Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (36 page)

“You gave me the last six personally.”

That upset him quite a bit. He glanced at me over the tops of his glasses, then closed the folder. “Have you ever investigated arson?”

“I went along on a couple of torch jobs. Is that the beef?”

“My usual man is out sick this week. He seems to be taken ill every year during the first week of deer hunting season. You don’t hunt?”

“I used to, with my father. It isn’t so much fun now that I do it for a living.”

“I don’t go in for blood sports myself. This case shouldn’t be too complicated. The only reason I’m suspicious at all is the policy holder refused permission to the local fire department to investigate the premises. By law the investigators are required to ask permission. Otherwise they must seek a warrant. They’re in the process of doing that now, but the circuit judge is away on a hunting trip and can’t be reached.”

“Can’t they get another judge?”

“It’s a small town, and it’s Friday afternoon. They might not be able to locate another before

Monday, by which time the integrity of the scene may be violated. Of course, this could be simply a case of a disgruntled homeowner sticking his finger in the spokes just to cause trouble. Do you know the term ‘pickups and shotguns’?”

I shook my head, which pleased him. Otell was a frustrated pedant.

“It’s a phrase advertisers use when they divide the population into consumer groups. Huron’s a small town in a farm community yielding slowly to suburban development. Pickups and shotguns outsell sportscars and cufflinks five to one.”

“I was there once. You’re overestimating sportscars and cufflinks.”

He slid another folder out from under the one with my name on it and held it out. “This contains all the information you’ll need to start. The commander of the sheriff’s substation is Sergeant Early. You’ll want to let him know what you’re up to.”

I didn’t ask him why. It was hunting season, and there were bound to be a lot more shotguns circulating around the neighborhood than pickups.

Huron had changed since my last visit. The local newspaper office was closed, probably having been wolfed down by a larger competitor and relocated. The restaurant was boarded up, real estate offices had taken over several of the retail stores in the business district, and the town had sprouted a tail along the main highway made up of chain department stores, fast-food franchises, and an antiques mall with all the old-world charm of a sperm bank. The twenty-first century was bearing down on Huron like an iron heel in an Air Jordan.

Sergeant Early was a solid-looking number with a military brush moustache in a cocoa-brown uniform with a sheriff’s star embroidered on each sleeve. He looked at my credentials, then got up from behind his desk and rescued his cap off a peg. “Supreme Court ought to have its head examined. Why a private cop can go into a place where sworn authority is barred is the first question the shrink should ask.”

“It’s a waiver the policyholder signs when he applies for insurance,” I said.

“He must’ve been drunk when he signed it. Mike Hopper won’t even sign a traffic citation. But he’s no insurance fraud.”

Early accompanied me in my car to a plot just outside the village limits containing a small barn, a couple of other outbuildings, and a pile of charred timbers that had once been a house. He leaned against a fender while I pulled an old rubber raincoat and a pair of galoshes out of the trunk and put them on. “What do you look for, exactly?” he asked.

“Suspicious burn patterns, combustible materials where they don’t belong, obvious evidence of arson. If they’re not present I leave the actual cause of the fire to the experts. I’m just a troubleshooter.”

“Well, you won’t find any trouble here. Hopper’s a pain in the butt. He’s also one of the most honest men I know.”

According to the file Lawrence Otell had given me, the Hopper family had sold its acreage short to developers years before, then watched the developers make back ten times the investment by subdividing, building houses, and selling the plots for a hundred thousand apiece. Meanwhile Mike, the last of the family, had become an independent trucker to survive. He had been alone at home, sleeping on the second story, when the fire broke out, and had escaped with only the pajamas he was wearing. The house was totally engulfed by the time the fire department arrived.

Sergeant Early remained outside while I waded through a muck of sodden ashes, turning over lumps of melted and half-burned furniture and shining my flashlight into corners made inaccessible by the piles of debris. The stench was one I could never get used to, which was why I didn’t specialize in arson investigation. I’d only taken the job to remind Midwest Confidential I was still in business. The company had saved me from a negative balance more times than I could count.

I fished out a couple of bowling trophies, smeared with soot but undamaged, and a thick spiralbound book charred around the edges that upon opening I found to contain what looked like family snapshots
going back to the thirties, judging by the cars and clothing that appeared in them. These items I wrapped in one of the kitchen trash bags I’d carried along to store evidence and laid atop what used to be a cabinet television. The sky looked like rain or snow, and such mementos are irreplaceable. That was it for the ground floor, as well as the second story, which had collapsed along with the rest of the house.

Finding the stairs to the basement I switched on my flash and descended, testing each step before I trusted my full weight to it. The half-cellar was dank and airless, and the stagnant water from the firemen’s hoses came up almost to my boot tops on the concrete floor. Something nudged one of my calves. My light found a red plastic can, half-burned, that I might have thought was a watering can floating on the surface if it weren’t just the kind of thing I was looking for. I picked it up by what was left of its handle and smelled the inside. Gasoline never smells like anything but what it is.

Advertised warnings to the contrary, a lot of people store gasoline in their cellars. I did some more looking. In a corner relatively untouched by the flames, I found two more cans just like it. Training the flashlight beam around the room, I spotted another floating object and waded over to it. It was a wooden dowel about two feet long, partially burned, with a husk of what might have been charred oilcloth wrapped around the end. On this end I smelled more gasoline. I carried the cans and the makeshift torch upstairs and showed them to Sergeant Early.

“It’s not conclusive,” I said. “Experts may be able to tell if the fire started in the basement, or maybe not. Right now it looks like someone doused the place with gas, then lit a torch and threw it in from the top of the stairs where he could get out before it got going.”

Early took off his cap, ran his fingers back through his short thinning hair, and put it back on. “Mike’s got enemies. One of ‘em might have been sore enough to burn him out.”

“If that’s true, he did him a favor, at least financially. The place was insured for a lot more than he would have gotten for it on the market.”

“Let’s go talk to him.”

Mike Hopper’s tractor-trailer, bearing his name on the cab, was parked behind a motel on an as yet undeveloped section of state highway, one of the old-fashioned kind with bungalows lined up on either side of the office. We were greeted at the door of No. 11 by a big man with narrow eyes, a reddish-brown beard and moustache that concealed his mouth completely, and a strip of untanned flesh at the top of his forehead where a cap would rest normally. He was shoeless and had on an undershirt and stained workpants. One of his big hands was wrapped around a beer can.

“Mike, this is Amos Walker. He’s with your insurance company. We need to talk.”

“I said I didn’t want nobody snooping around my place. I was born there. Nobody goes in without an invite but family, and I’m all the family that’s left.”

“It’s gone past that.” I held up one of the gasoline cans. “Is this yours?”

“I sold my pickup for a down payment on my rig. It’s diesel. I got no use for gas.”

“What do you owe on your rig?” Early asked.

“I’m three payments behind, not that it’s your damn business. What the hell goes on here?”

I read it like a primer. “You get much behind, the company repossesses your tractor-trailer. Without a rig you starve. That’s what
goes on here. Did you put a match to your place for the insurance?”

He almost caught me square on the jaw, but only because I thought he’d need more reaction time. As it was his fist clipped my left ear when I moved my head. The sergeant caught his wrist and twisted it behind his back, using Hopper’s own momentum against him. “Hold on, Mike. Walker doesn’t know you. Can you think of anybody you’ve had a run-in with who might want to set fire to your house?”

When the answer didn’t come right away, Early twisted harder. “No! Jeez, Tom, who do you think I hang out with? I tee somebody off, he takes a swing at me. He don’t come around in the middle of the night and try to fry me in my bed.”

“Mike’s right. His crowd isn’t that original.”

“In that case, Sergeant, I’m informing you that Midwest Confidential intends to press charges against Mr. Hopper for attempted fraud.”

“You heard him, Mike. I’m going to have to put you in custody.”

As he said it, Early gave me a black look that told me all I needed to know about which man he’d rather put handcuffs on.

He was still wearing the look an hour later, when he returned to his desk in the substation after seeing Hopper off to the county lock-up in the back of a squad car. “I never had to arrest a friend before,” he said. “I like it a lot, no, I don’t.”

I said, “I don’t much like being the bad cop, but he knows you.”

“I still don’t think he did it.”

“Neither do I.”

He touched his moustache, watching me. I liked that way he had of waiting for answers to the questions he didn’t ask. He had a lot of city cop in him for a glorified security officer.

I offered him a cigarette, and lit one for myself when he shook his head. “I wanted to get a look at him, just to see if he was the type who would throw away family treasures in return for the fast buck,” I said, depositing the match in a clay ashtray that looked as if Early had a kid who went to summer camp. “He isn’t. He was telling the truth when he said he didn’t want anyone but family poking through the ashes of his birthplace. If he burned his own house, he might sacrifice his bowling trophies to make it look good, but he’d find some way to save family pictures. He almost lost an album full of memories in the flames. He didn’t set that fire.”

“Who do you think did?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nobody. Maybe somebody sneaked in after the fire and planted the gasoline cans and the torch to make it look like arson.”

“Somebody’d have to hate Mike a lot to try to frame him. He’s got some enemies, but he’s got a lot of friends too. I’d hate to think what they’d do to someone who’d sink that low. If you didn’t buy it, why’d you have me arrest Mike?”

“If whoever it was thinks it worked, he may not be looking over his shoulder when we come up on him from behind. It would help if someone saw somebody hanging around the scene after the fire was out.”

“That’s a tough one. There are always gawkers. Pesky kids. Wait.” He touched his moustache again. “Al Ludendorf—that’s the fire chief—told me he caught Lloyd Golson skulking around the night after the fire. Golson’s a petty thief. Al thought he might’ve been there to loot the place, but he searched him and didn’t find anything on him. He ran him off.”

“Where would I find Golson?”

Sergeant Early smiled for the first time since we’d met. “Hell, that’s easy. I caught him shoplifting a circular saw out of the Huron Hardware yesterday. He’s locked up in the same wing with Mike Hopper.”

I drove straight from the county seat to the Midwest Confidential building. Ms. Roland, Lawrence Otell’s secretary, was putting on her coat when I stepped off the elevator into the reception area.

“Quitting time, sorry,” she said. “Mr. Otell’s busy clearing up some unfinished business.”

“So am I. Got a minute?”

“Just about that.” She glanced at the watch strapped to the underside of her wrist.

“I guess Mr. Otell’s pretty valuable to the company.”

“He holds the record for delivering the most policies with the fewest claims. He’s the front runner for the president’s job when Mr. Silverman retires.”

“That’s important, huh. I mean about his reporting the fewest claims against the policies he sold.”

“Well, yes. For a while it looked like Jeff Knapp had the inside track because he sold more policies, but then he caught a bad break during fire season. It’s kind of unfair when you think about it. No one can predict that.”

“You don’t know your boss as well as you think.”

“I’m sorry?”

But I was already going through the door to the private office. Inside Otell looked up quickly from the paperwork spread across his desk. “Around here we knock,” he said.

I said, “Things are a little less formal in Huron. I just spoke with Lloyd Golson.”

His square face showed nothing. “Who’s that?”

“You’ll find him in company files. Midwest Confidential sold a lot of policies around Huron. Several burglary claims were filed. His name came up in four of them as a suspect in the break-ins. He was convicted twice. Is that why you decided to use him, because his name kept showing up in claim cases?”

“Naturally I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. You’ve got a shot at the presidency because you’ve made the company more money from policies than you’ve lost in claims. That would change if too many customers like Mike Hopper were paid off for their losses in fires. Tampering with the fire scene to make it look like Hopper torched his own house for the insurance would allow the company to reject his claim, preserving your record and your chances for advancement.”

He pointed a finger. “Repeat that in front of witnesses and I’ll sue you for character assassination.”