Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (24 page)

“I think so.” She lowered her knees.

“Stay here.”

The door didn’t want to open. I shoved hard and it squawked against the buckled fender. I climbed out behind the Smith & Wesson in my right hand. I was in a living room with broken glass on the carpet and pieces of shredded siding slung over the chairs and sofa. Riddle lay spread-eagled on his face across the car’s hood and windshield, groaning. His legs dangled like broken straws in front of the smashed grille.

“Lose the piece, trooper.”

My eyes were still adjusting to the dim light indoors. I focused on Monroe Boyd baring his teeth in front of a hallway running to the back of the house. He had one arm around Tommy Corcoran’s chest under the arms, holding him kicking above the floor. His other hand bad a switchblade in it with the point pressing the boy’s jugular.

“Tommy!” Charlotte Corcoran had gotten out on the passenger’s side. She took a step and stopped. Boyd bettered his grip.

“Mommy,” said the boy.

“What about it, trooper? Seven or seventy, they all bleed the same.”

I relaxed my hold on the gun.

A shot slammed the walls and a blue hole appeared under Boyd’s left eye. He let go of Tommy and lay down. Twitched once.

I looked up at Frank Corcoran crouched at the top of the staircase to the second story. His arm was stretched out full length with a gun at the end of it, leaking smoke. He glanced at Tommy. “I told you to stay upstairs with me.”

“I left my ball here.” The boy pouted, then spotted Boyd’s body. “Funny man.”

Mrs. Corcoran flew forward and knelt to throw her arms around her son. Corcoran saw her for the first time, said “Charlotte?” and
looked at me. The gun came around.

“Stop waving that thing,” his ex-wife said, hugging Tommy. “He’s with me.”

Corcoran hesitated, then lowered the weapon. He surveyed the damage. “What do I tell the rental agent?”

I heard the sirens then.

The house was a half-timbered Tudor job
on Kendall, standing on four acres fenced in by a five-foot ornamental stone wall. It wasn’t the only one in the area and looked as much like metropolitan Detroit as it tried to look like Elizabethan England. A bank of lilacs had been allowed to grow over the wall inside, obstructing the view of the house from the street, but from there inward the lawn was bare of foliage, after the fashion of feudal estates to deny cover to intruders.

I wasn’t one. As instructed previously, I stopped in front of the iron gate and got out to open it and was on my way back to the car when something black hurtled at me snarling out of the shrubbery. I clambered inside and shut the door and rolled up the window just as the thing leaped, scrabbling its claws on the roof and clouding the glass with its moist breath.

“Hector!”

At the sound of the harsh voice, the beast dropped to all fours and went on clearing its throat and glaring yellow at me through the window while a small man with a white goatee walked out through the gate and snapped a leash onto its collar. He wore a gray sportcoat and no tie.

“It’s all right, Walker,” he said. “Hector behaves himself while I’m around. You are Amos Walker.”

I cranked the window down far enough to tell him I was, keeping my hand on the handle and my eye on the dog.

“You’re Mr. Blum?”

“Yeah. Drive on up to the house. I’ll meet you there.”

The driveway looped past an attached garage and a small front porch with carriage lamps mounted next to the door. I parked in front of the porch and leaned on the fender smoking a cigarette while Leonard Blum led the dog around back and then came through the house and opened the door for me. The wave of conditioned air hit me like a spray of cold water. It was the last day of June and the second of the first big heat wave of summer.

“You like dogs, Walker?”

“The little moppy noisy kind and the big gentle ones that lick your face.”

“I like Dobermans. You can count on them to turn on you someday. With friends you never know.” He ushered me into a dim living room crowded with heavy furniture and hung with paintings of square-riggers under full sail and bearded mariners in slick sou’west-ers shouting into the bow-wash. A varnished oak ship’s wheel as big around as a hula hoop was mounted over the fireplace.

“Nautical, I know,” said Blum. “I was in shipping a long time back. Never got my feet wet, but I liked to pretend I was John Paul Jones. That wheel belonged to the
Henry Morgan,
fastest craft ever to sail the river. In my day, anyway.”

“That doesn’t sound like the name of an ore carrier.”

“It wasn’t.”

I waited, but he didn’t embroider. He was crowding eighty if it wasn’t stuck to his heels already, with heavy black-rimmed glasses and a few white hairs combed diagonally across his scalp and white teeth that flashed too much in his beard to be his. There was a space
there when we both seemed to realize we were being measured, and then he said:

“My lawyer gave me your name. Simon Weintraub. You flushed out an eyewitness to an accident last year that saved his client a bundle.”

“I’m pretty good.” I waited some more.

“How are you at tracing stolen property?”

“Depends on the property.”

He produced a key from a steel case on his belt, hobbled over to a bare corner of the room, and inserted the key in a slot I hadn’t noticed. The wood paneling opened in two seconds, exposing a recessed rectangle lined in burgundy plush and tall enough for a man to stand in.

“Notice anything?” he asked.

“Looks like a hairdresser’s casket.”

“It’s a gun cabinet. An empty gun cabinet. Three days ago there wasn’t enough room to store another piece in it.”

“Were you at home when it got empty?”

“My wife and I spent the weekend on Mackinac Island. I’ve got a place there. Whoever did it, it wasn’t his first job. He cut the alarm wires and picked the locks to the front door and the cabinet slick as spit.”

“What about Hector?”

“I put him in a kennel for the weekend.”

“Are you sure someone didn’t just have a key?”

“The only key to this cabinet is on my belt. It’s never out of my sight.”

“Who else lives here besides your wife?”

“No one. We don’t have servants. Elizabeth’s at her CPR class now. I’ve got a heart I wouldn’t wish on an Arab,” he added.

“What’d the police say?”

“I didn’t call them.”

I was starting to get the idea. “Have you got a list of the stolen guns?”

He drew two sheets folded lengthwise out of his inside breast pocket, holding it back when I reached for it. “When does client privilege start?”

“When I pick up the telephone and say hello.”

He gave me the list. It was neatly typewritten, the firearms identified by make, caliber, patent date, and serial number.

Some handguns, four high-powered rifles, a few antiques, two shotguns. And a Thompson submachine gun. I asked him if he was a dealer.

“No, I’m in construction.”

“Non-dealers are prohibited from owning full automatic weapons,” I said. “I guess you know that.”

“I wanted a lecture I’d have gone to the cops to start.”

“Also a warrant for your arrest. Are any of these guns registered, Mr. Blum?”

“That’s not a question you get to ask,” he said.

I handed back the list. “So long, Mr. Blum. I’ve got some business up in Iroquois Heights, so I won’t charge you for the visit.”

“Wait, Walker.”

I had my back to him when he said it. It was the way he said it that made me turn around. It didn’t sound like the Leonard Blum I’d been talking to.

“Nothing in the collection is registered,” he said. “The rifles and shotguns don’t have to be, of course, and I just never got around to doing the paper on the handguns and the Thompson. I’ve never been fingerprinted.”

“It’s an experience no one should miss,” I said.

“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t holler cop.
For a long time now I’ve lived for that collection. My wife lays down for anything with a zipper; she’s almost fifty years younger than me and it’s no more than I have any right to expect. But pleasant memories are tied up with some of those pieces. I’ve seen what happens to old friends when they lose all interest, Walker. They wind up in wheelchairs stinking of urine and calling their daughters Charlie. I’d splatter my brains before I’d let that happen to me. Only now I don’t have anything to do it with.”

I got out one of my cards, scribbled a number on the back, and gave it to him. “Call this guy in Belleville. His name’s Ben Perkins. He’s a PI. who doubles in apartment maintenance, which as lines of work go aren’t so very different from each other. He’s a cowboy, but a good one, which is what this job screams for. But I can’t guarantee he’ll touch it.”

“I don’t know.” He was looking at the number. “Weintraub recommended you as the original clam.”

“This guy makes me look like a set of those wind-up dime store dentures.” I said so long again and let myself out, feeling cleansed. And as broke as a motel room chair.

The Iroquois Heights business had to do with a wandering wife I never found. What I did find was a deputy city prosecutor living off the town madam and a broken head courtesy of a local beat officer’s monkey stick. The assistant chief is an old acquaintance. A week after the Kendall visit I was nursing my headache and the office fan with pliers and a paperclip when Lieutenant John Alderdyce of Detroit Homicide walked in. His black face glistened and he was breathing
like a rhinoceros from the three-story climb. But his shirt and Chinese silk sportcoat looked fresh. He saw what I was doing and said, “Why don’t you pop for air conditioning?”

“Every time I get a fund started I get hungry.” I laid down my tools and plugged in the fan. The blades turned, wrinkling the thick air. I lifted my eyebrows at John.

He drew a small white rectangle out of an inside pocket and laid it on my desk, lining up the edges with those of the blotter. It was one of my business cards. “These things turn up in the damnedest places,” he said. “So do you.”

“I’m paid to. The cards I raise as best as I can and then send them out into the world. I can’t answer for where they wind up.”

He flipped it over with a finger. A telephone number was written on the back in a scrawl I recognized. I sighed and sat back.

“What’d he do,” I asked, “hang himself or stick his tongue in a light socket?”

He jumped on it with both feet. “What makes it suicide?”

“Blum’s wife was cheating on him, he said, and he lost his only other interest to a B-and-E. He as much as told me he’d take the back way out if that gun collection didn’t find its way home.”

“Maybe you better throw me the rest of it,” he said.

I did, starting with my introduction to Blum’s dog Hector and finishing with my exit from the house on Kendall. Alderdyce listened with his head down, stroking an unlit cigarette. We were coming up on the fifth anniversary of his first attempt to quit them.

“So you walked away from it,” he said when I was through. “I never knew you to turn your back on a job just because it got too illegal.”

I said, “We’ll pass over that on account of we’re so close. I didn’t like Blum. When he couldn’t bully me he tried wheedling, and he caught me in the wrong mood. Was it suicide?”

“It plays that way. Wife came home from an overnight stay with one of her little bridge partners and found him shot through the heart with a thirty-eight automatic. The gun was in his right hand and the paraffin test came up positive. Powder burns, the works. No note, but you can’t have music too.”

“Thirty-eight auto. You mean one of those Navy Supers?”

“Colt Sporting Pistol, Model Nineteen-Oh-Two. It was discontinued in nineteen twenty-eight. A real museum piece. The same gun was on a list we found in a desk drawer.”

“I know the list. He said everything on it had been stolen.”

“He lied. We turned your card in a wastebasket this morning. We tried to reach you.”

“I was up in the Heights getting a lesson in police work, Warner Brothers style. Check out the wife’s alibi?”

He nodded, rolling the cold cigarette along his lower lip.

“A pro bowler in Harper Woods. You’d like him. Muscles on his elbows and if his IQ tests out at half his handicap you can have my pension. Blum started getting cold around midnight and she was at Fred Flintstone’s place from ten o’clock on. She married Blum four years ago, about the time he turned seventy-five and handed over the operation of his construction firm to his partners. We’re still digging.”

“He told me he used to be in shipping.” Alderdyce shrugged. I said, “I guess you called Perkins.”

“The number you wrote on the card. Blum didn’t score any more points with him than he did with you. I’m glad we never met. I wouldn’t want to know someone who wasn’t good enough for two P.I.’s with cardboard in their shoes.”

I lit a Winston, just to make him squirm. “What I most enjoy paying rent on this office for is to provide a forum for overdressed
fuzz to run down my profession. Self-snuffings don’t usually make you this pleasant. Or is it the heat?”

“It’s the heat,” he said. “It’s also this particular self-snuffing. Maybe I’m burning out. They say one good way of telling is when you find yourself wanting to stand the stiff on its feet and ask it a question.”

“As for instance?”

“As for instance, ‘Mr. Blum, would you please tell me why before you shot yourself you decided to shoot your dog?’”

I said nothing. After a little while he broke his cigarette in two and flipped the pieces at my wastebasket and went out.

I finished my smoke, then broke out my Polk Administration Underwood and cranked a sheet into it and waited for my report to the husband of the runaway wife to fall into order. When I got tired of that I tore out the blank sheet and crumpled it and bonged it into the basket. My head said it was time to go home.

“Mr. Walker?”

I was busy locking the door to my private office. When I turned I was looking at a slender brunette of about thirty standing in the waiting room with the hall door closing on its pneumatic tube behind her. She wore her hair short and combed almost over one eye and had on a tailored black jacket that ran out of material just below her elbows, on top of a ruffled white blouse and a tight skirt to match the jacket. Black purse and shoes. The weather was too hot for black, but she made it look cool.