Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (35 page)

“Another thing Whitey didn’t know was that while the trio had succeeded in bribing and threatening his address out of Detroit’s walking wounded, they still didn’t know what room he was staying in. So Sugar Ray questioned the bums and degenerates on the ground floor, Chick got to work searching the building from the bottom up, and Leon climbed the stairs to the sixth floor and started working his way down with pipe in hand. Meanwhile, Whitey, thinking they were heading straight for his room, hid out in the vacant hole next door, hoping they’d think he was out and would go away. He crouched in a littered corner with his overcoat drawn over his head to shut out the cold and the noise of shouts and blows from downstairs.

“Chick was ten minutes kicking in doors on the first and second levels and pointing his gun at a lot of mold and cracked plaster. Whitey heard him mounting the squawking steps to his floor, heard more wood splintering as Chick zigzagged down the hall from room to room shattering locks that hadn’t worked in years. Realizing his mistake, the old man backed into a closet and drew the door shut. When Chick got to Whitey’s quarters he noticed the signs of occupancy and spent a little more time searching that one. He came up empty, but he’d seen the tools and the repaired furniture and must have remembered the abandoned table in the garage and known he was getting close. He poked his head through the empty doorway of the room opposite Whitey’s, then strode kittycorner to the next one down. That was the one Whitey was hiding in.

“He reared back and threw a heel at the lock, but the door had a broken latch and when it swung open he had to wrestle with his momentum to keep his face off the floor. Just then he caught a movement out of the corner of his right eye. He spun and fired. Glass collapsed and something made a shrill boinging noise, and he felt a blow to his ribs and his feet were snatched out from under him and he landed hard on his chest, almost letting go of the gun. He felt moist warmth under him and he must have known at that moment that he’d been shot.

“What he probably never knew was that the movement he’d fired at was his own reflection in the bathroom mirror to the right of the door, and that his bullet had struck the tiles behind the mirror at an angle, ricocheted, skidded off the adjacent wall, and struck him. In the process the soft-nosed slug had changed its shape a couple of times, and that, together with its wobbling trajectory, had made a hole in him the size of a baby’s fist, through which his blood was pumping at the rate of about a quart every three minutes. There are
five quarts of blood in the body of a full-grown man, and, well, you figure it out.

“Whitey, of course, had no idea what was going on. He thought he was the one being shot at, and since there seemed no good reason to stay where he was, he piled out through the closet door and, seeing two legs sticking out of the open bathroom door, leaped over them and out the exit. He had a survivor’s instinct for not stopping to ask himself questions he had no time to answer.

“By this time, having found the other tenants too far gone on drugs and rotgut to remember who Whitey was, much less where, Sugar Ray had taken up guard duty at the foot of the stairs. He heard the shot and thinking that Chick had got his man, headed on up to view the remains. He was rounding the second flight when he met Whitey coming down the third.

“The old man did an about-face while Sugar Ray was still trying to piece together what this meant in terms of Chick, and bounded back the other way, intending to go up past the third floor. But then he heard heavy footsteps further up and ran back down his own hallway instead. Sugar Ray, assimilated now, was taking the flight three steps at a time with his fists balled.”

I stopped to light a cigarette and looked around at my audience. “I know what you’re thinking. It would have been poetic if Sugar Ray and Leon the Pipe had met on the third-floor landing and seen to each other. But they weren’t armed for that, and anyway Leon was stalled somewhere up above, probably trying to figure out at what level the shot had been fired.

“Getting back to Sugar Ray. He reached the hallway in time to see Whitey, the dark tail of his overcoat flying behind him, leaping into the shadows at the far end. It was getting dark now. The slugger had been wondering if the other man had a gun, but the fact that
he was running instead of shooting reassured him and he thundered down that echoing old corridor as fast as his long legs would take him. At the end he ran out of floor and plunged kiyoodling down through three stories of dark cold nothing.

“Whitey had stopped just short of the empty elevator shaft he knew was there and flattened himself against the wall while Sugar Ray hurtled past and down, landing on his feet with the grace of a born athlete and driving his knees into his chin hard enough to snap his neck like a dry stick. For a long time after that, no doctor thought he would live, but you can visit him now at the State Forensics Center in Ypsilanti, where they feed him liquids and turn him over from time to time to prevent bedsores.

“While Ray was crumpled up down there groaning among the empty bottles and other scraps of garbage the building’s tenants had been throwing into the shaft for years, Whitey tried again for the stairs. But Sugar Ray’s cries had reached Leon, and once again the old man heard his tread, this time on the flight immediately above. It was as if some invisible force wouldn’t let him leave; he was the Flying Dutchman of the third floor. Not trusting the elevator trick to work a second time, and that having been pretty much an accident anyway, he ducked through the nearest open door.

“He didn’t know what room he was in. It was getting hard to see and he’d lost his bearings. He closed the door and in turning tripped over something on the floor. He landed on top of whatever it was and rolled off in a panic, because in that instant he realized it was Chick’s body. He’d made a complete circle and ended up in the room where he’d started.

“Chick wasn’t moving, and whether he was dead yet isn’t important to the story. The floor was slippery under Whitey’s hand. When he realized why, he jerked it away and barked his wrist on
something hard that moved when he struck it. He closed his hand around it, and he was holding Chick’s gun.

“Leon was in the hall now. A pale yellow oval slid under the door and Whitey shrank back with a gasp, but it sprang away and he knew the man with the pipe was swinging a flashlight beam from side to side in front of him as he crept through the darkness on the balls of his feet, softly calling Chick’s and Sugar Ray’s names. Whitey held his breath until the sighing of the floorboards under Leon’s weight grew faint. Then he moved as quickly as he could without making a noise that would carry down the hall.

“Once you’ve got your coat off it isn’t easy to put it on a man who’s dead or dying. The arms aren’t where you need them to be and the sleeve linings keep snagging on buttons and things. But he got it on the motionless man finally and got up and backed into the shadows, gripping the butt of the gun growing warm and slippery in his hand. He had never held one before and he was surprised at how heavy it was. He had heard about safeties and he hoped there was nothing like that on this gun because he wouldn’t know how to take it off. He did know about cocking it, which he did with both thumbs. Shards from the broken mirror crunched under the thin soles of his shoes, but he wasn’t worried about making noise now. He kept backing until his shoulder blades touched the tiles. There he waited with his heart bounding off his breastbone.

“By now Leon had had time to reach the end of the hall, but no one knows if he trained his light on the bottom of the shaft and saw Sugar Ray. His failure to raise either of his partners must have put him on his guard in any case. To Whitey it seemed a good hour before the squeak of an occasional hinge told him the pipe man was making his way back in Whitey’s direction one room at a time, poking the flash into each dark empty cell with his weapon probably
raised. Whatever small sounds the old man had made putting his coat on Chick and getting ready had apparently died at the door, although to him they had seemed loud enough to bring half the underworld crashing in on him. He stood in the cold moldy dark sweating into his collar and shoes and listening to the air dragging in and out of his lungs. His eyes had adjusted to the faint city glow leaking through the ventilator louvers over the toilet and he could see Chick’s inert bulk in his own black overcoat on the floor. If he hadn’t been dead before he certainly was now.

“A soft rubber sole kissed the sprung boards on the other side of the door, Whitey thought; but he had learned long ago not to trust his defective hearing. To calm himself he switched the gun from his right to his left hand and wiped his right palm down his thigh. Then he changed grips again and stopped breathing. The door to the hall was opening.

“It inched open as if pushed by the phantom beam that followed it into the room. The light nudged a smoky path through the blackness, prowled the area beyond the edge of the empty bathroom doorway, and attached itself to the dead man’s feet sticking out over the threshold. Leon took his breath in sharply. Then the light touched the worn hem of Whitey’s overcoat on the corpse and the intruder came in the rest of the way, the pipe dangling at the end of his right arm. Enough illumination came back up off the littered tile floor to expose a wolfish grin on Leon’s face. The smell of spent cordite was still thick in the enclosed space, and he must have thought he was looking at Chick’s handiwork. Which he was, but not in the way he thought.

“‘Chick?’ he said, and lifted the beam to take in the rest of the room.

“Whitey fired then, twice into the center of the light that was blinding him. The reports thudded massively against the tiles, the
recoil vibrating up his arm and through his body, shaking loose what shreds of mirror glass remained on the wall he was touching.

“Something clanged under the echoing of the shots. Whitey stood unmoving while the choking smoke curled and twisted toward the ventilator and out. When it cleared he was prepared to fire again because there was still light in the room, but then he saw it bending along the floor from the abandoned flash lying against Chick’s leg. He was alone with the dead man.

“Now he moved, stepping over the body but almost falling when something rolled out from under his foot. He caught himself against the jamb and knew without looking that the object was Leon’s pipe. He left it there but picked up the flash. The fresh bloodstains on the floor looked black in the light. Leon was wounded.

“Whitey followed the dribbling trail out of the room and up the hall toward the stairs. The flashlight beam reflected off a big dark puddle on the landing. He could smell it now, sharp and musty in the icy air. The traces meandered down two flights, at the bottom of which the clear outline of one of Leon’s waffle-patterned soles where he had stepped in his own leakage pointed toward the second-floor hallway. The light found no stains on the last flight before the ground. In his shock and panic Leon had miscounted his flights.

“There was nothing keeping the old man from leaving the building. Instead he turned and followed the stains. The gun was part of his hand now.

“Debris and great peeling sheets of wallpaper made bizarre shadows before the flash. The doors of most of the rooms on that floor had been kicked in by Chick, but he ignored them. The trail continued down the hall.

“He found Leon sitting on the floor with his back against the closed elevator doors that made the corridor a dead end, whimpering
with both hands buried in the gaping black hole above his belt. His bowels were torn, their stench foul enough to have texture. He screwed up his slick face against the light in his eyes and said something unintelligible in a pleading tone.

“Whitey didn’t make him wait. He snapped off the flash and there was an instant of darkness before the flame from the muzzle splattered it. Leon’s body arched, the back of his head striking the elevator doors with a reverberating boom, and then his torso sagged and his big chin settled into the hollow of his right shoulder. Whitey was still standing there holding the weapon when the cops came.”

I took advantage of the silence to lay in an inch of red wine in my glass. The congressman’s wife was the first to speak.

“Is that a true story?”

I nodded, wetting my tongue. “I spent three weeks tracking down derelicts who were in the building that night and collecting affidavits for the public defender who represented Whitey at his trial. The rest of it came from the old man himself.”

“What happened to him?” asked the professor.

“He pulled a year for third-degree murder knocked down from first. The coroner ruled death by misadventure on Chick, and Sugar Ray’s testimony by closed-circuit television from his hospital room failed to incriminate Whitey, but the judge wouldn’t go self-defense on Leon because the old man had his chance to flee after shooting him the first time. He’s living in a convalescent home in Southfield now. The hearing in his other ear went finally, but he doesn’t need it to fix furniture in the workshop for sale by the Salvation Army.”

“I think that’s nice,” said the professor’s wife.

Fifty minutes after
I arrived for my appointment five minutes early, Lawrence Otell’s secretary—a tawny-haired angel whose placard read MS. ROLAND—hung up her telephone and told me I could go in. I left off studying an actuarial chart on the wall that informed me I’d been dead for two years, passed through the door marked PRIVATE, and shook the hand of the big square middle-aged type seated behind a desk shaped like a lima bean. He managed my name and indicated the chair on the customer’s side, helping himself to a lump of hard candy from the jar on the desk without offering me one or apologizing for making me wait. I didn’t give it much thought. I’d been working off and on for Midwest Confidential Life, Automobile, & Casualty for fifteen years and had yet to receive so much as a Christmas card from its headquarters in downtown Detroit.

“I see you’ve handled a number of assignments for us, Mr. Walker.” Otell peered through a pair of black-rimmed readers at a file with my name lettered on the tab.