Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (11 page)

“More than capable. I never knock what the other guy is selling. One of the questions they’ll ask is if you knew where Garnet has been keeping himself these past thirty-four years. A sheriff’s investigator who wants to be sheriff can turn that into a case of harboring. If he doesn’t, the FBI will. They need to shift the blame before someone on Capitol Hill thinks to ask them why they couldn’t find him and you could. The media will want to know the same thing. Meldrum and Zinzser could be this year’s Enron.”

He straightened to his full height and faced me. His height wasn’t all that full, but he was narrow and made the most of the illusion. It would impress juries. “Are you threatening extortion?”

“I’d be bluffing. I’m fresh out of merchandise. I told a county captain everything yesterday. I’m surprised you haven’t heard from him before this, but I got the impression he thinks the manual is just a suggestion. All I’m after is a client.”

“We’ll take our chances. Would that be all right with you?”

“Hunky-dory. Someone comes up missing every day. Someone else will drop around eventually with a checkbook to ask me to look for him, and if he doesn’t, I’ll go to that second someone myself, just like I came to you today.”

“In that case, if you’ll excuse me.” He looked at his watch, a thin gold oval with an ostrich band.

I didn’t move. “There’s another thing to consider, and you
can have it for free. I assume you’re handling the rest of Beryl Garnet’s estate, apart from her ashes.”

“A number of institutions were named in the will, not that it’s any of your affair. You’ll get no details under this roof.”

“She could leave it to Underwear for Animals as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t ask. When homicide’s involved, a lot of penny action draws more fire than it would ordinarily. IRS will be curious about whether she declared all her illegal income. Since she ran a cathouse for forty years, it would all be illegal. The tax boys won’t care as long as they get their cut. An inquiry like that could tie up the estate until the Tigers win a pennant.”

“We have an excellent tax attorney on staff.”

“You’d better have a good PR guy, too. Otherwise you’ll go on
Sixty Minutes
as the best-dressed collection of pimps in history.”

He didn’t throw himself down on the carpet and gnaw on a table leg. I hadn’t expected him to. He did the next best thing, which was fold his hands behind his back. In that position he resembled the Duke of Wellington, when it still looked like Waterloo could go either way.

“And how do you, one man in one little office, propose to prevent that from happening?”

“It’s a suite,” I said. “One and a half rooms and a water closet. I can’t prevent it. No one can. But with a professional investigator on retainer to get to the bottom of the Garnet mess, you might manage to look like a respectable corporation of counselors that got a little egg on its face and would like to know who threw it.”

“Have you ever worked in public relations?”

“No. I do all my lying for free.”

He unlocked one of his hands and stroked the slick surface of the folder in front of him. “My partners and I retain an agency to conduct our investigations. We only approached you in the matter just ended because the late Mrs. Garnet requested it. Why should we use you now?”

“There’s every reason not to. Your partners will scream at you. I don’t have any extra manpower unless I go outside, which is playing with fire when it comes to keeping things confidential, and what connections I have don’t go far up. My references are no good, because if having top billing in a firm this size means anything, you already checked those out when Beryl mentioned me. I can’t offer a thing your regular agency can’t a couple of hundred times over with everything on it, except one.”

“Good old-fashioned Yankee know-how?” His face broke into crossgrains when he lifted his lip.

“A running start.”

I couldn’t read his expression. He’d stood in front of too many juries. “You’ll save us money on legwork? That’s your offer?”

“Two or three thousand, minimum. Assuming your agency’s minimum is my maximum.”

“Two or three thousand. We spend that much every week on erasers.”

“Your people make too many mistakes. You brought up money, not me. I’m saving you headlines. One local television station can air a hundred sound bites in one day. Multiply that by however many stations there are in this country. Don’t even count the twenty-four-hour news networks, where the crawl never stops. Ask your partners where they stand on that.”

“Are you actually saying you intend to solve this—murder?”

“I may solve two. No charge for the extra.”

“The father? What the devil do I care who murdered him?”

“Garnet cared. Maybe someone else cared he cared. It’s the long shot of long shots: fifty-three years and counting. But it has to be played.”

“With my money.”

“Yours and Zinzser’s. Is there a Zinzser, by the way, or is he like Betty Crocker?”

“He’s semi-retired. His always was the wiser head.”

I heard the knock before he did. I didn’t say anything. After a moment he shook himself like a lean old dog. “Yes?”

“A man to see you, Mr. Meldrum. He says he’s with the sheriff’s department.” Even from the other side of a door, Judy sounded as exotic as she looked.

“I’ll see him in my office.” To me: “Wait in reception. If I send word to show you out, that will be my answer.”

“I’ll wait in my own stall. I know the way out of it.”

“Please.”

He got the word out with effort, as if it had been stuck between two teeth. Pleaders hate to do it for free.

“Okay. Your magazines are newer than mine, anyway.”

“Thank you. I’ll pay you for your time.”

He held the door for me and locked it behind us. Captain Hichens towered over the receptionist in the hallway. I’d just about convinced myself he couldn’t be as tall as I remembered. His bleak eyes showed no expression when he recognized me. Expressing plenty. He shook Meldrum’s hand because it was in his way and pulled me aside by my sleeve. My arm was in the sleeve and I felt a bruise starting.

“Why the hell are you here?” He didn’t shout. He didn’t keep his voice low either. The other two people weren’t there for him.

“Chipped a tooth opening a beer can. Meldrum says I’ve got a case against Stroh’s. Or maybe it’s a case of Stroh’s. My Latin’s rusty.”

“Stay out of my murder.”

“Okay if I investigate Curtis Smallwood’s?”

“That what you’re investigating?”

“You want to see the tooth? I wrapped it in evidence tape.”

“Where’s that gun I told you to bring around?”

I reached under my suitcoat and took it out of its holster. He gripped my hand when I offered him the butt. My fingers pressed fresh holes in the cylinder. “Not here, goddamn it. Bring it to the City-County Building.” He looked around, appearing to notice for the first time we weren’t alone.

Meldrum cleared out some phlegm. “My office is down on your left, Sheriff.”

“Captain.”

The lawyer sliced his way down the middle of the hall and turned through a door near the end. Judy had drifted away on a zephyr.

Hichens watched me put away the .38. “I had someone call the TV station.
The Letter
started at noon. The first gunshot on film took place two minutes and forty-two seconds into the broadcast. That checks with the hostess, who said West called just before twelve, asking you to meet him in his room; provided the killer turned on the set and timed his shots to coincide with the shots on the soundtrack. That’s consistent with time of death as estimated by the coroner. In thirty years I’ve never had a more precise estimate.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Life isn’t Legos. I get nervous when all the pieces fit. Shooter could’ve done it as much as twenty minutes earlier, called downstairs pretending to be Garnet, then switched channels on the TV so we’d think he used the movie to cover the noise. Almost any other program could be cranked up loud enough to do the trick.”

“I’m still covered. I got there a half-hour early. Ask my waiter. He’s a light heavyweight named Joseph Sills.”

“I talked to him. He said you were interested in someone else who ate in the restaurant, same time as you. Morgenstern was the name. First name Jeremiah.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He said he told you he heard someone address the man as Mr. Morgenstern.”

“I didn’t know Jeremiah was his first name. Did you talk to him?”

“I talked to a woman who said she was his companion; a redhead I wouldn’t mind spending quality time with myself. She said he was in a meeting. She also said someone else had
been asking about him. He even left his name and number.”

“Guilty,” I said. “If there’s a law against it.”

“There is when it gets in the way of an official investigation. What made him so interesting?”

“Mr. Morgenstern is the kind of person who calls attention to himself.”

“Think he called attention to himself for a reason?”

“I didn’t at the time. Maybe, if everything happened twenty minutes earlier. He was in a meeting when I called. If it was the same one, I hope for his sake he got a lot of work done. Who is he?”

“Venture capitalist, the redhead said. I don’t know what that is, but whatever he does he does out of an office in Manhattan. His flight got in at eleven-twenty; plenty of time to do West and meet his party outside the restaurant for lunch. We’re tracking down the party now. Of course, that would mean he slipped the gun through security at LaGuardia.”

“Guy got a barbecue grill through the Seattle airport last week.”

“This killer hedges his bet too much to count on that kind of break,” Hichens said. “Seems to me you said something on the same order yesterday.”

“What about prints?”

“We’re still running ’em. Come next Christmas we should have a record of everyone who touched anything in that room over the past six weeks. FBI database matched West’s with Delwayne Garnet’s, by the way. A vacancy just opened up on the Ten Most Wanted list.”

“Think I’ve got a chance?”

He wasn’t listening. “We retrieved your prints from Lansing this morning. Not one set matched from that room.”

“I said I didn’t touch anything.”

“That’s what you said.”

I blew air. “I took the job Garnet offered. When a client gets killed, I get curious.”

“For free?”

“I’m working on that.”

He gouged a hole in the air with his finger. “You’re still my favorite. You could have shot him after you conned your way into his room. If I stumble over you again, I’ll book you as a material. Chances are I will anyway, but why fuck with chance? Stay out of my murder.”

He left me there and let himself into Meldrum’s office without knocking. Fifteen minutes later he came into the reception room alone. He stopped when he saw me. He had on the same black-on-black suit he’d worn the day before or one just like it. He looked like an exclamation point. “Why are you still here?”

I put down my magazine and held out my wrists.

He told me where to put them and went out the main entrance. The pneumatic closer prevented the door from slamming.

Something purred on the receptionist’s desk. Judy lifted a receiver, listened, and cradled it without a word. “Mr. Walker, Mr. Meldrum would like to see you in his office.”

I got up. I lingered in front of the desk. “Do you date white guys?”

She sat back, showing the long line of her torso, and tapped a gold pencil against her teeth. They were nice teeth, small and even and sharp. “I don’t date poor guys.”

I tilted my head toward the inner sanctum. “I’ve got a rich client.”

“I date the client.”

I knew my luck couldn’t hold. I went down the hall.

O
n a nice day in June it was a brisk walk from Meldrum and Zinzser to Walker and Nobody on West Grand. On an airless day like we were having, under a smut-colored sky screwed down to the rooftops, it was like crawling uphill through a dirty air duct. I stopped at my bank for a hit of conditioned air and to deposit Lawrence Meldrum’s check, then resumed crawling. Back in the penthouse I hung my coat on a chair in front of the office fan, bathed from the waist up in the water closet sink, put on a fresh shirt from the supply I keep in the safe, and called the Airport Marriott. The telephone rang seven times in Morgenstern’s room before the operator came back on to tell me no one was answering. I drew a question mark next to the Venture Capitalist’s name on the desk pad. He was my obsession of the week. He tickled my throat like the first sign of a bad cold.

At the second number I tried, a computer-generated voice gave me a pager code. I dialed that, followed the instructions provided by another machine, and hung up to wait. It was getting to be possible to spend all day on the telephone and never hook up with the owner of a respiratory system.

The bell rang while I was going over my notes, the most I’d ever made on a case before I landed it.

“Where you been keeping yourself, super sleuth? I was beginning to think you’d tapped into a wealthy divorcee.” Barry Stackpole’s voice was a fresh breeze in my ear.

“Wealthy divorcees don’t trade down; you know that. When’d you go on an electronic tether? I thought you took a vow.”

“It’s a loaner. I’m working a deal, and I’ve got competition.”

“What’s the deal?”

“Host of a reality-based crime series on CBS. Five grand a week to stand in front of a camera for twenty minutes.”

Barry was an investigative journalist, currently and frequently without a journal; but never for long. He was a walking database on every left-hand operation that had taken place in Detroit since Chief Pontiac. The Pulitzer committee had tagged him twice and the mob once, with six sticks of dynamite and an artificial leg.

“I need about twelve hundred dollars’ worth of your time,” I said.

“Try me tomorrow. They’re also taking meetings with a former attorney general and one of the guys from
Baywatch
.”

“There were guys on
Baywatch?
”

“I have to keep the line open.”

“Tomorrow’s no good,” I said. “I’ve got competition too. Its name is Captain Hichens.”