Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (22 page)

“What for?” He mouthed each letter as he typed.

“Corcoran, same as yesterday.”

“Go ahead and talk to him. I had a full head of hair before people started climbing over it.”

I followed his thumb to where a slim black man in striped shirtsleeves and a plain brown tie was filling a china mug at the coffee maker. He wore a modest Afro and gray-tinted glasses. I gave him a card.

“I’ve been hired by Charlotte Corcoran to look for her ex-husband and their boy Tommy,” I said. “The sergeant wasn’t much help.”

“Told you to walk off the dock, right?” His eyes might have twinkled over the top of the mug, but you can never be sure about cops’ eyes.

“Words to that effect.”

“Grandy’s gone as high as he’s going in my detail,” he said. “No diplomacy. You have some identification besides a card?”

I showed him the chintzy pastel-colored ID the state hands out. He reached into a pocket and flipped forty cents into a tray full of coins next to the coffee maker. “Let’s go into the cave.”

We entered an office made of linoleum and amber pebbled glass, closing the door. He set down his mug, tugged at his trousers to protect the crease, and sat on the only clear corner of his desk. Then he pulled over his telephone and dialed a number.

“Hello, Miss Arnold? This is Lieutenant Winkle in General Service... Millie, right. Is Mrs. Corcoran in? Thank you.” Pause. “Mrs.
Corcoran? No, I’m sorry, there’s nothing new. Reason I called, I’ve got a private investigator here named Walker says he’s working for you... Okay, thanks. Just wanted to confirm it.”

He hung up and looked at me. “Sorry. Department policy.”

“I’m unoffendable,” I said. “How many telephone numbers you keep in your head at a given time?”

“Last month I forgot my mother’s birthday.” He drowned his quiet smile in coffee. “We have nothing in the Corcoran case.”

“Nothing as in nothing, or nothing you can do anything with?”

“Nothing as in zip. We run on coffee and nicotine here. When we get a box full of scraps we can hand over to the feds we don’t waste time trying to assemble them ourselves. The FBI computer drew a blank on Corcoran.”

“Not unusual if he doesn’t have priors.”

“It gets better. Because of the exodus from Michigan to Texas over the past couple of years a lot of local firms have been dealing with finance companies out there, so when it landed back in our lap we fed Great Western Loans and Credit into the department machine. Still nothing on Corcoran, because only the officers are on file. But the printout said the corporation invests heavily in government projects. As investments counselor, Frank Corcoran should have shown up on that FBI report. He’d have had to been screened one time or another.”

“Some kind of cover-up?”

“You tell me. The word’s lost a lot of its impact in recent years.” I opened a fresh pack of Winstons. “So why keep Mrs. Corcoran in the dark?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not rubbing off on us,” he said. “We’re just holding her at arm’s length till we get some answers back from channels.
These things take time. Computer time, which is measured in Christmases.”

“So why tell me?”

He smiled the quiet smile. “When Sergeant Grandy gave me your card I did some asking around the building. If you were a bulldog you’d have what the novelists call ‘acquisitive teeth.’ Quickest way to get rid of you guys is to throw you some truth.”

“I appreciate it, Lieutenant.” I rose and offered him my hand. He didn’t give it back as hastily as some cops have.

“Oh, what would you know about a brown Chrysler that was shadowing me a little while ago?”

“It wasn’t one of mine,” he said. “I’m lucky to get a blue-and-white when I want to go in with the band.”

I grasped the doorknob. “Thanks again. I guess you’re feeling better.”

“Than what? Oh, yesterday. I called in sick to watch my kid pitch. He walked six batters in a row.”

I grinned and left. That’s the thing I hate most about cops. Find one that stands for everything you don’t like about them and then you draw one that’s human.

The job stank, all right. It stank indoors and it stank on the street and it stank in the car all the way to my building. I had the window closed this trip; the air was damp and the sky was throwing fingers whether to rain or snow. Michigan. But it wouldn’t have smelled any better with the window down.192

The pictures came out good, anyway. It must be nice to be in a business where if they don’t you can trace the problem to a bad filter or dirt in the chemicals, something definite and impersonal that you can ditch and replace with something better. I left the fat photographer developing nude shots for a customer on Adult Row on Woodward and went upstairs.

I lock the waiting room overnight. I was about to use the key when the door swung inward and a young black party in faded overalls and a Pistons warm-up jacket grinned at me. He had a mouth built for grinning, wide as a Buick with door-to-door teeth and a thin moustache squared off like a bracket to make it seem even wider. “You’re late, trooper,” he said. “Let’s you come in and we’ll get started.”

“Thanks, I’ll come back,” I said, and back-pedaled into something hard. The wall was closer this morning. A hand curled inside the back of my collar and jerked my suitcoat down to my elbows, straining the button and pinning my arms behind me.

Teeth drew a finger smelling of marijuana down my cheek. Then he balled his fist and rapped the side of my chin hard enough to make my own teeth snap together.

“Let’s you come in, trooper. Unless you’d rather wake up smiling at yourself from your bedside table every morning.”

I kicked him in the crotch.

He said, “Hee!” and hugged himself. Meanwhile I threw myself forward, popping the button and stripping out of my coat. My left arm was still tangled in the sleeve lining when I pivoted on my left foot and swung my right fist into a face eight inches higher than mine. I felt the jar clear to my shoulder. I was still gripping the keys in that hand.

The guy I hit let go of the coat to drag the back of a hand the size of a platter under his nose and looked at the blood. Then he took
hold of my shirt collar from the front to steady me and cocked his other fist, taking aim.

“Easy, Del. We ain’t supposed to bust him.” Teeth’s voice was a croak.

Del lowered his fist but kept his grip on my collar. He was almost seven feet tall, very black, and had artificially straightened hair combed into a high pompadour and sprayed hard as a brick. In place of a jacket he wore a full-length overcoat that barely reached his hips, over a sweatshirt that left his navel and flat hairy belly exposed.

Behind me Teeth said, “Del don’t like to talk. He’s got him a cleft palate. It don’t get in his way at all. Now you want to come in, talk?”

I used what air Del had left me to agree. He let go and we went inside. In front of the door to my private office Teeth relieved me of my keys, unlocked it, and stood aside while his partner shoved me on through. Teeth glanced at the lock on his way in.

“Dead bolt, yeah. Looks new. You need one on the other door too.”

He circled the room as he spoke and stopped in front of me. I was ready and got my hip out just as he let fly. I staggered sideways. Del caught me.

“That’s no way to treat a client, trooper,” Teeth said. “It gets around, pretty soon you ain’t got no business.”

“Client?” I shook off the giant’s hand. My leg tingled.

Teeth reached into the slash pocket of his Pistons jacket and brought out a roll of crisp bills, riffling them under my nose. “Hundreds, trooper. Fifty of them in this little bunch. Go on, heft it. Ain’t no heavier’n a roll of quarters, but, my oh my, how many more miles she draws.”

He held it out while I got my coat right side in. Finally his arm got tired and he let it drop. I said, “You came in hard for paying customers. What do I have to forget?”

“We want someone to forget something we go rent a politician,”
he said. “Twenty-five hundred of this pays to look for somebody. The other twenty-five comes when the somebody gets found.”

“Somebody being?” Knowing the answer.

“Same guy you’re after now. Frank Corcoran.”

“That standard for someone who’s already looking for him for a lot less?”

“There’s a little more to it,” he said. “Thought there might be.”

“You find him, you tell us first. Ahead of his wife.”

“Then?”

“Then you don’t tell her.”

“I guess I don’t ask why.”

His grin creaked. “You’re smart, trooper. Too smart for poor.”

“I’ll need a number,” I said.

“We call you.” He held up the bills. “We talking?”

“Let’s drink over it.” I pushed past him around the desk and tugged at the handle of the deep drawer. Teeth’s other hand moved and five inches of pointed steel flicked out of his fist. “Just a scotch bottle,” I said.

He leaned over the corner to see down into the drawer. I grabbed a handful of his hair and bounced his forehead off the desk. The switchblade went flying. Del, standing in front of the desk, made a growling sound in his chest and lurched forward. I yanked open the top drawer and fired my Smith & Wesson .38 without taking it out. The bullet smashed through the front panel and buried itself in the wall next to the door. It didn’t come within a foot of hitting the big man. But he stopped. I raised the gun and backed to the window.

“A name,” I said. “Whose money?”

Teeth rubbed his forehead, where a purple bruise was spreading
under the brown. He stooped to pick up the currency from the floor and stood riffling it against his palm. His smile was a shadow of a ghost of what it had been. “No names today, trooper. I’m fresh out of names.”

I said, “It works this way. You tell me the name. I don’t shoot you.”

“You don’t shoot. Desks and walls, maybe. Not people. It’s why you’re broke and it’s why I get to walk around with somebody else’s five long ones on account of it’s what I drop on gas for my three Cadillacs.”

“What about a Chrysler?”

“I pay my dentist in Chryslers,” he said. “So long, trooper. Maybe I see you. Maybe you don’t see me first. Oh.” He got my keys out of his slash pocket and flipped them onto the desk. “We’re splitting, Del.”

Del looked around, spotted my framed original
Casablanca
poster hanging on the wall over the bullethole, and swung his fist. Glass sprayed. Then he turned around and crunched out behind his partner, speckling my carpet with blood from his lacerated fingers.

The telephone rang while I was cleaning the revolver. When I got my claws unhooked from the ceiling I lifted the receiver. It was Lieutenant Winkle. He wanted to see me at Headquarters.

“Something?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said. “Don’t stop for cigarettes on the way.”

I reloaded, hunted up my holster, and clipped the works to my belt. No one came to investigate the shot. The neighborhood had fallen that far.

On Beaubien I left the gun in the car to clear the metal detectors inside. Heading there I walked past a brown Chrysler parked in the visitors’ lot. There was no one inside and the doors were locked.

The lieutenant let me into his office, where two men in dark suits were seated in mismatched chairs. One had a head full of crisp gray hair and black-rimmed glasses astride a nose that had been broken sometime in the distant past. The other was younger and looked like Jack Kennedy but for a close-trimmed black beard. They stank federal.

“Eric Stendahl and Robert LeJohn.” Winkle introduced them in the same order. “They’re with the Justice Department.”

“We met,” I said. “Sort of.”

Stendahl nodded. He might have smiled. “I thought you’d made us. I should have let Bob drive; he’s harder to shake behind a wheel. But even an old eagle likes to test his wings now and then.” The smile died. “We’re here to ask you to stop looking for Frank Corcoran.”

I lit a Winston. “If I say no?”

“Then we’ll tell you. We have influence with the state police, who issued your license.”

“I’ll get a hearing. They’ll have to tell me why.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Corcoran was the inside man in an elaborate scheme to bilk Great Western Loans and Credit out of six hundred thousand dollars in loans to a nonexistent oil venture in Mexico. He was apprehended and agreed to turn state’s evidence against his accomplices in return for a new identity and relocation for his protection. You’re familiar with the alias program, I believe.”

“I ran into it once,” I looked at Winkle. “You knew?”

“Not until they came in here this morning after you left,” he said. “They’ve had Mrs. Corcoran under surveillance. That’s how they got on to you. It also explains why Washington turned its back on this one.”

I added some ash to the fine mulch on the linoleum floor.

“Not too bright, relocating him in an area where his ex-wife’s cousin lives.”

Stendahl said, “We didn’t know about that, but it certainly would have clinched our other objections at the time. He spent his childhood here and had a fixation about the place. The people behind the swindle travel in wide circles; we couldn’t chance his being spotted. Bob here was escorting Corcoran to the East Coast. He disappeared during the plane change at Metro Airport. We’re still looking for him.”

“It’s a big club,” I said. “We ought to have a secret handshake. What about Corcoran’s son?”

LeJohn spoke up. “That’s how he lost me. The boy was along. He had to go to the bathroom and he didn’t want anyone but his father in with him. I went into the bookstore for a magazine. When I got back to the men’s room it was empty.”

“The old bathroom trick. Tell me, did Corcoran ever happen to mention that the boy was in his mother’s custody and that you were acting as accomplices in his abduction?”

“He seemed happy enough,” said LeJohn, glaring. “Excited about the trip.”

His partner laid manicured fingers on his arm, calming him. To me: “It was a condition of Corcoran’s testimony that the boy go with him to his new life. Legally, our compliance is indefensible. Morally—well, his evidence is expected to put some important felons behind bars.”

“Yeah,” I tipped some smoke out of my nostrils. “I guess you got too busy to clue in Mrs. Corcoran.”