Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Oral said you practically raised Jeff.”

  “It was a little more than practically. Dad tried to dry out several times, but he wasn’t much more help sober. I was just five years older than Jeff. He was in and out of trouble all though junior high and dropped out at sixteen to park cars at Carl’s Chop House. One night he forgot to bring one back. He did six months at the Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake, but all he learned there was how to jump wires and take a car apart in under an hour. He was crazy about cars.”

  “Still is. I didn’t know about the stretch in juvie.” I wondered if Homeland Security did. They’d know his rap sheet as an adult, and Agent Clemson knew his blood relations were extinct. That was as much as he’d told me, apart from the fact Starzek had outgrown the cigarette trade into something of more interest to his bureau.

  “You wouldn’t,” she said, “unless Jeff wanted you to know. They seal records under age eighteen.”

  “And you think your husband wouldn’t understand if he found out Jeff isn’t really your brother.”

  “I know he wouldn’t.”

  “Not very charitable to Oral. He might be more open-minded than you think.”

  “Open-minded,” she said. “Not stupid. Can I count on your confidence, Mr. Walker?”

  Her face was polished alabaster, the delicate mouth less fragile than it looked. A jackhammer couldn’t chip it into an expression I could read.

  I said, “I know who Deep Throat is. I’ve known for thirty years. You didn’t see it in the tabloids.”

  “I only have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about, but I’ll trust you. Jeff trusts you or he wouldn’t have told me to hire you. I love him, Mr. Walker. I love him more than Oral and, God help me, more than little Jeffie. And not as a brother.”

  This time I heard the baby cry, but not before she did. While she was upstairs, and to take my mind off the Deep Throat guff, I got up to look at the photographs sealed in Lucite on the mantel: a wedding shot of Oral and Rose, she in a tailored eggshell suit, he boiling like a lobster out of a tight collar and gray pinstripe, orchids pinned to their breasts; a studio pose of a couple hard on eighty who had contributed in equal parts to Oral’s big bald head and sloping shoulders; Rose pregnant; Rose holding Jeffie; Jeffie; an underexposed Polaroid of a grave-faced boy of about six, taken in someone’s backyard; a five-by-seven version of the wallet-size Oral had given me of Rose and Jeff Starzek. No shots of them together as children, or of Rose as a young girl. A spare, sad album—if Rose hadn’t lied to me the way she had to her husband.

  I smelled her at my side. The scent or soap she used was slightly almond. It might have been baby oil.

  “That’s Oral’s mother and father at their golden.” she said. “He died last year. They wouldn’t let me hold Jeffie or his brothers in the hospital. We took these pictures the day we brought him home. That’s Jeff. He was a skinny little kid. He filled out later. I guess you can tell we weren’t a big picture-taking family.”

  “There’s one missing.”

  “I had one of my father, but I haven’t seen it since we moved in. I tore up all the pictures of my mother the day I turned sixteen.”

  “I meant there’s no picture of Jeff’s brother.”

  She hesitated. “He doesn’t have a brother. I’m his only family.”

  “Paul Starzek runs a do-it-yourself church up in Port Huron. He’s twenty years older than Jeff.”

  She went back to her chair and curled up in it. hugging herself as if she were chilled. The electric fire kept the room an even seventy. “You waited long enough to toss that in my lap. Any other surprises?”

  “What surprised you, that he has a brother or that I knew about him?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You didn’t hire me to think. Pound for pound it’s a bad deal.”

  “I didn’t know. I don’t care whether you believe me. I don’t know what the advantage would be if I did and pretended I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I don’t know now. It’s possible. Jeff’s parents were in their forties when their plane went down. I never heard my mother and father say anything about their having a grown son; but then they hardly talked to each other. Who told you?”

  I hung on to that surprise, to find out if it was one. “Paul wouldn’t give me the time of day over the telephone, so I paid him a visit. He wasn’t home. His church doesn’t seem to be doing too well. What do you know about St. Sebastian?”

  “Nothing. I wasn’t raised Catholic.”

  “Episcopalian here. I’ll have to look him up. He seems to be the patron saint of Paul’s faith. Anyway the church is shut up for the winter, and maybe for good. It looks like he’s using it for storage.”

  “Jeff’s never mentioned him. Maybe he doesn’t know he even has a brother.”

  “He knows. Someone told me they broke off communication right around the time you say Jeff went wild. Paul confirmed it over the telephone. Maybe he tried to tap his big brother for a getaway stake.”

  “I’d have lent him whatever he needed. I’ve offered many times. He always turns me down.”

  “Maybe he thinks you don’t owe him anything and Paul does.”

  “He hasn’t needed money in some time. He tried to give us some when I was in the hospital, but Oral wouldn’t take it.”

  “It’s not money. He’s driving thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Detroit muscle. Whatever he’s after, he talked to Paul about it recently. Paul damned him for a smuggler, but he didn’t get into smuggling until he was in his twenties. How else would Paul know?”

  “You said you weren’t paid to think.”

  “It’s an expensive hobby.”

  “Since you aren’t charging for it, do you think Paul knows where Jeff’s gone?”

  “Someone else thinks so, or did. One of them is Oral.”

  I watched her closely, but she’d been too long in the cold war. I needed a court order just to take her pulse.

  “Oral doesn’t know about Paul,” she said. “I didn’t know, and I know my husband.”

  “That’s a common mistake. He was up there New Year’s Eve, asking about Paul.”

  “He was with me New Year’s Eve.”

  “It was during the day, when he told you and his supervisor he was busy climbing poles after a storm up north.”

  “He was. He came home exhausted. Why would he hire you if he already knew where to look?”

  “That was before he came to my office. Maybe he ran into the same wall I did.”

  “But how would he even know about Paul?”

  “Those tree-toppers get around. Paul had flyers printed advertising his church, and Starzek isn’t a common name. Maybe Oral went up there on a hunch and when it didn’t pan out he didn’t think it was worth sharing.”

  “If he knows Starzek is Jeff’s real name, he knows I’ve been lying to him all these years.”

  “Another good reason to keep his mouth shut.”

  “That’s why he agreed to hire you. My God,” she whispered. “He’s looking for grounds.”

  “Could be he’s waiting for you to say something.”

  She cocked her ear toward a small whimper, decided to stay put. Her eyes were Arctic blue and just as dry. “You said someone else thinks Jeff’s brother knows where he is, or did. Who?”

  “A man named Herbert Clemson. He’s the one who told me about Paul. He’s been up there asking around, like me. He told me there wasn’t anything in it, but those federal types lie to their parakeets just to stay in practice. He’s with Homeland Security.”

  She might have paled a shade. I saw a spread of blue veins under the skin, like sea grass in the shallows. It was the first real reaction I’d gotten from her.

  “I was pretty sure he hadn’t been here,” I said, nodding. “So far his information is strictly basic, the stuff of public record. He’ll come around when he gets the rest. You’ll like him. For a government sneak he’s got a well-developed sense of humor.”

  She loo
ked away. “It must be the cigarettes. They think everyone who doesn’t pay the tax sends the difference straight to terrorists. It wouldn’t occur to them people just like a bargain.”

  “Cigarette smuggling puts him to sleep. He’s more interested in what Jeff’s carrying now.”

  “How do you know he’s carrying anything?” She was looking at me again. “You just said Clemson’s a liar on principle.”

  “Jeff told me that night in Grayling he was switching loads. Not long after that, you got a Christmas card from him as much as telling you he was about to disappear. I’d tell you to figure out the rest, but you’re the client. Turns out there’s some thinking to the job after all.”

  “Is Jeff dead?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  The house got as quiet as a house in a bedroom community ever gets. Even the baby had stopped fussing.

  I shifted my cane to the other side and my weight with it. “I doubt it,” I said. “He’s fast and smart, and he’s lasted this long. I’m more concerned about the people who are looking for him.”

  “Not Oral.”

  “Not Oral. He’s big, but he’s got a high center of gravity.”

  “Clemson.”

  “What he represents. Some people’s idea of chess is to clear the board to take the king. Pretty tough on all the other pieces. And if Clemson’s right, Jeff’s running out of his class.”

  “You said you fell on the ice.”

  She was looking at my leg. I hadn’t realized I was rubbing it. That was a habit I’d have for a long time, like stroking a phantom beard.

  “I didn’t say why. It was Jeff who picked me up.”

  “Does that mean you’re not quitting?”

  “Who said I was? Everyone lies in this house. I can’t concentrate on the questions I need to ask if I can’t trust the answers I’ve got. Let me know when you and Oral get your collar and cuffs to match. You can leave a message with my service. I’m going north.”

  “You just got back from there.”

  “I left something behind.”

  “Find Jeff, Mr. Walker. Whatever happens to Oral and me.”

  She went up to look in on Jeffie. I drove back to my house, got a pair of long-handled bolt cutters out of the garage, and put them in the trunk. Churches ought never to lock their doors. You never know when someone might need enlightenment.

  NINE

  The Web site was called Martyrs R Us. You can’t make this stuff up.

  It belonged to a small Catholic press in some inexplicable place like Bayonne or Newport News. Its feature that month was a life of St. Thomas More, available in either trade paper or a deluxe limited edition bound in cardinal-red calfskin with a CD laid in of Gregorian chants, recorded by the brothers of Our Lady of Perpetual Dolour in Kirkwall, Scotland. You could also buy silver-and-enamel cuff links fashioned in the shape of John the Baptist’s severed head.

  Barry Stackpole had found it by typing in “St. Sebastian” and patiently nursing the entry through sites on cities of that name, church-sponsored pie-eating contests, the late actor Sebastian Cabot, and—mysteriously—Benito Mussolini. There appeared to be no Christian sects registered online that paid any more than lip service to the arrow-riddled martyr of Paul Starzek’s Church of the Freshwater Sea. I hadn’t really expected there to be: Starzek hadn’t appeared to own a television, much less a computer.

  At the last minute I’d postponed my return junket to Port Huron to find out what I could about the pole-barn parish. Barry had moved again, from the suburbs into the belly of the beast. With the kill fee a satellite network had paid him not to air a six-part series on the history of organized crime in America, he’d bought a condo on the fourth floor of a former steam radiator factory in the shrinking warehouse district off East Jefferson, within pistol range of the Renaissance Center. Bullet-resistant windows provided a view of Windsor, Ontario, across the river and also of cranes picking apart what remained of industrial-age Detroit.

  He’d paid enough for it to build a small mansion of six thousand or so square feet but, typically, had furnished it out of someone’s garage. The scattered sticks preserved the integrity of the loft’s bulk-storage origins, with steel utility shelves packed with commercial books on the mob arranged by geographical location and rows of transcripts of wiretapped conversations bound in paper covers stamped FBI PROPERTY—DO NOT REMOVE FROM LIBRARY. The only decoration was a battered eight-by-ten photograph in a brass document frame of Al Capone shaking hands with Babe Ruth, putatively signed by Scarface and the Bambino themselves. I don’t know how he came by it, but it was the only thing he’d taken with him through all his midnight moves. If I knew Barry at all—and I’d known him for thirty years and ten thousand miles—there was a working fire escape out back and a speedboat tied up to a dock for a fast exit. He wasn’t paranoid, just practical.

  I sat on a plywood potato-chip chair salvaged from some failed high school next to the sheet-metal kitchen table Barry used for a workstation and watched him riffle the keys on the most expensive fixture in the house. He was dexterous for a man with only eight fingers. Joe Zerilli’s street soldiers had blown off the rest, along with a leg and a piece of his cranium, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he got around on his prosthesis and combed his fair hair across the steel patch.

  The audio sample that came up with the Gregorians sounded like an overworked compressor in a refrigerator car. He turned down the volume on the speakers, tapped his mouse. His eyes never wandered from the seventeen-inch screen.

  “What’s that you’re whistling?” I asked.

  He stopped, then whistled the last couple of bars again. He hadn’t been paying attention. “ ‘The Thieving Magpie.’ Rossini.”

  “Oh.”

  “Theme from Prizzi’s Honor.”

  “Oh.” Different emphasis.

  “Fun flick. Inaccurate as hell. The Mafia doesn’t employ lady hitmen. Never has, never will. Even if they look like Kathleen Turner.”

  “Nicholson was good, though.”

  “Nicholson’s good even when he’s bad. Ah!”

  “What?” I never know where to look when I’m looking at a computer screen.

  He played an arpeggio. Suddenly the monitor was filled with postage-stamp images in full color of what looked at first like freeze-frames from a slasher film. A score of images displayed every manner of agony possible of a nearly naked man perced from hairline to ankle with arrows. Some were as green as amateur Polaroids, others so lifelike they made me bleed from pure osmosis. Evidently the fate of St. Sebastian had inspired Renaissance artists who had gotten all they could out of Christ on the cross. Winged angels appeared in flocks. They could fly, but as to intercepting arrows they were as useless as hairdressers at the Battle of the Bulge.

  “Fourth century,” he read. “Maybe earlier. Whenever the date’s unknown, it starts to read like pulp fiction. At one time I was studied up enough to take the veil. Not that they call it that when it’s the priesthood. Went to confession regular as the dentist. You’d be surprised how fast those made guys turn back into altar boys when you sprinkle the conversation with ecclesiastical Latin. I’m talking about guys that put other guys’ heads inside drill presses when their notes came past due. Not bad for a Dutch Reformed kid from Grand Rapids.”

  “Still go to confession?”

  “No point. The paisani are on the run. Now it’s Jews, Russians, Irish Protestants, blacks, and Asians. The Mexicans still attend, but they don’t believe. Damn shame. Like what happened to rock after the Beatles landed.”

  “I can’t figure out whether you hate the mob or love it.”

  “I wonder myself sometimes. Then bedtime comes around and I take off my leg with my pants.”

  He clicked on one of the postage-stamp images. A screen-size picture shot down from the top like a shaft of light. He was always upgrading his servers and equipment, supercharging the circuit boards and bundles of wire inside the computer tower like a kid tinkering with a hot rod. He
had the hardware to manipulate the stock market in his favor, but he chose to use it for good, and the occasional exclusive.

  I looked at the same pathetic punctured figure I’d seen on Paul Starzek’s living-room wall. This was a cleaner reproduction from a plate generations closer to the original painting. The carving on the pillar he was bound to was wedding-cake sharp and the blood streaming from his multiple wounds was bright arterial red. The picture dated back to the middle of the fifteenth century and the paint still looked wet.

  I read the artist’s credit line. “Andrea Mantegna. Wonder who she was.”

  “She was a he, you lowbrow flatfoot. The Renaissance didn’t begin and end with the Mona Lisa.”

  “Tell me about him, smart guy.”

  “What’s to tell? Look at the picture.”

  “What I thought. You don’t know any more about him than I do.”

  “You didn’t know he was a him until two seconds ago. I thought it was Sebastian you wanted to know about.”

  “I know how he died.”

  “You don’t even know that. It takes more than a shitload of arrows to kill these Mediterraneans.” He turned the page, or whatever they call it. Anyway a paragraph of text came up. I leaned over to read.

  Sebastian, of Gallic birth, was an officer in the imperial guard under Diocletian. Someone ratted him out as a Christian and he was strung up and used for archery practice. The widow of another martyr, St. Castulus, cut him down, patched up his wounds, and nursed him back to health. Diocletian found out and brought in more muscle, who beat him to death with cudgels.

  “His emblem’s the arrow,” Barry said, as if I couldn’t read. “It ought to be the blackjack, but you can’t expect scripture to make sense.”

  “Arrows take better pictures. A battered corpse is just side meat.”

  He sat back. His eyes reflected the cursor blinking on-screen.

  “What’s the attraction, Amos? Most of the stiffs you bring me are still warm. Anything in it for an out-of-work muckraker?”