Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (49 page)

“That part’s true enough,” I said. “I saw the car.”

“They’re blowing it off.” Mrs. Donato had both feet on the floor now. “If Albert were anyone but my stepson they wouldn’t have dared. Read the polls. I’m the most hated woman in America.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Investigate Subject. Killinger said he thought there was alcohol
involved. If he’s got a record I want it brought out into the open. If it leads to something else I want that to come out too. I’m no wicked stepmother, Walker. I was very fond of Albert. I won’t have his life wiped off the books just because the woman his father married made a mistake in arithmetic.”

Sporthaven reached inside his portfolio. “Under the conditions of her personal bankruptcy, Mrs. Donato cannot own anything for five years. However, my firm has authorized me to issue you a letter of credit for up to five thousand dollars.” He handed me a crisp sheet of expensive bond containing three paragraphs printed in boldface with justified margins. “Should you be successful, whatever is left is yours. Your standard fee is guaranteed, of course.”

“Of course.” I folded it as carefully as if it were the Declaration of Independence and interred it in my inside pocket. “What if nothing turns up?”

“Come now.” The woman sat back and recrossed her legs. “In your profession and mine, where would we be if we went around looking for the good in everyone?”

• • •

I spent an hour in the periodicals section of the Detroit Public Library downtown reading up on the accident. I knew most of the details, but I needed one in particular. When I had it I went back to the office and rummaged through my desk looking for business cards. I still have every card that was ever handed me. Twenty minutes of that and I had a match. I propped it against the base of the desk lamp, looked up Owen Subject in the metropolitan directory, and dialed the number. His wife answered, a break. She said Owen wasn’t home; another break. I read the name and title off the business card and arranged an interview at the house for seven that evening. She said Owen would be in by then.

The house was in Redford, one of a tract of brick ranch styles that had been poured in an ice cube tray and dumped out in the pattern in which they were formed. A small woman with red hair and gray roots snatched the door open under my knuckles.

“Owen? Oh.” She clutched her quilted housecoat together at her throat.

“Anson Wold, Mrs. Subject. We spoke earlier. I’m with Midwest Casualty. It
is
Mrs. Subject?” I handed her the card.

“Yes. I’m afraid Owen isn’t home yet. I expected him before this.” She stood aside.

The living room was full of glazed furniture and factory art. Stacks of supermarket tabloids occupied most of the chairs. The same alien seemed to have cropped up on the front pages of most of them. I found space on the couch.

“I just need a couple of details before I can finish processing Mr. Subject’s claim. I understand the truck is his property.”

“Yes. Um, I didn’t know he’d filed a claim. He’s been so busy with this court thing. They arrested him, you know.” She perched on the edge of a straight-back chair.

“Released on his own recognizance, I believe.”

“Right. Even at the arraignment the judge knew they had no case.”

“I imagine your finances are pretty tight with his truck in impoundment.”

“Well, there’s not much coming in. But the mortgage is paid off and so is the truck, and we have enough in savings to take care of incidentals.”

I made some scratches in my prop notebook. “He must be a hustler. Making a go of a small business in this economy is a twenty-six-hour-a-day job.”

“That’s what I said when he left the trucking company and made a down payment on the rig. I told him if he lost the house I’d leave
him. It was tough at first, but then he got a loan and right after that work started coming in. We’re better off now than when he was punching the clock, and his time’s his own.” That made her think to look at her watch. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping him. He was just going to see the lawyer.”

“Where did he get the loan?”

“Loan? Oh. Do you need to know that?”

“It’s for Records.”

The magic phrase brought her to her feet. “I forget the name of the company. I think there’s a card.” She went to a desk holding up a telephone shaped like a duck and pawed through drawers. “He got the name from a friend in the union. He almost gave up. He’d tried all the places that advertised in the yellow pages and on television. Here it is! Ever hear of them?”

I looked at the card she brought over. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard of Gryphon Collateral.”

• • •

I spotted the blue Chevy two turns after I left Redford. It was a closed tail and he was good, but traffic was light at that hour and the routes I take around the city are my own and make no sense to anybody but me.

I had three good chances to shake him. I didn’t use them. Thanks to Mrs. Subject I had a fair idea who was sending his kid through medical school, and it was handy to have someone close by I could ask questions of in case I hit a wall.

When I turned into the driveway in Highland Park the guy kept driving, reading the numbers on both sides of the street as if he were looking for one in particular. I heard him cut his motor down the block while I was waiting for someone to answer the front door.

“Chevies. What’s the world coming to?” Barry Stackpole trained a pair of graphite binoculars through the window of his home office. “Something important went out with bulletproof Cadillacs.”

“Ten’ll get you twenty when you run the plate it’ll kick out Gryphon Collateral,” I said.

The room, converted from a small bedroom on the second floor, was full of books and videotapes that had boiled out of the shelves onto the desk ad chairs and all but a narrow twisted walkway on the carpet. Some of the books bore his byline. All of the tapes belonged to the program he had hosted on local cable until someone decided that reruns of “Three’s Company” would skew better in his time slot. The program, titled “Know Your Neighbor,” had highlighted a different Detroit area crime figure each week. Barry had been a Mob watcher only a little longer than he’d been getting around with an artificial leg, two missing fingers, and a steel plate in his skull, souvenirs of the first time someone had suggested canceling him.

He put down the nocs and limped over to the desk to pour scotch into two glasses from a bottle of Glen-Something. “I want to thank you for bringing him here, Amos. I still have three limbs I don’t know what to do with.” He handed me a glass. “Cold steel.”

“Hot lead.” I lifted mine and tossed it back. “I brought him here on purpose. When he reports the address and they look it up, maybe they’ll panic and do something dumb.”

“Here’s hoping they do it to you.” He drank and leaned a hip against the desk. “Gryphon, you said?”

“I hear they got two floors of a high-rise in Southfield, no more dealing loans over a card table behind Tino’s Billiards on Livernois.”

“Michigan,” he corrected. “Livernois was Jake the Shake. Gryphon’s lost a lot of color. They figured out they don’t make anything when they have to break bones. That’s when they added Collateral
to the company name. Small business is their specialty. If you can’t pay they grab a piece or take it out in trade.”

“That explains why Owen Subject isn’t hurting for money.”

“Milton Thorpe.”

“Is that a name or another toast?”

“Milton likes to block roads,” he said. “He used to use cars, but someone got around him once by going up the bank. A truck is better. He used a truck the day he capped Guillermo Zuma.”

“Zuma I heard of. Someone named Milton Thorpe doesn’t sound like he attends the same cockfights.”

“Zuma always had a WASP front for him. This one had ambition. Loan sharks generally have plenty of indy truckers in inventory. And Milton Thorpe juices most of the sharks in town.”

“I don’t remember Zuma getting killed in a crash. I heard it was bullets.”

“You can’t count on a crash. He got it from the car following behind. He couldn’t go forward on account of the truck blocking the road and he couldn’t back up because the car was on his bumper. They squoze him in between, put it in Park, got out, and shot him and his driver in the barrel. Cops down in Ecorse snagged the trucker out of the river three days later.”

“Owen didn’t show tonight,” I said. “His wife was worried.”

“He’ll turn up in three days. That’s how long it takes the gas to bring them to the surface.”

“Lucky for Albert Donato he was driving so fast. It saved him from getting shot.”

“It would explain why Subject powdered and left the truck behind. Nobody told him there might be flames. The car with the guns would have done the same once Albert was toast.” Absently he scratched the wrong leg. “That store receivership wouldn’t have lasted
long. What was a kid with his bucks doing playing around with someone like Milton Thorpe?”

“Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was a message for his stepmother.”

“Are you suggesting your client might not have come across with the whole story?”

“I’m shocked too.” I drained my glass and set it on Barry’s face on the back of one of his books. “Thanks for the whiskey and information. I’ll be taking my tail and leaving.”

“Don’t forget you owe me a bottle.”

“I can’t afford your brand.”

“Hell, neither can I. That’s why I give out information.”

He stopped smiling. “Stay alive, buddy. Don’t leave me alone with the politically correct.”

“Don’t worry. I’m fire-retardant.”

I left the driver of the Chevy looking for a space near my building and went up to place some calls. First I tried Rita Donato at Milan, but after a long wait some prison brass came on and said she’d used up her allotment of calls for that period and would I care to leave a message? I hung up and got Lee Killinger at the Northville state police post.

“I’m out the door, Walker. Unless you’re calling for an address to send money you borrowed from me, which no keyholer will do ever, I got no time for you.”

“Sorry to hear it, Lee. So will a lady dispatcher I know at the Brighton post. Wasn’t her kid born just about the time you transferred over on your last promotion?”

“You can only draw that one so many times before it misfires,” he said after a pause. “What is it this time?”

“I’m wondering if Rita Donato ever had any dealings with a drug lord by the name of Milton Thorpe.”

“That’s federal.”

“I hear the computer in Lansing has coffee all the time with the one in Washington.”

“Anyway, all that would have come out during her trial. When they really want you they dig deep.”

It was a point, one sharp enough to deflate. I asked him to feed it through anyway. He said he’d get back to me in twenty-four hours and banged off. I was getting to be as unpopular as my client.

Next I called Owen Subject’s wife to ask if her husband had showed up. I knew what the answer would be when she speared the telephone halfway through the first ring. It was three minutes after ten. He’d been missing eight hours. I said something comforting. It made me unpopular with myself.

• • •

The next morning I was shaving with the bathroom door open when the TV morning-show hostess, a blonde on Percodans, reported that the body of a middle-aged male had been found snagged in brush on the American side of the Detroit River south of Flatrock. I wiped off the lather and made a call.

“Wayne County Morgue. Fitzgerald.”

“Walker, Fitz. How was Bingo Saturday night?”

“I’m still answering the phone here, ain’t I? What’s the rumpus so bright and early?”

“I may have an ID on that floater they gaffed down-river.”

“Too late. His wife identified him an hour ago.”

“How’d she take it?”

“Better than the son. He was leaning on the old lady when they left.”

“Son?”

“Clean-cut kid. You wouldn’t think he came from such rotten oins.”

“Fitz, I have an idea we’re not both talking about Owen Subject.”

“Never heard of the gentleman. Customer’s name is LoPolo.”

I groped for the pack in my shirt pocket and realized I was wearing my robe. “LoPolo comma Francisco in parentheses Pancho Polo?”

“Yeah, all of those. Plenty of places he could’ve landed between Bogota and here, but he, chose the Renaissance City. Two in the melon. Nine millimeter.”

“Didn’t he used to work for Guillermo Zuma?

“Uh-huh. Some folks thought he’d step into the old man’s pointy patent leathers. He didn’t and I hear it made him surly.”

I found a half-smoked Winston in the ashtray ant set fire to it. The smoke cleared the bees out of the skull. “Have you got an address for LoPolo?”

“His wife left it. Second.” He came back on after twenty. “Nice little cottage on Square Lake. Probably thirty-two rooms. Number’s—”

“Not necessary. Thanks.” I broke the connection and tried Killinger in Northville. The turn-out sergeant I spoke to said he wouldn’t be in until eight. I finished grooming, dressed, and drove to the office. The blue Chevy followed.

“I said twenty-four hours,” Killinger growled when I got him. “It’s been ten.”

“Forget it. I’m betting five thousand dollars Rita Donato didn’t know Milton Thorpe from Robert Young.” I told him about Francisco LoPolo and where he’d lived.

He blew air. “Snaps right in there, doesn’t it?” What about the trucker?”

“He’ll pop up in a couple of days. By then he’ll be the forgotten man. How’d you like a plush office in Lansing?”

“Depends on the deposit.”

I told him.

When the manager came on, shortly before noon, I tipped him, opened the manila envelope, studied what was inside, and transferred it to a No. 10 I’d already addressed and stamped. I slipped it into my inside breast pocket. Before I went out I checked the load in the Smith & Wesson .38 I’d had longer than my wife and clipped it to my belt.

The man behind the wheel of the blue Chevy shielded his eyes with his left hand when I came out of the building and lost himself in a map of what looked like Nebraska. He jumped when I tapped on his window with the muzzle of the revolver. I made a twirling motion with my free hand. He cranked down the glass.