Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (10 page)

The uniform took her elbow gently and steered her around as if she were a sleepy child. Nelson stood.

“Thanks for nothing, Walker.”

I said, “I’ll be surprised if the D.A. presses charges. If he does he’ll lose.”

“So what? I’m going to end up in the nut ward sooner or later. My way it counted for something. Why’d you have to take that away from me? We were friends for a while.”

I had nothing to throw at that. The plainclothesman prodded him forward and up the steps.

Alderdyce hung back. He had spotted the empty wine bottle, standing in a back corner of the workbench behind a can of gun stock refinisher. “That looks out of place here. Maybe I should have it dusted.”

“Forget it.” I picked it up and chucked it into the wastebasket.

“Dead soldier.”

The client was a no-show,
as four out of ten of them tend to be. She had called me in the customary white heat, a woman with one of those voices you hear in supermarkets and then thank God you’re not married, and arranged to meet me someplace not my office and not her home. The bastard had been paying her the same alimony for the past five years, she’d said, and she wanted a handle on his secret bank accounts to prove he was making twice as much as when they split. In the meantime she’d cooled down or the situation had changed or she’d found a private investigator who worked even cheaper than I did, leaving me to drink yellow coffee alone at a linoleum counter in a gray cinderblock building on Dequindre at Eight Mile Road. I was just as happy. Why I’d agreed to meet her at all had to do with a bank balance smaller than my IQ, and since talking to her I’d changed my mind and decided to refer her to another agency anyway. So I worked on my coffee and once again considered taking on a security job until things got better.

A portable radio behind the counter was tuned to a Pistons game, but the guy who’d poured my coffee, lean and young with butch-cut red hair and a white apron, didn’t look to be listening to it, whistling while he chalked new prices on the blackboard menu on the wall
next to the cash register. Well, it was March and the Pistons were where they usually were in the standings at that time and nobody in Detroit was listening. I asked him what the chicken on a roll was like.

“Better than across the street,” he said, wiping chalk off his hands onto the apron.

Across the street was a Shell station. I ordered the chicken anyway; unless he skipped some lines it was too far down on the board for him to raise the price before I’d eaten it. He opened a stainless steel door over the sink and took the plastic off a breaded patty the color of fresh sawdust and slapped it hissing on the griddle.

We’d had the place to ourselves for a while, but then the pneumatic front door whooshed and sucked in a male customer in his thirties and a sportcoat you could hear across the street, who cocked a hip onto a stool at the far end of the counter and asked for a glass of water.

“Anything to go with that?” asked Butch, setting an amber tinted tumbler in front of him.

“No, I’m waiting for someone.”

“Coffee, maybe.”

“No, I want to keep my breath fresh.”

“Oh. That kind of someone.” He wiped his hands again. “It’s okay for now, but if the place starts to fill up you’ll have to order something, a Coke or something. You don’t have to drink it.”

“Sounds fair.”

“This ain’t a bus station.”

“I can see that.”

Nodding, Butch turned away and picked up a spatula and flipped the chicken patty and broke a roll out of plastic. The guy in the sportcoat asked how the game was going, but Butch either didn’t hear him or didn’t want to. The guy gave up on him and glanced down the counter at me.

“You waiting for someone too?”

“I was,” I said. “Now I’m waiting for that bird.”

“Stood you up, huh? That’s tough.”

“I’m used to it.”

He hesitated, then got down and picked up his glass and carried it to my end and climbed onto the stool next to mine. Up close he was about 30, freckled, with a double chin starting and dishwasher hair going thin in front. A triangle of white shirt showed between his belt buckle and the one button he had fastened on the jacket. He had prominent front teeth and looked a little like Howdy Doody. “This girl I’m waiting for would never stand anyone up,” he said. “She’s got manners.”

“Yeah?”

“No, really. Looks too. Here’s her picture.” He took a fat curved wallet out of his hip pocket and showed me the head and torso of a blond in a red bandana top, winking and grinning at the camera. She stank professional model.

“Nice,” I said. “What’s she do?”

“Waitress at the Peacock’s Roost. That’ll change when we’re married. I don’t want my wife to work.”

“The girls in steel-rimmed glasses and iron pants will burn their bras on your lawn.”

“To hell with them. Rena won’t have anything to do with that kind. That’s her name, Rena.”

“I think it’s dead now,” I told Butch.

He landed the chicken patty on one half of the roll and planted the other half on top and put it on a china saucer and set the works on the linoleum. Howdy Doody finished putting away his wallet and stuck his right hand across his body in front of me. “Dave Tillet.”

“Amos Walker.” I shook the hand and picked up the sandwich. As it turned out I couldn’t have done any worse across the street at the Shell station.

Tillet sipped his water. “That clock right?”

Butch looked up to see which clock he meant. There was only one in the place, advertising Stroh’s beer on the wall behind the counter. “Give or take a minute.”

“She ought to be here now. She’s usually early.”

“Maybe she stood you up after all,” I said.

“Not Rena.”

I ate the chicken and Tillet drank his water and the guy behind the counter picked up his chalk and resumed changing prices and didn’t listen to the basketball game. I wiped my mouth with a cheesy paper napkin and asked Butch what the tariff was. He said “Buck ninety-five.” I got out my wallet.

“Maybe I better call her,” said Tillet. “That phone working?”

Butch said it was. Tillet drained his glass and went to the pay telephone on the wall just inside the door. I paid for the sandwich and coffee. “Well, good luck,” I told Tillet on my way past him.

“What? Yeah, thanks. You too.” He was listening to the purring in the earpiece. I pushed on the glass door.

Two guys were on their way in and I stepped aside and held the door for them. They were wearing dark windbreakers and colorful knit caps and when they saw me they reached up with one hand apiece and rolled the caps down over their faces and the caps turned into ski masks. Their other hands were coming out of the slash pockets of the windbreakers and when I saw that I jumped back and let go of the door, but the man closest to it caught it with his arm and stuck a long-barreled .22 target pistol in my face while his partner came in past him and lamped the place quickly and then put the
.22’s twin almost against Tillet’s noisy sportcoat. Three flat reports slapped the air. Tillet’s mouth was open and he was leaning one shoulder against the wall and he hadn’t had time to start falling or even know he was shot when the guy fired again into his face and then deliberately moved the gun and gave him another in the ear. The guy’s buddy wasn’t watching. He was looking at me through the eyeholes in his mask and his eyes were as flat and gray as nickels on a pad. They held no more expression than the empty blue hole also staring me in the face.

Then the pair left, Gray Eyes backing away with his gun still on me while his partner walked swiftly to a brown Plymouth Volare and around to the driver’s side and got in and then Gray Eyes let himself in the passenger’s side and they were rolling before he got the door closed.

Tillet fell then, crumpling in on himself like a gas bag deflating, and folded to the floor with no more noise than laundry makes skidding down a chute. Very bright red blood leaked out of his ear and slid into a puddle on the gray linoleum floor.

I ran out to the sidewalk in time to see the Plymouth take the corner. Forget about the license number. I wasn’t wearing a gun. I hardly ever needed one to meet a woman in a diner.

When I went back in, the counterman was standing over Tillet’s body, wiping his hands over and over on his apron. His face was as pale as the cloth. The telephone receiver swung from its cord and the metallic purring on the other end was loud in the silence following the shots. I bent and placed two fingers on Tillet’s neck. Nothing was happening in the big artery. I straightened, picked up the receiver, worked the plunger, and dialed 911. Standing there waiting for someone to answer I was sorry I’d eaten the chicken.

They sent an Adam and Eve team, a white man and a black woman in uniform. You had to look twice at the woman to know she was a woman. They hadn’t gotten around to cutting uniforms to fit them, and her tunic hung on her like a tarpaulin. Her partner had baby fat in his cheeks and a puppy moustache. His face went stiff when he saw the body. The woman might have been looking at a loose tile on the floor for all her expression gave up. Just to kill time I gave them the story, knowing I’d have to do it all over again for the plainclothes team. Butch was sitting on one of the customers’ stools with his hands in his lap and whenever they looked at him he nodded in agreement with my details. The woman took it all down in shorthand.

The first string arrived ten minutes later. Among them was a black lieutenant, coarse-featured and heavy in the chest and shoulders, wearing a gray suit cut in heaven and a black tie with a silver diamond pattern. When he saw me he groaned.

“Hello, John,” I said. “This is a hike north from Headquarters.”

John Alderdyce of Detroit Homicide patted all his pockets and came up with an empty Lucky Strikes package. I gave him a Winston from my pack and took one for myself and lit them both. He squirted smoke and said, “I was eight blocks from here when I got the squeal. If I’d known you were back of it I’d have kept driving.”

John and I had known each other a long time, a thing I admitted to a lot more often than he did. While I was recounting the last few minutes in the life of Dave Tillet, a police photographer came in and took pictures of the body from forty different angles and then a bearded black Homicide sergeant I didn’t know tugged on a pair of surgical gloves and knelt and started going through Tillet’s clothes. Butch had recovered from his shock by this time and came over to watch. “Them gloves are to protect the fingerprints, right?” he asked.

“Wrong. Catch.” The sergeant tossed him Tillet’s wallet.

Butch caught it against his chest. “It’s wet.”

“That’s why the gloves.”

Butch thought about it, then dropped the wallet quickly and mopped his hands on his apron.

“Can the crap,” barked Alderdyce. “What’s inside?”

Still chuckling, the sergeant picked up the wallet and went through the contents. He whistled. “Christ, it’s full of C-notes. Eight, ten, twelve—this guy was carrying fifteen hundred bucks on his hip.”

“What else?”

The celluloid windows gave up a Social Security card and a temporary driver’s license, both made out to David Edward Tillet, and the picture of the blonde.

“That Rena?” Alderdyce asked.

I nodded. “She waits tables at the Peacock’s Roost, Tillet said.”

Alderdyce told the sergeant to bag the wallet and its contents. To me: “You saw these guys before they pulled down their ski masks?”

“Not enough before. They were just guys’ faces. I didn’t much look at them till they went for the guns. The trigger was my height, maybe ten pounds to the good. His partner gave up a couple of inches, same build, gray eyes.” I described the getaway car.

“Stolen,” guessed the sergeant. He stood and slid a glassine bag containing the wallet into the side pocket of his coat.

Alderdyce nodded. “It was a market job. The girl was the finger. She’s smoke by now. Dope?”

“That or numbers,” said the sergeant. “He’s a little pale for either one in this town, but the rackets are nothing if not an equal opportunity employer. Nobody straight carries cash any more.”

“I still owe a thousand on this building.” Butch’s upper lip was folded over his chin. “I guess I’d be dumb to pay it off now.”

“The place is made,” the sergeant told him.

“Yeah?” The counterman looked hopefully at Alderdyce, who grunted.

“The Machus Red Fox is booked into next year and has been ever since Hoffa caught his last ride from in front of it.”

“Yeah?”

The lieutenant was still looking at me. “When can you come down and sign a statement?”

“Whenever it’s ready. I’m not exactly swamped.”

“Five o’clock, then.” He paused. “Your part in this is finished, right?”

“When I work, I get paid,” I said.

“How come that doesn’t comfort me?

I said I’d see him at five.

The morgue wagon was just creaking its brakes in front when I came out into the afternoon sunlight and walked around the blue-and-white and a couple of unmarked units and a green Fiat to my heap. I was about to get in behind the wheel when I stopped and looked again at the Fiat. The girl Dave Tillet had called Rena was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring at the blank cinderblock wall in front of the windshield.

I opened the door on the passenger side and got in next to her. She jumped in the seat and looked at me quickly. Her honey-colored hair was caught in a clasp behind her neck, below which a kind of pony-tail hung down her back, and she was wearing a tailored navy suit over a cream-colored blouse open at the neck and jet buttons in her ears, but I recognized her large smoky eyes and the just slightly toowide
mouth that was built for grinning, although she wasn’t grinning. The interior of the little car smelled of car and sandalwood.

She snatched up a blue bag from the seat and her hand vanished inside. I caught her wrist. She struggled, but I applied pressure and her face went white and she stopped struggling. I relaxed the hold, but just a little.

“Dave’s dead,” I said. “You can’t help him now.”

She said nothing. On “dead,” her head jerked as if I’d smacked her. I went on.