Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (38 page)

“Depends on who you are,” I said.

“I’m the man who ought to arrest you for obstructing justice.”

“I’ll guess. J. P. Ahearn.”

“
Commander
Ahearn.”

“You’re about four feet short of what I had pictured.”

“You’ve heard of me.” His chest came out a little.

“Who hasn’t?” I unlocked the inner office door. He marched in, slung a look around, and took possession of the customer’s chair. I sat down behind the desk without asking permission. He glared at me through his spectacles.

“What you did downtown today constitutes fleeing and eluding.”

“In Texas, maybe. In Michigan there has to be a warrant out first. What you did constitutes harassment in this state.”

“I don’t have official status here. I can follow anybody for any reason or none at all.”

“Is this what you folks call a Mexican standoff?”

“I don’t approve of smoking,” he snapped.

“Neither do I, but some of it always leaks out of my lungs.” I blew some at the ceiling and got rid of the match. “Why don’t let’s stop circling each other and get down to why you’re here?”

“I want to know what you and the Indian talked about.”

“I’d show you, but we don’t need the rain.”

He bared a perfect set of dentures, turning his face into a skull. “I ran your plate with the Detroit Police. I have their complete cooperation in this investigation. The Indian hired you to take money to Boyd to get him and his little Osage slut to Canada. You delivered it after you left the bar and lost me. That’s aiding and abetting and accessory after the fact of armed robbery. Maybe I can’t prove it, but I can make a call and tank you for forty-eight hours on suspicion.”

“Eleven.”

He covered up his store-boughts. “What?”

“That’s eleven times I’ve been threatened with jail,” I said. “Three of those times I wound up there. My license has been swiped at fourteen times, actually taken away once. Bodily harm, you don’t count bodily harm. I’m still here, six-feet-something and one-hundred-eighty-pounds of incorruptible P.I. with a will of iron and a skull to match. You hard guys come and go like phases of the moon.”

“Don’t twist my tail, son. I don’t always rattle before I bite.”

“What’s got you so hot on Boyd?”

You could have cut yourself on his jaw. “My daddy helped run Parker and Barrow to ground in ‘34.
His
daddy fought Geronimo and chased John Wesley Hardin out of Texas. My son’s a Dallas City patrolman and so far I don’t have a story to hand him that’s a blister on any of those. I’m retiring next year.”

“Last I heard Austin was offering twenty thousand for Boyd’s arrest and conviction.”

“Texas Federal has matched it. Alive
or
dead. Naturally, as a duly sworn officer of the law I can’t collect. But you being a private citizen.”

“What’s the split?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“No good.”

“Do you know what the pension is for a retired state police commander in Texas? A man needs a nest egg.”

“I meant it’s too generous. You know as well as I do those rewards are never paid. You just didn’t know I knew.”

He sprang out of his chair. There was no special animosity in it; it would be the way he always got up.

“Boyd won’t get out of this country even if you did give him money,” he snapped. “He’ll never get past the border guards.”

“So go back home.”

“Boyd’s
mine. “

The last word ricocheted. I said, “Talk is he felt he had a good reason to stick up those savings and loans. The company was responsible for his father’s suicide.”

“Bah!”

“Excuse me?”

“Bah!”

“That’s what I thought you said. I never heard anyone actually say it before.”

“If he’s got the brains God gave a mad dog he’ll turn himself in to me before he gets shot down in the street or kills someone and winds up getting the needle in Huntsville. And his squaw right along with him.” He took a shabby wallet out of his coat and gave me a card. “That’s my number at the Houston post. They’ll re-route your call here. If you’re so concerned for Boyd you’ll tell me where he is before the locals gun him down.”

“Better you than some stranger, that it?”

“Just keep on twisting, son. I ain’t in the pasture yet.”

After he left, making as much noise in his two-inch cowboy heels as a cruiserweight, I called Barry Stackpole at the Detroit
News.

“Guy I’m after is wanted for Robbery Armed,” I said, once the
small talk was put away. “He ditched his gun and then his stake didn’t come through and now he’ll have to cowboy a job for case dough. Where would he deal a weapon if he didn’t know anybody in town?”

“Emma Chaney.”

“Ma? I thought she’d be dead by now.”

“She can’t die. The Detroit cops are third in line behind ATF and Customs for her scalp and they won’t let her until they’ve had their crack.” He sounded pleased, which he probably was. Barry made his living writing about crime and when it prospered he did too.

“How can I reach her?”

“Are you suggesting I’d know where she is and not tell the authorities? Got a pencil?”

I tried the number as soon as he was off the line. On the ninth ring I got someone with a smoker’s wheeze. “Uh-huh.”

“The name’s Walker,” I said. “Barry Stackpole gave me this number.”

The voice told me not to go away and hung up. Five minutes later the telephone rang.

“Barry says you’re okay. What do you want?”

“Just talk. It isn’t cheap like they say.”

After a moment the voice gave me directions. I hung up not knowing if it was male or female.

It belonged to Ma Chaney, who greeted me at the door of her house in rural Macomb County wearing a red Japanese kimono with green parrots all over it. The kimono could have covered a Toyota. She was a five-by-five chunk with marcelled orange hair and round black eyes
imbedded in her face like nailheads in soft wax. A cigarette teetered on her lower lip. I followed her into a parlor full of flowered chairs and sofas and pregnant lamps with fringed shades. A long strip of pimply blonde youth in overalls and no shirt took his brogans off the coffee table and stood up when she barked at him. He gaped at me, chewing gum with his mouth open.

“Mr. Walker, Leo,” Ma wheezed. “Leo knew my Wilbur in Ypsi. He’s like another son to me.”

Ma Chaney had one son in the criminal ward at the Forensic Psychiatry Center in Ypsilanti and another on Florida’s Death Row. The FBI was looking for the youngest in connection with an armored car robbery in Kansas City. The whole brood had come up from Kentucky when Old Man Chaney got a job on the line at River Rouge and stayed on after he was killed in a propane tank explosion. Now Ma, the daughter of a Hawkins County gunsmith, made her living off the domestic weapons market.

“You said talk ain’t cheap,” she said, when she was sitting in a big overstuffed rocker. “How cheap ain’t it?”

I perched on the edge of a hard upright with doilies on the arms. Leo remained standing, scratching himself. “Depends on whether we talk about Virgil Boyd,” I said.

“What if we don’t?”

“Then I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“What if we do?”

“I’ll double what he’s paying.”

She coughed. The cigarette bobbed. “I got a business to run. I go around scratching at rewards I won’t have no customers.”

“Does that mean Boyd’s a customer?”

“Now, why’d that Texas boy want to come to Ma? He can deal hisself a shotgun at any K-Mart.”

“He can’t show his face in the legal places and being new in town he doesn’t know the illegal ones. But he wouldn’t have to ask around too much to come up with your name. You’re less selective than most.”

“You don’t have to pussyfoot around old Ma. I don’t get a lot of second-timers on account of I talk for money. My boy Earl in Florida needs a new lawyer. But I only talk after, not before. I start setting up customers I won’t get no first-timers.”

“I’m not even interested in Boyd. It’s his girlfriend I want to talk to. Suzie Frechette.”

“Don’t know her.” She rocked back and forth. “What color’s your money?”

Before leaving Detroit I’d cashed Howard Frechette’s check. I laid fifteen hundred dollars on the coffee table in twenties and fifties. Leo straightened up a little to look at the bills. Ma resumed rocking.

“It ain’t enough.”

“How much is enough?”

“If I was to talk to a fella named Boyd, and if I was to agree to sell him a brand new Ithaca pump shotgun and a P-38 still in the box, I wouldn’t sell them for less than twenny-five hunnert. Double twenny-five hunnert is five thousand.”

“Fifteen hundred now. Thirty-five hundred when I see the girl.”

“I don’t guarantee no girl.”

“Boyd then. If he’s come this far with her he won’t leave her behind.”

She went on rocking. “They’s a white barn a mile north on this road. If I was to meet a fella named Boyd, there’s where I might do it. I might pick eleven o’clock.”

“Tonight?”

“I might pick tonight. If it don’t rain.”

I got up. She stopped rocking.

“Come alone,” she said. “Ma won’t.”

On the way back to town I filled up at a corner station and used the pay telephone to call Howard Frechette’s room at the Holiday Inn. When he started asking questions I gave him the number and told him to call back from a booth outside the motel.

“Ahearn’s an anachronism,” he said ten minutes later. “I doubt he taps phones.”

“Maybe not, but motel operators have big ears.”

“Did you talk to Suzie?”

“Minor setback,” I said. “Your sister gave her and Boyd the boot and no money.”

“Tight bitch.”

“I know where they’ll be tonight, though. There’s an old auto court on Van Dyke between 21 and 22 Mile in Macomb County, the Log Cabin Inn. Looks like it sounds.” I was staring at it across the road.

“Midnight. Better give yourself an hour.”

He repeated the information.

“I’m going to have to tap you for thirty-five hundred dollars,” I said. “The education cost.”

“I can manage it. Is that where they’re headed?”

“I hope so. I haven’t asked them yet.”

I got to my bank just before closing and cleaned out my savings and all but eight dollars in my checking account. I hoped Frechette was good for it. After that I ate dinner in a restaurant and went to see a movie about a one-man army. I wondered if he was available.

The barn was just visible from the road, a moonlit square at the end of a pair of ruts cut through weeds two feet high. It was a chilly night
in early spring and I had on a light coat and the heater running. I entered a dip that cut off my view of the barn, then bucked up over a ridge and had to stand the Chevy on its nose when the lamps fell on a telephone pole lying across the path. A second later the passenger’s door opened and Leo got in.

He had on a mackinaw over his overalls and a plaid cap. His right hand was wrapped around a large-bore revolver and he kept it on me, held tight to his stomach, while he felt under my coat and came up with the Luger. “Drive.” He pocketed it.

I swung around the end of the pole and braked in front of the barn, where Ma was standing with a Coleman lantern. She was wearing a man’s felt hat and a corduroy coat whose sleeves came down to her fingers. She signaled a cranking motion and I rolled down the window.

“Well, park it around back,” she said. “I got to think for you, too?”

I did that and Leo and I walked back. He handed Ma the Luger and she looked at it and put it in her pocket. She raised the lantern then and swung it from side to side twice.

We waited a few minutes, then were joined by six feet and 250 pounds of red-bearded young man in faded denim jacket and jeans carrying a rifle with an infrared scope. He had come from the direction of the road.

“Anybody following, Mason?” asked Ma.

He shook his head and I stared at him in the lantern light. He had small black eyes like Ma’s with no shine in them. This would be Mace Chaney, for whom the FBI was combing the western states for the Kansas armored car robbery.

“Go on in and warm yourself,” Ma said. “We got some time.”

He opened the barn door and went inside. It had just closed when two headlamps appeared down the road. We watched them
approach and slow for the turn onto the path. Ma, lighting a cigarette off the lantern, grunted.

“Early. Young folks all got watches and they can’t tell time.”

Leo trotted out to intercept the car. A door slammed. After a pause the lamps swung around the fallen telephone pole and came up to the barn, washing us all in white. The driver killed the lamps and engine and got out. He was a small man in his early twenties with short brown hair and stubble on his face. His flannel shirt and khaki pants were both in need of cleaning. He had scant eyebrows that were almost invisible in that light, giving him a perennially surprised look. I’d seen that look in Frechette’s Houston
Chronicle
and in both Detroit papers.

“Who’s he?” He was looking at me.

I had a story for that, but Ma piped up. “You ain’t paying to ask no questions. Got the money?”

“Not all of it. A thousand’s all Suzie could get from the sharks.”

“The deal’s two thousand.”

“Keep the P-38. The shotgun’s all I need.”

Ma had told me twenty-five hundred; but I was barely listening to the conversation. Leo had gotten out on the passenger’s side, pulling with him the girl in the photograph in my pocket. Suzie Frechette had done up her black hair in braids and she’d lost weight, but her dark eyes and coloring were unmistakable. With that hairstyle and in a man’s workshirt and jeans and boots with western heels she looked more like an Indian than she did in her picture.

Leo opened the door and we went inside. The barn hadn’t been used for its original purpose for some time, but the smell of moldy hay would remain as long as it stood. It was lit by a bare bulb swinging from a frayed cord and heated by a barrel stove in a corner. Stacks of cardboard cartons reached almost to the rafters, below which Mace
Chaney sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the empty loft, the rifle across his knees.