Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (2 page)

“Vicodin. I didn’t think I’d limped.”

“You was trying too hard not to. I take Demerol for the back. They never will learn how to design these seats for no eight-hour tour.” He slurp-slurped. “I’d hate to have to bust you some night for possession.”

“So far it’s legal. I’ve got an understanding doctor.”

“That’s what the suburbs are for. Working late?”

“Not working lately. Business picks up around Devil’s Night.”

“Mine, too.”

“Teenage runaways, mine. All you’ve got to worry about’s vandalism and arson.”

“Scraphounds now, too. Strip the copper plumbing out of empty houses, pry up manhole covers, snatch bronze angels from cemeteries and sell ’em to salvage yards. Dig the fillings out of your teeth if you pass out at a bus stop. Whole city’s got a bad case of metal-eating termites. If they could get to the suspension cables on the Ambassador Bridge we’d have to swim to Canada.”

“There’s always the tunnel.”

“I’ll take my chances in the water, not under it.”

I drummed my fingers on the top of the coffee can in the plastic bag in my lap. “Scavengers, is that the job?”

“That’s
my
job. Man can gripe, can’t he?” He took a business card out of a pocket of his leather tunic and held it out between his first and second fingers.

I took it. It was glossy red with gold letters. I had to turn it this way and that in the reading light to cut the glare. Mansanard siphoned grapefruit juice as I read.

PAST PRESENCE

“Everything you require
for the Modern Regressive Lifestyle”

R. Crossgrain, Prop.

I turned it over. The back was blank. It was as spare as mine: no fax, cell, Web site, e-mail; just the street address and a landline. It was a collector’s item. “What’s the modern regressive lifestyle?”

“I ain’t just sure, but I think you’re living it.”

I got the rest of what I needed and then his straw gurgled and he crumpled the box in one fist and drove around to my car to save wear and tear on the leg, dropping the box in a curbside container on the way. I thanked him and we separated. Driving away I couldn’t shake the feeling I was still dreaming and heading toward that same triple smashup I’d been dreaming about for a week.

I never got the chance to tell Sergeant Mansanard what came of his tip. Four months later, on a mission to buy something flimsy for his wife for Valentine’s Day, he walked in on an armed robbery in the Victoria’s Secret store in the Fairlane Mall in Dearborn and took a slug through the heart before he could get to his holster.

TWO

Marcus Street didn’t feature often in the news. So far no meth labs had turned up there and it wasn’t one of those neighborhoods where body bags came and went as regularly as rain in Brazil. The address was spelled out in script on the wooden front porch of a narrow brick house in a row of them, with a driveway it shared with the neighbor next door and a TV antenna shaped like an airplane on the roof. Someone had taped a square of cardboard over a broken pane in the front door. I figured that was where the burglar had gained entry.

A tall man with an egg-shaped head opened the door at my knock. He wore a burnt-orange cardigan over a white bowling shirt and shapeless slacks the color of anything. An aluminum baseball bat rested on his left shoulder.

“You want to keep that down around hip level,” I said. “Shove it hard into their belly. Swinging takes too much space.” I held up my ID folder.

His eyes moved slowly behind rimless glasses, reading the credentials. “Is that badge real?”

“County phased out the design ten or twelve years ago. You can check out the rest with the state police in Lansing.”

“I did, right after you called. Your license is up for renewal in December, Mr. Walker.”

“I haven’t decided yet whether to apply. You’re Mr. Crossgrain?”

He nodded, taking inventory. I’d caught a couple of hours’ sleep—without dreams—and turned out scrubbed and shaved in a new suit. I seemed to pass inspection, because he stooped to lean the bat against the inside of the door frame and shuffled out of my way in slippers that left his heels bare. He closed and locked the door behind me and led me past a living room full of furniture draped in transparent plastic down a short hallway into a kitchen.

“Will you have a cup of coffee? I’m sorry if I was rude. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I’d like one, thanks. I bet you slept sitting up with that bat across your lap.”

“It was horrible. I’ve never been broken into before. It’s a violated feeling. What do you take in it?” He unplugged a percolator shaped like a spaceship and started pouring.

“Just more coffee.” I looked around. “I grew up in a room just like this.”

The kitchen was large, built back when everyone in the house gathered there, painted bright green and yellow, with a fluorescent halo ceiling fixture, a laminated table with matching chairs, and a Westinghouse refrigerator with old-fashioned coils on top. An old-fashioned gas range with one of those handles you pumped to bring up the pressure squatted on curved cast-iron legs at the end of a Formica counter.

“The stove and fridge were probably before your time. It’s over the top, I suppose, but you should’ve seen the place when I moved in. The seventies have a lot to answer for when it comes to architectural vandalism. Renovating it is how I got started.”

I accepted a steaming cup, white with a green stripe and as thick as my finger, and we sat down at the table. I watched him doctor his cup with sugar from a kind of dispenser I hadn’t seen in years. “So this is what you sell?”

He smiled. He was a year or two older than I was, with grayish skin that looked as if it would preserve thumbprints like putty. His teeth stood out white against it. “Just what part of ‘Past Presence’ didn’t you understand?”

“Sergeant Mansanard told me a little. I figured you could fill in the blanks.” Crossgrain’s place had been his first radio call of the midnight-to-eight tour.

“He wasn’t very encouraging. He wrote down what was missing, with a description, said if anyone tried to sell it and someone saw the stuff on the hot list or otherwise got suspicious the police might recover some of it. He didn’t even dust for fingerprints. Is that what they do now, just keep records of crimes for the statistics?”

“The cops solve most crimes. Forensics’ pretty strung out. Burglary falls below the middle on the list of priorities. It’d be different if you’d managed to get murdered.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Apparently not.” I drank. The coffee tasted heavily of aluminum, but that might have been the power of suggestion based on the Buck Rogers percolator. “It helps to keep things in perspective. Getting ripped off isn’t as bad as it can get. I understand you weren’t home at the time.”

“I got in late from a show in Chicago: Mid-twentieth-century collectibles. It was dark and I hadn’t left the porch light on—purposely, to avoid attracting burglars.” The smile now was bitter. “I didn’t notice the pane was broken until I opened the door and stepped on the glass.”

“Dead bolt’s not much good when there’s a window within reach of the knob. Is this where you do business?”

“From the basement, by appointment. I used to have a shop in Sterling Heights, but I lost my lease when the casinos went in here in town. All that new revenue was going to trickle down to the suburbs, you see. An upscale restaurant stood to pay more rent than a broken-down curiosity shop.”

“What was taken?”

He sipped from his cup. He’d kept the spoon in it and braced the handle with his thumb to keep from poking himself in the eye. The gesture reminded me of my father, in a kitchen much like his. “How much do you know about high-definition television?”

“I know I can’t afford one.”

“Many can’t, but they’re going to have to scrape up the money soon if they don’t want to abandon their reality shows. By federal law, every station in the country is switching to a high-def frequency. That’s the end of analog broadcasting. If you have a regular cathode-ray set like we’ve had since the dawn of television, you won’t get a signal.”

“You’d think Washington had enough to keep it busy without that.”

“The
excuse
is the government wants to reserve the analog frequency for emergency transmissions in the interest of national security, but some of us suspect the flow of campaign money from the manufacturers of plasma and liquid-crystal television receivers helped nudge undecided legislators off the fence. The home electronics industry stands to make trillions—not billions;
trillions
—from that decision over the next ten years.”

“Not to mention give aid and comfort to enemy extraterrestials.”

He stirred his coffee with deep concentration. “I’m a small businessman, not a conspiracy nut. If I went around lining hats with Alcoa wrap I wouldn’t have any time left to balance my books. But even an idiot might ask what’s to prevent a terrorist from getting hold of a 1965 Curtis Mathes and tuning in to the latest from NORAD.”

“Can we start with your situation, and work our way up to the Pentagon?” I was starting to think the morning was wasted, and I had a lot more of those than dollars.

“Sorry. I’m a little paranoid today. Somebody broke my stuff and made off with some of my other stuff. That’s the stuff I’m getting around to. I wasn’t quite accurate when I said you couldn’t watch HDTV on an analog set. I sell a type of converter box that unscrambles the transmission. It won’t deliver HD quality, but it allows you to watch anything broadcast over the new frequency at a fraction of the cost of updating your existing equipment. That’s what’s missing.”

“They stole a converter box?”

“They stole twenty-five, the entire shipment I took delivery on last week. They were still in the shipping boxes.”

“What are they worth?”

“Fifty apiece, wholesale. I’d planned to sell them for seventy-five.”

I’d gotten most of this from Mansanard, but raw data only, and he hadn’t seemed to have grasped the concept of just what had been stolen. If politics hadn’t knocked him out of the Criminal Investigation Division, his lack of imagination would have sooner or later.

The loss came to just under nineteen hundred, less than four hundred over my standard retainer for any job that looked as if it would take longer than a day. “A fifty percent markup seems low for retail.”

“It was going to be a come-on: Buy an analog set and I’d throw in the converter for seventy-five. A hundred for the box alone.”

“Extended warranty?”

“Of course.”

The morning was looking up. “Have you got a picture of one or something so I’d know what I was looking for?”

“I’ll show you one in person. I bought it to try out before I took the plunge.”

We left our cups behind and I followed him through a door and down a flight of plain wooden steps in a narrow well that smelled like potatoes. The place had been a Michigan basement at one time—meaning a hole in the ground with a house on top of it—and no matter how you finish one of those and what kind of equipment you install to change the air you can’t quite get rid of that homely funk. I’d never liked it since the day my mother sent me to the potato bin for a big baker and I grabbed a live rat.

At the bottom, Crossgrain palmed up a row of wall switches. There was a pause, then four rows of fluorescent tubes in ceiling troughs fluttered on, pouring icy light into a room the length and width of the house. Three oak timbers supported a massive beam that prevented the first and second floors from collapsing into the basement, where aisles invited visitors to inspect the inventory: vintage suits and dresses on pipe racks, incomplete sets of furniture, radios encased in walnut and Bakelite, bolts of curtain material, curved steel toasters, squat oil burners, wallpaper in rolls, men’s and women’s hats on Styrofoam heads, cartons of flatware, portable record players, and two rows of TV sets with tiny picture tubes in big oiled-wood cabinets with speakers covered in gold cloth. The twentieth century was having a rummage sale.

Everything was arranged more or less neatly, some of it in stacks that would have to be dismantled to get to the items on the bottom. Here the fetor broke down into a compost of mildew and dry rot, old furniture polish and the unique stench of scorched electrical insulation.

Crossgrain turned off a loudly whooshing dehumidifier. The room fell silent except for the insect buzz of a faulty light fixture. I said, “People buy this stuff, I guess.”

“Can’t get their fill. I’ve got a customer who drops in at least twice a week, which is ten times more often than I make significant changes in the stock. Once he bought a whole bedroom suite, birch and bird’s-eye maple. Some days he leaves with just a spoon. He’s as gay as a bishop, but heteros are just as hot to make a fetish of the past. Every time Bill Gates or Steve Jobs announces a new iPod, I get a flood of orders for steel phonograph needles. Here.” He lifted a black rotary telephone off a dusty plant stand. “Two years ago I couldn’t give these away. Now I’ve got a waiting list. The sheer therapeutic pleasure of actually
dialing
a number—even if that number belongs to a cell phone—can be as relaxing as a day in a hot tub.”