Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Pudge Capstone,” John said. “Legbreaker and bag man. Does a little bodyguarding when he feels like being legit. He’s got a thing for fancy footwear.”

  “How about a lift to my car? I’m sick of trains.”

  “Sure. I’ve only got a half-dozen homicides waiting for me back at the shop.”

  “Thanks, John. I was afraid I’d be imposing,” I tested the pulpy spot on the back of my head. My finger didn’t go in, so I was only half done. “Capstone ever do any body-guarding at Redline Records?”

  “Maybe. Some of those rockers need protection. Why?”

  Just a thought. You’d be surprised what a knock on the head does for the faculties of reason.”

  “In that case you must be the most reasonable guy in town,” he said.

  Five

  The bell played several bars of “Spanish Harlem” before Sheilah Sor-rell came to the door. She had on the African robe I’d seen before, as if she’d never been out of it.296

  “Where’s Eva Braun?” I asked.

  “If you mean Greta, it’s her night off. I’m a little tired now, Mr. Walker. Call me tomorrow.” She started to close the door. My shoulder got in the way.

  “Tonight’s better. By tomorrow the place will be crawling with cops.”

  She took a step back. I slid in through the opening and pushed the door shut behind me. The house looked the same, right down to the Oriental armor. I wondered if Ronnie had had time to regret leaving it at home.

  “What is it, Mr. Walker?”

  “I thought you might like to know there’s an all-points out for Pudge Capstone. My guess is when they get him he’ll talk. Murder’s out of his line.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Sure you do. You hired him to take me down and grab the ransom you conned out of Virgil Sweet for Ronnie’s release.”

  She looked at me, at the suit I’d wrinkled while napping on the floor at Cadillac Center. “You’re drunk. Ronnie’s in Miami.”

  “Ronnie’s in formaldehyde and you know it. You put him there. The cops found him right where you had him dumped. Who did the dumping doesn’t matter right now; it could have been anyone in pants. Men like to do you favors. Ask Ansel Albany.”

  She turned toward the living room. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Ask them what’s keeping them,” I said. “On my way here I stopped and left a message for a friend at headquarters. I was with him a little while ago and could have told him in person, but I wanted time with you first.”

  She turned back. “Maybe I’m the one who’s drunk. I don’t follow you.”

  “You should’ve ditched the gun after you shot Ronnie. Could be you clean and oil it as regularly as any good N.R.A. granny but I doubt it. You must have dirtied it recently. It’s my hunch Pudge worked for Redline a time or two, and you found out he was good for the rough stuff. Why you killed Ronnie isn’t important. Maybe it was an accident, because an ambitious young dealer like he was would be worth a lot more to you alive than any ransom as long as you could hold him. Maybe you found out you couldn’t, and reacted badly. Anyway you made the most of it, stashed the stiff someplace while you convinced Virgil Sweet his partner had been kidnapped by a rival outfit and that they’d told you to deliver the ransom alone. Sweet came through with the cash today and you went through the motions of a drop because you knew I was watching. Pudge was already aboard the train when you and I got on. He hits hard.”

  Her face was like something carved from teak. “That’s a lot to draw from a freshly cleaned gun. I mean, without a laboratory.”

  “The gun was just part of it. Things moved just a little too fast once I came in. I had the feeling the party was waiting for me to arrive before it heated up.”

  “Yes.” It was just a word to fill the silence. Then the teak split. A tear slicked her cheek. “I didn’t want him to hit me any more.”

  “Who, Ronnie?”

  “He’d hit me so many times. I was so bruised I stayed home from the studio so I wouldn’t have to show my face. I don’t even remember what it was we were fighting about this time. He came at me and I used this.” She drew the derringer out of the pocket of her robe and pointed it at me. “He gave it to me for protection.”

  “You don’t need it now. You need a lawyer.” Keep her talking.

  “It was my ace in the hole. I shot him and he fell.”

  She gave me the gun.

  “As anybody would, with two slugs in him.” I put the two-shot in my coat pocket.

  She said, “I only shot him once.”

  Six

  He wasn’t in his office, a crabbed little accident of a room created when two walls were improperly joined; warehouse architecture is not the UN Building. But I knew where to look.

  The light shed by the ceiling funnels in the big echoing room where Redline stored its old recordings fell short of the floor, making the tall racks look as if they were floating on shadow. I could smell Ansel’s tobacco smoke in the stale air. I called his name. No answer.

  The racks were arranged like library stacks with wide aisles running between them. I walked along the ends. One, two, three aisles, all unoccupied. Four...

  Something clipped the corner of a record sleeve near my right ear, followed closely by a report that swallowed up all the air in the room. I jumped back, snapping my Smith & Wesson from its belt clip.

  “Walker?”

  Ansel’s voice, at large somewhere in the big room.

  Crouching behind the rack I said, “She could have used her one telephone call on a lawyer, but she called you. That’s something, anyway.”

  “Go home, Amos. I don’t have so many friends I can afford to start killing them off.”

  “Ansel, the cops are on their way. I just left John Alderdyce at Ronnie Madrid’s house with Sheilah. Ronnie was shot twice, John said. Once with a twenty-two and once with a forty-four; a magnum from the way it penetrated. Why’d you do it?”

  “You’re telling it.”

  I had a hunch he was moving around. He was silent on his feet, but he wouldn’t stay in the same place under those circumstances. I backed up, putting another rack between us. “The way I see it, you were aware of the situation between Ronnie and Sheilah and told her to call you the next time he threatened to beat her up,” I said. “She did, but by the time you got there she’d plugged him once already. You finished the job.”

  “It wasn’t the first time I killed a man to protect someone.”

  “I heard it was three men.”

  “No, that was another time. Can you blame me for this one?”

  “Not so much for the kill. You shouldn’t have tried to make a buck off it.”

  “The son of a bitch hid all his cash and he didn’t have life insurance. If you charged him ten bucks for every one of Sheilah’s bruises, he still came out ahead. Did you think I was going to take any of it for myself?”

  “Where is it?”

  In the little silence that followed I could hear the air moving, “Pudge was supposed to bring it straight to Sheilah. Didn’t the cops find it at her place?”

  “Not on the first search. I didn’t hang around to watch them steam off the wallpaper.”

  “I don’t have it. I was busy ditching the body.” He laughed his short deep bark. “Who thought Pudge would have the brains to look inside the briefcase?”

  “He’s been a bag man a long time. Maybe he finally got curious.”

  The tip of a long shadow fluttered on the brick wall at the end of the aisle. Ansel was searching the aisles one by one. I looked at the record rack nearest me. It was solid, reinforced with angle irons and tiered like bookshelves. I holstered the revolver and began climbing.

  “You should’ve left things as they fell.” I raised my voice to cover the creaking. “It would’ve been self-defense for Sheilah and justifiable homicide for you. Framing a snatch makes it look like murder.”

  “Capping a druglord isn’t murder.” He was close now. His
foot scuffed concrete two or three aisles over. When I was six feet above the floor I stretched a leg and gained a foothold on the rack across the aisle. Now I was straddling the space between. Reaching for my gun I almost lost my balance. I caught myself and double-handed the Smith & Wesson, training it a few feet up the wall. Through the space between two tiers of records I saw him coming around the corner into the next aisle, the glitter of the big .44 magnum.

  “You used me, Ansel. You needed a reliable witness to report to the cops he saw the ransom drop, so you hired me to look in on Sheilah. You called her when you knew I was at her place, and when she ran out to meet Virgil Sweet you knew I’d be curious enough to follow. You set me up for a sapping so I wouldn’t see too much. Every time I try to look at it your way my head starts hurting.”

  “It had to be your head,” he said. “You were the only one I could count on to take the case that far. Tell you what. Since we’re friends I’ll give you five seconds to make a break for the door. If you get to it before I finish counting, I’ll let you keep running.”

  “You gave that liquor-store bandit ten.”

  “I’m older now. I need the edge.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way, Ansel.”

  “Sure it does.”

  As he spoke he lunged around the end of the rack into my aisle. My voice must have told him I was there, because he squeezed off two quick shots that spanged off the brick wall behind me, at what would have been chest level if I were standing on the floor. Before he could adjust his aim upward I returned fire, smashing his forearm. The big shiny gun slammed to the floor.

  He clutched the arm, staring up at me. He only had a minute before the pain and shock took away his speech. “That wasn’t any kind of a fair chance.”

  “It’s been a long day,” I said, “I needed an edge too.”

  “That’s how it starts.” His knees started to bend.

  Seven

  They tried Sheilah Sorrell and Ansel Albany separately for murder and conspiracy to commit extortion. The jury hung on Sheilah—there were only four women and it was easy to figure which way they split— and the prosecution decided against retrial. The police in Romulus picked up Pudge Capstone at Detroit Metropolitan Airport with $200,000 in twenties and fifties in a carry-on bag and a ticket to Mexico City in his pocket. And every time my work takes me to Jackson I stop in at the state penitentiary to visit Ansel. I don’t have so many friends I can afford to drop one just because he tried to kill me.

  People Who Kill

  “People who kill are different from you and me.”

  The guy doing the talking was a professor at the University of Detroit, one of the new breed with parlor hair pushed back behind his ears, a brown corduroy jacket, and a skinny tie like you see in early Dean Martin movies without Jerry Lewis. He had a gunfighter’s droopy moustache that kept getting in his wine and a pair of those glasses that react to light in steel rims. He was a little drunk, but then so was everyone else in the party except me. I was working.

  We were sitting at a big round table inside the red plush candy box of a downtown club; the professor and his trim wife and their guests, a former U.S. congressman and his wife, a lean woman in her fifties with very blonde hair and no flesh on her face, and me. The former congressman, a large, smiling bald man, was guest lecturing at the university. I was there to keep an eye on the string of matched pearls his wife wore around her skinny neck. My specialty as a private investigator is tracing missing persons, but the guard work would look good on my resume, and anyway my bank account could use the transfusion.

  The professor’s trim wife laughed quietly. The laugh fluttered at the hollow of her throat and her teeth showed liquid white against her red lipstick. I was watching her whenever I wasn’t watching the other woman’s pearls.

  “How’d we get on the subject of killing?” asked the professor’s wife.

  “Sorry. I was just thinking about this fellow in tonight’s News, who shot and killed the kid breaking into his house. The paper said the guy was popular in his neighborhood and had no criminal record. But he’s old enough to be a veteran of World War II, and I’ll lay you any odds that’s where he was trained to kill. There are two kinds of killers, those who are born and those who undergo rigorous conditioning to overcome their natural inclination toward nonviolence. Which is why I’m saying that people who kill aren’t like you and me.”

  “I’m not so sure,” put in the congressman’s wife. “If I ever found myself in this man’s position, all alone late at night with an intruder trying to get in, I wouldn’t hesitate to use a gun if I had one. The instinct for self-preservation runs deep.”

  The congressman said, “You surprise me, Ellen. I spent two terms fighting for stiffer gun laws.”

  The professor’s smile was a paper cut over his glass. “You might want to pull the trigger, but wanting to and pulling it aren’t the same. All that has been bred out of us. Assuming it was there to begin with.”

  “Well, I find the whole thing repugnant,” said his wife. But her eyes glittered.

  “Why are we arguing when we have an expert right here?” The congressman turned his beaming politician’s face on me. “What about it, Amos? Are killers an aberration or part of the natural order?”

  “Walker’s an example on my side,” said the professor. “He fought in Vietnam and has had to do with guns ever since.”

  His wife patted his hand. “Let him talk, Carl.”

  “I’m just the help.”

  “Don’t be difficult,” the congressman insisted. “With all respect to Carl, you’re the only one here whose opinion counts in this case.”

  “I know of someone,” I said, “but the story takes time.”

  “They don’t lock up here until two,” said the professor. They were all watching me. I moved a shoulder and got started.

  “He was crowding sixty when this happened, a chunky little old guy with a lot of rumpled white hair. They called him Whitey back on Jefferson where he hung out in his old black overcoat, but his real name was Walter and he’d been married and raised a girl. The wife died and the girl moved out and never came back. He was deaf in one ear, by the way, a thing that kept him out of the military during the war, so he had no combat training. He was a retired cabinetmaker living on a small pension in an apartment house on Michigan until it went condo, and then he relocated in a condemned hotel on Jefferson. It came down later to make room for the Renaissance Center. Dillinger had stayed there once when Illinois got too hot, but the place had to go so they could put up another hotel where no one stayed.

  “Anyway, Whitey checked out the rooms on the ground floor where he wouldn’t have to climb any stairs, but derelicts and rats had claimed all those, and the only vacancies on the second were on the side facing the river and the wind from Windsor came cold as a ghost’s breath through the broken panes. He settled finally for a room on the third with plywood over the window and empties insulating it on both sides. He had some blankets and a kerosene heater and there was a squirrel-chewed mattress on the floor, and as long as his monthly check kept coming care of General Delivery, he could afford to eat. A lot of old people with nice homes and relatives to look after them live worse.

  “Whitey was a night person. Thirty years on the graveyard shift are hard to shake, and with no light to read by and nothing to read even if he had light, he started taking long walks after midnight, when the streets are safe only for poor people and muggers. His rounds usually took him behind furniture stores, where he rescued items he could use from the dumpsters: a chair with a broken rung, a table missing a leg, part of a bed frame— things he could carry up to his room and fix up for his own use, with worn-out tools he got from the same place, and sometimes sell back to the stores where he got them. This is how he spent his days when he wasn’t sleeping. In four months of these nighttime scrounges, he was stopped only once, by a bored cop who wanted to know what he was doing carrying a rickety bookcase through the streets at one-thirty in
the morning. The cop was probably too bored to hear the answer, and let him go. Being old and poor in this town is as good as being invisible.

  “When you make a habit of being out at that hour, you tend to see a lot worth keeping to yourself, and Whitey soon learned the wisdom of keeping his feet moving and his eyes straight ahead. He never walked faster than when he was crossing the mouth of an alley or cutting through a sheltered parking lot. Not seeing things requires special skill, because you not only have to not see something but also look like you didn’t see it in case someone sees you not seeing it. Am I making sense?” I looked at the professor.

  “A great deal,” he said. “But then I don’t teach English.”

  I went on. “This night I’m talking about, Whitey dropped the ball. It was January, the wind chill was knocking around twenty below, and to avoid the icy air blasting between two buildings he ducked into an underground garage, carrying an end table with a wrinkled veneer, and found himself looking at four guys grunting and cursing between a pair of parked cars. One guy had another’s arms pinned behind his back and the other two were putting it to the pinned guy with their fists and a galvanized pipe. Moonlight from the entrance replayed the whole thing in shadows on the concrete wall.

  “Whitey couldn’t just keep going without walking right past them, and not seeing something is difficult under those circumstances. He turned back the way he came, but forgot he was carrying the end table and hung up one of its legs on someone’s bumper. He lost his grip and the table hit the floor with nothing near the racket a truck makes spilling off a haulaway trailer. Somebody yelled and Whitey took off running. Behind him the table made some more noise and someone cursed, but he didn’t look back to see who had stumbled over it. He hit the street on the fly, galloped around the corner of the building the garage was under, clattered through an alley, vaulted a construction sawhorse, and half slid, half rolled down a hill being gouged out for another underground garage for guys like the ones chasing him to beat up other guys in. He landed running and didn’t stop until his lungs tasted bloody in his throat. Remember that he was almost sixty and that he hadn’t run more than half a block to catch a DSR bus since high school. When his heart slowed to twice its normal rate and he didn’t hear footsteps behind him with his good ear, he wound his way back to his condemned hotel, hugging shadows and looking in every direction but up and down, contrary to his normal rules for survival. He stayed in his room all the next day and didn’t go out the night after that. He didn’t even leave to eat.