Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (3 page)

He looked like his picture. After leaving the restaurant, I’d walked around the corner to a building with a fruit and vegetable stand out front and a faded canvas awning lettered BUTSUKITIS’ FINE PRODUCE, and while a beefy bald man with fat quilting his chest dropped some onions into a paper sack for me, a tall young man came out the front door lugging a crate full of cabbages. He hoisted
the crate onto a bare spot on the stand, swept large shiny eyes over the milling crowd of tomato-squeezers and melon-huggers, and went back inside swinging his broad shoulders.

As the grocer was ringing up the sale, a blonde wearing a navy blue business suit asked for help loading two bags of apples and cherries into her car. “Santine!” he bellowed.

The young man returned. Told to help the lady, he hesitated, then slouched forward and snatched up the bags. He stashed them on the front seat of a green Olds parked half a block down the street and swung around and walked away while she was still rummaging in her handbag for a tip. His swagger going back into the store was pronounced. I paid for my onions and left.

Back at the office I called Iowa Information and got two numbers. The first belonged to a private detective agency in Des Moines. I called them, fed them the dope I had on Santine, and asked them to scrape up what they could. My next call was to the Des Moines
Register,
where a reporter held me up for fifty dollars for combing the morgue for stories about non-rape female assault and murder during the last two years Santine lived in the state. They both promised to wire the information to Barry Stackpole at the Detroit
News
and I hung up and dialed Barry’s number and traded a case of scotch for his cooperation. The expenses on this one were going to eat up my fee. Finally I called Lieutenant John Alderdyce at Police Headquarters.

“Who’s working the Five O’Clock Strangler case?” I asked him.

“Why?”

I used the dead air counting how many times he’d asked me that and dividing it by how many times I’d answered.

“DeLong,” he said then. “I could just hang up because I’m busy, but you’d probably just call again.”

“Probably. Is he in?”

“He’s in that lot off Lahser where they found the last body. With Michael Kurof.”

“The psychic?”

“No, the plumber. They’re stopping there on their way to fix De-Long’s toilet.” He broke the connection.

The last body had been found lying in a patch of weeds in a wooded lot off Lahser just south of West Grand River by a band student taking a shortcut home from practice. I parked next to the curb behind a blue-and-white and mingled with a group of uniforms and obvious plainclothesmen watching Kurof walk around with Inspector DeLong nipping along at his side like a spaniel trying to keep up with a Great Dane. DeLong was a razor-faced twenty-year cop with horns of pink scalp retreating along a mouse-colored widow’s peak and the kind of crossed eyes that kept you wondering where he was looking. Kurof, a Russian-born bear of a man, bushy-haired and blue of chin even when it was still wet from shaving, bobbed his big head in time with De-Long’s mile-a-minute patter for a few moments, then raised a palm, cutting him off. After that they wandered the lot in silence.

“What they looking for, rattlesnakes?” muttered a grizzled fatty in a baggy brown suit.

“Vibes,” someone answered. “Emanations, the Russky calls ’em.”

Lardbottom snorted. “We ran
in
fortune-tellers when I was in uniform.”

“That must’ve been before you needed a crowbar to get into one,” said the other.

I was nudged by a young black in starched blue cotton, who
winked gravely and stooped to lay a gold pencil on the ground, then backed away from it. Kurof’s back was turned. Eventually he and DeLong made their way to the spot, where the psychic picked up the pencil, stroked it once between the first and second fingers of his right hand, and turned to the black cop with a broad smile, holding out the item. “You are having fun with me, Officer,” he announced in a deep burring voice. The uniform smiled stiffly back and accepted the pencil.

“Did you learn anything, Dr. Kurof? DeLong was facing the psychic, but his right eye was looking toward the parked cars.

Kurof shook his great head slowly. “Nothing useful, I fear. Just a tangible hatred. The air is ugly everywhere here, but it is ugliest where we are standing. It crawls.”

“We’re standing precisely where the body was found.” The inspector pushed aside a clump of thistles with his foot to expose a fresh yellow stake driven into the earth. He turned toward one of the watching uniforms. “Give our guest a lift back to Wayne State. Thank you, Doctor. We’ll be in touch when something else comes up.” They shook hands and the Russian moved off slowly with his escort.

“Hatred,” the fat detective growled. “Like we need a gypsy to tell us that.”

DeLong told him to shut up and go back to Headquarters. As the knot of investigators loosened, I approached the inspector and introduced myself.

“Walker,” he considered. “Sure, I see you jawing with Alderdyce. Who hired you, the family of one of the victims?”

“Just running an errand.” Sometimes it’s best to let a cop keep his notions. “What about what this psychiatrist said about the strangler in this morning’s Freep? You agree with that?”

“Shrinks. Twenty years in school to tell us why some j.d. sapped an old lady and snatched her purse. I’ll stick with guys like Kurof; at least he’s not smug.” He stuck a Tiparillo in his mouth and I lit it and a Winston for me. He sucked smoke. “My theory is the killer’s unemployed and he sees all these women running out and getting themselves fulfilled by taking his job and sometimes snaps. It isn’t just coincidence that the stats on crime against women have risen with their numbers in the work force.”

“Is he a minority?”

“I hope so.” He grinned quickly and without mirth. “No, I know what you mean. Maybe. Minorities outnumber the majority in this town in case you haven’t noticed. Could be the victims are all WASPs because there are more women working who are WASPs. I’ll ask him when we arrest him.”

“Think you will?”

He glared at me in his cockeyed fashion. Then he shrugged. “This is the third mass-murder case I’ve investigated. The one fear is that it’ll just stop. I’m still hoping to wrap it before famous criminologists start coming in from all over to give us a hand. I never liked circuses even when I was a kid.”

“What are you holding back from the press on this one?”

“You expect me to answer that? Give up the one thing that’ll help us separate the original from all the copycats?”

“Call John Alderdyce. He’ll tell you I sit on things till they hatch.”

“Oh, hell.” He dropped his little cigar half-smoked and crushed it out. “The guy clobbers his victims before he strangles them. One blow to the left cheek, probably with his right fist. Keeps ’em from struggling.”

“Could he be a boxer?”

“Maybe. Someone used to using his dukes.”

I thanked him for talking to me. He said, “I hope you
are
working for the family of a victim.”

I got out of there without answering. Lying to a cop like DeLong can be like trying to smuggle a bicycle through Customs.

It was coming up on two o’clock. If the killer was planning to strike that day I had three hours. At the first telephone booth I came to I excavated my notebook and called Constantine Xanthes’ home number in Royal Oak. His wife answered. She had a mellow voice and no accent.

“Yes, Connie told me he was going to hire you. He’s not home, though. Try the restaurant.”

I explained she was the one I wanted to speak with and asked if I could come over. After a brief pause she agreed and gave me directions. I told her to expect me in half an hour.

It was a white frame house that would have been in the country when it was built, but now it was shouldered by two housing tracts with a third going up in the empty field across the street. The doorbell was answered by a tall woman on the far side of 40 with black hair streaked blond to cover the gray and a handsome oval face, the flesh shiny around the eyes and mouth from recent remodeling. She wore a dark knit dress that accentuated the slim line of her torso and a long colored scarf to make you forget she was big enough to look down at the top of her husband’s head without trying. We exchanged greetings and she let me in and hung up my hat and we walked into a dim living room furnished heavily in oak and dark leather. We sat down facing each other in a pair of horsehair-stuffed chairs.

“You’re not Greek,” I said.

“I hardly ever am.” Her voice was just as mellow in person.

“Your husband was mourning the old Greektown at lunch and now I find out he lives in the suburbs with a woman who isn’t Greek.”

“Connie’s ethnic standards are very high for other people.”

She was smiling when she said it, but I didn’t press the point. “He says you and Alexander have never been friendly. In what ways weren’t you friendly when he was living here?”

“I don’t suppose it’s ever easy bringing up someone else’s son. His having been deserted didn’t help. Lord save me if I suggested taking out the garbage.”

“Was he sullen, abusive, what?”

“Sullen was his best mood. ’Abusive’ hardly describes his reaction to the simplest request. The children were beginning to repeat his foul language. I was relieved when he ran away.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Connie did. They never found him. By that time he was eighteen and technically an adult. He couldn’t have been brought back without his consent anyway.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“He wouldn’t dare. He worshiped Connie.”

“Did he ever box?”

“You mean fight? I think so. Sometimes he came home from school with his clothes torn or a black eye, but he wouldn’t talk about it. That was before he quit. Fighting is normal. We had some of the same problems with our son. He grew out of it.”

I was coming to the short end. “Any scrapes with the law? Alexander, I mean.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were warm and tawny. “You know, you’re quite good-looking. You have noble features.”

“So does a German Shepherd.”

“I work in clay. I’d like to have you pose for me in my studio sometime.” She waved long nails toward a door to the left. “I specialize in nudes.”

“So do I. But not with clients’ wives.” I rose.

She lifted penciled eyebrows. “Was I that obvious?”

“Probably not, but I’m a detective.” I thanked her and got my hat and let myself out.

Xanthes had told me his half brother got off at four. At ten to, I swung by the market and bought two quarts of strawberries. The beefy bald man, whom I’d pegged as Butsukitis, the owner, appeared glad to see me. Memories are long in Greektown. I said, “I just had an operation and the doc says I shouldn’t lift any more than a pound. Could your boy carry these to the car?”

“I let my boy leave early. Slow day. I will carry them.”

He did, and I drove away stuck with two quarts of strawberries. They give me hives. Had Santine been around I’d planned to tail him after he punched out. Pounding the steering wheel at red lights, I bucked and squirmed my way through late afternoon traffic to Gra-tiot, where my man kept an apartment on the second floor of a charred brick building that had housed a recording studio in the gravy days of Motown. I ditched my hat, jacket, and tie in the car and at Santine’s door put on a pair of aviator’s glasses in case he remembered me from the market. If he answered my knock I was looking for another apartment. There was no answer. I considered slipping the latch and taking a look around inside, but it was too
early in the round to play catch with my license. I went back down and made myself uncomfortable in my heap across the street from the entrance.

It was growing dark when a cab creaked its brakes in front of the building and Santine got out, wearing a blue Windbreaker over the clothes I’d seen him in earlier. He paid the driver and went inside. Since the window of his apartment looked out on Gratiot I let the cab go, noting its number, hit the starter and wound my way to the company’s headquarters on Woodward.

A puffy-faced black man in work clothes looked at me from behind a steel desk in an office smelling of oil. The floor tingled with the swallowed bellowing of engines in the garage below. I gave him a hinge at my investigator’s Photostat, placing my thumb over the “Private,” and told him in an official voice I wanted information on Cab No. 218.

He looked back down at the ruled pink sheet he was scribbling on and said, “I been dispatcher here eleven years. You think I don’t know a plastic badge when I see one?”

I licked a ten-dollar bill across the sheet.

“That’s Dillard,” he said, watching the movement.

“He just dropped off a fare on Gratiot.” I gave him the address. “I want to know where he picked him up and when.”

He found the cab number on another ruled sheet attached to a clipboard on the wall and followed the line with his finger to some writing in another column. “Evergreen, between Schoolcraft and Kendall. Dillard logged it in at six-twenty.”

I handed him the bill without comment. The spot where San-tine had entered the cab was an hour’s easy walk from where the bodies of two of the murdered women had been found.

I swung past Alex Santine’s apartment near Greektown on my way home. There was a light on. That night after supper I caught all the news reports on TV and looked for bulletins and wound up watching a succession of sitcoms full of single mothers shrieking at their kids about sex. There was nothing about any new stranglings. I went to bed. Eating breakfast the next day I turned on the radio and read the
Free Press
and there was still nothing.

The name of the psychiatrist quoted in the last issue was Kor-necki. I looked him up and called his office in the National Bank Building. I expected a secretary, but I got him.

“I’d like to talk to you about someone I know,” I said.

“Someone you know. I see.” He spoke in cathedral tones.

“It’s not me. I have an entirely different set of neuroses.”