Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “We’ve never mixed it up, you and me,” he said. “You’d lose.”

  We stayed like that for a long moment, he resting his weight on the desk, I trying to breathe with the edge pressing my sternum and cold from the window glass soaking clammily through my jacket and shirt to my back. Then he pushed off and turned around and left. The door drifted shut against the pressure of the pneumatic closer.

  John and I had played together as kids, a million years ago.

  Max Montemarano found me straightening the furniture in the office a few minutes later. He wasn’t fat at all, just large and slope-shouldered with a civilian overcoat over his gray guard’s uniform and a visored cap on the back of his white head. His face was broad and ruddy, and burst blood vessels etched purple tributaries on his cheeks. “Colder’n a witch’s tit,” he said by way of greeting.

  I blew dust out of a pair of pony glasses and filled them with scotch. He managed to snatch one up without spilling anything, lifted it in a sort of toast, and knocked it back the way they used to do in westerns. When the glass came down empty I poked a fifty-dollar bill into it. “Myra Langan,” I said.

  He looked down at the bill without touching it. “What about her?”

  “You followed up another girl’s complaint about her for your sister. She had a pimp. He had a name.”

  He set the glass down on the desk and drew himself up, squaring his visor. “I’m not a cop anymore. She ain’t working for my sister now. I never dipped a finger in twenty-three years on the force and I ain’t about to start now.”

  I said, “She’s dead. There’s a better than even chance her pimp killed her or knows who did.”

  He hesitated. I uncapped the bottle again and moved it toward his glass. He scooped out the bill and straightened it between his fingers and folded it and put it in his breast pocket and snapped the flap shut. I poured. He put down half.

  “He was a regular customer of Myra’s until he stopped coming in,” he said. “That was about the time the first john was approached.” A brow got knitted. “Wilson. Jim Wilson.”

  “Fat, short, tall, skinny, black, white, what?”

  “White. Not fat. Thick like me. He had the widest shoulders for his height of any man I ever seen. Wider than yours. Wore cheap suits.”

  I was lighting a Winston. I avoided burning any fingers putting out the flame. “Shaggy head? A smoker?”

  “Like a stack at the River Rouge plant. And if the guy combed his hair at all—”

  I came around the desk and aimed him toward the door. “Thanks for coming in.”

  “My drink.”

  I handed him the glass and the bottle and held the door. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  After the outer door closed on Montemarano I made a call and then unlocked the top drawer of the desk, checked my Smith & Wesson for cartridges, and clipped the holster to my belt under the tail of my jacket. It was heavier than a rabbit’s foot but felt just as good.

  Six

  The same geezer was sorting mail into the pigeonholes behind the desk at the Woodward when I strode past heading for the stairs. The letters might have come Pony Express. I knocked at 212 and Trillen opened the door. The hotel dick was alone in the suite with a chalk outline on the carpet where the dead girl had been lying. I asked him where Chuck Lemler and Clinton De Wolfe were.

  “Coming. De Wolfe changed hotels. What’s it about?”

  I walked around, poking my head into the other rooms. The air smelled of cigarettes and there were three butts in the ashtray on the television set, all Trillen’s brand. He’d been waiting there since taking my call. “Applegate offered me a job nightside,” I said. “The pay stunk. Head of security pay any better?”

  “Not much. It ain’t open anyway.”

  “Not yet.”

  De Wolfe and Lemler arrived fifteen minutes later. The black controller-to-be looked tall and gaunt in a dark overcoat and gray scarf. Lemler had on a horse blanket and one black glove and the other in his fist posing as a riding crop.

  “I hope you have something,” Lemler demanded. “The mayor wants to avoid identifying Mr. De Wolfe with this hotel any more than is absolutely necessary.”

  “I agree. It’s bad enough he’s identified with his old bank.”

  De Wolfe measured me out some of his icy glare.

  I said, “You took early retirement. The board of directors was all for it. If the stockholders found out you’d been using bank funds to launder Mob money they’d clear the executive offices.”

  “You’re drunk!” Lemler was paler than usual.

  “It was a frame,” said De Wolfe. “A good vice-president makes enemies. It was the only way they could get rid of me.”

  “It’s probably true or you would’ve let it go to court,” I said. “But it rules out the theory that your opponents here dumped a body in your suite to embarrass you. They have access to my information; the publicity from that Mob tie-in alone would have been enough to take you out of the running for city office. They didn’t have to commit murder too.” I turned to Lemler. “Chuck, I owe you five hundred from the retainer you gave me. I spent two-fifty. I’ll eat the price of the whisky. “

  “I didn’t pay you to fork up dirt on my employer’s choice for controller.” He was twisting his glove.

  “No, you paid me to find out who killed Myra Langan. That was the name of the murdered girl.

  “Someone thought she was too pretty to throw away on old men at dinner parties in Birmingham and Grosse Pointe,” I went on. “This someone started seeing her as a customer of the escort service she worked for and when he had her confidence he hooked her on drugs to make her easier to steer. He was in a line of work that put him in contact with useful people on every level. When it came time to collect for the stuff he was supplying her, he put her to work. Some men would pay two hundred dollars for twenty minutes with a girl like Myra. For a time it was sweet. But one night something tilted, as things will in business relationships of that nature, and she became a liability. As her pimp he was used to favors other than money; he picked an intimate moment to strangle her senseless and then load her with enough dope to send her over. It would look like accidental death or suicide. Only he hadn’t counted on her throat showing the bruises his fingers made after death. He’d forgotten how strong his hands were.”

  It was warm in the room, but none of us who were wearing overcoats had moved to take his off. Trillen, wearing the same baggy gray suit I had met him in, hadn’t stirred at all. I put my hands in the pockets of my coat and said, “But pimps are nothing if not resourceful. It happened that a political big gun was stopping at the hotel later that morning. If her body were found in his suite it would change the whole complexion of the investigation. This particular pimp had access to the service elevator and the authority to see to it that all the employees that might be prowling the halls at four in the morning were in another part of the hotel when he moved the corpse. The bare chance that a stray guest might spot him was worth taking. Bringing in a P.I. later to muck things up worse didn’t hurt.

  “How’s the back, Wilson?” I asked Trillen. “You ought to get iodine on those scratches before they infect.”

  The hotel dick’s mouth smiled. “You’re just stirring ashes. No proof.”

  “Applegate, the night man, will remember you were in the hotel this morning hours before your shift started. Whatever excuse you made won’t stand. You’re wearing Myra’s marks and I spoke to a man today who will identify you as her pimp. Take a fellow sleuth’s advice and plead guilty to second-degree. The city will want to get this one under glass in a hurry. Am I right, Chuck?”

  “I’ll advise the mayor,” said Lemler. He and De Wolfe were staring at Trillen, who was moving his huge shoulders around under his jacket. The dick said: “I didn’t hook her. She was shooting between her toes when I met her. Whatever croaker gave her the nod at the escort place wasn’t thorough. It was business all the way with us; I got her the stuff, she wiggled her tail at conv
entions and sometimes for me.”

  “What was she doing, moonlighting on you?” I asked.

  “That wouldn’t have been so bad, but she started doing it here where I work. I like this job and I busted my butt to get it. I left something here last night and when I came in for it I found her working the bar. She tried to sugar me out of my mad in one-ten. I went crazy in the middle of it. I thought she was dead. I OD’d her to make it look like an accident, but then the bruises started to show. Well...” He put a hand behind his back as if to stretch and brought it around with a gun in it.

  “Let it go.”

  Trillen swung toward the new voice, bringing the gun with him. John Alderdyce, standing in the open door to the hallway, crouched with his .38 stretched out in front of him in both hands. The hotel man dropped his weapon and threw his palms into the air.

  “Okay,” called the lieutenant.

  The kid in the plaid overcoat entered from the bedroom with his gun drawn. He holstered it, frisked Trillen against a wall, cuffed him, and started droning from a printed card he carried in his shirt pocket.

  “Fire escape,” explained Alderdyce, tucking away his own gun. “Junior was still in your building when Montemarano came out. We questioned him. I figured you’d come straight here. You should have called me.”

  “I had to earn my fee first,” I said.

  “You cut it fine.”

  “Not so fine.” I pulled my right hand out of my coat pocket wrapped around the butt of the Smith & Wesson and returned it to its holster.

  We shook hands.

  De Wolf said, “Lieutenant, may I go now? I just have time to book the evening flight back to Chicago.”

  Lemler was standing by the window with his face on the floor. I went over there. “We didn’t know about De Wolfe.” he said.

  “I believe you. Look on it as a break. The opposition would have run it up the nearest flagpole. Everybody crapped out on this one. The mayor lost an appointee, De Wolfe lost a good job, Trillen’s out the next ten to twenty, and Myra Langan’s behind one life. She was too pretty to live.”

  “You’re the only one better off than he was this morning,” Lem-ler said.

  I looked out the window. My lone pigeon or one like it had followed me there and was perched on the ledge between gimcracks, looking cold and dirty and miserable and like the only pigeon in the whole world.

  “Yeah, I’m way ahead.”

  Blond and Blue

  Ernest Krell’s aversion to windows was a legend in the investigation business. It was a trademark, like his gunmetal tie clasp made from a piece of shrapnel the army surgeons had pried out of his hip in Seoul and his passion for black suits with discreet patterns to break up their severity. During his seventeen years with the Secret Service he had spent so many public hours warning presidential candidates’ wives away from windows that when it came time to open his own detective agency he dug into his wife’s inheritance to throw up a building that didn’t have any. Narrow vertical slits set eight feet apart let light into a black marble edifice that looked like a blank domino from anywhere along the Detroit river.

  A receptionist with blue stones in her ears and that silver complexion that comes free with fluorescent lights took my hat and left me alone in Krell’s office, a bowling alley of a room carpeted in black and brown and containing oak-and-leather chairs and an antique desk in front of a huge Mirò landscape, lots of blues and reds, to make up for the lack of a window. The walls were painted two shades of cinnamon, darker on the desk side of the office to keep customers where they belonged. A lot of framed citations, Krell’s license, and a square black-on-white sign reading RELIANCE—“Courtesy, Efficiency, Confidentiality” took care of the bare spots.

  There were no ashtrays, so I took a seat near a potted fern and lit a cigarette, tipping my ashes into the pot. After five puffs the man himself came in through a side door and scowled at the curling smoke and then at me and said, “There’s no smoking in this building.”

  “I didn’t see any signs,” I said.

  “You don’t see any ashtrays either.” He ran a hand under the edge of the desk. A second later, the silver-skinned receptionist came in carrying an ashtray made just for putting out smokes in and I did that. I couldn’t decide if it was the way he had pushed the button or if I just had the look of a guy that would light up in the boss’s office. When she left carrying my squashed butt the man extended his hand and I rose to take it. His grip was cool and firm and as personal as a haberdasher’s smile.

  “Good to meet you, Walker. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “This is the first time I’ve gotten any higher than the fourth floor,” I said.

  Krell chuckled meaninglessly. He was six-three and two hundred, a large pale man with black hair that looked dyed and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun looking for riflemen on rooftops. It was orange today, orange stripes on his black suit and jaunty orange sunbursts on his silk tie to pick it up. It softened the overall effect of his person like a bright ribbon tied to a buffalo’s tail made you forget he was standing on your foot. The famous tie clasp was in place.

  He waved me back into my chair but remained upright at parade rest with his hands folded behind him. “I spent last night reading the files on the cases you assisted us with,” he said. “Despite the fact that you’re anything but the Reliance type”—his gaze lit on my polyester gabardine—“you show a certain efficiency I admire. Also you spend more time and effort on each client than a Reliance operative could afford.”

  “You can do that when they only come into your office one at a time,” I volunteered.

  “Yes.” He let the word melt on his tongue, then pressed on. “The reason I asked you to come down today, we have a client who might best benefit from your rather unorthodox method. A delicate case and a highly emotional one. Frankly, I’d have referred her to another agency had she not come recommended by one of our most valued clients.”

  “She?”

  “You’ll meet her in a moment. It’s a missing persons situation, which I believe is your specialty. Her son’s been kidnapped.”

  “That’s the FBI’s specialty.”

  “Only in cases where ransom is demanded. On the statutes it’s abduction, which would make it a police matter except that her ex-husband is the suspected culprit. The authorities consider that a domestic problem and approach it accordingly.”

  “Meaning it gets spiked along with the butcher’s wife who threw a side of pork at her husband,” I said. “‘How old is the boy?”

  “Seven.” He quarter-turned toward the desk and drew a typewritten sheet from a folder lying open on top. “Blond and blue, about four feet tall leaning to pudgy, last seen April third wearing a blue-and-white striped T-shirt, red corduroy shorts, and dirty white sneakers. Answers to Tommy. One minute he was playing with a toy truck in the front yard of his mother’s home in Austin, Texas, and the next there was just the truck. Neighbor thought he saw him on the passenger’s side of a low red sports car going around the corner. The ex-husband owns a red Corvette.”

  “That’s April third this year?” I asked. It was now early May.

  “I know it’s a long time. She’s been to all the authorities here and in Texas.”

  “Why here?”

  “A relative of the mother’s is sure she saw the father at the Tel-Twelve Mall in Southfield three weeks ago. She flew in right after. Staying at the relative’s place there.”

  “What makes it too hot to touch?”

  He stroked the edge of the sheet with a meaty thumb, making a noise like a cricket. “The ex-husband is an executive with a finance corporation I sometimes do business with. If it gets out I’m investigating one of its employees—”

  “Last stop for the money train,” I finished. “What’s to investigate? She should’ve gone back to court to start, put the sheriffs on his neck.”

  “His neck is gone and so is he. He took a leave of absence from
his company, closed out his apartment in Austin, and vanished, boy and all. He probably had all his bags packed in the Corvette’s trunk when he picked up Tommy and just kept driving. It’s all here.” He put the sheet back inside the folder and handed the works to me.

  It ran just five pages, triple-spaced and written in Reliance’s terse patented preliminary-report language, but on plain paper without the distinctive letterhead. Very little of it was for me. The ex-husband’s name was Frank Corcoran. He was a house investments counselor for Great Western Loans and Credit, with branch offices in seventeen cities west of the Mississippi. There were two numbers to call for information there. The name and number of the witness who had seen his car at the time of the boy’s disappearance were there too, along with the ‘Vette’s serial number and license plate. It was long gone by now or the cops in Austin or Detroit would have had it in on a BOL weeks ago. I folded the report into quarters anyway and put it in a pocket and gave back the empty folder. “Can I talk to the mother?”

  “Of course. She’s in the other office.”

  I followed him through the side door into a room separate from the one where the receptionist sat, a chamber half the size of Krell’s decorated in muted warm colors and containing a row of chairs with circular backs, like the room in a funeral home where the family receives visitors. “Charlotte Corcoran, Amos Walker,” said Krell.

  The woman seated on the end chair raised a sunken face to look at me. Her jaw was too long to be pretty, but it had been an attractive face before she started losing weight, the bones sculpted, not sharp like now, the forehead high and broad instead of jutting and hollow at the sides. The little bit of lipstick she wore might have been painted on the corpse in that same funeral home. Her hair was blond and tied back loosely with wisps of gray springing loose around her ears. Her dress was just a dress and her bare angular legs ended in bony feet thrust into low-heeled shoes a size too large for her. She was smoking a cigarette with a white filter tip. I peered through the haze at Krell, who moved a shoulder and then flipped a wall switch that started a fan humming somewhere in the woodwork. The smoke stirred and began twisting toward a remote corner of the ceiling. I got out a Winston and sent some of my own after it.