Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  I hadn’t visited the Detroit Athletic Club since the old mayor died. The stately Italianate box had gone up in 1915 to give the old auto pioneers a place to hide from their fan base, but it had taken the optimism of a new administration to rescue it from demolition. Now, gentry like the Bernadottes were re-upping in herds, and restorers were uncovering the ornate painted ceilings and scraping the gum off the Pewabic tiles on the floors. I rode a brass elevator up to the gallery overlooking the Olympic-size swimming pool and gazed down on the spot where a pre-Tarzan Johnny Weismuller had trained for the 1924 games.

  Buzz wasn’t hard to spot. He was the one dripping in a Speedo at the far end, selecting a towel from among the half dozen offered him by a group of young men his age, all of whom dressed as he did in photographs, in loose unbleached cotton and khakis hand-stitched in Manila or someplace equally difficult and expensive to import from. and went to his hairdresser to tame their cowlicks. He was a slender, muscular twenty-two, with his father’s Gallic eyes and a five o’clock shadow that was hard to maintain unless you wanted to eliminate it, as I did. It cost him plenty to look as disheveled as Old Willie had for free. I wondered where the money came from.

  By the time I descended the stairs to the pool area, Buzz had put on a terrycloth robe and flip-flops and was on his way to the locker room. I showed him the bottom half of my ID folder, containing the honorary sheriff’s star. “It’s about the Whitney. It’ll just take a minute.”

  “Minutes are what I’m fresh out of,” he said. “The Detroit police have my statement. Don’t you boys talk to each other?” He started to push past.

  I took my other hand out of my pocket and stuck the palm under his nose with the toy gun lying on it. “Minutes aren’t the only thing you’re fresh out of, Buzz. Who’s paying your dues?”

  He recognized the item. His eyes seemed to get blacker. That was just the effect of the color leaving his face.

  “Buzz, you want me to get security?’? This from one of the youths clustered about him. He still had his baby fat.

  “No. Meet me in the bar later. Set yourselves up on me.” That cleared the room. Buzz and I stepped through a door into a locker room that was like no other, with a carpet and a little, leather-upholstered sitting area around a big-screen TV and, if you wanted them. a shower and a couple of rows of lockers. We sat down facing each other. He held out a hand. “I’ll take a closer look at that popgun.”

  I smiled and patted my pocket. “It’s evidence of nothing if I can’t put it in Lester’s hand, but I’ll hang on to it just the same. Who are you in to and how deep?”

  He shook his head. “What’s County’s interest? My car was stolen in Detroit.”

  “The badge is a toy, like the gun. I’m private. They hung the wrong rap on Lester, and I’m out to correct it.”

  “His family.” He showed me his orthodontia; his feet had found the shallow end of the pool. “How much for the gun and to forget you ever saw it?”

  “Thanks, Buzz. That saved me some, time. There was a bare chance you thought the gun was real, silly as that sounds, and didn’t set up the carjacking. What’s the insurance tag on the Porsche, couple of hundred thousand?”

  “Half a million. It’s a commemorative model. But you’ve got nothing. Even if you can enter the toy in evidence, my lawyers will hang up the case for years.”

  “What lawyers? You can’t pay them. You can’t even pay for your friends’ drinks. Your old man sent you packing. That’s why you decided to run a number on your insurance company, to keep up your lifestyle.”

  He sat back and crossed his arms behind his head. “You’re just like the old man, as you call him. You think he’s the only source of income in the world.”

  That puzzled me for a minute. Then it didn’t. My contact at the morgue had said Old Willie was a pro job, or made to look like one. I’d hung up on the second choice and hadn’t stopped to consider the first.

  “Your father said you weren’t an idiot, except when it came to money,” I said. “He’ll be relieved to know you’ve learned something. Who’s Daddy now, and does he speak with an accent or is he one of the new breed?”

  The black eyes shifted slightly. “I don’t follow.”

  “Sure you do. You just didn’t expect me to. Alec Bernadotte doesn’t care anymore if his kid gets in Dutch, but someone else does. Someone who wouldn’t hesitate to put a hole in the only witness who saw the carjacking close enough to know it was fake, then run him up to the fairgrounds and dump him.”

  “What? I don’t—”

  “The boys in the Combination like long-term investments. They know if they help you out now with cash, it will come back a hundred thousand times over when Bernadotte dies and his only son takes over the family finances. Except all that goes south the minute you draw a conviction for insurance fraud. Any good conservator would freeze you out forever.”

  His hands came out from behind his head. “I don’t know anything about murder. Who?”

  “You wouldn’t know him. I doubt you ever stopped long enough to throw him a pheasant leg on your way out of the Whitney. He only became important when he could place a silly toy gun in the hand of a kid who wanted some money to buy stereo speakers. That’s why he agreed to fake a carjack and stow the Porsche someplace until the policy paid off.

  “I thought at first you killed Old Willie yourself,” I went on. “Telling your mob friends about him, knowing what they’d do to correct the situation, amounts to the same thing. That’s how the judge will see it.”

  He gripped his knees through terrycloth. Very slowly his hands relaxed. He shook his head. “There’s a flaw. If I had this wonderful source of money, why did I decide to hold up the insurance company?”

  “You were looking for a buyout. Maybe you didn’t like the way they eat with their mouths open. Too bad you couldn’t ask your father for advice. He’d have told you an investment is not a loan. A one-time payoff wouldn’t satisfy them.”

  He smiled with some of his old cockiness. “It’s all smoke with-out—what did you call him? Without Old Willie. You could have bought that gun at Wal-Mart.”

  “You forgot Lester. He’s staring at hard time, and in a wheelchair. Your Woodward plan totaled itself against a lightpole.”

  “He’s in a coma.”

  “If he wakes up with this same story, without prompting, everything else falls into place: the gun, the dead bum, your bottomless bankroll. If I were the prosecutor, I’d spin the wheel. But you can always hope he doesn’t wake up. It’ll help pass the time.” I got up and left him there. The place was beginning to smell like a genuine locker room.

  I filled a glass from my private stock in the file drawer where I never filed anything but my portfolio on whiskey futures and drank it down at my desk. I was working up stimulation to dial Emory Freemantle’s line at the library. The case against Buzz wouldn’t hold water in a hurricane; without it, Lester would be wheeling up to a drill press at the state penitentiary in Jackson until they ran commuter flights to the moon. By then everyone would have his own robot private investigator and I’d be living on other people’s leftovers like poor Old Willie.

  Deciding that bad news went down a little less bad in person, I got up and reached for the doorknob just as someone came in. He was quiet; I hadn’t heard him in the outer office. He was built slighter than expected, and fair, with long lashes most women would sell their bodies for, although if they had them they’d get a better price. Well, there are blond Sicilians. He didn’t even have to be Sicilian at all, or Italian, for that matter. All he had to have was a gun, in this case a .22 target shooter with a silencer.

  “Don’t waste your time denying you’re Walker,” he said. “I pulled your picture from a file at the Free Press.”

  I raised my hands without waiting for orders. He liked that. He was young, and not the type to be patient with aging boomers. He patted the usual places, shook the flaps of my suitcoat for telltale weight. The toy gun in my side pocket weighed almos
t nothing and was too slim to make a bulge.

  “I’m disappointed. I thought all you old-time P.I.’s went around loaded for rhino.” He gestured with the .22. I backed up and he cocked a leg over a corner of the desk. “I’m waiting for a call,” he said. “Then we’ll finish.”

  “I’ll guess. Receiving Hospital.”

  “Maybe a pay phone outside. He might be in a hurry. Maybe not, though, if he rings for the nurse just before he sticks the ice pick in Lester’s chest. That’d give him another forty-five minutes.” He laughed. It was a boy’s laugh, light and completely unclouded.

  “Buzz didn’t waste any time getting in touch.”

  “I like Buzz. We got a special interest in Buzz.” He liked saying Buzz. “He shouldn’t try to think like us, though. Lester installed the sound system in Buzz’s Porsche—that’s how they met. If the cops felt like digging, they could link them up.”

  “I’d wondered about that. “That the same piece you used on Willie?”

  “Willie? Oh, the homeless guy. No, that’s in the river. Guns are cheap.”

  “Almost as cheap as shooters.”

  He laughed. “I like you. I’m going to regret this, I can see. It may not even be necessary. But why take the chance?”

  The telephone rang and I started toward it, as if from habit. He raised the pistol an inch, stopping me, and lifted the receiver. But he didn’t make me go back.

  “Hello.” He listened, watching me through his long, pale lashes. “No Alderdyce here. Wrong number. You’re very welcome.” He hung up. “You’d think with all this technology—”

  He stopped when the muzzle touched his temple. I didn’t raise my voice. We were only separated by the length of my right arm. “Your frisking needs work.”

  His finger whitened on the trigger of the target pistol. I pressed harder. “Twenty-two’s big on accuracy,” I said. “Lousy stopper. You can hit something vital and I’ll still have time to blow your brains out the other side.”

  “That’s not a real gun. That’s that toy Lester used.” His eyes were mostly white, straining to see it.

  “Probably. Then again, guns are cheap.”

  We were like that for a while. We might have been like that all day, but the telephone rang. It startled him; he jerked the trigger. But I was already slashing down with the arm holding the toy gun. I hit his hand and the bullet went into a baseboard. It’s still there. I crossed with my left fist and caught him on the temple, where his brains would have gone out if I’d been loaded for rhino. I reached down and twisted the .22 free as he tipped off the desk.

  The air smelled like a struck match and there was some smoke, but the silenced pistol had made no more noise than a drawer slamming shut. The telephone was still ringing. I picked up. “Me, John,” I said. “You took a chance. This character might have known there was an Alderdyce with Homicide.”

  “He caught me off guard,” the lieutenant said. “I didn’t expect anyone but you to answer your phone. You all right?”

  “Peachy. What about Lester?”

  “Still asleep. They say he might come out of it. He missed the excitement. Someone ought to tell these bozos a phony doctor’s smock is no place to carry an ice pick.”

  “I didn’t think they’d move this fast. Good thing you beefed up the guard.”

  “We’d have got him anyway.” John never gave an inch. “We picked up Buzz an hour ago. A car’s on its way to your office. Should I radio them what to expect?”

  “Tell them to bring a real gun. This one’s ready for the toy box.” I laid it on the desk and sat down with the .22 to wait for my visitor to wake up.

  Rumble Strip

  I ran off the road in the Lake Superior State Forest, straight at an old-growth pine. It was a rumble strip that woke me. The rubberized chevrons in the asphalt made my tires buzz and my hands tingle on the steering wheel and I stomped on the brake.

  I’d driven eleven hours one way, following a bad-check artist clear from Detroit to Manistique, giving him time to lay down a paper trail long enough to hang himself. Now that he was in the capable hands of the state police and off my client’s, I was on my way back and hoping to make Mackinaw City before I turned in. A judge in Detroit expected me in the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice at two P.M., dewy eyed and with my head chock full of salient facts in an unrelated case.

  The trunk of the tree I’d almost smashed into was so wide my lights didn’t show around it. The woods were as black as Lake Michigan on the other side. There wouldn’t be any motels for a while.

  I hate the woods at night; doesn’t everyone? They’re okay by day, with Disney creatures scampering about, but after dark, give me any gloomy alley and keep those black holes for yourself. When I’m in a deep funk I’m convinced I’ll end up in some shallow depression covered with dead leaves instead of a cozy luggage compartment in Long-Term Parking. The Upper Peninsula is a great place to visit, but I don’t want to die there.

  I took the last tepid swallow of Mountain Dew from the two-liter jug I kept in the car for surprise marathons—my hand had begun to shake from the delayed reaction—backed around, and got back onto Highway 2 to look for a place that poured coffee. A modern one, I hoped, with cheery fluorescents and expired hot dogs revolving on a carousel.

  No such luck. Happy’s Diner looked like a New Deal roadhouse, built low and square from local pine and covered with cheap stain that still showed in shiny patches like peanut brittle. More recently it had been a bowling alley, but from the condition of the six-foot wooden pin by the entrance, no strikes or spares had been rolled there this century. The windows and glass door looked new and ground spots illuminated the name on a square sign in the little parking lot. All the lights were burning. I pulled in next to a new Escalade with heavily tinted windows and got out. Crickets serenaded me with their sprightly little ode to Restless Legs Syndrome.

  The SUV was backed into its space, concealing the license plate from the road, but my instincts were on low battery. I got a whiff of coffee and pushed through the door like a herd smelling water. A gong sounded when it opened.

  The air was dense with roasted beans, pine, and layer upon layer of fried grease. Machine-embroidered tapestries of deer in the wild hung from gilded ropes like Rotarian banners, and Windsor chairs surrounded eight or ten round wooden tables, deserted at present and probably usually. There was a counter with stools upholstered in green leather, separated by a sliding frosted-glass panel over a pass-through. I sat on a stool and asked for coffee.

  “We’re closed.” The woman behind the counter, a creature of pumpkin-colored hair, sharp bone, and skin like Saran Wrap, stood in a pink uniform and white utility apron with her hands hugging her upper arms. She wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t know just where she was looking at first.

  “The sign says you’re open all night.”

  “Cook’s got the flu.”

  “All I want’s coffee.”

  “Last batch boiled away. You don’t want coffee the way I make it.”

  “I thought everyone was born knowing how to make coffee. If you think it’s too strong it’s just right.”

  “Closed, sorry.” Her voice went up half an octave.

  I followed her eyes then. The pass-through panel was open a crack. That woke me up. An airhorn next to the ear would have been too subtle.

  “Well, tell him get well soon.” I got up and headed toward the door, moving as casually as a marching band.

  Which wasn’t casual enough. The gong rang again and I lunged for the bar across the glass door, to pull it shut on the hand coming around the edge with a gun in it, but the panel behind me opened with a whoosh and a bang and a shell slid into a chamber with an oily metallic slam that can’t be duplicated any other way. That was to get my attention; the shell that was already there made a brassy tinkle when it landed on the floor.

  “I’d stop,” someone said.

  I was already stopped. The door was open now, and the man standing there held a deep-bellied Magnu
m braced against his hip. He was big and broad, soft looking, in a gray hoodie and old black jeans, which with his dark, mixed-blood face had blended with the shadows inside the tinted windows of the Escalade out front. “I should flag you for trying to bust my wrist.” His tone was a bottomless guttural. A hundred fifty years ago he’d have worn buckskin leggings and plaited his hair. It was as black as the woods at night.

  “Plenty of time for that. Feel him up.”

  This was one of those hand-me-down Swedish singsongs you still hear sometimes in the North Country. I turned around and held out my arms while the Indian went over me with one hand top to bottom. The man leaning inside the square opening to the kitchen— the owner of the singsong voice—might have been his photographic negative, drawn thin: colorless hair cut close to the skull, narrow pale face, and a tubular torso in a plaid flannel shirt over a black Zevon T-shirt. The hand resting on his stainless-steel nine-millimeter had a swastika tattooed on the back. Maybe there’s hope for peace when skinheads and redskins start hanging out together.

  The Indian pried my wallet out of my hip pocket. “Amos Walker. Private investigator, from Detroit.”

  “I knew he was a cop when he made for the door. Where’s your piece, Amos?”

  “I left it home. It’s not big enough for bear.”

  He watched me. He didn’t appear to have developed eyelids. He raised the semiautomatic.

  “Don’t!”

  He looked at the woman behind the counter. She had her hand to her mouth. “He some kind of friend of yours?” he asked.

  “I never saw him before. Just don’t kill him—please.”

  “Suppose I decide to kill you. Think he’ll beg for you?” He turned the pistol on her. He held it sideways, the way you see in movies. I hoped he was that green.