Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (27 page)

“The murder hit the radio tonight. When his suicide scam went bust he rabbited.”

The plainclothesman who had come with Alderdyce leaned out the open door of the pawnshop. Shoe was acting as a doorstop now. “He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two, John.”

“Hey, this guy’s still alive.”

Everyone looked at the uniform down on one knee beside Shoe. The wounded man’s chest rose and fell feebly beneath his bloody shirt. Alderdyce leaned forward.

“It’s over,” he said. “No sense lying your way deeper into hell. Why’d you kill Blum?”

Shoe looked up at him. His eyes were growing soft. After a moment his lips moved. On that street with the windows going up on both sides and police radios squawking it got very quiet.

It was even quieter on Farnum in Royal Oak, where night lay warm on the lawns and sidewalks and I towed a little space of silence through ratcheting crickets on my way to the back door of the duplex. The lights were off inside. I rang the bell and had time to smoke
a cigarette between the time they came on and when May Shinstone looked at me through the window. A moment later she opened the door. Her hair was tousled and she had on a blue robe over a lighter blue nightgown that covered her feet. Without make-up she looked older, but still nowhere near her true age.

“Isn’t it a little late for visiting, Mr. Walker?”

“It’s going to be a busy night,” I said. “The cops will be here as soon as they find out you’ve left the place in Birmingham and get a change of address.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but come in. When I was young we believed the night air was bad for you.”

She closed the door behind me. The living room looked like a living room now. The cartons were gone and the books were in place on the shelves. I said, “You’ve been busy.”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful? I’m one of those compulsive people who can’t go to sleep when there’s a mess to be cleaned up.”

“You can’t have gotten much sleep lately, then. Leaving Shoe with all those guns made a big mess.”

“Shoe? I don’t—”

“The cops shot him at the place where he tried to lay them off. When he found out he was mired up in murder he panicked. He made a dying statement in front of seven witnesses.”

She was going to brazen it out. She stood with her back to the door and her hands in the pockets of her robe and a marble look on her face. Then it crumbled. I watched her grow old.

“I let him keep most of what he stole,” she said. “It was his payment for agreeing to burgle Leo’s house. All I wanted was the Colt automatic, the thirty-eight he used to kill Manny Eckleberg. Shoe— his name was Henry Schumacher—was my gardener in Birmingham. I hired him knowing of his prison record for breaking and
entering. I didn’t dream I’d ever have use for his talents in that area.”

“You had him steal the entire collection to keep Blum from suspecting what you had in mind. Then on the anniversary of Eckle-berg’s murder you went back and killed him with the same gun. Pure poetry.”

“I went there to kill him, yes. He let me in and when I pointed the gun he laughed at me and tried to take it away. We struggled. It went off. I don’t expect you to believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe because it stinks first degree any way you smell it,” I said. “So you stuck his finger in the trigger afterwards and fired the gun through the window or something to satisfy the paraffin test and make it look like suicide. Why’d you kill the dog?”

“After letting me in, Leo set it loose on the grounds. It wouldn’t let me out the door. I guess he’d trained it to trap intruders until he called it off. So I went back and got the gun and shot it. That hurt me more than killing Leo, can you imagine that? A poor dumb beast.”

“What was Manny Eckleberg to you?”

“Nothing. I never knew him. He was just a small-time bootlegger from St. Louis who thought he could play with the Purple Gang.”

I said nothing. Waiting. After a moment she crossed in front of me, opened a drawer in a bureau that was holding up a china lamp, and handed me a bundle of yellowed envelopes bound with a faded brown ribbon.

“Those are letters my sister received from Abe Steinmetz when he was serving time in Jackson prison for Eckleberg’s murder,” she said. “In them he explains how Leo Goldblum paid him to confess to the murder. He promised him he wouldn’t serve more than two years and that there would be lots more waiting when he got out. Only he
never got out. He was stabbed to death in a mess room brawl six months before his parole.

“I was the one who was dating Abe, Mr. Walker; not my sister. I was seeing him at the same time I was seeing Leo. He swore her to secrecy in the letters, believing I wouldn’t understand until he could explain things in person. The money would start our marriage off right, he said. But instead of waiting I married Leo.”

She wet her lips. I lit a Winston and gave it to her. She inhaled deeply, her fingers fidgeting and dropping ash on the carpet. “My sister kept the secret all these years. It wasn’t until she died and I opened her safety deposit box and read the letters—” She broke off and mashed out the cigarette in a copper ashtray atop the bureau. “Do I have time to get dressed and put on lipstick before the police arrive? They never even gave Leo time to grab a necktie whenever they took him in for questioning.”

I told her to take as much time as she needed. At the bedroom door she paused. “I don’t regret it, you know. Maybe I wouldn’t have been happy married to Abe. But when I think of all those wasted years—well, I don’t regret it.” She went through the door.

Waiting, I pocketed the letters, shook the last cigarette out of my pack, and struck a match. I stared at the flame until it burned down to my fingers.

He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two.
I dropped the match and vaulted to the bedroom door. Moving too damn slowly. I had my hand on the knob when I heard the shot.

The temperatures soared later in the month, and with them the
crime statistics. The weathermen called it the hottest July on record. The newspapers had another name for it, but it had already been used.

I caught up with Judd Lindauer
in the Detroit Free Republic of Nicotine Abuse, otherwise known as the parking lot behind the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. The flag is a black lung on a field of tobacco leaves.

A big man of sixty beginning to stoop to a mere six-six, Lindauer left a crowd of litigants and judges and changed hands on his cigar to shake my hand. He had on a blue suit with flared lapels and a tan suede yoke over a snap-front shirt secured with a string tie. As far as I knew he’d never been west of Kalamazoo except when tracking a jump on a hundred-grand bail. He was a bail bondsman and a bounty hunter and enjoyed looking the part.

“Remember me on this one, Amos,” he said when we were out of earshot of the others. “There’s miles of press in it if you tear this one off. That can’t be bad for a one-man band like yours.”

I said, “Maybe I’ll buy you a drink when I know what it’s about. All my service told me is you wanted to see me.”

“That’s all I told them.” He lowered his voice to a reverberating boom. “It’s Adelaide Dix.”

“The trunk murderess?”

“If you believe the tabloids. Personally I don’t think she ever harmed a piece of luggage in her life, and I’m the one who went her bail.”

“Which time? She escaped what, four times?”

“Four and a half. She got outside the wall up in Marquette six weeks after they transferred her from Jackson, but they kept that one out of the papers. They managed to hang on to her for two years after that; then she flushed herself down the sewer. That was eight years ago. Nobody’s seen her since.”

I plucked a Winston out of my pack and put it between my lips without lighting it. There was enough smoke drifting across the lot to cure a ham. “I heard she drowned in Lake Superior.”

“I don’t have any reason to doubt it. Superior never gives up its dead.”

“So where is she?”

He handed me one of his cards, embossed in gold on white stock with a gold lariat in one corner. A telephone number was written on the back next to a name: G. Tolliver.

“The G stands for Geraldine,” he said. “She’s Adelaide’s daughter. Her husband’s Bert Tolliver, a building contractor. You get her, you get him too. But she does the talking. She says her mother’s alive.”

“Says to who, you? And why?”

“I put up bail when Adelaide got a new trial. She jumped—that was the first escape—and I brought her back. I flew with her from Denver to Detroit, first-class, no cuffs. I was the first person not to treat her like a tarantula. Geraldine was grateful. I’m the only member of the law enforcement community she thinks she can trust.”

“Why tell anyone? Old lady getting too tough to care for?”

“Ask Geraldine. I didn’t ask her any questions and I stopped her before she could give me any specific information. I’m an officer of
the court; it’s my license if I fail to report knowledge of a fugitive’s whereabouts. I told her I was giving it to you and you’re no gossip.”

“I’ve got a license too,” I said. “I didn’t get this job drawing Sherlock Holmes off a matchbook.”

“You’ve got the hot handle. What you do with it won’t burn me.” He blew a smoke ring big enough to snare me around the neck.

• • •

In 1985, Adelaide Dix had driven Iran-contra off the front pages when she was convicted of chopping up her second husband, packing him in an antique trunk, and stowing it in a corner of her Sterling Heights basement. A meter reader reported the smell and Adelaide got life. Her first escape while out on bail pending a new trial destroyed her defense; two more bought her a cell away up North in Marquette. She had an I.Q. of 160, fifty points higher than the average corrections officer, so another escape was inevitable. A set of size six footprints in the sand leading to Lake Superior convinced authorities she was dead, but that didn’t prevent her from showing up at a McDonald’s drive-through every couple of months with Elvis at the wheel.

A well-tended female voice, ratcheted a notch high for normal intercourse, provided an invitation and directions to a house in one of the newer suburbs, founded since white flight. It was a stack of trapezoidal boxes with passive solar windows—ornamental only in Michigan’s cloudy climate—tucked between hills in a tract named after a tree that had been extinct in the area for three hundred years.

Geraldine Tolliver was small and compact, about twenty, with short red hair and a tiny waist in a tailored shirt and capri pants or whatever they’re calling them this year. Her husband, Bert, was heavily muscled and sunburned in a polo shirt and khakis. He was a
hand-mangler; two drinks and he’d be pounding my back. I avoided the sofa in case he decided to sit within range and settled into an Eames knockoff with a scotch and soda.

Mrs. Tolliver tasted her gin and tonic, set it down, and never returned to it. “Mr. Lindauer says you’re a man one can confide in. Are you like a priest?”

“Only in that department.”

“Honey, I think we’d better see some ID. We’d better see some ID,” Bert Tolliver told me, over the top of a whiskey sour the size of a conga drum.

I showed them some ID.

“Mr. Walker, we need your word you’ll tell no one about this,” the woman said. “Not even your wife. Things have a way of getting back to Alvin Shrike. It’s almost supernatural.”

“I don’t have a wife. Who’s Alvin Shrike?”

“An icicle-pissing son of a bitch. Sorry, honey.” Tolliver sat back in the sofa and drank.

Mrs. Tolliver gave him the fisheye and finished what she’d started to say. “Shrike’s chief of police here. Bert’s right about the rest. He was an officer in Sterling Heights fifteen years ago. The man my— the dead man in the trunk was his partner.”

“That would be your father?”

“No. My father died of cancer when I was three months old. George Dix was a good-looking brute and a drunk who seduced my mother into marrying him and beat her up on a regular schedule. When he started in on me she did something about it.”

“No one would argue with that.”

“I don’t remember much about that night. I remember he slapped me and the way my face was still burning when I woke up. When I was old enough to understand she told me she shot him
with his service revolver. I have no doubt she’d have been acquitted if she’d stopped there. The dismemberment was a mistake.”

“It usually is.”

“She didn’t want me to wake up and find a corpse in the house. She was temporarily insane, of course, but the jury rejected that. Calling her ‘Adelaide the Axe’ in the tabloids didn’t help.”

“‘Slice-and-Dice Dix,’” put in Tolliver.

She closed her eyes. “That too. There were others. Why do people take such delight in grisly details?”

“It’s a dark old world,” I said. “Have you heard from your mother?”

“Once a year for eight years.” She got up, opened a drawer in a bleached oak table with a cordless telephone on top, and brought over a picture postcard. There was no message on the back, just a USPS postmark and the Tollivers’ address block-printed with a black felt-tipped pen. It had been mailed last week. The picture on the other side was a color shot of Grand Traverse Bay.

“They always come before my birthday,” Geraldine said. “Always a different scene, but always in Michigan. Mother’s a native, but like so many she never got around to visiting the local vacation spots. We used to talk about going to all of them when she got out of prison. This is as close as we can come to that as long as Shrike’s around.”

I gave it back. “It’s been fifteen years. Maybe he’s put it behind him.”

She shut the drawer on the postcard and stepped over to a window. “I want you to look at something.”

When I joined her, she drew aside the curtain two inches. A gold Chrysler four-door was parked on the corner across the street. I could read the headline on the newspaper the driver had spread in front of his face. “It isn’t Shrike,” she said. “Or maybe it is. The point is it doesn’t have to be, as long as he runs the police department in this
town. We have an escort every time we leave the house. I’d actually miss them if they weren’t there.”