Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (5 page)

“What’s one worth?”

“A hundred in the store, but you won’t pay twenty.”

“That’s all you want, the box?”

I lit a cigarette, blew smoke away from him. His lungs wouldn’t be in much better shape than his old man’s for as much exercise as he got rolling back and forth across that little space of bare floor. “One box won’t do my client any good. He lost twenty-five when someone broke in on him. To get the rest I need to find the man. Or the woman.”

“Women’s got too much sense for that kind of lay. You’re never sure if someone’s home, or what he’s carrying. He shoots first, you’re dead. You shoot first, you get to shower with skinheads till your pecker dries up and falls off.” He shook his head. “I shit in a bag. That’s whack. It gets out I gave up a customer’s name, somebody comes here and
feeds
me the bag. That’s worse.”

“Moot point. You don’t deal in electronics.”

His forehead creased. He’d stumbled over his own lie. “Let’s see the hundred.”

I folded the bill around a card and gave it to him. Johnny was a fence, not a welsher. And he couldn’t run. “Got a phone?”

He produced a clamshell from a flap pocket. “It’s a camera too. I gave one to the kid I send for hot dogs so he can send back pictures. I can’t make him understand what’s wrong with turkey franks.” He put it away with the currency and my card.

I went out and put the piece of siding back in place. I didn’t know where he kept his cash, but once or twice a year Detroit General Hospital admitted a patient from the neighborhood with a .22 slug in his leg and no satisfactory explanation for how he got it. Johnny was a light sleeper and never left the house.

I’d asked him once if Toledo was his legal name or if he had some connection with the Ohio city on the lake; all he’d said was he’d spent his entire life in Detroit. Half answers were as much as you could expect from him for free.

FIVE

I thought I’d make a commando call on Bud Lite in his storefront uptown without letting him know I was coming, but the job needed doping out and I needed to eat first. Inside Johnny Toledo’s, the lingering effect of all those scorched wieners was nausea; outside, I was ravenous. I made arrangements at a window for a fish sandwich and a fountain drink, then reported to my private pew in the periodicals section of the library. On the way up the steps I threw some melted ice on top of a couple of Vicodin and dumped the cup in the trash.

Photos of Saddam Hussein before and after his execution filled the front pages and inside sections of both the
News
and
Free Press
, but I found some nutshucks buried inside about the rap musician’s arrest in Guam for the fatal shooting of a man named Winfield, who owned a recording label and the house where the shots were fired. Bud Lite’s real name was Gale Kreski. He was a native of Hamtramck who ran a music store on the north end of Woodward Avenue, up near where the birds flew in the spring. The story got more play when he was indicted, and posted a hundred thousand dollars’ surety on a million dollars’ bail, receiving permission to return home while awaiting trial.

The territorial authorities believed the incident had started with a dispute over sales and promotion and finished with three slugs in Winfield’s chest as he sat on his terrace overlooking the Pacific. A cropped photo of the dead man with six hands on his shoulders featured the usual bald-headed butterball in an earring and trick spectacles.

People with recording contracts seemed to spend as much time posing for mugs as shooting videos, and I never heard where the bounty had been lifted on executives in the music industry, but the amount some bond company had ponied up to keep Kreski/Lite out of the tank was worth a splash in the media. Counting back the dates I figured out I’d been defending my life in a house in Iroquois Heights at the time, a legitimate distraction. But because most Americans couldn’t find the United States Territory of Guam on a map, the story fell like a busted satellite and burned up during descent. Even an album cover shot of the accused pointing a Glock at potential fans couldn’t slow it down.

He looked mild enough, despite the ordnance: one of the growing minority of local white hip-hop artists, with long ratty fair hair and a nose as big as a Polish fieldpiece under a porkpie hat, pale eyes with black pupils punched in the centers. A kid with a cap pistol appeared more dangerous.

It seemed he had enough on his plate without receiving and selling stolen goods; but I’d always heard you needed something to fall back on in case you washed out in show business.

I wasn’t going on appearances. Back in the car I paid a visit to the gun room and clipped on the .38.

Away from downtown, the scenery along the main stem looks less like part of a big city and more like a series of small towns deserted by an interstate: check-cashing places, two-for-one tattoo stalls, storefront campaign headquarters, mini-marts built like penitentiaries, and a Great Wall of China of plywood and spray paint, the only retail items that have trouble keeping up with the regional demand. The same dusty heirlooms make the rounds of all the pawn shops, all located conveniently next to corner lube joints and the crap games and dog fights inside. I watched a seagull too old to migrate to a choicer neighborhood picking at cracks in the sidewalk behind a walker.

Decade upon decade of weather and monoxide had gnawed the letters clean off the side of the four-story building that housed the music shop, but the darker brick where the paint had been still advertised the name of a hardware store and its date of establishment: 1908. Back then, the city had been known more for kitchen stoves than automobiles, and not at all for the businesses that have faded away with the paint. Sleek Stratocasters beckoned to customers from behind heavy plate-glass windows, with some decorative gravel strewn about to cover the chains shackling them to the superstructure. The entrance was set back in a rectangle made of more glass with a gold decal warning burglars that the place was protected by Reliance Alarm Systems, a division of the biggest detective agency in metropolitan Detroit, which broke out in hives at the very thought of the competition I offered.

The store’s name was Felonious Monk Music. The reference was probably lost on most of the clientele, but considering its owner’s current circumstances was good for a chuckle. A crude cartoon of a monkey brandishing a switchblade hung from a post above the door, probably to prevent ignorant questions. A jazzy downbeat answered for a bell when I let myself inside.

Nothing much seemed to have been done by way of remodeling since hardware-store days: broad swept planks creaked underfoot and the ceiling was pressed tin. Where kegs of bolts and sacks of washers had stood, more guitars leaned rakishly on stands. Woodwinds and brass suggested a swing band at rest behind the counter and there were the usual racks of picks and reeds and packages of strings and sheet music in pocket racks. A life-size cutout of Bruce Springsteen, made from the same sturdy cardboard used to make the original, drew attention to a display of DVDs that promised to teach guitar virtuosity in ten easy steps. Posters of pop icons all around and a bare spot of floor where something had stood that was heavy enough to make three distinct impressions in the solid pine planks.

“Eggshell-finish Yamaha baby grand. When it went, I cried more than when my grandma died, and she raised me from age two.”

This was a good voice, resonant without being self-aware, with the promise of more in reserve. It belonged to a man who’d come in from the back and stood at the end of the showcase counter wiping his hands with a streaked chamois cloth. I caught a strong whiff of 3-in-1 Oil, a not unpleasant tang that took me back to seventh-grade band, third chair; cornet valves will stick if you don’t lubricate them regularly.

No Glock, no porkpie hat, and he’d tied his ragged locks into a meager ponytail behind his neck, but he looked enough like his album cover not to fool a determined autograph hound or a border guard with basic training. He photographed older, and his eyes in person were not so much pale as the bright artificial blue of pool chalk: tinted contact lenses, possibly, although I figured him more likely these days to avoid attention rather than seek it out.

“I’m guessing it went toward bail,” I said. “A fine instrument like that’s worth more in draw than a flat-out sale.”

He went on kneading the cloth. He had on a plain black T-shirt and Levi’s that looked as if they’d worn honestly; torn at the crotch, not at the knees, uneven frays at the cuffs, a broad square lick from a brush loaded with whitewash. The brand of jeans belonged to an earlier generation, the inventor of hip, now solidly mainstream. His bare arms were a blue smear of elaborate needlework, each design screaming for attention in a mob.

He said, “I’m innocent. That’s the party line, on orders from my lawyer. You’re the third person today came in to look at me instead of the stock. I guess I’m the piano now.”

“Maybe I came for the stock.”

“You look like a musician,” he said, “like I look like a cop. What’s your pleasure?”

“It’s not as bad as that.” I showed him my ID with the deputy’s badge folded out of sight; he’d seen enough of those lately.

He folded the cloth into a neat square and laid it on the counter. His biceps were lean and moved smoothly under the ink-stained skin. I guessed martial-arts training, and wondered how many moves I remembered. “I guess everyone has a family, even a rat like Winfield. Ask your clients what they’d do if somebody promised you five million dollars, withheld ninety percent pending returns, and cut you off after one album on a three-album deal.”

“Go on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar drunk. But that’s just me.”

“What if you spent every cent on a house for your parents, a place in Grosse Pointe for yourself, this dump for the tax write-off, a fat salary for your publicist, and loans to all the friends who promised to pay you back with interest, only you said, no, no, pay me back what I lent you when you can, but they never paid back even that?”

“Go on a cheaper drunk. Old Milwaukee instead of Grey Goose. I’d still have the piano.” I put away the credentials. “I’m not investigating what went down in Guam. I’m tracking a shipment of stolen HDTV converters. They walked out of a house in Detroit sometime over the weekend.”

“Oh, Christ. Bait a second hook in case I slip off the first. I didn’t kill anyone and I don’t deal in electronics, stolen or otherwise.”

“No one in town deals in them. I asked. I’m starting to think it’s all outsourced to China.”

“Mister, I’m looking at fifty to life in a Philippine shithole for improper disposal of an earring with a piece of shit attached to it. Turning fence wouldn’t cozy me up to the jury.”

“The scatology’s sound, but the reasoning’s shaky. You’re into a bailbondsman for a hundred grand and you’ve got a lawyer to feed. If I were in your position I’d sell anything I could get my hands on.”

“Including your good name?”

“Which one. Gale Kreski or Bud Lite?”

“One’s easier to spell and download.” He scratched a tattoo and looked at his nails to see if it had come off. He’d lost his faith in every transaction. “My great-grandfather came through Ellis Island with a cardboard suitcase and fifty zlotys sewed inside the lining of his coat. That was about ten dollars American. He came to Detroit and hammered out engine blocks at Dodge. Thirty-six years of that and then an artery blew out in his brain right at the end of his shift. Two hundred people went to his funeral in St. Stanislaus’, counting friends and four dozen relatives he helped bring over from the Old Country. I never knew him, but my grandma told me stories every day, each one more saintly than the last.
No
body’s that good, but I wouldn’t turn thief and piss on his grave.”

“Where’d he stand on murder?”

His skin was fair and flushed at the first sign of rain, but that was as far as it went. “I told you twice I’m innocent.”

“How about Great-Grandpa? I thought all you Polacks had a dead Cossack in the family closet.”

That worked. I’d begun to think nothing would. He was fast, and I had twenty years on him, hard ones with painkillers crawling through my veins, but rock beats scissors. I cleared the .38 just as his right foot left the floor.

It was a near thing even then. The two yards that separated us spared me a bad case of athlete’s chin. He caught himself in mid-kick and lowered the foot.

“I wish I
had
killed the son of a bitch.” He was breathing hard. “If I had, I’d do the time satisfied.”

“People say that who never did time. But I believe you. If I didn’t before, I do now. You’d have kicked him off his terrace, not shot him. I don’t buy you on that album cover. No wonder it didn’t sell. You forgot to take off the safety.”

“I let Winfield talk me into posing for it. It was wrong on every level. I told him I’m no gangsta, but he said if I expected people to believe that I should tell them I came from Wichita. He seriously thought ‘Detroit iron’ meant guns.”

“He should’ve dumped the campaign and run with Ellis Island. I don’t think anyone’s ever shot a video there, but I’ve lost touch. My cable went out.”

“White Stripes, last year.” His smile was lost in the shade of the strong Balkan nose. “I opened for them in Cleveland.”

“Who killed him?” I don’t know why I asked. Every case doesn’t have to lead to murder.