“You got a lot of smart mouth.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Phil, who is it?”
The voice was Martin Cole’s. It sounded rushed and breathless.146
“That snooper,” answered Phil, his eyes still on me.
“Tell him to come back later.”
“You heard.” The man with the gun smiled without opening his lips, like a cat.
A sudden scuffling noise erupted from inside the room. Someone grunted. A lamp was turned over with a thud, slinging lariats of shadow up one wall. Phil turned his head and I chopped downward with the edge of my left hand, striking his wrist at the break. He cursed and the gun dropped from his grip. When he stooped to catch it I brought my right fist scooping up, catching him on the point of the chin and closing his mouth with a loud clop. I stepped back to give him room to fall. He used it.
I got the automatic out from under his unconscious body and stepped over him holding it in my sore right hand. I’d barked the knuckles on his obelisk jaw. It was a wasted entrance. Nobody was paying me any attention.
Billy Dickerson, naked but for a pair of blue jockey shorts with his pale belly hanging over top, was on his knees on the floor astraddle a scarcely more dapper-looking Martin Cole. The manager’s tailored jacket was torn and his neatly styled hair hung cockeyed over his left ear. It was the first I knew he wore a wig. Dickerson was holding a shiny steel straight razor a foot from Cole’s throat and Cole had both hands on the singer’s wrist trying to keep it there. Dicker-son’s eyes bulged and his lips were skinned back from long white teeth in a depraved rictus. His breath whistled. Through his own teeth Cole said, “Phil, give me a hand.”
Phil wasn’t listening. I took two steps forward and swept the butt of the automatic across the base of Dickerson’s skull. The singer whimpered and sagged. Falling, the edge of the razor nicked Cole’s cheek. It bled.
A floor lamp had been toppled against a chair. I straightened it and adjusted the shade.
“Most people watch television at this time of evening,” I said.
The manager paused in the midst of pushing himself free to look at me. Automatically a hand went up and righted his wig. Then he finished rolling the singer’s body off his and got up on his knees, listening with head cocked. A drop of blood landed on Dickerson’s naked chest with a plop. The manager sat back on his heels,. “He’s breathing. You hit him damn hard.”
“Pistol-whipping isn’t an exact science. What happened?”
“D.T.’s. Bad trip. Maybe a combination of the two. He usually doesn’t get this violent. When he does, Phil’s usually there to get a grip on him and tie him up till it’s over.” He glanced toward the man lying in the open doorway. “Jeez, what’d you do, kill him?”
“It’d take more than an uppercut to do that. How long’s he been like this?”
“Who, Billy? Couple of years. The last few months, though, he’s been getting worse. The drugs pump him up for his performances, the booze brings him back down afterwards. But lately it’s been affecting his music.”
“Not just lately,” I said. “It’s been doing that for the past year anyway. That’s how long attendance at his concerts has been falling off, according to the entertainment writer I spoke to at the News. “
He had picked up his tinted eyeglasses from the floor and was polishing them with a clean corner of the silk handkerchief he had been using to staunch the trickle of blood from his cut cheek. He stopped polishing and put them on. “Your friend’s mistaken. We’re sold out.”
“They came to see if history would repeat itself and someone would make a new try on Dickerson. Just as you hoped they would.”
“Explain.”
“First get your hands away from your body.”
He smiled. The expression reminded me of Phil’s cat’s-grin. “If I were armed, do you think I’d have wrestled Billy for that razor barehanded?”
“You would have. He’s too valuable to kill. Get ‘em up.”
He raised his hands to shoulder level. I unholstered my .38 and put the nine-millimeter in my topcoat pocket. Go with the weapon you know.
“There was no hit man,” I said, “no attempt on your boy’s life. The man you intended to get killed got killed. It was going to be Henry Bliss, but in Denver something went wrong and you had to dump him without trumpets. What did he do, find out what you had planned for him and threaten to go to the law?”
He was still smiling. “You’re out of it, Walker. If there was no hit man, who killed Ned Eccles?”
“I’m coming to that. You’ve got a lot of money tied up in Dick-erson, but he’s depreciating property. I’m guessing, but I’d say a man with your expensive tastes has a lot of debts, maybe to some people it’s not advisable to have a lot of debts with. So you figured to squeeze one more good season out of your client and get out from under. Attempted assassination is box office. A body gives it that authentic touch. After disposing of Bliss you shopped around. I looked pretty good. Security isn’t my specialty, my reflexes might not be embarrassingly fast. Also I’m single, with no attachments, no one to demand too thorough an investigation into my death. But I turned you down. Ned Eccles wasn’t as good. He was married. But his marriage was sour—you’d have found that out through questioning, as keeping secrets was not one of Ned’s specialties—and being an experienced shield he’d have been looking for trouble from outside, not from his employers.
“I called Art Cradshaw a little while ago. That was a mistake, Cole, saying he recommended me. He wasted some of my time being evasive, but when he found out I wasn’t dunning him for what he owes me he was willing to talk. He remembered especially how pleased you were to learn I have no family.”
Dickerson stirred and groaned. His manager ignored him. Cole wasn’t smiling now. I went on.
“What’d you do, promise to cut Phil in on the increased revenue, or just pay him a flat fee to ventilate the bodyguard?”
“Now I know you’re out of it. If Phil shot him, where’s the gun? His is a nine-millimeter. Eccles was shot with a thirty-eight.”
“You were right in front of the service elevator. One of you stepped inside and ditched it. Probably Phil, who was more reliable than Dickerson and tall enough to push open one of the panels on top of the car and stash it there. The cops had no reason to look there, because they were after a phantom hit man who made his escape through the back door.”
“You’re just talking, Walker. None of it’s any good.”
“The gun is,” I said. “I think you have it hidden somewhere in this suite. The cops will find it. They’ve been sticking too close to you since the shooting for you to have had a chance to get rid of it. Until now, that is. Where are they?”
“I pulled them off.”
The voice was new. I jumped and swung around, bringing the gun with me. I was pointing it at Lieutenant Gritch. He was holding his own service revolver at hip level. Phil lay quietly as ever on the floor between us.
“Put it away,” Gritch said patiently. “I don’t want to add threatening a police officer to the charge of interfering in an official investigation. Too much paperwork.”
I leathered the Smith & Wesson. “You pulled them off why?”
“To give Cole and Scabarda here breathing space. I didn’t have enough to get a warrant to search the suite. I had a plainclothes detail in the lobby and near the back entrance ready to follow them until they tried to ditch the piece. Imagine my surprise when one of my men called in to say he saw you going up to the third floor.”
“You knew?”
He said, “I’m a detective. You private guys forget that sometimes. I had to think who stood the most to gain from two dead bodyguards. What tipped you?”
“Cole’s story of what happened downstairs. Ned Eccles wouldn’t have stopped a bullet meant for his mother. But it didn’t mean anything until you said what you did in my office about Dickerson’s fans paying to see him get killed.”
“Yeah, that’s w
hen it hit me too.”
“Couple of Sherlocks,” I said.
And then the muzzle of Gritch’s revolver flamed and the report shook the room and if there had been a mirror handy I’d have seen my hair turn white in that instant. The wind of his bullet plucked at my coat. Someone grunted and I turned again and looked at Cole kneeling on the floor, gripping his bloody right wrist in his left and. A small automatic gleamed on the carpet between him and Billy Dickerson, the King of Country Rock.
“Circus shooting,” Gritch said, disgusted. “If my captain asks, I was aiming for the chest. I got suspended once for getting fancy. Oh, your client’s waiting out in the parking lot, shamus. I was questioning her when the call came in. Couldn’t talk her out of going. Three sheets to the wind she’s still one tough broad. You’d better see her before she comes up here.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “She might kick Cole’s head in.”
“Guess I’ll be able to get that warrant now. You going to be handy for a statement?”
I wrote the address of the shop steward’s house in Redford Township on the back of a card and gave it to him. “Don’t try to reach me there. I’ll be staying in the place across the street for a while starting tomorrow.”
“How long?”
“Indefinitely.”
“I got a sister-in-law trying to get out of Redford,” he said. “I feel sorry for you.”
“Like hell you do.”
He grinned for the first time since I knew him.
The Prettiest Dead Girl in Detroit
No one sat in the lobby of the Hotel Woodward anymore. The ceiling was too high, the brass balls on the banister posts were too big, the oak paneling on the walls was carved too deep. The dark red crushed-leather chairs and sofa ached to wrap themselves around someone’s thighs, and when I stepped through the front door and closed it against an icy gust, the potted fern that occupied the spot on the Persian rug where Theodore Roosevelt had stood to register stirred its dusty fronds like an old man raising his face to the sun. In six months it was all coming down to make room for a ladies’ gym.
A geezer with a white moustache growing straight out of his nostrils moved his lips over my ID on the front desk and directed me to Room 212. I climbed a staircase broad enough to roll a rajah’s dead elephant down and paused outside an open door with cigarette smoke curling through it. The girl lying on the floor was looking straight at me, but she didn’t invite me in. She had learned her lesson the last time. She was a redhead, which I don’t guess means much of anything these days, but the red was natural and would look blonde in some lights. She had a tan the shade of good brandy covering her evenly from hairline to pink-polished toenails without a bikini line anywhere. It was the only thing covering her. Her body was slim and sleekly muscled, a runner’s body. Her eyes were open and very blue. The dark bruises on her throat where the killer’s thumbs had gone were the only blemishes I could see.
The investigation business was the same as ever. All the beautiful women I meet are either married or guilty or dead. There were three men in the room with her, not dead. One was tall and fifty with crisp gray hair to match his suit and very black features carved along the coarse noble lines of a Masai warrior chief. Standing next to him, almost touching him, was a smaller man, fifteen years younger, with dark hair fluffed out on the sides to draw your eyes down from his thinning top to a handlebar moustache someone else trimmed for him and one of those outfits you grin at in magazine ads—plaid jacket over red vest over diamond-patterned sweater over shirt over pink silk scarf with red cherries on it. He looked very white next to the other man. The third man, also white, was very broad across the shoulders, bought his suit in Sears, and combed his hair with a rake. His age had leveled off somewhere between the others’. Guess which one of these men is the hotel dick.
He spotted me first and walked around the body, transferring his cigarette to his lips to take my hand. He had a grip like a rusted bolt. “Amos Walker? Trillen, security officer. I’m the one who called you.”
“What seems to be the problem?”
He started a little and looked at me closely. He had gray eyes with all the depth of cigarette foil. “Yeah, I heard you were a comic. The night man, Applegate, gave me your name. You helped him clear up an employee matter a few months back before it got to the papers.”
I remembered the case. One of the hops had been letting himself into rooms with a passkey and taking pictures of people who would rather not have had their pictures taken together in hotel rooms. One night he went into 618 looking to Allen-Funt a city councilman with his male aide and got me.
“This is Charles Lemler,” Trillen said. “He’s with the mayor’s press corps. I’ll let him tell it.”
“Everyone calls me Chuck. Amos, right?” The moustached man in the noisy outfit grasped the hand Trillen had finished with. Afterward I left it out to dry. “The woman was here when we checked in, just as you see her. The clerk offered to move Mr. De Wolfe to another room before the police got here, but it’s going to get out anyway that he registered the day a dead body turned up in the hotel. Trillen suggested you by way of putting some kind of face on this before we call in the authorities.”
“Mr. De Wolfe?”
“I’m sorry. Clinton De Wolfe, Amos Walker.”
The tall black man standing with his back to the body inclined his head a tenth of an inch in my direction. Well, I’d had my hand wrung enough for one morning.
“Mr. De Wolfe is a former Chicago bank officer,” Chuck Lemler explained. “He’s the mayor’s choice for city controller here.”
“Ah.”
“‘Ah’ means what?” snapped De Wolfe.
“That my mouth is too big for my brain. Sorry. Can I look at the body?”
They made room for me. I checked the face and forehead for bruises and the hair for clotting, found nothing like that, spread my fingers to measure the marks on her neck. The spread was normal and while the dark spots were bigger than my thumbtips they weren’t the work of an escaped orangutan or Bigfoot. It takes less strength to strangle a healthy woman than you might think. There was some darkening along her left thigh and under her fingernails. I did a couple of ungallant things with the body and then stood up. My hands felt colder for the contact with her skin.
“Cover her.”
“You don’t like ‘em boned?” asked Trillen.
“Trillen, for God’s sake!” Lemler’s moustache twisted.
“Yeah, yeah.” The dick strolled into another room and came back carrying a hotel bedspread under one arm. I took an end and we covered the body. I asked if anyone knew her.
Trillen shook his shaggy head and squashed out his butt in a glass ashtray atop the television set. Well, he’d hear about that from someone. “Just another night rental. I hustle ‘em out the back door and they come in again through the side and prowl the bar for fresh meat. This one’s new.”
“This isn’t just another fifty-a-pop career girl,” I said. “It takes income to maintain an all-over tan in Michigan in November and the body stinks exclusive health club. Also she didn’t die here, or if she did someone moved her. She was lying on that thigh until not too long ago.”
“I’d heard politics were rotten in this town,” said De Wolfe.
“That’s just the sort of knee-jerk assumption we’ve been fighting for years,” Lemler snapped. To me: “There’s some opposition to Mr. De Wolfe’s choice as controller. But they wouldn’t go this far.”
“You mean trash a hooker and stash the body in his suite to stir up bad press. It’s been done.” I shook a Winston out of my pack but stopped short of lighting it. Why later. “My consulting fee’s two-fifty, same as my day rate.” Lemler nodded. I said, “There’s a lieutenant in Homicide named Alderdyce. If you ask him to sit on it he’ll do it till it sprouts feathers. But only if you ask him.”
De Wolfe glared. “That’s your professional advice? Call the police?”
“Not the police. John Alderdyce.”
<
br /> “It’s the same thing.”
“I just got through telling you it isn’t.”
Lemler said, “We’ll think about it.”
I said, “You’ll do it. Or I will. Maybe this is common practice at the City-County Building, but on Woodward Avenue it’s failure to report a homicide. I have a license to stand in front of.”
Trillen said, “Tell him to keep the name of the hotel out of it too.”
“That’s for the newspapers to decide when it breaks. And whether you advertise with them heavily enough to make it worth deciding.”
“Will you stay on the case regardless?” Lemler asked.
“The sooner this gets squared away the better for us, but we can’t throw the city’s weight behind an ordinary homicide investigation without drawing flies.”
“I’ll stay as long as the two-fifty holds out. Or until Alderdyce orders me off it,” I added.
Lemler produced a checkbook from an inside pocket and began writing. “Will a thousand buy a week of your services?”
“Four days. Not counting expenses.”
“The mayor will howl.”
“Tell him to make his new raise retroactive to August instead of July.”
Trillen called the number I gave him for Alderdyce from downstairs. I was smoking my cigarette in the hall outside when they came, the lieutenant towing a black photographer with a beard like a shotgun pattern and a pale lab man with a shrinking hairline and a young Oriental carrying a black metal case. Alderdyce stopped in front of me. He’s my generation, built heavy from the waist up, with facial features hacked out of a charred tree stump blindfolded.
“You didn’t burn any tobacco in there?” he demanded. I shook my head. “Thank Christ for small miracles.” The group swept in past me. I killed my stub in a steel wall caddy and brought up the rear.
Chuck Lemler broke off a conversation with Clinton De Wolfe to greet the newcomers. But Trillen intercepted Alderdyce and their clasped hands quivered grip for grip until the hotel dick surrendered. Alderdyce wasn’t even looking at him. “The body was covered like that when it was found?”
Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection Page 14
