Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (22 page)

“You’re on I-75. Get off at fifty-nine and double back.”

“More busy work?”

“Taxi service.” I told him where to meet us. I flipped the telephone shut and gave it back to Pet. “You need a place to stay tonight. What about clothes?”

“I thought I’d buy what I need when I get down there. I didn’t clean out the store,” she said when I looked down at the bills in my hand. “I’ve got credit cards, and I checked on doing an electronic transfer.”

“The credit cards are history, or will be when Morgenstern figures out you took a powder. Make the transfer as soon as you get away from here. Hoods like him collect bankers like china.” I tugged five bills out of the pack and held out the rest. “The fee’s five hundred a day, same for molls and sisters of charity. The gentleman I just called is on retainer in another matter.”

She started to say something. I held up a hand, shutting her off. Two sets of feet were squeaking their way up the third flight of stairs outside.

I slid off the corner of the desk, took her purse, and stuck the money inside. I gave back the purse and went to the door. The feet were in the hallway now. I waited until they passed the door, then opened it a crack. Shelly and Nicky had stopped in front
of the door to my outer office. Pet had been gone twice as long as she needed to put Morgenstern’s proposition to me. Nicky tried the knob, found out it wasn’t locked, and drew his Beretta. Shelly hauled the big fifty out into the open and they went inside fast, clapping the door shut behind them.

There wasn’t time for conversation. I took hold of Pet’s wrist and pulled her out into the hallway and toward the stairs. We were on the second flight going down when I heard a door slam above. I wasn’t holding her wrist now. We picked up the pace and hit the foyer on the run.

The car was where I’d left it after I rammed the Jaguar. I put her in the passenger’s side and started the motor just as the two men boiled out onto the sidewalk. The guns came up when they saw us. I laid twin black streaks all the way around the corner. The roar of the big 455 drowned out any revolver reports. I didn’t figure there were any; Shelly at least was smart enough not to open fire with the boss’s girl in the car.

I eased back a little when we joined the heavier traffic on Livernois. I gave the Wrong brothers three minutes minimum to get to the Jag and pry it out of the parking lot, and I didn’t want to give up the advantage by attracting a scout car. They’d just heave to and pick us up when we resumed rolling. In a little while I made my way down to Fort and First, where I pulled around behind a white glazed-brick building and eased between a pickup with a mangled right fender and a Dodge Charger missing its engine, where the battered body of my old Cutlass blended in like chalk on whitewash.

Pet worked the door handle on her side. I reached across her and yanked the door shut.

“We’re a little early,” I said. “Just sit back and soak up some history.”

“What history would that be?” Her voice shook. She was looking at the homely old building, with its outside doors marked
MEN
and
WOMEN
.

“The oldest drive-in gas station in the world. Also the first,
and still in operation. Before that, whenever you needed to fill up, you went inside and bought it by the jug.”

“What is it with this town and cars? Isn’t just building them enough? Do you have to have invented the parking meter, too?”

“As a matter of fact, we did.”

Last night’s storm had swept away the clouds. The sun hammered the asphalt, drawing ribbons of heat from it like molten glass. A seagull off course from the river perched atop the
ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED
sign and spread its wings, drying its armpits. I turned on the ignition and used the air conditioner. We’d been sitting there ten minutes when a red Malibu turned off Fort, hesitated as it rounded the building, and parked on the grass on the other side of the gutted Charger. Llewellyn Hale got out and walked around to my side. The sun brought out his freckles.

I cranked down the window and made introductions. He bent down and smiled at Pet. “Hi.”

“Hi. You’re standing on sacred ground.”

“Is that so?” He glanced at the seagull for explanation. It shrugged and fluttered off.

“Yeah. Father Marquette stopped here to gas up the canoe.”

I said, “How’s your room at the RenCen?”

“It’s a room,” he said.

“How many beds?”

“Just one, a queen. You moving in?”

“Not me. See if you can get another room on the same floor. Next door with a connecting would be best. You’ve got a neighbor for tonight.”

He smiled at Pet again. “Hello, neighbor.”

“She’s got a morning flight tomorrow from Metro. Set your clock for five-thirty and don’t let her out of your sight until she goes to her gate. After that you can head back to Toronto and send me a bill.”

“Bad husband?” he asked her.

“Is there any other kind?”

“Ask my wife. We work together.”

I remembered the receptionist at Loyal Dominion, with Hale draped across the station talking to her. I’d thought he was on the make. I reached across Pet’s lap, worked the catch under the glove compartment, and snapped the Luger free. I inspected the load and stuck the pistol out the window, butt-first.

Hale didn’t take it. “Sorry. I never saw the use.”

“You will if two guys named Shelly and Nicky show up. Shelly’s gun came with training wheels.” I waggled the Luger.

He took it, found the release, examined the magazine for himself, and rammed it back into the handle. I looked at him. He stuck the pistol under his belt. “I didn’t say I didn’t know how to handle one. You Yanks weren’t alone in Desert Storm.”

“Put it in an envelope with my name on it and leave it at the desk when you check out. They’re doing random checks at the airport.”

“I guess I don’t get to know what this is about.”

“That part’s up to your passenger. I’m under the seal of the confessional. If you spot a gray Jaguar with New York plates, beat it downtown. You won’t be able to stay ahead of it on the open road.” I grinned at his reaction. “You asked for work, don’t forget. You were bored.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.” Pet was looking at me. “What about you?”

“I’ve never been less bored in my life.”

“You know what I mean. Jeremiah flies off the handle when he loses a cufflink.”

“I’ll try not to hurt him. You got a passport?”

She took a navy folder stamped in gold out of her blazer and showed me the eagle. “I’ve kept it on me ever since it came through. He doesn’t know I have it.”

“How’s your Spanish?”

“I know, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ and ‘I have money.’ ”

“Hire a tutor.”

“Do they come with long sideburns and tight pants?”

“Better get an old fat one with boils. You’ll need to concentrate. You may not be able to come back next year with the hummingbirds.”

“There are newspapers in Venezuela. Someone has to write the obituaries.” She returned the passport to her pocket. “You got a passport?”

I shook my head. “I’m too old to learn any new languages.”

Suddenly she leaned against me and gave me a kiss I felt in the back seat. Hale turned away and admired the pickup with the crippled fender.

When we came apart she said, “You notice I never asked why. There are easier ways to make five hundred dollars.”

“Send me a list.” I reached out the window and swatted Hale’s arm. He turned back, saw my hand, and shook it.

I said, “Anytime you want to join the States.”

“Anytime you want to turn Tory.”

I looked at Pet. “You still here?”

She beamed, piled out of the car. When she looked back in I raised a hand.

“So long, Duffy.”

After the Malibu turned into the street I got out and stood on the corner, watching until it vanished. No tail.

I felt a little lonely. Cars pulled up to and away from the pumps, clanging the bell as they drove over the black hose on the pavement. The station had been self-service for thirty years and no one was answering.

If Shelly and Nicky earned what Morgenstern paid them, they’d be waiting for me back at my building. I used the pay telephone outside the station to call my service. My contact at the DIA had called. He’d found the videotape of Curtis Smallwood’s only televised fight. I was back on the clock.

H
e was a flawed poem, a plot with a hole in it, a showpiece bridge with a design defect; a thing made to impress, but that would collapse the first time pressure was applied to the right spot. That first time might be years in coming; it might come in the next minute. You couldn’t keep your eyes off him for fear of missing it.

Even in the shimmery, overexposed black-and-white Kinescope filmed directly off a TV screen, then transferred from film to videotape, Smallwood’s speed and ferocity shone. He moved in on his opponent smoothly and swiftly as if mounted on rollers, no holding back, and scissored at him, left, right, left, right, left-left, step, left again, following through boldly with each blow, no concern about missing and spinning himself around into harm’s way. He lived in the moment. Whoever tagged him The Black Mamba had known a little about the snake’s work ethic. He was fast, he was focused, but most important, he was young, and therefore immortal. The other man, Manuel Castillo, was three years older, smart and in good shape, but somewhere in those thirty-six months he’d lost that last bit of iron that makes all the difference between reckless
confidence and cautious percentages. He was trying to beat a tiger on points. It can’t be done.

But when the first flush faded, when you got past Smallwood’s speed and the oiled machinery of the lean, hard, dark body in the black-and-white trunks, particularly if you’d spent three minutes in the ring, any ring, you saw that he put too much effort into protecting his face. He’d bought into that “colored entertainment’s answer to Tyrone Power” offal the flacks were shoveling, at the expense of covering his midsection. He bent low enough moving in, but when he threw his right, he opened a window to his solar plexus. An opponent with patience and a sense of timing would wait for that next right, then duck in under his arm with a left hook and fold him like a Christmas card. Smallwood would probably recover—he hadn’t gone 23 and 0 without someone laying a glove on him somewhere painful—but his faith would be shaken. From then on he would divide his defense. That was where experience gained points over animal instinct. When he went down, he would go down on his face and stay there like poured cement.

Not this time, however. Smallwood battled Castillo to a lopsided decision at the end of ten rounds, annihilating the competition on the basis of a knockdown in the sixth, an episode on the ropes in the ninth, with the older fighter covering up before a fusillade broken up by the referee, and cosmetics. At key points the victor managed to appear calm and in control while the more experienced man looked panicky, even when delivering combinations that under normal circumstances would raise his stock. This was politics. Archie McGraw, or someone if not Smallwood’s manager, had understood that spectator sport is a beauty contest at bottom and that judges are influenced as much by a show of grace under pressure as by an exhibition of skill.

The fight was Smallwood’s all the way. Nothing less than a KO would have pulled things out for Castillo, and three or four rounds in it was clear he wouldn’t get it without support from
infantry. I wondered what had become of the loser. In 1948, there wouldn’t have been much in front of him beyond selling used cars in local commercial spots and an endless stretch of would-be comeback bouts with one-time fellow contenders and farmhands who trained by lifting harrows and stunning Angus bulls with short-handled sledges behind the barn. If he caught a break he might have wound up as a stunt double for George Reeves on
Superman
. If his English was good, some producer might give him a speaking part as a
bandido
on
Hopalong Cassidy
. Likely he went back to Mexico or Guatemala and found work pumping gas and reliving his best fights for starry-eyed youths in a back room smelling of Valvoline and scorched fan belts.

Sitting in the viewing room at the Detroit Institute of Arts, alone on a metal folding chair in front of a sixteen-inch monitor on a cart, I watched the tape through twice. I muted the sound the second time, to eliminate the distraction of the irritating blow-by-blow by the announcer; then as now, they never seemed to be watching the same fight I was, and were always puzzled by anything less pat than a knockout.

It was pure self-indulgence on my part. Nothing about the fighting form of a man who’d been in his grave fifty-two years would tell me who put him there and why. Reading about Smallwood had aroused my nostalgia for a game that had become silly and irrelevant in later years, debased by loudmouth promoters, circus matches with professional wrestlers, and psychotic apes. It was crooked and brutal, always had been, but somewhere between the tank bouts and the greased palms of the officials you got to see a couple of youngsters with good reflexes literally battling themselves up out of the gutter. For all I knew, the racket may have taken a different direction if Smallwood had given the roadhouse a pass that chill winter night.

Probably not, though. Boxing would always belong to the sharpers, the hoods in sharkskin suits and the media musicians
in their shock hairdoes. Any kid dumb enough to stick his face into a buzz saw for money would never learn how to split a buck into ten parts and keep eleven.

The camera work was bare-bones primitive. The Hollywood embargo against television had restricted the industry to equipment ancient even by the standards of Poverty Row, and the men who operated it were unemployable anywhere else. From the bawling introductions (“Ladeeeeeez and gentulmennnn”) to the manic clangor of the bell at the end of Round Ten, the lenses remained on the ring, with the exception of a broad sweep around the audience when the program came back from commercial (“Mabel, Black Label”). That may have been an accident, a miscue from the floor manager that caught the technician looking, followed by a hasty swipe and frantic grope for focus on the men standing on the canvas. I’d seen it the first time, of course, but hadn’t paid much attention for wanting to get back to the fight. Now I’d seen the fight.