Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (42 page)

I took the check and put it in my wallet. I drank some more tea, peeled my upper lip back down, and stood, setting aside the cup and saucer. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Earlier if I find out anything.”

“Thank you.” She hesitated. “It isn’t just that I need him. If it were just that—”

“I had a dog once,” I said. “I still think about him sometimes.”

“You sound like someone who would.”

Mrs. Chase’s landlady, a thin blonde named Silcox, lived on the ground floor. Mrs. Chase was her oldest tenant and Mrs. Silcox’s son, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, had built the kennel at
his mother’s request. Neither was home when it was broken into.

From there I went to the office of the Iroquois Heights
Spectator.
The newspaper was the flagship of a fleet owned by a local politician, but the classified section was reliable. I asked for that editor and was directed to a paunchy grayhead standing at the water cooler.

“Rube Zendt,” he said when I introduced myself, and shook my hand. “Born Reuben, but trust newspaper folk to latch on to the obvious.”

His hair was thin and black on top with gray sidewalls and he had a chipmunk grin that was too small for his full cheeks. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a blue tie at half-mast on a white shirt. I apologized for interrupting his break.

“This distilled stuff rusts my pipes. I only come here to watch the bubbles. Got something to sell or buy, or did you lose something or find it?”

“Close. A local woman hired me to find her dog. I thought that holding down lost and found you’d be the one to talk to about the local market.”

“Dog-napping, you mean. I just take the ads. Man you want to see is Stillwell on cophouse.”

“He around?”

“This time of day you can catch him at the police station.”

“What time of day can I catch him anywhere else?”

The chipmunk grin widened a hundredth of an inch. “I see you know our town. But things aren’t so bad down there since Mark Proust made acting chief.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning he spends all his time in his office. Tell Stillwell Rube sent you.”

The first three floors of a corner building on the main stem belonged to the city police. It was a hot day in August and the air conditioning was operating on the ground floor, but that had nothing to do with the drop in my temperature when I came in from the street. At the peak of the busing controversy in the early seventies a group of local citizens had protested the measure by overturning a bus full of schoolchildren; some of that group were in office now and they had built the city law-enforcement structure from the prosecutor right down to the last meter maid.

A steely-haired desk sergeant with an exotropic eye turned the good one on me from behind his high bench when I said I was looking for Stillwell of the
Spectator
and held it on me for another minute before saying, “Over there.”

The wandering eye was pointing north and I went that way. He’d never have made the Detroit department with that eye, but with his temperament he was right at home.

Two big patrolmen in light summer uniforms were fondling their saps in the corner by the men’s room, leering at and listening to a man with no hair above the spread collar of his shirt and a wrinkled cotton sportcoat over it.

“... and the other guy says, ‘Help me find my keys and we’ll
drive
out of here!’”

The cops opened a pair of mouths like buckets and roared. I approached the bald man. “Mr. Stillwell?”

The laughter stopped like a bell grabbed in mid-clang. Two pairs of cop eyes measured me and the bald man’s face went guarded with the jokester’s leer still in place. “Who’s asking?”

“Amos Walker. Rube Zendt said to talk to you.”

“Step into my office.” He pushed open the men’s room door and held it. The cops moved off.

The place had two urinals, a stall and a sink. He leaned his shoulders against the stall, waiting. He was younger than the clean head indicated, around thirty. He had no eyebrows and clear blue eyes in a lineless face whose innocence could turn the oldest filthy joke into a laugh marathon. I gave him my spiel.

“Shepherd,” he said. “There’s not a lot of call for them without papers. No gold rushes going on in Alaska to goose the sled-dog trade.”

“It’s a Seeing Eye. That’s an expensive market.”

“They’re handled by big organizations that train their own. They don’t need to deal in stolen animals and you’d need papers and a good story to sell them one that’s already schooled. Tell your client to place an ad with Rube offering a reward and stay home and wait to hear from whoever took the dog.”

“Staying home is no problem.”

“I guess not. Sorry I can’t help.”

“What about the fight game?”

“There’s no fight game in this town.”

“What town we talking about?”

“Yeah.” He crossed his ankles then and I knew my leg had been pulled. “That racket’s all pit bulls now. I can think of only one guy would even look at a shepherd.”

I gave him twenty dollars.

“Henry Revere.” He crumpled the bill into the side pocket of his sportcoat. “Caretaker over at the old high school. He’s there days.”

“School board know what he does nights?”

“Everyone knows everything that goes on in this town, except the people who pay taxes to live in it.”

“Thanks.” I gave him a card, which he crumpled into the same pocket without looking at it.

Coming out of the men’s room I had the desk sergeant’s errant eye. The other was on a woman in a yellow pantsuit who had come in to complain about a delivery van that was blocking her Coup de Ville in her driveway.

It was a three-story brick box with big mullioned windows and a steel tube that slanted down from the roof for a fire escape. When the new school was built down the road, this one had been converted into administrative offices and a place to vote in district elections. I found its only inhabitant on that summer vacation day, an old black man wearing a green worksuit and tennis shoes, waxing the gym floor. He saw me coming in from the hall and turned off the machine. “Street shoes!”

I stopped. He left the machine and limped my way. I saw that the sole of one of his sneakers was built up twice as thick as its mate.

“Mister, you know how hard it is to get black heel marks off of hardwood?”

“Sorry.” I showed him my ID. “I’m looking for a German shepherd, answers to Max. If you’re Henry Revere, someone told me you deal in them.”

“Someone lied. What use I got for dogs? I got a job.”

“Also a lot of girlfriends. Unless those are dog hairs on your pants.”

He caught himself looking, too late. His cracked face bunched like a fist. “You’re trespassing.”

I held up two ten-dollar bills. He didn’t look at them.

“This here’s a good job, mister. I got a wife with a bad cough and a boy at Wayne State. I ain’t trading them for no twenty bucks. You better get out before I call the po-lice.”

I put away the bills. “What are you afraid of?”

“Unemployment and welfare,” he said. “Maybe you never been there.”

Back in my office in downtown Detroit I made some calls. First I rang Elda Chase, who said that no one had called her yet offering to return Max for a reward. I tried the Humane Society in three counties and got a female shepherd, a mix, and a lecture about the importance of spaying and neutering one’s pets at sixty bucks a crack. After that it was time for dinner. When I got back from the place down the street the telephone was ringing. I said hello twice.

“Walker?”

“This is Walker.”

Another long pause. “Ed Stillwell. The
Spectator?”

I said I remembered him. He sounded drunk.

“Yeah. Listen, what I told you ‘bout Henry Revere? Forget it. Bum steer.”

“I don’t think so. He denied too much when I spoke to him.”

There was a muffled silence on his end, as if a hand clamped over the mouthpiece. Then: “Listen. Forget it, okay? I only gave you his name ‘cause I needed the twenty. I got to make a monthly spousal support payment you wouldn’t believe. What I know about dog fighting you could stick in a whistle.”

“Okay.”

“‘Kay.”

A receiver was fumbled into a cradle. I hung up and sat there smoking a couple of cigarettes before I went home.

“...believe the motive was robbery. Once again, Iroquois Heights journalist Edward Stillwell, in critical condition this morning at Detroit General Hospital after police found him beaten unconscious in an empty lot next to the
Spectator
building.”

I had turned on the radio while fixing breakfast and got the end of the story. I tried all the other stations. Nothing. I turned off the stove and called the
Spectator.
I kept getting a busy signal. I settled for coffee and left home. As I swung out of the driveway, a navy-blue Chrysler with twin mounted spotlights and no chrome pulled away from the curb behind me.

It was still in my mirror when I found a slot in front of the
Spectator
office. I went inside, where everyone on the floor was hunched over his desk arguing with a telephone. Rube Zendt hung his up just as I took a seat in the chair in front of his desk. “The damn
Free Press,”
he said, pointing at the instrument. “They want the rundown on Stillwell before we even print it. Those city sheets think they wrote the First Amendment.”

“Which desk is Stillwell’s?”

“Why?”

I counted on my fingers. “Stillwell gives me a man to see about a dog. A cross-eyed sergeant at the cophouse sees us talking. I see the man. Last night Stillwell calls me, sounding sloshed and telling me
to forget the man. This morning the cops scrape Stillwell out of an alley.”

“Empty lot.”

“In Detroit we call them alleys. I’m not finished. This morning I’ve got a tail that might as well have UNMARKED POLICE CAR painted in big white letters on the side. Someone’s scared. I want to know what makes Stillwell so scary. Maybe he kept notes. He’s a newspaperman.”

“I can’t let you go through his desk. Only Stillwell can do that. Or Gerald Strong. He publishes the
Spectator.”

“I know who Strong is. Where is he?”

“Lady, we don’t
need
no warrant. We’re in hot pursuit of a suspect in an assault and battery.”

This was a new player. I turned in my chair and looked at a pair of hulks in strained jackets and wide ties standing just inside the front door dwarfing a skinny woman in a tailored suit. One, a crewcut blond with a neck like a leg, spotted me and pointed. “There he is.”

I got up. “Back way.”

Zendt jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “End of that hall. Good luck.” He stuck out his hand. I took it hastily and brought mine away with a business card folded in it.

The detectives were bumping into desks and cursing behind me when I made the end of the hall and sprinted out the back door. I ran around the building to my car. One of the cops, graying with a thick moustache, had doubled back and was barreling out the front door when I got under the wheel. I scratched pavement with the car door flapping. In the mirror I saw him draw his revolver and sight down on the car. I went into a swerve, but his partner reached him then and knocked up his elbow. I was four blocks away before I heard their siren.

I backed the car into a deserted driveway and unfolded the card
Zendt had given me. It was engraved with Gerald Strong’s name, telephone number, and address on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe Farms. I waited a little. When I was sure I couldn’t hear the siren any more I pulled out. My head stayed sunk between my shoulder blades until I was past the city limits.

It was one of the deep walled estates facing the glass-flat surface of Lake St. Clair, with a driveway that wound through a lawn as big as a golf course, but greener, ending in front of a brownstone sprawl with windows the size of suburbs. I tucked the Chevy in behind a row of German cars and walked around the house toward the pulse of music. I should have packed a lunch.

Rich people aren’t always throwing parties; it’s just that that’s the only time you catch them at home. This one was going on around a wallet-shaped pool with guests in bathing suits and designer original sundresses and ascots and silk blazers. There was a small band, not more than sixteen pieces, and the partiers outnumbered the serving staff by a good one and a half to one.

George Strong wasn’t hard to spot. He had made his fortune from newspapers and cable television, and his employees had dutifully smeared his face all over the pages and airwaves during two unsuccessful campaigns for state office. His towhead and crinkled bronze face towered four inches over his tallest listener in a knot of people standing by the rosebushes. I inserted some polyester into the group and introduced myself.

“Do we know each other?” Strong looked older in person than in his ads. His chin sagged and his face was starting to bloat.

“It’s about one of your reporters, Ed Stillwell.”

“I heard. Terrible thing. The company will pay his bills, even though the incident had nothing to do with the newspaper. I understand he was drunk when they mugged him.”

“Nobody mugged him. I think he was beaten by the police.”

“Excuse us, gentlemen.” He put a hand on my arm and steered me toward the house.

His study was all dark oak and red leather with rows of unread books on shelves and photographs of George Strong shaking hands with governors and presidents. When we were on opposite sides of an Empire desk I told him the story. Unconsciously he patted the loosening flesh under his chin.

“Ridiculous. The police in Iroquois Heights aren’t thugs.”

“Two of them tried to arrest me for Stillwell’s beating in the
Spectator
office half an hour ago, without a warrant. They followed me there from my house where they have no jurisdiction. Your classifieds editor gave me your card. Call him.”

He didn’t. “I won’t have my reporters manhandled. You say you want to go through Stillwell’s desk?”

I said yes. He took a sheet of heavy stock out of a drawer and scribbled on it with a gold pen from an onyx stand. He folded it and handed it to me. “I’ll pay double what the woman’s paying you to forget the dog and find out who beat up Stillwell.”