Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (8 page)

“Jeff’s never mentioned him. Maybe he doesn’t know he even has a brother.”

“He knows. Someone told me they broke off communication right around the time you say Jeff went wild. Paul confirmed it over the telephone. Maybe he tried to tap his big brother for a getaway stake.”

“I’d have lent him whatever he needed. I’ve offered many times. He always turns me down.”

“Maybe he thinks you don’t owe him anything and Paul does.”

“He hasn’t needed money in some time. He tried to give us some when I was in the hospital, but Oral wouldn’t take it.”

“It’s not money. He’s driving thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Detroit muscle. Whatever he’s after, he talked to Paul about it recently.
Paul damned him for a smuggler, but he didn’t get into smuggling until he was in his twenties. How else would Paul know?”

“You said you weren’t paid to think.”

“It’s an expensive hobby.”

“Since you aren’t charging for it, do you think Paul knows where Jeff’s gone?”

“Someone else thinks so, or did. One of them is Oral.”

I watched her closely, but she’d been too long in the cold war. I needed a court order just to take her pulse.

“Oral doesn’t know about Paul,” she said. “
I
didn’t know, and I know my husband.”

“That’s a common mistake. He was up there New Year’s Eve, asking about Paul.”

“He was with me New Year’s Eve.”

“It was during the day, when he told you and his supervisor he was busy climbing poles after a storm up north.”

“He was. He came home exhausted. Why would he hire you if he already knew where to look?”

“That was before he came to my office. Maybe he ran into the same wall I did.”

“But how would he even know about Paul?”

“Those tree-toppers get around. Paul had flyers printed advertising his church, and Starzek isn’t a common name. Maybe Oral went up there on a hunch and when it didn’t pan out he didn’t think it was worth sharing.”

“If he knows Starzek is Jeff’s real name, he knows I’ve been lying to him all these years.”

“Another good reason to keep his mouth shut.”

“That’s why he agreed to hire you. My God,” she whispered. “He’s looking for grounds.”

“Could be he’s waiting for you to say something.”

She cocked her ear toward a small whimper, decided to stay put. Her eyes were Arctic blue and just as dry. “You said someone else thinks Jeff’s brother knows where he is, or did. Who?”

“A man named Herbert Clemson. He’s the one who told me about Paul. He’s been up there asking around, like me. He told me there wasn’t anything in it, but those federal types lie to their parakeets just to stay in practice. He’s with Homeland Security.”

She might have paled a shade. I saw a spread of blue veins under the skin, like sea grass in the shallows. It was the first real reaction I’d gotten from her.

“I was pretty sure he hadn’t been here,” I said, nodding. “So far his information is strictly basic, the stuff of public record. He’ll come around when he gets the rest. You’ll like him. For a government sneak he’s got a well-developed sense of humor.”

She looked away. “It must be the cigarettes. They think everyone who doesn’t pay the tax sends the difference straight to terrorists. It wouldn’t occur to them people just like a bargain.”

“Cigarette smuggling puts him to sleep. He’s more interested in what Jeff’s carrying now.”

“How do you know he’s carrying anything?” She was looking at me again. “You just said Clemson’s a liar on principle.”

“Jeff told me that night in Grayling he was switching loads. Not long after that, you got a Christmas card from him as much as telling you he was about to disappear. I’d tell you to figure out the rest, but you’re the client. Turns out there’s some thinking to the job after all.”

“Is Jeff dead?”

“It’s a theory.”

The house got as quiet as a house in a bedroom community ever gets. Even the baby had stopped fussing.

I shifted my cane to the other side and my weight with it. “I doubt it,” I said. “He’s fast and smart, and he’s lasted this long. I’m more concerned about the people who are looking for him.”

“Not Oral.”

“Not Oral. He’s big, but he’s got a high center of gravity.”

“Clemson.”

“What he represents. Some people’s idea of chess is to clear the board to take the king. Pretty tough on all the other pieces. And if Clemson’s right, Jeff’s running out of his class.”

“You said you fell on the ice.”

She was looking at my leg. I hadn’t realized I was rubbing it. That was a habit I’d have for a long time, like stroking a phantom beard.

“I didn’t say why. It was Jeff who picked me up.”

“Does that mean you’re not quitting?”

“Who said I was? Everyone lies in this house. I can’t concentrate on the questions I need to ask if I can’t trust the answers I’ve got. Let me know when you and Oral get your collar and cuffs to match. You can leave a message with my service. I’m going north.”

“You just got back from there.”

“I left something behind.”

“Find Jeff, Mr. Walker. Whatever happens to Oral and me.”

She went up to look in on Jeffie. I drove back to my house, got a pair of long-handled bolt cutters out of the garage, and put them in the trunk. Churches ought never to lock their doors. You never know when someone might need enlightenment.

T
he Web site was called Martyrs R Us. You can’t make this stuff up.

It belonged to a small Catholic press in some inexplicable place like Bayonne or Newport News. Its feature that month was a life of St. Thomas More, available in either trade paper or a deluxe limited edition bound in cardinal-red calfskin with a CD laid in of Gregorian chants, recorded by the brothers of Our Lady of Perpetual Dolour in Kirkwall, Scotland. You could also buy silver-and-enamel cuff links fashioned in the shape of John the Baptist’s severed head.

Barry Stackpole had found it by typing in “St. Sebastian” and patiently nursing the entry through sites on cities of that name, church-sponsored pie-eating contests, the late actor Sebastian Cabot, and—mysteriously—Benito Mussolini. There appeared to be no Christian sects registered online that paid any more than lip service to the arrow-riddled martyr of Paul Starzek’s Church of the Freshwater Sea. I hadn’t really expected there to be: Starzek hadn’t appeared to own a television, much less a computer.

At the last minute I’d postponed my return junket to Port Huron
to find out what I could about the pole-barn parish. Barry had moved again, from the suburbs into the belly of the beast. With the kill fee a satellite network had paid him not to air a six-part series on the history of organized crime in America, he’d bought a condo on the fourth floor of a former steam radiator factory in the shrinking warehouse district off East Jefferson, within pistol range of the Renaissance Center. Bullet-resistant windows provided a view of Windsor, Ontario, across the river and also of cranes picking apart what remained of industrial-age Detroit.

He’d paid enough for it to build a small mansion of six thousand or so square feet but, typically, had furnished it out of someone’s garage. The scattered sticks preserved the integrity of the loft’s bulk-storage origins, with steel utility shelves packed with commercial books on the mob arranged by geographical location and rows of transcripts of wiretapped conversations bound in paper covers stamped
FBI PROPERTY—DO NOT REMOVE FROM LIBRARY
. The only decoration was a battered eight-by-ten photograph in a brass document frame of Al Capone shaking hands with Babe Ruth, putatively signed by Scarface and the Bambino themselves. I don’t know how he came by it, but it was the only thing he’d taken with him through all his midnight moves. If I knew Barry at all—and I’d known him for thirty years and ten thousand miles—there was a working fire escape out back and a speedboat tied up to a dock for a fast exit. He wasn’t paranoid, just practical.

I sat on a plywood potato-chip chair salvaged from some failed high school next to the sheet-metal kitchen table Barry used for a workstation and watched him riffle the keys on the most expensive fixture in the house. He was dexterous for a man with only eight fingers. Joe Zerilli’s street soldiers had blown off the rest, along with a leg and a piece of his cranium, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he got around on his prosthesis and combed his fair hair across the steel patch.

The audio sample that came up with the Gregorians sounded like an overworked compressor in a refrigerator car. He turned down the volume on the speakers, tapped his mouse. His eyes never wandered from the seventeen-inch screen.

“What’s that you’re whistling?” I asked.

He stopped, then whistled the last couple of bars again. He hadn’t been paying attention. “ ‘The Thieving Magpie.’ Rossini.”

“Oh.”

“Theme from
Prizzi’s Honor.”

“Oh.” Different emphasis.

“Fun flick. Inaccurate as hell. The Mafia doesn’t employ lady hitmen. Never has, never will. Even if they look like Kathleen Turner.”

“Nicholson was good, though.”

“Nicholson’s good even when he’s bad. Ah!”

“What?” I never know where to look when I’m looking at a computer screen.

He played an arpeggio. Suddenly the monitor was filled with postage-stamp images in full color of what looked at first like freeze-frames from a slasher film. A score of images displayed every manner of agony possible of a nearly naked man perced from hairline to ankle with arrows. Some were as green as amateur Polaroids, others so lifelike they made me bleed from pure osmosis. Evidently the fate of St. Sebastian had inspired Renaissance artists who had gotten all they could out of Christ on the cross. Winged angels appeared in flocks. They could fly, but as to intercepting arrows they were as useless as hairdressers at the Battle of the Bulge.

“Fourth century,” he read. “Maybe earlier. Whenever the date’s unknown, it starts to read like pulp fiction. At one time I was studied up enough to take the veil. Not that they call it that when it’s the priesthood. Went to confession regular as the dentist. You’d be
surprised how fast those made guys turn back into altar boys when you sprinkle the conversation with ecclesiastical Latin. I’m talking about guys that put other guys’ heads inside drill presses when their notes came past due. Not bad for a Dutch Reformed kid from Grand Rapids.”

“Still go to confession?”

“No point. The
paisani
are on the run. Now it’s Jews, Russians, Irish Protestants, blacks, and Asians. The Mexicans still attend, but they don’t believe. Damn shame. Like what happened to rock after the Beatles landed.”

“I can’t figure out whether you hate the mob or love it.”

“I wonder myself sometimes. Then bedtime comes around and I take off my leg with my pants.”

He clicked on one of the postage-stamp images. A screen-size picture shot down from the top like a shaft of light. He was always upgrading his servers and equipment, supercharging the circuit boards and bundles of wire inside the computer tower like a kid tinkering with a hot rod. He had the hardware to manipulate the stock market in his favor, but he chose to use it for good, and the occasional exclusive.

I looked at the same pathetic punctured figure I’d seen on Paul Starzek’s living-room wall. This was a cleaner reproduction from a plate generations closer to the original painting. The carving on the pillar he was bound to was wedding-cake sharp and the blood streaming from his multiple wounds was bright arterial red. The picture dated back to the middle of the fifteenth century and the paint still looked wet.

I read the artist’s credit line. “Andrea Mantegna. Wonder who she was.”

“She was a he, you lowbrow flatfoot. The Renaissance didn’t begin and end with the
Mona Lisa.”

“Tell me about him, smart guy.”

“What’s to tell? Look at the picture.”

“What I thought. You don’t know any more about him than I do.”

“You didn’t know he was a him until two seconds ago. I thought it was Sebastian you wanted to know about.”

“I know how he died.”

“You don’t even know that. It takes more than a shitload of arrows to kill these Mediterraneans.” He turned the page, or whatever they call it. Anyway a paragraph of text came up. I leaned over to read.

Sebastian, of Gallic birth, was an officer in the imperial guard under Diocletian. Someone ratted him out as a Christian and he was strung up and used for archery practice. The widow of another martyr, St. Castulus, cut him down, patched up his wounds, and nursed him back to health. Diocletian found out and brought in more muscle, who beat him to death with cudgels.

“His emblem’s the arrow,” Barry said, as if I couldn’t read. “It ought to be the blackjack, but you can’t expect scripture to make sense.”

“Arrows take better pictures. A battered corpse is just side meat.”

He sat back. His eyes reflected the cursor blinking on-screen.

“What’s the attraction, Amos? Most of the stiffs you bring me are still warm. Anything in it for an out-of-work muckraker?”

“I thought you were busy ghosting for fake gangsters.”

“That’s cold. I thought we were good.”

“I can’t make promises, Barry. There’s federal interest. You know where that always leads.”

“Tell me. My FBI file has sequels. Is it them?”

“Higher.”

He rotated his chair, an ergonomic item he’d smuggled out of Rockefeller Center when NBC gave him his walking papers. “Attorney general? Don’t tell me you’ve got me in bad cess with the Pentecostals.”

“Not that high.”

“Homeland Security. Son of a bitch.”

“I was impressed myself.”

“This have anything to do with what happened in Grayling?”

I wanted to smoke. I didn’t know what it might do to his equipment. “That’s a personal debt. If I can help you out I will. I can count the friends who’d drive six hours to take me home from the hospital on the fingers of a leper. If it turns out I can’t, it’ll have to be a favor to be named later. Right now I’m walking backwards in the dark.”

“Well, if it’s as bad as what happened to this poor bastard, CNN will get it before I do.” He drummed a tattoo on the keys. The text vanished and his screensaver popped up. He’d traded his montage of classic gangster movies for a still life of Frank Nitti sprawled dead in an alley.