Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (37 page)

“I can’t kill what you don’t have,” I said. “Golson talked, Otell. He ratted you out to get a shoplifting charge dropped that would have imprisoned him for five years as a repeat offender. You called him the morning after the fire and offered him five hundred dollars to plant evidence implicating Hopper.”

“A man like that would say anything to stay out of jail.”

“Maybe. It’s enough to make the authorities curious about other aborted claims against policies you sold. A man who would break the law once to improve his statistics would do it again. I’m guessing when they’re finished taking a hard look you’ll be facing several counts of interfering in criminal investigations and insurance fraud. You won’t like prison any more than Golson. The pinstripes go the wrong way.”

He thought about it a second, then opened the top drawer of his desk and brought out a revolver. That disappointed me.

“If you’re going to shoot yourself, don’t do it in your own office. That joke’s too old.”

“Who said anything about shooting myself?” He pointed the revolver at me.

Just then Ms. Roland came in. “Larry? Is everything—” She froze when she saw the gun.

Otell didn’t. In a second he was on his feet and lunging. He grabbed her arm, pulled her off balance, and swept behind her, grabbing her around the waist and clapping the revolver’s muzzle under her chin. “Don’t move, Walker!”

“Well, that one’s even older,” I said. “I thought you didn’t go in for blood sports.” But I didn’t move.

He backed through the open door, bringing her with him. I gave him a beat, then followed.

They were standing in front of the elevator. He took the gun from her throat long enough to push the button with his elbow, then replaced it. His expression was totally alien. The shock of a drop as long as the one from the president’s office to the defendant’s table affects many different people many different ways.

The doors slid open. He shoved the woman stumbling into the office and backed inside the elevator, swinging the gun from side to side. I stayed where I was. The doors closed and the car started down.

I helped Ms. Roland to her feet. “Are you going to call the police?” she asked.

“No.” I went back into Otell’s office. The wall behind the desk was made entirely of glass and looked down onto the street before the entrance to the underground garage where the employees parked. The secretary joined me.

“I called the parking attendant earlier,” I said. “Otell drives a gray Mercedes?”

“Yes. Are the police waiting for him?”

“Not exactly.”

A minute later a gray Mercedes nosed out into the street. It was waiting to turn when a battered Dodge pickup swept away from the curb and plowed into the door on the driver’s side. After a pause the passenger’s side door popped open and Otell piled out, waving his revolver. Just then a second pickup roared down the lane on that side and screeched to a halt. Both doors swung open and the occupants of the cab leveled shotguns across the tops. By then other pickups had appeared, ringing in the Mercedes and the man who had been driving it. All the drivers and passengers had shotguns except one.

Sergeant Early stepped down from a Ford Ranger, walked up to Otell, and took away his gun without a struggle.

You couldn’t miss the Indian
if you’d wanted to. He was sitting all alone in a corner booth, which was probably his idea but he hadn’t much choice because there was barely enough room in it for him. He had shoulders going into the next county and a head the size of a basketball and he was holding a beer mug that looked like a shot glass between his horned palms. As I approached the booth he looked up at me—not very far up—through slits in a face made up of bunched ovals and a nose like the corner of a building. His skin was the color of old brick.

“Mr. Frechette?” I asked.

“Amos Walker?”

I said I was. Coming from him my name sounded like two stones dropped into deep water. He made no move to shake hands, but he inclined his head a fraction of an inch and I borrowed a chair from a nearby table and joined him. He had on a blue shirt buttoned to the neck and his hair, parted on one side and plastered down, was blue-black without a trace of gray. Nevertheless he was about fifty.

“Charlie Stoat says you track like an Osage,” he said. “I hope you’re better than that. I couldn’t track a train.”

“How is Charlie? I haven’t seen him since that insurance thing.”

“Going under. The construction boom went bust in Houston just when he was expanding his operation.”

“What’s that do to yours?” He’d told me over the telephone he was in construction.

“Nothing worth mentioning. I’ve been running on a shoestring for years. You can’t break a poor man.”

I signaled the bartender for a beer and he brought one over. It was a workingman’s hangout across the street from the Ford plant in Highland Park. The shift wasn’t due to change for an hour and we had the place to ourselves. “You said your daughter ran away,” I said, when the bartender had left. “What makes you think she’s in Detroit?”

He drank off half his beer and belched dramatically. “When does client privilege start?”

“It never stops.”

I watched him make up his mind. Indians aren’t nearly as hard to read as they appear in books. He picked up a folded newspaper from the seat beside him and spread it out on the table facing me. It was yesterday’s Houston
Chronicle,
with a banner:

Bandit’s Van Found Abandoned in Detroit

I had read a related wire story in that morning’s Detroit
Free Press.
Following the unassisted shotgun robberies of two savings and loan offices near Houston, concerned citizens had reported seeing 22-year-old Virgil Boyd in Mexico and Oklahoma, but his green van with Texas plates had turned up in a city lot five minutes from where we were sitting. As of that morning, Detroit Police Headquarters was paved with feds and sun-crinkled out-of-state cops chewing toothpicks.

I refolded the paper and gave it back. “Your daughter’s taken up with Boyd?”

“They were high school sweethearts,” Frechette said. “That was before Texas Federal foreclosed on his family’s ranch and his father shot himself. She disappeared from home after the first robbery. I guess that makes her an accomplice to the second.”

“Legally speaking,” I agreed, “if she’s with him and it’s her idea. A smart DA would knock it down to harboring if she turned herself in. She’d probably get probation.”

“She wouldn’t do that. She’s got some crazy idea she’s in love with Boyd.”

“I’m surprised I haven’t heard about her.”

“No one knows. I didn’t report her missing. If I had, the police would have put two and two together and there’d be a warrant out for her as well.”

I swallowed some beer. “I don’t know what you think I can do that the cops and the FBI can’t.”

“I know where she is.”

I waited. He rotated his mug. “My sister lives in Southgate. We don’t speak. She has a white mother, not like me, and she takes after her in looks. She’s ashamed of being half Osage. First chance she had she married a white man and got out of Oklahoma. That was before I left for Texas, where nobody knows about her. Anyway she got a big settlement in her divorce.”

“You think Boyd and your daughter will go to her for a getaway stake?”

“They won’t get it from me, and he didn’t take enough out of Texas Federal to keep a dog alive. Why else would they come here?”

“So if you know where they’re headed, what do you need me for?”

“Because I’m being followed and you’re not.”

The bartender came around to offer Frechette a refill. The big Indian shook his head and he went away. “Cops?” I said.

“One cop. J. P. Ahearn.”

He spaced out the name as if spelling a blasphemy. I said I’d never heard of him.

“He’d be surprised. He’s a commander with the Texas State Police, but he thinks he’s the last of the Texas Rangers. He wants Boyd bad. The man’s a bloodhound. He doesn’t know about my sister, but he did his homework and found out about Suzie and that she’s gone, not that he could get me to admit she isn’t away visiting friends. I didn’t see him on the plane from Houston. I spotted him in the airport here when I was getting my luggage.”

“Is he alone?”

“He wouldn’t share credit with Jesus for saving a sinner.” He drained his mug. “When you find Suzie I want you to set up a meeting. Maybe I can talk sense into her.”

“How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

“Good luck.”

“Tell me about it. My old man fell off a girder in Tulsa when I was sixteen. Then I was fifty. Well, maybe one meeting can’t make up for all the years of not talking after my wife died, but I can’t let her throw her life away for not trying.”

“I can’t promise Boyd won’t sit in on it.”

“I like Virgil. Some of us cheered when he took on those bloodsuckers. He’d have gotten away with a lot more from that second job if he’d shot this stubborn cashier they had, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t hurt a horse or a man.”

“That’s not the way the cops are playing it. If I find him and don’t report it I’ll go down as an accomplice. At the very least I’ll
lose my license.”

“All I ask is that you call me before you call the police.” He gave me a high school graduation picture of a pretty brunette he said was Suzie. She looked more Asian than American Indian. Then he pulled a checkbook out of his hip pocket and made out a check to me for fifteen hundred dollars.

“Too much,” I said.

“You haven’t met J. P. Ahearn yet. My sister’s name is Harriett Lord.” He gave me an address on Eureka. “I’m at the Holiday Inn, room 716.”

He called for another beer then and I left. Again he didn’t offer his hand. I’d driven three blocks from the place when I spotted the tail.

The guy knew what he was doing. In a late-model tan Buick he gave me a full block and didn’t try to close up until we hit Woodward, where traffic was heavier. I finally lost him in the grand circle downtown, which confused him just as it does most people from the greater planet earth. The Indians who settled Detroit were being far-sighted when they named it the Crooked Way. From there I took Lafayette to 1-75 and headed downriver.

Harriett Lord lived in a tall white frame house with blue shutters and a large lawn fenced by cedars that someone had bullied into cone shape. I parked in the driveway, but before leaving the car I got out the unlicensed Luger I kept in a pocket under the dash and stuck it in my pants, buttoning my coat over it. When you’re meeting someone they tell you wouldn’t hurt a horse or a man, arm yourself.

The bell was answered by a tall woman around forty, dressed in a khaki shirt and corduroy slacks and sandals. She had high cheekbones and slightly olive coloring that looked more like sun than heritage and her short hair was frosted, further reducing the Indian effect. When she confirmed that she was Harriett Lord I gave her a card and said I was working for her brother.

Her face shut down. “I don’t have a brother. I have a half-brother, Howard Frechette. If that’s who you’re working for, tell him I’m unavailable.” She started to close the door.

“It’s about your niece Suzie. And Virgil Boyd.”

“I thought it would be.”

I looked at the door and got out a cigarette and lit it. I was about to knock again when the door opened six inches and she stuck her face through the gap. “You’re not with the police?”

“We tolerate each other on the good days, but that’s it.”

She glanced down. Her blue mascara gave her eyelids a translucent look. Then she opened the door the rest of the way and stepped aside. I entered a living room done all in beige and white and sat in a chair upholstered in eggshell chintz. I was glad I’d had my suit cleaned.

“How’d you know about Suzie and Boyd?” I used a big glass ashtray on the Lucite coffee table.

“They were here last night.”

I said nothing. She sat on the beige sofa with her knees together. “I recognized him before I did her. I haven’t seen her since she was four, but I take a Texas paper and I’ve seen his picture. They wanted money. I thought at first I was being robbed.”

“Did you give it to them?”

“Aid a fugitive? Family responsibility doesn’t cover that even if I felt any. I left home because I got sick of hearing about our proud
heritage. Howard wore his Indianness like a suit of armor, and all the time he resented me because I could pass for white. He accused me of being ashamed of my ancestry because I didn’t wear my hair in braids and hang turquoise all over me.”

“He isn’t like that now.”

“Maybe he’s mellowed. Not toward me, though, I bet. Now his daughter comes here asking for money so she and her desperado boyfriend can go on running. I showed them the door.”

“I’m surprised Boyd went.”

“He tried to get tough, but he’s not very big and he wasn’t armed. He took a step toward me and I took two steps toward him and he grabbed Suzie and left. Some Jesse James.”

“I heard his shotgun was found in the van. I thought he’d have something else.”

“If he did, he didn’t have it last night. I’d have noticed, just as I noticed you have one.”

I unbuttoned my coat and resettled the Luger. I was getting a different picture of “Mad Dog” Boyd from the one the press was painting. “The cops would call not reporting an incident like that being an accessory,” I said, squashing out my butt.

“Just because I don’t want anything to do with Howard doesn’t mean I want to see my niece shot up by a SWAT team.”

“I don’t suppose they said where they were going.”

“You’re a good supposer.”

I got up. “How did Suzie look?”

“Like an Indian.”

I thanked her and went out.

I had a customer in my waiting room. It was a small angular party crowding sixty in a tight gray three-button suit, steel-rimmed glasses, and a tan snapbrim hat squared over the frames. His crisp gray hair was cut close around large ears that stuck out and he had a long sharp jaw with a sour mouth slashing straight across. He stood up when I entered. “Walker?” It was one of those bitter pioneer voices.