Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

She lifted penciled eyebrows. “Was I that obvious?”

  “Probably not, but I’m a detective.” I thanked her and got my hat and let myself out.

  Five

  Xanthes had told me his half brother got off at four. At ten to, I swung by the market and bought two quarts of strawberries. The beefy bald man, whom I’d pegged as Butsukitis, the owner, appeared glad to see me. Memories are long in Greektown. I said, “I just had an operation and the doc says I shouldn’t lift any more than a pound. Could your boy carry these to the car?”

  “I let my boy leave early. Slow day. I will carry them.”

  He did, and I drove away stuck with two quarts of strawberries. They give me hives. Had Santine been around I’d planned to tail him after he punched out. Pounding the steering wheel at red lights, I bucked and squirmed my way through late afternoon traffic to Gra-tiot, where my man kept an apartment on the second floor of a charred brick building that had housed a recording studio in the gravy days of Motown. I ditched my hat, jacket, and tie in the car and at Santine’s door put on a pair of aviator’s glasses in case he remembered me from the market. If he answered my knock I was looking for another apartment. There was no answer. I considered slipping the latch and taking a look around inside, but it was too early in the round to play catch with my license. I went back down and made myself uncomfortable in my heap across the street from the entrance.

  It was growing dark when a cab creaked its brakes in front of the building and Santine got out, wearing a blue Windbreaker over the clothes I’d seen him in earlier. He paid the driver and went inside. Since the window of his apartment looked out on Gratiot I let the cab go, noting its number, hit the starter and wound my way to the company’s headquarters on Woodward.

  A puffy-faced black man in work clothes looked at me from behind a steel desk in an office smelling of oil. The floor tingled with the swallowed bellowing of engines in the garage below. I gave him a hinge at my investigator’s Photostat, placing my thumb over the “Private,” and told him in an official voice I wanted information on Cab No. 218.

  He looked back down at the ruled pink sheet he was scribbling on and said, “I been dispatcher here eleven years. You think I don’t know a plastic badge when I see one?”

  I licked a ten-dollar bill across the sheet.

  “That’s Dillard,” he said, watching the movement.

  “He just dropped off a fare on Gratiot.” I gave him the address. “I want to know where he picked him up and when.”

  He found the cab number on another ruled sheet attached to a clipboard on the wall and followed the line with his finger to some writing in another column. “Evergreen, between Schoolcraft and Kendall. Dillard logged it in at six-twenty.”

  I handed him the bill without comment. The spot where San-tine had entered the cab was an hour’s easy walk from where the bodies of two of the murdered women had been found.

  Six

  I swung past Alex Santine’s apartment near Greektown on my way home. There was a light on. That night after supper I caught all the news reports on TV and looked for bulletins and wound up watching a succession of sitcoms full of single mothers shrieking at their kids about sex. There was nothing about any new stranglings. I went to bed. Eating breakfast the next day I turned on the radio and read the Free Press and there was still nothing.

  The name of the psychiatrist quoted in the last issue was Kor-necki. I looked him up and called his office in the National Bank Building. I expected a secretary, but I got him.

  “I’d like to talk to you about someone I know,” I said.

  “Someone you know. I see.” He spoke in cathedral tones.

  “It’s not me. I have an entirely different set of neuroses.”

  “My consultation fee is one hundred dollars for forty minutes.”

  “I’ll take twenty-five dollars’ worth,” I said.

  “No, that’s forty minutes or any fraction thereof. I have a cancellation at eleven. Shall I have my secretary pencil you in when she returns from her break?”

  I told him to do so, gave him my name, and rang off before I could say anything about his working out of a bank. The hundred went onto the expense sheet.

  Kornecki’s reception room was larger than my office and a half. A redhead at a kidney-shaped desk smiled tightly at me, found my name on her calendar, and buzzed me through. The inner sanctum, pastel green with a blue carpet, dark green Naugahyde couch, and a large glass-topped desk bare but for a telephone intercom, looked out on downtown through a window whose double panes swallowed the traffic noise. Behind the desk, a man about my age, wearing a blue pinstripe and steel-rimmed glasses, sat smiling at me with several thousand dollars’ worth of dental work. He wore his sandy hair in bangs like Alfalfa.

  We shook hands and I took charge of the customer’s chair, a pedestal job upholstered in green vinyl to match the couch. I asked if I could smoke. He said whatever made me comfortable and indicated a smoking stand nearby. I lit up and laid out Santine’s background without naming him. Kornecki listened.

  “Is this guy capable of violence against strange women?” I finished.

  He smiled again. “We all are, Mr. Walker. Every one of us men. It’s our only advantage. You think your man is the strangler, is that it?”

  “I guess I was absent the day they taught subtle.”

  “Oh, you were subtle. But you can’t know how many people I’ve spoken with since that article appeared, wanting to be assured that their uncle or cousin or best friend isn’t the killer. Hostility between the sexes is nothing new, but these last few confusing years have aggravated things. From what you’ve told me, though, I don’t think you need to worry.”

  Those rich tones rumbling up from his slender chest made you want to look around to see who was talking. I waited, smoking.

  “The powder is there,” he went on. “But it needs a spark. If your man were to start murdering women, his second wife would have been his first victim. He wouldn’t have stopped at beating her. My own theory, which the Free Press saw fit not to print, is that the strangler suffered some real or imagined wrong at a woman’s hand in his past and that recently the wrong was repeated, either by a similar act committed by another woman, or by his coming into contact with the same woman.”

  “What sort of wrong?”

  “It could be anything. Sexual domination is the worst, because it means loss of self-esteem. Possibly she worked for a living, but it’s just as likely that he equates women who work with her dominance. They would be a substitute; he would lack the courage to strike out at the actual source of his frustration.”

  “Suppose he ran into his mother or something like that.”

  He shook his head. “Too far back. I don’t place as much importance on early childhood as many of my colleagues. Stale charges don’t explode that easily.”

  “You’ve been a big help.” I said and we talked about sports and politics until my hundred dollars were up.

  Seven

  From there I went to the Detroit News and Barry Stackpole’s cubicle, where he greeted me with the lopsided grin the steel plate in his head had left him with after some rough trade tried to blow him up in his car, and pointed to a stack of papers on his desk. I sat on one of the antique whiskey crates he used to file things in—there was a similar stack on the only other chair besides his—and went through the stuff. It had come over the wire that morning from the Des Moines agency and the Register, and none of it was for me. Santine had held six jobs in his last two years in Iowa, fetch-and-carry work, no brains need apply. His first wife had divorced him on grounds of marriage breakdown and he hadn’t contested the action. His second had filed for extreme cruelty.

  The transcripts of that one were ugly but not uncommon. There were enough articles from the newspaper on violent crimes against women to make you think twice before moving there, but if there was a pattern it was lost on me. The telephone rang while I was reshuffling the papers. Barry barked his name into the receiver, paused, and hel
d it out to me.

  “I gave my service this number,” I explained, accepting it.

  “You bastard, you promised to call me before you called the police.”

  The voice belonged to Constantine Xanthes. I straightened. “Start again.”

  “Alexander just called me from Police Headquarters. They’ve arrested him for the stranglings.”

  Eight

  I met Xanthes in Homicide. He was wearing the same light blue suit or one just like it and his face was pale beneath the olive pigment. “He’s being interrogated now,” he said stiffly. “My lawyer’s with him.”

  “I didn’t call the cops.” I made my voice low. The room was alive with uniforms and detectives in shirtsleeves droning into telephones and comparing criminal anecdotes at the water cooler.

  “I know. When I got here, Inspector DeLong told me Alexander walked into some kind of trap.”

  On cue, DeLong entered the squad room from the hallway leading to Interrogation. His jacket was off and his shirt clung transparent to his narrow chest. When he saw me his cross-eyes flamed. “You said you were representing a victim’s family.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “You did. What’s this trap?”

  He grinned to his molars. “It’s the kind of thing you do in these things when you did everything else. Sometimes it works. We had another strangling last night.”

  My stomach took a dive. “It wasn’t on the news.”

  “We didn’t release it. The body was found jammed into a culvert on Schoolcraft. When we got the squeal we threw wraps over it, morgued the corpse—she was a teacher at Redford High—and stuck a department-store dummy in its place. These nuts like publicity; when there isn’t any they might check to see if the body is still there. Nick the Greek in there climbs down the bank at half-past noon and takes a look inside and three officers step out of the bushes and screw their service revolvers in his ears.”

  “Pretty thin,” I said.

  “How thick does it have to be with a full confession?”

  Xanthes swayed. I grabbed his arm. I was still looking at DeLong.

  “He’s talking to a tape recorder now,” he said, filling a Dixie cup at the cooler. “He knows the details on all five murders, including the blow to the cheek.”

  “I’d like to see him.” Xanthes was still pale, but he wasn’t needing me to hold him up now.

  “It’ll be a couple of hours.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  The inspector shrugged, drained the cup, and headed back the way he’d come, sidearming the crumpled container at a steel waste-basket already bubbling over with them. Xanthes said, “He didn’t do it.”

  “I think he probably did.” I was somersaulting a Winston back and forth across the back of my hand. “Is your wife home?”

  He started slightly. “Grace? She’s shopping for art supplies in Southfield. I tried to reach her after the police called, but I couldn’t.”

  “I wonder if I could have a look at her studio.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.” When he hesitated: “It beats hanging around here.”

  He nodded. In my crate I said, “Your father was proud of his Greek heritage, wasn’t he?”

  “Fiercely. He was a stonecutter in the old country and built like Hercules. He taught me the importance of being a man and the sanctity of womanhood. That’s why I can’t understand...” He shook his head, watching the scenery glide past his window.

  “I can. When a man who’s been told all his life that a man should be strong lets himself be humiliated by a woman it does things to him. If he’s smart he’ll put distance between himself and the woman. If he’s weak he’ll come back and it’ll start all over again. And if the woman happens to be married to his half brother, who he worships—”

  I stopped, feeling the flinty chips of his eyes on me. “Who told you that?”

  “Your wife, some of it. You, some more. The rest of it I got from a psychiatrist downtown. The women’s movement has changed the lives of almost everyone but the women who have the most to lose by embracing it. You’re wife’s been cheating on you for years.”

  “Liar!” He lunged across the seat at me. I spun the wheel hard and we shrieked around a corner and he slammed back against the passenger’s door. A big Mercury that had been close on our tail blatted its horn and sped past. Xanthes breathed heavily, glaring.

  “She propositioned me like a pro yesterday.” I corrected our course. We were entering his neighborhood now. “I think she’s been doing that kind of thing a long time. I think that when he was living at your place Alexander found out and threatened to tell you. That would have meant divorce from a proud man like you, and your wife would have had to go to work to support herself and the children. So she bribed Alexander with the only thing she had to bribe him with. She’s still attractive, but in those days she must have been a knockout; being weak, he took the bribe, and then she had leverage. She hedged her bet by making up those stories about his incorrigible behavior so that you wouldn’t believe him if he did tell you. So he got out from under. But the experience had plundered him of his self-respect and tainted his relationships with women from then on. Even then he might have grown out of it, but he made the mistake of coming back. Seeing her again shook something loose. He walked into your house Alex Santine and came out the Five O’Clock Strangler, victimizing seemingly independent WASP women like Grace. Who taught him how to use his fists?”

  “Our father, probably. He taught me. It was part of a man’s training, he said, to know how to defend himself.” His voice was as dead as last year’s leaves.

  “We pulled into his driveway and he got out, moving very slowly. Inside the house we paused before the locked door to his wife’s studio. I asked him if he had a key.

  “No. I’ve never been inside the room. She’s never invited me and I respect her privacy.”

  I didn’t. I slipped the lock with the edge of my investigator’s photostat and we entered Grace Xanthes’ trophy room.

  It had been a bedroom, but she had erected steel utility shelves and moved in a kiln and a long library table on which stood a turning pedestal supporting a lump of red clay that was starting to look like a naked man. The shelves were lined with nude male figure studies twelve to eighteen inches high, posed in various attitudes. They were all of a type, athletically muscled and wide at the shoulders, physically large, all the things the artist’s husband wasn’t. He walked around the room in a kind of daze, staring at each in turn. It was clear he recognized some of them. I didn’t know Alexander at first, but he did. He had filled out since 17.

  Nine

  I returned two days’ worth of Xanthes’ three-day retainer, less expenses, despite his insistence that I’d earned it. A few weeks later, court-appointed psychiatrists declared Alex Santine mentally unfit to stand trial and he was remanded for treatment to the State Foren-sics Center at Ypsilanti. And I haven’t had a bowl of egg lemon soup or a slice of feta cheese in months.

  Robbers’ Roost

  I was met at the door by a hatchet-faced woman in a nurse’s uniform who took my card and asked me to accompany her to Dr. Tuskin’s office. I hadn’t come to see anyone by that name, but I said okay. I have another set of manners when my checks don’t bounce. On the way we passed some old people in wheelchairs whose drugged eyes followed us the way the eyes of sunning lizards follow visitors to the zoo. The place was a nursing home for the aged.

  “I can’t let you see Mr. Chubb,” announced Dr. Tuskin, after we had shaken hands and the nature of my visit was established. The nurse had withdrawn. “Perhaps I can help you, Mister”—he glanced down at my card—“Walker?”

  He was tall and plump with very white hair and wore a three-piece suit the color of creamed anything. His office wore a lot of cedar and the desk he was standing behind was big and glossy and bare but for the card. I didn’t think he’d scooped any paperwork into a drawer on my account.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I
got a telephone call from Mr. Chubb requesting my services. If he hasn’t confided in you we’ve nothing to discuss.”

  “He is infirm. I can’t imagine what reasons he’d have for engaging a private investigator at this time in his life.” But his frost-blue eyes were uneasy. I played on that.

  “I don’t think they have anything to do with the operation of this home or he wouldn’t have made the call from one of your telephones.” I dropped the reassuring tone. “But I have a friend on the News who might be interested in finding out why a private investigator was denied access to one of your patients.”

  His face tightened. “That sounds like blackmail.”

  “I was hoping it would.”

  After a moment he pressed something under his desk. Reappearing, Hatchet Face was instructed to take me to Oscar Chubb’s room on the second floor. Dr. Tuskin didn’t say good-bye as we left.

  Upstairs lay a very old man in bed, his pale, hollow-templed head almost lost amidst the pillow and heavy white quilt. The nurse awakened him gently, told him who I was, and moved to draw the blinds over the room’s only window, which looked out over the choppy blue-green surface of Lake St. Clair.

  “Leave it,” he bleated. “It’s taken me eighty years to get to Grosse Pointe. I like to be reminded.”

  She went out, muttering something about the glare and his cataract.

  “As if it mattered.” He mined a bony arm in a baggy pajama sleeve out from under the heavy spread, rested it a moment, then used the remote control atop the spread to raise himself to a sitting position. He waved me into the chair next to the bed.

  “I hear you’re good.”

  “Good’s a pretty general term,” I said. “I’m good in some areas. Missing persons, yeah. Divorce, no. I have a low gag threshold.”

  “Have you ever heard of Specs Kleinstein?”

  “Racketeer. Retired, lives in Troy.”