Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (3 page)

The UPS driver on that route was a former second-string guard with the Lions who looked like Baby Huey in short pants. He was used to bringing me flat parcels containing affidavits. He thumped the tall rectangular carton onto my desk. “Heavy. What’s in it, a bust of Beethoven?” He thrust his electronic gizmo under my nose.

I signed it and handed back the stylus. “Just an old acquaintance.”

When he left, I got out the switchblade I use for a letter opener, sawed through the tape, and lifted a bronze urn out of a mess of Styrofoam peanuts I’d still be sweeping up come the Fourth of July. It was shaped like a miniature milk can, with a brushed finish and a sealed lid, and had probably set Beryl Garnet back eight hundred dollars. The little shield-shaped plate designed for engraving a name, dates of birth and death, and a tasteful sentiment was blank. I shook the urn. It sounded like a can of baking powder.

I stood it up on the desk, fished the envelope containing the cashier’s check out of the box, put it in the safe, and took out my little blue book. A third of the names in it belonged to dead people, but I was too sentimental about Nate “The Nose” D’Innocenza and Jimmy Three Fingers to strike any of them out. Of what’s left, half would gladly strike out the other half for me, if they knew about the book. I found the name I wanted and dialed a number in Plymouth, Michigan. A bosun’s pipe blew in my ear and a canned voice told me the area code had changed. I didn’t think it had been that long since I’d called; but then Mammy Bell shuffled the codes around by the week. I drew a line through the old one, wrote in the one the recording gave me, broke the connection, and tried again.

“Yes?”

It’s an education just how flat one syllable can sound coming from the right mouth.

“Red, this is Amos Walker. Most civilians say ‘Hello.’ How long since you retired?”

“Almost half as long as I was in. This a land line?”

I said it was. He never spoke on a cell or a cordless telephone and refused to speak with anyone who was using one. He said any ten-year-old kid with a scanner could intercept a radio signal.

“What do you need?”

“This one’s got dust on it. It goes back thirty-four years.”

His arithmetic was faster than mine. “Shit.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself. What’s it going to cost?”

“How much venison you got in the freezer?”

“I haven’t been deer hunting in years, Red. It’s too much like my work week. How about a case of Scotch?”

“I quit. Promised my daughter.”

“Tigers tickets. You used to be a big fan.”

“Used to.”

I breathed. “That just leaves cash.”

“Uncle gives me more than I need just to keep me from writing my memoirs.”

We were at an impasse.

He said shit again. “Come on up. I had enough of my own company today.”

I said I’d see him in thirty minutes.

“Take Ford Road and you’ll see me in twenty.”

Red Burlingame had been with the Detroit field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than thirty years, the last ten as Special Agent in Charge. He’d personally engineered the arrests of five fugitives on the Ten Most Wanted list, which was three more than his nearest competitor. Even more impressive, he’d managed to do it without calling attention to himself and away from J. Edgar Hoover, thus avoiding transfer to the field office in Anchorage. If he didn’t know where I could start looking for Delwayne Garnet, I was going to have Aunt Beryl as an office mate for the rest of my life.

P
lymouth is a good-size town, too far from Detroit to be counted as a suburb, and trying hard to remain a village, with some success. Its business section is a playground of gift shops, antiques stores, and aromatic bakeries, which moved in about the time the last hardware store closed. Its annual show of ice sculptures draws visitors from all over the state. In June, there was not a six-foot peacock or Father Christmas to be found, just a pretty park and strollers in khaki shorts licking ice cream cones and dodging in-line skaters. I left them behind and drove through well-maintained streets lined with sleek brick split-levels and historic houses like wedding cakes and parked in an asphalt driveway behind a pickup truck the size of my house, with dual wheels and a hammered steel toolbox bolted across the bed. When Red Burlingame left the Bureau, it hadn’t taken him more than a week to go rural. He’d turned all his three-piece suits into greaserags except one to be buried in, planted tomatoes in his backyard, and inundated all his friends and relatives with birdhouses handmade in his basement.

We’d hooked up back when he was still in harness. His daughter had fallen into an abusive relationship, and he’d
needed an independent to dig up the boyfriend’s background, to avoid anything being traced back to Burlingame’s office and a charge of using government personnel for private purposes. I came lowly recommended by his colleagues, for the same reasons that made me right for the job. I’d spent three days finding the boyfriend’s arrest record under his real name. The daughter obtained a restraining order against him, and when he showed up at her apartment anyway, I was following him. I wasn’t there when the police came, but he wasn’t going anywhere with a collapsed lung.

Burlingame answered the door wearing a short-sleeved Madras sport shirt with the tail out over an old pair of slacks bagging in the knees and no shoes on his stockinged feet. He was a big man, thick through the shoulders and thickening in the waist, with rusty streaks in his white hair and a granite jaw against which a thousand alibis had dashed themselves to pieces. He wrung all the circulation out of my hand—from habit, not a contest of strength—and let me into a widower’s living room with scattered sections of newspaper and a half-eaten sandwich calcifying on a saucer balanced on the arm of the sofa. Forests of family photos stood on the mantle of a gas fireplace and on top of the TV set, where a roly-poly talk-show host was grilling a movie star in dungarees without sound. Burlingame snatched up a remote and flipped off the power.

“Twenty million dollars a picture, and he spends the whole interview talking about his colonic,” Burlingame said. “I may be senile, but I don’t remember Gable discussing enemas with Louella Parsons.”

“Maybe she edited it out.”

“Maybe I left public life just in time. What would you say to a beer?”

“I only start talking to them after three.”

He tipped a hand toward the sofa, carried the saucer with the fossilized sandwich into the kitchen, and came out a minute
later with a Tall Boy in each hand. He gave me one and slung himself into a recliner.

I asked him if he missed his job. The only sign in the room that he’d been in government work was a framed letter on the wall near the front door, signed by William Webster, the FBI director at the time of his retirement, congratulating Special Agent in Charge Randall Burlingame on his years of service.

“Just the field work. There got to be less and less of that near the end, and more pencil-pushing. The newbies had a hard-on against all the senior men who served under Hoover, so they buried us in paper, trying to make us quit. I hated the sawed-off son of a bitch, but when he didn’t like someone he fired him, and that was that.”

“Is it true you called him a fairy to his face?”

“Hell, no. He canned trainees just for looking down at that little platform he stood on when he handed out the diplomas.” He sipped from his can. “For the record, I never thought he took it in the ass. He never dressed up like a woman, either. You’d think what he did to King and the Kennedys would be enough without making shit up.”

“Ever hear from the Bureau?”

“Not if either of us can help it. Couple times a year a snot from the Feature page calls me up asking for an interview. I’m thinking of changing my number again.”

“Think they’ll send a hit squad?”

He wriggled his toes in their argyles. It was the only tell that he was agitated, and all the time he’d been in the field it would have been hidden in black Oxfords and parked under his desk.

“If you think that’s funny, you haven’t been reading papers or watching television. Just now the Bureau’s living out Hoover’s favorite wet-dream. They probably wouldn’t waste a cartridge on a brontosaurus like me, but they’d truss me up with the IRS so tight my great-grandchildren wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

I didn’t have anything for that. I took out the picture Beryl Garnet had given me and reached it over.

He took it, stood his beer can on the arm of his chair, and fished a pair of steel-rimmed glasses out of his shirt pocket, but didn’t put them on. Instead he held them in front of the photograph like a magnifying glass.

“I’m getting something,” he said. “Jewel name of some kind. Ruby?”

“Garnet. First name Delwayne. There’s a place for you on the Psychic Hotline if you ever get restless.”

“I always had a good memory. Back then it was an asset. Garnet, I remember that little fish. Swam right through the net we rigged up for the keepers. He never would’ve made the list except for what he knew and how easy he’d crack. Look at that face. Like a skinny Humpty-Dumpty.”

“Maybe you’re selling him short. He’s stayed hidden all these years.”

“That’s because for most of them he hasn’t been worth looking for. Anything he’d have to tell us we can get off a Golden Oldies album.” He handed back the picture. “Anyway, I know where he is. Or was when I quit.”

I put away the picture next to my notepad and left them both in my pocket. Burlingame’s mouth healed over whenever anyone started recording his words.

He drank some more beer, delicately. He used to fist back Scotches like fizzwater, but now it was like watching someone kiss his ex-wife. “Inside secret. It might not be so secret anymore, but I make it a point not to keep up. We never put anyone on the Ten Most Wanted list until we knew where he was. That way, we could time things and pop him just before the evening news. I know that shoots my legend all to hell, but who cares. If I don’t do it, some revisionist prick with a press card in his hatband will do it after I’m dead. Why give him the scoop?”

I’d known most of that, but I didn’t say anything. I assumed he knew reporters no longer wore hats or used words like “scoop.”

“So why didn’t you pop Garnet?”

“We found out the two geniuses who blew themselves up on the way to blow up the Federal Building were the whole organization. Washington wanted to go ahead anyway, for cosmetic purposes, but I convinced them we’d wind up looking like idiots when the case went to court. We rotated Garnet off the list and plugged in an armored-car bandit holed up over a TV repair shop in Cleveland. We’d been saving him for just such a rainy day.”

“But you continued to keep up with Delwayne.”

“He was my hobby. Well, not just him. After the Chief died I thought it might be a good idea to update my files on some of the investigations that didn’t go into the showcase at headquarters. A lot of the agents involved were busy reinventing themselves, which is hard to do as long as there’s a pin on the wall map who Knew Them When. You think twice about pulling out a pin and throwing it away when it has points on both ends.” He looked at a thumbnail that needed manicuring. It had probably needed it since he’d stopped wearing suits. “What makes Delwayne hot after all this time? His timing’s off if he wants back in this country. Even a bomber by default makes Customs nervous.”

I told him the job. There wasn’t any reason not to. The client was dead and I was in charge of an ashcan.

“Huh. I thought Aunt Beryl died years ago.”

“You knew her?”

“Better than she knew me. I put her place under surveillance after Delwayne rabbited. That was S.O.P. with a long successful history going back to Dillinger, but it hit the wall in the sixties. Those revolutionary types had discipline; cut off all ties to friends and relatives when they went underground. In most cases the ties were half cut already, but even so.” His eyes got a distant look. It didn’t last more than a second, and afterward I wasn’t sure it had been there at all. “You learn a lot of shit when you plant a bug in a whorehouse.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He drank.

I gave up waiting. There was more there than a couple of off-color stories, but I wasn’t going to get them then or ever.

I took a swallow, teetered the can on my knee. “So did any of these files come home with you?”

The den was small and pine-paneled, with a dartboard on the door, a half-grown rolltop desk, and more family pictures on the walls, most of them much older than those outside. A boy wearing a first draft of Burlingame’s square features posed in a cap and knickers in a monochrome snapshot with a pretty girl about fourteen, who might have been an older sister. I’d never heard him mention family apart from the one he’d started from scratch.

He’d gone in five minutes ahead, then unlocked the door. A portable file box stood on the desk with its lid open. It had probably come from a floor safe, possibly under the desk where he’d have to pull out a bottom drawer to open it. Other security features would apply. He knew the black-bag boys back to front.

The tabs were labeled
AUTO, CHECKING, DENTAL, HOUSEHOLD
; domestic dodges like that. They might have stood for
ABSCAM, CASTRO, DALLAS
, and
HOFFA
. Then again the files might have contained automobile receipts, checking statements, dentist’s bills, and his homeowner’s insurance policy. The file might have been a decoy to distract me from a secret sliding panel or a hidden midget with a photographic memory.

“No computer?”

He shook his head. “You can burn or shred paper, but no one can totally erase a hard drive. I gave notice the day I came back from lunch and found the office troll hooking one up in my office. I didn’t train to be a typist.” He handed me a gray cardboard folder with dog-eared corners.

I looked at the tab. “ ‘office supplies’?”

“Don’t waste time trying to figure out my code. It’s been
tried. You’re holding the sum total of the Bureau’s knowledge on the subject of Delwayne Garnet.”