Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (19 page)

The canvas arena has known its share of celebrated warriors, from the legendary John L. to Dempsey and the Raging Bull, but few if any have combined movie-star good looks with athletic grace and power. Curtis Smallwood, poised at present on the apron of national fame, is a handsome dusky lad from Detroit’s urban jungle with an astonishing record of 22 fights and 22 victories, who on appearance alone could hold his own in the Negro cinema, colored entertainment’s answer to Tyrone Power. . . .

Someone, presumably Smallwood himself, had scribbled “23” in ink in the margin, updating the record. A squib at the end of the article described its author, Edie Van Eyck, as a staff reporter with the
Detroit Free Press
. I’d seen her byline on two of the follow-up stories published in the
Free Press
in the wake of Smallwood’s murder; she’d interviewed Paul Wellstone, the
producer at MGM accused of threatening the fighter with mayhem unless he stopped seeing Fausta West, and Ben Morningstar, who’d been equally unforthcoming. She seemed to have made a hobby of The Black Mamba. (Another conquest?) I refolded the sheet and put it away.

A yellowed inventory sheet that had come with the box also listed a set of keys in a pigskin case and three hundred in twenties in a roll held together with a rubber band. I found the key case—empty but for what looked like a key to a house or apartment—but not the cash. The finance company would have claimed the car keys when it took possession of the Alfa-Romeo. As for the money, at any given time there are several hundred thousand dollars in currency and merchandise in a police evidence room, and attrition is a sad fact of the human condition. It was a wonder the jewelry had survived.

I glanced at Smallwood’s Social Security card and his picture on his Michigan driver’s license. His face wore a smirk. The bureaucrat behind the camera hadn’t succeeded in washing out the fine features. Van Eyck had been right about those. He must have had a terrific defense to preserve them from eager fists. I had to get a look at him in action, if any footage existed.

Personal effects. While you’re alive, they’re called your possessions. One minute you’re distributing them among your various pockets, getting tarted up to see in a new year filled with fat purses and popping flashbulbs. The next, someone’s shoving them into a box while a bored sergeant describes them for a deputy with a steno pad. “One wallet, brown. One wristwatch, yellow metal. Band brown.”

I tipped a second pair of cufflinks out of the second bag and cupped them in my palm. A careful man-about-town, Curtis Smallwood; carrying a spare set in case he lost one of the ones he was wearing. These were gold like the others, with a design machined into them.

I held one up and looked at it for a long time. Something
sprouted in a damp corner of my skull and grew rapidly. Soon there was barely room for anything else.

From the bag containing jewelry I pulled the tie bar and one of the musical-clef cufflinks, dumped the old magazines off the coffee table, and laid the pieces side by side, placing one of the other cufflinks next to them. Then I got up again and rooted inside the box. My hand closed on something long and narrow. I drew out Smallwood’s belt, a sporty gusseted job with a small gold buckle. Changing temperatures and humidities had dried it out and cracked the pigskin. It was brown, like his watchband and wallet and key case and shoes, except for the white caps on the toes; but I’d seen it before and I knew that. It wasn’t the belt I was after.

The necktie had slithered to the bottom of the box. I shoved aside the moth-ravaged tweed topcoat, the wreck of a suit, pulled out the tie, fished one of the cufflinks he’d been wearing from its glassine bag, and held it up against the tie. Then I laid the tie on the coffee table between the link and one of those from his pocket. I placed the tie bar on the tie and stood back to look.

Fifty-three years. Someone ought to have noticed.

Maybe someone had, and no one had listened. Hard science was sacred then as now, in forensics as in boxing. The sluggers, the intuitive types, were considered obsolete. Prewar. Or maybe it hadn’t panned out.

A minute of that and then I let myself into the inner office, switched on the overhead light, and got the bottle and two glasses from my desk. I splashed some into one and held it up in a mock toast to the electronic bug in the light fixture before pouring it down my throat. It wasn’t Johnnie Walker Blue. It killed the nerves in my tongue like Novocaine and plowed a smoking furrow all the way to the floor of my stomach.

Lightning strobed outside the window.

“Nice touch.” I didn’t care who heard me.

When Hichens came in from the hall, a few minutes after
eleven, he found me sitting on the upholstered bench drinking. The bottle and the other glass stood on the coffee table among Smallwood’s things. The rain had stopped gushing and had settled in for a long steady pour.

He took it all in. His hair and shoulders were soaked and he looked worn through. “I miss the party?”

“You’re just in time to help me see in the new year. How’d you get on with Winthrop and Regina?”

“He’s a passive pain in the ass. He never killed anybody. She’d kill Bambi’s mother if she gave her half a reason. How about you? Figure out who killed the fighter?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But I know who didn’t.”

U
h-huh,” he said. “You got a bathroom in this establishment?”

I jerked a thumb in the direction of the private office and he went that way. Five minutes later he came back with his hair combed and glistening. I wondered if he carried a tube of slickum in his pocket. He cast a questioning glance toward the ceiling of the inner office.

I shook my head. “I don’t think it can pick up anything in here. Then there’s the rain.”

He cleared some homicide evidence off the other end of the upholstered bench, sat down, and stretched out his long legs. He waited.

I asked him if he knew anything about fashion. He made a noise with his lips.

“I dress like an undertaker on purpose. Life’s simpler when you don’t have to fuck around with what goes with what. This got anything to do with the haberdashery?” He straightened a finger at the display on the coffee table.

“Smallwood was a sharp dresser. That was important then, especially if you didn’t always have money and suddenly promoters were throwing it at you in buckets. It didn’t matter that
most of it went back to his manager. A roll of bills is hard to see around when you’re young.”

“That hasn’t changed. I busted a kid last month for possession for sale. He had six hundred bucks on his feet. He was too short for basketball.”

“Someone gave Smallwood tips on how to dress, maybe Fausta West. In those days the studios kept an army of couturiers and former Russian royalty on staff to teach their contract players which fork to use and when to wear diamonds. Anyway he was wearing a thousand in tailoring and jewelry the night he was killed, and all his accessories matched, including his wallet and belt. Except for one item; two, actually.” I picked up the necktie and tie bar and handed them to Hichens.

He held them up, the bar against the tie. “They look pretty close to me.”

“They are. Those aren’t the items I was talking about. The match isn’t exact, but that’s just for uniforms. They’re both Art Deco. That’s—”

“I know what Deco is,” he snarled. “I’m married.”

I retrieved one of the cufflinks and stuck it out. He took it in the hand holding the tie bar and held them both against the pattern on the necktie.

“I’d call it a match,” he said. “Two sets of lines going both directions. He must’ve had the links made for the tie. Or maybe the other way around. I’m not following.”

“This is one of the links he was wearing.” I scooped up one with a musical clef engraved on it.

He had to put down the tie bar and the other link to take it. He held it up against the tie. “Well, I wouldn’t arrest him for it. But if he had a pair on him that matched—” He dropped his hands to his lap, their contents forgotten. His eyes got a little less bleak.

“I wondered the same thing,” I said.

“Maybe they mixed ’em up in Oakland. Put the wrong links in the wrong bags.”

“Doubtful. They listed everything in separate categories in the inventory. It checked.”

“I thought maybe he took along an emergency pair.”

“Me, too, at first. Then I had to ask why he kept the pair that went with the outfit in reserve and wore the pair that didn’t.”

“He had on the right pair when he went out.” He said it as if he’d been there; he was that certain. “He took ’em off and put them in his pocket and put on the others before he went to the roadhouse.”

“Why?”

“The musical ones were a gift.”

I slumped back, exhausted now that I knew I wasn’t alone.

“He put them on to please the person who gave them to him.”

“A dame.”

I grinned out of habit. He was as bad as I was. Surrounded by 1940s artifacts, discussing a half-century-old murder as if it had happened last week, it was hard not to talk like Roscoe Karns.

“He wasn’t alone that night,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be a woman, though. Maybe it was his manager.”

“Not him. Archie McGraw was on the list of suspects because he’d been riding Smallwood about his spending habits. He wouldn’t have given him gold cufflinks. Anyway, men didn’t give men jewelry then. Even if they did, it’s more likely Smallwood would stop off to see a woman on his way to celebrate the new year. She was his date. She gave him the gift when he picked her up.”

“It isn’t evidence.”

“It might have been, if someone had thought to trace those cufflinks to a jeweler. Now there’s no telling where they were bought or who bought them.”

“I can’t believe everyone overlooked it.”

“Too many cooks, probably,” I said. “It was a high-profile case at the time. Oakland brought in Detroit and Lansing to
help. A lot of investigators trying not to step on one another’s toes and a herd of reporters can trample all over a little thing like intuition. They were so busy looking at fingerprints and treadmarks they missed the one thing that might have led them to the murderer.”

“Or a witness.”

“If she saw it, why didn’t she come forward?”

“Fausta West had two good reasons not to. She was seeing a black man, and she had a morals clause in her picture contract.”

“She was already on the griddle for getting her picture taken with Smallwood outside the Oriole Ballroom. She’d have been committing career suicide to go with him to a New Year’s Eve party.”

“I never heard she was smart.”

“If she wasn’t any smarter than that, she wouldn’t have been able to read her lines.”

Hichens looked at the items in his hands. “You said Morgenstern told you Smallwood had a harem of white women. Any one of them could have seen it and kept her mouth shut.”

“You’re not thinking like the killer. Why take the chance? The three biggest suspects were McGraw, Wellstone, and Ben Morningstar. Of all of them, McGraw was the only one who might have done the job himself, and he was hosting a private party that night at home, in full view of eleven witnesses. He might have hired the job—certainly the others would have; they were above street work. A pro would’ve taken out an eyewitness right along with the target. There would have been two bodies in that parking lot.”

“If it was a pro.”

“That brings us back to the woman. Or another player.”

He shook his head. “That’s a dead end. If one of his dollies killed him, she needed a motive. How do you go from giving someone a gift to taking his life the same night?”

“It happens. Sometimes for the same reason. She would have had the cufflinks and the gun together in the same purse.

Maybe it
was
Fausta. She was single and pregnant. I’d hate to face those odds in her time and place.”

“You think she proposed and he turned her down?”

“That’s a jump. We don’t even know it was her.”

We listened to the rain whirring on the roof. He leaned forward, put down the tie and cufflink, poured two fingers of whiskey into the empty glass, and drank. He pulled a face. “So that’s what you meant when you said you knew who didn’t do it. On the female side we can rule out Bess Truman. Unless she was in town.”

“Don’t forget Sarah Bernhardt. She was dead.” I worked my neck. The crick was still there. “I’ve seen the physical evidence and I’ve read the official reports. I know what the papers had to say. The usual next step is to talk to people. Only they’re all dead.”

“Not all of them.” He picked up the Ziploc bag and held it by the top, with the ugly lump of lead weighing down a bottom corner. “Someone lived long enough to fire another of these from the same gun. Or to give it to someone who did.”

“That’s your end.”

He turned his bleak gaze on me.

“I’ve done everything I could on Garnet,” I said. “It wasn’t much but it was all I had. You can subpoena witnesses and evidence. You work that end.”

“So good of you to give me permission.” He turned back and took another drink. “Where do you buy this piss?”

“It’s honest liquor. You can tell by the taste. Guys like Morgenstern drink the premium brands. If there’s anything to Sunday school he’ll boil in it in hell.” I drank, rolled it around my mouth, and spat it back into the glass. “You’re right, it’s piss.”

“You get used to it after a little.”

He finished his, got up, and started scooping the stuff on the coffee table into their bags and the bags into the big carton. Then he hoisted it and looked down at me. “You going to spend a little of your client’s money on a ouija board or what?”

“I have a friend who’s a historian. Not the kind that studies ancient civilizations; more like the aging uncivilized. If he can’t help me I may have to sneak into Mount Elliott Cemetery with a shovel.”

I
drove home through clear gelatin, wipers beating out of dull habit, with the occasional bracer of mud slung off the tires of trucks passing in the opposite direction. I left my sodden clothes in a heap on the bedroom floor and crawled between the sheets feeling as crisp as a cigarette butt drifting in a mug of cold coffee. If I dreamed I didn’t remember it when I woke up, which was fine because my account was overdrawn on Curtis Smallwood until the next business day.