Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (28 page)

“You could do a quarterback split and decoy him off.”

“I’m sure there’s a contingency plan. Anyway, where would we go? Mother’s always been careful not to give any hints as to her whereabouts. You couldn’t even prove in court she’s the one who sends the cards. But I know.”

We sat back down. I asked her what she wanted me to do.

“I want you to talk her into giving herself up. She can’t run forever. I’m terrified someday I’ll turn on the news and hear she’s been shot down by Shrike or one of his officers. He said in court he wished Michigan would bring back the death penalty just for her.”

“Traverse City’s a good-size town. Even if it weren’t, she’s probably blown it by now, if she was ever there to begin with. You can buy postcards anywhere. I’d need a bigger comb than Shrike’s got and I’d have to start in Little America.”

“No, you wouldn’t. She’ll be at the cemetery in Sterling Heights the day after tomorrow.”

I looked from her to Tolliver, who was watching me over his glass like someone who’d heard the joke before and was waiting to see the reaction. I disappointed him. I sipped scotch and soda and said, “What time? I’m going to a ball game that night.”

Geraldine shook her head. “I can’t tell you that because I don’t know. The day after tomorrow is my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It’ll be their anniversary all day.”

I was starting to get it. “That’s where your father’s buried? What makes you think she’ll show?”

“Because when my father got sick and needed hope, my mother promised him they’d be together on their silver anniversary. She
keeps her promises. And she never forgets a date.” She tilted her head toward the drawer containing the postcard. “By now that officer outside has radioed in your license number and knows who you are, but I assume you’re experienced in discouraging people from following you. We’re not. We’d lead Shrike right to her.”

“Okay, the Tigers can lose without me in the bleachers. My fee’s five hundred for the day.”

Tolliver made himself useful and put down his drink and wrote me a check. His wife took the back off a picture frame from the fireplace mantel and handed me a photo of a handsome middle-aged woman with sharply intelligent eyes.

“That’s the latest we have. It was taken nine years ago. Every Christmas the inmates got to put on civilian clothes and pose for a professional photographer.”

I got up and slid it into my inside breast pocket along with the folded check. “It wouldn’t be an honest five hundred if I didn’t tell you it’s wasted. If your mother keeps that promise she isn’t as smart as I’d heard, even if she’s alive. Anyone could be sending you those postcards as a sick gag. You don’t know who knows about your conversations.”

“Thank you, Mr. Walker,” Geraldine said. “It isn’t wasted.”

I went out and stopped to light a cigarette before getting into the car, because I needed it and because it let me get another look at the driver of the gold Chrysler. He was still reading the Lively Arts section, committing the opera times to memory.

I put five blocks behind me before I spotted the tail. Same make, different color, fresh from Dispatch. You didn’t get to be chief of anyone’s police by sitting around growing your whiskers.

• • •

The outer-office buzzer caught me thinking the next morning about climbing up and dumping the fly wings out of the bowl fixture above my desk. I decided they wouldn’t be any deader an hour later, and opened the door for a square party a couple of inches below my height in a stiff gray suit with his tie snugged up to a chin that had begun to double and shards of silver glittering in his sandy crew cut. He looked like an unmarked car.

“I’m going out on a limb,” I said. “Chief Shrike?”

“That obvious?” He smiled with his bottom teeth only and took my hand. His was one even Bert Tolliver couldn’t mangle.

“Just the cop part. I was expecting the rest.” I showed him the chair. He put his hands in his pockets and stayed where he was.

“What’s a Detroit private cop got going with Adelaide Dix’s daughter?”

I put my hands in my own pockets. It was like looking in a mirror from ten years in the future, if I didn’t hurry up and take violin lessons. “Lizzie Borden was taken. What color’s your Chrysler?”

“Blue. That was me, all right. I figured you were wise. You know that was my marriage Adelaide broke up with her set of Ginsus. Best partner I ever had. He saved my ass six ways from Sunday.”

“Sundays he kicked his wife’s.”

“He had a temper. Lots of guys slap their women around. Lots of women don’t cut them into easily manageable pieces and put them up like preserves.”

“She’s in a lake.”

“I don’t think so. Why go that direction? Once you’re over the wall you got directions up the ass.”

“So she drowned herself.”

“She could’ve stopped her clock inside. Why go over the wall at all? She walked backwards in her own footprints and she’s been walking
ever since. Her daughter knows it. She just don’t know where she is. That’s why she hired you. I knew she’d crack if I leaned on her long enough.”

“I’m looking for a hit-and-run vehicle. Hers was on the list.”

“She told me you’re working for her.”

I laughed in his face.

He turned deep copper right up to his cropped hair. His hands came out fists. “I can pull you in right now as a material witness.”

“To what? A drowning? She’s dead. Marquette thinks it, the governor thinks it, the FBI thinks it, and so does the secretary who filled out the legal declaration of death. You’re a one-man Flat Earth Society, Shrike.”

“Wrong. There’s three others. Adelaide Dix knows she’s alive. So does Geraldine Tolliver. So do you. And I’m going to be on you like flies on a carp till you walk me right up to her.”

After he left, I looked up at the dead wings in the fixture, but I didn’t go after them. I appreciated the company.

• • •

I spent the rest of that day with Alvin Shrike. The blue Chrysler was with me when I wheeled my bucket out of its slot and it stayed three lengths behind except when it looked like I might lose it in traffic. It followed me around seventeen corners, across a vacant lot, and down both sides of a divided street as well as up and over the divider itself. Either he was one hungry fly or I was a pretty ripe carp. After we got both our cars washed on West Grand River I could see I would have to get rid of the horses.

I parked where the trucks go into the
Free Press,
where I could get a nice safe tow to the police garage, cut through the thundering pressroom on foot, and went out the front entrance past a surprised security
guard. He probably did a double take when Shrike went out right behind. I thought I’d shaken the tail when I skipped across Washington directly in front of the streetcar, but when I stopped sprinting a couple of hundred yards later and looked behind me, he was legging his way along Fort. I got lucky and caught a cab two blocks over; Shrike got lucky too and flashed his badge at a motorist who turned out to be a solid citizen and they trailed me clear to Redford.

We had supper at a chain place with license plates and other assorted junk on the walls. I sent him a bottle of beer which he drank without even lifting it in acknowledgment.

We had a moment when we both called for cabs from adjacent pay telephones, but by then I was getting tired and couldn’t raise a chuckle. I reached over and pushed down the lifter on his, breaking his connection. “Why don’t we just share mine? All I’m going is home.”

“I don’t tip cabbies,” he said. “You want to, go ahead.”

When the Redtop came, I got in first. He pushed in fast in case I tried to jerk the door shut. I hit him with everything I had; he was hard for a desk cop, but his forward momentum helped and he sagged against me like a sack of ball bearings. I worked the door handle on my side and slid out from underneath him.

“Take my friend to the Wayne County Airport,” I told the driver.

“Where’s his luggage?” He was a big Jamaican with gold teeth.

“He doesn’t have any. He’s going to a nudist camp.”

After the cab left I hightailed it to a Shell station, called another cab, and took it to my reporter friend Barry Stackpole’s place to borrow his car. He has an artificial leg and the hand controls took getting used to, but they got me to a motel in Sterling Heights.

I wasn’t taking chances. In the room I set the radio clock for 11:30 and called for a wake-up in case it wasn’t working. If I were on the run from the law—which I was, but my situation was variant—
and I had to be somewhere tomorrow, I’d pick one minute past midnight. Before I caught some sleep I laid my Chief’s Special on the floor in front of the door so I wouldn’t forget it when I left. I was meeting Adelaide the Axe, and I hadn’t thought to ask her daughter if she liked surprises.

• • •

At one minute past midnight I was leaning against the cool marble wall of a mausoleum in the Sterling Heights cemetery, wanting a cigarette and jerking my head around every time a nighthawk squirrel scampered up a tree. The temperature had dropped steeply after nightfall and there was a light ground mist rolling among the headstones like the dry ice in a Dracula movie. It and the squirrels were the only things that moved until dawn, by which time my back ached from standing and the clothes I’d had on for twenty-four hours felt like wet burlap. When it was light enough to burn tobacco I moved under a tree where the branches would break up the smoke. That was when I spotted Alvin Shrike striding between the posts that flanked the entrance to the cemetery.

He’d gotten it out of Geraldine Tolliver somehow, or more likely Bert, who seemed closer to the type who succumbed to the oldest kind of police persuasion. It had taken all night, and he’d started out mad; his face was the deep copper I’d seen earlier and his feet pounded dust out of the gravel path. There was a purple mark on his jaw left by my knuckles and his tie was no longer snug.

“Shrike.”

His head swiveled in my direction. He saw my gun and stopped, his flush draining away, the pro adjusting to a familiar situation. His bottom teeth showed in that werewolf grin.

“Drop the weapon!”

This time I swiveled. The uniformed cop was a pro too. I hadn’t known he existed until I saw him leveling a sniper’s rifle at me across the top of the iron fence that enclosed the grounds. I dropped the Chief’s Special and raised my hands. Shrike got his piece out and pulled me away from the tree and threw me up against the mausoleum and frisked and cuffed me in less time than it takes to tell.

“Aiding and abetting a fugitive and officer assault,” he said. “If one don’t stick the other will.”

“What’d you do to the Tollivers?” The cuffs were cutting off circulation to my fingers. I worked them. I didn’t want to forget how to make a fist.

“He’ll be sucking his lunch through a straw for a while, but he’ll live. Usually those muscle boys bend easy, but he did better than expected. Geraldine’s the one who talked, to save him the rest of his teeth. She loves her old lady, but Bert was there and so was I. Okay, Kennedy. Put him in the car and be invisible.”

Kennedy was tall and black and carried his rifle at rest as if it weighed no more than a cardboard roll. Fingers like pliers closed around my biceps and we walked out the entrance. The car, another unmarked Chrysler, was parked down the street in the shade of a tall hedge. One fender of Shrike’s blue Chrysler or another just like it showed around the corner.

“Why two cars?” I asked

“Shut up.” Kennedy shoved me into the backseat of the one by the hedge and got in behind the wheel, leaning his rifle against the door on the passenger’s side. After we’d sat long enough he got talkative. “Chief said two cars. I don’t ask how come.”

I didn’t like it. But there wasn’t one thing about the way the day was starting out that I did like.

A quiet cemetery will draw some visitors even on a weekday. Half
a dozen people came and went over the next several hours, including two couples. Nobody looked like Adelaide Dix in the picture in my pocket.

She came at high noon.

It was either a bonehead play or diabolically smart. She wasn’t even in disguise, unless you counted the quietly tailored dress and simple hairstyle. She looked older than her picture, older than she was, but not as if she’d been eating and sleeping in ratty motels for eight years. She had a job and had probably arranged identification papers that would pass quick inspection. I decided on diabolically smart.

Until that day.

In front of the entrance she stopped and looked around, looked directly at us. But we were too far away, and the shade was too deep to see inside the car. Still she went on looking for a minute before she entered the cemetery. She was carrying long-stemmed yellow flowers wrapped in silver paper.

“She’s coming, Chief” Kennedy had his microphone in his hand and an old front-and-profile mug of Adelaide Dix taped to the dashboard.

“Okay. Cover the gate.” Shrike’s voice from a handheld radio sounded thin and tight.

Kennedy hung up the mike and got out with his rifle. He positioned himself on the side of the car opposite the cemetery entrance, bumping the roof a couple of times as he leveled the long gun.

When Adelaide walked out five minutes later with her hands behind her and Shrike’s hand on her shoulder, I took my fingers out of the seat cushion and worked blood back into them. The woman’s face was pale but calmer than the chief’s. His bottom-teeth smile was a rictus. He walked her right past us and around the corner and
came back a minute later alone.

“Take this character’s piece and lose it in the system.”

He smacked my gun into Kennedy’s palm. “I’ll see you back in the barn.”

“Great work, Chief She give you any heartache?”

“Tame as a kitten. No trunks close by.”

He still sounded wound up tight. Most cops talk lazy after an arrest. The adrenaline leaks out fast once the job’s done.

Two cars.

“Kennedy!” I shouted. “Go with him. If he gets in that car alone with her she’ll never make it to the station alive.”

“Get him the hell out of here,” Shrike said. “Mirandize the son of a bitch and throw him in Holding. Throw him hard.”