Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (26 page)

I wasn’t interested in any of this. I knew what Smallwood looked like, and the rest was just scenery. I spread the prints in front of me like solitaire and accepted a heavy magnifying glass with a bone handle from Edie, who said if I was looking for Opal Benton I was wasting my time. “Anyway, you’ve got the evidence in your pocket, for whatever it’s worth now.”

“I’m not looking for Opal.”

She didn’t ask any questions after that. I decided she was a better journalist than either the
Times
or the
Free Press
had given her credit for.

I took out the digital photo from the DIA, laid it beside the press shots, and slid the lens over the faces in the crowd at the train station. Newspaper photography had lost an artist when Shansky died in Korea. Even disregarding those he hadn’t bothered to print, any of the ones he’d submitted would have been striking enough for the front page of any daily in the United States. Despite the obstructions and distractions of passengers and their parties flowing to and from the tracks, reporters trying to elbow their way closer to the catch of the day, and photographers from rival newspapers jockeying for position, he’d managed an even dozen prospects. Most of his colleagues in those competitive days would have been happy to settle for one.

The peripheral images alone were suitable for framing. In the backgrounds, a handsome black porter in his trim tunic and cap assisted a middle-aged woman in seamed stockings down from the car with a white-gloved hand on her elbow; a small
boy in a Cub Scout uniform sprinted toward a grandfatherly type in white handlebars lugging a two-suiter; a hulk in a mackinaw bent to inspect a wheel, one cheek pregnant with tobacco. There was a honey of a shot of a fat slob dressed in the rumpled standard issue of the Fourth Estate taking a picture of the inside of his own hat, knocked off his head by the corner of a trunk passing by on a baggage cart; printed, most likely, for the amusement of Shansky’s editor. All were in sharp focus, and any one could have been blown up and hung in a museum of Americana. I wasn’t interested in any of them either.

I missed what I wanted the first time. My eyes were watering from the close work, crying pure beer, and I slid the lens right past it. I’d seen it; it just hadn’t registered, because I was already thinking ahead to the next photograph. When I finished with the last print, I rubbed my eyes and started again.

“Good luck with that,” Edie said. “That’s one weekend I’ll never get back. It’s a wonder I never needed bifocals. Sometimes I think—”

I shushed her.

It was barely in the frame and almost out of focus. One hand was in motion and blurred. I blinked away the ghosts, bent closer, and centered the image in the lens. The face leapt forward.

He looked older in traveling clothes, carrying a coat over one arm and a scuffed satchel and wearing a grown-up hat with a braided band. The good-looking porter was reaching up to help him down, but the blurred hand was waving him back; he already had one foot on the platform, a lad in a hurry. Husky build, with some babyfat still showing on his face. Time would render it down. He already had the square jaw.

I looked from it to the digital photo and back. My eyes swept past Opal to the boy whose arm she was grasping in the seat next to hers. Then I turned both prints around and slid them toward Edie, tucking Opal’s face out of sight beneath the
newspaper shot. That put her male companion into center frame. I handed Edie the lens and pointed at the boy stepping down from the train. She looked at both images.

She sat back. “Same young fella. Who is he?”

“Opal’s kid brother,” I said. “The one who was away at school when she died.”

H
ow do you know that?” Edie asked. “You didn’t even know who she was when you came here.”

“I could be wrong. Maybe she picked up a newsboy in New York and he followed her home. Anyway, I know who he is. Fifty years can change a lot of things about a person, but not his bone structure. Benton was Opal’s married name, wasn’t it?”

“I think so. I lost most of my notes in the move to Malibu. I’m not sure I ever knew her family name. It wasn’t important to the story. Do you think he killed Smallwood?”

“He had a hell of a motive, if he thought Smallwood was responsible for her pregnancy. It cost her her life. I’m still short a witness.”

“You’re pushing your luck. The last five years went through my friends like grapeshot. I’ve outlived most of my pallbearers.”

“Isn’t that the idea?”

“Up to a point. A grave looks pretty bleak without flowers.”

“What kind do you like?”

“What kind do you?”

“Good point.” I stood and shook circulation back into my
legs. “Thanks for the day. I’ll let you know where it goes.”

“You’d better.”

I asked if she needed a hand putting the stuff away. She shook her head. She’d gathered the prints and curled snapshots into a pile, and now she plucked one off the top. “You can get me a beer while you’re up.”

I did that, and left her sorting through dead friends.

I was still a little woozy. I stopped at a Middle Eastern place, ate shredded lamb and rice, dry as pencil shavings, settled it with milk, and drove home. There was a bare chance Shelly and Nicky were staking out the place, but I was too tired to care. I’d been Walter Raleigh and Bulldog Drummond and the Roadrunner and Uriah Heep, all since breakfast; Salman Rushdie would have to wait until tomorrow. In any case there were no strange cars in the neighborhood.

I felt musty; when I caught a whiff of myself I smelled like old magazines. I took a shower, put on a robe, and drank part of a glass of Scotch watching amateur singers fracturing old Whitney Houston tunes on TV for a panel of judges. Both the drink and the singers were flat. I switched off the set and dumped out the ice and went to bed.

There was a band singer and a department-store model and I think a couple of cigarette girls
.

Jeremiah Morgenstern’s klaghorn voice was the last thing I wanted to jerk me out of the first shallow swells of sleep after an hour spent rolling the lumps out of my mattress. Enough alcohol in your system can make you drowsy; one drink too many can hold off sleep like a chorus of jackhammers. I was finally sinking under when I remembered what he’d said in his suite at the Airport Marriott.

Smallwood liked his quail pale, by the way. The Hollywood chippie was just a piece of ass in the crowd
.

A band singer and a department-store model and a couple of cigarette girls.

I got up, found the chair in the living room where I’d flung my suitcoat, and fished my notebook out of the pocket. I dialed a number I’d scribbled into it. The telephone rang three times, then a slow masculine voice came on and told me to leave a message after the beep. I hung up ahead of the beep and got dressed.

Royal Oak dozed fitfully. Dark houses were a thing of the twentieth century. Those that didn’t leave all their lights blazing like Gatsby’s featured the glimmer of a late-night talk show through picture windows or sent the turquoise beacon of a mercury bulb through the mosquito-ridden reaches of the night. Here and there a garage door yawned open, spilling dropcord yellow where some mid-level executive labored to reset a timing chain or polished the undercarriage of some obsolete two-seater, primping for the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise. You needed a fifty-foot ladder and a telescope just to keep tabs on Ursas Major and Minor.

The Babbage house was a blaze of light. Every lamp was burning, even the one on the porch. For a home occupied by two senior citizens who had outlived most of the friends they would invite to a party, that was an evil omen. I sprang the Smith & Wesson loose from the trick compartment and stuck it under my belt in back as I approached the front door.

Once again, Winthrop Babbage answered the bell. Super-added age had gouged cavities in the ham face. Shadows pooled beneath his eyes and engraved new lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, which hung open a little as if the springs that kept it closed had lost tension. The top button of his white shirt had come undone and the skin of his neck hung like bags of shot. His eyes were dull. I saw no recognition there.

“Amos Walker, Mr. Babbage. We met the other day. Is it too late to talk to your wife?”

“My wife is in the hospital.”

That explained the lights. It’s more lonely in the dark. “Is it serious?”

“They’re setting up a cot for me in her room. I only came home to pack a suitcase with clothes and my prescriptions. It’s not a good time, Mr. Walker.”

“Which hospital?”

His mouth worked a little before words came out. “She hasn’t much time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” He started to close the door.

“I wouldn’t be here at this hour if I didn’t have important questions. Maybe you can answer them.”

The door stopped. He drew his chin into the folds of his neck. “I don’t owe you answers, Mr. Walker. You’ve gotten far more than enough at this address. In fact, I blame you for Regina’s collapse. Since she spoke to you, the police have been here, because of information you gave them. She was severely upset by both visits. This morning she couldn’t get out of bed. I had to call an ambulance. I’ve been with her all day, and now it appears I’ll be with her until the end.” The door thumped shut.

The clock in the dash read 12:35, but the traffic was as heavy as at noon. The factory shifts were changing and speed limits were shattering all over town in the race to get home. My eyes smarted from lack of sleep. Oncoming headlights starred out across my corneas and I blinked hard to squeeze moisture into them. The gun was gouging a hole in my back. I unbelted it and laid it on the passenger’s seat. I was beyond exhaustion. But my heart was kicking my ribs sixteen beats to the measure. It was a good thing I was headed to a hospital.

When it comes to serious care, emergency or long-term, and you live in Royal Oak, there is only one place to go. The local branch of Beaumont Hospital is one complicated cell in a system that has absorbed most of the best-trained doctors, nurses,
and technicians in the health community of Southeastern Michigan. One or the other Babbage would fix on Beaumont as if no other facility existed.

If Winthrop hadn’t exaggerated, Regina’s thirty-four-year reign of hatred for Delwayne Garnet was drawing to a close. When Winthrop joined her—soon, if what I’d seen in his face wasn’t just a reflection of another death nearby—no one would be left to care or even remember how Karl Anthony Mason had blown himself and his colleague to pieces, leaving his mother to fill the vacant space with rage for the one who had survived. What it had to do with the murder of a forgotten fighter nineteen years before that was only a few answers away.

Maybe. Detecting isn’t an exact science. Nothing is, including science.

At night the sprawling medical complex burned enough electricity to illuminate Afghanistan. There were lights in all the windows and you could have played a night baseball game under the floods in the vast parking lot. I found a space within twenty miles of the entrance and legged it up the wheelchair ramp. The steps took too long; I was racing the Reaper.

The nurse on duty at the first station I came to was a pretty, round-faced brunette with a distracting scar slanting two inches across her chin. The degree came with combat training.

“Regina Babbage’s room number, please.” I spelled both names.

“Are you a relative?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Visiting hours are over. You’ll have to come back in the morning at eight
A.M
.”

“That’s when eight
A.M
. usually occurs. This can’t wait.” I showed her the county star.

She pressed her lips into a thin line, paged through a chart attached to a clipboard, and ran a short-nailed finger down the list of names. She paused long enough to make me wonder if I wasn’t at the wrong hospital after all.

“She’s in ICU. You’ll have to identify yourself over the intercom.”

I got the number of the intensive care unit, passed through a half-dozen doors equipped with bumper pads and cotton-covered hinges, scaled a long incline, and flattened my thumb against a button under a round speaker mounted next to a door. This time when a voice came on I broke the law instead of just nudging it. I said I was there to see patient Babbage on police business. I was asked to wait one minute.

One minute later a buzzer razzed and I pushed through the door. The lighting here was soft, as if it were some kind of salon instead of an arsenal of monitors, instrument panels, defibrilators, oxygen tanks, and one-finger latex gloves. The lone party at the station was a young man with a headset clamped over his buzz cut. He murmured an apology into the mouthpiece, looked at the bit of tin in my hand, and asked for my name.

“Captain Hichens.”

He asked if that was spelled with an
h
or a
k
. I told him and he wrote it down in a log, checking the time against a stainless-steel wristwatch and entering that. “She’s in Three. I can’t let you have more than five minutes.”

“That’ll be plenty.”

I hoped it would be. If she was unconscious or didn’t have the answers I needed, it would be a long time in a cell with nothing to occupy me but past failures.

The room was just big enough for the railed bed, the usual blinking and beeping equipment, a couple of cabinets for clothes and other personal items, and a narrow rollaway bed, made up as tightly as a bunk in a marine barracks. Whatever chairs there may have been for visitors had been removed to accommodate Winthrop Babbage for the night. Regina lay under a thin blanket, taking in and draining fluids through clear flexible tubes hooked up to the standard containers. In the light of a fluorescent panel behind the bed she looked as small as a child. Her pale blonde
hair, washed out by the light, was nearly indistinguishable from the white pillowcase. She had a tube in her nostrils. Without the little touch of lipstick and blush her face looked pasty and sunken.

Time is a fascinating invention. A couple of nights earlier, I wouldn’t have believed any pair of aluminum rails could have held her.