet had begun to gain weight by that time.”

  “Does she think she was pregnant?”

  Maggie smiled wickedly. “The odds are in favor of it. But I’m still coming to the good part.

  “The clerk wasn’t the only witness to what happened in the hardware store. There was a customer, a retired truck driver, who had seen Martin a couple of times in Detroit, though they had never actually been introduced. Only he knew him by a different name.”

  I waited. Her smile was diabolic, her eyes sharp as glass shards.

  “Phil Montana,” she finished.

  The telephone bell made me jump. She speared the receiver and barked the name of the newspaper into the mouthpiece. Someone wanted to place a classified ad. She put on her glasses, jotted down the information in shorthand on a yellow scratch pad, got the caller’s name and address, read it back, said, “Thank you,” and hung up. Her eyes returned to me.

  “Caught you off guard, didn’t I?”

  “It wasn’t the name I expected,” I admitted. “Is this truck driver still around?”

  She nodded. “In the cemetery west of town. He’s been dead ten years at least.”

  “The house on Pinedale. Who owns it now?”

  “Some firm in Detroit; I don’t remember the name. It’s been closed for some time. Would you like me to look it up?”

  I shook my head. “Do you think they’d mind if I drove out and took a look at the place?”

  “They don’t have to know about it. The less anyone in that city hears from us, the better. But you’ll never find it by yourself. I’d better go with you.”

  “What’ll it cost me?”

  “Not a damn cent.” She stood. “School’s letting out right now. There are
a couple of little girls that run over here every afternoon and beg me to take their picture for the paper. I’m too soft to refuse and film’s too expensive to waste. I’d rather just be out when they get here.” She went over to collect her purse.

  “You’re soft,” I said, getting up and putting on my hat. “Like a destroyer escort.”

  She grinned.

  We drove under the viaduct and along a scenic blacktop that wound past rows of subdivisions, stop-and-go party stores with gasoline pumps in front, an occasional lake, and a lot of real estate offices in what had been private homes. The sun was warm on the pavement, and here and there pretty girls of about seventeen were walking home from school in shorts with their books in one hand and their shoes in the other. Seeing them made me ache, not from sexual frustration, but from nostalgia. My passenger rode with her eyes trained straight ahead.

  “What have you got against Detroit?” I asked her.

  “Nothing, as long as it stays put and leaves us alone. At the present moment, more than half of Huron’s population works in the city and commutes back and forth. Nothing wrong with that either, except that the population of the village itself hasn’t changed in twenty years. They come swarming out here and buy up all the farmland and cut it up into acre and half-acre lots and put up GO TRESPASSING signs like they’re land barons.