Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (59 page)

“Eighty grand.” He rubbed his elbow. “She’s got that dough stashed somewhere. She can’t stay away from it forever.”

“You gave up on that once. What makes you think she knows where it is now?”

“Just a hunch I got.”

“Save it, Phil. There’s too much divorce work in this town for you to give up any of it on a hunch. What’s your source?”

“I got a note in my inside coat pocket.” He didn’t move.

“Fish it out. If it’s more iron I’ll shoot you in the head. It’s not much of a head but it’d be a shame to spoil that hat.”

He took the note out slowly. I pocketed the .22 and took it, a square of coarse Big Chief notepaper with two words printed on it in block ballpoint capitals: VESTA KNOWS. “Who sent it?”

He shook his head. “Came in the mail yesterday. No return address and a USPS postmark. Same printing on the envelope.”

“You’d drop everything and take off after her on an anonymous note?”

“I’d do it on less than that for eighty thousand.”

I put the note in my pocket and showed him Neil Cully’s picture. His eyebrow rippled. “Sure, he was sniffing around the Mainwaring broad last year. I ran his license plate through the Secretary of State’s office but he wasn’t nobody. I guess Cully could of been the name. I ain’t seen him lately.”

“Maybe you did and forgot. Like you forgot his name.”

“Hey, I hear a lot of names.”

I opened the door. “If I find out there’s more to it I’ll be back and you and I will go a round.”

“What about my guns?”

“Go straight home from here and I’ll mail them to your office. Tell anybody you feel like shooting to take a number till then.” I left him.

I caught six hours’ sleep and was standing in front of the Detroit Public Library when they unlocked the doors. The film section had several picture books on
cinema noir
and one scholarly tract,
Dark Dreams: Psychosexual Manifestations of Hollywood Crime Movies Circa 1945-1955,
by Ellis Portman, Ph.D. It had been published that year by Wayne State University Press. I lugged the thick volume over to a reading table and waded through a grand’s worth of four-dollar words, then turned to the author’s biography at the back. Ellis Portman, it said, taught psychology and film courses at Wayne State.

I also found a withdrawal card at the back bearing signatures of those who had checked the book out recently. I took it.

A public telephone on the main floor put me in touch with Dr. Portman and an acquaintance in the Detroit bureau of the FBI who owed me a favor. I made an appointment with Portman and stopped at the Federal Building on the way to give my acquaintance the note Phil Musuraca had given me.

The room number I’d gotten from Portman belonged to a small auditorium lit by only the black-and-silver images fluttering on a square screen at the far end. I found a seat in time to watch Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer careening down a country road in a big car with bug-eye headlamps toward a roadblock. Spotting the armed men in uniform, Jane Greer said, “Dirty double-crossing—” and shot Mitchum, who sent the car into a spin while the woman traded
fire with the officers. After she was killed and the car came to a stop, a cop opened the driver’s door and Mitchum flopped out, dead.

The lights came up and a small man with a big head, half the age I associated with a college professor, dismissed the students with a reminder that their papers were due Monday. As they filed out, discussing the movie, I introduced myself and shook Portman’s hand. Up close he was older than he looked from the back of the room. I sketched out the case on the way to the projector.

“Just another manifestation of the Don Quixote complex,” he said when I’d finished. “How can I help?”

“Most books on
noir
are for buffs. Yours takes on its psychology. I thought you might translate the Latin.”

He switched off the projector and removed the take-up reel. “We’ve always identified with gods and heroes. The appeal of the
noir
protagonist is he’s more approachable than Beowulf or Sherlock Holmes. He’s an ordinary guy with tall troubles, but he usually comes out on top, even if it does kill him sometimes.”

“Kind of a complex world to want to be part of.”

“Actually it’s simplistic. You’ve got your good guy, your heavy, your good girl, and your tramp. Upon examination the
noir
landscape makes more sense than our world. I don’t wonder that an obsessive like your client’s husband would prefer it to his own tangled affairs. His wife, whom he perceives as the good girl, represents the crushing responsibilities that landed him in therapy the first time. The girlfriend, whose situation might have come out of any crime movie of the forties, promises adventure and uninhibited sex and a respite from his oppressive routine. The whole thing might have been made to order for a man with his fixation.”

I watched him place the reel in a flat can labeled OUT OF THE PAST and seal the lid. “What would shake him out of it?”

“Nothing, if he’s too far gone. If not, the shock of reality might do it. Our world has more twists than any screenplay. Villains turn out to be just guys trying to get along. Bad girls are just good girls in trouble. Angels become whores in front of your eyes. If that doesn’t bring him back, electrodes won’t.”

Later, in my office transcribing the notes I’d taken in Dr. Portman’s classroom to my typewritten report, I took a call from my FBI acquaintance. We spoke for five minutes, after which I hung up and placed two calls. The first was to Gay Cully, who agreed to see me at her place that night.

It was just past dark when Netta, the Cullys’ maid, answered the bell and told me her mistress would be with me in a few minutes. I asked her to send Mrs. Cully to the basement when she was ready and went down there.

I slid the videotape I’d brought into Neil Cully’s VCR and turned on the giant-screen TV set. As the black-and-white credits for “Pitfall” came on I turned down the sound and switched off the lights in the room. Now the only illumination came from the screen. Shadows crawled in the silver glow on the tapes perched on their shelves.

“Mr. Walker, is that you?”

I hadn’t heard her coming down the stairs. She was standing on the second step from the bottom, a small trim figure in a fresh-looking pale tailored dress like the one she’d had on when we met. One hand rested at her throat.

“It’s not Neil,” I said. “Is that what you thought, Mrs. Cully?”

“I—well, yes, for a moment. He used to sit down here with no
lights on and a movie on the—”

“Couldn’t be him, though. You know that better than anyone.”

“I don’t—do you have news? Where is he?”

I was standing in shadow beside the TV set. The full light of the screen fell on her, as I’d planned. I said, “You were okay for a novice. You only made two mistakes. One was natural: Who’d expect Phil Musuraca to show me the note or that it would find its way to the FBI? The second was just plain stupid.

“Printing VESTA KNOWS was good,” I went on. “No handwriting expert could pin that small a sample on you. But that coarse paper holds prints like soft wax. When I had a fed friend check them against yours on file from an old job, it didn’t take long.”

“What are you implying?”

“Nuts. You’ve seen enough of these films to recognize the obligatory explanation scene. The note was smart, all right. It got Musuraca back on Vesta Mainwaring’s case and made him a prime suspect: Poor crazy Neil got himself involved all over again in Vesta’s troubles and stubbed his toe, permanently. Just in case the cops missed it you hired me, knowing I’d turn Musuraca eventually. The law couldn’t convict him without a body, but his interest in eighty thousand dollars stolen by Vesta’s ex would divert suspicion from you. You even read up on
cinema noir
to make sure your story about Neil’s obsession would hold water. But that was where you made your second mistake, the bonehead one.” I took the card out of my pocket and held it up to the light.

“What’s that?”

“A withdrawal card from the Detroit Public Library with your name on it, dated a week before you reported your husband missing. You shouldn’t have checked out Dr. Portman’s book. That was like signing your own name to a murder contract.” I put it away. “How
much is Neil’s half of the contracting firm worth?”

Shadows and light played over her face. “Fifty thousand. More if I liquidate the real property. But that’s not evidence. A note, a card with my signature. They won’t convict.”

“No, but they’re enough to obtain a warrant to dig up that berry patch at the end of this street. Before I rang the bell tonight I poked around with a flashlight. I found a lot of turned earth. With Neil’s corpse, the note and the card will convict.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

I said nothing.

“Listening to him babble about those stupid films,” she said. “Even when he had his affair it wasn’t with a woman, just a character in a movie. I’d have killed him for that alone; the half-partnership will just be compensation for the past two years I spent living with a zombie.”

“How’d you kill him?”

“Guess.” She raised a gun in the hand she’d had resting on the banister. I hadn’t seen it in the shadows. “I sent Netta out just now,” she said. “Call it a feeling I had.”

“Drop it, sister.”

I almost laughed. It was the one cliché the scene needed and you could count on Phil Musuraca to deliver it. His bulk filled the upper stairwell. The Sig-Sauer automatic I’d sent to him by messenger after calling him was in his hand. I took advantage of Gay Cully’s confusion to remove the Smith & Wesson from my pocket.

“Make that three mistakes,” I said. “You’re as much a sucker for that
noir
schtik as Neil. Just because a PI. is greasy enough to hound a woman for eighty grand doesn’t mean I can’t call on him for help. You’ve seen the pictures, Mrs. Cully. A staircase is no place to make a successful play.”

Her gun dropped, bounced down two steps, and landed on the carpet. Just then Dick Powell shot Byron Barr onscreen. Fat Phil said, “I didn’t care for that
greasy
crack.”

I got away from the Lathrup Village cops around midnight. On the way home I stopped at the video store, rented some tapes, and watched Doris Day movies until I fell asleep.

They were having one of those runs
for a disease on West Grand River. Most of the streets leading into it were blocked off with saw-horses and large Detroit Police officers in uniform, and some peace-loving soul had installed a loudspeaker on every third lightpole to blast a running commentary on the participants. I didn’t catch the name of the disease but it was a cinch it wasn’t a hearing disorder.

Normally on Sunday morning I’d have been sleeping through it all in my little cottage by Hamtramck, but my taxes were due the next day. So far I had located most of my canceled checks under the desk blotter in the office and was putting off pulling the file cabinet away from the wall to look for some missing receipts when the door to my reception room opened.

The buzzer was switched off, but the connecting door to the private office was ajar and I had a clear view of my visitor. I couldn’t have seen any more of her if the door had been open all the way, because she was as naked as an onion.

She was a tall brunette with her hair swept up from a long neck that hadn’t gotten much sun.

Her breasts were small but self-sustaining and she had athletic hips and legs with a little more meat on them than the current fashion
allowed, which was okay with me because I hadn’t caught up with it either. Her feet were pretty in a time that emphasizes hands and faces, the nails neatly pruned and unpainted. It was a pale body like you don’t see any more—it shone in the sunlight canting through the window at my back—and she hadn’t had any bikini waxes recently. She was in her late twenties.

For a beat after she closed the hall door she leaned against it, breathing in shallow gusts and looking around jerkily like a doe that had jumped the wrong fence. Then she saw me, standing half-turned toward the file cabinet, and seemed to realize her naked condition suddenly, because she blushed clear down to her bosom. It was like spilling red ink over a marble statue.

The loudspeaker under my window crackled and spewed some irrelevancy that gave me the best line I could dredge up under the circumstances. “The race is downstairs.”

She started, as if the additional discovery that I was capable of speech was too much for her to take in. “Next door,” she said; and fell on her face.

I couldn’t have caught her on a moped. Still, I sprinted through the connecting doorway, knelt and felt her carotid for the strong pulse I found there, and lifted her up onto the upholstered bench where the potential clients were expected to sit, thumbing through copies of
U.S. News
&
World Report
from the Carter administration. She’d skinned her nose when she fell, but the rest of the inventory checked out. She’d only fainted. I took my raincoat off the halltree and spread it over her. Then I went out, locking the dead bolt behind me.

The office next door belonged that month to a graphic artist, a bitter-faced old mutterer still waiting for his one-man show at the Detroit Institute of Arts—or failing that, next month’s rent—who
hadn’t said a word to me all the times we’d passed each other on the stairs. I nodded to the workman painting someone’s name on a glass door down the hall, knocked at the artist’s door, and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked. Nothing about the workman’s resigned expression told me he’d seen any good-looking naked women that day.

The office consisted of one room, slightly larger than my private tank. It had been converted into a studio, with unframed canvases covered with riotous slashes of paint hung on the walls and a sheet tacked over the south window to simulate north light. A foot-high wooden platform occupied one corner; across from it stood an easel holding up a canvas with the outlines of a nude human female form brushed on and a low zinc-topped table smeared all over with paint from half a dozen squashed tubes. A bouquet of brushes stood in a chipped coffee mug on one corner.