Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  A crew of eight were taking turns shoveling gravel and Elmer’s Glue into a single pothole the size of a dimple at Remington. They would tip the stuff into the hole, pat it down, then walk half a block back to the truck for another load. Even then it didn’t look as if they could make the job last until quitting time, but you never know. A hardhat crowding 50, with a great firm belly and sleeves rolled back past thick forearms burned to a dark cherry color, stood with one work shoe propped on the truck’s rear bumper, eyes like twin slivers of blue glass watching the operation through the smoke of his cigarette. They didn’t move as I pulled my car off to the side a safe distance from the county vehicle and got out. “Mr. Lawler?”

  His only reaction was to reach up with a crusted forefinger and flick ash off his cigarette without removing it from between his lips. Since the gesture seemed more positive than negative, I gave him a look at my license photostat and told him what I was doing there. “Gooding ran interference for your crew,” I wound up. “What can you tell me about him?”

  “He knew which side of the sign said STOP and which said SLOW.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Anything meaning what?” He still wasn’t looking at me.

  You run into him in every profession, the one bee in the hive who would rather sting than make honey. “Look,” I said, “I’m just earning a living, like you and the lightning corps here. You look like someone who’s talked to investigators; you know what I want. How did the old man get along with the other workers? Did you notice if there were any he was especially friendly with, or especially not friendly with? Did you overhear one of them saying something like, ’Gooding, I don’t like you and I’m going to blow you up in your car’? Little things like that.”

  He flicked off some more ash. “I talked to investigators,” he acknowledged. “Two years ago I seen a car run a stop sign on Jefferson and knock down a kid crossing the street. When I was getting set to testify against the driver his lawyer hired a detective to follow me from bar to bar and prove in court I was a drunk and an unreliable witness. Yeah,” he said, spitting out the butt, “I talked to investigators.”

  He walked away to look down into the pothole. I stood there for a moment, peeling cellophane off a fresh pack of Winstons. When he didn’t return I put one in my mouth and went back to my car. A lanky black with a scar on his jaw and his hardhat balanced precariously on the back of his head climbed into the passenger’s seat.

  “I heard you talking to Lawler, mister,” He talked through a sunny grin that brightened the interior. “He’s not a bad dude; he’s just had a run of bad luck.”

  “Must be tough.” I touched a match to my weed and shook it out. Waiting.

  “I knew Emmett Gooding some,” he said.

  I waited some more, looking at him. His grin was fixed. I got out my wallet and held up a ten-spot between the first and second fingers of my right hand. When he reached for it I pulled it back. He shrugged and sat back, still grinning.

  “Not enough to say much more than ’Hello’ to,” he went on. “There’s like a wall around those old men, you know? Except to Jamie.”

  “Jamie?”

  “James Dunrather, I think his right name was. White dude, about twenty-two. Long greasy blond hair and pimples. Lawler canned him a couple of weeks back for selling dope on the job.” He shook his head. “Ugly scene, man. He kept screaming about how he could get Lawler killed. Lawler just laughed.”

  I scraped some dust off the dash with the edge of the bill. “Dun-rather and Gooding were friends?”

  “Not friends. Jamie had a way of talking at you till you had to say something back just to get him to stop. I seen him talking at the old man that way on lunch break. Not the old man exclusive, mind you, just anybody close. Gooding was the only one that didn’t bother to up and walk away.”

  “What’d he talk about?”

  “Mostly he bragged about what a bad dude he was and all the bad dudes he knew. What you expect to hear from a part-time pusher. Then Gooding got sick and quit. But he come back.”

  “To work?”

  He shook his head again. “He come to where we was tearing up pavement on Eight Mile. It was about a week before Jamie got canned. Man, Gooding looked about a hundred, leaning on them canes. He talked to Jamie for maybe ten minutes and then left in that beat-up Pontiac of his. Rest of us might’ve been in Mississippi for all the notice he took of us.”

  “You didn’t hear what they were talking about?”

  “Man, when that Rotomill starts ripping up asphalt—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Where can I find this Dunrather?”

  He shrugged, eyeing the sawbuck in my hand. I gave it to him.

  “Hope that’s worth the job.” I nodded through the windshield at Lawler, watching us from beside the pothole. My angel grinned with one foot on the pavement.

  “Affirmative Action, man,” he said. “It’s a sweet country.”

  Five

  I made contact with Barry Stackpole at the News, who kept a personal file on street-level talent for his column. Jamie Dunrather had a record as long as Woodward Avenue for pushing pot and controlled substances, but no convictions, and an alias for each of his many addresses. Recent information had him living in a walkup over an adult bookstore on Watson. I promised Barry a dinner and tooled downtown.

  There was a drunk snoring on the bottom step inside the street door with flies crawling on his face. I climbed over him and up a narrow squawking staircase with a gnawed rubber runner between mustard walls sprayed all over with words to live by. The upstairs hallway smelled of mold and thick paint that was fresh when Ford started paying five dollars a day. The building was as real as a stained Band-Aid on the floor of a YMCA pool. I rapped on Dunrather’s door and flattened out against the wall next to the hinges, gripping the butt of my .38 in its belt clip. When no bullets splintered the panel I tried the knob. It gave.

  Unclipping the gun, I pushed the door open slowly, going in with it to avoid being framed in the doorway. The shade was drawn over the room’s only window, but enough light leaked in around it to fall on a ladderback chair mottled with old white paint, a dented table holding up a dirty china lamp and a portable TV, and a bed with a painted iron frame. The man dangling from the overhead fixture cast a gently drifting shadow as he twisted in the current of air stirring through the open door. He had a flexible wire like they hang pictures with sunk in the flesh of his neck, and his frog eyes and extended tongue were pale against his purple face. He was wearing faded jeans and track shoes and a red T-shirt with white letters that said MAKE ONLY BIG MISTAKES. You had to smile.

  A floorboard sighed behind me while I was comparing the dead man’s acned complexion and lank dishwater locks to my informant’s description of Jamie Dunrather. I turned about a century too late. Later I thought I’d heard the swish, but all I was sure of was a bolt of white pain and a black mouth swallowing me.

  Six

  “Put this where it hurts and shut up.”

  I’d expected gentler words on my way through the gates, but after staring for a moment at the wet handkerchief folded on the dusty pink palm I accepted it. I found the sticky lump behind my left ear with no trouble and fought back fresh darkness when the cold damp cloth touched the pulpy mass. Bitter bile climbed my throat. My thick tongue made me think of Dunrather and thought of Dunrather made the bile rise. I swallowed, vaguely conscious of having spoken.

  “Did I say anything worth holding against me?”

  Sergeant Blake ignored the question. He was sitting on the ladderback chair with his hands on his knees and his face too far from the floor where I was lying for me to make out. But I recognized the suit. Now I became aware of movement around me, and spotted the white coats from the morgue. They had freed the body and were wrapping it. Fister stood by watching.

  “Bag his hands,” Blake told them. To me: “I’m betting the wire made those cuts on his palms. He wouldn’t grab it that tight unless he was trying to save his
life. It wasn’t suicide.”

  I said, “The guy who slugged me must’ve been hiding behind the door. He had to go past the drunk on the stairs on his way out. Maybe the drunk saw something.”

  “The drunk’s at Headquarters now. But he was as gone as you, and the guy took the service stairs out back when he heard us coming. We found this on the steps. He tossed my wallet onto my chest. “It’s been dusted. He wore gloves. If he didn’t know who you were before, he knows now. Feed it to me.”

  I fed it to him, starting with what I’d learned at the road construction site. From past experience I didn’t try to sit up. A pillow from the iron bed was under my head, which was full of bass fiddles tuning up.

  “I say clink him,” Fister put in. “It’s his putzing around scared the killer into icing Dunrather.”

  “Unless Dunrather killed Gooding,” I said.

  Blake said, “No, it’s good business not to clog up an investigation with too many killers. We got the same information you did by threatening to take Lawler downtown, and traced Dunrather through the computer. On our way up here we heard a street door slam on the other side of the building. Those new security places with no fire exits to speak of spoiled us; we didn’t think to look for a back way.”

  I turned the handkerchief around to the cool side. “The bombing story hit the airwaves this afternoon. He’s mopping up. Dun-rather was a braggart, a poor risk.”

  “Everything about this case screams contract.” The sergeant considered. “Except Gooding. There’s no reason a pro would bother with an old man like that, and he couldn’t have expected anyone but Gooding to blow up in Gooding’s car.”

  I said, “He’s too sloppy for a pro anyway. If a seasoned heavyweight wanted Dunrather’s death to look like suicide he wouldn’t have let him cut up his hands that way.”

  “Now that he knows who you are and how close you are, whoever he is, I guess maybe we saved your butt by coming in when we did.”

  “You never get a flat tire when you need one,” Fister growled.

  Blake leaned his forearms on his knees. “Cop killings are messy, Walker. Third parties tend to stop lead. It doesn’t matter much to the guy who stops it whether it came from a Saturday Night Buster or a Police Special. Fister will type up your statement and we’ll collect your signature later. You want a ride home?” He stood.

  “My crate’s parked around the corner,” I said, sitting slowly. The fiddles were louder in that position. “And your good cop, bad cop number’s wasted on me.”

  “You’re cluttering up the murder scene, Hot Wit.” He held out my dented hat and gun, retrieved from the floor.

  Seven

  You can’t live on the edge all the time, check behind all the doors and under all the beds and still be the sort of man who reads Playboy. But if you’re lucky enough not to and live, it makes you alert enough next time to spot things like a cigarette end glowing like a single orange eye in the gloom behind your office window on your way to the front door of your building. I did, and forced my echoing skull to remember if I’d locked the inner sanctum. Then I decided remembering didn’t matter, because people who don’t mean harm don’t smoke in strange rooms while dusk is gathering without turning on a light.

  I mounted the stairs like anyone else returning to his place of business just before closing, but slower than usual, thinking. You get a lot of thinking done in three flights. By the time I reached my floor I was pretty sure why Emmett Gooding had been marked for death, though I didn’t know by whom, and none of it made sense anyway. It rarely does outside Nero Wolfe.

  I walked right past the outer office and through the one next to that, closing it behind me. My neighbor that week was a travel agent with one telephone and one desk and posters of places that looked nothing like Detroit on the walls. The agent’s narrow sad brown face lit up when I entered, fell when he recognized me and registered curiosity when I lifted his receiver and dialed Police Headquarters.

  Sergeant Blake had returned. When his voice finally came on the line I said, “How sure are you that Emmett Gooding left no survivors?”

  “Why?” Suspicion curled like smoke out of the earpiece.

  “Because someone had to be named beneficiary on his life insurance policy.”

  “Who told you he had one?”

  “You just did. Who is it?”

  “I’m reading the report now. Twenty-five thousand goes to a girl out on the Coast, the daughter of an old friend who worked with Gooding on the line at Dearborn till he died nine years ago. But she hasn’t left San Francisco this year.”

  “Double indemnity,” I pressed. “Fifty grand if he died by accident or mayhem.”

  “Why ask me if you know? And how do you know?” I told him I was a detective. After a pause he said, “Anything else, or can I go home and introduce myself to my wife?”

  “Do that. On the way you might stop by and pick up your cop-killer. He’s waiting for me in my office.”

  The pause this time was longer. “Where are you?”

  I told him.

  “Okay, sit tight.”

  “What if he tries to leave?”

  “Stop him.” The line went dead.

  I hung up and offered the travel agent a cigarette, but he wasn’t seeing the pack. He’d overheard everything. I lit one for myself and asked him if he’d sent anyone anywhere lately.

  “Just my ex-wife and her boyfriend,” he replied, coming out of it. “To Tahiti. On my alimony.”

  I grinned, but he could see my heart wasn’t in it. The conversation flagged. I smoked and waited.

  There had to be and insurance policy for Gooding to have done what he did. It had been done before, but the victims were always family men and any half-smart cop could wrap it up in an hour. Single men like my almost-client who had outlived whatever family or friends they’d had tended to throw off everyone but hunch-players like me and tireless pros like Blake who touched all the bases no matter how hopeless.

  At two minutes past five I heard the door to my outer office close softly. Swearing quietly, I killed my butt in the travel agent’s ashtray and advised him to climb under his desk. I didn’t have to tell him twice. I moved out into the hallway with gun in hand.

  His skinny back, clad in an army fatigue shirt, long black hair spilling to his shoulders, was just disappearing down the stairwell. I strode to the top of the stairs and cocked the .38. The noise made echoes. He started to turn. The overhead light painted a streak along the .45 automatic in his right hand.

  “Uh-uh,” I cautioned.

  He froze in mid-turn. He wasn’t much older than Dunrather, with a droopy moustache that was mostly fuzz and a bulbous lower lip like a baby’s. He was a third of the way down the flight.

  “Junior button man,” I sneered. “What’d Gooding pay you, a hundred?”

  “Five hundred.” His voice was as young as the rest of him. “He said it was all he had.”

  “He wasted it. He was a sick old man with nothing to look forward to but a nursing home. So like a lot of other sick old men he decided to go for the fast burn. But suicide would’ve voided his insurance and he wanted his dead friend’s daughter to get something out of his death. The stroke made up his mind. He remembered Jamie Dunrather bragging about all the bad cats he knew, got your name from him, and paid you to take him out.”

  “I didn’t want to get mixed up in no cop-killing,” he said. “Who knew the old man was going to conk and someone else would eat that charge I stuck under his hood?”

  “So when you heard about it you started covering your tracks. You cooled Dunrather and you would have cooled me too if the cops hadn’t interrupted you.” His thick lower lip dropped a millimeter. I pressed on. “You didn’t know it was the cops, did you? You knew Gooding had been to see me, you thought he’d told me everything, and you figured that by waiting for me back here you could ambush me and be in the clear.”

  “Why not? When you didn’t show by quitting time I decided to hit you at home. You
was all I had to worry about, I thought.”

  “Pros give the cops more credit than that,” I said. “But you’ll never be a pro.”

  The air freshened in the stairwell, as if someone had opened the street door. I was talking to draw his attention from it. His knuckles whitened around the automatic’s grip, and I saw he was wearing transparent rubber gloves.

  “What’d he want to come see you for anyway?” he demanded.

  “He changed his mind. When it came down to it he didn’t really want to die. When he couldn’t find you to call it off he was going to hire me to look for you. He read my name in the paper and that gave him the idea.”

  He made a thin keening sound between his teeth and twisted around the rest of the way, straightening his gun arm.

  “Police! Drop it!”

  A pro would have gone ahead and plugged me, then tended to Blake on the second landing, but I was right about him. He swung back to fire down the stairs. Blake and I opened up at the same time. The reports of our .38s battered the walls. The man in the fatigue shirt dropped his .45 clattering down the steps, gripped the banister, and slid three feet before sliding off and piling into a heap of army surplus halfway down the flight.

  In the echoing silence that followed, Officer Fister, who had entered the building a second behind his partner, bounded past Blake and bent to feel the man’s neck for a pulse. He straightened after a moment. “He’s killed his last cop.”

  “The hell with him,” said the sergeant, holstering his gun under his left arm. Smoke curled spastically up the stairwell.