Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (41 page)

“One night’s pretty much like all the rest in this place. You’re sure you didn’t forget?” I handed him the photograph of Merle Ketch I’d gotten from the personnel manager at Powertrain.

The kid glanced at it, then handed it back. “I saw McCorking-dale on the news. This isn’t him.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“Well, I didn’t see him either.”

“Or maybe he paid you up through next semester to forget you did.”

He adjusted his glasses. “Education’s expensive. Look, just because I have to do a little grifting doesn’t mean I’d cover up for a killer.”

I put away the photograph. “Okay.”

“Okay?” His forehead wrinkled.

I pointed at the book. “I read the same text in college. They fight to update them every twenty years or so. Anyway, you missed.”

I went out to my car, but I didn’t drive away. I’d parked it at a discreet angle so I could see through the glass doors into the lobby. I was prepared for a very long wait. The clerk’s kidneys were much younger than mine, and for all I knew he’d taken a break just before I arrived. But I had the whole night to see this through. And an empty coffee can for emergencies.

Luck smiled after twenty minutes. The clerk slid off his high stool, laid down the textbook, stretched and went through a door behind the desk. I was out of the car in less than five seconds. The box was on the shelf under the desk where he’d had it Saturday.

When he came back from the bathroom, he found me standing there scratching my chin with the corner of a registration card from Monday night.

I caught Mary Ann Thaler in the squad room, dunking a tea bag into a cup of hot water. It was the 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. shift, and we had the place all to ourselves. The lieutenant looked as fresh as the morning in a royal-blue silk blouse and a black skirt.

“I got the message you left this afternoon,” she said. “We checked out Merle Ketch. He was drinking beer with some buddies in the Sidecar Tavern when the thing went down at the Alamo. That good a friend he wasn’t. Sorry.”

“I’m not interested in him anymore. I need a pass to see Billy Fred.”

“Now? What’ve you got?”

“I’ll tell you after I talk to him. “

“Withholding evidence, are we?”

“A hunch isn’t evidence. What about it?”

“I don’t guess it would hurt. I’ve got my hands full enough with Joey Bats without worrying about McCorkingdale.”

“Any change?”

“His vitals have stabilized, whatever that means, but the news isn’t good. These pro jobs don’t leave much to go on.”

“Talk to his mistress?”

She nodded. “She didn’t see anything. She was inside the station reading a paperback.”

“Ask her where she was Saturday night.”

“Not without knowing why, I won’t.”

“I’ll fill you in while you write out that pass.”

The visitors’ room I was shown into at the Wayne County Jail was drywalled and painted a not unpleasant shade of ivory, but it had no decorations or outside windows or features of any kind except the two doors that led into it and a table and two folding chairs. I was seated there thirty seconds when Billy Fred McCorkingdale came in, accompanied by a turnkey in a deputy’s uniform who took a glance around, then departed, locking the door behind him. His slab face remained in the steel-gridded window.

Billy Fred sat down facing me. His eyes were sunken. I saw no recognition in them.

“Amos Walker,” I reminded him. “You hired me last week.”

“I know.” His voice grated, as if he hadn’t used it in days. He hadn’t said a word at his arraignment.

“I talked to Merle Ketch,” I said. “You got lousy taste in friends.”

He shrugged and said, “Merle’s company.”

“You’d do better with a parakeet. I suppose he told you his grand-daddy wrung his wife’s neck for straying, and the jury let him off.”

“Cut her throat, he said.”

“Things have changed since then. People don’t walk on their knuckles. They don’t hang their long johns in the backyard and almost never acquit wife murderers. Even when the wives are unfaithful.”

He said nothing.

“Life in Jackson’s ten times as long as life on the outside,” I went on. “Those rednecks you work with will have plenty of time to forget all about what a hero you are, and you’ll be in for another thirty years. Take back the confession.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. Tears came out of the cracks. He raised his hands to his face. “I killed her,” Billy Fred said. “I murdered Lynne.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It’s my fault she’s dead.”

“Better, but still not accurate. It may be your fault she went looking for attention, but that’s between you and a therapist. I know one, if you don’t mind waiting for him to graduate. Lynne’s dead and so is that poor slob Kenneth Brindle because some bottom feeder who didn’t know either of them from Rembrandt kicked down the door of their room and blew them into kibble. And he’s out there walking around while you’re in here blubbering and being admired by that dirtbag Merle Ketch.”

His face went blank but only for a moment. He was listening now.

“I sneaked a peek at the Alamo registration cards,” I said. “I did it the same way the killer did Monday night—waited for the clerk to go to the bathroom and went in and rifled the box. Your wife and Brindle weren’t the only couple who registered as Mr. and Mrs. Brown that night. There was one other.”

His fingers made deep indentations in the table’s padded vinyl top, but he kept quiet.

“The clerk at the Alamo scores tuition money for college the same way employees in ratty hotels the world over draw cash. He registered a party he recognized from TV and the newspapers and accepted a bribe to forget he ever saw him.
That
was the phony Brown the killer was looking for.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know the killer’s name. I only know why he did it. He was hired to kill a man registered as Brown and the woman he had with him, to eliminate her as a witness. He was in a hurry. As soon as he found a card with that signature and a room number, he stopped looking. Once that door flew open, he didn’t have time for a positive ID. He saw a man and a woman in bed, shot them both twice and took off. I doubt he knew he’d killed the wrong Browns until he saw the news later.”

“Who?” he asked again, but it wasn’t the same question,

“The other Browns? ‘Joey Bats’ Battaglia and his girlfriend. They hauled out of there after the big noise and before the cops arrived. That’s why Joey was in such a hurry to leave town the next day. He wasn’t so lucky that time. That time the shooter made up for his mistake.”

“Like hell he did.” He had his face in his hands again.

“All this is speculation so far,” I said, “although the desk clerk’s ready to talk. The cops figured they had their man—you—they
never bothered to check the registration cards. They’re talking to Battaglia’s mistress now. If she confirms that she and Joey were at the Alamo Monday night, you’ll have a defense. But you have to retract that confession.”

“Sure.” He was staring down at his hands: big hands, callused all over, with decades of dirt and steel shavings ground deep into the knuckles. “Poor Lynne.”

I got up and signaled to the turnkey, who let himself in. Billy Fred rose. At the door to the cells he looked back over his shoulder. “I’m hiring you again. Trust me on the advance?”

“Hiring me for what?”

“You’re the detective.”

The guard followed him out and drew the door shut with a clink.

It looked as if I had underestimated Joey Bats’s luck. On Thursday the head of surgery at Detroit Receiving Hospital announced at press conference that his team had managed to save one of the patient’s kidneys. Arrangements had been made to transfer him to Hutzel Hospital for recovery as early as the weekend.

When the appointed day arrived, a crew consisting of a nurse and a pair of interns, with a uniformed police officer looking on, strapped their charge to a gurney and ferried him for security’s sake through an exit normally reserved for mortuary cases. An intern held open the door to the ambulance while his partner and the nurse prepared to slide the patient inside.

Just as they lifted the stretcher, an ambulance bearing the logo of another company rolled around the corner, squished to a stop, and two men in ski masks piled out of the back. One of them covered the uniformed cop with an automatic pistol. His companion sprinted up to the gurney and swung up a shotgun with the stock and barrel
sawed off. Before he could squeeze the trigger, the patient sat up and shot him in the chest with a .38 revolver. This startled the man with the pistol just long enough for the “nurse” to produce a nine-millimeter Beretta from the folds of her uniform.

“Police!” Mary Ann Thaler shouted. “Drop the weapon!”

He dropped the weapon. At this point the driver of the second ambulance floored the accelerator. Tires spun, and the vehicle took off. The uniformed officer drew his sidearm, crouched, and fired a single shot through the open door at the back of the ambulance. The vehicle veered sharply, jumped the curb, and slammed into a steel post holding up a sign calling for silence. The horn sounded in a long, irritating blast. It didn’t stop until one of the “interns,” a detective with Felony Homicide, grabbed the driver by his collar and pulled his dead body away from the steering wheel.

By the time I got free of the gurney, the uniform had Ski Mask Number One facedown on the ground with his wrists in cuffs. The second “intern,” another plainclothesman, bent over Ski Mask Number Two with the shotgun in hand. “This one’s still breathing, Lieutenant,” he said.

Thaler knelt and stripped off the man’s mask. He had one of those faces you couldn’t have picked out of a lineup if you were married to him—young and unlined without a single distinguishing feature. I holstered my revolver under the paper gown I had on over my clothes and got down on one knee beside the lieutenant.

I said, “Joke’s on you, fella. Joey died Thursday morning. The whole thing was a gag to bring you back for a third try.”

“I just figured that out,” he said. “Bonehead play. That’s two this week,” he said. “Stupid.” Pink bubbles rippled between his lips.

I was tingling now, but I didn’t have time to savor it. “What was the first?”

“The Alamo.” He coughed and gurgled, or maybe it was an attempt to laugh. “Remember the Alamo—get it?”

“Got it,” I said. And then he was gone.

Lieutenant Thaler and I stood. “Deathbed confession,” she said, and put away her Beretta. “Looks like your client’s off the hook.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad it’s not the one that counts.”

Elda Chase
lived in an efficiency flat in Iroquois Heights with no rugs on the hardwood floor and the handsome furniture arranged in geometric patterns like a manor house maze. That day she had the curtains open on the window overlooking the municipal park and the statue of LaSalle with his foot up on a rock scratching his head over a map he had unrolled on his knee. The view was strictly for my benefit; Elda Chase had been blind since birth.

Not that you’d have known it from the way she got around that apartment, discreetly touching this chair and brushing that lamp as she bustled to catch the whistling teapot and find the cups and place the works on a platter and bring it over and set it down on the coffee table. When I leaned forward from the sofa to pour, I was just in time to accept the full cup she extended to me. She filled the other one then and took a seat in the chair opposite. She was a tall woman in her middle fifties who wore her graying hair pinned up and lightly tinted glasses with clear plastic rims. Her ruby blouse and long matching skirt went well with her high coloring and she had on pearl earrings and white low-heeled shoes. I wondered who picked it all out.

“The Braille edition of the Yellow Pages comes so late,” she said, balancing her cup and saucer on one crossed knee. “I was half afraid your number had changed.”

“Not in a dozen years. Or anything else about the office, except the wallpaper.”

“Anyway, thank you for coming. You were the fourth investigator I tried. The first number was disconnected and the other two men referred me to the Humane Society. I’d called them right after it happened, of course. They wanted me to put up posters around the neighborhood. As if I could go out at all without my Max.”

“Max is the dog?”

“A shepherd. I’ve had him three years. When Lucy died I was sure I’d never have another one as good, but Max is special. He’s taken me places I’d never have dared go with Lucy.”

I sipped some tea and was relieved to find out it was bitter. Watching her operate I’d begun to feel inadequate. “You’re sure he didn’t run away?”

“Trained seeing-eye dogs don’t run away, Mr. Walker. But to lay your cynicism to rest, the padlock on the kennel door had been cut. You saw it in the yard?”

“A six-foot chain link fence to keep in a dog that wouldn’t run away,” I confirmed.

“The fence was to protect him. It didn’t do a very good job. I knew dog stealing was a possibility, but I hate to keep a big animal cooped up indoors. The police were not encouraging.”

“I’m not surprised, in this town.”

“I like Iroquois Heights,” she said.

“The park is nice.”

She raised her face. With her sightless eyes downcast behind the colored lenses she looked like a lioness taking in the sun. “Can you
find him?”

“There are markets for purebreds. I can ask some questions. I can’t promise anything. My specialty’s tracing two-legged mammals.”

“I could have gone to someone who traces pets for a living. I don’t like professional dog people. They’re strident. They’d make me out the villain for not hiring a governess to look after the dog.”

“Is there a picture?”

She groped for and opened a drawer in the end table next to her chair and handed me a color snapshot of herself in a wrap and gloves hanging on to a harness attached to a black-and-tan German shepherd.

“Marks?” I put it in my breast pocket.

“Now, how would I know that?”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. He answers to his name with a sharp bark.” She took a checkbook off the end table and started writing. “Seven-fifty is your retainer, I believe.”