Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Mrs. Gendron is under sedation. I’m Dr. Redding, the family—her physician.” He made the change with a slight twitch of his very black eyebrows. They looked lacquered on. “Perhaps later, when the shock has worn off—”

  “Did you know Mr. Gendron well?”

  “Very. He was my friend before he was my patient.”

  “Maybe I could talk to you.”

  He moved his eyebrows, then stood aside to let me in. The living room was done in beige, with blonde furniture and a twist of bleached driftwood resting on the mantel of a pale stone fireplace. A bloodless room, professionally decorated. He offered me the ivory-colored sofa and helped himself to a thin cigar from his inside breast pocket.

  “Shocking habit, especially for a doctor.” He lit it with a Zippo and got a Winston burning for me. I noticed he chewed his nails. “We’re as weak as everyone else.”

  “Didn’t I see your name in Gendron’s file?”

  “I conducted his physical when he applied for the policy last year.”

  “Was that the last time you examined him?”

  “No. I gave him his annual just six weeks ago. He was in excellent condition for a man of forty, though he could’ve stood to lose ten pounds.”

  “Every doctor says that. You knew him socially?”

  “Dick and I became friends when he was a freshman at Michigan and I was interning in the hospital there. I introduced him to his wife.” He flipped some ash into the tray on the blonde coffee table.

  “How was he emotionally?”

  “In good spirits. Maybe a little harried. Public Relations is a cannibal profession. I’ve referred a number of Dick’s colleagues to stress counseling. Not him, though. He coped.”

  I added some ash of my own to the pile. The tray contained two of his cigar stubs and a number of shredded cigarette butts with pink lipstick stains on the tips. “Would you know if he had money troubles?”

  He stroked the brown underside of his chin. “Is there something suspicious about Dick’s death? I thought it was established he was killed at random by some strung-out bandit.”

  “That’s how it looks. I’m just stitching up the loose corners. People who live in nice houses like this have a tendency to go into the hole.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  It sounded stiff. “Just asking,” I said. “Friends usually know about those things. How were relations between him and his wife?”

  “They were devoted to each other. Really, I’m curious. Does someone imagine he threw himself in front of that bullet just to cheat the insurance company?”

  “It’s happened.”

  “Not with Dick. He had too much to live for.” He killed his cigar. “I think that if Lynn were standing where I am she’d be asking you to leave about now.”

  “He’s just doing his job, Tim.”

  I’m some detective. I hadn’t heard her entering the room through the doorway behind me. I stood and turned to look at a small brunette in her mid-thirties, wearing a pageboy haircut and a blue satin dressing gown trimmed in ruffles. Her feet were bare in flat-heeled sandals and she was without make-up but for a touch of pink on her lips. She wouldn’t need much else. Her eyes were a little puffed.

  “I heard you talking,” she said. “I’m Lynn Gendron, Dick’s— widow.”

  “Then you can answer the questions I was asking Dr. Redding.”

  “Lynn, you should be resting.”

  “What does it matter? Dick’s the first thing I think of when I wake up. My husband was a happy man, Mr.—?”

  “Walker.”

  She smiled her thanks sadly. “He worked hard and it took its toll on his nerves, but he liked the work and he loved me. We had the usual debts, nothing we couldn’t stay on top of. The house is mortgaged and we—I owe three more payments on the car. If that’s something to panic over, this whole neighborhood should be half berserk.”

  “That’s the Camaro you owe on?” I asked.

  “Yes,” offered Redding. “The Citroen is mine. All mine.”

  The cigarette was burning my fingers. I got rid of it. “It’s good you still make house calls.”

  “Only in special cases. Lynn is a dear friend. Now, I really must insist you go. Despite what Lynn says, time alone is the best cure for grief.”

  “Alone with you, you mean.”

  He did the trick with the eyebrows. “I think I resent that.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Walker,” cut in Mrs. Gendron. She sounded more tired than angry. I thanked her for her help and left while Redding was still making the effort to be civilized.

  Three

  Hegelman Associates, advertising and public relations, occupied the twenty-second floor of the Penobscot Building, a grand old pile of granite and red marble in downtown Detroit that looked as if it was willing to tolerate all that space-age plastic going up along the riverfront for a while longer anyway. I followed a short carpeted corridor from the elevator to a desk behind which a China doll in a stiff blouse and Max Factor directed me to Richard Gendron’s office. The woman I found there wasn’t quite as pretty, but she didn’t work as hard at it. I liked her slight overbite and the wisp of soft brown hair that strayed out over her forehead. She read my card and her face got drawn.

  “Mr. Hegelman said someone from the insurance company would be coming by,” she said quietly. “He said we should all cooperate.”

  Her voice broke a little. I said, “Gendron was a good boss, huh.”

  “He was a good man. When I threw out my back bending over to open a file drawer, the company tried to deny me compensation. Dick—Mr. Gendron stormed into Mr. Hegelman’s office in the middle of a conference and threatened to quit if my claim wasn’t honored. I got my first check two days later. He took care of his people.”

  “All his people, or just you?”

  Her chin came up. “I’m happily married and so was he. Ask anyone on the staff; they’ve all got stories just like mine. He did right by all of us, even if it meant breaking the rules.”

  “Sorry. I’m starting from scratch, that’s all. Can I look in his office?”

  She said the door was unlocked and I went inside. It was a corner room, looking down on Griswold to the west and out on the Renaissance Center to the south, a giant poker-chip caddy with the handle gone. An original architect’s drawing of the Penobscot Building hung on the east wall and a framed studio shot of Gendron’s wife Lynn shared the desk with a telephone pad and a complicated intercom. The drawers yielded pens, stationery, a paperback book, and a carton of Pall Malls.

  The telephone pad was blank. I picked it up and riffled through it. A business card slid out onto the desk. I read it.

  I studied the buttons on the intercom for a minute, then gave up and went back into the outer office. Gendron’s secretary looked up from her typing.

  “Your boss said he was going to the store for cigarettes?”

  “Yes. We had an agreement: I wouldn’t try to talk him into quitting, and he wouldn’t send me out to maintain his habit. We—”

  “What brand did he smoke?”

  “What brand? Pall Malls.”

  “Any thoughts on why he’d go out for cigarettes—when he had a ten-day supply in his desk?”

  She shook her head.

  I laid the business card on top of the typewriter. The legend was embossed in tasteful blue on pebbled beige stock:

  Reliance Investigations

  “Courtesy, Efficiency, Confidentiality”

  “What business would he have had for a private investigator?” I asked.

  “It must have fallen out of the Turner file,” she said, and stopped. Something fluttered across her face; a confidence betrayed.

  “Who’s Turner?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that.”

  “Not even if it means finding out why Gendron died?”

  She looked up at me with dry eyes. “Discretion was very important to Dick. He practiced it in
everything he did. He’d want me to do the same no matter what.”

  “Okay.” I left the card where I had put it. “Did he confide in you personally?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as his health.” I brought out the paperback book I had found in Gendron’s desk. A pastoral cover, doves circling a meadow in blossom, the title in gentle script: COPING WITH TERMINAL ILLNESS.

  She stared at it a long time. “Maybe it was someone he knew. His mother or father. Or his wife.”

  “Maybe. Have the police been here?”

  “Just to talk. None of them went into the office.”

  “No need, for a simple robbery killing. Can I use your telephone? It’s a local call.”

  She said go ahead and I dialed police headquarters and asked for Deborah Stonesmith in Major Crimes. After a minute her saloon-singer voice came on the line.

  “Walker, Inspector,” I said. “Did that autopsy sheet come through?”

  “On my desk. What do you need, if it’s quick?”

  “Gendron’s physical condition at time of death. Was he suffering from cancer, heart disease, anything that would snuff him if the bullet didn’t?”

  “Nope. I should be so healthy.”

  “Okay, thanks. How’s the investigation?”

  “Hot as hell. We found the kid’s partners right where he said we would. They’re being processed now.”

  “Names?”

  “After the arraignment tomorrow morning.”

  I thanked her again and we were through talking. The secretary’s eyes were on me. “Gendron was sound as a rock,” I said.

  “Surprised?”

  “Only a little.”

  Four

  Back in my office I removed the Free Press movie section from the telephone and called Hal Needham at Reliance Investigations. When I wasn’t working for Midwest or following someone’s husband through the after-hours places downtown or looking for someone’s daughter in the Cass Corridor, I sometimes farmed myself out to Reliance, and Hal and I had worked in tandem enough times to owe each other some favors. I recognized his Kansas twang as soon as he answered.

  “Walker? Call you back.”

  The telephone rang a minute later. When I picked it up he said, “Sorry. Krell’s got a tap on all the incoming lines. This one’s clean.”

  “How can you work for him?”

  “I got a gifted daughter and I’m starting a bail fund for my son. What’s the favor?”

  “Guy named Richard Gendron at Hegelman Associates did some business with Reliance a while back, something to do with someone or something named Turner. I need the details.”

  He whistled. “It gets back to Krell he’ll play the ‘Rogue’s March’ over the office PIA. and break my men’s room key over his knee.”

  “He won’t get it from me.”

  “This one’s worth a dinner. At least.”

  “You pick the place.”

  “Whose sheet are you on?”

  “Midwest is picking up the expenses on this one.”

  “In that case, make it the London Chop House. Give me a half hour.”

  I said okay and broke the connection. Next I tried Lee Horst downtown. Lee’s an information broker, and if you’re on his accepted list he’ll hand you the inside track on anyone or anything in the Detroit area, provided you meet his price. He picked up the receiver himself; no secretaries or assistants to undersell Lee.

  “Timothy Redding,” he repeated in his high soft voice, after I had told him what I needed. “M.D.?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  The counter down the street from my building served me a three-course dinner—tuna fish sandwich, coffee, and a bill—and I unlocked the door to my office again just as the telephone started ringing. It was Hal Needham.

  “Turner Chemicals,” he said. “They went to Hegelman looking for a better public image and Gendron got the assignment. He observed their operation for a month and made recommendations that included a dress code for office personnel and a pink slip for the dispatcher in their Warren plant.”

  “How come the canning?”

  “Gendron didn’t think it was good business practice to keep an armed robber on the payroll. Guy’s name was Phil Hardy and he had priors going back to the riots. Also he was driving a new red Pontiac Firebird that he didn’t buy on a dispatcher’s salary.”

  “I like that part,” I said. “I like it a lot. Tomorrow night okay for the chop house?”

  “I’m not eating a bite until then.” He laughed shortly and hung up.

  Lee Horst didn’t call back that day. I dialed my service and asked them to reroute all calls to my home telephone, then closed the office. At home I watched a little TV, dealt myself a couple of losing games of Solitaire, and turned in early. All that dialing can really take it out of you.

  Five

  In the morning I showered, dressed, and turned on the radio for the news while the coffee was brewing. When the announcer had finished with Washington and the Middle East he noted that three men had been arraigned ten minutes before in Recorder’s Court in connection with Tuesday’s drugstore robbery and the murder of Richard Gendron. He gave two names I didn’t recognize and we pronounced the third one together. Philip Hardy.

  “Yeah. I want his finances, but if you find anything else juicy I’ll take that too.”

  Stonesmith was a few minutes getting rid of the reporters and coming to the telephone. I congratulated her on the arrests. She said, “Save it for the convictions. Jay Albert Matthews represented them at the arraignment.”

  Matthews had defended a millionaire’s daughter or two and written a best-selling book, Mistakes of Darrow or something on that order. “Who’s paying him?” I asked.

  “Privileged information, he said. It sure isn’t any of those three.”

  “I think I know.”

  “Well, spill it.”

  “Privileged information, Inspector.”

  I hung up on whatever name she was calling me and lifted the receiver again and got Lee Horst just as he was entering his office. He apologized for not calling.

  “Computer was down, and isn’t that the most popular new lie this season?” Keys clattered on his end. “Okay, I got a readout on Dr. Redding. You want it over the phone or on paper?”

  I said over the telephone was fine, and smoked two cigarettes while he was feeding it to me.

  When he was through I asked him how much.

  “For you, a hundred.”

  “You’re a fraud, Lee.”

  “My informants like to eat, what can I say?”

  I promised to get a check off to him that week. Then I went out without finishing my coffee.

  Six

  The yellow Citroen was parked in the same spot behind Lynn Gen-dron’s Camaro when I climbed out of my own crate. It might not have moved since yesterday, but Redding was too discreet for that. A discreet fellow was Dr. Redding.

  “What now?”

  He had shed the camel-hair for a sober blue serge suit and knitted black necktie. This time he stood across the doorway with his feet spread, a graying sentinel with a Palm Beach tan. I said, “We can go inside or we can talk out here. My voice carries.”

  After a beat he let me pass. Gendron’s widow was sitting on the sofa in a snug-fitting black dress that caught her just below the knees. A pair of gray cotton gloves lay on the coffee table in front of her, next to a barrel glass half-full of amber liquid.

  “Dick’s funeral is this morning.” Redding closed the door. “Can’t this wait until after?”

  “What’d you tell him, cancer?” I said.

  His lacquered eyebrows squirmed. “What?”

  “Cancer, probably. It’s a buzzword, bound to have the extreme effect you were after. How deep are you in debt really, Redding? My information says six figures.”

  “Are you drunk? You’re babbling.”

  “This is a computer society. Everything’s on record. Your house in Grosse Pointe has a t
hird mortgage and you dumped a ton of preferred stock at a loss to keep the loan sharks happy downtown. You’re into the IRS for sixty grand, you owe every bookie between here and Miami. You told me the truth about your car, though; you own that, at least until the government or some guy named Big Tony the Hippo seizes it.”

  “Keep talking,” he said. “You’re constructing an ironclad case for slander and invasion of privacy.”

  “You need that quarter-million insurance money, Redding. It means surviving or staying out of jail, depending on which of your creditors gets to you first. Murder was a little out of your reach, and since your old friend Gendron wasn’t going to accommodate you by committing suicide, you decided to supply him with a good reason. So when you gave him his last physical you told him he had terminal cancer.”

  “Now I know you’ve been drinking. He was in excellent health.”

  “You knew that, but he didn’t. The symptoms of stress can be made to seem like the early stages of something much more serious, and he trusted you enough not to get a second opinion from another doctor. I found a well-thumbed self-help book in his office about living with death. It didn’t take, though. With your help he chose a sudden end over letting his insides rot away slowly.”

  Redding smiled grimly. “Very inventive, but you forgot one thing. Suicide would have voided the policy.”

  “Only if it looked like suicide. Being an old friend, you planted a simple idea in Gendron’s head: Set up your own murder. He pulled the file on a man named Phil Hardy, a man he’d persuaded a client of his to fire in the interest of a better public image, a known armed robber who would organize the hit for an inducement—something up front, say, plus whatever he got away with from the robbery and a good attorney if he got caught.

  “Jay Albert Matthews is the direct link. Gendron could supply the advance payment, but you had to hire Matthews to represent Hardy and his partners, because Gendron wouldn’t be around to do it once he kept his appointment in that drugstore, and if you reneged on the deal they’d spill the details. The law says Matthews doesn’t have to divulge his client’s name, but once it gets out you set the whole thing up, he’ll turn you to save his own reputation. Lawyers are like that. That’s where you went sour, Redding. You didn’t have the guts to arrange the kill yourself, so you let Gendron do it. Only in the end you had to get your hands dirty too.”