Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (6 page)

That night I dreamed I was out swimming on a warm evening when I came upon a vintage car sunk in the mud, moonlight shining on it through the water. Peering inside, I was snatched by flabby
hands and found myself grappling with an old woman whose face was blotched gray with death. We rolled over and over, but her grip was like iron and I couldn’t shake her. I awoke as drenched as if I had actually been in the water.

The telephone was ringing. It was John Alderdyce.

“Good news and bad news, shamus. Sheriff’s men got Barnes at Metro Airport a few minutes ago, boarding a plane for L.A.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“We looked up his record. There’s nothing to indicate he was anything but square. I wish to hell mine were as good.”

That tore it as far as getting a good night’s sleep was concerned. I sat up smoking cigarettes until dawn.

The day was well along when Alderdyce and I shared the Ecorse dock with a crowd of local cops and the curious, watching a rusty sedan rise from the river at the end of a cable attached to a derrick on the pier. Streaming water, the glistening hulk swung in a wide, slow arc and descended to a cleared section of dock. The crane’s motor died. Water hissed down the archaic vehicle’s boiler-shaped cowl and puddled around the rotted tires.

Uniforms held back the crowd while John and I inspected the interior. Decayed wooden crates had tumbled over everything. Something lay on the floor in front, swaddled in rags, and what remained of the upholstery. White, turtle-gnawed bone showed through the tattered and blackened fabric.

“Not much hope of proving he was sapped or shot,” said the lieutenant. “The denizens of the deep have seen to that.”

“Even so,” I said, “having a
corpus delicti
makes for a warm, cozy feeling. Is Barnes still in custody?”

“For the time being. We won’t be able to hold him much longer without evidence. What is it?”

A longshoreman who had been pressed into service to unload the cargo had exclaimed as he lifted out the first of the crates. “Awful light for a box full of booze,” he said, setting it down on the dock.

A crowbar was produced and the rotted boards gave way easily to reveal nothing inside. Alderdyce directed another crate to be opened, and another. They were equally unrewarding.

“I wonder why Eddie would risk his life for a carload of empty boxes,” I mused, breaking the silence.

In the end, it was the boxes and not the body that broke him. After an hour of questioning, Alderdyce dropped the bombshell about the strange cargo, whereupon Barnes’s face lost all color and he got so tongue-tied he couldn’t keep his lies straight. When he started confessing, the stenographer had to ask him twice to slow down so she could keep up.

Outside Oscar Chubb’s room that evening an orderly with shoulders you couldn’t hike across grasped my upper arms as I started to push past and I asked him to let go. He squeezed harder, twisting the muscle and leering. I jabbed four stiffened fingers into the arch of his ribcage. When he doubled over I snatched hold of his collar and opened the door with his head. Inside, a gentle boot in the rump laid him out on his face.

Dr. Tuskin and the hatchet-faced nurse were standing on the other side of the bed. An oxygen tent covered Chubb’s head and torso
and he was wired to an oscilloscope whose feeble beep disconcertingly resembled a countdown. The noise echoed the beating of my client’s heart.

“Call the police,” Tuskin told the nurse.

“Uh-uh.” I blocked her path. “What happened?”

Tuskin hesitated. “Stroke. It happened shortly after you left yesterday. What right have you to break in and batter my staff?”

I studied the gaunt face behind transparent plastic. “Is he conscious?”

Before the doctor could respond, Chubb’s eyelids rolled open and the great eyes slued my way. To Tuskin I said, “This will only take a minute. It’ll be on tonight’s news, so you can stay if you like.”

He liked. I spoke for longer than a minute, but by then no one was watching the clock. The dying man lay with his eyes closed most of the time. I had only the peeping of the electronic whozis to tell me I still had an audience.

“I confirmed it in back issues of the
News
and
Free Press
at the library,” I went on. “That wasn’t the first load of hooch Specs paid for and never got. His rumrunning boats and cars had a habit of sinking and getting hijacked, more than those of his rivals. Eddie bought the stuff in Canada with the boss’s money, stashed part of it to be picked up later, and saw to it that the empty crates he’d replaced it with got lost. He was making a respectable profit off each load. Kle-instein got wind of it and threatened him. Eddie and Clara never were an item. That was just Barnes’s story.”

Chubb’s lips moved. I didn’t need to hear him.

“Sure you saw them together,” I said. “They were retrieving a load from one of their caches. If Barnes was Eddie’s pipeline into the police department, as he’s confessed, Clara was his spy in Specs’s inner circle, ready to sound the alarm if he ever got suspicious. When
he did, Barnes panicked and had Eddie taken out to keep him from talking.”

I read his lips again and shook my head.

“No. I thought Barnes had killed him too until we checked out his alibi. The night Eddie went down, your partner was sitting vigil in a Harper Woods funeral parlor with a cousin’s remains. Two people who were with him that night are still alive, and they’ve confirmed it. There was only one other person who had a stake in Eddie’s death, who he would have trusted to go with him that last night.”

His lips didn’t move this time. I hurried on.

“It was the girl, Mr. Chubb. Clara Baxter. She shot him and spent all night chipping a hole under the car to cover the evidence. Barnes hasn’t changed much in fifty years. When I started poking around he lost his head again and tipped Kleinstein anonymously to get me out of the way while he offed Clara. He knew she wouldn’t confess to Eddie’s murder, but if Specs got suspicious and wrung the truth about the swindle out of her, Barnes was cold meat. In court he stood a chance. The underworld doesn’t offer one.”

I waited, but he didn’t respond. After a brief examination Dr. Tuskin announced that his patient had lapsed into coma. I never found out if he was conscious long enough to appreciate the fact that he’d spent half a century hating a man for the wrong reason. He died early the next morning without telling his son about our arrangement, and I didn’t have enough capital on hand to sue his estate. But I wasn’t the biggest loser by far.

Three days after his arraignment on two counts of murder, while awaiting trial in the Wayne County Jail, Walter Barnes was found strangled to death in his cell with the cord from his hearing aid. The coroner called it suicide.

The old man
wrestled open my inner office door and held it with a shoulder while he worked his way inside, supporting himself on two steel canes, dragging one foot behind him that clanked when he let his weight down on it. He had a corrugated brow and a long loose face of that medium gray that very black skin sometimes turns with age, shot through with concentration and pain. His brown suit bagged at the knees and no two buttons on the jacket matched.

At that moment I was up to my wrists in typewriter ribbon, changing spools on the venerable Underwood portable that came with the office, and unable to get up from behind my desk to assist him— not that he looked like someone who was accustomed to receiving help from anyone. I simply said hello and nodded toward the customer’s chair on his side. While I threaded the ribbon through the various forks, hooks, and prongs I heard him lower himself thankfully onto semisoft vinyl and make the little metallic snicking noises that went with undoing the braces securing the canes to his wrists.

I took my time, giving him breathing space. Going to see a private investigator isn’t like visiting the dentist. I come at the desperate end of the long line of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, friends of friends, and guys around the corner whose friends owe
them favors. By the time the potential client gets around to me he’s admitted that his problem has grown beyond him and his circle. So I let this one resign himself to the last stop before the abyss and didn’t realize until I looked up again that I was playing host to a dead man.

You know dead once you’ve seen it a few times, and the old man’s cocked head and black open mouth with spittle hanging at one corner and the glittering crescents of his half-open eyes said it even as I got up and moved around the desk to feel his neck for an artery he didn’t need any longer. His face was four shades darker than it had been coming in, and bunched like a fist. He’d suffered six kinds of hell in that last quiet moment.

I broke a pair of surgical gloves out of a package I keep in the desk, put them on, and went through his pockets. When someone dies in a room you pay rent on it’s only polite to learn who he is. If the driver’s license in his dilapidated wallet was valid, his name was Emmett Gooding and he lived—had lived—on Mt. Elliott near the cemetery. What a crippled old man was doing still driving was strictly between him and the Michigan Secretary of State’s office. There were twelve dollars in the wallet and a ring of keys in his right pants pocket, nothing else on him except a handful of pocket lint and a once-white handkerchief that crackled when unfolded. He was wearing a steel brace on his left leg. I put everything back where I’d found it and dialed 911.

The prowl car cop who showed up ten minutes later looked about 17, with no hair on his face and no promise of it and a glossy black visor screwed down to the eyes. He put on gloves of his own to feel Gooding’s neck and told me after a minute that he was dead.

“That’s why I called,” I said, knocking ash off a Winston into the souvenir ashtray on my desk. “I wanted a second opinion.”

“You kill him?” He laid a hand on his sidearm.

“I’ll answer that question when it counts.”

Creases marred the freckles under his eyes. “When’s that?”

“Now.” I nodded at the first of two plainclothesmen coming in the door. He was a slender black with a Fu Manchu moustache and coils of gray hair like steel wool at his temples, wearing the kind of electric blue suit that looks like hell on anybody but him. I knew him as Sergeant Blake, having seen him around Detroit Police Headquarters but not often enough to talk to. His companion was white, short, fifteen pounds too heavy for department regs, and a good ten years too old for active duty. He had a brush cut, jug ears, and so much upper lip it hung down over the hollow in his chin. I didn’t know him from Sam’s cat. You can live in a city the size of Detroit a long time and never get to know all the cops on the detective force if you’re lucky.

Blake’s flat eyes slid over the stiff quickly and lit on the uniform as he flashed his badge and ID. “Anything?”

“Just what’s here, Sarge,” reported the youngster, and handed me a glance meant to be hard. “Suspect’s uncooperative.”

“Okay, crash.” And the uniform was off the case. When he had gone: “They’re running too small to keep these days.”

The short fat cop grunted.

“Amos Walker, right?” Blake looked at me tor the first time. I nodded. “This is my partner, Officer Fister. Who’s the dead guy?”

I said I didn’t know and gave him the story, leaving out the part about searching the body. Cops consider that their province, which it is. Fister meanwhile wrapped a handkerchief around his fingers and drew the dead man’s wallet out of his inside breast pocket. He had probably run out of surgical gloves years ago. He read off what mattered on the driver’s license and inventoried the other contents. Blake watched me carefully while this was going on, and I made my
face just as carefully blank. At length be gave a little shrug. That was it until the medical examiner arrived with his black metal case and glanced at Gooding’s discolored face and looked at his fingers and took off the dead man’s right shoe and sock and examined the bottom of his foot and then put all his instruments back in the case, humming to himself. He was a young Oriental. They are almost always Orientals; I think it has something to do with ancestor worship.

Blake looked at him and the M.E. said, “Massive coronary. We’ll root around inside and spend a hunk of taxpayer’s money on tests and it’ll still come out massive coronary. When their faces turn that shade and there’s evidence of an earlier stroke”—he indicated the leg brace, part of which showed under the dead man’s pantsleg—“it can’t be much else.”

The sergeant thanked him and when the expert left had me tell the story again for Fister’s notepad and then again just for fun while the white coats came to bag the body and cart it down to the wagon. “Any ideas about why he came here?” Blake asked. I shook my head. He sighed. “Okay. We might need your statement later if Charlie Chan turns out to be wrong about the heart attack.”

“He didn’t act like someone who’s been wrong recently,” I said.

Fister grunted again. “Tell me. I never met one of them croakers didn’t think his sweat smelled like lilacs.”

On that sparkling note they left me.

I spent the rest of the week tailing a state senator’s aide around Lansing for his wife in Detroit, who was curious about the weekends he was spending at the office. Turned out he had a wife in the state capital,
too. I was grinning my way through my typewritten report at the desk when Sergeant Blake came in. He wore a tired look and the same shocking blue suit. There couldn’t be another like it in the city.

“You’re off the hook,” he announced. “Gooding’s heart blew like the M.E. said. We checked him out. He was on the line at the Dearborn plant till he took his mandatory four years ago. Worked parttime flagging cars during road construction for County, had a stroke last year, and quit. No family. Papers in his dump on Mt. Elliott said he was getting set to check into a nursing home on Dequindre. Staff at the home expected him this week. Next to his phone we found Monday’s
Free Press
folded to an article about employee theft that mentioned you as an investigator and the Yellow Pages open to the page with your number on it.”