Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “My boy Tommy turned seven last week,” Charlotte Corcoran told the wall across from her. “It’s the first birthday I missed.”

  Her speech had an east Texas twang. I twirled another chair to face hers and sat down. The connecting door clicked shut discreetly behind Krell. It was the only noise he made exiting. “Tell me about your husband,” I said.

  She snicked some ash into a tray on the chair next to her and looked at me. Seeing me now. “I could call him a monster. I’d be lying. Before this the worst thing he did was to call a half hour before supper to say he was working late. He did that a lot; it’s part of why I divorced him. That’s old news. I want my son back.”

  “What’d the police in Austin say?”

  “They acted concerned until I told them he’d been kidnapped by his father. Then they lost interest. They said they’d put Tommy’s picture on the bulletin board in every precinct, and maybe they did. They didn’t give it to the newspapers or TV the way they do when a child’s just plain missing. I got the same swirl of no action from the police here. Kidnapping’s okay between relatives, I guess.” She spat smoke.

  “Skipping state lines should’ve landed it in the feds’ lap,” I said.

  “I called the Houston office of the FBI. They were polite. They test high on polite. They said they’d get it on the wire. I never saw any of them.”

  “So far as you know.”

  It was lost on her. She mashed out her butt, leaving some lipstick smeared on the end. “I spent plenty of time at Police Headquarters here and back home,” she said. “They showed me the door nice as you please, but they showed me the door. They wouldn’t tell me what they’d found out.”

  “That should have told you right there.”

  Her expression changed. “Can you find them, Mr.—I’ve forgotten.”

  “Walker,” I said. “A lot rests on whether they’re still here. And if they were ever here to begin with.”

  “Frank was. My cousin Millie doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “That’s Millicent Arnold, the relative you’re staying with?” She nodded. “I’ll need a picture of Tommy and one of Mr. Corcoran.”

  “This should do it.” From her purse she drew a 5x7 bureau shot and gave it to me. “I took it last summer on a trip to Corpus Christi. Tommy’s grown several inches since. But his face hasn’t changed.”

  I looked at the man with dark curly hair and a towheaded boy standing in swim trunks on a yellow beach with blue ocean behind them. “His father didn’t get that build lifting telephone receivers.”

  “He worked out at a gym near his office. He was a member.”

  I pocketed the photograph next to the Reliance report and stood up. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “I’ll be in.”

  Krell was on the intercom to his receptionist when I reentered his office. I waited until he finished making his lunch reservation, then:

  “How much of a boost can I expect from Reliance on this one?”

  “You already have it,” he said. “The situation is—”

  “Delicate, yeah. I’ll take my full fee, then. Three days to start.”

  “What happened to professional courtesy?”

  “It went out of style, same as the amateur kind. What about it? You’re soaking her five bills per day now.”

  “Four-fifty.” He adjusted his tie clasp. “I’ll have Mrs. Marble draw you a check.”

  “Your receptionist has access to company funds?”

  “She’s proven herself worthy of my trust.”

  I didn’t say it. My bank balance was stuck to the sidewalk as it was.

  Two

  The report had Mrs. Corcoran in contact with a Sergeant Grandy in General Service, missing persons detail. I deposited half of the Reliance check at my bank, hanging on to the rest for expenses, and drove down to Police Headquarters, where a uniform escorted me to a pasteboard desk with a bald head behind it. Grandy had an egg salad sandwich in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other and was using a blank arrest form for a placemat. He wore a checked sportcoat and a moustache healthy enough to have sucked all the hair from his scalp.

  “Corcoran, yeah,” he said, after reading my card and hearing my business. “It’s in the works. You got to realize it don’t get the same priority as a little boy lost. I mean, somebody’s feeding him.”

  “Turn anything yet?”

  “We got the boy’s picture and the father’s description out.”

  “That’s what you’ve done. What’ve you got?”

  He flicked a piece of egg salad off his lapel. “What I got is two Grosse Pointe runaways to chase down and a four-year-old girl missing from an apartment on Watson I’ll be handing to Homicide soon as she turns up jammed in a culvert somewhere. I don’t need parttime heat too.”

  We were getting started early. I set fire to some tobacco. “Who’s your lieutenant?”

  “Winkle. Only he’s out sick.”

  “Sergeant Grandy, if I spent an hour here, would I walk out any smarter than I was when I came in?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay. I just wondered if you were an exception.”

  I was out of there before be got it.

  On the ground floor I used a pay telephone to call the Federal Building and explained my problem to the woman who answered at the FBI.

  “That would be Special Agent Roseman, Interstate Flight,” she said. “But he’s on another line.”

  I said I’d wait. She put me on hold. I watched a couple of prowl-car cops sweating in their winter uniforms by the Coke machine. After five minutes the woman came back on. “Mr. Roseman will be tied up for a while. Would you like to call back?”

  I said yeah and hung up. Out on Beaubien the sidewalks were throwing back the first real heat of spring. I rolled down the window on the driver’s side and breathed auto exhaust all the way to my office building. You have to celebrate it somehow.

  Three

  The window in my thinking parlor was stuck shut. I strained a disc heaving it open a crack to smell the sweet sun-spread pavement three stories down. Then I sat down behind the desk—real wood, no longer in style but not yet antique—and tried the FBI again. Roseman was out to lunch. I left my number and got out the Reliance report and dialed one of the two numbers for the firm where Frank Corcoran worked in Austin.

  “Great Western.” Another woman. They own the telephone wires.

  I gave her my name and calling. “I’m trying to reach Frank Corcoran. It’s about an inheritance.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Corcoran is on indefinite leave.”

  “Where can I reach him?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I thanked her anyway and worked the plunger. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s basic to try the knob before you break out the lock picks. I used the other number, and this time I got a man.

  “Arnold Wilson, president of Thornbraugh Electronics in Chicago,” I said. Thornbraugh Heating & Cooling put out the advertising calendar tacked to the wall across from my desk. “We’re building a new plant in Springfield and Frank Corcoran advised me to call Great Western for financing. Is he in?”

  “What did you say your name was?” I repeated it. “One moment.”

  I had enough time to pluck out a cigarette before he came back on the line. “Are you the private investigator who spoke to my partner’s secretary about Mr. Corcoran a few moments ago?” His tone had lost at least three layers of silk.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t have any walls in that place?”

  I was talking to myself. As I lowered the dead receiver I could hear the computers gossiping among themselves, trashing my credit rating. The laugh was on them; I didn’t have one.

  Four

  My next trip was through the Yellow Pages. There were at least fifty public gymnasiums listed within a half hour of downtown Detroit, including Southfield, any one of which would suit Corcoran’s obsession with a healthy body. We all have our white whales. I made a list of the b
igger, cleaner places. It was still long. Just thinking about it made my feet throb.

  I tried the number of the place where Charlotte Corcoran was staying in Southfield. A breathy female voice answered, not hers.

  “Millicent Arnold?”

  “Yes. Mr. Walker? Charlotte told me she spoke to you earlier. She’s napping now. Shall I wake her?”

  “That’s okay. It’s you I want to talk to. About the man you saw who looked like Frank Corcoran.”

  “It was Frank. I spent a week in their home in Austin last year and I know what he looks like.”

  “Where did you see him at the mall? In what store?”

  “He was coming out of the sporting goods place. I was across the corridor. I almost called to him over the crowd, but then I remembered. I thought about following him, see where he went, but by the time I made up my mind he was lost in the crush. I went into the store and found the clerk who had waited on him. He’d paid cash for what he bought, didn’t leave a name or address.”

  “What’d he buy, barbell weights?” Maybe he was working out at home and I could forget the gyms.

  “No. Something else. Sweats, I think. Yes, a new sweatsuit. Does that help?”

  “My feet will give you a different answer. But yeah. Thanks, Miss Arnold.”

  “Call me Millie. Everyone does.”

  I believed her. It was the voice.

  After saying good-bye I scowled at the list, then raised my little electronic paging device from among the flotsam in the top drawer of the desk and called my answering service to test the batteries. They were deader than the Anthony dollar. I said I’d call in for messages and locked up.

  The office directly below mine was being used that month by a studio photographer, five foot one and three hundred pounds, with a Marlboro butt screwed into the middle of a face full of stubble. I went through the open door just as he finished brushing down the cowlick of a gap-toothed ten-year-old in a white shirt buttoned to the neck and blue jeans as stiff as aluminum siding and waddled around behind the camera, jowls swinging. “Smile, you little,” he said, squeezing the bulb on the last part. White light bleached the boy’s face and the sky-blue backdrop behind.

  When the kid had gone, following the spots in front of his eyes, I handed the photographer the picture Charlotte Corcoran had given me of her ex-husband and their son. “How much to make a negative from this and run off twenty-five prints?” I asked.

  He held the shot close enough to his face to set it afire if his stub were burning.

  “Eighty-seven fifty.”

  “How much for just fifteen?”

  “Eighty-seven fifty.”

  “Must be the overhead.” I was looking at a rope of cobwebs as thick as my wrist hammocking from the ceiling.

  “No, you just look like someone that wants it tomorrow.”

  “Early.” I gave him two fifties and he changed them from a cigar box on a table cluttered with lenses and film tubes and wrote me out a receipt.

  I used his telephone to call my service. There were no messages. I tried the Federal Building again. Special Agent Roseman had come in and gone out and wasn’t expected back that day. He had the right idea. I went home and cooked a foil-wrapped tray for supper and watched the news and a TV movie and went to bed.

  Five

  I was pulling a tail.

  Leaving the diner I let fix my breakfast those mornings I can’t face a frying pan, I watched a brown Chrysler pull out of the little parking area behind me in the rearview mirror. Three turns later it was still with me. I made a few more turns to make sure and then nicked the red light crossing John R. The Chrysler tried the same thing but had to brake when a Roadway van trundled through the intersection laying down horn.

  I was still thinking about it when I squeezed into the visitors’ lot outside Police Headquarters. My next alimony payment wasn’t due for a month and I hadn’t anything to do with the Sicilian boys’ betterment league all year.

  Sergeant Grandy had a worried-looking black woman in a ratty squirrel coat in the customer’s chair and was clunking out a missing persons report with two fingers on a typewriter that came over with Father Marquette. I asked him if Lieutenant Winkle was in today.

  “What for?” He mouthed each letter as he typed.

  “Corcoran, same as yesterday.”

  “Go ahead and talk to him. I had a full head of hair before people started climbing over it.”

  I followed his thumb to where a slim black man in striped shirtsleeves and a plain brown tie was filling a china mug at the coffee maker. He wore a modest Afro and gray-tinted glasses. I gave him a card.

  “I’ve been hired by Charlotte Corcoran to look for her ex-husband and their boy Tommy,” I said. “The sergeant wasn’t much help.”

  “Told you to walk off the dock, right?” His eyes might have twinkled over the top of the mug, but you can never be sure about cops’ eyes.

  “Words to that effect.”

  “Grandy’s gone as high as he’s going in my detail,” he said. “No diplomacy. You have some identification besides a card?”

  I showed him the chintzy pastel-colored ID the state hands out. He reached into a pocket and flipped forty cents into a tray full of coins next to the coffee maker. “Let’s go into the cave.”

  We entered an office made of linoleum and amber pebbled glass, closing the door. He set down his mug, tugged at his trousers to protect the crease, and sat on the only clear corner of his desk. Then he pulled over his telephone and dialed a number.

  “Hello, Miss Arnold? This is Lieutenant Winkle in General Service... Millie, right. Is Mrs. Corcoran in? Thank you.” Pause. “Mrs. Corcoran? No, I’m sorry, there’s nothing new. Reason I called, I’ve got a private investigator here named Walker says he’s working for you... Okay, thanks. Just wanted to confirm it.”

  He hung up and looked at me. “Sorry. Department policy.”

  “I’m unoffendable,” I said. “How many telephone numbers you keep in your head at a given time?”

  “Last month I forgot my mother’s birthday.” He drowned his quiet smile in coffee. “We have nothing in the Corcoran case.”

  “Nothing as in nothing, or nothing you can do anything with?”

  “Nothing as in zip. We run on coffee and nicotine here. When we get a box full of scraps we can hand over to the feds we don’t waste time trying to assemble them ourselves. The FBI computer drew a blank on Corcoran.”

  “Not unusual if he doesn’t have priors.”

  “It gets better. Because of the exodus from Michigan to Texas over the past couple of years a lot of local firms have been dealing with finance companies out there, so when it landed back in our lap we fed Great Western Loans and Credit into the department machine. Still nothing on Corcoran, because only the officers are on file. But the printout said the corporation invests heavily in government projects. As investments counselor, Frank Corcoran should have shown up on that FBI report. He’d have had to been screened one time or another.”

  “Some kind of cover-up?”

  “You tell me. The word’s lost a lot of its impact in recent years.” I opened a fresh pack of Winstons. “So why keep Mrs. Corcoran in the dark?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not rubbing off on us,” he said. “We’re just holding her at arm’s length till we get some answers back from channels. These things take time. Computer time, which is measured in Christmases.”

  “So why tell me?”

  He smiled the quiet smile. “When Sergeant Grandy gave me your card I did some asking around the building. If you were a bulldog you’d have what the novelists call ‘acquisitive teeth.’ Quickest way to get rid of you guys is to throw you some truth.”

  “I appreciate it, Lieutenant.” I rose and offered him my hand. He didn’t give it back as hastily as some cops have.

  “Oh, what would you know about a brown Chrysler that was shadowing me a little while ago?”

  “It wasn’t one of mine,” he said. “I’m lucky to get
a blue-and-white when I want to go in with the band.”

  I grasped the doorknob. “Thanks again. I guess you’re feeling better.”

  “Than what? Oh, yesterday. I called in sick to watch my kid pitch. He walked six batters in a row.”

  I grinned and left. That’s the thing I hate most about cops. Find one that stands for everything you don’t like about them and then you draw one that’s human.

  Six

  The job stank, all right. It stank indoors and it stank on the street and it stank in the car all the way to my building. I had the window closed this trip; the air was damp and the sky was throwing fingers whether to rain or snow. Michigan. But it wouldn’t have smelled any better with the window down.192

  The pictures came out good, anyway. It must be nice to be in a business where if they don’t you can trace the problem to a bad filter or dirt in the chemicals, something definite and impersonal that you can ditch and replace with something better. I left the fat photographer developing nude shots for a customer on Adult Row on Woodward and went upstairs.

  I lock the waiting room overnight. I was about to use the key when the door swung inward and a young black party in faded overalls and a Pistons warm-up jacket grinned at me. He had a mouth built for grinning, wide as a Buick with door-to-door teeth and a thin moustache squared off like a bracket to make it seem even wider. “You’re late, trooper,” he said. “Let’s you come in and we’ll get started.”

  “Thanks, I’ll come back,” I said, and back-pedaled into something hard. The wall was closer this morning. A hand curled inside the back of my collar and jerked my suitcoat down to my elbows, straining the button and pinning my arms behind me.