Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  If there was anything to it, God help him. You can murder a federal agent and Uncle Sam will track you down with no more than his usual resources and prosecute you according to the book. You might even get off with life, or nothing at all if the lawyers and investigators blundered the way they so often do where national security is involved. But print and pass one dirty dollar and he’ll come down on you like frogs on Egypt. They’ll bury you inside.

  It might have been the Vicodin talking. Anyway I didn’t know what to do with it. It was too big a subject—IMAX times ten—and I was sitting too close to the screen, where I couldn’t see around the wings of the eagle. I got better results in a neighborhood theater, with a simpler script and a smaller cast of characters. Someone who’d said his name was Oral Canon had paid me in cash to find his wife’s kid brother. Except Jeff Starzek never had a sister and so far all the client’s contact numbers had given me was a sleigh ride through the chilly winter wonderland of fiber optics.

  I’d sat too long. Cold lay on my ears and nose and pierced my femur like an ice pick. I twisted the key and pumped the pedal, grinding at the starter until it caught. A glacial gust blew from the heater. I switched off the blower. A bank thermometer changed from eight to seven as I passed it.

  The four and five o’clock rush hours had melded into one lump of slow-moving steel downtown. Windows lighted against the early dusk and hung like the last leaves of autumn among the abandoned offices and apartments next door and on the floors above and below. The city had emptied into the suburbs when I got back to the office and climbed back aboard the sleigh.

  A voice with plenty of bottom welcomed me to Verizon Wireless and told me the cell number Oral Canon had given me was unavailable. I broke the connection and tried his home once again. Three stories down in the street, someone’s car alarm started hooting. It sounded like one of those goofy birds in a Tarzan movie with no room in the budget for elephants. On the fifth ring I took the receiver away from my ear.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice, sounding farther away than the alarm-bird. I put her back to my ear.

  “I’m trying to reach the Canon residence.” I’d probably dialed wrong. No one had picked up all day.

  “This is Mrs. Canon. Who’s calling, please?”

  SEVEN

  Rose Canon,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Oral Canon.” I couldn’t think of any other conjugations. The woman on the other end of the line prevented me from going back and starting over.

  “Is this Amos Walker?”

  Her voice had dropped like the temperature outside. She sounded as if she were talking through a paper tube. You can usually tell when someone’s cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. In spite of that I heard a male voice in the background, the hand-rubbed baritone of a TV anchorman reading the results of a presidential poll.

  “Oral’s there, isn’t he?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want him to know you’re talking to me.”

  “No.”

  “Stop saying yes and no. When’s he leave for work in the morning?”

  “Eight.”

  “I’ll call back then. Tell him you just lost a radio quiz.”

  “Thank you, anyway.” Something plopped in my ear.

  I’d poured a finger of Scotch and let it come up to room temperature. The bottom drawer where I kept it caught the draft from the floor. I swirled it like brandy and threw it back like a movie cowboy. It hit my stomach like a bass drum and crawled through my limbs, driving out the chill. Alcohol thins the blood, they say, making you more vulnerable to hypothermia, not less. Five generations of alpine St. Bernards had labored under an illusion.

  Her voice was a little husky in the low registers, the way I like trombone music and women’s voices. Maybe she had a cold. I got out the snapshot Canon had given me, of the woman he’d said was his wife and Jeff Starzek, the man he’d said was her brother. The face went with the voice: pretty, lightly seasoned. I had a hunch cameras didn’t do her justice.

  I wondered what was this fascination for other men’s wives.

  The card Oral Canon had given me had come out with the picture by accident. I looked at my name and the old telephone number, then turned it over and read the handwriting Canon had said was Starzek’s: Rose—If you don’t hear from me by the first of the year, hire this man. No signature or initial.

  No vibes either, but that was okay. Preternatural communication exists, all right, but it’s wrong just as often as the regular kind. I put the card and picture back in my pocket, stuck the bottle out of temptation’s path, and took a pill instead. Then I drove home through empty polar streets with houses on both sides still wearing Christmas lights and opened a can of soup.

  My leg woke me the next morning ten minutes ahead of the alarm, but I was lying in my own bed and not a frozen parking lot, which was progress of a kind. I had coffee and painkillers for breakfast. At eight o’clock I called the Canons’ home. A baby with steel lungs wailed in the background. That was another suspected lie laid to rest, and I resolved to give Oral the benefit of some doubt until I could question Rose in detail. She couldn’t talk right then, so I got the address and said I’d be there at nine.

  The house was a two-story frame in Oak Park with a hip roof, one of several built on a tree-lined street in the second generation after VJ Day and something of an improvement over the G.I. Bill ranches that had preceded them. A pair of mature cedars towered in the front yard, their upper branches hollowed out in a U by Detroit Edison crews to keep them from taking down wires during windstorms. Oral Canon might have done the job himself, if he was with DTE as he said and splicing technicians weren’t above that sort of work. I still had some reservations about him.

  A hand-lettered three-by-five card inserted in one of the small panes in the front door asked visitors not to use the bell. I rapped gently and waited. My breath smoked and the iron air frosted the hairs inside my nostrils. It was like breathing through fiberglass.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Walker. Come in and take off your coat. It must be zero.” Her husky voice was almost a whisper.

  She had blue eyes and the blackest hair I’d ever seen on an Occidental, a color combination that always puts blondes in the second rank. A crumpled red face and a full head of coarse black hair showed above a blue blanket wound into a coccoon in the crook of her left arm. The kid seemed to have his father’s complexion; but I had one more point to clear up before I stepped inside.

  “It was two below when I left the house.” I kept my voice low. “Could you describe your husband for me, Mrs. Canon?”

  Her face showed no surprise. It was oval, pale as milk, with a strong straight nose and a dimpled upper lip with edges as delicate as a ski track in fresh powder. It looked as if it would collapse if you touched it with a finger.

  “He’s a big man, like you, only heavier. Bald and sunburned. I can’t get him to wear block. My father died of melanoma.”

  “I heard he drank.”

  Her eyebrows went up, black contrails against her fair skin. “Oral? Not—”

  “Your father. Oral said he drank and your mother walked out on you.”

  “You get personal right on the doorstep, don’t you?” The whisper was harsh. The bundle in her arm stirred and opened its eyes a crack. They were blue like the mother’s, but they say that’s true of all babies. I’d never paid them that much attention. They can’t answer questions and don’t hit very hard.

  “The answers could save us both time and you money. Your husband hired me to look for a brother it turns out you don’t have.”

  “He didn’t lie.” She jiggled the baby, pulled the edge of the blanket up around its ears. “Please come inside. The doctor said a little cold air isn’t really bad, but Jeffie doesn’t know that.”

  I stepped in past her. It was the Jeffie that did it. She closed and locked the door.

  A heavy oaken hall tree stood to one side with a variety of outerwear ha
nging from it. I shrugged out of my overcoat and used a vacant hook. “You named him after Jeff Starzek?”

  “I’ve always liked the name. It has strength and tradition. You’d never believe how many babies in the maternity ward were named Joshua and Jason.”

  “Why not Oral, Junior?”

  She made a face; whether at Oral or Junior I couldn’t tell. It didn’t make her any less pretty. She wore a blue-and-white-checked flannel blouse with the tails out over black stirrup pants with her bare feet in blue fleece slippers. She had a trim waist, athletic legs, nice ankles. She was five-four but looked taller. She wore her hair in bangs with a ponytail; two minutes from shower to fixed. Motherhood breeds efficiency. “I’ll hold onto him for a little, if you don’t mind. He’ll fuss if he isn’t asleep before I put him in his crib.”

  I said I didn’t mind. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t have changed anything if I had.

  The living room took up the front half of the ground floor. A rug with Oriental borders covered the hardwood floor to within eight inches of the walls. It was the most expensive thing in the room. A cheap new sofa with two matching platform rockers, an old green naugahyde recliner for the buttocks of the master of the house, a glass-topped coffee table stacked with books on infant care, and an electric fireplace answered for the rest. Family pictures in plastic cubes crowded the mantel, above which hung a Thomas Kincaide print of a medieval-looking lighthouse where the Seven Dwarfs spent their summers. TV, VCR-DVD combo, a speaker telephone to free both hands for diapering. There was the usual truckload of baby stuff testifying to the reign of the little tyrant in the blue blanket. A comfortable room, sprinkled with potpourri, faint cooking odors, and scented Lysol.

  I consented to an offer of coffee and sat down in one of the padded rockers to stretch my leg, hooking my cane over the arm, while she carried the baby through an arch into a kitchen the size of my living room. I heard the disheartening sound of a jar opening and boiling water pouring into two mugs: The coffee was instant. She came back thirty seconds after she left, juggling the baby and both mugs with the fingers of one hand twined through the handles. I struggled to get up and help.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “After three months, I could join the circus.”

  I leaned forward far enough to unburden her of one of the mugs and sat back to warm my hands around it. “He seems small for three months.”

  “He’s a triplet. His brothers didn’t make it out of the incubator.” She lowered herself and Jeffie into the other rocker without spilling a drop, from mug or baby. She smiled down at it and planted a kiss on the crown of its coarse black head. “We tried for years. ‘Patience,’ a word we both came to despise, along with doctors and nurses and snippy receptionists and the magazines in waiting rooms: Sports Illustrated, U.S. News and World Report—Runner’s World, for God’s sake. You know how fast-food restaurants purposely design their seats to be uncomfortable, to keep the traffic moving?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I drive by the window.”

  “I think doctors’ office managers choose the magazines they subscribe to for the same reason, to discourage you from taking too much of their time. It turned out there was nothing medically wrong with either of us, but I finally took fertility pills. At the clinic they suggested artificial insemination—AI, they call it. Oral was willing, but I set myself against it. Too much like mixing martinis. Anyway we conceived finally, and after twelve hours in labor I agreed to a C-section. Jeffie was stronger than either of his brothers. He’s a special child, and that’s why I named him after Jeff. What happened to your leg?”

  “I fell on the ice. Tell me about Jeff. He isn’t your brother.”

  “Oral doesn’t know that. He didn’t lie to you. I’m the liar in this marriage.”

  She sounded proud of it. I said nothing and sipped from my mug. What was inside bore a closer resemblance to a lemon Fizzie dissolved in radiator water than it did to coffee, but I didn’t comment or gag. I’d had worse, much worse. In order to get the answers you need, you have to put up with the ritual of hospitality. I groped for my pack of cigarettes.

  “No one’s smoked in this house for ten years. I made Oral give it up after we married.”

  I apologized and put it back. I hadn’t paid attention to what my fingers were doing.

  “If you need it, you need it. I was just making an observation. I want visitors to be comfortable in our home. I don’t have any use for people who make you take off your shoes before they let you walk on their rug. You can always clean up after they leave.” She looked down at Jeffie. “He’s asleep now. I’ll put him down. Please feel free to smoke. I’ll open a window later.”

  It was an order, the “please” notwithstanding, and I complied while she went out of the room, toward a hallway and a set of stairs that creaked under the combined weight of mother and child. I parked the cup of reconstituted cardboard, found a dish on the coffee table with a lone Jolly Roger inside, and used it for an ashtray. When she came back, she inhaled the secondhand smoke with the dreamy erotic grace of a connoisseur.

  “I’ve always liked the smell of tobacco. The taste, too; though I’ve never smoked.” She sat down and curled her hands around her mug. She hadn’t drunk from it yet. “I miss that nicotine kiss. I only made Oral give it up because I want him to be around to attend Jeffie’s graduation. That’s the point, isn’t it? Not how the drapes smell.”

  “My ex-wife told me it was like licking an ashtray.” I blew a plume of smoke into an uninhabited corner.

  “That’s just stupid.”

  “I asked you to tell me about Jeff. So far all you’ve told me is you named Jeffie after him because he’s a special child.”

  “Jeff’s a child of tragedy. I thought you might have known something about that. Oral said you were friends.”

  “It’s more complicated than friendship,” I said. “I helped get him out of a jam once. He more than canceled that out the last time I saw him.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “I don’t know if he prefers football to basketball or collects redheads or eighteenth-century chamber pots. I didn’t know he played piano before that night. We had the longest conversation we’d ever had and all I found out was the brand of cigarettes he was smuggling.” I took another drag and snuffed the butt in the candy dish. “Yeah, I like him.”

  “Oral hates him. Not just because of what he does. He’s seen what worrying about Jeff does to me.” She drank from her mug, grimaced. I was beginning to like her too. “If Jeff told you what he was doing, it’s more than he told me. You read the note he sent.”

  I drew out the card and put it on the coffee table. “I just borrowed it. You’re sure he wrote it?”

  “I know his hand as well as I know my own. I taught him to read and write. I’m also the one who taught him to play the piano.”

  “You knew him when he was a boy?”

  “He’s my brother,” she said. “But he’s not. That’s something you can never tell Oral.”

  EIGHT

  Rose Canon cocked her head suddenly, excused herself, and scampered upstairs. I hadn’t heard anything, but I’m nobody’s mother. In a little while she came back down and curled back up in her chair.

  “He was just restless,” she said. “Do you think a three-month-old baby can have nightmares?”

  “They’re born naked, in a room full of people wearing masks. I don’t see how they can have anything but.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. She’d left her instant coffee to grow cold on the glass-topped table. I took another sip, purely for the caffeine, and let mine grow cold along with it. My leg felt better than it had in days. Doubts about the story Oral Canon had told me had made it worse, but relief seemed to be within my reach.

  “My maiden name’s Aseltine,” she said. “Oral thinks Jeff took Starzek from some accomplice to keep anything from coming back to me. I may have said something to give him that impression. Anyway it makes him less intolerant toward Jeff, so th
ere’s no point in setting him straight. His parents, the Starzeks, were overage flower children: stupid people who left him with friends while they chartered a plane to Cuba to cut cane with the proletariats. The plane went down in the Caribbean. Jeff was three.”

  “The friends were your parents?”

  She nodded. “The Starzeks were responsible enough to draw up a will naming a guardian in case they never came back from Cuba, and irresponsible enough to name my dear mother.”

  “This is the mother who left you?”

  “That happened later. I said they were stupid and irresponsible. I didn’t say they were criminally neglectful.”

  “Why’d she agree to it?”

  “I can only assume that when they approached her she thought it was a remote possibility at best. When the worst happened, I suppose she had some idea raising a second child would save her marriage. Everyone knows what a positive effect that has on a husband who sleeps on a barstool more often than his bed at home.”

  “It’s been known to happen,” I said. “But only at the turning point.”

  “All it did was turn him deeper into the bottle. A lot of men in those circumstances just leave, but he was too weak even for that. In the end he was too weak and afraid to see a doctor when a mole on his neck started changing shape. But Mother wasn’t weak. One morning she gave me lunch money, put me on the school bus, dropped Jeff off at day care, and kept on driving. My father was passed out in his chair as usual when I came home, and when the day-care people called to find out why no one had come for Jeff, I was the one who answered.

  “That was twenty-seven years ago last September,” she said. “We were living in South Lyon. The police tracked her to a hotel in Chicago, but she’d checked out before they got there. She may still be alive. Then again, she may have driven straight from the hotel into Lake Michigan.”