Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (62 page)

“What is inside it?” Rosecranz asked. “Not money.”

“
TV Guide.”
I put it away. “You shouldn’t have trusted it.
M.A.S.H.
was listed last night, but it didn’t air. A programmer at Channel Two told me the president’s speech threw off the schedule. The last half hour of
Steel Magnolias
ran in that time slot. That soundtrack wouldn’t have drowned out a mouse’s burp, let a lone a burglar kicking in two doors.”

The building super moved a shoulder. “The same thing runs every night at the same time for two years. Who knew?”

“What did you need the money for?”

“I didn’t. I don’t.” He leaned his cheek against the lamppost, sliding
his hat off center. “I am eighty-six Friday. I never did nothing. Nothing since I came to this country.”

“What about Sacco and Vanzetti? You were arrested at a rally.”

“That was my cousin. I tell that story. I never did nothing. Nothing in eighty-six years.”

“You’re hell on locks.”

“I smash the dead bolts with a monkey wrench. Forty years I have spent opening file cabinets when tenants lose keys.”

“You shook down a fighter, an heiress, and a racketeer. That’s not nothing. What did you do with the files you took?”

“I will show you.”

I drove him back to the building, where he unlocked his single room on the ground floor, complete with steel desk, Murphy bed, and a teenage soap playing out in black-and-white on his ancient TV set. His tools lay in a pile on a folding table designed for lonely dinners in front of the tube.

He moved a stack of
Popular Mechanics,
and there were the manila folders in a dilapidated egg crate. I went through the files quickly. Nothing was missing.

“Comfy setup. Ralph Kramden ever drop by?”

I turned around. With Boy Falco and his family-size driver standing inside it, the room was barely big enough for oxygen. Rose-cranz was watching them without hope.

“See what happens when you leave the front door open?” I said.

“You’re a laugh hemorrhage.” Falco’s smile was dead on arrival. He was looking at the stack of folders in my hands. “Mine in there?”

When I hesitated, the driver unbuttoned his overcoat. The fisted handle of his Magnum stuck up out of a holster two inched left of his navel. I shuffled the stack and gave Falco the folder tabbed CRUIK-SHANK. He riffled through the pages, paused to examine the signature
he’d forged on the airline receipt—all the feeds needed to tie him to the Miami drug scene—then put it back and stuck the file under his arm.

“What’s it doing in here?” His tone was almost pleasant.

“I asked Rosecranz to hide the files in his place until I got a better set of cabinets.”

“Thief give you any trouble?”

“Trouble’s my name. I changed it to Amos when the other kids laughed.”

He wasn’t listening. He was looking at the super.

“Whisper something,” he said.

Rosecranz looked sad. “What should I whisper?”

“That’s the accent.” He jerked his chin at the driver. The Magnum came out.

“You got what you came for,” I said. “What’s the point?”

“The point is I don’t get crapped on by private creeps and janitors. Make it neat. I’ll be in the car.” He turned toward the door.

As he passed in front of the big man, I snatched the monkey wrench off the folding table, the same wrench Rosecranz had used to demolish the front door lock and one to my office. It was fourteen inches long and as heavy as a handtruck; it swung practically without help. The case-steel head struck the knobby bone on the driver’s wrist with a crack and the gun went flying.

That was it for the muscle. He doubled over, gripping his shattered wrist between his knees, and I stepped around him and laid the wrench alongside Falco’s head, a little more gently. I didn’t want to crush his skull, God knew why. He folded like a paper fan.

When I turned around, Rosecranz was covering the driver with the Magnum.

The big man wasn’t paying much attention. He was still bent into a jackknife and his face was gray. Rosecranz looked as tragic as
ever. The hand holding the gun was shaking. I took it from him, put it in my pocket and drew out my on .38. I have a thing against playing with someone else’s clubs. I told the old man to search Falco for weapons while I kept an eye on the driver.

Rosecranz knelt beside Falco and rose a minute later hefting a paper sack. “He had this under his coat.”

I went that way, still holding the gun, and peered inside the sack. I reached in with one hand drew out the heavy object. The engraved brass plate was riveted to the base.

“Whaddaya know,” I said. “He spelled Chester’s name right.”

The super looked around. “Just like
NYPD Blue..’

“You do need to get out more.” I reached over and turned off the TV.

“Police?” he asked.

I nodded. “Police.”

“Me?”

“No.”

He didn’t look any happier. “Why?”

“You’re a necessary evil.” I put the Golden Glove back in the sack, pocketed the .38, and picked up the Cruikshank file from the floor while Rosecranz worked the rotary dial on his old telephone.

“
Every cockfight
looks pretty much like all the rest, until you get to know it for the sport it is,” Jackie Brill said.

“Football’s a sport,” I said, “and you don’t have to watch a guy mop up blood and feathers at halftime.”

“No, football’s a game. Sport is life and death and taking risks.”

“The roosters take the risks. I like my chickens flame broiled.”

“Trust me on this. I’ve traveled enough in it to write a book on the subject, like that Irish guy that invented bullfighting. Hennessey.”

I lost a beat, and two or three sentences of Jackie’s high-octane pitch, before I realized he’d meant Hemingway. He was a drawn strip of forty-year-old jerky with shoulder-length dirty blond hair, a wind-sock moustache, and blue eyes pickled in scotch—the pizza delivery man in 1970s stag films—whose daily uniform only varied by which color of plaid flannel he wore over his jeans and black Surfaris T-shirt. He belonged to the fifth generation of a family whose fortune had built the Detroit Opera House, the public library on Woodward, and Joe Louis Arena.

His approaching me at Ford Field didn’t increase my chances of making the Social Register that season; his relatives paid him to travel in circles other than theirs. I was only giving him time because I was
stuck there until the parking lot cleared, and he’d come over to wait with me in the vacant seat next to mine.

When I’d heard enough about beaks dipped in poison and feed laced with antifreeze—the tricks of the cockfighting trade—I asked what he wanted. With the elaborate care of a proud father, he unshipped a crocodile wallet, stripped off the rubber band that kept it from falling apart, and handed me a Polaroid of the biggest, ugliest rooster this side of Lyle Lovett.

The bird stood straight as a reinforcing rod, glaring through chicken wire at the camera, with its head tilted like a boxer’s and a blood-red comb that flopped to one side like Hitler’s lock. It had a gorilla chest and railroad spikes for spurs. I gave back the picture. “That’s not a chicken. It’s the love child of my ex-wife and a California condor. Just out of curiosity, who was on your lunchbox as a kid, Strangler Lewis?”

“I went to Grosse Pointe schools. My lunch was catered.” He admired the snapshot, then tucked it away carefully and returned it to his hip. “He’s Prince Cortez, out of Montezuma III by Queen Isabella, whose father took top money at the world tournament in Tijuana three years ago. He’s just a year old and undefeated in three matches. Think Mike Tyson at eighteen.”

“How much you got down on him?”

“Betting’s for rubes. I’m buying him outright: two thousand cash.”

“He must be a hundred percent white meat.”

“I told you, you don’t understand the sport. One more win and the price goes to five.”

“If he’s that good, why’s he for sale?”

“His owner’s got INS on his neck; something about lying on his visa app about his connections with those Zapatistas a dozen or fifteen
years back. He needs juice wherever he can squeeze it. He’s overextended.”

“So buy the bird. You make that much a week just by staying away from Symphony Hall.”

“See, that’s why I’m glad I bumped into you. He wouldn’t sell Prince Cortez to me for ten grand. I need somebody to carry the pony down to Mexicantown and pick up the goods by proxy.”

“What’d you do, sleep with his wife?”

“His daughter.” He broke eye contact. “Carmelita’s a ripe little peach. I wasn’t the first to pick her, but I was the one she expected to stick. When that didn’t happen she went to the old man. So now Zorboron’s prejudiced against my case.”

“
Tiger
Zorboron?”

“
El Tigre del Norte
, they call him down in DelRay. His right name’s Emiliano. That’s like Mac in Mexican.”

Jackie’s local roots were showing. The old Hungarian section of town, once called DelRay, had been Mexicantown for years, attracting immigrants from south of the border to lay brick and pour mortar so their children could practice medicine and law. There was a gang element among them, of course, promising Old Country justice to new Americans and extracting tribute for the service. Emiliano Zorboron kept the tally.

I stood. The stands were still a quarter full, and the exits from the lot would be jammed tighter than Calcutta, but just then my car seemed a safer place to be. “Forget the prince, Jackie. You can mail order baby chicks by the crate for a lot less than two thousand. Try raising your own champ.”

He slouched in his seat, thin as the slats but loose as the peanut sacks blowing about the field. “I heard you had
cojones
.”

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t worry so much about machetes.”

‘I’ll pay two thousand to deliver two thousand. You went worse places for less for my uncle’s law firm. I was brought up soft, but I’ve been down there a hundred times.”

“It’s the hundred and first I’m worried about.” I left.

• • •

He was found in an alley behind a restaurant off West Vernor, the Mexicantown main drag. The cheap trash bag fell apart when a sanitation worker lifted it and Jackie Brill’s head rolled out.

They’d cut him in six pieces, tucked them together as neatly as Legos, and if they’d used a Hefty Steelsack Jackie might have been buried in a landfill and forgotten, which is the fate of heirs who fall out of favor and vanish.

As it was he fell back in when his remains were identified. The Grosse Pointe Brills turned the screws on the mayor, the mayor put the squeeze on the chief of police, and the chief cracked the whip on the precinct commanders, who set loose the dogs. The restaurant belonged to a cousin of Emiliano Zorboron’s, and even though the cousin lost his English under interrogation, and forgot his Spanish when a Hispanic detective clocked in, street informants were helpful; the story of the Tiger’s strained relations with Jackie was known from one end of Vernor to the other. Within twenty-four hours of the discovery of the corpse, Zorboron was under arrest for murder.

Run-of-the-mill homicides don’t make the local columns or see air-time. This space-saving policy pays off whenever a Jackie Brill dies under grisly circumstances. He was still on page one and ahead of the first commercial days later, when Mexicantown paid a call to my office.

I leave the door to the reception room unlocked during the day. You never know when loose money might blow in from the street while you’re at lunch. The doorknob turned while I was reaching for
it and an Aztec idol invited me inside. He was three hundred fifty pounds stretched out six and a half feet in a Hawaiian print shirt, cargo pants, and what looked like blue fur on his arms but which on closer inspection turned out to be tribal tattoos. His feet were disproportionately small—about size fourteen—in shining loafers, but his head was the size of a temple bell and looked larger still with a bushy mane of black hair combed up and over and down to his collar.

“Aloha,” I said.

“
Buenos dias. “
His bass rumbled like someone rolling a piano through an empty warehouse. “We’ve been waiting.”

He was big enough to be plural, but when I stepped inside from the hall, a human being who could have sat on his shoulder rose from the upholstered bench. She was about nineteen, olive-tinted, with full lips, eyes as big as the giant’s in a head half as large, and black hair hanging loose and glistening to her waist. She wore a white blouse tucked into black slacks cinched by a belt with a heavy silver buckle, cork sandals on her bare feet. She’d have looked appropriate in a mantilla and lace, or a cape made of turquoise, sitting on a sandstone throne.

The season was past for Hawaiian shirts and sandals, but those traditions don’t exist in Mexico or its northernmost branch.

“Mr. Walker?” said the woman. “I’m Carmelita Zorboron.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. I was hoping you were Dolores, the patron saint of private detectives.”

“You’re not surprised. My picture has been in the papers and on TV. I’m sure that upsets my father. Before this, the only time his picture was ever published he was wearing a black bandanna across his face and holding a rifle.”

“That was him? I thought that Zapatista story was a gag.”

“Not to him. He is a proud man. He denied it just once, when he wanted to bring his family to the United States.”

I thought she was more Anglicized than she acted. Her accent was too pronounced, her English too careful. But seeing her made me feel better about the hunk of pre-Columbian architecture in my little waiting room. I had an idea she could control him.

“Let’s go inside.” I rattled my keys. “This half of the building’s been unstable since they blew up Hudson’s Department Store. Senor Colossus exceeds the load capacity.”

“Felipe,” rumbled the big man.

“Okay if I call you Flip?” I opened the private door and held it. He said nothing, hanging back for Carmelita to enter first.

Inside the brain trust he pulled out the customer’s chair and hung on until she was perched on the edge. He remained standing while I took my seat behind the desk. There were no other chairs, but he looked as if he’d feel at home sitting Indian fashion on the floor.