Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  Trillen said no. The lieutenant barked at the lab man to take some fiber samples from the blanket and subtract them from whatever else was found on the corpse. He lifted one corner of the blanket.

  “Damn.”

  “Jesus,” said the photographer, and took a picture.

  I said, “Yeah.”

  Alderdyce flipped aside the blanket. “Bag her hands,” he told the lab man. “There’s matter under her fingernails.”

  “Blood and skin,” I said. “She branded somebody.”

  He looked at me. “I guess you better feed me all of it.”

  “Strangulation maybe,” said the young Oriental, before I could speak. He was down on one knee beside the body with his case open on the floor, prying one of the dead eyelids farther open with a thumb in a surgical glove. “Maybe OD. I’ll say what when I get her open.”

  “No tracks,” said Alderdyce, glancing at her wrists and legs.

  I said, “There’s scar tissue between her toes. I checked.”

  “Damn nice of you to think to call us in, Walker.”

  I let that one drift.

  “Get some Polaroids,” Alderdyce told the photographer. “Last time the shots were three days coming back from the lab.” He stopped looking at the body and pointed at the used ashtray. “Careful with that butt. The girl’s wearing lipstick. It isn’t.”

  “Uh, that’s mine,” said Trillen.

  The lieutenant swore.

  The rest was routine. Under questioning Trillen revealed that the suite had been cleaned the afternoon before and that no one had been inside between then and when the body was found. There were enough passkeys floating around and keys that had gone off with former guests to spoil that angle, and while Lemler maintained that De Wolfe’s arrival and the number of his suite had been kept confidential, Trillen admitted that there was no standing on the staff grapevine. Meanwhile the lab man quartered the carpet for stray paperclips, and the photographer, having traded the camera he’d been using for another strung around his neck, took more pictures of the body and laid them on the telephone stand to finish developing. I palmed a good one and let myself out while Alderdyce was politely grilling De Wolfe.

  Two

  Barry Stackpole came out of the YMCA showers scrubbing his sandy hair with a towel, hesitated when he saw me by the lockers, then grinned and lowered the towel to cover his lower body modestly. Only it wasn’t his nakedness that embarrassed him, just his Dutch leg. I said, “Doesn’t that warp or something?”

  He shook his head, reaching for his pants. “Fiberglass. I could’ve used you out on that handball court a few minutes ago.”

  “No, you couldn’t. I was watching you.”

  I’ve known Barry since we shared a shell crater in Cambodia, years before he started his column on organized crime for the Detroit News and got his leg and two fingers blown off for his syntax. Someone at the paper had told me I’d find him creaming a Mob attorney on the courts. I held the Polaroid I’d swiped in front of his face while he was tying his shoes. He whistled. “Actress?”

  “Prostitute,” I said. “Maybe. Know her?”

  “Not on my salary. Who squiffed her?”

  “Why I’m here. Can you float it among your friends on the well-known Street, put a name to the face? It wouldn’t have stayed so pretty very long if she wasn’t connected.”

  He finished drawing on his shirt and put the picture in the breast pocket. “User?”

  “Yeah. Either someone throttled her unconscious and then shot too much stuff to her or shot too much stuff to her and couldn’t wait. While you’re at it, feed Clinton De Wolfe to your personal computer and see what it belches out.”

  “I know that name.”

  “If you do you heard it from your guy on city government. He’ll be fine-tuning the books if the mayor gets his way.”

  “That isn’t it. When I remember what it was I’ll get back to you.” He took down a bottle of mouthwash from the shelf in his locker and unscrewed the cap. “How rich does this little errand stand to make me?”

  “A century, if I like what I hear, Otherwise seventy-five.”

  “Century either way. Plus a fifth of Jack Daniel’s.”

  “I thought you were on the wagon.”

  “It’s a cold dry ride.” He hoisted the mouthwash. “Cold steel.”

  “Hot lead,” I returned. The joke toast was as old as the last Tet offensive and the stuff in the bottle smelled like rye. I left him.161

  Three

  My office waiting room was full of no customers. I unlocked the door to the brain trust, forward-passed a sheaf of advertising circulars I found under the mail slot to the wastebasket, pegged my hat and coat, and set the swivel behind the desk to squeaking while I broke the scotch out of the deep drawer. There was frost on the window, frost on my soul. I guessed Barry had found my breath sweet enough not to need help. As the warmth crawled through my veins I dialed my service. John Alderdyce had tried to reach me twice. I knew why. I asked the girl to hold any further calls from him and thumbed down the plunger and tried another number from memory. A West Indies accent answered on the third ring, cool and female.

  “Iris, this is Amos.”

  “Amos who?”

  “It’s a funny hooker,” I said dryly. “I’m trying to identify a lady who might have been in your line. Five-six and a hundred and ten, red and blue, Miami tan, about thirty. She showed up dead in a suite in the Woodward this morning. Drugs and strangulation. She wasn’t a stranger to the drugs.”

  “Sounds a little rich for the street.”

  “You get around.”

  “In Blacktown. You’re talking Grosse-Pointe chic. Try the escort services.”

  “The real ones or the fronts?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “That’s all you can tell me, huh.”

  “Every one of us don’t know everyone else,” she retorted, her class slipping. “Amos?”

  I’d started to peg the receiver. I raised it again and said yeah. After a pause she said, “I’m going home.”

  “Home where?”

  “Home where. Home the island. I’m going back to live with my mother.”

  “I’m glad,” I said after a moment. “It’s what you’ve been wanting.”

  “That’s all? I thought maybe you’d try to talk me out of it.”

  “I don’t have any hold on you, Iris.”

  “No. I guess you don’t.”

  “Have a good flight.” I was speaking into a dead line.

  I looked at the calendar on the wall across from my framed investigator’s license. Then I looked at a pigeon shivering alone on the ledge of the apartment house facing my building. Then I looked at the calendar again to see what the date was. I winched the Yellow Pages out of the top drawer and looked up Escorts.

  I tried the display advertisements first and got three possibles. Then I tried the cheaper listings and lucked out on the first call.

  “I need an escort for a business party Friday night,” I told the woman who answered, by rote. “What I’m interested in is a specific redhead I saw with a friend of mine in the restaurant of the Hotel Woodward recently. I didn’t get her name but I think she’s with your service.” I described her.

  “That sounds like Myra Langan,” said the woman. “But she doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “Did she resign?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “That means she was fired.”

  “I m not—”

  “Can I talk to you about her in person? It’s important.”

  “We have another redhead,” she started to say. I told her I’d pay for her time. She hesitated, then said, “Our regular escort fee is a hundred dollars.” I said that sounded fair and agreed to meet her in the office at three. “Ask for Linda.”

  It was just past noon. I thought about the woman’s voice. She sounded pleasant and young. You can’t always get the accent you want. I skipped lunch and drove to a downtow
n theater where an old Robert Mitchum detective film was playing in revival. I took notes. In the lobby afterward I used the pay telephone to call Barry Stack-pole’s private number at the News.

  “Nobody I showed the picture to knows her from Jane Fonda,” he told me. “Could be I’m working the wrong level. All the capos are browning their bellies at Cannes this time of year.”

  “Try Myra Langan. I’ve got an appointment today with a woman she worked with at a legit floss rental firm.” I named the place.

  “Our guy on cophouse might turn something. It means bringing him in.”

  “Cut the best deal you can.” I took the instrument away from my ear.

  “Don’t you want to hear what I found out about Clinton De Wolfe?”

  I paused. “I’m on pins and noodles.”

  “I get an exclusive when this breaks, right?”

  “Feed it to me. “

  “I finally remembered where I’d heard the name and hooked a snitch,” he said. “De Wolfe is on the books as having resigned his vice-presidency at a Chicago bank in September. The dope is he was forced out for making unsecured loans to a Mob subsidiary in Evanston and accepting repayment in cash skimmed from the tables in Vegas.”

  I looked at a stiff face reflected in the telephone’s shiny steel cradle. “Laundering?”

  “Yeah. They let him quit to duck bad press. Good?”

  “Listen, I’m on my way to your office with a C-note and a fifth of JD. Have that picture ready, okay?”

  “Bring a glass for yourself.” He broke the connection.

  Four

  It was a quick stop and a quicker drink. From there I drove downriver to a low yellow brick building between a beauty salon and a hairpiece emporium with the escort firm’s name etched in elegant script across the front. Inside was an office decorated like a living room with a white shag rug and ivory curtains and a lot of blond furniture, including a tall occasional table with turned legs and a glass top, but it didn’t fool me. I know a desk when I see one. A brunette with her hair piled atop her head in blue waves and the kind of cheeks girls used to have their back teeth hauled out to get sat behind it wearing a black dress with a scoop neck and pearl buttons in her ears. I took off my hat and asked for Linda.

  “You’re Mr. Walker?” I said I was. “I’m Linda.”

  I glanced around. The room took up the entire ground floor and we were the only ones in it. “Who was I supposed to ask?”

  “I wanted to get a look at you. In this business we have to go out with whoever has the price and no bloodstains on his necktie. When I get the chance to choose I leap on it. Are you a daylighter or a sundowner?” I must have looked as stupid as I felt, because she said, “A sundowner waits for darkness before he’ll take a drink. It’s dark in England.”

  “My father’s family was English.”

  She smiled and rose. “I’ll get my coat and purse.”

  We went to a place down the street with a blue neon cocktail glass on the roof and took a booth upholstered in red vinyl around a table the size of a hubcap. She ordered something green. I took scotch and when the waitress left I slid the Polaroid shot I had gotten back from Barry across the table. Linda’s nostrils whitened when she glanced down at it. Then she looked at me:

  “You’re not a policeman. Your eyes are too gentle.”

  “I’m a private investigator.” I tapped the picture. “Myra Langan?’

  “It’s her. Are you looking for her murderer?”

  “Who said murderer?”

  “She was the kind of a girl who would wind up murdered or suicided. Did she kill herself?”

  “Not unless she found a way to strangle herself bare-handed. What kind of a girl is the kind that would wind up murdered or suicided?”

  She sipped her drink and set it down. After a beat I passed her two fifties. With what I’d given Barry, that left me just fifty from the first day of my retainer. I was on the wrong end of the information business.

  “Myra got fired for her action on the side,” said Linda, snapping shut her purse. “The police keep a tight eye on the escort business for just that. It was can her or risk a raid.”

  “Who snitched on her?”

  “Another girl, Susan. They were at the same party and Susan overheard Myra discussing terms with her escort. Myra tried to cut her in but she wasn’t having any.”

  “Myra got canned on just her word?”

  “The boss lady ran a check. Her brother’s a retired cop. He interviewed some of Myra’s regular customers. The same pimp put six of them on her scent.”

  “What’d he interview them with, a Louisville Slugger?”

  “He’s retired like I said.” She licked a drop off the end of her swizzle stick, eyeing me. “Married?”

  “Not recently. Was she using when she worked for the firm?”

  “You mean drugs? She couldn’t have been. A complete physical is part of the screening process for new employees.”

  “Could’ve happened after she was hired. She worked there how long?”

  “She was there when I came. A year, maybe. You think the pimp turned her on to get a handle on her?”

  “It’s not new. Looks like hers run high in executive circles. He have a name?”

  “Probably. Talk to Max Montemarano. That’s the boss lady’s brother. He’s a day guard at Detroit Bank and Trust. The main branch.”

  I got up and left money on the table for the drinks. “Thanks. I have to see a man.”

  “Me, too.” She swung a mile of silk-paved leg out from under the table. “What do you do when you’re not detecting?”

  I watched her stand up. Some women know how to get out of a booth. I asked her if she’d ever lived on an island.

  “What? No.”

  “Okay, thanks again.”

  On my way out a man in a blue suit seated near the door looked from me to the woman in the black dress standing by the booth and then back to me. I agreed with him.

  Five

  I called the bank from an open-air booth outside a service station. A receptionist got me Montemarano, who explained in a hard fat man’s voice that his shift didn’t change for another hour but agreed to stop by my office on his way home for a quick fifty. The expenses on this one had just caught up with my fee.

  A kid in a plaid overcoat stood in the foyer of my building reading the sign on the building super’s door. The sign read MANAGER. He was still studying when I reached the second-floor landing. He might as well have worn a uniform.

  I found Lieutenant John Alderdyce sitting on the bench in my waiting room learning about the Man of some other Year from a copy of Time he’d unstuck from the coffee table. He had on a tan jacket and a red knit tie over a champagne-colored shirt. Since I knew him he’d dressed from nowhere closer to the street than J. L. Hudson’s second floor. “This year it’s a computer,” he said, flicking his fingers at the photograph on the cover. “What do you think about a machine making the cover of Time?”

  “Electricity’s cheap. You and I run on tobacco and alcohol.”

  I unlocked the inner office door. “Someone should enroll your boy in the lobby in a remedial reading course.”

  “He’s on loan from the commissioner’s office. His Police Positive has an ivory handle.” He got up and followed me inside, where I shed my outerwear and sat down and got an old bill from under the desk blotter and pretended to check the arithmetic. He thumped his hand down on the desk, palm up. “The photog used up a twelve-pack of Polaroid film at the Woodward. He wound up with eleven pictures.”

  I started to reach for my inside breast pocket, then remembered I’d left the picture of Myra Langan on the table where I’d had drinks with Linda. “I’ll stand the department to a new pack tomorrow.”

  “You wouldn’t be prowling around in an open homicide investigation,” he said. “Not you.”

  “It happens we’re both working for the city this one time. Check with Lemler.”

  “No thanks. Every time I look a
t that guy’s clothes and shut my eyes I see spots. What’d you turn?”

  I watched him. He had sad eyes. Cops do, and it doesn’t mean anything more than a croc’s smile. Finally I said, “Her name was Myra Langan. She worked for an escort service downtown till they booted her for soliciting.” I told him which service and gave him Linda’s name. I didn’t mention Max Montemarano or the pimp. It weighed light without them and Alderdyce saw it. He said, “I guess you stopped here on your way to Headquarters.”

  “More or less.”

  “More less than more. You passed Headquarters on your way here.”

  “I wanted to see if I had customers. “

  “No good. Go again.”

  “I’m a small guy in a small business, John. I don’t have your resources.”

  “Resources. The redhead—Myra?—rode the springs with some guy not long before she was killed, the M.E. said. He took a smear and the type matches the blood we found under her fingernails. She was alive until four this morning. I’ve got men knocking on doors in the hotel looking for busted lamps and shaving cuts that don’t fit a razor and scouting up the night staff, which by now is scattered between here and Ann Arbor. It’s a big hotel, Walker. It has a big staff and lots of rooms. If I could put the squad on it I’d have the answers I need in an hour. But police reporters notice when the squad’s missing and start asking questions. I’ve got Junior downstairs and one other detective and two uniforms borrowed from Traffic. I can’t even get priority at the lab because someone who knows the number of one of this town’s three TV stations might be looking.”

  He stuck his brutal face inches from mine. “Those are my resources, Walker. Four men, and the mayor’s dresser asking me every five minutes when I’m going to arrest someone. You’re a detective. Does it look to a detective like I need a keyholer playing Go Fish with me too?”

  “I’m waiting to hear it,” I said.

  “Hear what?”

  “‘Get off my foot or I’ll jerk your license.’”

  Alderdyce lifted weights when he wasn’t sifting leads. He gave the desk a shove and it struck me in the solar plexus and I rolled backward on squealing casters and came to a rest pinned against the window. He leaned on the desk.