Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (13 page)

I never ate in Butch’s diner again, either. These days you can’t get in the place without a reservation.

When I finally got in
to see Alec Wynn of Reiner, Switz, Galsworthy, & Wynn, the sun was high over Lake St. Clair outside the window behind his desk and striking sparks off the choppy steel-blue surface with sailboats gliding around on it cutting white foam, their sharkfin sails striped in broad bright bikini colors. Wynn sat with his back to the view and never turned to look at it. He didn’t need to. On the wall across from him hung a big framed color photograph of bright-striped sailboats cutting white foam on the steel-blue surface of Lake St. Clair.

Wynn was a big neat man with a black widow’s peak trimmed tight to his skull and the soft gray hair at his temples worn long over the tops of his ears. He had on aviator’s glasses with clear plastic rims and a suit the color and approximate weight of ground fog, that fit him like no suit will ever fit me if I hit the Michigan Lottery tomorrow. He had deep lines in his Miami-brown face and a mouth that turned down like a shark’s to show a bottom row of caps as white and even as military monuments. It was a predator’s face. I liked it fine. It belonged to a lawyer, and in my business lawyers mean a warm feeling in the pit of the bank account.

“Walker, Amos,” he said, as if he were reading roll call. “I like the name. It has a certain smoky strength.”

“I’ve had it a long time.”

He looked at me with his strong white hands folded on top of his absolutely clean desk. His palms didn’t leave marks on the glossy surface the way mine would have. “I keep seeing your name on reports. The Reliance people employ your services often.”

“Only when the job involves people,” I said. “Those big investigation agencies are good with computers and diamonds and those teeny little cameras you can hide in your left ear. But when it comes to stroking old ladies who see things and leaning on supermarket stock boys who smuggle sides of beef out the back door, they remember us little shows.”

“How big is your agency?”

“You’re looking at it. I have an answering service,” I added quickly.

“Better and better. It means you can keep a secret. You have a reputation for that, too.”

“Who told?”

“The humor I can take or let alone.” He refolded his hands the other way. “I don’t like going behind Reliance’s back like this. We’ve worked together for years and the director’s an old friend. But this is a personal matter, and there are some things you would prefer to have a stranger know than someone you play poker with every Saturday night.”

“I don’t play poker,” I said. “Whoops, sorry.” I got out a cigarette and smoothed it between my fingers. “Who’s missing, your wife or your daughter?”

He shot me a look he probably would have kept hooded in court. Then he sat back, nodding slightly. “I guess it’s not all that uncommon.”

“I do other work but my main specialty is tracing missing persons. You get so you smell it coming.” I waited.

“It’s my wife. She’s left me again.”

“Again?”

“Last time it was with one of the apprentices here, a man named Lloyd Debner. But they came back after three days. I fired him, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

A thin smile played around with his shark’s mouth, gave it up and went away. “Seems awfully Old Testament, I know. I tried to be modern about it. There’s really no sense in blaming the other man. But I saw myself hiding out in here to avoid meeting him in the hall, and that would be grotesque. I gave him excellent references. One of our competitors snapped him up right away.”

“What about this time?”

“She left the usual note saying she was going away and I was not to look for her. I called Debner but he assured me he hadn’t seen Cecelia since their first fling. I believe him. But it’s been almost a week now and I’m concerned for her safety.”

“What about the police?”

“I believe we covered that when we were discussing keeping secrets,” he said acidly.

“You’ve been married how long?”

“Six years. And, yes, she’s younger than I, by fourteen years. That was your next question, wasn’t it?”

“It was in there. Do you think that had anything to do with her leaving?”

“I think it had everything to do with it. She has appetites that I’ve been increasingly unable to fulfill. But I never thought it was a problem until she left the first time.”

“You quarreled?”

“The normal amount. Never about that. Which I suppose is revealing. I rather think she’s found a new boyfriend, but I’m damned if I can say who it is.”

“May I see the note?”

He extracted a fold of paper from an inside breast pocket and passed it across the desk. “I’m afraid I got my fingerprints all over it before I thought over all the angles.”

“That’s okay. I never have worked on anything where prints were any use.”

It was written on common drugstore stationery, tinted blue with a spray of flowers in the upper right-hand corner. A hasty hand full of sharp points and closed loops. It said what he’d reported it had said and nothing else. Signed with a C.

“There’s no date.”

“She knew I’d read it the day she wrote it. It was last Tuesday.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That means what?” he demanded.

“Just uh-huh. It’s something I say when I can’t think of anything to say.” I gave back the note. “Any ideas where she might go to be alone? Favorite vacation spot, her hometown, a summer house, anything like that? I don’t mean to insult you. Sometimes the hardest place to find your hat is on your head.”

“We sublet our Florida home in the off-season. She grew up in this area and has universally disliked every place we’ve visited on vacation. Really, I was expecting something more from a professional.”

“I’m just groping for a handle. Does she have any hobbies?”

“Spending my money.”

I watched my cigarette smoke drifting toward the window. “It seems to me you don’t know your wife too well after six years, Mr. Wynn. When I find her, if I find her, I can tell you where she is, but I can’t make her come back, and from the sound of things she may not want to come back. I wouldn’t be representing your best interests if I didn’t advise you to save your money and set the cops loose on it. I can’t give guarantees they won’t give.”

“Are you saying you don’t want the job?”

“Not me. I don’t have any practice at that. Just being straight with a client I’d prefer keeping.”

“Don’t do me any favors, Walker.”

“Okay. I’ll need a picture. And what’s her maiden name? She may go back to it.”

“Collier.” He spelled it. “And here.” He got a wallet-size color photograph out of the top drawer of the desk and skidded it across the glossy top like someone dealing a card.

She was a redhead, and the top of that line. She looked like someone who would wind up married to a full partner in a weighty law firm with gray temples and an office overlooking Lake St. Clair. It would be in her high school yearbook under Predictions.

I put the picture in my breast pocket. “Where do I find this Debner?”

“He’s with Paxton and Ring on West Michigan. But I told you he doesn’t know where Cecelia is.”

“Maybe he should be asked a different way.” I killed my stub in the smoking stand next to the chair and rose. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

His eyes followed me up. All eight of his fingers were lined up on the near edge of his desk, the nails pink and perfect. “Can you be reached if I want to hear from you sooner?”

“My service will page me. I’m in the book.”

A Japanese accent at Paxton & Ring told me over the telephone that Lloyd Debner would be tied up all afternoon in Detroit Recorder’s
Court. Lawyers are always in court the way executives are always in meetings. At the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice a bailiff stopped spitting on his handkerchief and rubbing at a spot on his uniform to point out a bearded man in his early thirties with a mane of black hair, smoking a pipe and talking to a gray-headed man in the corridor outside one of the courtrooms. I went over there and introduced myself.

“Second,” he said, without taking his eye off the other man. “Tim, we’re talking a lousy twenty bucks over the fifteen hundred. Even if you win, the judge will order probation. The kid’ll get that anyway if we plead Larceny Under, and there’s no percentage in mucking up his record for life just to fatten your win column. And there’s nothing saying you’ll win.”

I said, “This won’t take long.”

“Make an appointment. Listen, Tim—”

“It’s about Cecelia Wynn,” I said. “We can talk about it out here in the hall if you like. Tim won’t mind.”

He looked at me then for the first time. “Tim, I’ll catch you later.”

“After the sentencing.” The gray-headed man went into the courtroom, chuckling.

“Who’d you say you were?” Debner demanded.

“Amos Walker. I still am, but a little older. I’m a P.I. Alec Wynn hired me to look for his wife.”

“You came to the wrong place. That’s all over.”

“I’m interested in when it wasn’t.”

He glanced up and down the hall. There were a few people in it, lawyers and fixers and the bailiff with the stain that wouldn’t go away from his crisp blue uniform shirt. “Come on. I can give you a couple of minutes.”

I followed him into a men’s room two doors down. We stared at a guy combing his hair in front of the long mirror over the sinks until he put away his comb and picked up a brown leather briefcase and left. Debner bent down to see if there were any feet in the stalls, straightened, and knocked out his pipe into the sink. He laid it on a soap canister to cool and moved his necktie a centimeter to the right.

“I don’t see Cecelia when we pass on the street,” he said, inspecting the results in the mirror. “I had my phone number changed after we got back from Jamaica so she couldn’t call me.”

“That where you went?”

“I rented a bungalow outside Kingston. Worst mistake I ever made. I was headed for a junior partnership at Reiner when this happened. Now I’m back to dealing school board presidents’ sons out of jams they wouldn’t be in if five guys ahead of me hadn’t dealt them out of jams just like them starting when they were in junior high.”

“How’d you and Cecelia get on?”

“Oh, swell. So good we crammed a two-week reservation into three days and came back home.”

“What went wrong?”

“Different drummers.” He picked up his pipe and blew through it.

“Not good enough,” I said.

He grinned boyishly. “I didn’t think so. To begin with, she’s a health nut. I run and take a little wheat germ myself sometimes— you don’t even have to point a gun at me—but I draw the line at dropping vitamins and herb pills at every meal. She must’ve taken sixteen capsules every time we sat down to eat. It can drive you blinkers. People in restaurants must’ve figured her for a drug-addict.”

“Sure she wasn’t?”

“She was pretty open about taking them if she was. She filled the capsules herself from plastic bags. Her purse rattled like a used car.”

A fat party in a gray suit and pink shirt came in and smiled and nodded at both of us and used the urinal and washed his hands. Deb-ner used the time to recharge his pipe.

“Still not good enough,” I said, when the fat party had gone. “You don’t cut a vacation short just because your bed partner does wild garlic.”

“It just didn’t work out. Look, I’m due back in court.”

“Not at half-past noon.” I waited.

He finished lighting his pipe, dropped the match into the sink where he’d knocked his ashes, grinned around the stem. I bet that melted the women jurors. “If this gets around I’m washed up with every pretty legal secretary in the building.”

“Nothing has to get around. I’m just looking for Cecelia Wynn.”

“Yeah. You said.” He puffed on the pipe, took it out, smoothed his beard, and looked at it in the mirror. “Yeah. Well, she said she wasn’t satisfied.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No one’s ever told me that before. I’m not used to complaints.”

“
Uh-huh”

He turned back toward me. His eyes flicked up and down. “We never had this conversation, okay?”

“What conversation?”

“Yeah.” He put the pipe back between his teeth, puffed.

“Yeah.”

We shook hands. He squeezed a little harder than I figured he did normally.

I dropped two dimes into a pay telephone in the downstairs lobby and fought my way through two secretaries before Alec Wynn came on the line. His voice was a full octave deeper than it had been in person. I figured it was that way in court too.

“Just checking back, Mr. Wynn. How come when I asked you about hobbies you didn’t tell me your wife was into herbs?”

“Into
what?”

I told him what Debner had said about the capsules. He said, “I haven’t dined with my wife in months. Most legal business is conducted in restaurants.”

“I guess you wouldn’t know who her herbalist is, then.”

“Herbalist?”

“Sort of an oregano guru. They tell their customers which herbs to take in the never-ending American quest for a healthy body. Not a few of the runaways I’ve traced take their restlessness to them first.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Trina might. Our maid. She’s at the house now.”

“Would you call her and tell her I’m coming?”

He said he would and broke the connection.

It was a nice place if you like windows. There must have been fifty on the street side alone, with ivy or something just as green crawling up the brick wall around them and a courtyard with a marble fountain in the center and a black chauffeur with no shirt on washing a
blue Mercedes in front. They are always washing cars. A white-haired Puerto Rican woman with muddy eyes and a faint moustache answered my ring.

“Trina?”

“Yes. You are Mr. Walker? Mr. Wynn told me to expect you.”

I followed her through a room twice the size of my living room, but that was designed just for following maids through, and down a hall with dark paintings on the walls to a glassed-in porch at the back of the house containing ferns in pots and lawn chairs upholstered in floral print. The sliding glass door leading outside was ajar and a strong chlorine stench floated in from an outdoor crescent-shaped swimming pool. She slid the door shut.