Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Cut his legs loose,” he said. “He isn’t going anywhere.”

  Feet scraped earth behind me. A blade sawed fiber and my ankles came apart. I got up awkwardly with my wrists still bound. Circulation needled back into my lower legs.

  “When was the last time, snoop? The Broderick kill?”

  I said nothing. Officer Joyce joined Proust, folding a jackknife. The crewcut gave his face a planed look, like a wooden carving with the features blocked in for finishing later.

  “Shut up those dogs,” Proust said.

  I hadn’t realized Henry Revere was present. The old black man came up from behind me and kicked the cage containing the loudest of the dogs. The dog, a sixty-pound pit bull, stopped barking and shrank back snarling. He kicked two more. The third dog hesitated, then lunged, fangs biting wire. Revere kicked again and it yelped and cowered. Its eyes glittered in the shadows at the rear of the cage. The rest of the animals fell into a whimpering silence. Two of the cages contained shepherds.

  “Know where we are, snoop?” asked Proust.

  “The Iroquois Heights Police Academy,” I said. “Those are some of your new rookies.”

  “Funny guy. It’s my little ten-acre retirement nest egg six miles out of the Heights. The old high school’s nice, but it’s too close to everything.”

  “Makes a good front, though,” I said. “Like dog fighting, which is illegal but forgivable in case someone starts prying. Maybe he won’t think to look further and find the real racket.”

  “What’s that, snoop?”

  I said nothing again.

  “Smart.” He smirked at Joyce and Revere. “A smart private nose is what we got here. Only he just thinks he’s smart. Thinks if he acts dumb we’ll let him go on breathing. Which makes him dumb for real.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. I heard enough to know you’ve graduated from fighting dogs to fighting inmates, probably from downtown holding. In return for their release or a word to the judge they agree to fight each other, probably in front of a crowd that’s outgrown betting on dogs. Your piece of the gate must be sweet.”

  “It pays the bills. Especially when we put a black in the pit with a white. A lot of the residents here left Detroit to get away from the blacks. No offense, Henry.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t put one in with Stillwell.”

  “He wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Gogol and Joyce almost killed him without even trying.” He paused, tasting his next words. “I figure you for a better show.”

  “I was wondering when we were coming to that.”

  “You might win, who knows?”

  “What do I win, a bullet?”

  “Warm up if you want. People are still coming. I’ll send someone back for you.” He went out, trailing Joyce and Revere. A padlock rattled.

  It was a truss barn with a high roof and some moonlight seeping through cracks between the bolted-on sections. The cage doors were latched with simple sliding bolts. I backed up to them and worked them loose, hoping the agitated dogs inside wouldn’t chew off my fingers. I left them engaged just enough to keep the doors closed. A good lunge would slip any of them. I came to the shepherds last.

  In the gloom either of them could have been the dog in the picture Elda Chase had given me.

  “Max.”

  One of them barked sharply. I called again. It barked again. The other looked at me and gave a rippling snarl. Just to be sure I left both cages locked. They were safer inside.

  Some of the cages were empty and I sat on one. I wanted a cigarette but I didn’t fidget. The last thing I wanted to do was startle a dog into breaking loose while I was still present.

  After a long time of measured breathing and sweating beyond measure, I heard the lock rattle again and Gogol and Joyce came in. I stood. The detective with the moustache held his revolver on me while his partner led me out. Gogol followed with the gun.

  We walked twenty yards through a jumble of cars parked on rutted earth to a steel barn bigger than the one we had just left. Henry Revere passed us coming out the door. He was going back to see to the dogs.

  The interior was lit with electric bulbs strung along the tops of the walls. Crude bleachers had been erected on either side of a hole dug five feet deep and eight feet in diameter and lined with rough concrete. The bleachers were jammed with men and some women, all talking in loud voices that grew shrill when we entered. This building smelled as strong as the other, but the stink here was sharper, more foul, distinctly human. Proust sat in the middle of the front row.

  We stopped at the edge of the pit and Joyce unlocked my handcuffs. Inside the pit stood a black man wearing only faded blue jeans. His hair was cropped short and his torso was slabbed with glistening muscle. He watched me with yellowish eyes under a ridge of bone.

  I was rubbing circulation back into my wrists when Joyce shoved me into the pit. My opponent caught me and hurled me backward. I struck concrete, emptying my lungs. The crowd shrieked. He charged. I pivoted just in time to avoid being crushed between him and the wall. He caught himself with his hands, pushed off, and whirled. I hit him with everything, flush on the chin. He shook his head. I threw a left. He caught it in a hand the size of my office and hit me on the side of the head with his other fist. I heard a gong.

  I backpedaled, buying time for my vision to clear. He followed me. I kicked him in the groin and punched him in the throat; he was no boxer and had left both unprotected. They didn’t need protecting.

  He wrapped a hand around my neck and reared back. “Sorry, man.”

  The fist was coming at me when a woman in the crowd screamed. The scream was higher and louder than any of the others and it made him hesitate just an instant.

  I didn’t. I doubled both fists and brought them up in an uppercut that tipped his head back and snapped his teeth together and broke his grip on my neck. Then I put my head down and butted him in the chest. He staggered back, spitting teeth.

  The whole crowd was screaming now, and not at us. A torn and bleeding Henry Revere had stumbled into the building trailing a pack of enraged dogs that were bounding through the audience, bellowing and slashing at limbs and throats with the madness of fear and anger and pain. One, a red-eyed pit bull, leaped over the concrete rim and landed on my dazed opponent and I clubbed it with my forearm before it could rip out his throat. Stunned, the dog sank down on all fours and fouled the pit.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  He got his feet under him, a hand on his throat. It came away bloody, but the skin was barely torn.

  “I guess.”

  “What’d they promise you, a clean ticket?”

  “Probation.”

  “Give me a leg up and maybe you’ll still get it.”

  After a moment he complied and I scrambled out of the pit, then stuck out a hand and helped him up. Most of the crowd had cleared out of the building. One of the dogs lay dead, shot through the head by one of the cops; the report had been drowned in the confusion. Another stood panting and glaze-eyed with its tongue hanging out of a scarlet muzzle. I didn’t look for the others. My former opponent and I went out the door.

  It was more dangerous outside now than in. Cars were swinging out of the makeshift parking lot, sideswiping one another and raking headlamps over scurrying pedestrians and dogs. I heard sirens getting nearer. I wondered who had called the cops. I wondered which cops they had called.

  A maroon Cadillac swung into the light spilling out the barn door, illuminating Proust’s pale face behind the wheel. I shouted at the black man and we ran after it. His legs were longer than mine; he reached the car first and tore open the door on the driver’s side and pulled Proust out with one hand. The car kept going and stalled against the comer of the other building.

  The black man took a gun from under Proust’s coat and hit him with it. I let him, then twisted it out of his grip from behind. His other hand was clutching the acting police chief’s collar. Proust was bleeding from a cut on his forehead.

  �
�Police! Freeze! Drop the gun!”

  I did both. A county sheriff’s car had pulled up alongside us and a deputy was coming out with his gun in both hands. The door on the passenger’s side opened and George Strong got out.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “That’s our inside man.”

  The deputy kept his stance. “What about the other?”

  I said, “He’s with me.”

  Strong looked from Proust’s half-conscious face to mine. “I bribed the guard at the high school for this spot. I remembered I was a newspaperman and that maybe the biggest story in years was getting away from me. What about the ones who hurt Stillwell?”

  “Sergeant Gogol and Officer Joyce,” I said. “APB them.”

  His crinkled face got wry. “Did you find the woman’s dog?”

  I indicated the other barn. “In there. Take it easy on him,” I told the deputy. “Take it easy on all of them.”

  “You a dog lover or something?”

  “No, just one of the dogs.” I walked away to breathe.

  Safe House

  One

  Our host was a county deputy who wore a lumberman’s checked jacket over his uniform blouse and non-issue wool pants. His name was Jerry and he had a long slab of blue chin and a .38 Chief’s Special in a holster behind his right hipbone. I wanted to ask how the hunting was in that country but I’d been told not to speak to anyone except the two detectives who were guarding me. Jerry no longer looked at me, having filed me with the antlers over the door and the ulcerated leather sofa he said his father had died in with a .30-30 round in his chest during the 1966 deer season.

  “Boys need anything?” he asked at the door. “How you fixed for eggs and shit?”

  “Eggs we can use. Walker here gives us all the shit we need.” Sergeant Coyne, seated as close to the oilcloth-covered table as his hard thick belly would let him, booted two cards out of his hand and accepted fresh recruits without looking up.

  Jerry left. Outside, his Jeep Cherokee started up and clattered away. Officer Blevins, a long sinewy strip of busted University of Detroit basketball scholarship in an unbuttoned vest, as black as Coyne was pale, bumped the pot up six bits and the sergeant threw in his hand with an oath.

  “Two players sucks. Just pushing the same three sixty-seven back and forth. Sure you won’t sit in?” Coyne looked at me.

  “How long have you two partnered?” I asked.

  He frowned at Blevins. “Six years?”

  “Eight.” The black detective raked in the pot and shuffled the deck.

  I said, “I’ll pass. I got cleaned out once playing checkers in Huron Metropark with this old wheeze who spent his retirement playing with his friend. Either one of them could tell you in three moves where the game was going from there.”

  “Hear that, Marcus?” Coyne said. “You and me are too good for the private flash.” Blevins grunted and dealt.

  Actually the sergeant was the worst poker player I’d seen in a long time. His face mirrored every card he drew and he fell like a piano for the most transparent bluffs; but I needed his good opinion.

  They’d been shoving three bucks and change around the table for eight days, ever since I’d been tagged to testify before a grand jury investigating the death of a hood named Frank Acardo in front of my building. I’d missed the shoot, but I’d seen the Colombian hitters waiting for him earlier and so far I was the only witness who could place them at the scene. Rumor said the Colombians were laying out ten grand for me dead, which was a good deal more than I was worth alive. I hadn’t had a client in weeks.

  “Spicks got all the hotels staked out,” Coyne had said when we’d arrived at the safe house, a hunting cabin in Oakland County arranged by a friend of the deputy’s in the Detroit Police Department. “Sorry we got no mints to put on your pillow.”

  I didn’t mind. There was nothing waiting for me at the office and the smell of knotty pine reminded me of hunting trips north, a long time ago. I ate Blevins’ greasy cooking and read old paperback westerns and watched Coyne get himself bluffed out of everything but his shoulder rig.

  He tossed in his cards again and leaned back, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Ten G’s, that’s a year’s pay after taxes for me. How’s come the Spicks got more to spend than the city?”

  “Less overhead.” Blevins reshuffled. “Spit-in-the-Ocean?”

  “I ain’t got spit. You cleaned me out.” He rose to answer the telephone. “Coyne. Sure, he’s still breathing. What time? ‘Kay.” He hung up. “Pack your panties, Sherlock. You go on at three.”

  I got up from the sofa. “I’ll miss this place.”

  “You and Grizzly Adams,” he said, shrugging into his sportcoat.

  It was a 45-minute drive to Detroit and the City-County Building, where a soporific clerk directed us to a row of seats outside the jury room. The seats across from us were occupied by the man I was there to give evidence against and his entourage. This included his lawyer, young and black in a gray sharkskin suit and one of those bottle-top haircuts they go in for now and a pair of dark-skinned, long-haired bodyguards that would dress out to 500 pounds and look at home in Aztec ceremonial kit.

  The man seated between the two hulks belonged to another species. Hector Matador was narrow enough in face and body to vanish when he turned your way, which may have been why he always presented a three-quarter profile, looking at you out of one eye. He had small hands and feet, big eyes, a hawk nose, and wore his black hair in bangs like Al Pacino in Scarface. Dressed like him, too, in fawn-colored suits with peaked lapels, pink silk neckties, and a camel’s-hair overcoat flung across his shoulders cape fashion. He glanced at me with one mahogany-colored eye that had no bottom, then looked away.

  He recognized me, all right. The last time I’d seen him he was seated beside the driver of the car that sped away from the scene of Frank Acardo’s murder.

  After a brief whispered consultation with the assistant city prosecutor, a big man named Fallon with red hair and the broken-knuckled hands of an Irish bricklayer, I went in to answer questions. Thirty minutes later I paused at the top of the outside steps to shake Fallon’s hand.

  “We’ll get an indictment,” he said. “I’ll call you when we have a trial date. I wish you’d reconsider and remain in custody.”

  “Being a witness doesn’t pay enough. I’ll watch my back.” I’d said good-bye to Coyne and Blevins outside the jury room.

  “Watch your front, too. These Colombians don’t care what direction they come at you from.”

  I took a cab to the office, circular-filed most of the mail I found waiting for me under the slot, paid some bills, and ran a duster over the desk. My answering service had no messages for me; just to make sure they asked me to repeat my name. The investigation business has more slumps than the Tigers. I was thinking of signing up for a course in word processing when the telephone rang.

  “Walker’s School of Dance. Fox-trots our specialty.”

  Pause. “Is this Amos Walker?” Female, middle register, 30 to 35. I took my foot off the file drawer and said it was. “My husband has been missing for a week.”

  “Do you want him back?”

  “I wouldn’t be calling you if I didn’t. Do you know the Blue Heron?”

  “It takes a month to get a reservation there,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you there at six. Ask for Glasscock.” She hung up.

  Two

  The restaurant was tucked back from four lanes of solid traffic in West Bloomfield, identified only by a blue long-legged bird taking off from a sign with no lettering. A rangy hostess in a white silk blouse and long black skirt came out from behind a trellis and towed me to a corner table looking out on the garden.

  “I’m Natalie Glasscock. Thanks for coming.”

  I took a slim hand with a ruby the size of a typewriter attached and gave it back to the woman seated at the table. I’d guessed her age right over the telephone. She had a lot of black hair brushed back without ceremony and a l
ittle makeup on the kind of face that writers call handsome to keep from slobbering all over the keyboard. She wore a grayish-pink suit with no blouse that was plain enough to have cost plenty. The ring was her only jewelry. It would have been enough for Imelda Marcos.

  I sat down. “Glasscock Bodies?”

  “Now it’s GlasCo, and we make everything from surgical lasers to those easy-exercise gadgets that get a ten-day workout and then wind up in the attic. Cars don’t have bodies any more. Drink?”

  She had a full martini glass in front of her. I got rye from the waitress who’d materialized when she made the offer. The help faded. “Your husband is a Glasscock?”

  “My husband is an Emmett Firman. My great-grandfather founded the company. He’s hypertensive.”

  “Your great-grandfather?”

  “He died in 1930. Emmett’s the hypertensive one. I thought it might help you locate him.”

  “You mean by making faces at strangers until one turns red and keels over?”

  “I mean by canvassing drugstores. He needs medication. I brought his prescription.” She took an empty plastic vial out of a purse with a clasp that looked like a Krugerrand and gave it to me.

  I glanced at the typewritten label and pocketed it. “This is Detroit. People with high blood pressure outnumber the muggers. I could peddle Emmett’s picture around drugstores every day for a month and not cover them all. That’s a manpower job. Any reason you haven’t called the police?”

  “Just one. The same reason I haven’t called the Six O’clock News. Except for the occasional wedding and death the name Glasscock has never wandered beyond the newspaper business page. As the last one to bear the name I’d rather keep it that way.”

  “When’d he leave?”

  “Last Monday morning about eight o’clock. He has an office in the GlasCo Building on Grand. He never arrived.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “Emmett and I never fought. He’s entirely without passion. Frankly I was surprised when his doctors diagnosed hypertension. It was the first I knew he had any blood pressure at all.”