Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (8 page)

A floorboard sighed behind me while I was comparing the dead man’s acned complexion and lank dishwater locks to my informant’s description of Jamie Dunrather. I turned about a century too late. Later I thought I’d heard the swish, but all I was sure of was a bolt of white pain and a black mouth swallowing me.

“Put this where it hurts and shut up.”

I’d expected gentler words on my way through the gates, but after staring for a moment at the wet handkerchief folded on the dusty pink palm I accepted it. I found the sticky lump behind my left ear with no trouble and fought back fresh darkness when the cold damp cloth touched the pulpy mass. Bitter bile climbed my throat. My thick tongue made me think of Dunrather and thought of Dunrather made the bile rise. I swallowed, vaguely conscious of having spoken.

“Did I say anything worth holding against me?”

Sergeant Blake ignored the question. He was sitting on the ladderback chair with his hands on his knees and his face too far from the floor where I was lying for me to make out. But I recognized the suit. Now I became aware of movement around me, and spotted the white coats from the morgue. They had freed the body and were wrapping it. Fister stood by watching.

“Bag his hands,” Blake told them. To me: “I’m betting the wire made those cuts on his palms. He wouldn’t grab it that tight unless he was trying to save his life. It wasn’t suicide.”

I said, “The guy who slugged me must’ve been hiding behind the door. He had to go past the drunk on the stairs on his way out. Maybe the drunk saw something.”

“The drunk’s at Headquarters now. But he was as gone as you, and the guy took the service stairs out back when he heard us coming. We found this on the steps. He tossed my wallet onto my chest. “It’s been dusted. He wore gloves. If he didn’t know who you were before, he knows now. Feed it to me.”

I fed it to him, starting with what I’d learned at the road construction site. From past experience I didn’t try to sit up. A pillow from the iron bed was under my head, which was full of bass fiddles tuning up.

“I say clink him,” Fister put in. “It’s his putzing around scared the killer into icing Dunrather.”

“Unless Dunrather killed Gooding,” I said.

Blake said, “No, it’s good business not to clog up an investigation with too many killers. We got the same information you did by threatening to take Lawler downtown, and traced Dunrather through the computer. On our way up here we heard a street door slam on the other side of the building. Those new security places with no fire exits to speak of spoiled us; we didn’t think to look for a back way.”

I turned the handkerchief around to the cool side. “The bombing story hit the airwaves this afternoon. He’s mopping up. Dun-rather was a braggart, a poor risk.”

“Everything about this case screams contract.” The sergeant considered. “Except Gooding. There’s no reason a pro would bother with an old man like that, and he couldn’t have expected anyone but Gooding to blow up in Gooding’s car.”

I said, “He’s too sloppy for a pro anyway. If a seasoned heavyweight wanted Dunrather’s death to look like suicide he wouldn’t have let him cut up his hands that way.”

“Now that he knows who you are and how close you are, whoever he is, I guess maybe we saved your butt by coming in when we did.”

“You never get a flat tire when you need one,” Fister growled.

Blake leaned his forearms on his knees. “Cop killings are messy, Walker. Third parties tend to stop lead. It doesn’t matter much to the guy who stops it whether it came from a Saturday Night Buster or a Police Special. Fister will type up your statement and we’ll collect your signature later. You want a ride home?” He stood.

“My crate’s parked around the corner,” I said, sitting slowly. The fiddles were louder in that position. “And your good cop, bad cop number’s wasted on me.”

“You’re cluttering up the murder scene, Hot Wit.” He held out my dented hat and gun, retrieved from the floor.

You can’t live on the edge all the time, check behind all the doors and under all the beds and still be the sort of man who reads
Playboy.
But if you’re lucky enough not to and live, it makes you alert enough next time to spot things like a cigarette end glowing like a single orange eye in the gloom behind your office window on your way to the front door of your building. I did, and forced my echoing skull to remember if I’d locked the inner sanctum. Then I decided remembering didn’t matter, because people who don’t mean harm don’t smoke in strange rooms while dusk is gathering without turning on a light.

I mounted the stairs like anyone else returning to his place of business just before closing, but slower than usual, thinking. You get a lot of thinking done in three flights. By the time I reached my floor I was pretty sure why Emmett Gooding had been marked for death, though I didn’t know by whom, and none of it made sense anyway. It rarely does outside Nero Wolfe.

I walked right past the outer office and through the one next to that, closing it behind me. My neighbor that week was a travel agent with one telephone and one desk and posters of places that looked nothing like Detroit on the walls. The agent’s narrow sad brown face lit up when I entered, fell when he recognized me and registered curiosity when I lifted his receiver and dialed Police Headquarters.

Sergeant Blake had returned. When his voice finally came on the line I said, “How sure are you that Emmett Gooding left no survivors?”

“Why?” Suspicion curled like smoke out of the earpiece.

“Because someone had to be named beneficiary on his life insurance policy.”

“Who told you he had one?”

“You just did. Who is it?”

“I’m reading the report now. Twenty-five thousand goes to a girl out on the Coast, the daughter of an old friend who worked with Gooding on the line at Dearborn till he died nine years ago. But she hasn’t left San Francisco this year.”

“Double indemnity,” I pressed. “Fifty grand if he died by accident or mayhem.”

“Why ask me if you know? And how do you know?” I told him I was a detective. After a pause he said, “Anything else, or can I go home and introduce myself to my wife?”

“Do that. On the way you might stop by and pick up your cop-killer. He’s waiting for me in my office.”

The pause this time was longer. “Where are you?”

I told him.

“Okay, sit tight.”

“What if he tries to leave?”

“Stop him.” The line went dead.

I hung up and offered the travel agent a cigarette, but he wasn’t seeing the pack. He’d overheard everything. I lit one for myself and asked him if he’d sent anyone anywhere lately.

“Just my ex-wife and her boyfriend,” he replied, coming out of it. “To Tahiti. On my alimony.”

I grinned, but he could see my heart wasn’t in it. The conversation flagged. I smoked and waited.

There had to be and insurance policy for Gooding to have done what he did. It had been done before, but the victims were always family men and any half-smart cop could wrap it up in an hour. Single men like my almost-client who had outlived whatever family or friends they’d had tended to throw off everyone but hunch-players like me and tireless pros like Blake who touched all the bases no matter how hopeless.

At two minutes past five I heard the door to my outer office close softly. Swearing quietly, I killed my butt in the travel agent’s ashtray and advised him to climb under his desk. I didn’t have to tell him twice. I moved out into the hallway with gun in hand.

His skinny back, clad in an army fatigue shirt, long black hair spilling to his shoulders, was just disappearing down the stairwell. I strode to the top of the stairs and cocked the .38. The noise made echoes. He started to turn. The overhead light painted a streak along the .45 automatic in his right hand.

“Uh-uh,” I cautioned.

He froze in mid-turn. He wasn’t much older than Dunrather, with a droopy moustache that was mostly fuzz and a bulbous lower lip like a baby’s. He was a third of the way down the flight.

“Junior button man,” I sneered. “What’d Gooding pay you, a hundred?”

“Five hundred.” His voice was as young as the rest of him. “He said it was all he had.”

“He wasted it. He was a sick old man with nothing to look forward to but a nursing home. So like a lot of other sick old men he decided to go for the fast burn. But suicide would’ve voided his insurance and he wanted his dead friend’s daughter to get something out of his death. The stroke made up his mind. He remembered Jamie Dunrather bragging about all the bad cats he knew, got your name from him, and paid you to take him out.”

“I didn’t want to get mixed up in no cop-killing,” he said. “Who knew the old man was going to conk and someone else would eat that charge I stuck under his hood?”

“So when you heard about it you started covering your tracks. You cooled Dunrather and you would have cooled me too if the cops hadn’t interrupted you.” His thick lower lip dropped a millimeter. I pressed on. “You didn’t know it was the cops, did you? You knew Gooding had been to see me, you thought he’d told me everything, and you figured that by waiting for me back here you could ambush me and be in the clear.”

“Why not? When you didn’t show by quitting time I decided to hit you at home. You was all I had to worry about, I thought.”

“Pros give the cops more credit than that,” I said. “But you’ll never be a pro.”

The air freshened in the stairwell, as if someone had opened the street door. I was talking to draw his attention from it. His knuckles whitened around the automatic’s grip, and I saw he was wearing transparent rubber gloves.

“What’d he want to come see you for anyway?” he demanded.

“He changed his mind. When it came down to it he didn’t really want to die. When he couldn’t find you to call it off he was going to hire me to look for you. He read my name in the paper and that gave him the idea.”

He made a thin keening sound between his teeth and twisted around the rest of the way, straightening his gun arm.

“Police! Drop it!”

A pro would have gone ahead and plugged me, then tended to Blake on the second landing, but I was right about him. He swung back to fire down the stairs. Blake and I opened up at the same time. The reports of our .38s battered the walls. The man in the fatigue shirt dropped his .45 clattering down the steps, gripped the banister, and slid three feet before sliding off and piling into a heap of army surplus halfway down the flight.

In the echoing silence that followed, Officer Fister, who had entered the building a second behind his partner, bounded past Blake and bent to feel the man’s neck for a pulse. He straightened after a moment. “He’s killed his last cop.”

“The hell with him,” said the sergeant, holstering his gun under his left arm. Smoke curled spastically up the stairwell.

The dead man’s name turned out to be Jarvis, and he had been questioned and released in connection with three unsolved homicides in the past year and a half. I didn’t know him from Sam’s cat. You can live in a city the size of Detroit a long time and never get to know all the killers if you’re lucky.

Nha Nelson’s Oriental face
was shaped like an inverted raindrop, oval with a chin that came to a point. She just crested five feet and ninety pounds in a tight pink sweater and a black skirt that caught her legs just below the knees. Her eyes slanted down from a straight nose and her complexion was more beige than ivory. She was as Vietnamese as a punji stick.

I said, “My name’s Amos Walker. I think we spoke on the telephone about a package I have for Mr. Nelson.” I held up the bottle in the paper sack.

“Come in.” She gave every consonant its full measure.

Carrying my wine like a party goer, I followed her into a neat living room where two men sat watching television. One rose to grasp my hand. Reed Nelson was my height and age—just six feet and on the wrong side of 30—but he had football shoulders under his checked shirt and wore his brass-colored hair cut very close. His brittle smile died short of his eyes. “My neighbor, Steve Minor.”

I nodded to the other man, fortyish and balding, who grunted back but kept his seat. He was watching the Lions lose to Pittsburgh.

“Nha said a private detective called.” Nelson’s eyes went to the bottle. “It’s about the tontine, isn’t it?”

I said it was. He asked Steve Minor to excuse him, got a grunt in reply, and we adjourned to a paneled basement. Hunting prints covered the walls. Rifles and handguns occupied two glassed-in display cases, and a Browning automatic lay in pieces on a workbench stained with gun oil and crowded with cartridge-loading paraphernalia. My host cleared a stack of paper targets off one of a pair of crushed-leather armchairs and we sat down.

“Expecting someone?” I asked.

He smiled the halfway smile. “Friend of mine owns a range outside Dearborn. I was a sharpshooter in the army and I’d rather not lose the edge. If I were you I wouldn’t smoke; you’re sitting on a case of black powder.”

I looked down at the edge of a carton stenciled EXPLOSIVE sticking out between the legs of my chair and put away my pack of Winstons.

“David Kurch hired me to find you and deliver the bottle,” I said. “He’s the lawyer you and the others left it with when you formed the tontine.”

“I remember. He was an ARVN then, stationed in Que Noc.” Nelson’s expression turned in on itself. “That was only twelve years ago. It’s hard to believe they’re all dead.”

“They are, though. Chuck Dundas stepped on a mine two feet shy of the DMZ in ’seventy. Albert Rule was MIA for seven years and has been declared dead. Fred Burlingame shot himself in New York last year, and Jerry Lynch died of cancer in August. Congratulations.” I handed him the bottle.

He slid it out of the sack, fondled it. “It was bottled in some Frenchman’s private vineyard in ’thirty-seven. Al found it in a ruined cellar near Hue, probably left behind when the French bugged out. The tontine was Fred’s idea. The last man left was supposed to get the bottle. Were you over there?”

“Two years.”

“Then you know how preoccupied we were with death. But, hell, I forgot all about this till you showed up. When I saw the package I remembered.”