Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (6 page)

I’d left the munitions behind, which was a wise choice, because they found the catch to the gun compartment I’d tricked out under the dash and sprang it open. They’d seen my investigator’s license and carry permit, so they didn’t ask any questions about it. One of them tugged the cover off the urn, slid out the aluminum canister, twisted loose the top, and stirred the
gritty contents with his fingers. He was older and darker than the others and might have been American Indian.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Client. I’m delivering her to her son.”

“I always thought human ashes would be more fluffy.”

“You wouldn’t if you knew her.”

He put everything back together and held it out. “Sorry for the inconvenience, sir. These days we have to be careful.”

I cradled the urn in one arm like a loving cup. “It was ‘cremains,’ wasn’t it? I should’ve said ashes.”

“Enjoy your stay in Canada.”

I shook loose of Windsor by way of Queen’s Highway 401 and followed it for two hours through miles of forestry the lumber sharks of Fifth Avenue and Pall Mall hadn’t managed to get their hands on, then took 2 along the shore of Lake Ontario, which on a cloudless day in June offered no horizon, rolling unbroken into blue infinity. Miles out, the occasional turnturtle profile of a laden ore carrier crept among the waves like dragons on an Old World map.

Toronto’s a clean city, not much crime of the violent kind, and no place for a professional who pays his bills with the interest accrued from human misery. From that perspective, there isn’t a thing wrong with it that twenty years of crooked politics and a casino or two couldn’t cure. The motorists obey the law without much horn action and the swarms of Hollywood second units that shoot there on location have to send back to the states for bags of trash to make the place look like New York City. Even the little man on the pedestrian
WALK
signal has good posture.

Loyal Dominion appeared to be doing well, despite the inequity in abductions, blackmail, and street thuggery; but then I supposed even Canadians stepped out on their spouses and ran away from home. A discreet sign bearing just its name stuck out perpendicularly from a four-story brick building that sparkled from recent sand-blasting. Its neighbors included the local office of a large United States travel agency and one of
those places that sell coffee in giant cups with whitecaps. I drove two blocks past the building and beat a BMW into a spot freshly vacated by a delivery van. The driver of the BMW tapped his horn and drove on without gestures. I hoped I wouldn’t need an interpreter.

The air was crisp, on a day when Detroiters were testing their air conditioning and wondering if they could get by without bringing a jacket to work for the drive home. There was a virile breeze blowing off the lake, and in the dead of summer you can still draw a horizontal line from there to the Bering Sea on a map. I pulled my suitcoat out of the back seat and shrugged into it as I walked.

A hidden gong went off when I opened the door to the detective agency. The reception room was a done-over storefront, with pale green carpeting, antique excursion posters framed on the walls, and a pair of panoramic aerial shots hung side by side above a doughnut-shaped work station of Horseshoe Falls roaring into a ravine full of smoky spray. I thought for a moment I’d entered the travel agency by mistake.

A freckle-faced towhead sprawled across the work station interrupted his conversation with the receptionist to look my way. He had on a denim shirt over a gray T-shirt and jeans with the cuffs turned up, the way U.S. youngsters used to wear them in the fifties. The scuffed sneakers seemed to be overdoing things, but then I didn’t keep up with fashions on either side of the border. Maybe I looked like someone who’d bled through a seam in the time-space continuum. He said something to the woman seated inside the doughnut, then undraped himself and strolled out through an open door in back.

The woman at the work station smiled up at me. A plastic hairband kept her pale brown bangs in place. She wore a white sweater with a gold chain holding it together in front and a blue silk blouse, and when she moved her hand, a charm bracelet on that wrist jangled and clanked like armored cavalry.

“Amos Walker. I have an appointment with Llewellyn Hale.”

“Yes, the American detective. Mr. Hale says to go right in. His office is at the end of the hall.”

This was the owner of the virtual English accent I’d talked to the day before. I said, “When did he say that?”

“Just now.”

The hallway led past two rows of open doors, beyond which young, casually dressed people sat in lozenge-shaped offices, cricketing computer keyboards and speaking over headsets. In between the doors were framed letters of official appreciation, signed by ministers and home secretaries. The door at the end was open as well. I raised my fist to rap on the frame.

“Come in, please, Mr. Walker. We don’t stand on ceremony here.”

I recognized this voice, too. It belonged to the freckled tow-head. He sat behind a small blue-enameled desk, immersed to his elbows in what looked like a tangle of black seaweed on the composition top. The walls were hung with floor plans of Byzantine temples and a small window behind him looked out on a street that was identical to the one that ran past the front of the building.

He extricated himself from the tangle long enough to shake hands and point at the plastic scoop chair that faced the desk. “I have to say you look like my idea of what an American private detective should look like.”

“Broke?” I sat down.

“Resilient. We’ve an easier time of it here, I think. The law is quite specific about what we can and can’t do. So long as we color inside the lines, it lets us alone.”

“It’s the same where I come from.”

He smiled. “Only you don’t always color inside the lines.”

“It’s a four-hour drive, Mr. Hale. Not a spaceship. The work’s the same.”

“You didn’t fly?”

“You have to be at the airport two hours early. By then I was in St. Thomas.”

“Next time you ought to take the train.” He caught me looking at what he was doing, and grinned broadly. “An industrialist in London found our surveillance equipment in his ceiling. This is how he delivered it. Whenever I have time on my hands I untangle another ten or twenty feet. Do you do divorce work?”

“Every time I get the urge I slam a car door on my hand and it goes away. My tag’s missing persons. Like Delwayne Garnet?”

He accepted the prod with a forgiving smile. “Mr. Garnet is no longer missing. He never was, actually. He’s been observing the statutes and paying the taxes of Canada right here in town for more than thirty years. That’s how we found him, by accessing the tax rolls in Ottawa.” He twitched an elbow toward a computer console on a stand. “He uses the name Lance West, as you suggested.”

“Where’s he using it?”

He slid open the deep drawer of the desk with a toe, dumped the ball of wire inside, and kicked the drawer shut. Then he spun his chair and lifted a marbled gray cardboard folder off a neat stack on a credenza under the window. “His address is on the first page,” he said, turning back and holding it out. “He works at home.”

It was printed in boldface. “Where’s Yonge Street?”

“Just round the corner. I wouldn’t be surprised if I passed Mr. West every day on the street. Shall we bill you, or would you rather leave a check with the receptionist?”

I read the report in my car. Lance West, 52, was employed by Lost Galleon Entertainment, publisher and distributor of a line of graphic novels, which Llewellyn Hale had described as “Comic books with a glandular condition”; complex stories of conflicted superheroes, disgraced police officers, and other societal misfits pitted against even worse antagonists in stories told through panels, speech balloons, and spelled-out sound
effects. Personal details were sketchy. There was no mention of marriages, children, or club memberships. But then all I’d authorized Loyal Dominion to do was find Garnet/West. A run through court records hadn’t turned up so much as a ticket for jaywalking, much less making or detonating bombs. International flight to avoid prosecution seemed to be the universal cure for political principles.

The Yonge Street address belonged to the second story of a building containing a seafood-and-pasta restaurant. I found a spot across the street and got out with the urn under my arm to read the menu posted in the window. It was placed conveniently next to a door with a gridded glass, behind which a flight of narrow steps led to the next level. The specialty of the house was ravioli cooked in squid ink. I should have packed a lunch.

A narrow alley separated the building from a stationery shop next door. I took it around to the back, where three cars shared a hundred square feet of brick paving with a pair of locked Dumpsters, and looked up at the second-floor windows. There were four, including two half-size crankouts that would probably belong to bathrooms. The square butts of air conditioners stuck out of the others. No easy exits there. An accommodating town, Toronto. I liked it more the longer I stayed.

The door to the front stairs was unlocked. The well had been painted recently, a pleasing shade of teal, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid taking in fumes. The steps creaked. There was nothing I could do about that. I missed my .38. Most serious injuries take place on staircases, particularly when there are felons at the top.

I made it to the landing without taking on any fresh holes. The place appeared to be in the middle of a spruce-up; a wainscoted hallway stretching to my right glistened with fresh varnish, but the floral runner looked as if it had been pressed between the pages of a book for sixty years. The jury was still out on the vintage bowl fixtures hanging from the ceiling. They
were either part of the retro remodeling craze or left over from when they were new.

There were two doors, paneled and painted, with numbers in scrolled brass fixed with brads to the center. The number on the second door was the one I was interested in. I used the section of wall between for a shield and knocked.

“Who is it?” The voice was muffled by the door. I never try to read anything into one in that situation.

“Delivery for Lance West.”

He was silent just long enough for me to wonder if he took deliveries of any kind.

“Okay, just a second.”

Bolts slid. Chains jingled. Latches turned. I got ready to put my foot in the door.

It opened wide, a surprise. A slightly older version of the Delwayne Garnet I’d seen in FBI telephoto shots stood in the doorway, wearing a gray hooded University of Toronto sweatshirt over brown cords with the ribs rubbed shiny at the knees, carpet slippers on his feet. He’d put on weight and lost hair, but the chin whiskers looked the same. At close range I was sure he was part black. Turpentine fumes rolled out of the apartment behind him.

Time and lack of interest from the other side of the border had blunted his reflexes. He blinked at me from behind half-glasses, then at the urn I was holding. “What the hell’s that?”

“Delwayne Garnet?”

He took in air and tried to put the door in my face. I got my weight against it and swiveled inside.

“I’m not a federal agent,” I said. “I’m not even a cop. I really am here just to make a delivery.”

He’d stepped back, expecting an assault. “My name is West.”

“Your mother’s name was West.”

He turned and ran.

I said hell, set the urn on a coffee table covered with artistic clutter—paintbrushes sticking up out of glasses, stained rags,
stubs of charcoal scattered like droppings—and followed him down a short hall. The door he’d slammed behind him was locked, but it was one of those bathroom locks with a straight slot, designed to slip with a butterknife in case someone fell in the tub and needed rescuing. I used my pocket knife on it and found Garnet with one foot on the toilet, wriggling to get his hips through the narrow crankout window.

I grabbed the waistband of his pants and pulled him back inside. His foot slipped off the toilet and he sat on the floor hard. Ten Most Wanted, my ass.

H
ow do I know these are Beryl’s ashes?”

Perched on a tall stool upholstered in black vinyl and silver duct tape, Delwayne Garnet had the top off the canister and was glowering inside. The stool was the only place to sit in the living room/office, apart from an unmade bed and a plaid armchair with a brick inserted in place of an amputated leg. I was sitting on one of its arms. The seat, sprung and sunken, looked like a miniature Bermuda Triangle.

“I can’t swear to it myself,” I said. “You hear stories about crematoriums. Does it matter?”

“I guess not.” He put the top back on and slid the canister into the bronze urn, balanced on the rail of a tilted drawing board. “Who was it said if we really believed in an afterlife, there’d be no need to visit a cemetery?”

“Billy Graham. I’ve got a receipt from the lawyer for you to sign. You get a copy, if it helps.” I found it in my pocket and held it out.

“Lawyers are fascists’ tools.” He took the receipt and read it. “What about the rest? The house on John R, all the money she squeezed out of her girls? A starving family in the Dominican
Republic could live for a year off what she paid the Detroit Police Department every Tuesday.”

“City turned the house into an empty lot years ago. The rest never came up in conversation. I suppose she made other arrangements.”

“She would. I was just a tax deduction to her.” He took a fine-line pen off the drawing board rail, started to write “Lance West,” then drew a line through it when I cleared my throat, and scrawled “Delwayne Garnet” instead. I took it, tore off the original, and gave him the carbon.

“She didn’t pay taxes. Her business was cash and carry. She raised you as a favor to your mother, because having a baby in Hollywood and no wedding band didn’t fly with the morals clause in a player’s contract. She didn’t have to. She went on supporting you after you ran away with the circus. She didn’t have to do that either. Then you stiffed her for better than thirty years without even a postcard. In her place I wouldn’t have given you my ashes. But that’s just me.”