Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (57 page)

“Pay the bartender. Stand up for me at my next arraignment.”

I caught up with Inspector John Alderdyce in the Detroit Athletic Club, swimming laps around the pool where Johnny Weissmuller had trained for the Olympics. The gymnasium was more brightly lit than it had been for thirty years, when a brick wall had blocked the view of the encompassing city. Now it looked out on the larger-than-life statues of dead ballplayers in Comerica Park.

Anthropologists say that black men haven’t the buoyancy to break records in the water, but they hadn’t seen Alderdyce, dark and gleaming, arms and legs slicing the surface like a water rocket. There was no one present to enforce the rules, so I lit a cigarette and waited while he circled twice and climbed out. The water came off him in sheets, like rain from a locomotive. He’d put on weight around the middle, but he was all slabbed muscle through the chest and shoulders, with a head hewn roughly like a chainsaw sculpture from a living tree.

“Put that out,” he said. “I’m on probation here six more weeks.”

I squashed out the butt on the tiles while he toweled off and put on a terrycloth robe with the DAC monogram above the pocket. We sat down in a pair of folding chairs with woven plastic seats and I got right to it.

“Why didn’t Ed come see me in person?” he asked when I’d finished.

“He says he’s a pariah.”

“You’re not?”

“I made the same argument. He said I wasn’t in his league.”

“He doesn’t know you like I do.”

“What do I tell him?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That means no.”

“No means no. ‘I’ll think about it’ means I’ve got a stack of homicides on my desk that won’t investigate themselves. What’s your end?”

“Not a cent. I owed him a solid.”

“I don’t.”

“He knows that.”

“What’s my end if I deliver?” he asked. “I mean from you.”

“There isn’t one from me. Personally, I don’t care if Ed Warburton’s name shows up in the morning roll or not. He got a raw deal if he’s telling the truth, but this mayor and this chief hardly ever deal any other way. I don’t have the time or the capital to square up the deck every week.”

“Think he’s on the level?”

“He made all the right faces when he was talking, but you cops all got more personalities than Mel Blanc. For what it’s worth, I think he wants to clean the slate.”

“Tell Ed I’ll call him.”

Warburton called me at home a week later. I don’t know where he got the number. It was late and he was drunk.

I said, “I guess you didn’t see any pink eels.”

“I’m celebrating,” he said. “You’re talking to Officer Edward Thomas Warburton. That’s unofficial until they give me the oath, but I’m taking it out for a test drive.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Walker. John gave me the news an hour ago. The chief waived training. All I have to do is pass the physical and qualify on the range.”

“Bet she’s hoping you’ll fail one or the other.”

“I won’t, though. I’ve never missed a doctor’s appointment or a target. I’ve got fifteen years till mandatory. I might make lieutenant. Then I’ll be in a position to even things up with you.”

“If I’m still doing what I’m doing fifteen years from now, that might mean asking you to put a round in my head.”

“I’d like to buy you another drink.”

“No, you don’t. A fresh fish like you can’t afford to be seen in public with a disgraced character like me.”

We continued in that vein for five seconds more and then we were through talking. We were back to last names and that was just fine. I never heard from him again. But I heard about him plenty.

A writer who’d ghosted three presidential memoirs spilt a publishing contract with Warburton and brought out his story under the title
Second Chance.
Before it appeared, a Hollywood studio bought the rights to adapt it, but the circumstances themselves were public domain, and at one point a movie company, a broadcast TV network, and a satellite station had all announced plans to dramatize the story: Kevin Costner, Kiefer Sutherland, and Denzel Washington entered into negotiations to play the lead. No cameras turned on any
of the productions and the book went into remaindering after one printing.

Ten months after Officer Warburton raised his right hand and promised to serve and protect his community on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN, officers with the General Service Bureau arrested him for embezzling forty thousand dollars from the stash the department kept for buying drugs in sting operations. Subsequent investigation revealed he’s lost that much at least in the three casinos in town.

He was dismissed by order of the chief of police, found guilty of grand theft, and sentenced to serve eight to twelve years at hard labor in the state penitentiary in Jackson, where he was placed in isolation to protect him from the convicts he’d helped send there. His wife divorced him, his daughter’s husband lost his bid for public office, and his son changed his name. Meanwhile, the FBI informed the chief it was expanding its probe of the department, and Inspector John Alderdyce was suspended for three weeks with pay while General Service investigated his connections with Warburton. His membership in the Detroit Athletic Club was canceled.

My name didn’t come up in any of the press conferences that accompanied the story, but I got my car into a garage to bring all the safety equipment up to date. These days I can’t afford to be stopped for even a broken taillight in the city of Detroit.

The address I’d written down
belonged to a house in Lathrup Village three miles north of Detroit, the only one in a cul-de-sac that ended in a berry thicket and a cyclone fence. It was a cool, sprawling ranch-style of brick and frame with four great oaks in the yard arranged in such a way that the house would always be in shade. I felt the sweat drying on my body during the short walk from my car to the front door.

A woman in a gray dress and white apron with her hair caught up by combs led me into a sunken living room and went away. They’re no longer called maids, but they still can’t speak English.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Walker. I’m Gay Cully.”

She’d come in through an open sliding glass door from a patio in back when I was looking in another direction, a small compact red-haired woman with the sun behind her. Assuming she’d planned her entrance, that put her over forty. She had large eyes mascaraed all around, a pixie mouth, and a fly waist in a pale yellow dress tailored to show it off.

“I like your home.” I borrowed a warm, slightly moist hand with light calluses and returned it. “They don’t design them this way since air conditioning.”

“Neil has an eye for that kind of thing. He’s a building contractor.”

“Neil’s your husband?”

“Yes. Can I get you something? I’m afraid Netta has narrow ideas about her housekeeping duties.”

“Just water. Anything stronger’s wasted on a day like this.”

She agreed that it was hot and came back after a few minutes with two glasses and a bowl of crushed ice on a tray. When we were seated on either side of a glass occasional table she said, “Neil’s officially missing. Twenty-six hours. I trust the police but they’re outnumbered by their cases. That’s why I called you.”

“This puts me even up. I take it he isn’t in the vanishing habit.”

“No. He’s never been gone without an explanation except for the time he was in the hospital.”

“Accident?”

She drank and set down her glass. “He checked himself into a sanitarium. That was eighteen months ago, when the construction business was in a slump. Our lawyer advised him to declare bankruptcy, but Neil insisted on paying back every creditor in full. It was too much for him, the worrying, the long hours. One day he left for work and never showed up. The police traced him to the hospital after three days.”

“I guess you checked there this time.”

“I called every hospital in the area, public and private. No one answering his description has been seen in any of them.”

“How’s he been lately?”

“A little keyed up. We’re just now getting back on our feet. I didn’t think it was anything serious until his partner called yesterday to ask where he was.”

I had some water. I wasn’t thirsty any more, I just never liked asking the question. “Any reason to suspect he’s involved with another woman?”

“Yes, but I called her and she swears she hasn’t seen him in months.”

“You know her?” I stroked my Adam’s apple. A piece of ice had stalled in my throat during her answer.

“Vesta is her name. Vesta Mainwaring. She was the bookkeeper at the office until I made Neil fire her.” She leaned over and touched my wrist. The light found hairline creases in her face.

“I should explain something before we go any further. My husband is an obsessive personality, Mr. Walker. He’s subject to binges.”

“Alcohol?”

“No, but just as intoxicating. Come with me to the basement.” She rose.

We went through a stainless steel kitchen and down a flight of clean sawdust-smelling steps into a cellar that had been turned into a den, mahogany paneling and tweed wall to wall. It contained a wet bar, Naugahyde chairs and a sofa, and a television set whose forty-eight-inch screen dwarfed the videocassette recorder perched on top. A set of built-in shelves that looked at first to hold books was packed with videotapes instead.

“My husband’s favorite room,” said Mrs. Cully. “He spends most of his time here when he’s not working.”

I read the labels on the tapes. They were all movies: “The Dark Corner,” “Night and the City,” “Criss Cross,” “Double Indemnity”—not a Technicolor title in the bunch, and none of them made after about 1955. “He likes murder mysteries, I see.”

“Not just murder mysteries. Dark films with warped gangsters and troubled heroes and fallen women. There’s a name for them; my French isn’t very good—”

“
Cinema noir, “
I said. “Black films. I like old movies myself. So far it hasn’t landed me in psychiatric.”

“You just like them. Neil sucks on them. In the beginning I watched with him. They were interesting, but not as a steady diet. I don’t think he even noticed when I stopped watching. Lately he’s been spending every spare minute in front of this set, exposing himself to I don’t know how many murders, deceits, and depressing situations. It’s not healthy.”

An empty cassette sleeve lay on an end table. “Pitfall,” starring Dick Powell, Raymond Burr, and Lizabeth Scott. I went to the VCR and punched Eject. A tape licked out. “Pitfall.” It hadn’t been rewound.

“He was watching this one when?”

“Night before last. He disappeared the next day.”

“When was the last time he got on this kick?”

“Just before he entered the hospital. About the time I found out he was having an affair with Vesta Mainwaring.”

“How’d you find out?”

“The police told me. The little slut caved in pretty quickly when they started asking questions about his disappearance.”

I slid the tape into its sleeve. “Where can I find Miss Mainwaring?”

“She’s listed. But as I told you, she doesn’t know where he is.”

“I’d like to hear her say it. What’s the name of your husband’s firm?”

She’d anticipated that and gave me a business card from the pocket of her dress. CULLY AND WEBB, it read. “Webb is the partner?”

“His first name’s Leo. They’ve been together longer than Neil and I.”

“Can I take this with me?” I held up the videotape.

“Of course. You’ll need a picture of Neil too.”

Upstairs she took a five-by-seven out of its frame and handed it to me. Cully was a craggy-looking party in his late forties with sad
eyes and dark hair thinning in front. “Any ideas on what he might be up to?” I asked his wife.

She hesitated. “It might sound crazy.”

“Try me.”

“You have to understand that he might be unbalanced,” she said. “I didn’t put it together the first time, but I’ve seen enough of these things now to recognize the plot. I think Neil wants to be one of these
noir
heroes, Mr. Walker. I think he thinks he’s in a film.”

Cully and Webb had a small suite on the seventeenth floor of the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building on Woodward, a furnace-shaped skyscraper with a lobby out of Cecil B. DeMille, complete with sparkling blue lights mounted under the thirty-foot ceiling and a bronze ballerina pirouetting among exterior pools. The offices themselves were just offices. A gray-haired woman with reading glasses suspended from a chain around her neck spoke my name into a telephone and Leo Webb came out to shake my hand.

He was a short wiry sixty with white hair slicked back, a power nose, and eyes like glass shards. His suit was tailored snugly and there was something about the knot of his silk tie that said he’d given it a jerk and a lift just before his entrance.

When I told him my business he steered me into his office, a square room full of antiques and statuary, trembling on the rim of bad taste. I admired the view of downtown Detroit through his window and managed to sit without upsetting a plaster cupid notching an arrow into its bow on a pedestal next to the chair.

“Gay’s overreacting,” Webb said, settling himself behind a
French Empire desk crusted all over with gold inlay. “Cully’s just off on a toot. He’s that age. He’ll be back when he’s had enough.”

“Vesta Mainwaring told her she hasn’t seen him in months.”

“This town’s full of squirming women. I know. That’s why I never bothered to get married.”

“How’s he been acting lately?”

“Same as anyone in this goddamn business, jumpy. Every time it rains on Wall Street mortgage rates go up and people stop building houses. If you’re looking for security, keep going.”

“You wouldn’t know that to see this office.”

He smiled and ran a finger down the side of a Dresden Marie Antoinette on the desk. “I’m a sucker for nice things. We’re into developing in a small way. You get a sixth sense for dying old widows looking to unload their property in order to have something to leave their grandchildren. The bargains would surprise you.”