Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  When no one answered I tried the knob. It turned freely. There might have been nothing in that; college housing is always getting burgled because the students are careless about locking up. The boxy window unit that stuck out of the nearest window was pumping full out. I didn’t like that. The damp air off the river was too cool to bother running up the utility bill. I went back to my car and transferred the Chief’s Special from its special compartment to my pocket.

  Still no answer. I opened the door as quietly as I could, just wide enough to step inside around the edge with my hand on the revolver. It was like walking into a refrigerator truck.

  The first one lay on a blown-out sofa near the wheezing air conditioner. He was in his underwear, lying on his side facing the back of the sofa, as if he’d been caught sleeping. I found the next one on his back in an open doorway connecting to a hallway and had to step over him to inspect the rest of the apartment. I had the gun out now.

  Number three was twisted like a rag on the floor halfway down the short hallway. I eased open the door to a small bathroom, dirty but unoccupied, found an untidy bedroom with no one in it, checked out a narrow closet with sports equipment piled on the floor, and finished the inventory in another bedroom at the back. This one, more cautious than the others, sprawled on the bed with his legs hanging over the footboard, arms splayed. When I stepped in for a closer look, my toe bumped into something that rolled: an aluminum baseball bat. He’d dropped it when he fell backward. He was naked, the others nearly so. No one wears pajamas anymore.

  I put away my weapon. There was nobody left to shoot.

  I noticed the smell then, faint but bitter, mixed with the slaughterhouse stink. They’d all been blasted at point-blank range by a heavy-caliber shotgun.

  Checking for pulses would have been redundant. I went back to the first corpse. The back of his head was a mass of pulp; stray pellets had torn fresh holes in the upholstery, but he’d taken most of the charge. The others had been struck in the chest or abdomen. Mr. Sofa was the only white victim. Mark Childs was white.

  I wished it was that easy, but I had a report to make. Setting my jaws tight, I grasped his bare shoulder to pull his face into view. The skin was cold and the body turned all as one piece, stiff as a plaster cast. Death alters features, but he looked enough like his picture to give him a name. The birthmark on his upper lip settled the question.

  The front room was as big as the rest of the apartment. The sofa was part of a rummage-sale set facing a home theater from a box, with a kitchen at the other end. Disposable food cartons littered a folding card table with four mismatched folding chairs around it, but plastic forks and smeared paper napkins suggested more nomadic dining habits. My breath made gray jets. I thought about turning down the air conditioner but didn’t. Whoever had touched the controls last wasn’t present.

  The place didn’t seem to be wired for a telephone. I found a cell on the sticky kitchen counter and called police headquarters. I bypassed 911 and asked for Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler.

  “Why felony homicide?” she asked. “Why not plain homicide?”

  “It looked like a drug thing,” I said.

  “It still looks like it.”

  “So I called you to avoid a handoff.”

  “I appreciate it. I’ve been on duty thirteen hours now.”

  She sat across from me at the folding table, dangling a tea bag on a string in a big cardboard cup with a Powerpuff Girl printed on it. Now that she no longer wore glasses the tiredness showed, but she was still the best-looking thing I’d seen all day, and mine had started as early as hers. Her skin was fair, she had her light brown hair tied in a ponytail with a yellow silk scarf, and a fitted jacket and pleated slacks didn’t distract the admiring male gaze from the rest. Her SIG Sauer would be on the left side of her belt, the gold shield on the right. Her brown eyes were as big as wheel covers.

  The place buzzed with assorted professionals. A happy Asian medical examiner hummed show tunes and probed at wounds with the nightmare tackle from his tin box. Young people of both sexes measured spatter patterns and bumped into a big black radio-car cop who kept grunting and moving out of their way and into someone else’s. Every light was on and a couple of arcs had been brought in for a better look.

  Finally the air conditioner stopped. A fingerprint tech had lifted la-tents off the controls with a gizmo that took pictures like a camera phone.

  “That should wrap this,” Thaler said. “The heat wave broke night before last; the tenants had no reason to crank up the cold. Whoever did wanted to keep them from getting ripe long enough to split and set up an alibi. I figure these boys have been dead since early this morning or they wouldn’t have been undressed for bed.”

  She sipped tea and twisted in her chair to gesture with the cup. “Your boy Charles died in his sleep. The next two came running when they heard the noise and Shotgun popped them, one, two, like birds. Number Four stuck it out in his room in batter’s position, but rock breaks scissors. That how you see it?”

  “Clear as gin. Can I smoke?”

  She nodded, watched me light up while she rotated the cup between her palms. She kept her nails short and polished clear. “What else you see?”

  “Not a thing. I called you right after I ID’d my runaway.” I drew in a lungful and staggered it out through my nostrils.

  “You didn’t snoop around for dope? Funny money? Stolen rubies?”

  “I’m not as curious as I used to be.”

  “Who else you call?”

  “The client. It’s all in your notebook.”

  “Before or after you called me?”

  “After.”

  She was still deliberating my case when a sergeant or something in a sharp suit and cowboy boots came over carrying two Ziploc bags. The one he dropped on the table contained four spent shotgun shells. “Twelve-gauge double-O buck, L.T.,” he said. “Nothing surer, richer or poorer.”

  “Rick McCoy, Amos Walker. Walker called it in.”

  He took my hand in a hickory grip. He wore his hair to his collar and a soul patch in the hollow of his chin. I figured he was working undercover with a Wild West show.

  “What else?” Thaler said.

  McCoy flipped the other bag onto the table. We didn’t have to open to smell what was inside. “In the fridge.”

  “Nothing harder?” Thaler asked.

  “The gunner left with it if so. But if my honker is working this isn’t nickel-bag stuff. There’s right around six or seven grand in there.” He had an accent, Arkansas or farther.

  “How’d he miss it?”

  “Maybe he found another stash and stopped looking.”

  “Okay. Tag both bags and get them to the Poindexters downtown.”

  “Who’s McCoy?’ I asked when he left with the evidence.

  “Narcotics. He caught the squeal and hitched along. He thought the same thing you and I did when it came down.”

  “I did then.”

  “You saw the pot. Either a buy went wrong or word got out the stuff was here. You’ve seen it before.”

  “Not over pot. Not even the premium kind. Someone who knows his way around a shotgun might stick them up, but he wouldn’t cut loose for anything less than heroin, or high-grade coke on the outside. He was methodical, if not professional. And any idiot who’s ever seen Cops knows enough to look in the refrigerator.”

  “McCoy’s people will run a check on the stiffs as we make them. One of ‘em will cash back.”

  “That sounds like racial profiling.”

  “Not if it turns out it’s Childs.”

  “His family never said anything about drugs.”

  “That’s reliable.” She raised and plunged the tea bag a couple more times; the contents of her cup were nearly black. “You’re out at first base, Walker. If you think Homicide rides its fence you don’t know anything about those cowboys in Narco.”

  I dragged in everything but the filter and put it out in a carton of moo shu pork. “I told y
ou I’m not as curious as I used to be.”

  “You were more convincing the first time.”

  • • •

  Mark Childs was the product of a broken home; the home in his case being a nine hundred square foot house in old Delray. At age three he’d traded it for a Cape Cod on Lake St. Clair, with grass and clay courts and a skiff tied up at the dock out back with Childs’ Plaything scripted on its transom. Orson Childs, Swedish on one side, English on the other, with equal shares in Volvo and British Petroleum, had adopted Mark after his mother’s divorce and her marriage to Orson. If I understood right, Orson’s own mother had commemorated the occasion by endowing the boy with a trust fund that after nearly fifteen years of compound interest looked like the annual budget for the state of Rhode Island.

  The houseman, a fine-featured Micronesian in a white coat, left me standing in the entrance hall while he found out if anyone was home at 11 o’clock on a weeknight. It was a room meant for standing, despite the presence of a row of straight shieldback chairs and an antique oak hall tree with a bench. I got the nod finally and followed him into a carpeted living room with a sunken conversation pit and Mrs. Childs drinking from an umbrella stand in a white leather armchair. She was a horsey-looking woman of fifty, not horsefaced but the type you pictured riding to hounds in a red habit and black helmet, and to hell with the animal rightists, in a gray silk blouse, black stirrup pants, tasseled loafers on her bare feet; fencerail-lean with high cheekbones and straight auburn hair swept behind her ears. She’d been crying. She offered me a drink. I said no thanks and she threw out the houseman with her bony chin.

  I remained standing. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why should you be? You didn’t kill him. Did you?” She had a flat Midwestern accent. In those surroundings, with her features, it should have been New England, but then she’d been married to a construction worker before Orson came along.

  “Have the police been here?”

  “They just left. They were polite; sincere, even. They asked if Mark was into drugs. I said no. They didn’t believe me, but they were polite about it, so I didn’t throw anything at them. I suppose we owe you money.”

  “We’re square. You gave me a three-day retainer but I only used two days. Actually, it’s your husband I wanted to talk to. Is he around?”

  She said he was in his workshop and gave me directions. Then she swirled the ice in her glass and drank from it and I stopped existing.

  It was a metalworking shop in a small building behind the house, a shed that was supposed to be an old carriage house that had been converted into a shed but had always been a shed. It was one of the newer estates in Grosse Pointe, less than sixty years old; no vintage auto money there of the Dodge and Ford and Durant type. I knocked, but it was noisy inside, so I let myself into a room filled with blue smoke and the sharp stench of scorched metal and sparks from Childs’s cutting torch. He was a hobbyist who made sculpture from rescued driveshafts, leaf springs, and gold dental retainers scrounged from salvage yards and dumpsters behind schools. At the moment he was cutting up a length of steel pipe clamped in a vise bigger than my head.

  I waited, hands in pockets, not wanting to startle him while he was handling dangerous equipment. When he saw me he jumped a little anyway, then tipped up his visor and screwed shut the valve on the acetylene tank. I said I was sorry about Mark.

  “Yes.” He spoke in clipped tones: stiff-upper-lip Brit by way of Vancouver, where the American branch of his family emigrated after the colonies declared independence from England. “I consider our transactions at an end, barring outstanding expenses. If you’ll submit a statement, we can put an end to this sad business.” He produced a checkbook from a hip pocket. He had it on him with a leather apron.

  “We’re fine,” I said. “I just wanted to clear up some details before I type my report.”

  “Clarissa’s the detail person. Why don’t you come back when she’s in a condition to answer your questions?”

  “Stepfathers tend to be more objective considering their wives’ children. Was there anything about Mark’s behavior that suggested he might have been into the drug scene?”

  He tugged off his gauntlets. He was a good-looking man creeping up on sixty, with a receding hairline and a long upper lip fighting the old battle between pickled youth and premature old age. “I liked Mark,” he said. “I couldn’t really love him, because he came to me fully assembled, but I think we might have been friends if I hadn’t married his mother. It never occurred to me he had anything to do with drugs, but then I didn’t pay as much attention to that sort of thing as I suppose I should have. It would explain some things, wouldn’t it?”

  “Things such as what?”

  “Well, his poor academic performance and his running off. He wasn’t a rebellious boy. He was a sickly child, always on some kind of medication. Maybe that’s where it started.”

  “His real father might know something.”

  “Hank? I doubt it. They haven’t seen each other in years.”

  “That’s what he said when I called to ask if Mark had moved in with him. Then he hung up.”

  “That’s Hank Worden. I suppose I should be grateful he’s such a miserable son of a bitch. He’s made me look like the ideal husband by contrast.”

  I thanked him and thought of some more words of sympathy, but he had his gloves back on and the visor down and was firing up the torch for another go at his project. People grieve all sorts of ways.

  The houseman was standing in the path between the house and the workshop when I let myself out. His hands hung at his sides and his white coat glowed blue under a mercury light mounted on top of a tall pole.

  “We talk,” he said.

  He asked me to call him Truk. That was the name of the archipelago where he’d grown up; he said his real one was even harder to pronounce than it was to spell. His room in the walkout basement contained popular fiction on the shelves and stacks of People. I guessed he read them to improve his English. He sat cross-legged on a neatly made twin bed, showing bare ankles and the smooth brown line of his throat when he tipped his head back to draw on the cigarette he’d bummed.

  I smoked and waited in a wicker armchair and wondered how old he was, thirty or sixty. His bowl-cut hair was glossy black, but Micronesians are a long time going gray.

  “Police?” he asked.

  “Private,” I said.

  His face crumpled into a wrinkled mask. Sixty, definitely. “I don’ know what this is, private.”

  “It means I can’t shoot if you run away from me. Apart from that the work’s the same.”

  He smiled, showing gold teeth and smoothing out his face. Thirty, maybe. “I thought Mark is dead before this.”

  “Bad habits?”

  He puffed and said nothing. He didn’t inhale, just filled his mouth and let it out like cigar smoke. His grin set like plaster of Paris. Forty, probably. I got out a twenty, folded it lengthwise, and held it up between two fingers. He drew his lip down over his teeth and shook his head.

  I started to put it away.

  “Kidneys,” he said.

  I stopped; “What about them?”

  “Like he didn’t have none. None that worked.”

  “He didn’t die because his kidneys failed. His kidneys failed because he died.”

  “I mean before. Three year, four. He got a new one.”

  “His mother and stepfather didn’t mention that.”

  “He didn’t get it from them.”

  “Who donated it?”

  He dropped the filter into a jar lid on the nightstand and asked for another cigarette. I tucked the twenty into the pack and flipped it onto the bed. I’d guessed the answer, but I might have to come back for more later.

  He pocketed the pack with the bill inside. He didn’t take out a cigarette. “His father, the real one.”

  “The mother’s type didn’t match?”

  He shrugged.

  I said, “I heard Mark and his father
weren’t that close.”

  He smiled again and patted his pocket.

  I misunderstood. “That’s all you get. I’m dipping into capital.”

  “Money’s what I meant. They pay.”

  “Hank Worden sold one of his kidneys? For how much?”

  He lifted and dropped his shoulders again. I asked him how he knew about the deal.

  “I didn’, then. Later, Worden comes back, drunk, loud. Mr. Childs he say, ‘I call police.’ Then he leave.”

  “What was he mad about?”

  “I think maybe he wants more and Mr. Childs says no. I guess. My English is not so good as now.”

  “Was Mrs. Childs here at the time?’

  “She is out. It is after the operation, she goes to see Mark in the hospital.”

  I got up and put out my cigarette in the jar lid. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing else. I hear you talk to Mrs. Childs, I think maybe you want to know.” I was at the door when he spoke again. “You no police?”

  “When’s the last time a cop gave you money?”

  He lifted his bangs to show me a thin white scar on his scalp. “Sixteen stitch, ten year ago. All I ever got. So why you want to know about Mark?”

  “I’m more curious than I thought I was.”

  The radio news had more details on the victims in the apartment. Du’an Reeves, twenty, was a sophomore at Wayne State. Gordon Samuels and LeRon Porter, both twenty-one, were juniors.

  Porter had done short time in County for nonpayment of child support to a seventeen-year-old former girlfriend in Redford Township. None of the others had a record, including Mark Childs. The police were still investigating drug connections. I switched off.

  Hank Worden, Mark Childs’s father and Clarissa Childs’s ex, lived in a bungalow that needed a new roof on West Vernor, the old Delray section, now mostly Mexican. The disrepair wasn’t uncommon in houses where construction workers lived; the work is all outgo and no income. His lights were on at midnight, so I knocked on his door. I had my gun with me on a hunch, but I didn’t need it to get in. I accomplished that by sticking my foot in the door and pushing a twenty through the gap.