Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (2 page)

The book was rejected twice, first by my editor at Doubleday, who wanted me to write another novel set in Victorian London, the second time by another publisher who said it wouldn’t stand a chance in the marketplace. But my agent, Ray Puechner, was relentless, and placed it with Ruth Hapgood at Houghton Mifflin, who would go on to edit the next nine books in the series. Two of those titles would be named Notable Books of the Year by the
New York Times,
and the fifth,
Sugartown,
would win the first of four Shamus Awards given by the Private Eye Writers of America to the series. The books were picked up in the United Kingdom and Australia and translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Danish, and Japanese. As of this
writing, twenty Amos Walker novels have been published, with a twenty-first awaiting its time in stores and libraries.

It’s not quite a rags-to-riches story; more of a rags-to middle-class respectability. Amos Walker has never cracked a national bestseller list, but he’s survived a number of fictional detectives who have. The series has been with four publishers, not counting mass-market and trade-paper reprints, and for seven years I was enjoined from writing about Walker in a book because of a dispute over contracts. However, the fact that readers embraced the character all over again after so long a silence testifies to his durability.

Here again is where my congenital muleheadedness paid off. When asked the reason for Walker’s long tenure, my reply is always “applied denial.” Publishing wisdom says that there is no percentage in picking up a series after it’s been dropped by a competitor, but I’ve never been one to let someone else’s wisdom stand in my way. After Houghton Mifflin bowed out of an auction, and after I canceled a contract with the high bidder over professional differences, I took the series to the Mysterious Press, where an editor I’d known for years was eager to show what he could do with it. When, four books later, that editor was terminated in the ill-fated AOL/Time-Warner merger, I offered the series to Forge, which had been publishing my historical westerns for years, and there the novels have remained to this day. On occasion, these changes of venue have involved smaller cash advances, but never so small as to be unworthy of my best efforts, and in the long run the books have earned as much if not more through royalties. I need money to live, and I enjoy spending it when there’s anything left over after my belly is full and my mortgage is paid, but I’ve never considered it an indicator of my value as a human being or as an artist. I don’t keep score with figures involving dollar signs.

So much for the novels—although I hope there is a great deal more to be heard from and about them. The present collection contains more than thirty short stories featuring Walker beginning in 1982. Walker connoisseurs, assuming such creatures exist, may note that the stories place less emphasis on photorealistic style and more on leanness of prose. It’s an often-repeated misconception that not a single word can be excised from the Estleman canon; going back over my earlier work, I always find bales of stuff I could do without. I’m one of those critics I hate.

Economy is crucial to the short form, but when you pare a thing too close to the bone you risk nicking the marrow. It’s not enough to say the air is cold and leave it at that. If you want the reader to feel the cold, you need to lay a piece of metal alongside his spine; only you can’t do that, and I can’t either, because I already have. If I repeat the image, the reader will remember it from before and wind up thinking about that instead of how cold it is. In a novel, I can spend a paragraph comparing ice floes to tipped-over tombstones, frosting noses with tiny needles, and bursting the cores of trees; but this isn’t a novel, it’s piston-driven, I’m being paid by the word; okay, you made your point, it’s cold. What happens next?

A novel is a broad canvas. You can hide coarse brushstrokes in the expanse. Short stories are miniatures, where flaws of any sort are immediately obvious. A Botticelli would never have attempted one. There are highly accomplished novelists who blanch at the prospect of writing short fiction. William Faulkner once said that he’d tried poetry, couldn’t do it, then tried short stories, couldn’t do that, and so he wrote novels. More prosaic writers have compared writing short stories to making love on an elevator and having to finish before it reaches the top floor. They’re an intolerant form. When I type the last period on a short story I consider satisfactory, I feel a sense of accomplishment
(and exhaustion) that I don’t necessarily feel at the end of a novel that took me six months to complete.

The stories in this book satisfied me, when I wrote them. Looking back from the perspective of years or even weeks, I can always see something else to be done, but if in the rereading I wasn’t sufficiently happy with the result, I wouldn’t be offering it here. This is the humblest way I can think of to say these are good stories. Walker himself owes them a personal debt: They kept him alive when I was prohibited from writing about him at book length.

These stories originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and various other magazines and anthologies. They’re arranged in rough chronological order for those who care to track Walker’s progress through time beginning with “Robbers’ Roost” in 1982, two years after his debut in
Motor City Blue.
Amateur anthropologists of this stamp might discover a somewhat sadder and wiser detective in “Rumble Strip” than the one they made the acquaintance of in “Greektown.”

Or perhaps not; but I’m a somewhat sadder and wiser man myself than I was when the only place you could look up a telephone number was in the Yellow Pages. I have to believe that some of life’s lessons have spilled out into print.

As I said, the outlook for private eye fiction in 1980 was dismal. Within two years, other series had sprung up against the backdrop of every major city in the U.S. A national organization of private detective writers was chartered, with applications for membership streaming in from as far away as Australia. I can’t claim credit for this renaissance, because others were developing their characters at the same time. But I can state that most of those writers have moved on to other subjects and that some have left the trade entirely. Meanwhile, Amos Walker and I remain. I have, of course, many readers to
thank, as well as editors Ruth Hapgood, Cathleen Jordan, Janet Hutchings, Bill Malloy, Jim Frenkel, and Linda Landrigan, as well as the staff responsible for the present book, and agents Ray Puechner, Barb Puechner, Millie Puechner, Robin Rue, and Dominick Abel. Finally, I can’t emphasize too strongly the importance of the City of Detroit to the series, and the courageous people who maintain the place with little help from the people in office.

—L
OREN
D. E
STLEMAN

   January 2010

The restaurant was damp and dim
and showed every indication of having been hollowed out of a massive stump, with floorboards scoured as white as wood grubs and tall booths separated from the stools at the counter by an aisle just wide enough for skinny waitresses like you never see in Greektown. It was Greektown, and the only waitress in sight looked like a garage door in a uniform. She caught me checking out the booths and trundled my way, turning stools with her left hip as she came.

“You are Amos Walker?” She had a husky accent and large dark pretty eyes set in the rye dough of her face. I said I was and she told me Mr. Xanthes was delayed and sat me down in a booth halfway between the door and the narrow hallway leading to the restrooms in back. Somewhere a radio turned low was playing one of those frantic Mediterranean melodies that sound like hornets set loose in the string section.

The waitress was freshening my coffee when my host arrived, extending a small right hand and a smiling observation on downtown Detroit traffic. Constantine Xanthes was a wiry five feet and ninety pounds with deep laugh lines from his narrow eyes to his broad
mouth and hair as black at 50 as mine was going gray at 33. His light blue tailormade suit fit him like a sheen of water. He smiled a lot, but so does every other restaurateur, and none of them means it either. When he found out I hadn’t eaten he ordered egg lemon soup, bread, feta cheese, roast lamb, and a bottle of ouzo for us both. I passed on the ouzo.

“Greektown used to be more than just fine places to eat.” He sighed, poking a fork at his lamb. “When my parents came it was a little Athens, with markets and pretty girls in red and white dresses at festival time and noise like I can’t describe to you. It took in Ma-comb, Randolph, and Monroe Streets, not just one block of Monroe like now. Now those colorful old men you see drinking retsina on the stoops get up and go home to the suburbs at dark.”

I washed down the last of the strong cheese with coffee. “I’m a good P.I., Mr. Xanthes, but I’m not good enough to track down and bring back the old days. What else can I do to make your life easier?”

He refilled his glass with ouzo and I watched his Adam’s apple bob twice as the syrupy liquid slid down his throat. Afterward he was still smiling, but the vertical line that had appeared between his brows when he was talking about what had happened to his neighborhood had deepened.

“I have a half brother, Alexander,” he began. “He’s twenty-three years younger than I am; his mother was our father’s second wife. She deserted them when Alexander was six. When Father died, my wife and I took over the job of raising Alexander, but by then I was working sixty hours a week at General Motors and he was seventeen and too much for Grace to handle with two children of our own. He ran away. We didn’t hear from him until last summer, when he walked into the house unannounced, all smiles and hugs, at least for me. He and Grace never got along. He congratulated me on my success
in the restaurant business and said he’d been living in Iowa for the past nine years, where he’d married and divorced twice. His first wife left him without so much as a note and had a lawyer send him papers six weeks later. The second filed suit on grounds of brutality. It seems that during quarrels he took to beating her with the cord from an iron. He was proud of that.

“He’s been here fourteen months, and in that time he’s held more jobs than I can count. Some he quit, some he was fired from, always for the same reason. He can’t work with or for a woman. I kept him on here as a busboy until he threw a stool at one of my waitresses. She’d asked him to get a can of coffee from the storeroom and forgot to say please. I had to let him go.”

He paused, and I lit a Winston to keep from having to say anything. It was all beginning to sound familiar. I wondered why.

When he saw I wasn’t going to comment, he drew a folded clipping from an inside breast pocket and spread it out on the table with the reluctant care of a father getting ready to punish his child. It was from that morning’s
Free Press,
and it was headed PSYCHIATRIST PROFILES FIVE O’CLOCK STRANGLER.

That was the name the press had hung on the nut who had stalked and murdered four women on their way home from work on the city’s northwest side on four separate evenings over the past two weeks. The women were found strangled to death in public places around quitting time, or reported missing by their families from that time and discovered later. Their ages ranged from 20 to 46, they had had no connection in life, and they were all WASPs. One was a nurse, two were secretaries; the fourth had been something mysterious in city government. None was raped. The Freep had dug up a shrink who claimed the killer was between 25 and 40, a member of an ethnic or racial minority group, and a hater of professional
women who had had experiences with such women unpleasant enough to unhinge him. It was the kind of article you usually find in the Science section after someone’s made off with Sports and the comics, only today it had run Page One because there hadn’t been any murders in a couple of days to keep the story alive. I’d read it at breakfast. I knew now what had nagged me about Xanthes’ story.

“Your brother’s the Five O’Clock Strangler?” I tipped half an inch of ash into the tin tray on the table.

“Half brother,” he corrected. “If I was sure of that, I wouldn’t have called you. Alexander could have killed that waitress, Mr. Walker. As it was he nearly broke her arm with that stool and I had to pay for X rays and give her a bonus to keep her from pressing charges. This article says the strangler hates working women. Alexander hates
all
women, but working women especially. His mother was a licensed practical nurse and she abandoned him. His first wife was a legal secretary and
she
left him. He told me he started beating his second wife when she started talking about getting a job. The police say that because the killer strangles women with just his hands he has to be big and strong. That description fits my half brother; he’s built more like you than me, and he works out regularly.”

“Does he have anything against white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?”

“I don’t know. But his mother was one and so was his first wife. The waitress he hurt was Greek descent.”

I burned some more tobacco. “Does he have an alibi for any of the times the women were killed?”

“I asked him, in a way that wouldn’t make him think I suspected him. He said he was home alone.” He shifted his weight on the bench. “I didn’t want to press it, but I called him one of those nights and he didn’t answer. But it wasn’t until I read this article that I really started to worry. It could have been written about Alexander.

That’s when I decided to call you. You once dug up an eyewitness to an auto accident whose testimony saved a friend of mine a bundle. He talks about you often.”

“I have a license to stand in front of,” I said. “If your half brother
is
the strangler I’ll have to send him over.”

“I understand that. All I ask is that you call me before you call the police. It’s this not knowing, you know? And don’t let him find out he’s being investigated. There’s no telling what he’ll do if he learns I suspect him.”

We took care of finances—in cash; you’ll look in vain for a checkbook in Greektown—and he slid over a wallet-size photo of a darkly handsome man in his late twenties with glossy black hair like Xan-thes’ and big liquid eyes not at all like Xanthes’ slits. “He goes by Alex Santine. You’ll find him working part-time at Butsukitis’ market on Brush.” A telephone number and an address on Gratiot were written on the back of the picture. That was a long way from the area where the bodies were found, but then a killer hardly ever lives in the neighborhood where he works. Not that that made any difference to the cops busy tossing every house and apartment on the northwest side.