Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde (24 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - P.I. - Hardboiled - Detroit

BOOK: Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde
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“Them too. They came across the Bering Strait from Siberia. The only real natives were mammoths and midget horses, which they managed to wipe out long before Columbus. I never dug into the family history. I do enough of that kind of thing during working hours.”
“And just what are your working hours?”
“Nineteen seventy-five to the present.”
“There must be an easier way to make a living.”
“Spoken like a true American. There must be an easier way than singing and dancing.” I picked up my sandwich.
“You’re one of the few outsiders who realize that. I am always up before dawn and seldom in bed before midnight. I have no social life.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“What you hear is carefully choreographed. When you see a
picture of me on the arm of a bankable movie star, it is the climax of a complicated business negotiation. I might add they are the only climaxes I experience.” She stirred her soup. Then she let the spoon drift. “Before you take a bite of that sandwich.”
The nook was a tighter fit for me than it was for her. I was still sitting when she slid out and draped herself awkwardly across my lap and kissed me. Whatever she was wearing won out against the garlic and cabbage.
When we separated I put down the sandwich. “This how you worked the balcony scene?”
Her dark eyes were puzzled. Then she nodded. “I thought I saw something moving in the bushes that day. Did you see the picture?”
“I couldn’t afford it.”
“That, too, was a business deal.”
“What’s this?”
“Recreation.” She kissed me again.
“This won’t work here,” I said when we came up.
She undraped herself, but only long enough for me to stand up. This time I had leverage on my side. Her teeth scraped at my tongue. Then the kitchen went white.
“Amos!” It was a gasp.
I was already moving. The flash was fading from the window. I went out the back door and ran around the corner. His Geo was parked in the street and he might have made it except he turned and aimed his flashgun at me and I deflected my vision to the ground without slowing up. The bulb flared and I lunged and snatched the camera out of his hands. It was strapped around his neck. I twisted the camera and threw my weight against him, pinning him against the car and choking him. His Dodgers cap slid off. His greasy hair stuck down all around like Beetle Bailey’s, only a lot less tidy, and he was bald at the crown like a monk. He still needed a bath. In the light from the corner street-lamp his face was dark with congestion, the whites of his eyes glittering. I untwisted the strap, snaked it up and over his head in one movement, groped until I found the catch on the back of the camera, and yanked out the film like glistening entrails.
“I got Jeff Daniels on that roll!” He sounded more squeaky than usual. He was still filling his lungs.
I hit him hard in the chest with the camera. He expelled what he had and hugged it as if I might take it away again. I leaned my face close to his. “Get back in this roller skate and go. If I see it or you again I’ll have you up on a morals charge before you can say Woody Allen.”
“There ain’t no Lieutentant Franklin with the Detroit cops! I checked.”
“I mean for window peeping. Some of my neighbors have visiting grandchildren. There’s no telling what you had on that roll. It won’t convict you, but the complaint will follow you from here to the Riviera. Go back to Hollywood. All you have to worry about there is private security and Sean Penn with a snootful.”
I gave him some space. He looked around, found his cap, and slapped it onto his head along with a fistful of slush. It was still running down his face when he scrambled into the driver’s seat and spun his wheels. This time I stepped back far enough to avoid getting splashed.
Fritz Fleeman. The next time I heard the name, the L.A. cops had him in custody for trespassing on Alec Baldwin’s estate.
Gilia was standing at the back door when I waded back through the snow on the lawn. Her face was tight. “Did you get the film?”
“I trashed it. Let’s eat.”
She didn’t argue. The mood was as dead as Jillian Rubio.
I
slid into the curb around the corner from the Hyatt. With most of the windows lit up it looked like cut crystal against a sky swiped clean of stars. There was more snow coming, or one of those spitty February rains if the temperature went up.
She opened her door. “I’m sorry. A boy should be able to see his girl home.”
“I’m not a boy, and you’re not my girl. Apart from that you’re right. I still say I can use the publicity.”
“It isn’t that. We might run into Hector. He is a dangerous man.”
“I told you that. You didn’t believe me.”
“I did not know then he was in love with me.”
She let go of the door and leaned over and kissed me. Then she slid her glove down my cheek. “I cannot help thinking we have missed an opportunity,
hombre
.”
“We’ll always have Hamtramck.”
She laughed the way she sang, with all of her life behind it. The joke wasn’t that good. She got out then and swung the door shut. I watched her under the streetlamps, small and elegant in her furs, until she vanished around the corner. Then I let out the clutch and coasted away. The street shone like oil, with clumps of plowed snow piled like runes in the gutters.
I didn’t want to go home. I bought a copy of the
News
from
a sidewalk stand and found a Denny’s and read the paper front to back, sipping coffee someone had drained from a radiator with the night help vacuuming up crumbs around my feet. There was nothing new on the Rubio investigation, and dead Nico had dropped right out of the columns, replaced by suicide bombers in the Middle East. Even a shaky self-hanging was no competition for a nineteen-year-old fanatic with a vest made of C-4. But they found ten inches on the front page for the video Gilia was shooting in Mexicantown. Half of metropolitan Detroit had blown off a day’s wage hoping for a shot as an extra. After that I couldn’t find a thing to laugh at in the comics.
When I’d had my fill of black coffee and yellow press I paid my bill and drove around the suburbs, listening to an all-night truckers’ station selling broken hearts and Thermo King refrigeration units. There wasn’t much traffic, most of the houses were dark, and the store windows spilled the ghostly blue glow of security lights.
I wasn’t pining for lost love. I had boxes of .38 cartridges older than she was, and people who took up with stars who weren’t themselves stars always wound up looking like empties along the freeway. I had a skinful of caffeine and garlic and a bellyful of cops and crooks and university professors and a murder no one much cared about except the ones whose job it was to care about it and a middle-aged woman who bred large dogs,
muy fiero
. Except if it wasn’t solved before the feds mixed in, a lot of people would care on the double.
A small car almost clipped me as I turned into my street. It was going twice the limit and I wouldn’t have paid it any more attention than the close call with the truck earlier except it’s a quiet neighborhood. Not that many people drive through it that late, and when they do they aren’t hurrying. It was moving too fast and the block was too dark for me to make it out in detail. It might have been a Chevy Corsica. It might have been brown.
I parked half a block from the house, popped open the booby hatch, checked the load in the Luger, and stuck it under my belt on the left side where I could get to it fast using a cross draw. I flicked off the domelight and got out and eased the door into
the frame without latching it. I made very little noise, but it sounded like explosions in the stillness.
Most of the houses on the street were dark. Silver-blue light throbbed in the ground-floor window of the saltbox two doors down from mine where the old woman who took the Polish-language newspaper sat up watching infomercials on her black-and-white set. It went out suddenly as I was walking. That made it a little after 1:00 A.M. She was as reliable as the nuclear clock in the U.S. Naval Observatory for keeping time.
It took me ten minutes to get from my car to my front door. I kept as much as I could to the shadows and tried not to hurry through the lighter patches from one to the next. There was something on the door that might have been a leaf from last autumn, carried by a gust and stuck there with frost. There is always one house that attracts debris from the street and on that block it’s mine. I ignored the object and tried the knob. It was locked, just the way I’d left it. I hadn’t expected anyone waiting inside to give himself away by leaving it open, but whatever I had that passed for instinct and experience told me the house was empty.
I looked closer at the thing on the door. I found my pencil flash in my pocket and snapped it on. The thing was black, with fragile-looking membranous wings, which stretched out as they were didn’t extend any farther than a man’s spread hand. A tiny, bunched, ugly face, almost eyeless, but whose ears were nearly as large as a cat’s. Someone had nailed it to the center panel with a three-inch galvanized spike through the thorax. I didn’t know if it had been dead at the time, but if it hadn’t, that would have done it.
A bat. That was something new.
“V
ampyrum spectrum
,” Barry Stackpole said. “More commonly known as the vampire bat; the false vampire, actually, with a big range throughout South America. The true vampire is Central American, and kind of disappointing, growing no larger than our little friend here. This one’s a baby. Easier to smuggle through Customs, I imagine.”
We were looking at a screen-size closeup on his seventeeninch monitor. The squashed face, big ears, and exposed nasal cavity were identical to the face of the dead specimen spread out on a sheet of Xerox paper on the computer desk. I’d put on gloves to remove it from my front door and dump it into a Ziploc bag, which he’d opened and taken by the corners to slide the carcass out onto the sheet. We’d both heard too much about rabies in bats to handle it. Not to mention how many Bela Lugosi movies we’d watched.
It was Saturday morning. I’d left my little visitor in the garage overnight, slept James Bond–style with one hand on the Smith & Wesson under a second pillow, and made an appointment with Barry over the telephone after coffee. He was living in Highland Park that year, in a rented ranch style with a spare bedroom that looked like the control room of the Starship
Enterprise
; back when he was still working for other people, he’d had the reputation of never leaving a job without taking some of the equipment
with him. Apart from the technology, it was a modest little place in a suburb that was struggling against the gravitational pull of Detroit. That black hole was hungry for population and would annex hell to have it. When it comes to maintaining a low profile, Barry makes Salman Rushdie look like Madonna.
“How come you know so much about bats?” I said.
“Degrees of separation.”
Having thus enlightened me, he boogied his keyboard and brought up a file slugged SLEEPING WITH FISH. Without pausing, he scrolled through a glossary of underworld terms and plinked up rapid-fire explosions of color-coded sidebars, most of which lingered barely long enough for me to form an impression of what they contained. Some came with graphics. I spotted the comic valentine in Machine Gun Jack McGurn’s dead hand, several Mafia
coups de grace
(loose translation: bullet holes in heads), severed Yakuza fingers, a black hand traced on a scrap of paper, orchards of flaming crosses, a nightmare shot of a dead stool pigeon with his own genitals crammed into his mouth; other images that meant nothing to me, but had obviously meant a great deal to someone else. Whoever said crooks lacked imagination had never stopped to contemplate the many colorful ways the criminal class in every society has thought up to sign its work and warn nonbelievers of the wages of sin. Sin being whatever the local gang lord, warrior chief, shogun, Grand Wizard, or head accountant defined it to be.
“Black Panthers used to mail a crow to suspected FBI informers,” Barry muttered, possibly to himself. “They called it ‘slipping ’em the Jim.’ Clever.”
I made no comment. My back was sore from bending over his shoulder and the MTV activity on-screen made my eyes smart. For a lot of people, the Internet is a doorway to the universe. For me, it’s a boon to the aspirin industry.
“
Voilà!
Or, I should say,
olé!
” He’d made one final tap and sat back with a flourish.
I looked at a newspaper page with a blurred black-and-white photo of a thickset, bearded Hispanic in a storm trooper cap and
Sam Browne belt, stretching a small bat between his hands. The text was in Spanish.
“Holy what?” I said. “I left my Berlitz at home.”
“Oh, sorry.” He tapped five keys in the time it would take me to strike one on my old Underwood. The page disappeared and a translation took its place, in bold yellow letters against royal blue.
“But why wear out your eyes?” he said. “This story hit the fan several years ago. Seven or eight stiffs turned up in Medellin one week—hardly front-page material there, that’s a slow Monday—but they were all employed in the transportation business: taxi drivers, streetcar conductors, tour boat captains, commuter pilots, of which the city has more than Alaska. Mules, naturally; still not Section A. Except according to friends and relatives of the deceased, in every case the victim had received a dead bat by way of private messenger services. There was some confusion for a while about whether the bats were true vampires of the variety found in Nicaragua and Panama or the false type I mentioned at the start of my lecture. Not important. Finally someone thought to bring in a sociologist from the university in Bo
gota, who traced the practice back to the Chibchan Indians near Cartagena in the sixteenth century, who believed that stray bats only visited the dwellings of those who were about to die. Could be coincidence. Modern drug lords are not known to test high in anthropology. But after those corpses showed, the government started having difficulty finding paid informants at any price.”
“They identify the drug lord behind it?”
“ID’s never a problem down there; they list in the Yellow Pages.” He scrolled down two paragraphs. “Jose Cipriano Nun
ez, an avuncular character called Papa Joe by those who dealt with him directly. There wasn’t a waiting list. They tended to outgrow their usefulness inside six weeks and float picturesquely down the Rio Cauca.”
“What would a Medellin Cartel big shot be doing in Detroit? L.A.’s their big market.”
“Papa Joe’s not anywhere, except all over the central Cordilleras.
Someone scored a direct hit on his classic ’34 Bentley with an artillery shell in a mountain pass four years ago. Criminal waste of a beautiful automobile. Bó
gota suspects his brother-in-law, Francisco. He moved up five slots on the
Fortune
Five Hundred list of scumbags, scalawags, and highbinders the next week. There’s a footnote.”
He crossed his artificial leg over his good one and grinned at me. I waited. My back spasmed. I leaned forward then and tapped a couple of keys, any old couple of keys. A list of names appeared on the screen and a box with a snippy little legend asked if the user wanted to delete this file, yes/no. Barry spat a stream of invective, uncrossed his legs, and manipulated his mouse. A tiny blue pistol poked its muzzle at “no.” He waited, then exhaled, brought up his screen saver. This was a montage of tommy guns, armored sedans, and fedoraed plug-uglies from the golden age of the gangster film. I could never figure out if he hated racketeers or revered them, even as he was exposing them. Maybe he’d wanted to be one and his father wouldn’t buy him a blackjack.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” he said. “I thought you didn’t know a control key from a bottle cap.”
“I don’t. Let’s hear the footnote.”
“To be called Papa, it helps to be one. Hector Matador was the first one to call him that.”
I nodded. “I always thought Matador was a guerrilla name.”
“A show of surprise might be expected,” he said. “It might even be appreciated. When you play a friend for a numbskull, one might consider it the least you could do.”
His face was as flat as paint. It only got that way when he was close to blowing. The only thing separating his brain from the open air was a sheet of steel not much thicker than foil.
I said, “Boo frigging hoo. Sometimes the friend’s an enemy.”
“How many stories have I sat on for you?”
“Matador is one of those things you’re not objective about. If I’d told you he was in it, you’d have been on him like a bumper sticker. There’s a whole generation of would-be newshawks
around town who make their time following you from lead to lead. This one’s hotter than hot. It’s fission.”
“You said the other day this was a quid pro quo to be named later. Later’s now.”
“More than ever.”
I gave it to him, starting with Gilia at Cobo and finishing with the bat nailed to my front door. I had to lay it out in order; otherwise the two things didn’t belong to one story. Listening, he closed his eyes a couple of times, to commit a name or an address to memory. He’d gotten out of the habit of taking notes when the Supreme Court decided they were public property. The Adelaide episode made no visible impression. He went through worse every time the climate changed.
“Alderdyce had a hard-on against Matador,” he said when I’d wrapped. “Always has. I don’t see him for this. A slug in the brain’s more his style. And he could be in love, why not? Cops forget these guys have glands and follicles and a circulatory system just like them. If they were machines they’d never get caught.”
I leaned my back against the only section of wall not covered with electronics. He had the only chair. “That’s how I see it. I didn’t want to. The guy’s a coatrack. You want to hang something on him even if you didn’t bring a coat.”
“That’s how conviction records get broken. The Rubio woman had a partner. Either he surprised her on her way to the bus stop or she arranged with him for the ride and the bus story was just a blind so her mother wouldn’t know she was part of a double act. If there’s anything at all to that ‘in the event of my death’ dodge, it suggests a partner, someone to hold the evidence and deliver it.”
“Banks have safe-deposit boxes and hardly ever cut themselves in on blackmail,” I said. “Also she wasn’t greedy enough for two. Gilia tips her hairdresser more than five grand a month.”
“Winos kill each other over a slug of Boone’s Farm. Half of five grand’s a fortune when you’re working for minimum wage. Some people spend their lives too close to the ground to aim
high. There had to be a partner. People get abducted and killed every day by strangers. Some of them may be extortionists. One or two might be poisoned. Not with this poison, though, and not this victim.”
“Alderdyce said Stelazine was used to tie in Gilia and hike the ante.”
“Even a cop gets a bright idea now and then.” Barry had lost his police credentials when a packet of cash dropped out of a chief’s ceiling during remodeling and Barry broke the story on his cable show. The chief had gone to prison but the whistle-blower’s privileges weren’t restored. These days he didn’t even read
Dick Tracy
.
“He also thought Gilia hired Matador to do the job,” I said.
“I wouldn’t mind tying it around his neck myself. It would be one way to balance out the karma for all the knots he’s slipped. But you have to have a client.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Next time I get the urge I’ll stick a fork in a wall socket. After this job it’ll be a vacation.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”

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