Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (29 page)

“Two cars Kennedy! No witnesses. Think about it.”

“Shut up, you. See you there, Chief.” Kennedy got back in and put up his rifle. Shrike walked back around the corner. The blue fender swung away from the curb and was gone.

• • •

No charges were filed against me because the arresting officer never appeared. After twenty-four hours they got around to letting me go and I got my gun back finally at the end of a long strip of red tape.

Neither Adelaide the Axe nor Alvin Shrike made it to the police station. They found the blue Chrysler parked on a quiet residential street in Sterling Heights with a bullet from Shrike’s revolver embedded in the backseat, clotted with his blood. No one could figure out what he’d been doing in the backseat to begin with. He wasn’t around to tell whatever story he’d cooked up, and I wasn’t asked. It had to happen close so he could say he shot her during a struggle for the gun. Only he forgot she’d outmaneuvered more than one cop
and a couple of hundred prison guards.

Adelaide Dix wasn’t seen again in Sterling Heights or anywhere else. It hasn’t been a year yet, so Geraldine Tolliver hasn’t gotten any more postcards.

When the cops searched the rest of the car, they found Chief Shrike. In the trunk.

The old man said
his name was Doto. I don’t know if it was short for something or if someone had hung it on him when he was a boy in Warsaw. There was no sign of it on his mail or in the string of names that appeared later with his picture in the paper or on local TV. For years I only spoke with him when the carrier put his mail in my box or I rescued his
Free Press
from a snowdrift.

When he came to my door it was spring, no snow for a week, and the mail hadn’t run. I let him in and we sat down in the breakfast nook. I poured coffee from my second bucket of the morning.

My three-room hut stood on the Detroit side of the street facing his in Hamtramck, a suburb surrounded entirely by the city. The houses there resemble one another, not through the arbitrary vision of a designer of tract homes but because the people who built them had come from the same place and culture, and they had stood for most of the twentieth century, with an invisible line drawn between the Polish and Ukrainian neighborhoods by a sense-memory of Cossack wars. The cars in the driveways are held together by wire hangers and tape, but the lawns are cropped and the houses repainted every five years.

“Your coffee is strong, Mr. Walker. How do you sleep?”

“At night I cut it with bourbon. Would you like milk?”

“I would like bourbon.”

I got the bottle down from the cabinet and topped off our cups. He put both hands around his and inhaled the fumes. He was in his seventies, with a low center of gravity and small features set out generously to take up space on his broad face. He needed a shave. His forearms were thick, and where a white thermal cuff was turned back over a plaid sleeve, the last two digits of a faded blue tattooed number showed.

He saw me looking and tugged down the cuff as if to hide a stain. “Treblinka,” he said. “I was nine when I came. Nine hundred when I left. The odd thing is I remember best the way the needle stung like red ants.”

I said nothing, which started the flow. He made no more mention of the Nazi concentration camp, but I found out about his two wives, one dead of fever during the crossing to America, the other dead of cancer twenty years ago. He’d worked at the Dodge Main plant until it was torn down in a conspiracy involving Mayor Young of Detroit, the Hamtramck city council, and General Motors to condemn the Poletown neighborhood for a Cadillac plant that was never built. I gathered he was some kind of artist who’d taken advantage of his enforced retirement to open a shop in Detroit, where he’d sold his work exclusively, but he’d retired from that as well and lived on Social Security. He had no children, and his silence on any other blood relations suggested they’d disappeared in the ovens of Treblinka and Auschwitz.

The Polish are emotional as a rule, not ashamed to shed tears in healthy bales, but he spoke in an even tone and his face never cracked. I didn’t know the why of it, or why me, but he was old and alone and I hadn’t anything pressing at the office, so I sipped and
listened. The lost-diamond season was over, it was too early for stolen racehorses, and the credit-check business had gone the way of the dot-com bubble. Anyway, I was alone, too, and not young.

Then he surprised me.

“You are a detective?” he asked.

I nodded. “Private.”

“What means private?”

“It means I work for one person at a time and pay my own hospital bills.”

“It sounds expensive.”

“So’s health insurance.”

“How much do you charge?”

When I told him, his face didn’t change, but an opaque shadow slid across his wintry blue eyes.

“What do you need done?” I asked. “On simple jobs I charge by the hour.”

He seemed to brighten at that. He slid off the seat, apologizing for not touching a drop of his spiked coffee. “I have good vodka at home,” he said, “not that Stalin’s piss they make in Russia.”

“It’s a little early for me. I was only joining you to be polite.”

“You can be polite across the street.”

It was as close to a command as I’d heard from him, in the tone he’d probably used as a foreman at Dodge. We went across the street.

He unlocked his front door and led me through a small, overstuffed living room, a dining room with piles of books and newspapers on the table, and a spotless kitchen, each stacked behind the other like plant rooms in a greenhouse. We stepped out onto a screened back porch, where I caught a puckery whiff of a stench I’d never liked. A twelve-gauge Remington shotgun leaned in a corner. It didn’t mean anything. You don’t have to register a shotgun in
Michigan, and in Detroit it’s the self-defense weapon of choice, as well as a handy noisemaker on New Year’s Eve.

It didn’t mean anything, except longtime Detroiters know better than to keep them in a place as easy to break into as a screened porch. Especially when there’s a ragged hole gaping in the nylon screen on the outside door.

I stepped over and leaned down to sniff at the barrel. I felt older then.

He pulled open the door against the pressure of the spring. The body on the winterkilled grass was a pile of limbs in a dirty T-shirt, filthy and tattered jeans, and a pair of athletic shoes run down thin as paper at the heels. It lay facedown. I picked up the shotgun, holding it by the middle to avoid smearing prints, and straddled the body, one foot on the wooden stoop, the other on the ground, to reach down and grope for a pulse in the thick vein on the side of its neck. There wasn’t any. The skin felt cool.

“I heard scratching,” Doto said. “It sounded like an animal trying to get in. It was still dark. I came out with the gun. The light hit him from the kitchen. I don’t remember even raising the gun.”

I straightened. “How long ago?”

“Five. Five thirty, maybe. I waited for the police. I thought someone would hear the shot and call. When the sun came up and they didn’t come, I waited another hour. Then I got dressed and went across the street.”

I tried to remember if I’d heard anything that early in the morning. It’s the tool of the town, as I said, and a night without a long bang somewhere is as rare as virgin timber. “Know him?” I asked.

“I didn’t see his face too clear.”

I like turning over dead bodies as well as the next guy, and the cops are specific on where they stand on rearranging the centerpiece;
it’s a union thing. But he’d come to me and told me his life story. No rigor yet, so I was able to turn the top half enough to see the face, patched purple where the blood had settled. The age surprised me; he looked seventeen or younger. His shaggy, dirty, fair hair had looked almost white from the back.

There was a mark on the right cheek that hadn’t been made by post-mortem lividity. It was a swastika, etched delicately in turquoise-colored ink.

I told Doto he needed a lawyer, not a private detective, and he needed to call the police. They get woolly when you fail to report a gunshot corpse on day of issue.

“I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“The court will appoint one.” I climbed back onto the porch, realized I was still holding the shotgun, and returned it to its corner. I’d seen there was a telephone in the living room, but I made him lead me to it.

“One question.” I rested my hand on the receiver. “Did you see that swastika before you fired?”

“I don’t remember. I told you, I don’t even remember shooting.”

“You might want to stick with that answer. The law’s clear on defending yourself in your home with deadly force, but a hungry prosecutor can fog it up quicker than a doggie in the window. Right now your two best friends are that tattoo on your arm and the one on his cheek.”

“I don’t even know him.”

“Better and better.” I dialed 911.

• • •

The first uniforms on the scene were a sergeant and an officer, both black. The Hamtramck department used to be mostly Polish descent,
but the established ethnic groups had been migrating to the suburbs since before we landed on the moon, leaving behind the senior citizens on fixed incomes and new faces from the Middle East and what remained of the Jim Crow South. The team took turns confirming there was a body, never leaving us alone on the porch. We could have skedaddled anytime after I made the call but you can’t fight procedure with logic.

The officer shooed Doto into the house to question him. The sergeant stayed with me.

“You move the shotgun?”

“It’s where I found it.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

I said I’d taken it with me when I went out to look at the corpse.

“That’s called tampering.”

“I call it being considerate. Two carcasses mean double the paperwork for you guys.”

“You said you’ve been neighbors for years.”

“We didn’t speak ten words to each other that whole time. He told me he shot the man. In those circumstances I wouldn’t turn my back on my long-lost brother with the weapon in the room.”

“Prints!”

“If he left any they’re still on the pistol grip and the forepiece. I took it by the middle.”

“You one of those private guys used to be a cop?”

“I got in my thirty.”

He lowered his lids. “You must’ve started young.”

“Minutes. Not years.”

“I got no time for this. I ought to put the bracelets on you for obstruction and interference.”

“You’ve got as much time as it takes before the first squad shows up.”

We got on like that until the plainclothes arrived, led by a lieutenant named Sandusky. He had short blond hair and the erect bearing of a Polish lancer, but the eyes in the fifty-year-old face were kind. He glanced at me a couple of times while the sergeant was reporting, then dismissed him and strolled over. He’d been to see the sight, which was now in the charge of the lab rats with their black metal cases.

“How long you live here, Walker?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“It’s not that big of a town. I’m surprised we never met.”

“I live on the Detroit side. I’ve met plenty over there.”

“So I heard. I checked you out with Thirteen Hundred. You’ve worn yourself quite a trough there.”

Thirteen hundred is the street address of Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien. I said, “I’m taking a personal day today. Seems I can get into trouble even when I’m just doing the neighborly thing.”

“Don’t worry about Futterman. We call him Cop-a-tude downtown. I’d close this one today if they let me. My uncle survived the Warsaw ghetto. Best way to deal with these white supremacist pukes is to arm everyone who went through the Holocaust and put them on the scent.”

“This kid’s generation is barely aware we fought a war over there. Maybe he thought it was just a pretty tattoo.”

“Same difference to a man like Doto. If I were his p.d., I wouldn’t let a man or woman under seventy on the jury, and I’d try to smuggle in one or two with a concentration camp serial number on their arm. If he saw that swastika before he pulled off. He didn’t seem sure.”

“A man has a right to defend himself in his home if he feels threatened, whether it’s by a Boy Scout or the Hitler Youth.”

“Damn straight. He says the screen was hooked, and the techies found an open pocket knife when they turned the puke over; small
for a weapon, but good for sticking between the door and the frame to slip the hook. But there’s been a rash of accidental firearms deaths lately, and a lot of noise about keeping them out of civilian hands. The county prosecutor wants to be attorney general, the attorney general wants to be governor, and the governor wants to go to Washington.”

“That’s a lot of weight to put on the back of one little old man.”

“Well, you saw what happened to the Detroit cops just for beating one rotten little recidivist to death with flashlights. We can’t carry ‘em that size anymore even here. Have to make do with guns and tasers and sap gloves and batons. We’re going out there practically naked. What chance has a private citizen got?”

“Maybe the puke has a violent record.”

“How can he not? That’s not a Happy Face on his cheek.”

The lieutenant cut me loose. Outside, Doto sat in the back of a police cruiser, staring through the grid separating him from the front seat. His head came barely level with the padded rest. He looked nine years old.

• • •

Sandusky’s puke didn’t have a violent record. He had almost no record at all, and the one he had told a story nearly as sad as Doto’s.

His name was Ryan Lister. He was sixteen and, by all appearances, had been living on the street since his father had booted him out for not contributing to the household income. In February the manager of a Starbucks in Highland Park found him sleeping in a corner of the kitchen when he came in to open up, discovered the latch broken on the back door, and had him arrested for breaking and entering. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of illegal entry, spent six weeks in a juvenile detention center, and was released. That was the narrative on Lister’s life of crime.