Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (20 page)

“But you asked me about the boxes before there was a murder.”

“I’m not the police. It rated high enough with me. Your chiseler wouldn’t know I’d been hired to find the boxes.”

“I’ll arrange to have them picked up.” She scooped up her telephone.

Barry reached over and thumbed down the plunger. “We’ll pick them up. All part of the service.”

I said, “If you tip off the help, the snow will drift to another location. If we deliver ten empty boxes to the stadium, that’s how many pieces you’ll get Ouida back in.”

She replaced the receiver, frowned, drew open a shallow drawer, and took out a checkbook bound in printed silk.

“This is more than I asked for,” I said, when she’d handed me the check she’d written. “Barry’s here because of your agreement, not to split the bill.”

“You can do what you like with the extra. The original amount was for risking your life to bring Ouida back. Now you’re suggesting risking your life a second time just to obtain what the kidnappers are after. You might want to cash it before you set out. The beneficiary of your estate will never find a bank that will honor a check made out to a dead man.”

“This
is
my estate.” I put the check in my wallet. “Three times, by the way, not two.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Risking my life. You promised to kill us both if we ring in the cops.”

“You didn’t tell me that part,” Barry said. “You know, I canceled an interview with the governor for this.”

“You’re welcome.”

*   *   *

Barry was driving a buzzy little sports job with an emerald finish and the top folded down. It would be a gift from some high-placed snitch in return for keeping their association a gentleman’s affair, registered to some branch of some corporation whose comptroller didn’t know his stock options depended on the house advantage in Las Vegas. The arrangement was a conflict of interest only if Barry put anything more into it than his customary silence. He disliked owning things outright. It made them harder to part with if he had to take off in the middle of some night. That long-ago bomb had taken away more than a leg and sundry other pieces of his body; it had blown apart his faith in the permanence of anything.

I followed him to the garage where he stored the car, just down from the converted department store where he rented his apartment on a month-by-month basis, waited until he climbed in next to me, and let out the clutch while he transferred the big chrome fifty-caliber magnum from the slash pocket of his coveralls to the glove compartment.

“If you packed lighter, you wouldn’t have to keep moving it around all the time,” I said.

“It’s no trouble.”

“You don’t have to do this. I brought you in for your computer skills.”

“Wish I’d never developed them. I used to spend most of my time doing this. Pushing a mouse around a pad is not why I joined the Fourth Estate.”

“Everything gets old, even riding with the U.S. Cavalry.”

It was coming on noon. The business-lunch traffic was heading out of town to where the restaurants were. We turned off Jefferson and crunched to a stop on gravel alongside a strip of bleached asphalt ending in a guardrail. Beyond the rail rolled the river, the color of brushed aluminum under the sun filtering through a scrim of smut from both sides of the international border.

The warehouse district, which used to stretch from the old Stroh’s brewery all the way down to Toledo, Ohio—mile after mile of brick and block storage space stacked to the roofs with steel coils and sacks of grain—hardly qualifies as a district any more. Developers are renovating or knocking down the century-old piles one by one, establishing condominiums and lofts available at tenement rates in order to lure young professionals away from the suburbs. The earth there is corrupt to its center, drenched with toxic waste leeched from car batteries in storage and rusted chemical tanks, but the city issues waivers on a fixed-price menu. Variances are easier to obtain than dog licenses.

Barry got out and stuck the big magnum through his slash pocket into some kind of holster under his coveralls. “I was born way too late. I should’ve been shooting rumrunners with a Speed Graphic. They tied up right there.” He pointed to where the ground sloped down from the guardrail and slid under the river.

“One flash and you’d be doing the tommy gun dance.” I checked the magazine in the Luger and poked it away under the tails of my sport coat.

The warehouse Eugenia Pappas had directed us to was a community affair, a series of leased spaces in a homely barn that looked as if someone had gone over every inch of its brick exterior with a blowtorch; fires had razed generations of wooden buildings that had stood on the spot. Most of the recent maintenance had gone into replacing broken windowpanes. Whole sections were more masonite than glass, and BBs had punched holes in most of the rest. Roman numerals chiseled into a cream-colored cornerstone fixed 1903 as the end of unchecked conflagration. A brick loading dock faced the river, where yard engines had chugged along rails long since torn up and sold for scrap, towing stove parts and lumber from cargo ships anchored off the bank before the coming of the guardrail to prevent wayward drunks from pitching their cars into the river. An iron sliding door designed to open onto the dock was secured with a padlock and chain.

“We could shoot if off,” Barry said.

“We could. Self-inflicted gunshot wounds don’t interest me.”

“How unromantic of you. Well, I left my battering ram in my other pants.”

“Here’s a thought.” I knocked on the door with the meaty part of my fist.

Nothing answered but the wind off the water and the smell of carp. I tried again, then stepped back and kicked at the door, bonging it in its heavy frame.

Barry touched my arm.

I turned and watched a stoop-shouldered figure in a tattered brown Carhartt coat and baggy green work pants coming our way around the corner of the building with his fists stuck deep in his pockets. His chin was plastered to his chest, giving us a view of a head of feathery dirty-gray hair that looked as if it had never been trained, an ambulatory dandelion gone to seed. His steel-toed work boots made twin channels in the gravel, leaving the ground only when he skipped at every fourth shuffle, a hurrying gait in his set. He kept right on coming until the top of the loading dock came flush with his chest, then took his hands out of his pockets and rested them on the dock; twisted, gray-white roots, painful even to look at. He showed his face then, screwed up against the diffused sunlight. It was as brown and wrinkled as a roasted potato.

“Lock’s there for a purpose.” His speech was a shrill twang, packed in from some prairie state, Kansas or Nebraska; some flat place where it cracked like a .22 rifle.

“So’s this.” I got down on one knee and snapped open a folded sheet under his nose. “This is a bill of lading signed by Eugenia Pappas in receipt for merchandise you’re holding.”

He didn’t take it. I doubted his fingers opened far enough. He worked his lips over the syllables. His eyesight seemed sound. The sheet was greenish and nearly transparent, torn from a pad bequeathed by Nick Pappas. The date blank followed
19–
. Eugenia had filled it out, substituting the new century with a mark through the old, and signed it in a hand as angular as the rest of her.

He lifted his head from the sheet. “She’s off her rocker. This is the easiest caretaking job I ever had. Nobody tries to bust into a place that’s empty.”

“When’s the last time you looked inside?”

“What for? I got me a little office in the side with an outside door. Sleep there sometimes on this little cot, chase away kids with air pistols. I tell you there’s nothing there.”

“Chase ’em away? I thought you invited them around for variety.” Barry kicked at a squashed copper pellet that had bounced off brick.

The old man tugged aside the collar of his coat to show him an angry red welt on his neck. “Mister, they don’t pay me enough.”

“Let’s take a look anyway,” I said.

He gathered the bones of his shoulders into a steeple behind his head and let them drop, turned, and shuffled back the way he’d come, following the tracks he’d made in the gravel. No skipping now. We hopped down from the dock and followed.

“What do they do, back-order these guys from Dickens?” Barry murmured.

We went in through a brown steel fire door labeled
KEEP OUT
and waited in a small square architect’s mistake of a room with an army cot and a gray steel desk while the caretaker shook loose a key on a ring and inserted it in a door on the other side. The desk was littered with jointed pieces of plastic, squashed tubes of paint and cement, and what looked like a replica of the
Mayflower,
as it would have appeared half finished in the shipmaker’s yard in Southampton. The solitary life is stuffed with crosswords and paint-by-numbers sets.

A gust of decayed wood and mildew came out when he opened the door, shredding a webwork as intricate as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Barry and I exchanged a look; steers don’t come any bummer.

The storage area was a vast square space going twenty feet in every direction, including up to the rafters, where dynasties of birds had built nests. Descendants of the early founders fluttered off their perches when the current of air reached them, making new deposits onto the chalky splatter below. The panes that lingered in the windows, dirty and discolored and nearly opaque, cast the huge room in eternal twilight. Our feet scraped the concrete slab, making echoes. My toe collided with the skeleton of a small animal laid out intact on its side, as if in state, and sent it sliding like a shuttle.

“See?” The old man’s voice cracked triumphantly. “When a rat can’t live off what’s here, man, it’s empty.”

As if in confirmation, a blast of wind off the river shook the building, dislodging sawdust and old ash off a wooden framework weakened by the last fire. A termite’s sneezing fit would save some developer the cost of demolition.

“What’s that?” Barry pointed at an uneven shape, vaguely rectangular, covered by a stiff canvas tarpaulin in a far corner.

“Wood pallets. It don’t pay to haul ’em out to the curb.”

“Why cover wood pallets?” I asked.

“If I start to ask why, I’ll end up asking why anybody pays me to look after a great big box of nothing. At my age you don’t have to look far to get depressed.”

I approached the tarp-covered shape, stooped to hook a hand under the hem, and turned it back, taking a step away in case a rat hadn’t gotten the message. Nothing came out, but a puff of gray dust rose from the top and settled back. It didn’t seem nearly enough dust for as much time had passed since a forklift truck had disturbed any of the pallets.

Barry broke the silence. “Never fails. No one ever leaves a place as tidy as he found it.”

The pallets lay end to end and stacked three deep, with square shipping cartons arranged on top in three uneven rows. Each was stamped with the same legend:

MACARTHUR INDUSTRIES

TWENTY-THREE

The caretaker scratched his chin with a gnarled knuckle. For him it was the equivalent of a backflip. I asked him if he was there all the time.

“They don’t chain me to the wall. I go home nights.”

“That cobweb we came through took time to build,” Barry said. “They had to have come in through the bay door. That means a key to the padlock, or they cut it off and replaced it. One pretty much looks like all the rest.”

I said, “They had a key. You might go to that much trouble to take something out and cover your tracks, but not to put something in. Who do you punch in with?” I asked the old man.

“Nobody. It’s just me here, day after day. Every other Friday the mailman comes in with my paycheck, signed by Mrs. Pappas.”

I took the check she’d given me out of my wallet and showed it to him. “That the signature?”

“Can’t say. Can’t make it out.”

“Well, if you can make it out on your paycheck well enough to know it’s Mrs. Pappas’ name, that means it’s different.”

Barry smiled. “Ouida won’t starve.”

I put away the check and lifted a carton off the top of one stack. It was lighter than it looked. I put it down, got out my pocket knife, and slit the sealing tape on the flap. A shallow rectangle made of black plastic slid out of the packing material. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of converter boxes only a couple of days ago. I used the point of the blade to loosen the tiny brass screws on the back panel and removed it. I showed Barry the empty cavity.

“Couple of kilos short,” he said. “Check the rest.”

I didn’t have to open any more cartons. They were all equally lightweight.

“Decoys?” he asked.

“Now, maybe. They didn’t start out that way. No circuit boards or wires. They were never intended to be hooked up. Somebody beat us to them.”

“So what now?”

“Same plan.”

“What about what you said about delivering empty boxes?”

“The directions said only boxes. No mention of heroin.” When he stared I said, “I’m open to alternatives.”