Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (17 page)

“You’ve got a future as a spokesman for Big Tobacco. How much for the phone?”

He frowned. “Five hundred.”

I snapped another hundred straight and slid it under the glass. His eyes followed it. Nothing else moved.

“Is three.”

“What will you do with the money?”

“Put it with the rest until I am sixteen, then fly to Spain and run with the bulls.”

I added two more bills to the pile. He had the reflexes of a rabbit. I pinned his wrist to the bench with my hand just as he fisted them and leaned his weight forward to make a dash for the door. The bottle of Bushmill’s wobbled on its base like a tenpin. I caught it with my other hand just before it fell. The movement turned two heads at the nearest table, but only for a second.

Luis’ eyebrows shot high. “If you move so fast yesterday, we would talk this talk then.”

I let go of the bottle and held out my palm. He moved his shoulder once again and slapped the cell onto it. I let go of his wrist. The five hundred disappeared into the red jacket.

“Mexico’s closer and cheaper,” I said. “You can run with the bulls there, and you don’t have to wait till you’re sixteen. Go now.”

He was standing. He lifted his chin. “I am not a cripple.”

I held up the phone. “He’ll take care of that, then finish the job after you’ve told him where this is.”

His grin was almost as bright as the camera screen; it lit up that gloomy corner. “I send you a postcard from Mexico City.”

After he left I weighed the cell on my palm. Balance weights shifted in my head, assuming a pattern based on that Asian face. It tripped something in my memory I’d thought was dead, or obsolete at the worst. I got up, put the phone in my pocket, and picked up the Irish for the cab driver. Half the world was Asian. It didn’t have to mean anything. Most things don’t. But I was grateful for the German engineering in the small of my back.

NINETEEN

The building was a quiet single story of new-looking red brick at the corner of Grand River and Schaefer. A Tigers pitcher could stand on the roof of my building and hit it with a fastball, if the team had a bull pen. It wasn’t as new as it looked; sandblasting had ground decades of auto exhaust and pigeon incontinence off the bricks and glaziers had replaced the discolored windowpanes with bulletproof glass. In the old days it had been the second police precinct. Now it’s Detroit Homicide.

It lacked the charms of 1300 Beaubien, with its tall arched windows and interior of marble and mahogany and brass; but also its rotten floors and weeping ceilings, mementoes of generations of looters in the office of mayor. Once you got past the metal detector, the new place looked like the accounting department of any modern corporation, illuminated from behind frosted glass panels and alive with the twee noises made by desktop computers and printers. On my way to the heart of the order I overheard more telephone conversations in cubicles about ethanol futures than prior arrests.

John Alderdyce’s name was lettered in platinum on more frosted glass. When he barked and I opened the door, I might have been in one of those movies where an actor turns a knob on location in Delaware and steps into a studio interior in Southern California. The room looked as if it had been lifted by a crane from its original upper floor downtown and lowered onto this spot. The big plane table he used for a desk was the same and what looked to be the same stacks of file folders and jackets bound with giant rubber bands covered it in seeming disarray; in fact they were arranged according to a personal filing system that was harder to figure out than Stonehenge. Alderdyce’s police academy class picture hung on the same nail at the same drunken angle, the same scanner bound with friction tape to protect it when it fell spat and crackled on top of a pile of blank forms, and the same face made up of dark matter watched me from behind the desk. The gravitational pull the inspector exerted on every free-floating object that drifted into his orbit hadn’t lost its strength with the move; if anything it was even more powerful at ground level.

The academy picture had a rusty sepia look, the young faces shaved and shorn at the temples like members of an old-time baseball team, depressingly turn-of-the-twentieth century. He’d graduated only a class ahead of me.

“I’ve cracked more half-baked alibis with that picture than a team of men with rubber hoses,” he said, tracking the line of my vision. “They can’t sit still for wanting to get up and put it straight, especially the ex-cons. The correctional officers in this state make them be orderly.”

“My old partner said the North Koreans used to booby-trap crooked pictures to blow up when GI’s tried to straighten them.”

“They won’t let us have explosives. You missed the grand opening, if that’s why you’re here. The bottled water flowed like champagne.”

It was morning. I’d taken a taxi to OK Towing & Repair, collected my Cutlass and what was left of my suit coat from what was left of the Plymouth Gran Sport, parked in the usual lot down from my building, and walked the rest of the way. I’d determined to replace pills with exercise. Now I sat in the folding metal chair facing the desk and crossed my legs, tugging at the knee of my trousers to disguise the spasms in the long muscle of the game one. I slipped the clamshell phone from the inside breast pocket of my sport coat and balanced it atop one of his stacks.

He left it there. “I’ve got one, too. I miss cranking for the operator.”

“It isn’t mine.”

“Lost and Found’s at Thirteen Hundred.”

“You didn’t find one at Johnny Toledo’s, did you?”

His expression didn’t change, but it meant nothing. When it did it was strictly a hydraulic operation. “All we found was Johnny, all broken up into puzzle pieces. The coroner’s busy putting them together to see what’s missing. No big stash of cash in the place either, so there’s one more urban legend laid to rest. Where’d you get it?”

“You didn’t ask if it’s Johnny’s.”

“Sometimes I ask them out of order.”

“Sometimes I answer them the same way,” I said. “It’s Johnny’s, but it’s not the one he carried. He bought a pair and gave one to a kid who ran errands for him.”

“Who’s the kid?”

“His name’s Luis. His grandfather was the greatest bullfighter in the history of Argentina.”

“Whose wasn’t? Where’s he hang out?”

“Mexico, if he’s as smart as he is fast.” I gave it to him then, from the foot chase I’d left out before to last night’s exchange in the blind pig. I didn’t tell him the rest of Luis’ name. He’d need the head start in case he hadn’t jumped on my advice right away.

“We’d’ve closed the Marcus Garvey years ago if it wasn’t the best place to start looking for all the landed scum in town.” So far he hadn’t touched the cell. It might not have been there at all. “What you’re telling me is when Johnny’s phone didn’t turn up by his body you figured the killer kiped it, in case he got a message off to this Luis, who gave you a nice run through some of our more colorful neighborhoods.”

“I almost had him the second time, until he ran down a one-way street.”

“Ah. Shame on you. You made that haircut story so convincing I was going to ask you to recommend the barber.”

“I am ashamed. I don’t enjoy taking advantage of your native gullibility.”

“What’d he tell Luis over the cell?”

“Nothing. It was while he was being stomped on and he wouldn’t have had the time or breath.”

He watched me, his eyes burning steady as filaments under the ledge of his brow. “If an upgrade’s all you wanted, you can do a hell of a lot better for less than five hundred bucks.”

“I doubt it. This one has a camera.”

That took less than a second to sink in. He snatched it up and slung it open.

“That doohickey on the bottom, with a picture of an old-fashioned shutter job on it,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up.” He thumbed the button.

The skin tightened across his forehead as the image came up. It had been a long way from loose before. He’d lost flesh from age and the weight of the world, pasting skin to bone like shrink-wrap. His boys were grown and married, one of them was still speaking to him, and his wife, who earned more money than he did working shorter hours, was often away on business. Home for him was just a place to change horses between shifts.

None of this had come from him, although we’d known each other since we were children. The police community in Detroit is growing smaller along with the population, and no one in it has many secrets from the rest. Even a moth fluttering around its edges picks up morsels.

“This could be anything,” he said finally.

“It could be. It isn’t.”

“He could be dancing.”

“That cupid thing falling off the table behind him belonged to Johnny’s old man, by right of theft. He kept it as a family heirloom. It didn’t have a scratch on it until I found it yesterday, before I found Johnny. That fall put a big dent in it. I’ll bet you the five hundred I gave Luis that when you blow up the picture there won’t be a dent. That puts the time of the dance even with time of death.”

“We don’t know that’s when it fell.”

“Sure we do. You do and I do, and so does Luis.”

“If we had his testimony, we could bracket the time between his visits: Johnny alive, Johnny dead, with this character filling the gap. Only we don’t, so we can’t. You went home to catch some winks and he hitched a ride to Mexico.”

“He’s got a better chance of staying alive there than in an eight-by-ten room in County.” I tapped a finger on his desk. “Double or nothing says something else shows up when you blow it up. Blood.”

“Ketchup from one of Johnny’s hot dogs. You can’t do a chemical analysis on a photographic image.”

“You can’t convict anyone at all if you don’t pick him up. This is way better than a police sketch. How many Asian whirligigs are in town this season?”

“One less than usual, probably. Assassins don’t hang around once they’re made.”

“This one took Johnny’s cell. That means he knows what’s on it and where he sent it. He’ll hang around long enough to make the set complete.”

He transferred a stack of sheets from a telephone console, lifted the receiver, and tapped a key. “Hornet.” He cradled the receiver without waiting for an answer.

The lieutenant opened the door ten seconds later, filling the frame. He scowled when he saw me. “Holding or County?” he asked Alderdyce.

“Walker’s not under arrest. Run this down to the photo lab and tell them to get prints of the picture on it.” He stuck out the cell.

Hornet balanced it on his palm like a compass. “That’s an errand for a uniform.”

“I’d run it down myself if I didn’t have more to talk about with Walker. The fewer hands it passes through, the less chance some fumblefuck has to delete what’s on it by accident.”

“What is it?”

“A possible inspectorship for you. Retirement for me with the rank of commander.”

He seemed to draw a conclusion close to correct. His thought processes worked just fine or the department would have turned him out years ago as a health risk. “Want me to call Marshal Thaler?”

“Let’s keep it local for now.”

“Yessir, Inspector.” He took his baggy grin out with the phone.

Alderdyce measured the height of my eyebrows. They were up around my hairline. “It’d mean another meeting, and nothing ever gets done in those. It’s bad enough I’ve got to share this one with those assholes in Narcotics. Drugs are just a gimmick in the case. When a mistake gets made and someone sends out a life-taker to tidy up, it’s Homicide. I can’t work where I can’t swing my elbows without poking someone on either side.”

“How sure are we it was a mistake?”

“Dumping a load of grade-five heroin where there isn’t a user in a carload who can afford crack without making a withdrawal from some party store? Even Santa Claus does better market research than that.”

“Who says money’s the motive?”

“I thought about that for about half a second,” he said. “I’m a detective. Nut-job killers and terrorists bitch up the whole process of investigation. It’s tough enough to make a case for means, motive, and opportunity if the motive is you’re just mad at someone else or you want to scare the shit out of a lot of people you’ve never met.”

“It doesn’t have to be that kind of terrorism. Maybe someone’s just mad at Detroit, or using Detroit as a test lab for something bigger. They say Baby Face Nelson used to throw cops off his tail by dumping cash out his car window. Unloading industrial-strength dope by the long ton packs an even bigger punch: an OD on every block.”

He chuckled deep in his chest, like corn popping in a cave. “Find a part for Godzilla and you can sell that one to Hollywood. Just now I’m going to concentrate on picking up our dancer.”

“Is it all right if I go on looking for those converter boxes? This is the last day I owe Crossgrain.”

“I’d almost forgotten about those. Just don’t turn the wrong way down any more one-way streets.”

“I’m driving my own car now. The tail you’re pinning on me will want to know that.”

“Hornet told you that wasn’t us before. He’s a fat lazy slob who chews with his mouth open, but he’s no liar.”