Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (7 page)

He pouted. I was beginning to see why no marriages had appeared on his record. There was a patch of dried blood on his cheek where he’d scratched himself trying to poke a thirty-six-inch waist through a thirty-inch window. The effort had taken the starch out of him, and he’d moped in from the bathroom and climbed up on the stool and listened to my spiel without interruption. It helped that I didn’t look like FBI. The Bureau wasn’t disguising its undercover men in cheap suits and tired faces that season.

An oversize sheet of drawing paper was clipped to the tilted board, with two rows of panels roughed out on it in pencil. The action appeared to have something to do with two men wrestling on top of a tall building. The speech balloons were blank. Finished sheets of panels were thumbtacked to the walls. He was a good representative artist, with an eye for subtle expressions. The anatomy looked accurate, but then I can barely draw a conclusion.

“You’ve come a ways from the Moroccan Army of Liberation,” I said.

“That was Stu’s idea. He thought it sounded exotic, and that it would convince the pigs we had branches in both hemispheres. He was the idea man. Karl made the bombs. He had a chemistry scholarship at the U of M before he dropped out. He showed me how to make an explosive device out of used kitty litter.”

Stuart Pearman and Karl Anthony Mason were the anarchists the Detroit forensics team had shoveled out of the wrecked van in 1968. I said, “I would’ve thought it was explosive enough without help. Ever blow anything up?”

“Only on paper.” He swept an arm toward one of the tacked-up sheets, filled with flying debris and body parts and a
Karumpph!
in fat letters. “I’m hot stuff with a pencil or a brush. Any other tool—”

“Ka-rumpph. How’s the money?”

“Pays the rent. The General Service Tax is killing me. These streets don’t clean themselves. Lost Galleon Entertainment is four guys and a PageMaker program. If I could hook up with one of the big imprints in the States I’d be set. They’re making movies out of graphic novels now.”

“Spiderman.”

He screwed up his face. “No, that’s a comic book: steroid freaks in long underwear. I mean dark, really complex pictures, where the camera crawls inside the heads of serial killers and psychotic gangsters. The originals are practically storyboards for the production team. All they have to do is cast the parts.”

“I remember when they used to make movies out of real books.”

“If you mean those gasbags on the
New York Times
list, they still are. I’m talking about the difference between a seven-course meal and a Twinkie. This is a respected art form.”

“So what’s stopping you from making it big in the States?”

“I’m a fugitive. I have to lie low.”

“No one’s looking for you, Delwayne. The feds have known where you are for years. Who do you think I asked?”

“If that’s true, how come I’m not in custody?”

“They lost interest a week after you rabbited. They have bigger shrimp to poach these days, suicide bombers and video pirates. They use old hippies for target practice.”

He frowned. He picked up a soft-lead pencil and added an ear to one of the men duking it out on the skyscraper. He threw the pencil down on the rail.

“This could all be a ruse to coax me across the border and arrest me. I bet you’re a veteran.”

“You might re-think
ruse
before you make the trip,” I said. “Yeah, I served. I don’t owe the feds a thing.”

“Neither do I. A pig’s a pig. I watched them belly their way up to the trough for eighteen years. This one fat lieutenant asked me for a blow job once. Next time I saw him was on TV, accepting a commendation for valor from the mayor.”

“Maybe he earned it.” I got up. “I didn’t come here for your backstory. I had that already. I don’t care if you come back home or go on drawing pictures for mooses and Mounties. I got what I came for.” I folded the receipt and put it in my pocket.

His eyes followed me up. He unhooked his reading glasses. Without them, his face resembled one I’d been looking at in pictures lately; fuzzy ones made up of tiny dots in fifty-year-old newspapers. “I guess if you thought about it you’d hate my guts.”

“You’d be surprised how little time I spend thinking about your guts.”

“I do. I think about it a lot. Not what
you
think. I didn’t know you existed until a little while ago. I mean that whole idiotic episode, picket signs and combat footage and throwing buckets of blood in people’s faces. I tried to do a story about it. The images wouldn’t come. It’s not the block; I don’t believe in that except as an excuse not to work. After thirty years it all seems childish, even for a comic book.”

“Graphic novel.”

“You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. A lot of people who lived through it can’t get past it, no matter what side of it they were on.”

“So don’t write about it. Do what they did then: Tell it as a western, or a comedy in Korea. You draw good explosions. Your sound effects need work. They go boom, just like you always heard.”

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there when Stu and Karl were killed. I used to have nightmares about it, though, where I was. I saw myself lying in pieces and wondering how I was going to stick them all back together.” He looked at the drawing sheet, picked up the pencil, put it back. “Sometimes I had them when I wasn’t asleep.”

“Flashbacks are cheap entertainment.”

“I haven’t had one in years. I guess if I was going to use the material it should have been then.”

“What are you going to do with the ashes?”

He put his glasses back on, as if he couldn’t see the urn without them. “I haven’t thought about it. I’m not the kind of person who can live with something like that on the mantel, even if I had a mantel. Toss them in Humber Bay, I suppose. Think she’d mind?”

“I didn’t know her well enough to know what she’d mind. All she told me was she didn’t want the State of Michigan to have them.”

He showed his teeth. It might have passed for a raffish smile in one of his panels. “Same old Aunt Beryl. That was one area where we agreed.”

“Put on old clothes. You never know when the wind will change.” I fisted the doorknob.

“The story I really want to tell is my father’s.”

Just pull on the knob and walk out. Like climbing in from a ledge. Nothing easier if you prefer solid earth under your feet to having it come at you from forty floors up. The job’s done.
Forget about a hotel room or supper. Just pull on the knob and walk out and gas up and drive back across the border and don’t look back.

Being smart is more than just knowing what to do. It’s knowing what to do and then doing it. So what I did was turn around and step off the ledge.

H
e was looking at me, with his head tilted back so that I couldn’t have been more than a smear seen through lenses designed for close work. It was probably as much as he wanted to see. A smear is a lot easier to talk to than a human being.

“You know so much about me, you must know who my father was.”

“I don’t. Unless Beryl told you, you don’t either. I’d bet plenty she didn’t.”

“You said you didn’t know her that well.”

“She ran a whorehouse in downtown Detroit for forty years and bought two generations of cops. You wouldn’t be just now taking delivery on her ashes if she were the type to spill secrets to adolescents.”

“It wasn’t that big a secret. People hear things and guess the rest. They gossip. You’d be surprised what a boy can learn through an open transom in an old house.”

“Or hiding in closets. Under beds, too. I guess you picked up a real education there.”

“Oh, sex. I found out all about that by the time I was eleven. I graduated with the help of a forty-eight-year-old whore named
Rose. It was my first time and also my last. I’m still disgusted.”

“I was the same way with mushrooms. Now I like them fine. Maybe you just got hold of a bad mushroom.”

“Maybe I’m just not the mushroom type.” He took off his glasses and rubbed them on the front of his sweatshirt. “I admit it, I was a snoop. I lived in a house full of babysitters, and each one thought one of the others was keeping an eye on me. Five days a week after school and all day Saturday and Sunday I had the run of the place. I found out every method of birth control and all the remedies for crabs and worse, all by observation. And I found out my family history by eavesdropping. It was a glamorous life for the son of a movie star and a contender for the lightweight championship of the world.”

“Movie stars don’t take bits in musicals, and Smallwood had a lot of contenders standing between him and the title. Romanticizing them doesn’t make your childhood less glamorous.” I shot my watch out of my cuff. “I need to get back on the road. The trucks start piling up on the bridge at four.”

“What do you charge for an investigation?”

“Depends on the investigation.”

“You must know I’m talking about solving a murder.”

“That’s police work.”

“Are you saying you never interfere in a police case?”

“I never take a job to interfere in a police case. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t see it.”

“The police do.”

“Are you afraid of the police?”

“Terrified. They’re armed and they drink a lot of coffee.”

He held the glasses up to the light. They looked dirtier than before he’d tried to clean them. “If everyone felt that way, we’d still be fighting that crummy war.”

“Give it up, Delwayne. Even the cops gave it up in the end. There was a bushel of suspects, too many motives, and not enough incentive after the press lost interest.”

“Because the victim was black.”

“Partly, probably. Also it wasn’t the only murder in town. Automobile production was up, employment was up, births, too. Somebody had to make room for all those babies.”

“So it’s not a police case anymore. You’re free to accept it.”

“I always was.”

He scratched his chin whiskers with the earpiece of his glasses. “Sounds like we’re still on opposite sides.”

“I can’t afford to turn down work on that basis. Homicide’s different. It can be contagious, for one thing.”

“This one’s more than fifty years old. What’s the half life?”

“Same as the statute of limitations. It can still burn you after a hundred.”

“I’m not convinced you’re as cowardly as all that.”

I grinned. “That won’t work either.”

“Let’s quit chasing rabbits. How much to overcome your fear of death?”

“Authority, too. Don’t forget authority. I only adjust my rates for inflation, not for risk.” I gave him the usual numbers.

He goggled. “U.S.?”

“Cigarette machines in Detroit don’t take Canadian.”

“What kind of expenses?”

“Mileage. Long distance calls. Stitches. Bail, since cops are involved. Cold cases are like extinct volcanoes: no such thing. That’s why I need three days up front. It saves running back to you every time I come out of cardiac arrest.”

“What if the expenses run higher than your fee?”

“You pay them, same as when they don’t.”

“What kind of a payment plan do you offer?”

“The traditional one. If you stiff me, I call a collection agency. They nose around among your neighbors and business associates, ask embarrassing questions, stand in the middle of Yonge Street and call you a deadbeat through a bullhorn. If that doesn’t work, they get a court order and seize your assets.”

He tried to make a sneer. It looked better on paper. “I’ve got eighty-nine dollars in savings. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

“In that case, we’re wasting time. You can’t afford me.”

“Can you recommend anyone?”

“Not for eighty-nine dollars.”

“There’s a check coming when I deliver this book in the fall. I can pay you then.”

“Call me in the fall. What’s three more months on top of fifty years?”

He scooped a gum eraser off the rail and rubbed out the ear he’d drawn earlier. It seemed to take all his concentration.

“I’m impetuous,” he said. “I imagine you knew that before. If the mood I’m in passes, I’ll never know the circumstances of my father’s murder and my mother’s suicide.”

“A lot of people with that background pay plenty to therapists to help them forget the circumstances you want to pay an investigator to find out.”

“At least they have that option.” He redrew the ear. “Sometimes I think being the child of death unresolved must be like living life as an amnesiac. You can go for long periods behaving normally, without wondering about the blank. Then, suddenly, it’s urgent you know. The feeling passes, it always does, but in the meantime you age at an accelerated rate. Who said swinging a bat and missing consumes more energy than swinging and connecting?”

“Al Capone. You might prefer the blank.”

“Do you always spend this much energy talking yourself out of a job?”

“Truth in advertising. You can’t exchange an unsatisfactory answer.”

“Does anyone ever change his mind when you give that speech?”

“One did.”

“Just one?”

“He came back later.”

He leaned forward, blew away the eraser shavings and graphite dust, and sat back to examine the new ear over the top of his glasses. It didn’t look any different to me, but then I once hung a Picasso print upside down.

“You’re as curious as I am,” he said. “You know too much about something that happened years and years before I left home. You didn’t need it just to find me.”

“Don’t read too much into that. I’m a forties buff.”

“What?”

“You know: Glenn Miller and
Casablanca
and the Bataan Death March. Nobody worried about cholesterol and you could smoke in a supermarket. We didn’t have civil rights or penicillin, but you could get a T-bone steak for a buck at Berman’s. I like hats and big cars and black-and-white movies. I can get lost in all that. Then the lights come up and I have to fill up the tank on the way home, at twenty-first-century prices. I’ve got twelve hundred and forty-two dollars in savings. Eleven hundred of it came from your Aunt Beryl. Call me in the fall, when you’ve got fifteen hundred to blow.” I foraged, found a card, and stuck it between two of the brushes sticking up out of a glass on the coffee table.