Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (47 page)

“Things such as what?”

“Well, his poor academic performance and his running off. He wasn’t a rebellious boy. He was a sickly child, always on some kind of medication. Maybe that’s where it started.”

“His real father might know something.”

“Hank? I doubt it. They haven’t seen each other in years.”

“That’s what he said when I called to ask if Mark had moved in with him. Then he hung up.”

“That’s Hank Worden. I suppose I should be grateful he’s such a miserable son of a bitch. He’s made me look like the ideal husband by contrast.”

I thanked him and thought of some more words of sympathy, but he had his gloves back on and the visor down and was firing up the torch for another go at his project. People grieve all sorts of ways.

The houseman was standing in the path between the house and the workshop when I let myself out. His hands hung at his sides and his white coat glowed blue under a mercury light mounted on top of a tall pole.

“We talk,” he said.

He asked me to call him Truk. That was the name of the archipelago where he’d grown up; he said his real one was even harder to pronounce than it was to spell. His room in the walkout basement contained popular fiction on the shelves and stacks of
People.
I guessed he read them to improve his English. He sat cross-legged on a neatly made twin bed, showing bare ankles and the smooth brown line of his throat when he tipped his head back to draw on the cigarette he’d bummed.

I smoked and waited in a wicker armchair and wondered how old he was, thirty or sixty. His bowl-cut hair was glossy black, but Micronesians are a long time going gray.

“Police?” he asked.

“Private,” I said.

His face crumpled into a wrinkled mask. Sixty, definitely. “I don’ know what this is,
private.”

“It means I can’t shoot if you run away from me. Apart from that the work’s the same.”

He smiled, showing gold teeth and smoothing out his face. Thirty, maybe. “I thought Mark is dead before this.”

“Bad habits?”

He puffed and said nothing. He didn’t inhale, just filled his mouth and let it out like cigar smoke. His grin set like plaster of Paris. Forty, probably. I got out a twenty, folded it lengthwise, and held it up between two fingers. He drew his lip down over his teeth and shook his head.

I started to put it away.

“Kidneys,” he said.

I stopped; “What about them?”

“Like he didn’t have none. None that worked.”

“He didn’t die because his kidneys failed. His kidneys failed because he died.”

“I mean before. Three year, four. He got a new one.”

“His mother and stepfather didn’t mention that.”

“He didn’t get it from them.”

“Who donated it?”

He dropped the filter into a jar lid on the nightstand and asked for another cigarette. I tucked the twenty into the pack and flipped it onto the bed. I’d guessed the answer, but I might have to come back for more later.

He pocketed the pack with the bill inside. He didn’t take out a cigarette. “His father, the real one.”

“The mother’s type didn’t match?”

He shrugged.

I said, “I heard Mark and his father weren’t that close.”

He smiled again and patted his pocket.

I misunderstood. “That’s all you get. I’m dipping into capital.”

“Money’s what I meant. They pay.”

“Hank Worden sold one of his kidneys? For how much?”

He lifted and dropped his shoulders again. I asked him how he knew about the deal.

“I didn’, then. Later, Worden comes back, drunk, loud. Mr. Childs he say, ‘I call police.’ Then he leave.”

“What was he mad about?”

“I think maybe he wants more and Mr. Childs says no. I guess. My English is not so good as now.”

“Was Mrs. Childs here at the time?’

“She is out. It is after the operation, she goes to see Mark in the hospital.”

I got up and put out my cigarette in the jar lid. “Anything else?”

“Nothing else. I hear you talk to Mrs. Childs, I think maybe you want to know.” I was at the door when he spoke again. “You no police?”

“When’s the last time a cop gave you money?”

He lifted his bangs to show me a thin white scar on his scalp. “Sixteen stitch, ten year ago. All I ever got. So why you want to know about Mark?”

“I’m more curious than I thought I was.”

The radio news had more details on the victims in the apartment. Du’an Reeves, twenty, was a sophomore at Wayne State. Gordon Samuels and LeRon Porter, both twenty-one, were juniors.

Porter had done short time in County for nonpayment of child support to a seventeen-year-old former girlfriend in Redford Township. None of the others had a record, including Mark Childs. The police were still investigating drug connections. I switched off.

Hank Worden, Mark Childs’s father and Clarissa Childs’s ex, lived in a bungalow that needed a new roof on West Vernor, the old Delray section, now mostly Mexican. The disrepair wasn’t uncommon in houses where construction workers lived; the work is all
outgo and no income. His lights were on at midnight, so I knocked on his door. I had my gun with me on a hunch, but I didn’t need it to get in. I accomplished that by sticking my foot in the door and pushing a twenty through the gap.

He sat in a quagmire sofa drinking Diet Pepsi from a can, a man in his middle fifties but fit, tan from rugged outdoor work, in jeans and run-down tennis shoes and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He had all his hair, splintered with silver, and from the look of him it was easy to see why his kidney passed muster. But you don’t have to socialize with a vital organ.

“So you got the boy killed.” That’s what he opened with.

I remained standing. All the seats in the place looked like sinkholes and I didn’t want to have to wallow my way out of one to clock him. “According to the cops he was dead almost before I started looking for him. Do you want to fight? I sure don’t. It’s been a day.”

He shook the last drops onto his tongue and tossed the can toward a raveled straw laundry basket heaped over with empties. “I don’t want to fight. I been in fights and I never got a thing out of them, not even the sense to stop picking ‘em. Last time I saw Mark he was in Pampers. I know I ought to feel something, but I don’t. Bastard, ain’t I?”

“Who told you, the cops?”

“They make the family rounds when something like this happens. Greasers next door get a visit every time one of their uncles gets squiffed. They got more uncles than a rabbit. Ought to loan ‘em out to colored boys that got no daddies.”

“You thought enough of Mark to give him a kidney.”

“First thing I thought when they told me. ‘Well, there’s a piece of me wasted.’ You know about that, huh?”

“I told you, I’m a detective. So what about it?”

“That was strictly a business deal. Ten thousand bucks and all expenses paid. See, Mark and me was a perfect match. Is that a hoot? Clary took him when she left and she had less in common with him than me.”

“Ten grand doesn’t go as far as it used to. That was true even three or four years ago. So you went back for more, and Childs threw you out.”

His face darkened under the tan. “That what he said?”

“It’s what I heard.”

“I ought to go back up there and bash in his skull with one of them nutty statues he makes out of scrap.”

I didn’t like the way he said it. He was too calm. “If the cops heard you say that, they’d be down here tossing the place for a shotgun.”

“Go ahead, it’s in that closet. I used to bring it along when I had a job in the country, in case I saw a deer. Now I just keep it around to punch holes in the sky on New Year’s Eve.”

It was a Remington twelve-gauge in good condition. The barrel smelled oily and there was a little dust in it when I turned it toward the light. It hadn’t been fired recently. I put it back. “Of course, it could be one of a set.”

He made a kazoo with his lips. “I can barely afford to buy pop in six-packs. Get me one, will you? Take one for yourself. I ain’t had a real drink in twelve years; that’s why my kidney was so rosy pink.” He took one of the two I got from the refrigerator in the kitchenette and watched me snap the top on mine. “If Childs told you I got greedy, then he’s a liar on top of a deadbeat. I only went to that barn of his to get what was promised me. That check he wrote me ought to be tied to a paddle with a string.”

“It bounced?”

“Man, I had to duck when I tried to cash it.” He popped open his can. “I guess his insurance took care of the hospital bill, but I don’t go in to get carved on just for the rush.”

“You didn’t take it to court?”

“No contract. He said it was dicey legalwise. What you think of that, man lives like that, hanging paper like some goldbrick?” He poured half the can down his throat.

“Maybe he lives better than he is off.” I sipped. No matter what they put in place of sugar it always tastes like barbed wire left to steep. “I don’t guess you told any of this to the police.”

“I would’ve, if they asked. Why should I cover up for a squirt like Orson Childs?” He spoke the name with an effete accent.

“No reason, except they might look at it as motive for murder. You made a deal to save Mark’s life, Childs reneged, so you decided to repossess.”

He paused in mid-guzzle, swallowed. “Jesus, that’s cold.”

“It should be. I just took it out of your refrigerator.”

“I mean what you said. So why’d I wait four years?”

“Murder plots have been known to stew a lot longer than that.”

He drank off the second half and flipped the can toward the basket. It wobbled but didn’t fall off, as some of the others had. “Do I
look
like somebody who’d wait that long?”

• • •

I drove away from there, yawning bitterly and hoping Barry Stack-pole’s lights would be out so I could go home and go to bed. But Barry lived without sleep, a journalistic vampire who that season had sublet lodgings downtown, five minutes from each of the city’s three legal casinos. He had a theory that the owners were building a Mafia outside the Mafia with no ties to what the gaming commission interpreted
as organized crime, but with all the benefits attendant. He might have had something, at that; the owners were exclusively male, and the mob is not an equal opportunity employer. Traditional gangsters had taken one of his legs, some fingers, and put a steel plate in his skull, so he was less than reasonable on the subject of thugs incorporated. In that vein of mind he’d hacked into every hundred-thousand-dollar bank account between Puget Sound and Puerto Rico. Thirty minutes after I dropped in on him and his computer arsenal, I found out Orson Childs had been selling off his family’s stock for five years, trying to bolster investment losses and personal indulgences, from
Childs’ Plaything
to a racehorse named Lightyear that couldn’t hold its own beside a California redwood. I promised Barry a case of scotch and left him to his obsession of the season.

The rest was as glamorous as it gets. I caught a few hours’ sleep in my hut on the west side of Hamtramck, got up at the butt-crack of dawn with black sludge in a thermos, and camped out across the street from the Childs house in Grosse Pointe. That morning happened to be trash collection. I was out of the car the second Truk wheeled the household refuse bin to the curb and started back up the drive, puffing smoke from one of the cigarettes I’d given him.

I worked fast, because the trash truck was snorting its way up Lake Shore Drive, the collectors evaluating the inventory for personal aggrandizement before feeding it to the crusher. I found what I wanted among the empty single-malt bottles and plain garbage, put it in my trunk, and went home to hose off and change. Rich people are never available before 9:00 anyway; not even rich people who aren’t really rich, mathematically speaking. In America, even the broke are divided into classes.

Truk let me in with no expression on his face to indicate he knew me from anyone else who came to the door. He didn’t even glance at
the red and blue gym bag I was carrying. After a little absence he came back and led me through a room I hadn’t been in and outside to a flagged courtyard where Orson and Clarissa Childs sat in fluffy white robes drinking coffee; Mrs. Childs’s out-of-focus gaze said there was as much Kentucky as Colombian in her cup.

The houseman faded and I set down my bag, which clanked when it touched the flagstones. Childs, looking up from the
Free Press,
glanced back at it, then at me. Portrait shots of the shooting victims bordered a grainy picture of the murder scene on the front page.

“Anything new?” he asked. “There was nothing on the radio that wasn’t there last night.”

“There wouldn’t be. The press doesn’t know yet about the kidney.”

The woman started, spilling coffee on the table. Childs folded the paper and laid it on the vacant chair. “It didn’t have anything to do with what happened. I assume you’ve been talking with Worden.”

“What happens to Mark’s trust fund now that he isn’t around to collect it?”

“It goes to his heirs and assigns. Before you go any further, you might want to consider the penalty for slander.”

“What lawyer would press the case after your retainer check came back from his bank?”

The couple locked gazes. He blinked first. She set down her cup with a double click.

Childs said, “You should be having this conversation with Worden. He’s an angry man and simple. His thought processes are easy to predict when he thinks he’s been cheated. Not that there is anything to whatever he told you. Buying organs is shaky from a legal standpoint.”

“So’s murder. His shotgun tests clean. How about yours?”

“I don’t own a shotgun.”

“Not anymore. You decided to get rid of it after you used it on Mark and then his roommates to make it look like he wasn’t the only target.”

He lengthened his upper lip. “Evidence?”

“Me, for starters. I’m a witness.” I leaned down, unzipped the bag, and took out one of the pieces I’d retrieved that morning. The barrel had been cut into eight-inch lengths, then split down the middle. When I laid it on the table, Mrs. Childs squeaked, got up, and half ran inside, holding a hand over her mouth. I let her. “If I’d known this was what you were slicing up last night, it would’ve saved me a dive in your Dumpster. No wonder you jumped when I walked in on you.”