Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “No, football’s a game. Sport is life and death and taking risks.”

  “The roosters take the risks. I like my chickens flame broiled.”

  “Trust me on this. I’ve traveled enough in it to write a book on the subject, like that Irish guy that invented bullfighting. Hennessey.”

  I lost a beat, and two or three sentences of Jackie’s high-octane pitch, before I realized he’d meant Hemingway. He was a drawn strip of forty-year-old jerky with shoulder-length dirty blond hair, a wind-sock moustache, and blue eyes pickled in scotch—the pizza delivery man in 1970s stag films—whose daily uniform only varied by which color of plaid flannel he wore over his jeans and black Surfaris T-shirt. He belonged to the fifth generation of a family whose fortune had built the Detroit Opera House, the public library on Woodward, and Joe Louis Arena.

  His approaching me at Ford Field didn’t increase my chances of making the Social Register that season; his relatives paid him to travel in circles other than theirs. I was only giving him time because I was stuck there until the parking lot cleared, and he’d come over to wait with me in the vacant seat next to mine.

  When I’d heard enough about beaks dipped in poison and feed laced with antifreeze—the tricks of the cockfighting trade—I asked what he wanted. With the elaborate care of a proud father, he unshipped a crocodile wallet, stripped off the rubber band that kept it from falling apart, and handed me a Polaroid of the biggest, ugliest rooster this side of Lyle Lovett.

  The bird stood straight as a reinforcing rod, glaring through chicken wire at the camera, with its head tilted like a boxer’s and a blood-red comb that flopped to one side like Hitler’s lock. It had a gorilla chest and railroad spikes for spurs. I gave back the picture. “That’s not a chicken. It’s the love child of my ex-wife and a California condor. Just out of curiosity, who was on your lunchbox as a kid, Strangler Lewis?”

  “I went to Grosse Pointe schools. My lunch was catered.” He admired the snapshot, then tucked it away carefully and returned it to his hip. “He’s Prince Cortez, out of Montezuma III by Queen Isabella, whose father took top money at the world tournament in Tijuana three years ago. He’s just a year old and undefeated in three matches. Think Mike Tyson at eighteen.”

  “How much you got down on him?”

  “Betting’s for rubes. I’m buying him outright: two thousand cash.”

  “He must be a hundred percent white meat.”

  “I told you, you don’t understand the sport. One more win and the price goes to five.”

  “If he’s that good, why’s he for sale?”

  “His owner’s got INS on his neck; something about lying on his visa app about his connections with those Zapatistas a dozen or fifteen years back. He needs juice wherever he can squeeze it. He’s overextended.”

  “So buy the bird. You make that much a week just by staying away from Symphony Hall.”

  “See, that’s why I’m glad I bumped into you. He wouldn’t sell Prince Cortez to me for ten grand. I need somebody to carry the pony down to Mexicantown and pick up the goods by proxy.”

  “What’d you do, sleep with his wife?”

  “His daughter.” He broke eye contact. “Carmelita’s a ripe little peach. I wasn’t the first to pick her, but I was the one she expected to stick. When that didn’t happen she went to the old man. So now Zorboron’s prejudiced against my case.”

  “Tiger Zorboron?”

  “El Tigre del Norte, they call him down in DelRay. His right name’s Emiliano. That’s like Mac in Mexican.”

  Jackie’s local roots were showing. The old Hungarian section of town, once called DelRay, had been Mexicantown for years, attracting immigrants from south of the border to lay brick and pour mortar so their children could practice medicine and law. There was a gang element among them, of course, promising Old Country justice to new Americans and extracting tribute for the service. Emiliano Zorboron kept the tally.

  I stood. The stands were still a quarter full, and the exits from the lot would be jammed tighter than Calcutta, but just then my car seemed a safer place to be. “Forget the prince, Jackie. You can mail order baby chicks by the crate for a lot less than two thousand. Try raising your own champ.”

  He slouched in his seat, thin as the slats but loose as the peanut sacks blowing about the field. “I heard you had cojones.”

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t worry so much about machetes.”

  ‘I’ll pay two thousand to deliver two thousand. You went worse places for less for my uncle’s law firm. I was brought up soft, but I’ve been down there a hundred times.”

  “It’s the hundred and first I’m worried about.” I left.

  • • •

  He was found in an alley behind a restaurant off West Vernor, the Mexicantown main drag. The cheap trash bag fell apart when a sanitation worker lifted it and Jackie Brill’s head rolled out.

  They’d cut him in six pieces, tucked them together as neatly as Legos, and if they’d used a Hefty Steelsack Jackie might have been buried in a landfill and forgotten, which is the fate of heirs who fall out of favor and vanish.

  As it was he fell back in when his remains were identified. The Grosse Pointe Brills turned the screws on the mayor, the mayor put the squeeze on the chief of police, and the chief cracked the whip on the precinct commanders, who set loose the dogs. The restaurant belonged to a cousin of Emiliano Zorboron’s, and even though the cousin lost his English under interrogation, and forgot his Spanish when a Hispanic detective clocked in, street informants were helpful; the story of the Tiger’s strained relations with Jackie was known from one end of Vernor to the other. Within twenty-four hours of the discovery of the corpse, Zorboron was under arrest for murder.

  Run-of-the-mill homicides don’t make the local columns or see air-time. This space-saving policy pays off whenever a Jackie Brill dies under grisly circumstances. He was still on page one and ahead of the first commercial days later, when Mexicantown paid a call to my office.

  I leave the door to the reception room unlocked during the day. You never know when loose money might blow in from the street while you’re at lunch. The doorknob turned while I was reaching for it and an Aztec idol invited me inside. He was three hundred fifty pounds stretched out six and a half feet in a Hawaiian print shirt, cargo pants, and what looked like blue fur on his arms but which on closer inspection turned out to be tribal tattoos. His feet were disproportionately small—about size fourteen—in shining loafers, but his head was the size of a temple bell and looked larger still with a bushy mane of black hair combed up and over and down to his collar.

  “Aloha,” I said.

  “Buenos dias. “ His bass rumbled like someone rolling a piano through an empty warehouse. “We’ve been waiting.”

  He was big enough to be plural, but when I stepped inside from the hall, a human being who could have sat on his shoulder rose from the upholstered bench. She was about nineteen, olive-tinted, with full lips, eyes as big as the giant’s in a head half as large, and black hair hanging loose and glistening to her waist. She wore a white blouse tucked into black slacks cinched by a belt with a heavy silver buckle, cork sandals on her bare feet. She’d have looked appropriate in a mantilla and lace, or a cape made of turquoise, sitting on a sandstone throne.

  The season was past for Hawaiian shirts and sandals, but those traditions don’t exist in Mexico or its northernmost branch.

  “Mr. Walker?” said the woman. “I’m Carmelita Zorboron.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. I was hoping you were Dolores, the patron saint of private detectives.”

  “You’re not surprised. My picture has been in the papers and on TV. I’m sure that upsets my father. Before this, the only time his picture was ever published he was wearing a black bandanna across his face and holding a rifle.”

  “That was him? I thought that Zapatista story was a gag.”

  “Not to him. He is a proud man. He denied it just once, when he wanted to bring his family
to the United States.”

  I thought she was more Anglicized than she acted. Her accent was too pronounced, her English too careful. But seeing her made me feel better about the hunk of pre-Columbian architecture in my little waiting room. I had an idea she could control him.

  “Let’s go inside.” I rattled my keys. “This half of the building’s been unstable since they blew up Hudson’s Department Store. Senor Colossus exceeds the load capacity.”

  “Felipe,” rumbled the big man.

  “Okay if I call you Flip?” I opened the private door and held it. He said nothing, hanging back for Carmelita to enter first.

  Inside the brain trust he pulled out the customer’s chair and hung on until she was perched on the edge. He remained standing while I took my seat behind the desk. There were no other chairs, but he looked as if he’d feel at home sitting Indian fashion on the floor.

  “You spoke with Jackie two days before he was killed,” the woman said.

  “Did I?” I didn’t hesitate while taking a cigarette out of the pack.

  “You don’t have to deny it. I’m not accusing you of anything. One of my father’s people saw him at the football game. He saw you talking, and when you left he followed you and got your license plate number. He told me this after my father was arrested. He did not tell the police.”

  “It wouldn’t have looked good for your father if he had. They’d have wanted to know why he was so interested, and who for. Did he happen to overhear this conversation?”

  She shook her head. “That is one of the reasons why I am here, to ask you what it was about.”

  “What does anybody talk about at Ford Field? Someone should sue the team on behalf of real lions for character assassination.”

  Felipe shifted his weight from one foot to the other, punishing a floorboard.

  “Please,” Carmelita said.

  I blew smoke at the dark spot on the ceiling. “It won’t help your father’s case.”

  “Please.”

  “Por favor, “ said Felipe, without tone.

  “I didn’t take the job,” I said, “so it wasn’t privileged communication. He wanted to hire me to buy a fighting cock from Zorboron. Your father wouldn’t deal with him.”

  “Prince Cortez.” Carmelita nodded. “Jackie was right. Papa was not pleased with our relationship.”

  “If he were any less pleased, Jackie’d be cut in twelve pieces instead of six.”

  “My father did not do that.”

  “There’s not a lot of difference between swinging the machete and giving the order.”

  “He did not do that either,” she said. “If he had, do you not think he would have arranged to be seen engaged in some innocent activity at the time the police think Jackie was murdered?”

  I smoked my cigarette in silence. It was a point.

  Carmelita lifted her chin. “My father is not an angel. Nor is he a fool. He has no illusions about his daughter’s virtue. Even if he had, he would do nothing during his time of trouble with Immigration. He would wait. He has the patience of a hunting cat. That is why they call him EI Tigre.”

  “Okay; so you’ve established reasonable doubt. You’d better get going if you want to convince the rest of the jury pool.”

  “I want to hire you to find the real killer.”

  “I don’t hunt killers. My specialty’s missing persons. The first rule is not to become one.”

  “You can at least demonstrate that my father was not the only one in Mexicantown who had a reason to kill Jackie.”

  “Why should I? My books are in good shape right now. One Emiliano Zorboron more or less won’t affect the local tax base.”

  “My father is the one man my people can go to for justice when they are preyed upon by their own. The police file reports and do nothing. If he is convicted and deported there will be no one to defend them.” She paused, a fist on her thigh until her breath stopped coming in short, shallow gusts. “I should not need to add that deportation would be a death sentence. The Mexican government tried him in absentia after the Zapatistas failed. His enemies will see to it he does not survive his first six weeks in prison.”

  I took one last bitter drag—a mistake I make twenty times a day—and mashed out the stub. “Where would I start? Your people don’t pour out their secrets for Anglos.”

  Talk to my father. He is like a priest, and Mexicantown is his flock. There is no affair so private he does not know it in detail. He will not see me, and I suspect he distrusts Felipe’s ability to act upon any information he might give him.”

  “The justice system has laws against outside competition. If he can open up to me without incriminating himself in another area he knows the language better than I do. A turnkey would be listening, and he’d wind up with a dozen more charges against him. I’d have to be working for his lawyer in order to arrange a private interview.”

  Felipe trundled forward and handed me a business card:

  Felipe Quintas De La Merida

  Attorney at Law

  I ran my thumb over an embossed coat of arms. “You represent Zorboron?”

  “Si. Yes. Since before Carmelita was born.”

  “Okay, Mr. Merida. I need fifteen hundred to start.”

  “Felipe?”

  The big man nodded and went out. He made very little noise crossing through the reception room. They say elephants walk quietly too. “Where’s his briefcase?” I asked Carmelita.

  “In his head.”

  “He could fit the entire Michigan Penal Code in there.”

  When he returned, Merida was carrying what might have been a medium-size safe by a handle on top. The handle stuck up through a hole in a heavy black cloth that covered the boxlike shape on all sides. When I realized he was about to set it on my desk, I cleared room for it. He hoisted it onto the corner without much effort. It seemed to be a lot lighter than a safe.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Your retainer.” He twitched off the cloth, startling the thing inside, which made a shrill squawk of a battle cry and hurled itself against the wooden staves that caged it. I shoved away from it as if a snake had struck at me. Merida, who seemed to know his way around a few things other than torts, made cooing noises until the dervish in the cage stopped whirling and flapping. It stood erect on its newspaper carpet, glaring at me from under its floppy comb with feathers floating down all around.

  “His highness, the prince.” Carmelita crossed her legs. “You know his worth. Jackie was many things, but he was not a liar.”

  “I meant cash, not livestock.”

  “Immigration has frozen all my father’s accounts. I wait tables for minimum wage in my cousin’s restaurant, the one where Jackie was found.” Her throat worked. “Cortez is all I can offer in the way of security.”

  “Where would I put him? This place only looks like a barnyard until the cleaning service shows up.”

  Merida said, “He needs sunlight and air and cracked corn. Water. A goldfish is more trouble.”

  “Keep him. I’m appointing you his conservator.”

  He dropped the cloth back over the cage, choking off the rooster in the middle of some avian blasphemy.

  “You will find him at this address,” said the lawyer, writing on the back of another card. “Raul is in charge. Show him this card to collect.”

  I took it. “I’ll need a letter for the cops, confirming I’m acting as your agent. On stationery without the Kentucky Colonel’s picture on it.”

  He produced an envelope from a pocket of his cargo pants. His name and an address on West Vernor were engraved on it in gold and on the computer-printed letter it contained, both good linen stock. His signature might have been written by Prince Cortez. That made him genuine.

  Carmelita Zorboron rose and grasped my hand in a fine slim one strung with hidden cable. “Thank you, Mr. Walker. Please report to Flip.” Her smile burst like an incandescent bulb and was gone. In a minute she and Merida were as well.

  I stared at
the door for a while. Then I stared at the window and the wall. I’d bartered my services for jewelry and friendship and debts outstanding. It was bound to come to chickens sooner or later.

  • • •

  “Trust me,” I said. “I’m the only one you’ve talked to in forty-eight hours who doesn’t have an axe to grind.”

  “Felipe told me Carmelita wanted to hire you. I said no. Jail has robbed me of the respect of my servant and my child.”

  “Yeah, well, what are you gonna do? Up here they don’t let you stick them in cages and feed them cracked corn.”

  I had no idea how that sat with him. Emiliano Zorboron looked as much like a gang leader as Felipe Quintas de la Merida looked like an attorney; small for a tiger, with the cuffs of his orange Wayne County jumpsuit turned back to let his hands poke out, and fine featured to the point of transparency. But when it came to showing what he was thinking, he was as transparent as a drill press. He might have been thirty-five or fifty. His accent was less obvious than his daughter’s, which confirmed my suspicion she leaned on hers a little for effect.

  We were seated facing each other at a plain maple table in a room reserved for lawyer-client conferences at the jail. I didn’t think it was bugged, but just in case, I’d brought along a transistor radio and tuned it in to a gassy talk show to confuse eavesdroppers. RICO and the Patriot Act had danced a flamenco all over the First and Fifth Amendments.

  “I had no part in Jackie Brill’s death,” Zorboron said.

  “I’m being paid to believe you, so okay. Who did?”

  “Someone with good sense.”

  “I didn’t care for him either, but you’ve got the best motive so far.”

  “What does it matter whether they send me home for murder or committing perjury when I applied for my visa? I am sure you know something of my trouble there.”

  “The immigration beef you can beat, if Merida’s half as good as his stationery. Murder’s ten times tougher. We got all the killers we need domestic. We can export one now and then.”