Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (32 page)

“Seaton wouldn’t know how to double-cross anyone. He was straighter than the Equator.”

This was a new player. I’d inspected the bathroom window and decided it was too narrow to admit anything human, but I hadn’t reckoned on the skimpy proportions of the gent I thought of as Slim Jim, after his calling card. He’d shed his jacket, and his rucked-up shirt told me it had been a snug fit, but here he was walking out of the bathroom with a nickel-plated .38 Super automatic in his right hand. He had a yellow complexion and a military buzz cut that helped his general resemblance to a skull.

Vennable didn’t look at him. “I didn’t make up much,” he told me, “just changed the names around. We stuck up that armored car.
Seaton was one of the couriers we locked inside. He got out somehow, caught a ride, and jumped us down the road. Nick here shot him when he was picking up the paper we dropped. He lost his weapon, but he got into the car with the paper and the driver took off. We caught up with the car in Toledo. The driver said he’d stopped and refused to go any farther, so Seaton left on foot carrying the paper. That driver was full of talk when Nick did the asking.”

“So he hitched another ride north and you tailed him and here you are,” I said. “What about the dead man near Lexington?”

“A little invention to explain Seaton’s wound.” Vennable was smiling. “Shoot him, Nick. That paper’s got to be in this room.”

I’d been through the Detroit Police training course, and the situation’s covered: Go for your primary target and worry about the others later. The navy must have had a similar policy, because Vennable crouched and charged me, clawing for the Beretta on his belt, and that’s why I shot him in the groin instead of the chest where I’d been aiming. He reeled in front of Nick. Nick changed positions to get a clear field. I shot him twice, once through his partner. Somehow he was still standing when the door splintered and Commander Torrance of the state police put a third one in him before he knew about the first. I don’t know if he’d have fallen even then if he hadn’t tripped over Vennable. These wiry boys are hell for stamina.

“This one’s still flopping.” Straightening, the blocky commander jerked the Beretta from Vennable’s holster and leathered his own Police Special. Blood was pumping between the navy man’s fingers where he lay moaning and clutching his crotch with both hands.
The second bullet had passed through his left arm. “Tell ‘em not to bother about any sirens for the other one.”

I finished giving the information to the 911 operator and hung up. “What brought you, the shots in the parking lot?”

“Folks up here get involved, they make calls. When I heard the name of the motel I thought you might’ve checked in here. What’s the skinny?”

Sliding the telephone book cover from under the directory, I opened it and held up the thick sheaf of paper. “This is what they killed my hitchhiker to get their hands on,” I said.

“What the hell is it?”

“The dreams that stuff is made of.” I told him the rest. By the time he had it all, the first ambulance had arrived. The room was full of state troopers and paramedics now.

Torrance’s wolf eyes never left my face. “Why didn’t you just turn the duffel over to me to begin with?”

“Old habit. When I pick someone up on the road I’m offering him protection, even if he was beyond it when I met him, and way beyond anyone’s when we parted company. That included finding out who killed him and why.”

“Boy, that’s the worst lie I ever heard.”

“I’ve told worse.” I breathed some air. “Maybe I just wanted to see how this one ended. It was a long dull trip otherwise.”

“Better. Was it worth it?”

“Put it this way. Before I leave here in the morning I’m buying a pack of cigarettes off the manager so I won’t have to make any more stops. That’s how I fell into this mess.”

“Better make it a carton,” Torrance said.

When I heard
Redline Records had banned smoking everywhere in the renovated warehouse where it conducted business on Riopelle, I knew I’d find Ansel Albany sneaking a butt back in the stacks. He saw me coming between racks of inflammable 78 and 45 rpm records and squashed out a Camel under one of his size fifteens. At fifty he was white-haired and his complexion had faded from plum blue to medium gray, but he still looked like an old athlete. Following a disappointing season with the Pistons, the six-foot-nine Kettering graduate had joined the Detroit Police Department, where he served twelve years until he shot three suspects to death during an attempted liquor store robbery on Woodward. The first two passed at the inquiry, but an eyewitness testified that Albany had given the third man a ten-second head start, then drew and shot him in the back through the glass door. Albany got the boot.

Whether the report was true or not—Ansel swore it wasn’t— there was nothing false about the sixteen-inch Colt Python he wore strapped to his ribs under his old plaid jacket. I caught a glimpse of it when he reached out to accept the mailer I’d brought. He slid out the videotape and examined both sides.

“Did you play it?”

“That’s why the meet was in a video store,” I said. “There might be copies, but I don’t think you’ll be hearing from them again.”

“Rough ‘em around, did you? Wish I could’ve been there to help.”

“I told them next time you would be. It was easier on my knuckles.”

He laughed once, a short deep bark, and slipped the tape back into the mailer and the mailer into his side pocket. “Management should’ve canned the little asshole when they found out he was into payola. But he’s the front man and they’re convinced he’s another Barry Gordy.”

“Here’s two thousand back.” I handed him a thick envelope. “They believed me when I told them Motown is dead and the local record business is depressed. All part of the service.”

“I’d have shot the motherfuckers.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I’m paid to end trouble, not start it. And they demanded an outsider. What do we owe you, Walker?”

“Simple buy-back, no complications. A C-note ought to do it.”

“Hell.” He drew two bills from the envelope and held them out. “Buy a new suit with the extra hundred. You’ll never get the stink out of the one you’re wearing.” I took one of the bills. “We go back a long way, Ansel. Put it in your retirement fund.”

“Who’s retiring?”

I started to go. He called me back. His Masai features were unreadable. “If you won’t accept tips, maybe you’ll take work. A girl I know could use a break.”

“What kind?”

“If I knew that I’d help her myself. Redline’s got her on contract. Lately she’s been missing sessions. Management was getting set to
tout her as the new Diana Ross, but now they’re talking about dropping her. She’s got trouble but she won’t say what.”

I lit a Winston. “What’s she to you?”

He drew himself up; all the way up, which was hard on my neck. “What’s that mean?”

“Don’t sweat it, Ansel. If she’s your kid, swell. If she’s your something on the side, that’s swell, too, but it makes a difference in the way I approach her. You know that.”

“Shit.” He relaxed. “I’ve been around these corporate twerps so long I’m starting to
act
like a pimp. Sheilah’s just a sweet kid, used to stop by security on her way to the studio and pass the time of day. When I brought up the rumors and asked her if I could help, she walked out. Now she won’t even look at me on her way past. Maybe a young stud like you could get something out of her. Color doesn’t matter any more, not in this business.”

“Sheilah’s her name?”

“With an H on the end. Sheilah Sorrell, that’s the name on the label. You’ll find her in Farmington Hills.” He scribbled an address in his pocket pad and gave me the sheet. “She lives with Ronnie Madrid.”

“The druglord?”

“Please. The entertainment mogul. He owns two comedy clubs in town and tried to buy this company.”

“He can afford to. When his boys wiped out the Little Colombia mob he inherited the whole East Side.”

“You got something against free enterprise? A girl can’t help who she falls in love with.”

“Who pays?”

“Redline Records, who else?”

“You mean you.”

He leaned back against the brick wall. His jacket fell open, exposing the big shiny magnum.

“They pay me too much to keep out the pirates, and I’m too old to spend it on anything worthwhile.”

“Like hell you are.” I left.

The neighborhood was made up of large homes with clean lines tucked between hills, not one of them more than twenty years old or worth less than three hundred thousand. The Madrid house was glass and brick with a red tile roof and a swimming pool that would have held my place in Hamtramck. Nice work for a kid who not so long ago was begging in the streets of Managua.

Ronnie Madrid, born Rafael Maldronado y Sanchez etcetera, had found a shortcut Horatio Alger had overlooked. The only survivor of a family of Nicaraguan rebels massacred by Sandanistas, he’d been brought to Detroit by a distant relative while still in short pants, gone to work running dope for the Colombians, and become a bodyguard at age nineteen for Luis “El Tigre” Rodriguez; but he wasn’t too good at that, because six weeks later The Tiger turned up bound and gagged and shot full of holes in the trunk of his Excalibur at City Airport. A gutter war raged for months. When it ended, Ronnie was the Man to See east of Cadillac Square for everything from Mescaline to Mexican Brown. Twenty now, old enough to vote if he were a citizen but still too young to buy beer, he was using his good looks, streetwise charm, and drug connections in South America to gain a foothold in the local entertainment industry, assuring himself both
a legitimate front and a place to launder his money to Uncle Sam’s taste. Like the man said, only in America.

The doorbell chimed “Spanish Harlem,” no kidding. A maid whose ironclad features suggested she would know “Der Horst Wessel Lied” better carried my card back into the house and returned five minutes later to tell me Miss Sorrell would see me.

I waited in the entryway. The floor tiles were Mexican. Spanish needles grew in ceramic pots on either side of a curving staircase. A framed poster advertised a bullfight in Spanish on one wall. Inside the curve of the staircase stood a suit of Japanese armor, looking abashed.

“Awful, isn’t it? Ronnie insisted on buying it. I told him it wouldn’t go with the rest of the house, but you don’t tell Ronnie anything.”

She had come up on me while I was staring at the armor. She was small, with fine Jamaican features and skin as light as mine, which may have been why she wore her hair in cornrows and dressed in a stiff white cotton robe with African symbols painted on it in primary colors. Unbelted, it left her collarbone bare and covered her feet.

“Maybe he thinks he needs a tin suit,” I said. “They’d be a sellout in high school parking lots.”

“I’m Sheilah Sorrell. Did Ansel send you, Mr. Walker?” I’d written his name on the back of my card.

“He’s fresh out of kittens caught in trees. He thinks you’re in some kind of jam.”

“I’m not. He’s kind of like an uncle, always looking out for me. Can I offer you a drink, or are you on duty?”

“I’m not that kind of detective.”

“I’ve got gin, scotch—”

“Stop there.”

She laughed in a way only singers can, turned, and lifting her robe the way they do in Victorian movies, led the way into something
they probably don’t call a living room in houses like that. It was done in blue and white with French doors looking out on the sparkling pool. There was a small bar and a wall full of audio equipment that looked like the computer in
2001.
Sheilah Sorrell stepped behind the bar.

“This is something I never let Greta do for Ronnie. I like mixing drinks. Water or ice?”

“A glass is fine.”

She poured it from a cut-glass decanter, fixed herself something amber, and brought them over to a blue satin sofa. We sat down. She crossed a country block of smooth bare leg over the other and showed me a white leather sandal and coral polish on her toenails. “I’m sorry you wasted your time,” she said. “Ansel’s a mother hen.”

“That mother hen was thrown out of the toughest police department in the country for misuse of deadly force.” I drank. “Where’s Ronnie?”

“Away on business. What did Ansel tell you?”

“He said you’ve been missing work.”

“I’m a musician. I play a delicate instrument. My voice strains easily and I have to rest it. I don’t expect a security man to understand that but Redline should.”

“He says there’s talk of letting you go.”

“They can’t do that. I’ve got a contract.”

“I heard someone say once that in show business a signed contract is considered the beginning of the negotiating process.”

She smiled then. The colors in the room faded in the light. Then her gaze shifted. “Yes, Greta.”

“Telephone, missus.” The maid was standing in the doorway.

“Who is it?”

“He would not say. It is important he said.”

“I’ll take it upstairs.” She set her drink down untasted on the white coffee table and rose, “Excuse me, Mr. Walker. Play some music if you like.” She went out, followed by Greta.

A cabinet contained several of Sheilah Sorrell’s CDs. After a few minutes I figured out how to work the player—I haven’t forgiven the music business for changing technologies just when I had amassed a collection of all my favorites on eight-track—and put on one, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” She ran Cole Porter through Motown and it came out like raw silk. I stood listening and looking at the pool for thirty seconds before the detective in me kicked in. The bar was stocked with wines and liquors I had only heard about. The carpet and drapes had been bought in New York. And Sheilah Sor-rell had a pistol in the drawer of a blue lamp table.

It was a .22 magnum derringer, a two-shot and too delicate-looking for an
hombre de guerra
like Madrid: it was nickel-plated and the sidegrips were mother-of-pearl. The engraving on the backstrap read: “Your Ace in the Hole. Ronnie.” “Ace in the Hole” was another Cole Porter song in Sheilah’s CD cabinet. The muzzle gave off a vanilla-flavored whiff of powder solvent. I tipped light into the barrels and looked inside. No dust. A thorough job of cleaning for a woman, and very recent.