Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (24 page)

The living room was like a mineshaft after the sunny front yard. I found a switch that turned on a pair of lamps with pleated paper shades. The walls were paneled in blonde laminate with a duck-hunting scene in a cherrywood frame and diplomas sealed in clear Lucite. She would have journalism degrees. I didn’t know if she would hunt ducks. An orange carpet with black flecks covered the floor wall to wall. There was a sofa and some chairs and a coffee table stacked to the corners with paperback mysteries, rectangles of paper sticking out like tongues from between their pages. She looked to have eight or ten of them going at the same time. I wondered how she kept track of the clues.

On a wall opposite the hunting print hung a rectangular arrangement of stamped metal strips in a steel frame held together with thumbscrews. Random squares that might have been tintypes broke up the rows; zinc photoengraving plates from a hot-metal printing operation, locked in a steel chase among the rows of type. The letters were all backwards, but I read the names KENNEDY and CAVANAUGH in the bolder heads. It was the front page of an eight-column broadsheet newspaper set in lead alloy. The masthead was done in Old English letters:
The Detroit Times
.

“I see you found the monstrosity. It’s not exactly a theme you can decorate around.”

I turned. She was standing inside the square arch with a Stroh’s longneck in each hand.

“I thought you wrote for the
Free Press
.”

“I did, until Mr. Hearst offered me twice as much to write for the
Times
. He used money like a blackjack. I’ve made worse mistakes. He died the next year. The chain rattled on without him, but the paper ceased publication in nineteen sixty. That’s the front page of the last issue you were looking at. Everyone else was stealing office supplies.”

“Was that your last newspaper job?”

She nodded, double-stacked some books to clear space on the coffee table, and set down the beers. “It’s a wonder I lasted that long. Mr. Hearst made me fashion editor. I dressed the same way I do now.”

“You look comfortable.”

“I’m not. I’m recovering from a stroke, and I’ve got a urinary tract infection that would cripple a bull elk. Diabetes, polyps on my colon—growing old is a serious health risk, Mr. Walker. You shouldn’t consider it without a note from a physician.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I can’t think why. It isn’t as if knowing it will make a damn bit of difference.” She dropped heavily onto the sofa and snatched up one of the beers. “These things are best drunk ice cold. Stroh’s went to hell when they dynamited the plant on Jefferson.”

I picked up the other bottle and sat on a platform rocker with as much play in it as an eight-week-old puppy. She’d replaced the furniture recently. Indentations in the carpet showed where a monster davenport and what had probably been a matched pair of recliners had stood. The place wasn’t any cleaner than it had to be, without appearing slovenly. She didn’t strike me as a bad housekeeper so much as an indifferent one. I liked her so far. But it was early in the visit.

“When the paper folded I still had some contacts I’d made
on the Coast when I covered Smallwood,” she continued. “I rented out this house, took a place in Malibu, and wrote script continuity for ten years. Continuity, that’s what they call it when you plug the holes left by the writers they pay two thousand a week. I worked on
Cleopatra
, but then who didn’t? Couple of Jeff Chandler vehicles, one line in
Lawrence of Arabia
, which was the only thing they cut. Then the youth cult rolled in and I was retired at the ripe old age of fifty-three. I wrote a memoir. You can read it, if you like. It’s holding up the short leg of the nightstand in my bedroom.”

“What did Mr. Van Eyck do?” I drank. She was probably right about the brand, but the bottle was sweating and pleasantly cold to the touch.

“Mr. Van Eyck was my father. He gave up farming for five dollars a day at Rouge and blew an artery working in the glass plant in nineteen twenty-seven. He was forty. I never met a man who measured up.”

She leaned back suddenly and dug in a dress pocket. I thought she was going for medication, but she pulled out a salt shaker and shook it into her beer. She offered me the shaker. I said no thanks and she stood it on the table. She could have strangled a poodle with one of her big, heavy-veined hands. “How do you know Barry?”

“He fell on me in a shell hole,” I said. “He didn’t say he knew you.”

“He might not remember. We shared a table at the press club once; they let us fossils in every time one of the rags hits the century mark. He was busy trying to nail the waitress.”

“I think he’d remember you.”

“I’m a fascinating old gargoyle,” she averred. “The last twitching remnant of the venerable and abused sorority of sob sisters. Give us two columns and a seat in the gallery at the murder trial of an auto heiress and we could squeeze tears out of a shotgun.” She lifted her bottle, toasting herself, and drank it down to the label.

“Speaking of murder,” I said.

“What murder?” She licked a crust of salt off her upper lip. “That little pug committed suicide.”

I stopped in mid-swallow.

“Suicide by blonde,” she said. “Peroxide’s poison.”

I
opened my throat and let the beer do its work. “You snagged me by the gills there,” I said. “I thought you were being literal.”

“I was. Men are dumb. There’s a skull and crossbones on the bottle, plain for all to see. But they always lead with their dicks.”

“Jack Johnson liked blondes. It didn’t get him killed.”

“It didn’t make him Gene Tunney either. Anyway, we’re not discussing race.”

“Sure we are. That’s what sent you to Hollywood. Fausta West’s producer would never have threatened his life if he were white.”

“Wellstone didn’t kill Smallwood. He didn’t pay to have it done either.”

“He told you that?”

“He didn’t have to. Back then, reporters were paid to think as well as report, not like now. Now, when people ask me how I spent my tender youth, I tell them I was in prison. Who needs the stigma?” She tipped up her bottle.

“What convinced you he was innocent?”

She shook her head, like a bulldog shaking a rat in its jaws.
“Suppose you tell me why Smallwood’s suddenly current.”

“That’s fair. The other day a man named Delwayne Garnet was shot to death at Metro Airport, with the same gun that was used to kill Curtis Smallwood. There’s more. Garnet was Smallwood’s son by Fausta West.”

“I read about the Marriott shooting,” she said after a moment. “The cops must be sitting on the rest. How’d the gun get past security?”

“We’ll ask the killer when we find him.”

“Who’s
we
?”

“Me and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Your card says
private
.”

“I’ve had three clients on this case so far. At present I represent the legal firm retained by Garnet’s late mother.”

“Beryl.” She nodded. “I wondered why the name was familiar.”

“Did you know her?”

“Not personally. The Freep frowned on its lady employees hanging out at hookshops and gin mills, at least during working hours. Beryl Garnet’s place was like a clearinghouse for leads. Male reporters went there daily to hang their ears out. Schlongs too, probably.” She shook her bottle, drained it off, stood. “Ready for a second round?”

“Not yet.” Mine was still half full.

“Don’t count on getting me drunk. I cut my teeth on Kansas City shine.”

I’d have guessed Kansas. The more she drank, the more hardrock came out in her speech.

When she came back with a fresh longneck I said, “You were going to tell me why you don’t think Wellstone killed Smallwood.”

“Was I?” She sat down. Then she smiled. Her teeth were worn down by eighty-plus years of chewing her consonants. “Okay, my turn. Wellstone was a pansy. He was terrified of the publicity he was getting in connection with a murder. It was
okay to be a fruit in Hollywood even then, so long as it didn’t get into the papers. He’d survived one witch hunt already, naming names to the FBI to avoid appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never said that. That was homework. The other thing, the faggot thing, was an open topic everywhere in L.A. Howard Hawks threw him off the
Red River
set for servicing Montgomery Clift in his trailer.”

“A smart prosecutor could use that against him.”

“Even if it didn’t convict him, it would wash him up,” she said. “He was too smart to put himself in that position for the sake of a minor contract player. Oh, he threatened Smallwood, I’m sure of that; the goons were just getting their hooks into the studios then, and intimidation was already part of the negotiating process. Believe me, if I thought for one moment he’d carried it out, the front page would’ve led with it the next day. The libel laws were just suggestions then.”

“Then.”

She let that one sail past. She’d already taken her swipe at the postmodern press. “So I took in some sun, met Lana Turner and Clark Gable, and took the train back home with enough feature stuff to fill the section. Gable had false teeth and bad breath, and he was still sexier than the milk-babies who fill theaters today. Or I’m told they do. I haven’t seen a picture on the big screen since they turned the Michigan into a parking garage.”

“What about Lana Turner?”

“Stoned to the eyeballs. Some things about the town never change.” She drank, eyes twinkling. “Incidentally, it wasn’t her daughter who stabbed that thug Turner was sleeping around with; that one was all Mama’s. Years later I collaborated with the screenwriter who wrote that little scenario for the boys in PR.”

“Let’s concentrate on one crime at a time,” I said. “Who killed Smallwood?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t have squandered my God-given talent on that puff I filed.”

“How well did you know him?”

“I didn’t. I only met him once, when I interviewed him for a piece I sold to a national magazine. You wouldn’t have heard of it. It folded after twelve issues, along with three-quarters of the ring magazines that sprang up after the war. They glutted a narrow market.”

“Gloves and Laces.”

She lifted her eyebrows above her bottle. “It appears I have a fan.”

“Smallwood was one. He had the article folded up in his wallet the night he was killed.”

“That’s no testament to me. His father was a barber in the old Black Bottom. Before Curtis put on his first pair of gloves, the closest that family came to fame was straightening Billy Eckstine’s hair when he was in town. Curtis was one of the lucky ones. For every one of him, there were ten colored boys who climbed into a ring to get out of the ghetto and left their brains on the canvas.”

She took a swig, swallowed fast, and thumped down the bottle. She’d remembered something. “That interview was an exclusive, a scoop. He’d won the Castillo fight and was on his way home from New York. Every reporter in town had a copy of his train schedule. When that oilburner pulled into the Michigan Central, you couldn’t swing a cat without knocking the hat off of one of them. I left my cat at home, borrowed the society editor’s Auburn, and broke every law between here and Monroe; also a headlight when I clipped a mile marker passing a haywagon on an inside curve. Monroe was the last stop before Detroit. I boarded there and bribed a porter for the number of Smallwood’s compartment. That skunk Archie McGraw tried to have me thrown off the train, but Smallwood was still high from the win, and maybe from something else. Maybe he thought I was a blonde. Anyway he agreed to the interview. I had it all down in my pad by the time the rest of the pack
crowded in. I’ll never forget the look on H.G. Salsinger’s face when I stepped down from Smallwood’s car. He was cock-of-the-walk in the sports section of the
News
for fifty years. But not that night.”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t run you out of the business.”

“I filed the interview with the
Free Press
,” she said. “That was the job, and the bonus I got allowed me to replace that broken headlight. The thinkpiece I freelanced to the magazine paid me enough to put something down on a car of my own. Not an Auburn. Topping a hundred on those roads put me off speed for life.”

“Speaking of speed. What was Smallwood high on besides beating Castillo?”

“Nothing, maybe. I didn’t know him; maybe he was born giggling. If I had to guess, it would be cocaine. Ben Morningstar had that racket buttoned up tight in this town.”

“Morningstar was high on the suspect list.”

“He lived there. Next came Tony and Vito Giacalone, and then Sam Lucy. To read the papers, you’d think they started the eighteen oh-five fire. I don’t buy Morningstar for Smallwood. He had too much invested. We used to say you could do anything to Specs: screw his wife, spit in his face, call him a pimp in public, and all he’d do was shake his head and laugh. But steal one goddamn nickel from him, and he’d crucify you.”

“What about Fausta West? Did you ask Smallwood about their relationship?”

“No, and I wouldn’t have if it had been public knowledge then. ‘Thou shalt not piss off the subject.’ That’s one commandment we all lived by. Anyway that was before they had their picture taken together. I didn’t ask him about the girls I knew he was seeing either. It was a piece on boxing.”

She looked annoyed. I wondered why.

“I heard there was a band singer and a department-store model and a cigarette girl or two.”

“You cast a long line.” She tilted the bottle, but she didn’t drink. She lowered it. “Nobody’s mentioned the model in fifty years. Who broke silence?”

“Morningstar’s grandson. He calls himself Morgenstern. He said Ben rambled toward the end.” I chipped at the label on my bottle with a thumbnail. I didn’t want her to see my eyes. “What about the model?”

“I saw her on the train. She was leaving the compartment as I was heading toward it. I recognized her from Hudson’s. I had to buy a black dress to cover Henry Ford’s funeral at St. Paul’s.”

“What was her name?”

“How should I know? I just wanted to throw money at a dress and get out. I told you I wasn’t a clothes horse.”