Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  She wet her lips. I lit a Winston and gave it to her. She inhaled deeply, her fingers fidgeting and dropping ash on the carpet. “My sister kept the secret all these years. It wasn’t until she died and I opened her safety deposit box and read the letters—” She broke off and mashed out the cigarette in a copper ashtray atop the bureau. “Do I have time to get dressed and put on lipstick before the police arrive? They never even gave Leo time to grab a necktie whenever they took him in for questioning.”

  I told her to take as much time as she needed. At the bedroom door she paused. “I don’t regret it, you know. Maybe I wouldn’t have been happy married to Abe. But when I think of all those wasted years—well, I don’t regret it.” She went through the door.

  Waiting, I pocketed the letters, shook the last cigarette out of my pack, and struck a match. I stared at the flame until it burned down to my fingers.

  He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two. I dropped the match and vaulted to the bedroom door. Moving too damn slowly. I had my hand on the knob when I heard the shot.

  Twelve

  The temperatures soared later in the month, and with them the crime statistics. The weathermen called it the hottest July on record. The newspapers had another name for it, but it had already been used.

  The Anniversary Waltz

  I caught up with Judd Lindauer in the Detroit Free Republic of Nicotine Abuse, otherwise known as the parking lot behind the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. The flag is a black lung on a field of tobacco leaves.

  A big man of sixty beginning to stoop to a mere six-six, Lindauer left a crowd of litigants and judges and changed hands on his cigar to shake my hand. He had on a blue suit with flared lapels and a tan suede yoke over a snap-front shirt secured with a string tie. As far as I knew he’d never been west of Kalamazoo except when tracking a jump on a hundred-grand bail. He was a bail bondsman and a bounty hunter and enjoyed looking the part.

  “Remember me on this one, Amos,” he said when we were out of earshot of the others. “There’s miles of press in it if you tear this one off. That can’t be bad for a one-man band like yours.”

  I said, “Maybe I’ll buy you a drink when I know what it’s about. All my service told me is you wanted to see me.”

  “That’s all I told them.” He lowered his voice to a reverberating boom. “It’s Adelaide Dix.”

  “The trunk murderess?”

  “If you believe the tabloids. Personally I don’t think she ever harmed a piece of luggage in her life, and I’m the one who went her bail.”

  “Which time? She escaped what, four times?”

  “Four and a half. She got outside the wall up in Marquette six weeks after they transferred her from Jackson, but they kept that one out of the papers. They managed to hang on to her for two years after that; then she flushed herself down the sewer. That was eight years ago. Nobody’s seen her since.”

  I plucked a Winston out of my pack and put it between my lips without lighting it. There was enough smoke drifting across the lot to cure a ham. “I heard she drowned in Lake Superior.”

  “I don’t have any reason to doubt it. Superior never gives up its dead.”

  “So where is she?”

  He handed me one of his cards, embossed in gold on white stock with a gold lariat in one corner. A telephone number was written on the back next to a name: G. Tolliver.

  “The G stands for Geraldine,” he said. “She’s Adelaide’s daughter. Her husband’s Bert Tolliver, a building contractor. You get her, you get him too. But she does the talking. She says her mother’s alive.”

  “Says to who, you? And why?”

  “I put up bail when Adelaide got a new trial. She jumped—that was the first escape—and I brought her back. I flew with her from Denver to Detroit, first-class, no cuffs. I was the first person not to treat her like a tarantula. Geraldine was grateful. I’m the only member of the law enforcement community she thinks she can trust.”

  “Why tell anyone? Old lady getting too tough to care for?”

  “Ask Geraldine. I didn’t ask her any questions and I stopped her before she could give me any specific information. I’m an officer of the court; it’s my license if I fail to report knowledge of a fugitive’s whereabouts. I told her I was giving it to you and you’re no gossip.”

  “I’ve got a license too,” I said. “I didn’t get this job drawing Sherlock Holmes off a matchbook.”

  “You’ve got the hot handle. What you do with it won’t burn me.” He blew a smoke ring big enough to snare me around the neck.

  • • •

  In 1985, Adelaide Dix had driven Iran-contra off the front pages when she was convicted of chopping up her second husband, packing him in an antique trunk, and stowing it in a corner of her Sterling Heights basement. A meter reader reported the smell and Adelaide got life. Her first escape while out on bail pending a new trial destroyed her defense; two more bought her a cell away up North in Marquette. She had an I.Q. of 160, fifty points higher than the average corrections officer, so another escape was inevitable. A set of size six footprints in the sand leading to Lake Superior convinced authorities she was dead, but that didn’t prevent her from showing up at a McDonald’s drive-through every couple of months with Elvis at the wheel.

  A well-tended female voice, ratcheted a notch high for normal intercourse, provided an invitation and directions to a house in one of the newer suburbs, founded since white flight. It was a stack of trapezoidal boxes with passive solar windows—ornamental only in Michigan’s cloudy climate—tucked between hills in a tract named after a tree that had been extinct in the area for three hundred years.

  Geraldine Tolliver was small and compact, about twenty, with short red hair and a tiny waist in a tailored shirt and capri pants or whatever they’re calling them this year. Her husband, Bert, was heavily muscled and sunburned in a polo shirt and khakis. He was a hand-mangler; two drinks and he’d be pounding my back. I avoided the sofa in case he decided to sit within range and settled into an Eames knockoff with a scotch and soda.

  Mrs. Tolliver tasted her gin and tonic, set it down, and never returned to it. “Mr. Lindauer says you’re a man one can confide in. Are you like a priest?”

  “Only in that department.”

  “Honey, I think we’d better see some ID. We’d better see some ID,” Bert Tolliver told me, over the top of a whiskey sour the size of a conga drum.

  I showed them some ID.

  “Mr. Walker, we need your word you’ll tell no one about this,” the woman said. “Not even your wife. Things have a way of getting back to Alvin Shrike. It’s almost supernatural.”

  “I don’t have a wife. Who’s Alvin Shrike?”

  “An icicle-pissing son of a bitch. Sorry, honey.” Tolliver sat back in the sofa and drank.

  Mrs. Tolliver gave him the fisheye and finished what she’d started to say. “Shrike’s chief of police here. Bert’s right about the rest. He was an officer in Sterling Heights fifteen years ago. The man my— the dead man in the trunk was his partner.”

  “That would be your father?”

  “No. My father died of cancer when I was three months old. George Dix was a good-looking brute and a drunk who seduced my mother into marrying him and beat her up on a regular schedule. When he started in on me she did something about it.”

  “No one would argue with that.”

  “I don’t remember much about that night. I remember he slapped me and the way my face was still burning when I woke up. When I was old enough to understand she told me she shot him with his service revolver. I have no doubt she’d have been acquitted if she’d stopped there. The dismemberment was a mistake.”

  “It usually is.”

  “She didn’t want me to wake up and find a corpse in the house. She was temporarily insane, of course, but the jury rejected that. Calling her ‘Adelaide the Axe’ in the tabloids didn’t help.”

  “‘Slice-and-Dice Dix,’” put in Tolliver.

  She close
d her eyes. “That too. There were others. Why do people take such delight in grisly details?”

  “It’s a dark old world,” I said. “Have you heard from your mother?”

  “Once a year for eight years.” She got up, opened a drawer in a bleached oak table with a cordless telephone on top, and brought over a picture postcard. There was no message on the back, just a USPS postmark and the Tollivers’ address block-printed with a black felt-tipped pen. It had been mailed last week. The picture on the other side was a color shot of Grand Traverse Bay.

  “They always come before my birthday,” Geraldine said. “Always a different scene, but always in Michigan. Mother’s a native, but like so many she never got around to visiting the local vacation spots. We used to talk about going to all of them when she got out of prison. This is as close as we can come to that as long as Shrike’s around.”

  I gave it back. “It’s been fifteen years. Maybe he’s put it behind him.”

  She shut the drawer on the postcard and stepped over to a window. “I want you to look at something.”

  When I joined her, she drew aside the curtain two inches. A gold Chrysler four-door was parked on the corner across the street. I could read the headline on the newspaper the driver had spread in front of his face. “It isn’t Shrike,” she said. “Or maybe it is. The point is it doesn’t have to be, as long as he runs the police department in this town. We have an escort every time we leave the house. I’d actually miss them if they weren’t there.”

  “You could do a quarterback split and decoy him off.”

  “I’m sure there’s a contingency plan. Anyway, where would we go? Mother’s always been careful not to give any hints as to her whereabouts. You couldn’t even prove in court she’s the one who sends the cards. But I know.”

  We sat back down. I asked her what she wanted me to do.

  “I want you to talk her into giving herself up. She can’t run forever. I’m terrified someday I’ll turn on the news and hear she’s been shot down by Shrike or one of his officers. He said in court he wished Michigan would bring back the death penalty just for her.”

  “Traverse City’s a good-size town. Even if it weren’t, she’s probably blown it by now, if she was ever there to begin with. You can buy postcards anywhere. I’d need a bigger comb than Shrike’s got and I’d have to start in Little America.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. She’ll be at the cemetery in Sterling Heights the day after tomorrow.”

  I looked from her to Tolliver, who was watching me over his glass like someone who’d heard the joke before and was waiting to see the reaction. I disappointed him. I sipped scotch and soda and said, “What time? I’m going to a ball game that night.”

  Geraldine shook her head. “I can’t tell you that because I don’t know. The day after tomorrow is my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It’ll be their anniversary all day.”

  I was starting to get it. “That’s where your father’s buried? What makes you think she’ll show?”

  “Because when my father got sick and needed hope, my mother promised him they’d be together on their silver anniversary. She keeps her promises. And she never forgets a date.” She tilted her head toward the drawer containing the postcard. “By now that officer outside has radioed in your license number and knows who you are, but I assume you’re experienced in discouraging people from following you. We’re not. We’d lead Shrike right to her.”

  “Okay, the Tigers can lose without me in the bleachers. My fee’s five hundred for the day.”

  Tolliver made himself useful and put down his drink and wrote me a check. His wife took the back off a picture frame from the fireplace mantel and handed me a photo of a handsome middle-aged woman with sharply intelligent eyes.

  “That’s the latest we have. It was taken nine years ago. Every Christmas the inmates got to put on civilian clothes and pose for a professional photographer.”

  I got up and slid it into my inside breast pocket along with the folded check. “It wouldn’t be an honest five hundred if I didn’t tell you it’s wasted. If your mother keeps that promise she isn’t as smart as I’d heard, even if she’s alive. Anyone could be sending you those postcards as a sick gag. You don’t know who knows about your conversations.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Walker,” Geraldine said. “It isn’t wasted.”

  I went out and stopped to light a cigarette before getting into the car, because I needed it and because it let me get another look at the driver of the gold Chrysler. He was still reading the Lively Arts section, committing the opera times to memory.

  I put five blocks behind me before I spotted the tail. Same make, different color, fresh from Dispatch. You didn’t get to be chief of anyone’s police by sitting around growing your whiskers.

  • • •

  The outer-office buzzer caught me thinking the next morning about climbing up and dumping the fly wings out of the bowl fixture above my desk. I decided they wouldn’t be any deader an hour later, and opened the door for a square party a couple of inches below my height in a stiff gray suit with his tie snugged up to a chin that had begun to double and shards of silver glittering in his sandy crew cut. He looked like an unmarked car.

  “I’m going out on a limb,” I said. “Chief Shrike?”

  “That obvious?” He smiled with his bottom teeth only and took my hand. His was one even Bert Tolliver couldn’t mangle.

  “Just the cop part. I was expecting the rest.” I showed him the chair. He put his hands in his pockets and stayed where he was.

  “What’s a Detroit private cop got going with Adelaide Dix’s daughter?”

  I put my hands in my own pockets. It was like looking in a mirror from ten years in the future, if I didn’t hurry up and take violin lessons. “Lizzie Borden was taken. What color’s your Chrysler?”

  “Blue. That was me, all right. I figured you were wise. You know that was my marriage Adelaide broke up with her set of Ginsus. Best partner I ever had. He saved my ass six ways from Sunday.”

  “Sundays he kicked his wife’s.”

  “He had a temper. Lots of guys slap their women around. Lots of women don’t cut them into easily manageable pieces and put them up like preserves.”

  “She’s in a lake.”

  “I don’t think so. Why go that direction? Once you’re over the wall you got directions up the ass.”

  “So she drowned herself.”

  “She could’ve stopped her clock inside. Why go over the wall at all? She walked backwards in her own footprints and she’s been walking ever since. Her daughter knows it. She just don’t know where she is. That’s why she hired you. I knew she’d crack if I leaned on her long enough.”

  “I’m looking for a hit-and-run vehicle. Hers was on the list.”

  “She told me you’re working for her.”

  I laughed in his face.

  He turned deep copper right up to his cropped hair. His hands came out fists. “I can pull you in right now as a material witness.”

  “To what? A drowning? She’s dead. Marquette thinks it, the governor thinks it, the FBI thinks it, and so does the secretary who filled out the legal declaration of death. You’re a one-man Flat Earth Society, Shrike.”

  “Wrong. There’s three others. Adelaide Dix knows she’s alive. So does Geraldine Tolliver. So do you. And I’m going to be on you like flies on a carp till you walk me right up to her.”

  After he left, I looked up at the dead wings in the fixture, but I didn’t go after them. I appreciated the company.

  • • •

  I spent the rest of that day with Alvin Shrike. The blue Chrysler was with me when I wheeled my bucket out of its slot and it stayed three lengths behind except when it looked like I might lose it in traffic. It followed me around seventeen corners, across a vacant lot, and down both sides of a divided street as well as up and over the divider itself. Either he was one hungry fly or I was a pretty ripe carp. After we got both our cars washed on West Grand River I co
uld see I would have to get rid of the horses.

  I parked where the trucks go into the Free Press, where I could get a nice safe tow to the police garage, cut through the thundering pressroom on foot, and went out the front entrance past a surprised security guard. He probably did a double take when Shrike went out right behind. I thought I’d shaken the tail when I skipped across Washington directly in front of the streetcar, but when I stopped sprinting a couple of hundred yards later and looked behind me, he was legging his way along Fort. I got lucky and caught a cab two blocks over; Shrike got lucky too and flashed his badge at a motorist who turned out to be a solid citizen and they trailed me clear to Redford.

  We had supper at a chain place with license plates and other assorted junk on the walls. I sent him a bottle of beer which he drank without even lifting it in acknowledgment.

  We had a moment when we both called for cabs from adjacent pay telephones, but by then I was getting tired and couldn’t raise a chuckle. I reached over and pushed down the lifter on his, breaking his connection. “Why don’t we just share mine? All I’m going is home.”

  “I don’t tip cabbies,” he said. “You want to, go ahead.”

  When the Redtop came, I got in first. He pushed in fast in case I tried to jerk the door shut. I hit him with everything I had; he was hard for a desk cop, but his forward momentum helped and he sagged against me like a sack of ball bearings. I worked the door handle on my side and slid out from underneath him.

  “Take my friend to the Wayne County Airport,” I told the driver.

  “Where’s his luggage?” He was a big Jamaican with gold teeth.

  “He doesn’t have any. He’s going to a nudist camp.”

  After the cab left I hightailed it to a Shell station, called another cab, and took it to my reporter friend Barry Stackpole’s place to borrow his car. He has an artificial leg and the hand controls took getting used to, but they got me to a motel in Sterling Heights.

  I wasn’t taking chances. In the room I set the radio clock for 11:30 and called for a wake-up in case it wasn’t working. If I were on the run from the law—which I was, but my situation was variant— and I had to be somewhere tomorrow, I’d pick one minute past midnight. Before I caught some sleep I laid my Chief’s Special on the floor in front of the door so I wouldn’t forget it when I left. I was meeting Adelaide the Axe, and I hadn’t thought to ask her daughter if she liked surprises.