Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  I took another hit. I was still too sober to sort that one out. I still had some White Castle in my stomach. It floated. “The husband’s always the last to know.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  I handed back the bottle without rubbing it. Any bacteria that could survive those fumes could arm-wrestle an octopus. I watched him tilt it.

  “If you didn’t know Rose wasn’t Starzek’s sister, how’d you find out he had a brother in Port Huron?”

  My timing worked. He sprayed, gagged. Pellets of alcohol crackled on the TV screen. I watched him jackknife and claw for air. I wondered if I ought to get up and smack him on the back. It seemed like a lot of trouble when I’d just gotten my leg into a position that didn’t hurt.

  After a while he stopped barking. He mopped his face on his sleeve, elevated the bottle again, and bit the dog. He sat back cradling the bottle in his lap. His face was redder than usual. It would stop a train.

  I said, “I was pretty sure Rose hadn’t told you I found out about your trip to church. You wouldn’t have given her the chance.”

  “You went up there too, I guess.” His vocal cords twanged. “How’d you find out?”

  “I’m a detective, not a splicing technician.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t make any money answering questions.”

  “For a minute there I forgot it was a business arrangement. What was that song upstairs about doing it for your old buddy Jeff?”

  “Most of your fifteen hundred’s in the bank. You can have it as soon as I can climb up and get my checkbook.”

  “Who’d I spend it on? Rose’s left me by now.” He looked at a set of scraped and oozing knuckles.

  “Did you hit her?”

  “No! God, no. I smacked my hand on the sidewalk out front. But she ain’t the type to hang around after I said what I said.” He started to lift the bottle to his lips, then leaned forward and banged it down on the corner of the desk. “Starzek or someone tacked a church flyer to a pole I climbed,” he said, sinking back. “That’s a no-no, so I tore it off and stuck it in my pocket to throw out later. I forgot about it till I got home and read it. There aren’t that many Starzeks; I only knew of one. Anyway a storm hit that night and they sent me north with a crew to repair the lines. That put me only twenty minutes from Starzek’s church, so I got somebody to cover for me and borrowed a truck. I guess I should be docked for the time I spent with the Bible-thumping old coot. What’s five minutes out of twenty an hour?”

  “Could be worse. Pay scale in Jackson’s a lot lower.”

  “Edison can be a bitch to work for, but so far playing hookey don’t qualify as a prison offense.” A sad smile cracked his big face.

  “Murder does. So far.”

  He blinked. “Jeff? Why the hell—”

  “Not Jeff. I spent the afternoon with a sheriff’s sergeant named Finlander, a real cupcake. Someone buried Paul Starzek under a pile of firewood next to his church. I’m not sure it counts as consecrated ground.”

  “Jesus. You don’t think it was me.”

  “No, but sooner or later the cops will come around asking. You got directions to his place from the old lady who sells gas and groceries around the corner, and you may have been seen by someone else. You don’t exactly blend into the scenery. I only spoke to Paul once, but I’m pretty sure he’s the one who answered his telephone yesterday morning. If you can account for your movements between then and when I dug him up, the cops will let you alone. Chances are he was dead the first time I went up there. His truck hadn’t been moved in a while and the old lady doesn’t think he’s the kind to go out for a stroll in the cold.”

  “I was out with a crew most of yesterday. This morning I had an overloaded circuit in a power station in Flatrock till just before noon. A dozen guys saw me. Paul was easy not to like, and I guess if I knew him better I’d hate his guts, but if I went around killing everybody I didn’t get along with I’d be on the road all the time.”

  “What did you and Paul talk about?”

  “I said I was looking for Jeff and asked him if he was any relation. At first he said no, but he wasn’t much of a liar. Those people who went to his church must’ve been easy to fool; only not so much maybe, because the place didn’t look any too prosperous. I kept on. He blew his top, said he hadn’t seen his brother since he was a kid and didn’t want to if he turned out anything like their godless hippie parents. That’s what he said, ‘godless hippies.’ I bet he read the Bible every night till his lips got tired.”

  “What else?”

  “He said he was fed up with people coming around asking about him. Then he threw me off his doorstep.”

  I looked at him. The sad grin crawled back up onto his face.

  “Not really. I guess if he tried I’d’ve flipped him into a snowbank. He wasn’t built nearly as stout as Jeff and he was a lot older. He told me to get out and I got.”

  “Did you happen to mention Jeff’s a smuggler?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. We didn’t get that far. What makes it important?”

  “If you didn’t, he was a better liar than you gave him credit for. He told the feds the same thing about not having had anything to do with Jeff in years and years, and they believed him, too. He knew Jeff was a smuggler. I think he knew because he was involved himself.”

  “You think that’s how he got killed. Jesus, you think Jeff—?”

  “No. Given the right circumstances anyone’s capable of murder, but whoever killed Paul buried the corpse. Jeff might run from the law—that was his special skill—but he wouldn’t scratch dirt over his leavings like a cat in a sandbox. No one knows him, not you or Rose or me, but I know him well enough to be sure of that. He took valuable time off a narrow head start to bring me to the hospital with law all around.”

  “That’s him all over. Nobody ever saw him run scared. He’s the original Roadrunner.” He heard himself then. His face got dark behind the red. “That don’t mean I admire him or anything he did. I saw Rose cry over him too many times. I guess I always knew why, I mean deep down. I wasn’t so awful surprised to find out the truth as you might think.”

  “Still want me to find him?”

  “Hell, yeah. Maybe I didn’t, but just for a little while. I might have a chance against him with Rose, but the best man in the world can’t go toe to toe with no ghost. I guess I proved I’m not the best man in the world.” He seemed to sink deeper into the chair.

  “The net’s not too high, if you’ve seen the field.”

  He wasn’t listening. He turned up his thick palms. “If it turns out he’s what she wants, they won’t have no trouble from me. If he makes her cry again—” He closed the palms into fists. Then he shook himself like a horse and looked at me. “Where you figure to start this time?”

  “He told me in Grayling he was headed down the Lake Huron shoreline. I don’t know for sure if he got as far as Port Huron, though the feds think different. Anyway I’m going to start from there and work my way north, run his route backwards. When I know where he was most recently, I’ll be a month closer to where he is now.”

  “Month. Guy that drives like him could’ve circled the world twice.”

  “I had a tune-up last fall. I’ve been waiting for the chance to open up.”

  “I shouldn’t’ve jumped you. I ain’t thinking any too straight these days. Last week I almost fried myself running a high-tension line straight into a transformer.”

  “I hate it when that happens.” I drank. It seemed to be intermission. Then I remembered something. “Still have that church flyer?”

  He sat up, slapped his chest and his hips, then drew a sodden twist of paper from a slash pocket. The slush on the sidewalk had soaked through his coveralls. I spread it carefully, recognizing the soured older version of Jeff Starzek’s face on Paul Starzek’s body and the smudged letterpress advertising the Church of the Freshwater Sea. It came apart in my hands. It was printed on
regular paper. He wasn’t dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.

  Just then the hall door opened, Rosecranz leaned in, spotted the bottle on the desk, and asked what we were doing with his cleaning solvent.

  SIXTEEN

  North again. I’d become the needle on the compass.

  The cleaning-solvent crisis turned out to be a false alarm. Oral Canon had the emergency operator on the telephone when Rosecranz confessed we’d been drinking from a bottle of vodka smuggled through U.S. Customs from Kiev. He only drank from it on Jewish holidays and used it to scrub the grime from the stair rail the rest of the year. Oral went back to Oak Park to recover what he could of the fragments of his marriage and I went home to sleep. I didn’t know how he came out, but I got up only once during the night to swallow a pill and flush the cotton off my tongue with water.

  I got the jump on the morning rush. The sun broke red as an angry boil over Lake Huron, dyeing the lake-effect snow across the roadway a shade of pink that did nothing for my hangover. The stuff had swept across both lanes with a feral will of its own, obliterating the centerline and aprons. Avoiding drifts, I drove over virgin countryside broken only by mule-drawn harrows and the curses of German farmers. I got stuck seven times and rocked my way out, abusing the clutch and my good leg as well as my bad. I crawled for an hour behind a snowplow and made five miles. I grew to hate Currier & Ives.

  Then the push started for the eight o’clock whistle and a steady desperate stream of Tauruses, Infinities, buzzy little Civics, and a continuous iron girder of armored SUVs blew the powder off the road and tamped the heavy wet foundation into a footing of solid glass, sixteen inches deep and as hard as Old Man Winter’s mean little heart. Up around Fargo—a city I’d thought was stored safely away in North Dakota—an idiot at the wheel of a twenty-ton Freightliner boomed past me doing eighty on a gentle curve. The volume of air spun me into a 360, shaving steel off a guardrail and my left front fender.

  I sat there a minute with the motor running and my heart in my lap, then exited and drank a quart of black coffee at a Burger King. I eavesdropped on a party of old men telling Paul Bunyan stories in the window.

  “You heard Lyle Mundy died.”

  “Who’s Lyle Mundy?”

  “Lyle Mundy! You remember Lyle.”

  “I don’t remember any Lyle Mundy.”

  “Sure you do. He got his foot cut off by a brush hog.”

  “Oh, Lyle Mundy! How’d he die?”

  “Brain aneurysm. Went like that.”

  “That cocksucker always did have all the luck.”

  Up around Lexington, in Sanilac County, I cut my speed and started paying attention to hotel and motel signs. If Jeff Starzek had run his last route directly from Grayling, that would be as far as he got when he stopped to rest. Contrary to popular folklore, smugglers are almost never in a hurry, smashing through roadblocks and careering down mountain roads with the police in hot pursuit. When they have a deadline to meet, they adjust their schedule so they can make it without tipping over the speed limit and risking a pullover, and when they do attract red flashers they generally stop and take their medicine, fleeing and eluding being the one rap that sticks when all the others fall away. They can cross three large states in a day when they want, but the best of them make regular stops to eat, fuel up, stretch their legs, and sleep. They’re the safest and most law-abiding drivers on the road.

  Jeff usually ran by night, when the troopers had their hands full with drunks and overweight trucks dodging the scales that are open only during the day. He bailed out of morning rush hour into someplace quiet, parking his muscle machine out back near a window where he could keep an eye on it or hear the grumble of the engine starting. The cargo was more valuable than the carrier. I was looking for a place that was likely to offer vacancies on the ground floor, off the beaten track but not far enough off to make the regular roust sheet, with separate outside entrances to the rooms. That let out most of the national chains, where any officer with a partner could seal off both exits. I wanted a Bide-a-Wee, an Alpine, a Hiawatha Motor Lodge. Someplace where Ma and Pa Kettle rubbed fenders with Bonnie and Clyde.

  I spent twenty minutes following the directions on a pitted sign half-hidden behind shaggy hollyhocks (“FORTY WINKS INN for the Weary Traveler - Ice - Color TV”) and found a burned-out shell on a two-lane blacktop. I turned around and went back to the main highway. There is no mountain in Mt. Clemens, or anywhere else in Michigan, Mounts Brighton and Pleasant and Peach Mountain to the contrary. The Great Lakes had planed the northern two-thirds of the state as flat as a cookie sheet before the first Indian. I passed a gaunt grain elevator I saw for a mile, read three plain signs welcoming me to my own cottage at the Edelweiss Chalet, and turned onto a freshly plowed gravel road between farms lying fallow under three feet of snow. In a little while I was in pickup city, where a plywood cutout of a jolly fat man in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat beckoned me into a faux-Tudor office with half-timbered bungalows behind it, lined up under a common roof.

  The office was a plasterboard box, overheated, with a Coke machine, a waist-high woodgrain-printed counter, and behind it a man who’d never been nearer Switzerland than Atlantic City. He’d STPed his muddy brown hair into a ducktail and carried his shoulders up around his ears in the classic convict’s cringe. He didn’t recognize Jeff from the picture and couldn’t remember anyone specifically requesting ground-floor accommodations within recent weeks. I didn’t ask to see his registration cards or try to sneak a look. Jeff would disguise his handwriting and write in a phony automobile make and model and plate number; he couldn’t be sure it would be me looking. Out back I caught a teenage housekeeper shaking out a bath mat. The photo didn’t ring any bells. I gave them each a couple of bucks and got back on the road.

  The story this time out was there’d been a death in the family and I was working for the estate lawyer to round up all the heirs. It was old enough to be respectable, even if nobody believed it, and implied there was money to be made in return for reliable information. I’d dressed down for the natives, in a green parka, worn Dockers, and work boots, and the cane was good for sympathy. The new year was only a few days old but was starting to look pretty much like all the others, give or take a crippling injury.

  No major expressways have carved up the Huron shoreline yet, dropping trails of Taco Bells, Wal-Marts, and Uncle Ed’s Oil Shops. Of course the fast-food chains are represented—they travel on the wind like parachute seeds—but in singles only, not acres of plastic and steel and overflowing trash cans. The local steak-and-egg cafes operate inside the survival margin. The state highway is one long Main Street running past Woolworth’s, small navigable hardware stores, and the one-screen movie theater. The parks have cannons, the VFWs hold bingo tournaments. When you slow down, the pedestrians either wave at you or put their hands in their pockets and glower; strangers are a big deal. The dogs are all named Duke.

  I ate several bowls of chili in several Sugar Bowl Diners and bought a roll of Turns in each of a half-dozen pump-and-pantries, just to cover the bases. All the conversations I overheard had to do with some variation of Lyle Mundy and his fortunate fate. The counter help and regulars shook their heads when I showed them Jeff Starzek’s picture. I didn’t really think they’d tell me they bought merchandise from a smuggler, but their faces were easier to read than the urban kind. The trick was not to expect a break, but not to miss it when it broke. Complacency had gotten me shot once.

  Just to be thorough I tried a bed-and-breakfast, in an old brick farmhouse; the barn, a massive relic from the golden age of European immigration, was an antiques mall in warm weather. It was one of those places with big poofy beds and two rooms to a bath, with plenty of oak and flocked paper in the foyer and a guestbook on a stand. A funeral director could have moved in without redecorating. A sweet-faced old lady doused in lavender told me she rented to couples only, lifted the glasses on the chain around her neck to stare at Jeff’s picture, and apologized for
not being able to place him. She offered me ribbon candy from an oval dish.

  Wherever you go, there is someone willing to take your money and give you a roof for the night. I drove past three or four likely places because I was tired of talking to strangers and absolving them of their ignorance.

  In Port Sanilac, just below the nail of the Thumb, a squall blanked out the windshield, lifted the Cutlass off its wheels, and set it down on a Y branching off to the left. At least it felt that way. Probably it was nothing less prosaic than the gust blowing me off course when I couldn’t distinguish between road and country. Anyway when the white dust settled and the wipers gouged out eyeholes in the mask I found myself on a snowmobile track with nothing but DeKalb signs on either side, and up ahead, like a lighthouse beacon, a rectangular sign on aluminum poles sunk deep in snow, illuminated by sickly yellow beams from a row of cup lights on top:

  THE SPORTSMEN’S REST

  Rooms by day or week

  Your journey ends in 1500 feet

  I shifted into first to beat the drifts and powered on. I had no illusions. Fate whispers in your ear. It hardly ever screams in your face.

  SEVENTEEN

  The road—some kind of access that had had its day as a major artery before the state bulldozers came through—bent to the right around an old-growth oak hoary with vines and sprung birds’ nests to parallel the newer blacktop and the lake. I passed a deserted glazed-brick filling station sprayed all over with graffiti, the boarded-up remains of a frontier false-front souvenir shop, ropy also with garlands of black and green acetate, and a half-collapsed sign in a snowfield advertising a roadside zoo. It was all reminiscent of an extinct civilization that hadn’t progressed far beyond cliff-dwelling.

  I saw a leaping fish, then descended a gentle grade and saw the angler on the other end of the line, dwarfed by perspective in water almost up to his vulcanized waist, gripping his bent rod with both hands; an Outdoor Life cover blown up to Cinemascope. A timber framework supported the sign on the curved slope of the roof belonging to a railroad caboose, painted schoolhouse red and parked on a forty-foot section of track. It was as if car and rails had been lifted in one piece from the Oregon Short Line and deposited in the middle of four scraped acres. Around it, broadcast as if by the same great hand, were six smaller structures, four of which had been trucked in and plopped down on concrete blocks, the other two assembled on-site from boxes of giant Lincoln Logs. White aluminum sided the modular units and someone had painted the log cabins the muted orange of Campbell’s tomato soup.