Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Took a shot at me,” Jeremy said.

  I sat up. “Who did?”

  “Well someone,” Judy said. “We don’t know it was them.”

  “Put a hole in my hat.” Jeremy thrust it across the desk.

  I took it and looked it over. It was stiff brown felt with a silk band. Something that might have been a bullet had torn a gash near the dimple on the right side of the crown. I gave it back. “Where’d it happen?”

  “Jeremy was in front of the building yesterday morning, doing some measuring. I wasn’t with him. He said his hat came off just like somebody grabbed it. Then he heard the shot. He ducked in through the doorway. He waited an hour before going back out, but there weren’t any more shots and he couldn’t tell where that one had come from.”

  “Maybe it was a careless hunter.”

  “Wasn’t no hunter.”

  Judy said, “We called Ollie Springer at the sheriff’s substation and he came out and pried a bullet out of the doorframe. He said it came from a rifle, a .30-30. Nobody hunts with a high-powered rifle in this part of the state, Mr. Walker. It’s illegal.”

  “Did this Springer talk to the Solomon people?”

  She nodded. “They denied knowing anything about it and there it sits. Ollie said he didn’t have enough to get a warrant and search for the rifle.”

  I said he was probably right.

  “Oh, we know he was,” she said. “Jeremy and me know Ollie since he was three. Where we come from folks don’t move far from home. You’ll see why when you get there.”

  I hadn’t said I was going yet, but I let it sail. “Can you think of anyone else who might want to take a shot at you?”

  She answered for Jeremy. “Good Lord, no! It’s a friendly place. Nobody’s killed anybody around there since 1867, and that was between outsiders passing through. Besides, I don’t think anybody wants to hurt either one of us. They’re just trying to scare us into selling. Well, we’re not scared. That’s what we want you to tell those Solomon people.”

  “Why not tell them yourself?”

  “Ed Snilly said it would mean more coming from a detective.” She folded her hands on her purse in her lap, ending that discussion.

  “Want me to scare them?”

  “Yes.” Something nudged the comfortable look out of her face. “Yes, we’d like that a whole lot.”

  I scratched my ear with the pencil I used to take notes. “I usually get a three-day retainer, but this doesn’t sound like it’ll take more than half a day. Make it two-fifty.”

  Jeremy pulled an old black wallet from his hip pocket and counted three one hundred-dollar bills onto the desk from a compartment stuffed full of them. “Gimme fifty back,” he said. “And I want a receipt.”

  I gave him two twenties and a ten from my own wallet, replaced them with the bills he’d given me, and wrote out the transaction, handing him a copy. “Do you always come to town with that much cash on you?” I asked.

  “First time we been to Detroit since ‘59.”

  “Oh, that’s not true,” Judy said. “We were here in ‘61 to see the new Studebakers.”

  I got some more information from them, said I’d attend to their case that afternoon, and stood to see them out.

  “Don’t you wear a coat?” I asked Jeremy. Outside the window the snow was falling in sheets.

  “When it gets cold.”

  I accompanied them through the outer office into the hallway, where I shook Jeremy Cuttle’s corded old hand and we said goodbye. I resisted the urge to follow them out to their car. If they drove away in anything but a 1961 Studebaker I might not have been able to handle the disappointment.

  Two

  I killed an hour in the microfilm reading room at the library catching up on the Children of Solomon.

  It was a fundamentalist religious group founded in the 1970s by a party named Bertram Comfort on the grounds that the New Testament and Christian thought were upstarts and that the way to salvation led through a belief in a vengeful God, tempered with the wisdom of King Solomon. Although a number of complaints had been filed against the sect’s youth camp in the north woods, mostly for breach of the peace, the outstate press remained unaware of the order’s existence until a fourteen-year-old boy died in one of the cabins, his body bearing the unmistakable signs of a severe beating.

  The camp was closed by injunction and an investigation was launched, but no evidence surfaced to disprove Comfort’s testimony that the boy died in their care after receiving rough treatment Solomon only knew where. The Children themselves were unpaid volunteers working in the light of their faith and the people who sent their children to the camp were members and patrons of the church, which was not recognized as such by the state.

  There was nothing to indicate that Comfort and his disciples would shoot at an old man in order to acquire real estate in Southeastern Michigan, but before heading out the Cuttles’ way I went back to the office and strapped on the Smith & Wesson. Any place that hadn’t had a murder in more than 120 years was past due.

  Three

  An hour west of Detroit the snow stopped falling and the sun came out, glaring hard off a field of white that blended pavement with countryside; even the overpasses looked like the ruins of Atlantis rearing out of a salt sea. The farther I got from town the more the scenery resembled a Perry Como Christmas special, rolling away to the horizon with frosted trees and here and there a homeowner in Eskimo dress shoveling his driveway. The mall builders and fast food chains had left droppings there just like everywhere else, but on days like that you remembered that kids still sledded down hills too steep for them and set out to build the world’s tallest snowman and lay on their backs in the snow fanning their arms and legs to make angels.

  Judy had told me she and Jeremy were living in a trailer behind the old Stage Stop, which stood on a hill overlooking Old US-23 near the exit from the younger expressway. At the end of the ramp, an aging barn she had also told me about provided more directions in the form of a painted advertisement flaking off the end wall. I turned that way, straddling a hump of snow left in the middle of the road by a county plow. Over a hill and then the gray frame saltbox she had described thrust itself between me and a bright sky.

  As it turned out, I wouldn’t have needed either the sign or the directions. The rotating beacon of a county sheriff’s car bounced red and blue light off the front of the building.

  I parked among a collection of civilian cars and pickup trucks and followed footsteps in the snow past the county unit, left unattended with its flashers on and the two-way radio hawking and spitting at top volume, toward a fourteen-foot house-trailer parked behind the empty tavern. A crowd was breaking up there, helped along by a gangling young deputy in uniform who was shooing them like chickens. He moved in front of me as I stepped toward the trailer.

  “We got business here, mister. Please help us by minding yours.”

  I showed him the license, which might have been in cuneiform for all the reaction it got. “I’m working for the Cuttles. Who’s in charge?”

  “Sergeant Springer. Until the detectives show up from the county seat, anyway. You’re not one of them.”

  I held out a card. “Please tell him the Cuttles hired me this morning.”

  He looked past me, saw the first of the civilian vehicles pulling out, and took the card. “Wait.” He circled behind the trailer. After a few minutes he came back and beckoned me from the end.

  The sergeant was a hard-looking stump about my age with silver splinters in the black hair at his temples and flat tired eyes under a fur cap. The muscles in his jaw were bunched like grapeshot. He was standing ankle-deep in snow fifty feet from the trailer with his back to it on the edge of a five-acre field that ended in a line of firs on the other side. A few yards beyond him, a man and woman lay spread-eagled side by side on their faces in the snow. The backs of the man’s suitcoat and the woman’s overcoat were smeared red. More red stained the snow around them in a bright fan. They were
dressed exactly as I had last seen Judy and Jeremy Cuttle.

  “Figure the son of a bitch gave them a running start,” the sergeant said as I joined him. “Maybe he told them if they made it to the trees they were home free.”

  “Who found them?” I asked.

  “Paper boy came to collect. When they didn’t answer his knock he went looking.”

  “Anybody hear the shots?”

  “It’s rabbit season. Day goes by without a couple of shotgun blasts...” He let it dangle. “Your name’s Walker? Ollie Springer. I command the substation here.” I could feel the wire strength in his grip through the leather glove. “What’d they hire you for?”

  “To hooraw the Children of Solomon. Jeremy thought they were the ones who took a shot at him yesterday. Who identified them?”

  “It’s them all right. I started running errands for the Cuttles when I was six and my parents knew them before that. If Comfort’s bunch did this I’ll nail every damn one of them to a cross.” His jaw muscles worked.

  “Any sign of a struggle?”

  “Trailer’s neat as a button. Judy was the last of the great homemakers. Bastard must’ve got the drop on them. Jeremy didn’t talk much, but he was a fighter. You don’t want to mess with these old farmers. But you can’t fight a jinx.”

  “What kind of jinx?”

  “The Stage Stop. Everybody who ever had anything to do with the place came to no good. Last guy who ran it went bankrupt. One before that tried to torch the place for the insurance and died in prison. I took a run at it myself once—nest egg for my retirement— and then my wife walked out on me. I guess I should’ve tried to talk them out of it. Not that they’d have listened.”

  “Mind if I take a look inside the trailer?”

  “Why, didn’t they pay you?”

  “Excuse me, Sergeant,” I said, “but go to hell.”

  He went over me with his cop’s eyes, grunted. “Go in with him, Gordy. Make sure he doesn’t touch anything.”

  There was a door on that side of the trailer, but the deputy and I went around to the side facing the Stage Stop. Gordy should have set up his post closer to the road; the path to the door had been trampled all over by curious citizens, obliterating the killer’s footprints and those of any herd of Clydesdales that might have happened by. Inside, Judy Cuttle had done what she could to turn a mobile home into an Edwardian farmhouse, complete with antimacassars and rusty photos in bamboo frames of geezers in waistcoats and glum women in cameos. A .20-gauge Remington pump shotgun, still a fixture in Michigan country houses, leaned in a corner of the tiny parlor. Without touching it I bent over to sniff the muzzle. It hadn’t been fired recently.

  “Jeremy’s, Ollie says,” the deputy reported. “He used to shoot pheasants till he slowed down.”

  The door we had entered through had a window with a clear view to the tavern and the road beyond. The purse Judy had carried into my office lay on a lamp table near the door. The quality of the housekeeping said she hadn’t intended it to stay there for long. I wondered if they’d even had a chance to take off their hats before receiving their last visitor.

  An unmarked Dodge was parked next to the patrol car when we came out. On the other side we found a plainclothesman in conversation with Sergeant Springer while his partner examined the bodies. Their business with me didn’t take any longer than Springer’s. I thanked the sergeant for talking to me and left.

  So far the whole thing stank; and in snow, yet.

  Four

  Judy Cuttle’s directions were still working. A houseboy or something in a turtleneck and whipcord trousers answered the door of a gray stone house on the edge of the nearby town and showed me into a room paneled in fruitwood with potted plants on the built-in shelves. I was alone for only a few seconds when Bertram Comfort joined me.

  He was a well-upholstered fifty in a brown suit off the rack, with fading red hair brushed gently back from a bulging forehead and no visible neck. His hands were pink and plump and hairless, and grasping one was like shaking hands with a baby. He waved me into a padded chair and sat down himself behind a desk anchored by a chrome doodad on one end and a King James Bible the size of a hand-truck on the other.

  “Is it Reverend Comfort?” I asked.

  “Mister will do.” His voice had the enveloping quality of a maiden aunt’s sofa. “I’m merely a lay reader. Are you with the prosecutor’s office up north? I thought that tragic business was settled.”

  “I’m working for Judy and Jeremy Cuttle. I’m a private investigator.”

  He looked as if he were going to cry. “I told the officer none of the Children were near the property yesterday. I wish these people could lay aside the suspicions of the secular world long enough to understand it is not we but Solomon who sits in judgment.”

  “I notice you refer to it as the property, not their property. Do you still hope to obtain it for your camp?”

  “Not my camp. Solomon’s. All the legal avenues have not yet been traveled.”

  “It’s the illegal ones I’m interested in. Maybe you’ve got a rebel in the fold. It happens in the best of families, even the God-fearing ones.”

  “The Children love God; we don’t fear Him. And everyone is accounted for at the time of yesterday’s unfortunate incident.”

  “Yesterday’s yesterday. I’m here about today.”

  “Today?”

  “Somebody shotgunned the Cuttles behind their trailer about an hour ago. Give or take.”

  “Great Glory!” He glanced at the Bible. “Are they—”

  “Gone to God. Knocking on the pearly. Purgatory bound. Dead as a mackerel.”

  “I find your mockery abhorrent under the circumstances. Do the police think the Children are involved?”

  “The police think what the police think. I’m not the police. Yesterday somebody potted at Jeremy Cuttle, or maybe just at his hat as a warning. Today he and his wife engaged me to investigate. Now they’re not in a position to engage anything but six feet of God’s good earth. I’m a detective. I see a connection.” I looked at my watch. “It’s three o’clock. Do you know where the Children are?”

  Again his eyes strayed to the Bible. Then he placed his pudgy hands on the desk, jacked himself to his feet, and hiked up his belt, the way fat men do. “I have Solomon’s work to attend to. ‘Go thou from the presence of a foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.’”

  “‘Sticks and stones may break my bones,’” I said, rising, “but any parakeet can memorize sentences.” I went me from his presence.

  Five

  Ed Snilly, the lawyer who had recommended me to the Cuttles, lived in an Edwardian farmhouse on eighty acres with a five-year-old Fleetwood parked in the driveway sporting a bumper sticker reading HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR HOGS TODAY? His wife, ffty-odd years of pork and potatoes stuffed into stretch jeans, directed me to the large yellow barn behind the house, where I found him tossing ears of dried corn from a bucket into a row of stalls occupied by chugging, snuffling pigs.

  “One of my neighbors called me with the news,” he said after he’d set down the bucket and shaken my hand. He was a wiry old scarecrow in his seventies with a spotty bald head and false teeth in a jaw too narrow for them. “Terrible thing. I’ve known Judy and Jeremy since the Depression. I’d gladly help out the prosecution on this one gratis. Do you suspect Comfort?”

  “I’d like to. Did you represent the Cuttles when they bought the Stage Stop?”

  “Yes. It was an estate sale, very complicated. Old Man Herndon’s heirs wanted to liquidate quickly and wouldn’t carry any paper. Jeremy negotiated to the last penny. I also stood up with them at the hearing with the State Liquor Control Commission. A license transfer can be pretty thorny without chicanery. I’m not sure we’d have swung it if Ollie Springer hadn’t appeared to vouch for them.”

  “I’m surprised he spoke up. He told me the place was jinxed.”

  “I can see why he’d feel that way. Old Man Herndon w
as Ollie’s father-in-law. The Stage Stop was going to be a belated wedding present, but that ended when Herndon’s daughter ran out on Ollie. The rumor was she ditched him for some third rate rock singer who came through here a couple of years back. I think that’s what killed the old man.”

  “So far this place is getting to be almost as interesting as Detroit.”

  “Scandals happen everywhere, but in the main we country folk look out for one another. That’s why Ollie helped Judy and Jeremy in spite of his personal tragedy. To be honest, I thought they were getting in over their heads too, especially later when they talked about digging a wine cellar and adding a room for pool. They were looking far beyond your usual mom-and-pop operation.”

  “Is gaming that big hereabouts?”

  “Son, people around here will go to a christening and bet on when the baby’s first tooth will come in. Phil Costa’s made a fortune off the pool tables in the basement of his bowling alley out on M-52. Lord knows I’ve represented enough of his clientele at their arraignments every time Ollie’s raided the place.”

  “Little Phil? Last I heard he was doing something like seven to twelve in Jackson for fixing the races at Hazel Park.”

  “He’s out two years now, and smarter than when he went in. These rural county commissioners stay fixed longer than the city kind. Phil never seems to be around when the deputies bust in.”

  “So if the Cuttles went ahead and put in their poolroom, Little Phil might have lost business.”

  “It’s a thought.” Snilly picked up his bucket and resumed scattering ears of corn in the stalls. “A thought is what it is.”