Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “School board know what he does nights?”

  “Everyone knows everything that goes on in this town, except the people who pay taxes to live in it.”

  “Thanks.” I gave him a card, which he crumpled into the same pocket without looking at it.

  Coming out of the men’s room I had the desk sergeant’s errant eye. The other was on a woman in a yellow pantsuit who had come in to complain about a delivery van that was blocking her Coup de Ville in her driveway.

  Four

  It was a three-story brick box with big mullioned windows and a steel tube that slanted down from the roof for a fire escape. When the new school was built down the road, this one had been converted into administrative offices and a place to vote in district elections. I found its only inhabitant on that summer vacation day, an old black man wearing a green worksuit and tennis shoes, waxing the gym floor. He saw me coming in from the hall and turned off the machine. “Street shoes!”

  I stopped. He left the machine and limped my way. I saw that the sole of one of his sneakers was built up twice as thick as its mate.

  “Mister, you know how hard it is to get black heel marks off of hardwood?”

  “Sorry.” I showed him my ID. “I’m looking for a German shepherd, answers to Max. If you’re Henry Revere, someone told me you deal in them.”

  “Someone lied. What use I got for dogs? I got a job.”

  “Also a lot of girlfriends. Unless those are dog hairs on your pants.”

  He caught himself looking, too late. His cracked face bunched like a fist. “You’re trespassing.”

  I held up two ten-dollar bills. He didn’t look at them.

  “This here’s a good job, mister. I got a wife with a bad cough and a boy at Wayne State. I ain’t trading them for no twenty bucks. You better get out before I call the po-lice.”

  I put away the bills. “What are you afraid of?”

  “Unemployment and welfare,” he said. “Maybe you never been there.”

  Five

  Back in my office in downtown Detroit I made some calls. First I rang Elda Chase, who said that no one had called her yet offering to return Max for a reward. I tried the Humane Society in three counties and got a female shepherd, a mix, and a lecture about the importance of spaying and neutering one’s pets at sixty bucks a crack. After that it was time for dinner. When I got back from the place down the street the telephone was ringing. I said hello twice.

  “Walker?”

  “This is Walker.”

  Another long pause. “Ed Stillwell. The Spectator?”

  I said I remembered him. He sounded drunk.

  “Yeah. Listen, what I told you ‘bout Henry Revere? Forget it. Bum steer.”

  “I don’t think so. He denied too much when I spoke to him.”

  There was a muffled silence on his end, as if a hand clamped over the mouthpiece. Then: “Listen. Forget it, okay? I only gave you his name ‘cause I needed the twenty. I got to make a monthly spousal support payment you wouldn’t believe. What I know about dog fighting you could stick in a whistle.”

  “Okay.”

  “‘Kay.”

  A receiver was fumbled into a cradle. I hung up and sat there smoking a couple of cigarettes before I went home.

  Six

  “...believe the motive was robbery. Once again, Iroquois Heights journalist Edward Stillwell, in critical condition this morning at Detroit General Hospital after police found him beaten unconscious in an empty lot next to the Spectator building.”

  I had turned on the radio while fixing breakfast and got the end of the story. I tried all the other stations. Nothing. I turned off the stove and called the Spectator. I kept getting a busy signal. I settled for coffee and left home. As I swung out of the driveway, a navy-blue Chrysler with twin mounted spotlights and no chrome pulled away from the curb behind me.

  It was still in my mirror when I found a slot in front of the Spectator office. I went inside, where everyone on the floor was hunched over his desk arguing with a telephone. Rube Zendt hung his up just as I took a seat in the chair in front of his desk. “The damn Free Press,” he said, pointing at the instrument. “They want the rundown on Stillwell before we even print it. Those city sheets think they wrote the First Amendment.”

  “Which desk is Stillwell’s?”

  “Why?”

  I counted on my fingers. “Stillwell gives me a man to see about a dog. A cross-eyed sergeant at the cophouse sees us talking. I see the man. Last night Stillwell calls me, sounding sloshed and telling me to forget the man. This morning the cops scrape Stillwell out of an alley.”

  “Empty lot.”

  “In Detroit we call them alleys. I’m not finished. This morning I’ve got a tail that might as well have UNMARKED POLICE CAR painted in big white letters on the side. Someone’s scared. I want to know what makes Stillwell so scary. Maybe he kept notes. He’s a newspaperman.”

  “I can’t let you go through his desk. Only Stillwell can do that. Or Gerald Strong. He publishes the Spectator.”

  “I know who Strong is. Where is he?”

  “Lady, we don’t need no warrant. We’re in hot pursuit of a suspect in an assault and battery.”

  This was a new player. I turned in my chair and looked at a pair of hulks in strained jackets and wide ties standing just inside the front door dwarfing a skinny woman in a tailored suit. One, a crewcut blond with a neck like a leg, spotted me and pointed. “There he is.”

  I got up. “Back way.”

  Zendt jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “End of that hall. Good luck.” He stuck out his hand. I took it hastily and brought mine away with a business card folded in it.

  The detectives were bumping into desks and cursing behind me when I made the end of the hall and sprinted out the back door. I ran around the building to my car. One of the cops, graying with a thick moustache, had doubled back and was barreling out the front door when I got under the wheel. I scratched pavement with the car door flapping. In the mirror I saw him draw his revolver and sight down on the car. I went into a swerve, but his partner reached him then and knocked up his elbow. I was four blocks away before I heard their siren.

  I backed the car into a deserted driveway and unfolded the card Zendt had given me. It was engraved with Gerald Strong’s name, telephone number, and address on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe Farms. I waited a little. When I was sure I couldn’t hear the siren any more I pulled out. My head stayed sunk between my shoulder blades until I was past the city limits.

  It was one of the deep walled estates facing the glass-flat surface of Lake St. Clair, with a driveway that wound through a lawn as big as a golf course, but greener, ending in front of a brownstone sprawl with windows the size of suburbs. I tucked the Chevy in behind a row of German cars and walked around the house toward the pulse of music. I should have packed a lunch.

  Rich people aren’t always throwing parties; it’s just that that’s the only time you catch them at home. This one was going on around a wallet-shaped pool with guests in bathing suits and designer original sundresses and ascots and silk blazers. There was a small band, not more than sixteen pieces, and the partiers outnumbered the serving staff by a good one and a half to one.

  George Strong wasn’t hard to spot. He had made his fortune from newspapers and cable television, and his employees had dutifully smeared his face all over the pages and airwaves during two unsuccessful campaigns for state office. His towhead and crinkled bronze face towered four inches over his tallest listener in a knot of people standing by the rosebushes. I inserted some polyester into the group and introduced myself.

  “Do we know each other?” Strong looked older in person than in his ads. His chin sagged and his face was starting to bloat.

  “It’s about one of your reporters, Ed Stillwell.”

  “I heard. Terrible thing. The company will pay his bills, even though the incident had nothing to do with the newspaper. I understand he was drunk when they mugged him.”

/>   “Nobody mugged him. I think he was beaten by the police.”

  “Excuse us, gentlemen.” He put a hand on my arm and steered me toward the house.

  His study was all dark oak and red leather with rows of unread books on shelves and photographs of George Strong shaking hands with governors and presidents. When we were on opposite sides of an Empire desk I told him the story. Unconsciously he patted the loosening flesh under his chin.

  “Ridiculous. The police in Iroquois Heights aren’t thugs.”

  “Two of them tried to arrest me for Stillwell’s beating in the Spectator office half an hour ago, without a warrant. They followed me there from my house where they have no jurisdiction. Your classifieds editor gave me your card. Call him.”

  He didn’t. “I won’t have my reporters manhandled. You say you want to go through Stillwell’s desk?”

  I said yes. He took a sheet of heavy stock out of a drawer and scribbled on it with a gold pen from an onyx stand. He folded it and handed it to me. “I’ll pay double what the woman’s paying you to forget the dog and find out who beat up Stillwell.”

  “Save it for your next campaign. If my hunch is right I’ll find them both in the same spot.” I put the note in my breast pocket and took myself out.

  Seven

  The navy-blue Chrysler was parked across the street from the newspaper office when I came around the corner from where I’d left my car. There was only one man in it, which meant his partner was watching the back door. I ducked inside a department store down the block to think.

  There was a fire exit in Men’s Wear with a warning sign in red. The clerk, slim and black in a gray three-piece, was helping a customer pick out a necktie by the dressing rooms. I pushed through the door.

  The alarm was good and loud. Moustache had gotten out of the car and was hustling through the front door when I rounded the building and trotted across the street to the Spectator. The skinny woman in the tailored suit read Strong’s note and pointed out Ed Stillwell’s desk.

  Reporters are packrats. While I was sifting through a ton of scrawled-over scrap, Rube Zendt came over and leaned on the desk. “Cops are watching the place,” he said.

  “Do tell.”

  “The older one with the moustache is Sergeant Gogol. The wrestler’s Officer Joyce. They’re meaner than two vice principals. When you’re ready to go, hide in the toilet and I’ll call in Joyce from the back—tell him Gogol’s got you out front or something—and you can duck out the rear. It worked once.”

  “I guess you scribblers look out for each other.”

  “Stillwell? Can’t stand the bald son of a bitch. But ink’s thicker than blood.” He strolled back to his desk.

  Ten minutes later I found something that looked good, one half of a fifty-dollar bill with a scrap of paper clipped to it and “9 p.m. 8/8 OHS” penciled on the scrap in Stillwell’s crooked hand. Today was the eighth. The torn-bill gag was corny as anything, but that was Iroquois Heights for you. I pocketed it, got Zendt’s attention, and went to the bathroom.

  Eight

  I spent the rest of the day in a Detroit motel in case the cops went to my house or office. From there I called Elda Chase to tell her I was still working and to ask if she’d heard anything. She hadn’t. I watched TV, ordered a pizza for dinner, and left three slices for the maid at 8:30.

  The old high school was lit up like Homecoming when I presented myself at the open front door. A security guard in khaki asked me if I was there for the parents’ meeting. I handed him the half-bill.

  He looked at it, dug the other half out of a shirt pocket, and matched them. Then he put both halves in the pocket. “You’re Still-well?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard you was in the hospital.”

  “I got out.” I passed him ahead of any more questions.

  A meeting was going on somewhere in the building; voices droned in the linoleum-and-tile halls. Acting on instinct I headed away from them, stepping around a folding gate beyond which the overhead lights had been turned off. A new noise reached me: louder, not as stylized, less human. It increased as I passed through twin doors and stopped before a steel one marked BOILER ROOM. I opened it and stepped into tropical heat.

  I was on a catwalk overlooking the basement, where twenty men in undershirts or no shirts at all crouched around fifteen square feet of bare concrete floor, shouting and shaking their fists at a pair of pit bulls ripping at each other in the center. From the pitch of their snarls it was still early in the fight, but already the floor was patterned with blood.

  The door opened behind me while I was leaning over the pipe railing trying to get a look at the men’s faces. I stepped back behind the door, crowding into a dark corner smelling of cobwebs and crumbling cement. I wished I’d brought my gun with me. I’d thought it would slow me down.

  Two men came in and stood with their backs to me, close enough to breathe down their collars. I recognized Henry Revere’s white head and green workclothes. The other man’s hair wasn’t much darker. He was taller and white, wearing a gray summerweight suit cut to disguise an advanced middle-age spread. From the back he looked familiar.

  “Which dog’s that?” wheezed the man in the suit. I knew that broken windpipe.

  “Lord Baltimore,” said Revere. “Bart. He’s new.”

  “He doesn’t have the weight to start out that hard. He’ll fold in five.”

  “That’s a bull for you. Shepherds pace theirselves.”

  “Shepherds are pansies. I told you not to buy any more.”

  “I gots to buy something. We’re running out of dogs.”

  “Sell what you got. I’m jumping this racket.”

  “Man, I don’t like the other. That’s heat with a big H.”

  “I’m the heat.”

  “What if one of them cons talks to the press?”

  The man in the suit coughed. “Why’d he want to? What other chance he got to miss a stretch in Jackson? He should thank us.”

  “Not if he gets beat half to death like that reporter.”

  “Gogol and Joyce got carried away. They were supposed to just rough him around, maybe break something. Anyway he had his slice. He should’ve stood on his tongue.”

  “What I mean,” Revere said. “If he talked, so could a con. And what about that detective?”

  “I got men everyplace he goes. His wings are clipped.”

  “You say so, Chief. I feel better when he’s grounded.”

  A shrill yelp sheared the air. Then silence.

  “There, you see?” said the man in the suit. “No distance.”

  The door opened again. I squeezed tight to the wall. The pair turned, and I got a good view in profile of Acting Chief of Police Mark Proust’s long slack face. His complexion matched the gray of his suit.

  “Chief, that guy Stillwell’s here. Thought I better tell you.” The security man’s voice was muffled a little on the other side of the open door.

  “Impossible. What’d he look like?”

  “About six feet, 185, brown hair.”

  “That’s not—”

  I hit the door with my shoulder, occupying the guard while I shoved Proust into the railing.

  Revere moved my way, but his short leg slowed him down. I swept past him and threw a right at the guard, missing his jaw but glancing off the muscle on the side of his neck. He lost his balance. I vaulted over him.

  “It’s Walker!” Proust shouted. “Use your gun!”

  Flying through the twin doors in the hall I sent a late dog rooter sprawling. Behind me a shot flattened the air. The bullet shattered the glass in one of the doors. I reached the folding gate, but the opening was gone; the guard or someone had closed and locked it. The guard was coming through the broken door, behind his gun. I ducked through a square arch in the wall, stumbled on stairs in the darkness, caught my equilibrium on the run, and started taking them two at a time heading up. A bullet skidded off brick next to my right ear.

  I ran out of st
airs on a dark landing. Feet pounded the steps behind me. I felt for and found a doorknob. It turned.

  Cool fresh air slid over me down a shaft of moonlight. I was on the roof with the lights of Iroquois Heights spread at my feet. I let the heavy door slam shut of its own weight, got my bearings, and made for the fire chute. I had a foot over the edge when the security guard piled out the door and skidded to a halt, bringing his gun up in two hands. Gravity took me.

  The inside of the tube smelled of stale metal. My ears roared as I slid a long way, as if falling in a dream. Then I leveled out and my feet hit ground and inertia carried me upright and forward. Officer Joyce, standing at the bottom, pivoted his bulk and brought his right arm down with a grunt. A fuse blew in my head and I went down another chute, this one bottomless.

  Nine

  I awoke with a flash of nausea. My scalp stung and an inflated balloon was rubbing against the inside of my skull. I got my eyelids open despite sand in the works, only to find that I was still in darkness. This darkness stank. As I lay waiting for my pupils to catch up I grew aware of an incessant loud yapping and that it was not in my head. Then I identified the smell. I was in a kennel.

  Not quite in it, I thought, as objects around me assumed vague shape. I was lying on moist earth surrounded by wire cages with wet black muzzles pressed against the wire from inside and eyes shining farther back. These were the quiet ones. The others were setting up a racket and hurling themselves against the doors and trying to gnaw through the wire.

  My arms had gone to sleep. I tried to move them, and that was when I found out my wrists were cuffed behind me. My ankles were bound too, with something thin and strong that chafed skin; twine or insulated wire. I rolled over onto my face and worked myself up onto my knees. The balloon inside my head creaked.

  Something rattled, followed by a current of air that sucked in light. The walls were gray corrugated steel. A pair of shiny black Oxfords appeared in front of me and I looked up at Mark Proust. The battery-powered lantern he was carrying shadowed the pouches in his paper-pulp face.