Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Ah. I thought maybe you wanted his job after all. I’d rather hoped.”

  “You’ve got police protection now. What happened in front of the service elevator?”

  “Well, we were standing there waiting for the doors to open when this guy came out from behind the elevator and asked Billy for his autograph. As soon as he got rid of the pad he pulled a gun from under his jacket. Eccles stepped in and took both bullets.”

  “Was Eccles armed?”

  Cole nodded. “A revolver of some kind. I don’t know from guns. It was still in his shoulder holster when the police came. There wasn’t time to get it out.”

  “What was Phil doing while all this was going on?”

  “Hustling Billy out of the way, with me. Meanwhile the guy got away.” He gave me the same description he’d given Carol.

  “If he was after Dickerson, why’d he leave without scratching him?”

  “He panicked. Those shots were very loud in that enclosed space. As it was he barely got out before the place was jammed with gawkers.”

  “What happened to the pad?”

  “Pad?”

  “The pad he handed Dickerson for his autograph. Fingerprints.”

  “I guess Billy dropped it in the scramble. Some souvenir hunter has it by now.”

  I got out a cigarette and tapped it on the back of my left hand. “Anyone threaten Dickerson’s life lately?”

  “The police asked that. He gets his share of hate mail like every other big-name entertainer. They don’t like his hair or his singing or his politics. That kind of letter is usually scribbled in Crayola on ruled paper with the lines an inch apart. I called Billy’s secretary in L.A. to go through the files and send the most likely ones by air express for the police to look at. But she throws most of them away.”

  “What’s the story on this bodyguard that disappeared?”

  “Henry?” Carefully plucked eyebrows slid above the tinted glasses. “Forget him. He was a drunk and he got to wandering just when we needed him most. Flying in from L.A. day before yesterday we changed planes in Denver and he was missing when we boarded for Detroit. Probably found himself a bar and he’s drying out in some drunk tank by now. If he hadn’t ducked out we’d have fired him soon anyway. He was worse than no protection at all.”

  “Full name and description.” I got out my notebook and pencil.

  “Henry Bliss. About your height, a little over six feet. Two hundred pounds, sandy hair, fair complexion. Forty. Let’s see, he had a white scar about an inch long on the right side of his jaw. Dropped his guard, he said. Don’t waste your time with him. He was just an ex-pug with a taste for booze.”

  “It’s my client’s time. Any reason why someone would want to kill Dickerson? Besides his hair and his singing and his politics?”

  “Celebrities make good clay pigeons. They’re easier to get at than politicians, but you can become just as famous shooting them.”

  “Everyone’s famous today. It’s almost worth it to get an obscure person’s autograph.” I flipped the notebook shut.

  “Can I reach you here if something turns up?”

  “We’re booked downstairs for two weeks.”

  “Except for tonight.”

  “We’re opening tonight as scheduled. Look, you can tell Ned’s partner how sorry we are, but—”

  “The show must go on.”

  Cole smiled thinly. “An ancient tradition with a solid mercenary base. No one likes giving refunds.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Cole. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  “You know,” he said, “I can’t help thinking that had you been on the job, things would have gone differently today.”

  “Probably not. Ned knew his business. Your boy’s alive. That’s what you paid for.”

  As I closed the door behind me, Lieutenant Gritch came away from his crew next to the elevator. “What’d you get?” he demanded.

  “Now, would I be earning my client’s money if I answered that after going to so much trouble to keep the cops out of my pockets?”

  His pale face flushed for a moment. Then the color faded and he showed his eyeteeth in a gargoyle’s grin, nodding.

  “Okay. I guess I bought that. We’ll trade. You go.”

  I told him what I’d learned. He went on nodding.

  “That’s what we got. There’s nothing in that autograph pad. Even if it had liftable prints, which nothing like that ever does, they’ll have someone else’s all over them by now. We Telexed this Henry Bliss’s name and description to Denver. It won’t buy zilch. This one’s local and sloppy. If we get the guy at all it’ll be because somebody unzipped his big yap. Give me a pro any time. These amateurs are a blank order.”

  “What makes him an amateur?”

  “You mean besides he got the wrong guy? The gun. We frisked the service area and the parking lot and the alley next door. No gun. A pro would’ve used a piece without a history and then dumped it. He wouldn’t take a chance on being picked up for CCW. You got a reference?”

  The change of subjects threw me for a second. Then I gave him John Alderdyce’s name in Detroit Homicide. He had a uniform write down the name in his notebook.

  “Okay, we’ll check you out. You know what the penalty is for interfering with a murder investigation.”

  “Something short of electrocution,” I said. “In this state, anyway.”

  “Then I won’t waste breath warning you off this one. You get anything—anything—you know where to come.” He handed me one of his cards.

  I gave him one of mine. “If you ever have a rug that needs looking under.”

  “I’d sooner put my gun in my mouth,” he said. But he stuck the card in his pocket.

  Four

  The sun had gone down, sucking all the heat out of the air. It still smelled like snow. On my way home I stopped at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library on Woodward, where I knew the security guard. I spotted him a ten to let me in after closing and browsed through the out-of-town directories until I found a list of detective agencies in Denver and copied some likelies into my notebook.

  Colorado is two hours behind Michigan. Calling long-distance from home I found most of the offices still open.

  The first two I called didn’t believe in courtesy rates. The third took down the information I had on Henry Bliss the wandering bodyguard and said they’d get back to me. I hung up and dialed my service for messages. I had a message. I got the union executive I was working for at home. He had a tail job for me, a shop steward suspected of pocketing membership dues.

  “What am I looking for?” I asked.

  “Where he goes with the money.” The executive’s tone was as smooth as ice. No lead pipes across his throat like in the old days. “He’s not depositing it and he’s not investing it. Follow him until it changes hands. Get pictures.”

  The job would start in the morning. I took down the necessary information, pegged the receiver, slid a TV tray into the oven, and mixed myself a drink while it was heating up. I felt like a pretty, empty-headed girl with two dates for Saturday night.

  In the morning after breakfast I rang up Barry Stackpole at the Detroit News. While waiting for him to answer I watched the snow floating down outside the window turn brown before it reached the ground.

  “Amos the famous shamus,” said Barry, after I’d announced myself. “What can I do you for this lovely morning?”

  “You must be in St. Tropez. I need a name on a pro heavyweight.” I described Ned Eccles’ killer. Barry wrote a syndicated column on organized crime and had a national reputation and an artificial leg to show for it.

  “Offhand I could name twenty that would fit,” he said. “Local?”

  “Maybe. More likely he was recruited from somewhere else.”

  “Make that a hundred. I can get a list to your office by special messenger this afternoon. What’s the hit?”

  “A P.I. named Eccles. You wouldn’t know him. He ate that lead that was meant for Billy Dickers
on yesterday.”

  “That was a hit?”

  “I don’t know. But the cops are following the amateur theory and that leaves this way open. I step on fewer official toes.”

  “When did you get religion?”

  “I’m duplicating them on one thing, a previous bodyguard that got himself lost out West. The cops don’t put much faith in it. I wouldn’t be earning my fee if all I did was sniff their coattails. What’s this list going to run me?”

  “A fifth of Teacher’s.”

  “Just one?”

  “I’m cutting down. Hang tight.”

  After he broke the connection I called my service and asked them to page me if Denver called. Then I dug my little pen-size beeper out of a drawer full of spent cartridges and illegible notes to myself and clipped it to my belt and went to work for the union.

  The shop steward lived a boring life. I tailed his Buick from his home in Redford Township to the GM Tech Center in Warren where he worked, picked him up again when he and two fellow workers walked downtown for lunch, ate in a booth across the restaurant from their table, and followed them back to work. One of the other guys got the tab. My guy took care of the tip. On my way out I glanced at the bills on the table. Two singles. He wasn’t throwing the stuff away, that was sure.

  During the long gray period before quitting time I found a public booth within sight of the Buick in the parking lot and called my service. There were no messages from Denver or anywhere else. I had the girl page me to see if the beeper was working. It was.

  I followed the steward home, parked next to the curb for two hours waiting to see if he came out again, and when he didn’t I started the engine and drove to the office. Opening the unlocked door of my little waiting room I smelled cop.

  The door to my private office, which I keep locked when I’m not in it, was standing open. I went through it and found Gritch sitting behind my desk looking at a sheet of typing paper. His skin wasn’t any more colorful and he looked like a billboard with the window at his back. My scotch bottle and one of my pony glasses stood on the desk, the glass half full.

  “Pour one for me,” I hung up my hat and coat.

  He got the other glass out of the file drawer and filled it. His eyes didn’t move from the paper in his left hand. “You got better taste in liquor than you do in locks,” he said, leveling off his own glass.

  “I’m working. I wasn’t when I bought the lock,” I put down my drink in one installment and waited for the heat to rise.

  “This is quite a list you got. Packy Davis, yeah. Benny BoomBoom Bohannen, sure. Lester Adams, don’t know him.” His voice trailed off, but his lips kept moving. Finally he laid the sheet on the desk and sat back in my swivel-shrieker and took a drink, looking at me for the first time.

  “It isn’t quite up to date. Couple of those guys are pulling hard time. Two are dead, and one might as well be, he’s got more tubes sticking out of him than a subway terminal.”

  “You know lists. They get old just while you’re typing them up.” I bought a refill.

  “Some smart kid in a uniform brought it while I was waiting for you. I gave him a quarter and he looked like I bit his hand. Who sent it?”

  “A friend. You wouldn’t know him. He respects locks.” His marblelike face didn’t move. He’d heard worse. “This to do with the Eccles burn?”

  I said nothing. Drank.

  “Yeah, Alderdyce said you could shut up like an oyster. I called him. We had quite a conversation about you. Want to know what else he said?”

  “No, I want to know what brings you to my office when everyone else’s office who has any brains is closed.”

  “Your client won’t answer her phone. Her office is closed too, but it’s been closed all day and her home isn’t listed. And you’re harder to get hold of than an eel with sunburn. I didn’t feel like talking to the girl at your service. She sounds like my aunt that tells fortunes. I got to find out if there was any connection between Eccles and Henry Bliss, Dickerson’s old bodyguard.”

  A little chill chased the whisky-warmth up my spine, like a drop of cold water running uphill. “How come?”

  “No reason. Except the Denver Police fished a floater out of the South Platte this morning, with two holes in the back of its skull. We got the Telex two hours ago. The stiff fits Bliss’s description down to the scar on his chin.”

  Five

  I struck a match, cracking the long silence, and touched the flame to a Winston. Gritch watched me. He said:

  “Dunked stiffs surface after three days. That puts him in the river just about the time Dickerson and Cole and their boy Phil noticed him missing.”

  “Meaning?” I flipped the dead match into the ashtray on the desk and cocked a hip up on one corner, blowing smoke out my nostrils.

  “Meaning maybe yesterday’s try on Dickerson, if that’s what it was, wasn’t a backyard job after all. Meaning maybe the same guy that dusted Bliss dusted Eccles. Meaning that seeing as how the two hits were a thousand miles apart and seeing as how the guy that did it didn’t leave tracks either time, he’s pro after all.”

  “Slugs match up?”

  He shook his fair head without taking his eyes off my face. “Nothing on that yet. But they won’t. Major leaguers never use the same piece twice. What I want to know—”

  “You said they didn’t take their pieces away with them either.”

  “What I want to know,” he went on, “is how it happens I come here looking to talk to you and your client about Eccles’ being a mechanic’s job and find a list of mechanics all typed up nice and neat before I’m here five minutes.”

  “Just touching all bases,” I said. “Like you. You didn’t send a flyer to Denver looking for some local nut that doesn’t like loud music. “

  “That’s it, huh.”

  I said it was. He sipped more scotch, made a face, rubbed a spot at the arch of his ribcage, and set the glass down. I never knew a cop that didn’t have something wrong with his back or his stomach. He said, “Well, I got to talk to Carol Greene.”

  “I’ll set up a meet. What makes it Bliss and Eccles were connected?”

  “Nothing. But if it’s Dickerson this guy was after, he’s a worse shot than I ever heard of.”

  “Why make the bodyguards targets?”

  “That’s what I want to ask the Greene woman.” He got up, rubbing the spot. The hound’s-tooth overcoat he had on was missing a few teeth. “Set it up. Today. I get off at eight.”

  “How’d Dickerson do last night?”

  He opened the door to the outer office. “Capacity crowd. But he don’t have the stuff he had when the wife was a fan. When no one shot at him they left disappointed.”

  He went out. I listened to the hallway door hiss shut behind him against the pressure of the pneumatic device. Thinking.

  Six

  I finished the cigarette and pulled the telephone over and dialed Carol’s number. She answered on the third ring.

  “Lieutenant Gritch wants to talk to you,” I told her, after the preliminaries. “You’re better off seeing him at Headquarters. That way you can leave when you want to.”

  “I already talked to him once. What is it this time?” Her tone was slurred. I’d forgotten she was an alcoholic. I told her about Bliss. After a pause she said, “Ned never mentioned him. I’d know if they ever did business.”

  “Tell Gritch that.”

  “You got anything yet?”

  “A shadow of a daydream of an idea. I’ll let you know. Take a cab to Dearborn.”

  Next I got the Denver P.I. on the telephone. He said he was still working on the description I’d given him of Henry Bliss. I told him that was all wrapped up and I’d send him a check. Then I called Barry Stackpole.

  “That list all right?” he asked.

  “A little out of date, according to the cops. I may not need it. Who’s on the entertainment desk today?”

  “Jed Dutt. I still get my Teacher’s, right?”

&nb
sp; “If you switch me over to Dutt I’ll even throw in a bottle of tonic water.”

  “Don’t be blasphemous.” He put me on hold.

  “Dutt,” announced a rusty old wheeze thirty seconds later.

  “My name’s Walker,” I said. “I’m investigating the attempt on Billy Dickerson’s life yesterday. I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “Sorry. “

  I asked him the question. His answer was the first time I got more than one word out of him. I thanked him and broke the connection. The telephone rang while my hand was still on the receiver. It was the man from the union.

  “I’m still working on it,” I told him. “No money changed hands today.”

  He said, “Keep an eye on him. He isn’t swallowing it or burying it in the basement. I made some inquiries and found out the house across the street is for rent. Maybe you ought to move in.”

  “Round-the-clock surveillance costs money.”

  “Name a figure.”

  I named one. He said, “Can you move in tomorrow?”

  I said that was short notice. He said, “Your retainer buys us that right. Shall I make the rental arrangements?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said.

  I smoked a cigarette, looking at the blonde in the bikini on the calendar on the wall opposite the desk. Then I ground out the stub and made one more call. It took a while. When it was finished I got up and unpegged my hat and coat. Before going out I got the Smith & Wesson out of my top drawer of the desk and checked it for cartridges and snapped the holster onto the back of my belt under my jacket. I hate forcing a case.

  Seven

  No cops stopped me on my way into the Royal Tower this time, no one was waiting to frisk me when I stepped off the elevator on the third floor. I felt neglected. I rapped on 306.

  “What do you want?”

  I grinned at Phil. There was no reflection at all in his flat dark eyes. The automatic pistol was a growth in his fist.

  “This is for the grown-ups,” I said. “Any around?”