Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (18 page)

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She might kick Cole’s head in.”

“Guess I’ll be able to get that warrant now. You going to be handy for a statement?”

I wrote the address of the shop steward’s house in Redford Township on the back of a card and gave it to him. “Don’t try to reach me there. I’ll be staying in the place across the street for a while starting tomorrow.”

“How long?”

“Indefinitely.”

“I got a sister-in-law trying to get out of Redford,” he said. “I feel sorry for you.”

“Like hell you do.”

He grinned for the first time since I knew him.

No one sat in the lobby
of the Hotel Woodward anymore. The ceiling was too high, the brass balls on the banister posts were too big, the oak paneling on the walls was carved too deep. The dark red crushed-leather chairs and sofa ached to wrap themselves around someone’s thighs, and when I stepped through the front door and closed it against an icy gust, the potted fern that occupied the spot on the Persian rug where Theodore Roosevelt had stood to register stirred its dusty fronds like an old man raising his face to the sun. In six months it was all coming down to make room for a ladies’ gym.

A geezer with a white moustache growing straight out of his nostrils moved his lips over my ID on the front desk and directed me to Room 212. I climbed a staircase broad enough to roll a rajah’s dead elephant down and paused outside an open door with cigarette smoke curling through it. The girl lying on the floor was looking straight at me, but she didn’t invite me in. She had learned her lesson the last time. She was a redhead, which I don’t guess means much of anything these days, but the red was natural and would look blonde in some lights. She had a tan the shade of good brandy covering her evenly from hairline to pink-polished toenails without a
bikini line anywhere. It was the only thing covering her. Her body was slim and sleekly muscled, a runner’s body. Her eyes were open and very blue. The dark bruises on her throat where the killer’s thumbs had gone were the only blemishes I could see.

The investigation business was the same as ever. All the beautiful women I meet are either married or guilty or dead. There were three men in the room with her, not dead. One was tall and fifty with crisp gray hair to match his suit and very black features carved along the coarse noble lines of a Masai warrior chief. Standing next to him, almost touching him, was a smaller man, fifteen years younger, with dark hair fluffed out on the sides to draw your eyes down from his thinning top to a handlebar moustache someone else trimmed for him and one of those outfits you grin at in magazine ads—plaid jacket over red vest over diamond-patterned sweater over shirt over pink silk scarf with red cherries on it. He looked very white next to the other man. The third man, also white, was very broad across the shoulders, bought his suit in Sears, and combed his hair with a rake. His age had leveled off somewhere between the others’. Guess which one of these men is the hotel dick.

He spotted me first and walked around the body, transferring his cigarette to his lips to take my hand. He had a grip like a rusted bolt. “Amos Walker? Trillen, security officer. I’m the one who called you.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

He started a little and looked at me closely. He had gray eyes with all the depth of cigarette foil. “Yeah, I heard you were a comic. The night man, Applegate, gave me your name. You helped him clear up an employee matter a few months back before it got to the papers.”

I remembered the case. One of the hops had been letting himself into rooms with a passkey and taking pictures of people who would rather not have had their pictures taken together in hotel rooms.
One night he went into 618 looking to Allen-Funt a city councilman with his male aide and got me.

“This is Charles Lemler,” Trillen said. “He’s with the mayor’s press corps. I’ll let him tell it.”

“Everyone calls me Chuck. Amos, right?” The moustached man in the noisy outfit grasped the hand Trillen had finished with. Afterward I left it out to dry. “The woman was here when we checked in, just as you see her. The clerk offered to move Mr. De Wolfe to another room before the police got here, but it’s going to get out anyway that he registered the day a dead body turned up in the hotel. Trillen suggested you by way of putting some kind of face on this before we call in the authorities.”

“Mr. De Wolfe?”

“I’m sorry. Clinton De Wolfe, Amos Walker.”

The tall black man standing with his back to the body inclined his head a tenth of an inch in my direction. Well, I’d had my hand wrung enough for one morning.

“Mr. De Wolfe is a former Chicago bank officer,” Chuck Lemler explained. “He’s the mayor’s choice for city controller here.”

“Ah.”

“‘Ah’ means what?” snapped De Wolfe.

“That my mouth is too big for my brain. Sorry. Can I look at the body?”

They made room for me. I checked the face and forehead for bruises and the hair for clotting, found nothing like that, spread my fingers to measure the marks on her neck. The spread was normal and while the dark spots were bigger than my thumbtips they weren’t the work of an escaped orangutan or Bigfoot. It takes less strength to strangle a healthy woman than you might think. There was some darkening along her left thigh and under her fingernails. I did a couple
of ungallant things with the body and then stood up. My hands felt colder for the contact with her skin.

“Cover her.”

“You don’t like ‘em boned?” asked Trillen.

“Trillen, for God’s sake!” Lemler’s moustache twisted.

“Yeah, yeah.” The dick strolled into another room and came back carrying a hotel bedspread under one arm. I took an end and we covered the body. I asked if anyone knew her.

Trillen shook his shaggy head and squashed out his butt in a glass ashtray atop the television set. Well, he’d hear about that from someone. “Just another night rental. I hustle ‘em out the back door and they come in again through the side and prowl the bar for fresh meat. This one’s new.”

“This isn’t just another fifty-a-pop career girl,” I said. “It takes income to maintain an all-over tan in Michigan in November and the body stinks exclusive health club. Also she didn’t die here, or if she did someone moved her. She was lying on that thigh until not too long ago.”

“I’d heard politics were rotten in this town,” said De Wolfe.

“That’s just the sort of knee-jerk assumption we’ve been fighting for years,” Lemler snapped. To me: “There’s some opposition to Mr. De Wolfe’s choice as controller. But they wouldn’t go this far.”

“You mean trash a hooker and stash the body in his suite to stir up bad press. It’s been done.” I shook a Winston out of my pack but stopped short of lighting it. Why later. “My consulting fee’s two-fifty, same as my day rate.” Lemler nodded. I said, “There’s a lieutenant in Homicide named Alderdyce. If you ask him to sit on it he’ll do it till it sprouts feathers. But only if you ask him.”

De Wolfe glared. “That’s your professional advice? Call the police?”

“Not the police. John Alderdyce.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“I just got through telling you it isn’t.”

Lemler said, “We’ll think about it.”

I said, “You’ll do it. Or I will. Maybe this is common practice at the City-County Building, but on Woodward Avenue it’s failure to report a homicide. I have a license to stand in front of.”

Trillen said, “Tell him to keep the name of the hotel out of it too.”

“That’s for the newspapers to decide when it breaks. And whether you advertise with them heavily enough to make it worth deciding.”

“Will you stay on the case regardless?” Lemler asked.

“The sooner this gets squared away the better for us, but we can’t throw the city’s weight behind an ordinary homicide investigation without drawing flies.”

“I’ll stay as long as the two-fifty holds out. Or until Alderdyce orders me off it,” I added.

Lemler produced a checkbook from an inside pocket and began writing. “Will a thousand buy a week of your services?”

“Four days. Not counting expenses.”

“The mayor will howl.”

“Tell him to make his new raise retroactive to August instead of July.”

Trillen called the number I gave him for Alderdyce from downstairs. I was smoking my cigarette in the hall outside when they came, the lieutenant towing a black photographer with a beard like a shotgun pattern and a pale lab man with a shrinking hairline and a young Oriental carrying a black metal case. Alderdyce stopped in front of me. He’s my generation, built heavy from the waist up, with facial features hacked out of a charred tree stump blindfolded.

“You didn’t burn any tobacco in there?” he demanded. I shook my head. “Thank Christ for small miracles.” The group swept in
past me. I killed my stub in a steel wall caddy and brought up the rear.

Chuck Lemler broke off a conversation with Clinton De Wolfe to greet the newcomers. But Trillen intercepted Alderdyce and their clasped hands quivered grip for grip until the hotel dick surrendered. Alderdyce wasn’t even looking at him. “The body was covered like that when it was found?”

Trillen said no. The lieutenant barked at the lab man to take some fiber samples from the blanket and subtract them from whatever else was found on the corpse. He lifted one corner of the blanket.

“Damn.”

“Jesus,” said the photographer, and took a picture.

I said, “Yeah.”

Alderdyce flipped aside the blanket. “Bag her hands,” he told the lab man. “There’s matter under her fingernails.”

“Blood and skin,” I said. “She branded somebody.”

He looked at me. “I guess you better feed me all of it.”

“Strangulation maybe,” said the young Oriental, before I could speak. He was down on one knee beside the body with his case open on the floor, prying one of the dead eyelids farther open with a thumb in a surgical glove. “Maybe OD. I’ll say what when I get her open.”

“No tracks,” said Alderdyce, glancing at her wrists and legs.

I said, “There’s scar tissue between her toes. I checked.”

“Damn nice of you to think to call us in, Walker.”

I let that one drift.

“Get some Polaroids,” Alderdyce told the photographer. “Last time the shots were three days coming back from the lab.” He stopped looking at the body and pointed at the used ashtray. “Careful with that butt. The girl’s wearing lipstick. It isn’t.”

“Uh, that’s mine,” said Trillen.

The lieutenant swore.

The rest was routine. Under questioning Trillen revealed that the suite had been cleaned the afternoon before and that no one had been inside between then and when the body was found. There were enough passkeys floating around and keys that had gone off with former guests to spoil that angle, and while Lemler maintained that De Wolfe’s arrival and the number of his suite had been kept confidential, Trillen admitted that there was no standing on the staff grapevine. Meanwhile the lab man quartered the carpet for stray paperclips, and the photographer, having traded the camera he’d been using for another strung around his neck, took more pictures of the body and laid them on the telephone stand to finish developing. I palmed a good one and let myself out while Alderdyce was politely grilling De Wolfe.

Barry Stackpole came out of the YMCA showers scrubbing his sandy hair with a towel, hesitated when he saw me by the lockers, then grinned and lowered the towel to cover his lower body modestly. Only it wasn’t his nakedness that embarrassed him, just his Dutch leg. I said, “Doesn’t that warp or something?”

He shook his head, reaching for his pants. “Fiberglass. I could’ve used you out on that handball court a few minutes ago.”

“No, you couldn’t. I was watching you.”

I’ve known Barry since we shared a shell crater in Cambodia, years before he started his column on organized crime for the Detroit
News
and got his leg and two fingers blown off for his syntax. Someone
at the paper had told me I’d find him creaming a Mob attorney on the courts. I held the Polaroid I’d swiped in front of his face while he was tying his shoes. He whistled. “Actress?”

“Prostitute,” I said. “Maybe. Know her?”

“Not on my salary. Who squiffed her?”

“Why I’m here. Can you float it among your friends on the well-known Street, put a name to the face? It wouldn’t have stayed so pretty very long if she wasn’t connected.”

He finished drawing on his shirt and put the picture in the breast pocket. “User?”

“Yeah. Either someone throttled her unconscious and then shot too much stuff to her or shot too much stuff to her and couldn’t wait. While you’re at it, feed Clinton De Wolfe to your personal computer and see what it belches out.”

“I know that name.”

“If you do you heard it from your guy on city government. He’ll be fine-tuning the books if the mayor gets his way.”

“That isn’t it. When I remember what it was I’ll get back to you.” He took down a bottle of mouthwash from the shelf in his locker and unscrewed the cap. “How rich does this little errand stand to make me?”

“A century, if I like what I hear, Otherwise seventy-five.”

“Century either way. Plus a fifth of Jack Daniel’s.”

“I thought you were on the wagon.”

“It’s a cold dry ride.” He hoisted the mouthwash. “Cold steel.”

“Hot lead,” I returned. The joke toast was as old as the last Tet offensive and the stuff in the bottle smelled like rye. I left him.161

My office waiting room was full of no customers. I unlocked the door to the brain trust, forward-passed a sheaf of advertising circulars I found under the mail slot to the wastebasket, pegged my hat and coat, and set the swivel behind the desk to squeaking while I broke the scotch out of the deep drawer. There was frost on the window, frost on my soul. I guessed Barry had found my breath sweet enough not to need help. As the warmth crawled through my veins I dialed my service. John Alderdyce had tried to reach me twice. I knew why. I asked the girl to hold any further calls from him and thumbed down the plunger and tried another number from memory. A West Indies accent answered on the third ring, cool and female.