Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (52 page)

“Do you have to guzzle that in front of me?” he snarled. “It just makes me hotter.”

“That’s your problem. I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

“You can stay home and nurse it after Lansing jerks your license. Impersonating an officer.”

“I did an impression of one. There’s a difference.”

“I’d sure as hell like to know what it is.”

“It wouldn’t do you any good. You have to shut off half your brain, and half’s all you got.”

“That a Mexican joke?”

“I don’t know any Mexican jokes. They haven’t been up here long enough. It’s a cop joke. Force of habit. You’d have got around to Trinka after you finished sweating Beaver Cleaver.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He reached back and twisted the knob on the window fan, looking for a speed faster than High. Maintenance turned off the air conditioner at midnight.

A uniform poked his head in and said the suspect was in Interview Room 3. Testaverde stood and pulled his shirt away from his back. “Keep these two company.” He stabbed a finger at me. “Let’s find out what half your brain turned up.”

Detective Clary was still at his post, but he wasn’t asking many questions. Vadya Svetlana, having changed into a simple but by no means unfashionable green dress, but otherwise looking much as she had standing on her own doorstep, sat at the table Michael Nash had occupied, speaking directly to the video camera.

“You Americans talk of family until it means nothing,” she said. “You couple it with other words—family
values,
family
workplace, extended
family—as if it needed the help. I will tell you about family. When the Nazis shelled Leningrad, my grandmother was visiting friends outside the city. She tried to sneak back in, carrying her baby—my uncle—and holding her firstborn’s hand—my mother’s
hand—and almost stumbled into an SS patrol. She took cover in a doorway. When the baby began to cry, she smothered it with her hand so the soldiers wouldn’t hear and slaughter them all. She killed her son to save her family.”

After a moment, Clary cleared his throat. “Let’s move closer to the present. Why did you replace the colored water in the vial with acid?”

“Because my niece is a fool.”

The camera whirred, wanting more.

“Most kids are,” prompted the detective. “Most guardians don’t turn it into a reason for mayhem.”

“Most guardians don’t have Cossack blood. When someone dishonors you, the name of your family, you don’t just scare him. You say, ‘Boo!’, what is that? No, you say it with a knife in the belly.”

“If you feel that way, why didn’t you do it yourself?”

“The boy wanted to do it. He said it was too dangerous for a girl. When a boy wishes to play at soldiers, it is not a woman’s place to interfere.”

“Except in the business of the vial.”

“You frighten a pig, it runs away squealing. The fright goes away, the pig comes back. What you expect, he will stop being a pig? If you want a pig to stop being a pig, for the honor of your family, you must kill him.”

“But you didn’t try to kill him.”

She shrugged. It was an entirely Slavic gesture, not to be imitated. “It is America. You make the adjustment.”

Officer Clary was silent. We were silent. She lifted her eyebrows and looked directly at us. The glass was a blank mirror on her side.

“What did I say?” she asked. “It is my English?”

Testaverde switched off the intercom. I thought he shuddered a little. It could have been the cold.

They were the unlikeliest visitors
I’d had in my office since the time a priest came in looking for the antiquarian bookshop on the next floor.

She was a comfortably overstuffed sixty in a plain wool dress and a cloth coat with a monkey collar, gray hair pinned up under a hat with artificial flowers planted around the crown. He was a long skinny length of fence wire two or three years older with a horse face and sixteen hairs stretched across his scalp like violin strings, wearing a forty-dollar suit over a white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, and holding his hat. They sat facing my desk in the chairs I’d brought out for them as if posing for a picture back when a photograph was serious business. Their name was Cuttle.

I grinned. “Ma and Pa?”

“Jeremy and Judy,” the woman said seriously. “Ed Snilly gave us your name. The lawyer?”

I excused myself and got up to consult the file cabinet. Snilly had hired me over the telephone three years ago to check the credit rating on a client, a half-hour job. He’d paid promptly.

“Good man,” I said, resuming my seat. “What’s he recommending me for?”

Judy said, “He’s a neighbor. He sat in when we closed on the old Stage Stop. He said you might be able to help us.”

“Stage Stop?”

“It’s a tavern out on Old US-23, a roadhouse. Jeremy and me used to go there Saturday night when all our friends were alive. It’s been closed a long time. When the developers gave us a hundred thousand for our farm—we bought it for ten back in ‘53—I said to Jeremy, ‘We’re always talking about buying the old Stage Stop and fixing it up and running it the way they used to, here’s our chance.’ And we did; buy it, that is, only—”

“Dream turned into a nightmare, right?”

“Good Lord, yes! You must know something about it. Building codes, sanitation, insurance, the liquor commission—I swear, if farming wasn’t the most heartbreaking life a couple could choose, we’d never have had the sand for this. When the inspector told us we’d be better off tearing down and rebuilding—”

“Tell him about Simon,” Jeremy snapped. I’d begun to wonder if he had vocal cords.

“Solomon,” she corrected. “The Children of Solomon. Have you heard of it, Mr. Walker?”

“Some kind of Bible camp. I thought the state closed them down. Something about the discipline getting out of hand.”

“A boy died in their camp up north, a runaway. But they claimed he came to them in that condition and nobody could prove different, so the charges were dropped. But they lost their lease on the land. They were negotiating a contract on the Stage Stop property when we paid cash for it. Solomon sued the previous owner, but
nothing was signed between them and the judge threw it out. They tried to buy us off at a profit, but we said no.”

“Took a shot at me,” Jeremy said.

I sat up. “Who did?”

“Well someone,” Judy said. “We don’t know it was them.”

“Put a hole in my hat.” Jeremy thrust it across the desk.

I took it and looked it over. It was stiff brown felt with a silk band. Something that might have been a bullet had torn a gash near the dimple on the right side of the crown. I gave it back. “Where’d it happen?”

“Jeremy was in front of the building yesterday morning, doing some measuring. I wasn’t with him. He said his hat came off just like somebody grabbed it. Then he heard the shot. He ducked in through the doorway. He waited an hour before going back out, but there weren’t any more shots and he couldn’t tell where that one had come from.”

“Maybe it was a careless hunter.”

“Wasn’t no hunter.”

Judy said, “We called Ollie Springer at the sheriff’s substation and he came out and pried a bullet out of the doorframe. He said it came from a rifle, a .30-30. Nobody hunts with a high-powered rifle in this part of the state, Mr. Walker. It’s illegal.”

“Did this Springer talk to the Solomon people?”

She nodded. “They denied knowing anything about it and there it sits. Ollie said he didn’t have enough to get a warrant and search for the rifle.”

I said he was probably right.

“Oh, we know he was,” she said. “Jeremy and me know Ollie since he was three. Where we come from folks don’t move far from home. You’ll see why when you get there.”

I hadn’t said I was going yet, but I let it sail. “Can you think of anyone else who might want to take a shot at you?”

She answered for Jeremy. “Good Lord, no! It’s a friendly place. Nobody’s killed anybody around there since 1867, and that was between outsiders passing through. Besides, I don’t think anybody wants to hurt either one of us. They’re just trying to scare us into selling. Well, we’re not scared. That’s what we want you to tell those Solomon people.”

“Why not tell them yourself?”

“Ed Snilly said it would mean more coming from a detective.” She folded her hands on her purse in her lap, ending that discussion.

“Want me to scare
them?”

“Yes.” Something nudged the comfortable look out of her face. “Yes, we’d like that a whole lot.”

I scratched my ear with the pencil I used to take notes. “I usually get a three-day retainer, but this doesn’t sound like it’ll take more than half a day. Make it two-fifty.”

Jeremy pulled an old black wallet from his hip pocket and counted three one hundred-dollar bills onto the desk from a compartment stuffed full of them. “Gimme fifty back,” he said. “And I want a receipt.”

I gave him two twenties and a ten from my own wallet, replaced them with the bills he’d given me, and wrote out the transaction, handing him a copy. “Do you always come to town with that much cash on you?” I asked.

“First time we been to Detroit since ‘59.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Judy said. “We were here in ‘61 to see the new Studebakers.”

I got some more information from them, said I’d attend to their case that afternoon, and stood to see them out.

“Don’t you wear a coat?” I asked Jeremy. Outside the window the snow was falling in sheets.

“When it gets cold.”

I accompanied them through the outer office into the hallway, where I shook Jeremy Cuttle’s corded old hand and we said goodbye. I resisted the urge to follow them out to their car. If they drove away in anything but a 1961 Studebaker I might not have been able to handle the disappointment.

I killed an hour in the microfilm reading room at the library catching up on the Children of Solomon.

It was a fundamentalist religious group founded in the 1970s by a party named Bertram Comfort on the grounds that the New Testament and Christian thought were upstarts and that the way to salvation led through a belief in a vengeful God, tempered with the wisdom of King Solomon. Although a number of complaints had been filed against the sect’s youth camp in the north woods, mostly for breach of the peace, the outstate press remained unaware of the order’s existence until a fourteen-year-old boy died in one of the cabins, his body bearing the unmistakable signs of a severe beating.

The camp was closed by injunction and an investigation was launched, but no evidence surfaced to disprove Comfort’s testimony that the boy died in their care after receiving rough treatment Solomon only knew where. The Children themselves were unpaid volunteers working in the light of their faith and the people who sent their children to the camp were members and patrons of the church, which was not recognized as such by the state.

There was nothing to indicate that Comfort and his disciples would shoot at an old man in order to acquire real estate in Southeastern Michigan, but before heading out the Cuttles’ way I went back to the office and strapped on the Smith & Wesson. Any place that hadn’t had a murder in more than 120 years was past due.

An hour west of Detroit the snow stopped falling and the sun came out, glaring hard off a field of white that blended pavement with countryside; even the overpasses looked like the ruins of Atlantis rearing out of a salt sea. The farther I got from town the more the scenery resembled a Perry Como Christmas special, rolling away to the horizon with frosted trees and here and there a homeowner in Eskimo dress shoveling his driveway. The mall builders and fast food chains had left droppings there just like everywhere else, but on days like that you remembered that kids still sledded down hills too steep for them and set out to build the world’s tallest snowman and lay on their backs in the snow fanning their arms and legs to make angels.

Judy had told me she and Jeremy were living in a trailer behind the old Stage Stop, which stood on a hill overlooking Old US-23 near the exit from the younger expressway. At the end of the ramp, an aging barn she had also told me about provided more directions in the form of a painted advertisement flaking off the end wall. I turned that way, straddling a hump of snow left in the middle of the road by a county plow. Over a hill and then the gray frame saltbox she had described thrust itself between me and a bright sky.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t have needed either the sign or the directions. The rotating beacon of a county sheriff’s car bounced red and blue light off the front of the building.

I parked among a collection of civilian cars and pickup trucks and followed footsteps in the snow past the county unit, left unattended with its flashers on and the two-way radio hawking and spitting at top volume, toward a fourteen-foot house-trailer parked behind the empty tavern. A crowd was breaking up there, helped along by a gangling young deputy in uniform who was shooing them like chickens. He moved in front of me as I stepped toward the trailer.

“We got business here, mister. Please help us by minding yours.”

I showed him the license, which might have been in cuneiform for all the reaction it got. “I’m working for the Cuttles. Who’s in charge?”

“Sergeant Springer. Until the detectives show up from the county seat, anyway. You’re not one of them.”

I held out a card. “Please tell him the Cuttles hired me this morning.”

He looked past me, saw the first of the civilian vehicles pulling out, and took the card. “Wait.” He circled behind the trailer. After a few minutes he came back and beckoned me from the end.

The sergeant was a hard-looking stump about my age with silver splinters in the black hair at his temples and flat tired eyes under a fur cap. The muscles in his jaw were bunched like grapeshot. He was standing ankle-deep in snow fifty feet from the trailer with his back to it on the edge of a five-acre field that ended in a line of firs on the other side. A few yards beyond him, a man and woman lay spread-eagled side by side on their faces in the snow. The backs of the man’s suitcoat and the woman’s overcoat were smeared red. More red stained the snow around them in a bright fan. They were dressed exactly as I had last seen Judy and Jeremy Cuttle.