Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (12 page)

“We tracked down Paul Venito. I thought you’d want to know.”

“In Vegas?”

He moved his large close-cropped head from side to side slowly. “At Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Stiff as a stick in the trunk of a stolen Oldsmobile.”

The antique clock my grandfather bought for his mother knocked out the better part of a minute with no competition. I shook out my last Winston and smoothed it between my fingers. “Shot?”

“Three times with a twenty-two. Twice in the chest, once in the ear. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah.” I speared my lips with the cigarette and lit up. “How long’s he been dead?”

“That’s up to the M.E. Twelve hours anyway. He was a cold cut long before Tillet bought it.”

“Which means what?”

He shook his head again. His coarse face was drawn in the light of the one lamp I bad burning.

“My day rate’s two-fifty,” I said. “If you’re talking about consulting.”

“I’m talking about withholding evidence and obstruction of justice. The Murrow woman is getting to be important, and I think you know where she is.”

I smoked and said nothing.

“It’s this tingly feeling I get,” he said. “Happens every time a case involves a woman and Amos Walker too.”

“Christ, John, all I did was order the chicken on a roll.”

“I hope that’s all you did. I sure hope.”

We watched each other. Suddenly he seized the knob and pushed open the bedroom door, scooping his Police Special out of his belt holster. I lunged forward, then held back. The room was empty.

He went inside and looked out the open window and checked the closet and got down in push-up position to peer under the bed. Rising, he holstered the .38 and dusted his palms off against each other. “Perfume’s stronger in here,” he observed.

“I told you I was a heartbreaker.”

“Make sure that’s all you’re breaking.”

“Is this where you threaten to trash my license?”

“That’s up to the state police,” he said. “What I can do is tank you and link your name to that diner shoot for the reporters until little old ladies in Grosse Pointe won’t trust you to walk their poodles.”

On that chord he left me. John and I had been friendly a long time. But no matter how long you are something, you are not that something a lot longer.

So far I had two corpses and no Rena Murrow. It was time to punt. I dialed Great Lakes Importers, Paul Venito’s legitimate front, but there was no answer. Well, it was way past closing time; in an orderly society even the crooks keep regular hours. I thawed something out for supper and watched an old Kirk Douglas film on television and turned in.

The next morning was misty gray with the bitter-metal smell of rain in the air. I broke out the foul-weather gear and drove to the Great Lakes building on East Grand River.

The reception area, kept behind glass like expensive cigars in a tobacco shop, was oval-shaped with passages spiking out from it, decorated in orange sherbet with a porcelain doll seated behind a curved desk. She wore a tight pink cashmere sweater and a black skirt slit to her ears.

“Amos Walker to see Mr. Venito,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Mr. Venito’s suffered a tragic accident.” Her voice was honey over velvet. It would be.

“Who took his place?”

“That would be Mr. DeMarco. But he’s very busy.”

“I’ll wait.” I pulled a Thermos bottle full of hot coffee out of the slash pocket of my trenchcoat and sat down on an orange couch across from her desk.

The porcelain doll lifted her telephone receiver and spoke into it. A few minutes later, two men in tailored blue suits came out of one of the passages and stood over me, and that was when the front crumbled.

“Position.”

I wasn’t sure which of them had spoken. They looked alike down to the scar tissue over their eyes. I screwed the top back on the Thermos and stood and placed my palms against the wall. One of them ricked my feet apart and patted me down from tie to socks, removing my hat last and peering inside for atomic devices. I wasn’t carrying. He replaced the hat.

“Okay, this way.”

I accompanied them down the passage with a man on either side. We went through a door marked P. VENITO into an office the size
of Hart Plaza with green wall-to-wall carpeting and one wall that was all glass, before which stood a tall man with a fringe of gray hair and a neat Van Dyke beard. His suit was tan and clung like sunlight to his trim frame.

“Mr. Walker?” he said pleasantly. “I’m Fred DeMarco. I was Mr. Venito’s associate. This is a terrible thing that’s happened.”

“More terrible for him than you,” I said.

He cocked his head and frowned. “This office, you mean. It’s just a room. Paul’s father had it before him and someone will have it after me. I recognized your name from the news. Weren’t you involved in the shooting of this Tillet person yesterday?”

I nodded. “If you call being a witness involved. But you don’t have to call him ’this Tillet person.’ He worked for you.”

“He worked for Great Lakes Importers, like me: I never knew him. The firm employs many people, most of whom I haven’t had the chance to meet.”

“My information is he was killed because he was leaving Great Lakes and someone was afraid he’d peddle what he knew.”

“We’re a legitimate enterprise, Mr. Walker. We have nothing to hide. Tillet was let go. Our accounting department is handled mostly by computers now and he elected not to undergo retraining. Whatever he was involved with outside the firm that led to his death bas nothing to do with Great Lakes.”

“For someone who never met him you know a lot about Tillet,” I said.

“I had his file pulled for the police.”

“Isn’t it kind of a big coincidence that your president and one of your bookkeepers should both be shot to death within a few hours of each other, and with the same caliber pistol?”

“The police were here again last night to ask that same question,”
DeMarco said. “My answer is the same. If, like Tillet, Paul had dangerous outside interests, they are hardly of concern here.”

I got out a Winston and tapped it on the back of my hand. “You’ve been on the laundering end too long, Mr. DeMarco. You think you’ve gotten away from playing hardball. Just because you can afford a tailor and a better barber doesn’t mean you aren’t still Freddy the Mark, who came up busting heads for Peter Venita in the bad old days.”

One of the blue suits backhanded the cigarette out of my mouth as I was getting set to light it. “Mr. DeMarco doesn’t allow smoking.”

“That’s enough, Andy.” DeMarco’s tone was even. “I was just a boy when Prohibition ended, Walker. Peter took me in and almost adopted me. I learned the business and when I got back from the war and college I showed him how to modernize, cut expenses, and increase profits. For thirty years I practically ran the organization. Then Peter died and his son took over and I was back to running errands. But for the good of the firm I drew my pay and kept my mouth shut. We’re legitimate now and I mean for it to stay that way. I wouldn’t jeopardize it for the likes of Dave Tillet.”

“I think you would do just that. You remember a time when no one quit the organization, and when Tillet gave notice and you found out young Paul had arranged to buy his silence instead of making dead sure of it, you took Paul out of the way and then slammed the door on Tillet.”

“You’re fishing, Walker.”

“Why not? I’ve got Rena Murrow for bait.”

The room got quiet. Outside the glass, fourteen floors down, traffic glided along Grand River with all the noise of fish swimming in an aquarium.

“She set up the meet with Tillet for Venito,” I went on. “She can tie Paul to that diner at Eight Mile and Dequindre and with a little
work the cops will tie you to that trunk at Metro Airport. She can finger your two button men. Looking down the wrong end of life in Jackson, they’ll talk.”

“Get him out of here,” DeMarco snarled.

The blue suits came toward me. I got out of there. I could use the smoke anyway.

I was closing my front door behind me when Rena came out of the bedroom. She had fixed her make-up since the last time I had seen her, but she had on the same navy suit and it was starting to look like a navy suit she had had on for two days.

I said, “You remembered to relock the door this time.”

She nodded. “I stayed in a motel last night. The cops haven’t got to them all yet. But I couldn’t hang around. They get suspicious when you don’t have luggage.”

“You can’t stay here. I just painted a bull’s-eye on my back for Fred DeMarco.” I told her what I’d told him.

“I can’t identify the men who killed Dave,” she protested.

“Freddy the Mark doesn’t know that.” I lifted the telephone. “I’m getting you a cab ride to Police Headquarters and then I’m calling the cops. Things are going to get interesting as soon as DeMarco gets over his mad.”

The doorbell buzzed. This time I didn’t have to tell her. She went into the bedroom and I got my Luger off the table and opened the door on a man who was a little shorter than I, with gray eyes like nickels on a pad. He had traded his Windbreaker for a brown leather jacket but it looked like the same .22 target pistol in his right hand.

Without the ski mask he looked about my age, with streaks of premature gray in his neat brown hair.

I waved the Luger and said, “Mine’s bigger.”

“Old movie line,” he said with a sigh. “Take a gander behind you.”

That was an old movie line too. I didn’t turn. Then someone gasped and I stepped back and moved my head just enough to get the corner of my eye working. A man a little taller than Gray Eyes, with black hair to his collar and a handlebar moustache, stood behind Rena this side of the bedroom door with a squat .38 planted against her neck. His other hand was out of sight and the way Rena was standing said he had her left arm twisted behind her back. He too had ditched his Windbreaker and was in shirtsleeves. The lighter caliber gun he had used on Tillet and probably on Paul Venito would be scrap by now.

It seemed I was the only one who needed a key to get into my house.

“Two beats one, Zorro.” Gray Eyes’ tone remained tired and I figured out that was his normal voice. He stepped over the threshold and leaned the door shut. “Let’s have the Heine.” He held out his free hand.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I give it to you and then you shoot us.”

“You don’t, we shoot the girl first. Then you.”

“You’ll do that anyway. This way maybe I shoot you too.”

Moustache shifted his weight. Rena shrieked. My eyes flickered that way. Gray Eyes swept the barrel of the .22 across my face and grasped the end of the Luger. I fired. The report gulped up all the sound in the room. Moustache let go of Rena and swung the .38 my way. She knocked up his arm and red flame streaked ceilingward. Rena dived for her blue bag on the easy chair. Moustache aimed at her back. I swung the Luger, but Gray Eyes was still standing and
fired the .22. Something plucked at my left bicep. The front window exploded then, and Moustache was lifted off his feet and flung backwards against the wall, his gun flying. The nasty cracking report followed an instant later.

I looked at Gray Eyes, but he was down now, his gun still in his hand but forgotten, both hands clasped over his abdomen with the blood dark between his fingers. I relieved him of the weapon and put it with the Luger on tile table. Rena was half-reclining in the easy chair with her skirt hiked up over one long leg and her .32 Remington in both hands pointing at Moustache dead on the floor. She hadn’t fired.

“Walker?”

The voice was tinny and artificially loud. But I recognized it.

“We’re all right, John,” I called. “Put down that bullhorn and come in.” I told Rena to drop the automatic. She obeyed, in a daze.

Alderdyce came in with his gun drawn and looked at the man still alive at his feet and across at the other man who wasn’t and at Rena. I introduced them. “She didn’t set up Tillet,” I added. “Fred DeMarco bought the hit, not Venito. This one will get around to telling you that if you stop gawking and call an ambulance before he’s done bleeding into his belly.”

“For you too, maybe.” Alderdyce picked up the telephone.

He’d seen me grasping my left arm. “Just a crease,” I said. “Like in the cowboy pictures.”

“You’re lucky. I know you, Walker. It’s your style to set yourself up as the goat to smoke out a guy like DeMarco. I had men watching the place and had you tailed to and from Great Lakes. When the girl broke in we loaded the neighborhood. Then these two showed—” He broke off and started speaking into the mouthpiece.

I said, “My timing was off. I’m glad yours was better.”

The bearded black sergeant came in with some uniformed officers, one of whom carried a 30.06 rifle with a mounted scope. “Nice shooting,” Alderdyce told him, hanging up.

“What’s your name?”

“Officer Carl Breen, Lieutenant.” He spelled it.

“Okay.”

I let go of my arm and wiped the blood off my hand with my handkerchief and got out my wallet, counting out two hundred and fifty dollars, which I held out to Rena. “My day rate’s two-fifty.”

She was sitting up now, looking at the money. “Why’d you ask for five hundred?”

“You had your mind made up about me. It saved a speech.”

“Keep it. You earned it and a lot more than I can pay.”

I folded the bills and stuck them inside the outer breast pocket of her navy jacket. “I’d just blow it on cigarettes and whisky.”

“Who’s the broad?” demanded the sergeant.

I thought of telling him that’s what a Dulcinea was, but the joke was old. We waited for the ambulance.

The surviving gunman’s name was Richard Bledsoe. He had two priors in the Detroit area for ADW, one conviction, and after he was released from the hospital into custody he turned state’s evidence and convicted Fred Demarco on two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. DeMarco’s appeal is still pending. The dead man went by Austin Grant and had done seven years in San Quentin for second degree homicide knocked down from Murder One. The Detroit Police worked a deal with the Justice Department and got Rena Murrow relocation and a new identity to shield her from DeMarco’s friends. I never saw her again.