Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (19 page)

“Iris, this is Amos.”

“Amos who?”

“It’s a funny hooker,” I said dryly. “I’m trying to identify a lady who might have been in your line. Five-six and a hundred and ten, red and blue, Miami tan, about thirty. She showed up dead in a suite in the Woodward this morning. Drugs and strangulation. She wasn’t a stranger to the drugs.”

“Sounds a little rich for the street.”

“You get around.”

“In Blacktown. You’re talking Grosse-Pointe chic. Try the escort services.”

“The real ones or the fronts?”

“There’s a difference?”

“That’s all you can tell me, huh.”

“Every one of us don’t know everyone else,” she retorted, her class slipping. “Amos?”

I’d started to peg the receiver. I raised it again and said yeah. After a pause she said, “I’m going home.”

“Home where?”

“Home where. Home the island. I’m going back to live with my mother.”

“I’m glad,” I said after a moment. “It’s what you’ve been wanting.”

“That’s all? I thought maybe you’d try to talk me out of it.”

“I don’t have any hold on you, Iris.”

“No. I guess you don’t.”

“Have a good flight.” I was speaking into a dead line.

I looked at the calendar on the wall across from my framed investigator’s license. Then I looked at a pigeon shivering alone on the ledge of the apartment house facing my building. Then I looked at the calendar again to see what the date was. I winched the Yellow Pages out of the top drawer and looked up Escorts.

I tried the display advertisements first and got three possibles. Then I tried the cheaper listings and lucked out on the first call.

“I need an escort for a business party Friday night,” I told the woman who answered, by rote. “What I’m interested in is a specific redhead I saw with a friend of mine in the restaurant of the Hotel Woodward recently. I didn’t get her name but I think she’s with your service.” I described her.

“That sounds like Myra Langan,” said the woman. “But she doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Did she resign?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“That means she was fired.”

“I m not—”

“Can I talk to you about her in person? It’s important.”

“We have another redhead,” she started to say. I told her I’d pay
for her time. She hesitated, then said, “Our regular escort fee is a hundred dollars.” I said that sounded fair and agreed to meet her in the office at three. “Ask for Linda.”

It was just past noon. I thought about the woman’s voice. She sounded pleasant and young. You can’t always get the accent you want. I skipped lunch and drove to a downtown theater where an old Robert Mitchum detective film was playing in revival. I took notes. In the lobby afterward I used the pay telephone to call Barry Stack-pole’s private number at the
News.

“Nobody I showed the picture to knows her from Jane Fonda,” he told me. “Could be I’m working the wrong level. All the
capos
are browning their bellies at Cannes this time of year.”

“Try Myra Langan. I’ve got an appointment today with a woman she worked with at a legit floss rental firm.” I named the place.

“Our guy on cophouse might turn something. It means bringing him in.”

“Cut the best deal you can.” I took the instrument away from my ear.

“Don’t you want to hear what I found out about Clinton De Wolfe?”

I paused. “I’m on pins and noodles.”

“I get an exclusive when this breaks, right?”

“Feed it to me. “

“I finally remembered where I’d heard the name and hooked a snitch,” he said. “De Wolfe is on the books as having resigned his vice-presidency at a Chicago bank in September. The dope is he was forced out for making unsecured loans to a Mob subsidiary in Evanston and accepting repayment in cash skimmed from the tables in Vegas.”

I looked at a stiff face reflected in the telephone’s shiny steel cradle. “Laundering?”

“Yeah. They let him quit to duck bad press. Good?”

“Listen, I’m on my way to your office with a C-note and a fifth of JD. Have that picture ready, okay?”

“Bring a glass for yourself.” He broke the connection.

It was a quick stop and a quicker drink. From there I drove downriver to a low yellow brick building between a beauty salon and a hairpiece emporium with the escort firm’s name etched in elegant script across the front. Inside was an office decorated like a living room with a white shag rug and ivory curtains and a lot of blond furniture, including a tall occasional table with turned legs and a glass top, but it didn’t fool me. I know a desk when I see one. A brunette with her hair piled atop her head in blue waves and the kind of cheeks girls used to have their back teeth hauled out to get sat behind it wearing a black dress with a scoop neck and pearl buttons in her ears. I took off my hat and asked for Linda.

“You’re Mr. Walker?” I said I was. “I’m Linda.”

I glanced around. The room took up the entire ground floor and we were the only ones in it. “Who was I supposed to ask?”

“I wanted to get a look at you. In this business we have to go out with whoever has the price and no bloodstains on his necktie. When I get the chance to choose I leap on it. Are you a daylighter or a sundowner?” I must have looked as stupid as I felt, because she said, “A sundowner waits for darkness before he’ll take a drink. It’s dark in England.”

“My father’s family was English.”

She smiled and rose. “I’ll get my coat and purse.”

We went to a place down the street with a blue neon cocktail glass on the roof and took a booth upholstered in red vinyl around a table the size of a hubcap. She ordered something green. I took scotch and when the waitress left I slid the Polaroid shot I had gotten back from Barry across the table. Linda’s nostrils whitened when she glanced down at it. Then she looked at me:

“You’re not a policeman. Your eyes are too gentle.”

“I’m a private investigator.” I tapped the picture. “Myra Langan?’

“It’s her. Are you looking for her murderer?”

“Who said murderer?”

“She was the kind of a girl who would wind up murdered or suicided. Did she kill herself?”

“Not unless she found a way to strangle herself bare-handed. What kind of a girl is the kind that would wind up murdered or suicided?”

She sipped her drink and set it down. After a beat I passed her two fifties. With what I’d given Barry, that left me just fifty from the first day of my retainer. I was on the wrong end of the information business.

“Myra got fired for her action on the side,” said Linda, snapping shut her purse. “The police keep a tight eye on the escort business for just that. It was can her or risk a raid.”

“Who snitched on her?”

“Another girl, Susan. They were at the same party and Susan overheard Myra discussing terms with her escort. Myra tried to cut her in but she wasn’t having any.”

“Myra got canned on just her word?”

“The boss lady ran a check. Her brother’s a retired cop. He interviewed some of Myra’s regular customers. The same pimp put six of them on her scent.”

“What’d he interview them with, a Louisville Slugger?”

“He’s retired like I said.” She licked a drop off the end of her swizzle stick, eyeing me. “Married?”

“Not recently. Was she using when she worked for the firm?”

“You mean drugs? She couldn’t have been. A complete physical is part of the screening process for new employees.”

“Could’ve happened after she was hired. She worked there how long?”

“She was there when I came. A year, maybe. You think the pimp turned her on to get a handle on her?”

“It’s not new. Looks like hers run high in executive circles. He have a name?”

“Probably. Talk to Max Montemarano. That’s the boss lady’s brother. He’s a day guard at Detroit Bank and Trust. The main branch.”

I got up and left money on the table for the drinks. “Thanks. I have to see a man.”

“Me, too.” She swung a mile of silk-paved leg out from under the table. “What do you do when you’re not detecting?”

I watched her stand up. Some women know how to get out of a booth. I asked her if she’d ever lived on an island.

“What? No.”

“Okay, thanks again.”

On my way out a man in a blue suit seated near the door looked from me to the woman in the black dress standing by the booth and then back to me. I agreed with him.

I called the bank from an open-air booth outside a service station. A receptionist got me Montemarano, who explained in a hard fat man’s voice that his shift didn’t change for another hour but agreed to stop by my office on his way home for a quick fifty. The expenses on this one had just caught up with my fee.

A kid in a plaid overcoat stood in the foyer of my building reading the sign on the building super’s door. The sign read MANAGER. He was still studying when I reached the second-floor landing. He might as well have worn a uniform.

I found Lieutenant John Alderdyce sitting on the bench in my waiting room learning about the Man of some other Year from a copy of
Time
he’d unstuck from the coffee table. He had on a tan jacket and a red knit tie over a champagne-colored shirt. Since I knew him he’d dressed from nowhere closer to the street than J. L. Hudson’s second floor. “This year it’s a computer,” he said, flicking his fingers at the photograph on the cover. “What do you think about a machine making the cover of
Time?”

“Electricity’s cheap. You and I run on tobacco and alcohol.”

I unlocked the inner office door. “Someone should enroll your boy in the lobby in a remedial reading course.”

“He’s on loan from the commissioner’s office. His Police Positive has an ivory handle.” He got up and followed me inside, where I shed my outerwear and sat down and got an old bill from under the desk blotter and pretended to check the arithmetic. He thumped his hand down on the desk, palm up. “The photog used up a twelve-pack of Polaroid film at the Woodward. He wound up with eleven pictures.”

I started to reach for my inside breast pocket, then remembered I’d left the picture of Myra Langan on the table where I’d had drinks with Linda. “I’ll stand the department to a new pack tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t be prowling around in an open homicide investigation,” he said. “Not you.”

“It happens we’re both working for the city this one time. Check with Lemler.”

“No thanks. Every time I look at that guy’s clothes and shut my eyes I see spots. What’d you turn?”

I watched him. He had sad eyes. Cops do, and it doesn’t mean anything more than a croc’s smile. Finally I said, “Her name was Myra Langan. She worked for an escort service downtown till they booted her for soliciting.” I told him which service and gave him Linda’s name. I didn’t mention Max Montemarano or the pimp. It weighed light without them and Alderdyce saw it. He said, “I guess you stopped here on your way to Headquarters.”

“More or less.”

“More less than more. You passed Headquarters on your way here.”

“I wanted to see if I had customers. “

“No good. Go again.”

“I’m a small guy in a small business, John. I don’t have your resources.”

“Resources. The redhead—Myra?—rode the springs with some guy not long before she was killed, the M.E. said. He took a smear and the type matches the blood we found under her fingernails. She was alive until four this morning. I’ve got men knocking on doors in the hotel looking for busted lamps and shaving cuts that don’t fit a razor and scouting up the night staff, which by now is scattered between here and Ann Arbor. It’s a big hotel, Walker. It has a big staff and lots of rooms. If I could put the squad on it I’d have the answers
I need in an hour. But police reporters notice when the squad’s missing and start asking questions. I’ve got Junior downstairs and one other detective and two uniforms borrowed from Traffic. I can’t even get priority at the lab because someone who knows the number of one of this town’s three TV stations might be looking.”

He stuck his brutal face inches from mine. “Those are my resources, Walker. Four men, and the mayor’s dresser asking me every five minutes when I’m going to arrest someone. You’re a detective. Does it look to a detective like I need a keyholer playing Go Fish with me too?”

“I’m waiting to hear it,” I said.

“Hear what?”

“‘Get off my foot or I’ll jerk your license.’”

Alderdyce lifted weights when he wasn’t sifting leads. He gave the desk a shove and it struck me in the solar plexus and I rolled backward on squealing casters and came to a rest pinned against the window. He leaned on the desk.

“We’ve never mixed it up, you and me,” he said. “You’d lose.”

We stayed like that for a long moment, he resting his weight on the desk, I trying to breathe with the edge pressing my sternum and cold from the window glass soaking clammily through my jacket and shirt to my back. Then he pushed off and turned around and left. The door drifted shut against the pressure of the pneumatic closer.

John and I had played together as kids, a million years ago.

Max Montemarano found me straightening the furniture in the office a few minutes later. He wasn’t fat at all, just large and slope-shouldered with a civilian overcoat over his gray guard’s uniform and a visored cap on the back of his white head. His face was broad and ruddy, and burst blood vessels etched purple tributaries on his cheeks. “Colder’n a witch’s tit,” he said by way of greeting.

I blew dust out of a pair of pony glasses and filled them with scotch. He managed to snatch one up without spilling anything, lifted it in a sort of toast, and knocked it back the way they used to do in westerns. When the glass came down empty I poked a fifty-dollar bill into it. “Myra Langan,” I said.

He looked down at the bill without touching it. “What about her?”

“You followed up another girl’s complaint about her for your sister. She had a pimp. He had a name.”

He set the glass down on the desk and drew himself up, squaring his visor. “I’m not a cop anymore. She ain’t working for my sister now. I never dipped a finger in twenty-three years on the force and I ain’t about to start now.”

I said, “She’s dead. There’s a better than even chance her pimp killed her or knows who did.”