Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (17 page)

“Thanks for what? I’m a born liar. You practically said it to my face.”

“I’ll say it, then. It used to be considered an insult. You’re a liar, but you’re nobody’s idea of an actor. You almost dropped a stitch when I accused you of planting that bug. That’s what I came here to see. You’re off the hook with me.” I got up. “And thanks for the booze. You’re a lot more generous than your grandfather.”

He set down his glass and rose. “He’d be glad to hear you say that. He couldn’t believe what I paid for a hot dog. He thought they should still be a nickel.”

He didn’t offer his hand. He was smart enough to know I wouldn’t take it. Part of being a made guy is avoiding disrespect.

P
et was still on the sofa in the sitting room. Her glass stood empty on the inlaid coffee table and a glance at the bottle told me the tide hadn’t gone out anymore. She’d hit the wall. She sat with her head back against the cushion and her eyes closed, hanging on to the seat with both hands. Her bluish pallor wore a tinge of green.

“It’s better with your eyes open,” I said. “You may not be tall enough for this ride.”

She started and they opened. They found focus, then lost it. “I thought you’d gone.”

“Which way, the window? Jerry’s not in my weight class.”

“Did you get what you wanted?”

“Did you?”

Focus snapped back. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Probably nothing. I’m a little sloshed. I’m going to catch a bite downstairs before I hit the road. Hungry?”

“What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. “Five-thirty.”

“I have to get ready.” She didn’t move.

“The Blue Heron. I forgot. You’d better grab something
from room service before you go. You might miss the elevator.”

“I’ve drunk before,” she said. “Who made you my alcoholic angel?”

“So sorry. Thanks for the hospitality.” I went to the door.

“Don’t leave in a boil on my account,” she said. “I get this way whenever I meet someone from outside. Jane was probably okay with Tarzan for months and months. Then the great white hunters came to call, and all she had to greet them in was a tiger skin.”

“Lion. Tigers aren’t native to Africa. And those skins I saw hanging in your closet would tame Hemingway.”

She smiled a sad Blue Label smile. “I forgot you’re a detective. Your cheek looks better. Not so red. Did he ask about it?”

“He thinks you objected to being called by your real name. I let him.” I touched the cheek with the back of a hand. It was still warm. “I was hoping to keep it alive a little longer. You didn’t give me a rose to press in my memory book.”

“Don’t mush it up. You didn’t make that big an impression.”

“That’s me, footprints in sand. Why a hummingbird?”

Her brows drew together. Then she remembered the tattoo on her ankle. “I got it last year. Do you know anything about them?”

“I know one weighs about as much as a playing card, and they’re the only birds that can fly backwards.”

“They migrate all the way to South America. Little things like that.” She stretched out her leg, turning the ankle so she could see it. “What do you suppose they do down there?”

“Same as up here, probably. Drink nectar and make little hummingbirds. Maybe Sundays they flock outside the church and bombard the bishop’s Buick. I have an idea they’re Protestants.”

“I hope you’re wrong. I’d hate to think they made it all that way just to fall into the same bad habits.”

“Why not fly down and see for yourself? The international terminal’s that way. Northwest has a flight to Caracas leaving every Thursday at eight
A.M
. Change planes in Miami.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s the work. You’d be surprised how many missing bookkeepers wind up in cabanas. Or maybe not. You can’t cover your ears and yodel all the time. It would annoy Jerry.”

I couldn’t tell if she’d heard. She was staring at the tattoo. Then Morgenstern bellowed from the bedroom, asking about cufflinks. She unfolded herself from the sofa, swayed on her feet. “Whoa.”

“Cheese is good,” I said. “The protein soaks up the alcohol. Order Stilton if they have it. It goes best with an expensive buzz.”

“You’re just a little Heloise, aren’t you? What do they serve on the flight to Caracas?”

“I don’t know. I only follow them as far as the airport. The rest I farm out.”

“I guess you’re no hummingbird.”

“Just a city pigeon.” I said good-bye and left just as Morgenstern shouted again.

The dining room was filling for dinner. The female linebacker was on duty at the reservation desk. She looked at her book and said the smoking section was full. That’s how things are in Detroit. We also chew the stuff and spit it into a Folger’s can between our feet. I said nonsmoking would be all right and asked if Joseph Sills was available. I didn’t have any fresh questions for the boxing waiter from Philadelphia. I just wanted a familiar face. She told me it was his night off.

She seated me near the kitchen. The waitress who came eventually took my order for coffee and veal and I watched the servers bumping in and out through the swinging doors until the food arrived. I ate and drank without tasting—I hadn’t had anything all day, but the Happy Hour upstairs had made me drowsy and I didn’t want to take a cab all the way home and leave my car on the street near my building overnight. Although it didn’t look like much from the outside, the engine
would pay the rent on a chop shop for a month. I was paying the bill when Captain Hichens came to light on the chair facing me. His gaunt frame in the black suit looked like a carrion bird perched on a branch. But then I had birds on the brain.

I blinked. Then I sat back holding my cup of lukewarm coffee. “The monitors by the metal detector. I should’ve known you review the videotapes.”

“Better. I have monitors in my office. Not the one where we talked; that’s just a dummy. I was busy, didn’t get the chance to follow it up till a little while ago. I caught Morgenstern and his squeeze on their way out to dinner. I got his side of your conversation. You want to give me your half, see if they match?”

I gave him the works, interrupting the flow only when the waitress came for the check. She asked Hichens if he wanted anything. He shook his head. When she left with her tip I told him the rest. I didn’t hold anything back. I didn’t know how much Morgenstern had told him.

Silence fell while he concentrated on the paper airplane he was making out of a napkin. He spent a lot of time on the flaps. All those years at the airport had taught him a thing or two about aerodynamic engineering.

“Morgenstern told me about the bug. It would’ve been nice if I heard it from you first.”

“I only found out about it this morning.”

“Think he planted it?”

“It made sense when I came. Now not. I’m pretty sure it came as a surprise to him.”

“Yeah, these wise guys have no experience faking innocence.” He tore out a notch and smoothed the ragged edges with a thumb.

“They never bother to fake it. They expect to be suspected, so they lie and count on there not being evidence to convict. You didn’t see his face when I sprang it on him. He might’ve taken out the twin towers, but he’s clean on this one. Since there’s no other way he could have known Garnet was here wanting
to solve the Smallwood murder, it follows he’s clean on that too.”

He folded a wing. “So it’s his sore luck he picked the time he picked to check in here. He ought to check his horoscope before he leaves home.”

“He said someone else picked the spot for his meeting. He wouldn’t say what it was about. Maybe he was set up.”

“That smells better. Not like lilacs. Who?”

“If I knew that, I’d be on my way off this case.”

“Who says you’re not?”

“Three guys: Meldrum, Zinzser, and me.”

“That’s a lot of guys.”

“I didn’t mention the guys who drew up the state constitution. I haven’t given you a legal reason to take me off it.”

“I don’t have to use legal means to do it.”

“Think it’ll fly?”

He looked up at me. Then he finished folding and sat back, propping the airplane between his forefingers. It was a pretty thing, balanced and sharp. He pushed his palms together and crumpled it into a ball. “Who else you talk to?”

I told him about Winthrop and Regina Babbage. He rolled the ball of paper between his palms all the time I was talking. When I finished he tossed it onto the table. It bounced, rolled, and came to a stop against my saucer.

“I’m headed up there tonight,” he said. “I made the appointment with Winthrop over the phone. He mentioned you. I wanted to see if you’d volunteer it.”

I didn’t show relief. I didn’t feel it. I said, “I like Regina for it better than I ever did Morgenstern; or Winthrop, if she’s as sick as he says she is. The motive’s fresher, and nobody can do you a hate like somebody’s mother. It’s the only thing holding her together.”

“You think the Babbages bugged your office?”

“They could have hired that part, but they’d have to know I had some connection with Garnet first. Beryl sure wouldn’t
have told them. If the lawyers leaked it, I’d need to know why, and that would take time I’d rather put into this end. Anyway I don’t see either of them slipping a gun through airport security. That wasn’t dumb luck. Garnet took planning. You can’t count on some guard looking at his thumb while you smuggle in hardware. You wouldn’t mistake this couple for Mr. and Mrs. James Bond.”

“They could have hired that part too.”

“Wait till you meet Regina. Given any choice she’d pull the trigger herself.”

“She’s sick, you said.”

I let him have that one.

He said, “I’d like to see that bug.”

“Later. As long as whoever’s listening doesn’t know I know about it, I’m out in front. I don’t know just yet what I’ll do with the lead, but I’m not giving it up without a warrant.”

He thought about that idea. Then he crumpled it too. “Speaking of guns, you can pick yours up at the City-County Building. I had them run it through ballistics at Thirteen Hundred. Garnet was shot with a thirty-eight revolver, unjacketed slugs, just like yours; but not with your gun. I thought you’d be happy to hear that.”

I thanked him dryly. Thirteen Hundred Beaubien is the address of Detroit Police Headquarters, and it was a sign of the changing times that the authorities there were willing to help out Wayne County. There’d been sour blood between them for a long time after sheriff’s deputies shot it out with undercover cops during a bungled sting operation in the seventies, and the relationship hadn’t improved during twenty years with a paranoiac in the mayor’s office who was convinced everyone outside the city limits was out to get him. No one ever did, for the record. Emphysema and the devil got him in the end.

“Am I still a suspect?”

“I’d grill the pope if he prowled around Garnet’s room before he was even room temperature. For a guy who says he
knows the state constitution, you sure pissed all over it up there. But you didn’t kill Garnet.”

“The constitution’s only forty years old,” I said. “They’ll just draw up a fresh one.”

“You still investigating this from the Smallwood end?”

“I’m starting to think that isn’t the reason he was killed. But I can’t shake the feeling it wouldn’t have happened if someone hadn’t killed Smallwood. Who said genius is the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time?”

“Sybil. I got another one for you. No sense only one of us going home fluttering his lips with his finger.”

I tensed. I watched him smooth out the crumpled airplane, examining it with all the attention of an FAA consultant trying to reconstruct a crash. Finally he pushed it away.

“You’ve got instincts,” he said. “If I didn’t have a few myself I’d think you’d been holding out on me. After you told me about Curtis Smallwood, I requisitioned the evidence from Oakland County. I had Detroit Ballistics compare the slugs that killed Garnet to the one the county coroner dug out of Small-wood’s brain. Father and son were both killed by the same gun, fifty-three years apart.”

I
studied Hichens, the bleak eyes in the unremarkable face cut off abruptly at the top by the straight black hairline, like a Greek mask. All around us crockery rattled, flatware jingled, busboys and servers murmured among themselves as they stripped the tables between onslaughts. White noise from an improbable future, buzzing disconnectedly below and behind the solid reality of December 31, 1949.

“Dead certain?” I said.

Hichens chuckled joylessly.

“Dead and certain. I looked through the eyepieces myself. Right-hand twist, identical wear patterns in the striations. At the risk of sawing off the limb I live on, I’d say the gun was never fired between the two killings. Not enough anyway to wear down the grooves any further.”

“So where’s it been all these years?”

“If I knew that, I’d know where it is now. My guess on the last would be the bottom of the Detroit River, with all the rest of the ordnance.”

“What kind of killer kills a man, waits for the victim’s son to grow up, then kills him too?”

“The kind I’d like to clap in solitary for however many years
he’s got left. I don’t care if he needs a walker to make it to the end of the cell block.”

“You know that won’t happen.”

“Juries are soft. They’d acquit Hitler if he showed up at his trial wearing a hearing aid. But that’s not my job.” He retrieved the creased napkin, then pushed it back. “You said the Babbage woman blamed Garnet for her son getting himself blown up. That’s a long time to carry a grudge. Maybe she had practice from before.”

“It’s a theory,” I said. “That’s all it is, unless you can put her in that roadhouse parking lot the night Smallwood bought it.”

“If she’s as bitter as you say, it might not take much leverage. You want to come with? I’ll let you be good cop.”

“Why so generous?”

“You’ve got a history with the case. My official partner wants to be sheriff. That doesn’t mean he’s a lousy cop, necessarily.”

“He just won’t dive for grounders.”