Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection
Page 45
“I wasn’t Dick’s beneficiary, Walker. Lynn was.”
I looked at her on the sofa. “He’s trying to lay it off on you.”
The skin of her face drew tight. “The hell he will.”
“Shut up, Lynn.”
“I guess she’s in love with you, or thinks she is,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone along with it. A divorce would only have given her part interest in a car with three payments to go on it and half a house with a mortgage, but her husband’s death by misadventure was good for a quarter million. It would make a nice dowry when you two got married after a suitable interval. Don’t move, Redding. Let’s keep my gun in my belt holster and this conversation civilized.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. I was just reaching for a cigar.”
“That’s another thing. You really should have emptied the ashtray in your Citroen. I took the liberty of inspecting it on my way up to the door just now. The pink lipstick on the cigarette butts I found there isn’t your shade. Bet there are more in your house.”
“You’re a man.”
I looked again at Mrs. Gendron. Her glass was empty now but she was still holding it, her knuckles white. “You don’t know what it’s like being married to a dull man in a dull job who never took a chance in his life. Dick was horridly, stultifyingly dependable. Try living with that.”
“Don’t say anything more,” Redding warned her. “Matthews won’t talk and Hardy and the others don’t know either of us from Adam.”
“You should be grateful he was so dependable.” I lifted the receiver off the telephone stand near the door and used that same hand to dial police headquarters, keeping my gun hand free and my eyes on Redding. “Gendron took his responsibilities seriously, and hang the rules. That’s why he tried to see that you got his insurance money. He took chances, all right, but not like yours. All of his were for other people.”
The police switchboard put me through to the Major Crimes unit.
Seven
“Matthews won’t turn,” Deborah Stonesmith said. “Why should he? He’s not guilty of anything but being a lawyer. Even if he did talk it wouldn’t prove anything.”
We were seated in her office, waiting for the stenographer who had taken my statement to finish typing it up so I could sign it. The inspector had on a light blue suit today, over a white ruffled blouse that on her looked like a lace doily on an armored car. She was playing with the glasses on the chain around her neck.
I said, “Keep working on the Gendron woman. She might crack.”
“More likely it’ll be Redding. A funny thing happens in these in-equal partnerships when they go into Interrogation; they reverse roles. The strong one spills his guts and the weak one clams up tight. If it happens at all.”
“In any case, Midwest saves having to payoff. If your hunch is right and Hardy folds on Gendron, it’s suicide any way you slice it.”
“So why aren’t you happy?” she asked.
“Why aren’t you?”
She smiled. There was no joy in it. The light of a gray Detroit sort of day came through the window at her back and painted a red nimbus around her head of hard hair. “So it was just an ordinary domestic murder after all. Not a major crime.”
“They’re all major,” I said, admiring her halo through the smoke of my Winston. “Every last one of them.”
Square One
The bar in the new Hilton Garden Inn in Harmonie Park is a pleasant place to sit and listen to the bartenders clinking their instruments and watch baseball on the liquid-crystal screen in the corner—two or three more games and it will be a year-round sport. I don’t go there often. I spend less on a bottle of red wine than the place charges for a glass of decent scotch.
That day I went. Ed Warburton had done me a favor as commander of the eleventh precinct when he could just as well have jailed me as a material witness, and had a round bought in his honor at the local cop hangout that evening. I’m unpopular there as a rule. The break had given me a chance to close out an my investigation I’d been working three weeks, and Warburton to clear up a police case that had hung fire for more than a year. When he called me at the office and asked me to meet him in the Hilton bar, I took out a loan and drove down.
I didn’t ask why he’d chosen a spot so far from his home park. When a cop stumbles and falls on his sword, his colleagues give him a door-busting going-away party in a private room above a saloon and then the dustoff. It isn’t that they’re ashamed, or disapprove of what he did. Cops are superstitious and convinced that bad luck is contagious. No one is safe if a Detroit police commander can get caught with his thumb in the till.
Not that he had. Six officers from his precinct had gone up on charges of substituting confectioners’ sugar for twenty kilos of cocaine in the evidence room, and brass is expected to know about such things. Even then he might have come off with a reprimand and possibly demotion to inspector, but when the jury voted to acquit the officers, the department had had to let blood somewhere. He’d resigned after being relieved of his duties.
It was the middle of the afternoon. A man and woman in business dress had the bartender to themselves at the bar. No one was watching the game. Warburton lifted a hand, and when I went over to his booth raised himself six inches to shake hands. He was fifty and looked it with less hair than I remembered, and the stoop was new, but if I’d had twenty years on him I wouldn’t have chosen him. He stood six two with no body fat and his grip would bend a coconut.
“Thanks for coming, Amos. What are you drinking?”
I knew then the occasion wasn’t social. Cops only call me by my first name when they want something. “What are you?”
He held up his glass, a narrow tumbler half filled with sparkling water, with a lemon wedge straddling the top. “French fizzie. I haven’t had a nibble in a week.”
“Program?”
“Experiment. I like the stuff. I want to see if I need it. No pink eels yet.” He drank and made the sort of face a seasoned drinker makes over carbonated water. He had a long, humorous face, like the put-upon father in a 1950s sitcom. His suit was pressed but his tie was at half-mast. That and the teetotaling were his only visible concessions to his situation. I lured the help away from the couple at the bar and ordered a scotch.
“What’s your fee?” Warburton asked when I had it and we were alone again.
I drank. It tasted sweet, not like the paintstrip I kept at home. “Depends on the work. I can run a credit check in an hour, that’s forty. Otherwise, five hundred a day, with three days up front for seed. If you want me to scratch up dirt on the chief, I’ll need a little more. No hospitalization,” I explained.
“You wouldn’t have to dig too deep. She’s the mayor’s creature, and we know what he is. You never see those two apart. I wouldn’t take them on in a sack race.”
“She slam-dunked you pretty hard.”
“I don’t hold it against her. Not much. She’s got the feds sitting in her lap. A whole line of chiefs crooked the joint before she came along. I want you to put in a word,” he said. “It shouldn’t take three days.”
“I don’t know the chief. It would take that long to get past the reception room, and then I might as well hit her up for a personal loan while I’m there. I’ll get the same answer.”
“Not with the chief. With Inspector Alderdyce. You two go back.”
“Our fathers ran a gas station together. We entered training the same day. I washed out a week short, he stayed on. That’s our history. We swap favors now and then, but right now I’m in the red. Even if I weren’t, there’s no way an endorsement from either of us will put you back in charge of the eleventh.”
“I don’t want that. I’m asking you to ask him to ask the chief to green-light my application to rejoin the department at entry level.”
I drank again. “You want to get back into the blue bag?”
“I’ll take cadet if I have to. I’d rather not. They’re making those scaling walls higher than th
ey did thirty years ago. I can file, hold down the front desk, get coffee for the C.I.D. Free up a younger man for the streets. I know I can’t be Supercop. See? No delusions. Next week maybe I’ll go back to drinking beer.” He drained off his glass and set it down with a thump.
“What’s the gag?”
“It’s legit. I bit the moose hard; lost my pension, almost lost my wife. My daughter won’t speak to me. The twerp she married wants to be drain commissioner, but that won’t happen thanks to good old dad. I could write a book, or take security work, but I don’t want that. I want to go back to square one and this time roll the dice with the other hand.”
“The chief won’t go for it,” I said. “It’s like cutting the end off a blanket and stitching it back on the other end. They’ll fry her in the media.”
“Everybody deserves a second chance. That’s the spin. I’m physically fit, no misdemeanors or felonies, and it wouldn’t be the first time a middle-aged man was accepted for duty.”
“It’s her head if you screw up again. She won’t go for it.”
“She’s forgotten what it was like in the ranks. She put me down as incompetent because I couldn’t offer evidence against those six officers. It never occurred to her I wouldn’t because you don’t rat on a brother cop.”
“You knew?”
He frowned. “This conversation is like attorney-client privilege, right? To you, I mean; it doesn’t swing a flea’s weight in court, but I know you’ve gone into the cage over it in the past. Your file makes good reading at the dentist’s.”
“If I entertain you, I’ve done my job. I’m not writing my memoirs anytime soon, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Not worried. Just wanted to know how wide I can open up. I wouldn’t have to explain this brothers-in-blue business to Alderdyce. He may run Homicide, but his heart’s still in uniform.”
“So ask him to put the word in with the chief. What do you need me for?”
“You might have noticed I’m not shaking friends from the department off my lapels just now. Being seen with a disgraced character like me might not make a grease spot in his jacket downtown, but it wouldn’t win him points next time he comes up for promotion. A man like John wouldn’t refuse to see me, but I can’t do that to him.”
“I’m not exactly a photo op myself,” I said.
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re a bug on the radar at best.”
“Since you put it that way, go to hell.” I drank off my scotch and slid to the end of the booth.
Warburton had the reflexes of a rookie. His hand clamped my wrist.
“Let’s not fight,” he said. “When you’ve been called six kinds of an imbecile where your wife and your kids and all their friends can see it, you let fly at whatever’s in range.”
I settled back against the seat. I still felt the pressure of his fingers on my wrist after he let go. “I have to work in this town,” I said, “which means getting along with chiefs and inspectors, inspectors especially. Forget about convincing the chief for now. First you have to convince me you’re not just dicking around.”
“My God, man, I’m degrading myself in front of the world. Why would I make it up?”
“It’s got Spike TV all over it. All you’d have to do is stick it out long enough to interest some hack, sell the idea to New York and L.A., and bug out before your appointment comes up for the department physical. That makes everyone else look like an imbecile, and guess who takes the heat? I don’t like security work any more than you do, but that’s all I’ll have left this side of a refrigerator box on Gratiot. That’s if they let me.”
“I’m not grandstanding. I took an oath to serve and protect, that’s the job. I got so busy trying to keep the job, I forgot to do it. This is the one shot I’ve to make up for it.”
If he’d popped a tear, or put a throb in his throat, or hauled out the speech about a man’s word being all he has left in the finish, I’d have paid for my drink and left there and then. But his face was as calm and clear as a reflecting pool. I believed him.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “That’s as far as the promising goes. Working on keeping jobs is the slogan they ought to paint on the squad cars.”
He reached inside his coat and slid out a checkbook bound in marbled blue leather. I stopped him before he clicked his pen.
“Pay the bartender. Stand up for me at my next arraignment.”
I caught up with Inspector John Alderdyce in the Detroit Athletic Club, swimming laps around the pool where Johnny Weissmuller had trained for the Olympics. The gymnasium was more brightly lit than it had been for thirty years, when a brick wall had blocked the view of the encompassing city. Now it looked out on the larger-than-life statues of dead ballplayers in Comerica Park.
Anthropologists say that black men haven’t the buoyancy to break records in the water, but they hadn’t seen Alderdyce, dark and gleaming, arms and legs slicing the surface like a water rocket. There was no one present to enforce the rules, so I lit a cigarette and waited while he circled twice and climbed out. The water came off him in sheets, like rain from a locomotive. He’d put on weight around the middle, but he was all slabbed muscle through the chest and shoulders, with a head hewn roughly like a chainsaw sculpture from a living tree.
“Put that out,” he said. “I’m on probation here six more weeks.”
I squashed out the butt on the tiles while he toweled off and put on a terrycloth robe with the DAC monogram above the pocket. We sat down in a pair of folding chairs with woven plastic seats and I got right to it.
“Why didn’t Ed come see me in person?” he asked when I’d finished.
“He says he’s a pariah.”
“You’re not?”
“I made the same argument. He said I wasn’t in his league.”
“He doesn’t know you like I do.”
“What do I tell him?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“That means no.”
“No means no. ‘I’ll think about it’ means I’ve got a stack of homicides on my desk that won’t investigate themselves. What’s your end?”
“Not a cent. I owed him a solid.”
“I don’t.”
“He knows that.”
“What’s my end if I deliver?” he asked. “I mean from you.”
“There isn’t one from me. Personally, I don’t care if Ed Warburton’s name shows up in the morning roll or not. He got a raw deal if he’s telling the truth, but this mayor and this chief hardly ever deal any other way. I don’t have the time or the capital to square up the deck every week.”
“Think he’s on the level?”
“He made all the right faces when he was talking, but you cops all got more personalities than Mel Blanc. For what it’s worth, I think he wants to clean the slate.”
“Tell Ed I’ll call him.”
Warburton called me at home a week later. I don’t know where he got the number. It was late and he was drunk.
I said, “I guess you didn’t see any pink eels.”
“I’m celebrating,” he said. “You’re talking to Officer Edward Thomas Warburton. That’s unofficial until they give me the oath, but I’m taking it out for a test drive.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks, Walker. John gave me the news an hour ago. The chief waived training. All I have to do is pass the physical and qualify on the range.”
“Bet she’s hoping you’ll fail one or the other.”
“I won’t, though. I’ve never missed a doctor’s appointment or a target. I’ve got fifteen years till mandatory. I might make lieutenant. Then I’ll be in a position to even things up with you.”
“If I’m still doing what I’m doing fifteen years from now, that might mean asking you to put a round in my head.”
“I’d like to buy you another drink.”
“No, you don’t. A fresh fish like you can’t afford to be seen in public with a disgraced character like me.”
A writer who’d ghosted three presidential memoirs spilt a publishing contract with Warburton and brought out his story under the title Second Chance. Before it appeared, a Hollywood studio bought the rights to adapt it, but the circumstances themselves were public domain, and at one point a movie company, a broadcast TV network, and a satellite station had all announced plans to dramatize the story: Kevin Costner, Kiefer Sutherland, and Denzel Washington entered into negotiations to play the lead. No cameras turned on any of the productions and the book went into remaindering after one printing.
Ten months after Officer Warburton raised his right hand and promised to serve and protect his community on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN, officers with the General Service Bureau arrested him for embezzling forty thousand dollars from the stash the department kept for buying drugs in sting operations. Subsequent investigation revealed he’s lost that much at least in the three casinos in town.
He was dismissed by order of the chief of police, found guilty of grand theft, and sentenced to serve eight to twelve years at hard labor in the state penitentiary in Jackson, where he was placed in isolation to protect him from the convicts he’d helped send there. His wife divorced him, his daughter’s husband lost his bid for public office, and his son changed his name. Meanwhile, the FBI informed the chief it was expanding its probe of the department, and Inspector John Alderdyce was suspended for three weeks with pay while General Service investigated his connections with Warburton. His membership in the Detroit Athletic Club was canceled.
My name didn’t come up in any of the press conferences that accompanied the story, but I got my car into a garage to bring all the safety equipment up to date. These days I can’t afford to be stopped for even a broken taillight in the city of Detroit.