Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (48 page)

Childs turned his head slowly from side to side, as if he were trying to get out of my shadow. “Assuming that’s where you found it, what’s it prove? You can’t trace scrap.”

“You know a lot less about shotguns than you do about metal-work. Cutting up the barrel’s a waste of time; it’s smooth, leaves no striations on the pellets. In order to connect the weapon to the murder, all the cops have to do is match the firing pin to the marks on the shells found on the scene.” I was holding the bag now. I took out the heavy Browning receiver and laid it on the table. The incriminating evidence was intact.

He stared at it while I let the bag drop with the rest of the pieces inside.

“Planting that high-grade pot was smart,” I said. “It should have been coke or heroin, but maybe a man in your circumstances doesn’t know how to go about finding them. Smart, and stupid: It diverted the investigation, but it put it in the hands of a narc named McCoy, who’ll have all the upper-end dealers in the area in his data
bank. The one you bought it from will turn you if it means ducking four charges of homicide.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I don’t know much about dope or shotguns.”

“Don’t say anything, Orson. All you did was buy marijuana.”

I turned around. Clarissa Childs was standing in front of the door to the house with the twin of the chopped-up Browning raised to her shoulder. The barrel looked as big as a culvert.

“He wasn’t lying to you, Mr. Walker,” she said. “Orson has never fired a shotgun in his life. My first husband taught me how to hunt. I’ve been putting game on the table for years.”

I thought about the revolver in my belt. She read my mind. The shotgun twitched. I held my hands out from my body.

“Clarissa—” Childs began.

“I said don’t say anything!” She kept her eyes on me. “Nothing that ever came from Hank was any good. His son was defective; even his kidney didn’t fix what was really wrong with Mark. After everything Orson and I did for him, he turned his back on his education and ran away. Why should he fall into money when we’ve got three mortgages on this house?”

“Clarissa?” This time his throat throbbed with warning.

“Drop it!”

We turned our heads together. Childs sat motionless, staring at Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler, Rick McCoy, and three uniforms standing with sidearms pointed at the woman with the shotgun. I’d called them early enough to avoid a standoff, but they must have taken the long way around the house.

“Drop it!” Thaler shouted again.

Clarissa Childs hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. The officers were advancing when she swiveled the butt down to the ground,
jammed the muzzle up under her chin, and tripped the trigger with the toe of her slipper.

• • •

“We got a partial off that air conditioner knob that puts the mother on the scene,” Thaler said while my statement was being typed up. “For what it’s worth.”

“It closes the case. That must be worth something to someone.”

She was drinking tea again, from one of those mugs they sell downstairs with the police seal on it. Headquarters is running a boutique to catch up on repairs. Today she had on a grayish-pink suit; ashes of rose, I think they call it. She looked less tired. “All we’ve got on Orson Childs is attempting to destroy evidence. I don’t think we can make accomplice after the fact stick. Some mother, huh? I used to think there was something to maternal instinct. I thought I was missing something.”

“Not wanting kids and killing the one you have don’t walk under the same sun.”

“Plus three other mothers’ sons just for garnish. Sometimes I hate this town. Other times I just dislike it a little.”

“It started in Grosse Pointe.”

“It’s all Detroit.” She worked the tea bag. “I’d sure like to know how you confirmed the Childses had money troubles. If I thought you knew your way around a computer I might ask the boys in white-collar crime to keep an eye on you.”

“You don’t have to log in to run a bluff.”

“On,” she said. “You log on to the Internet, not in. But you knew that. You’re overdoing it.”

“The less people think you know, the better for you.”

“If that’s true you’ll live forever.”

I said nothing.

She said, “I know about you and Barry Stackpole. You two are the evil twins of amateur law enforcement.” She took out the tea bag and dumped it into her wastebasket. “Any questions?”

“None I can think of.”

“Well, you know what they say about curiosity.” She sipped.

The blue flashers made me slow down.
The red flashers made me pull over and stop to see if I could help scrape someone off the pavement. When the state troopers and the county sheriffs both come out, it means there’s been more than just a merger of fenders.

The light bar on the EMS van was stuttering in a desultory kind of way, splashing colors off the dewy asphalt and into the faces of the usual human detritus that gets pulled into the slipstream of accidents, fires, and drive-by shootings: guys in quilted vests and baseball caps, cigarette-puffing women in head scarves and denim, teenage boys reeking of Stroh’s, and big cops in leather jackets writing birthdates and license numbers into spiral notebooks with doodles on the covers. The air smelled of scorched metal, gasoline, and carbon tetrachloride. A plume of dank smoke hung over a charred blob of something that might have been a Ford Escort or a Cadillac Seville or the tail section of the
Hindenburg,
kneeling on bare wheels with its front end accordioned against the trailer of a flatbed truck parked across Square Lake Road, somewhere in No Man’s Land between Southfield and Iroquois Heights, seven miles north of Detroit.

“See anything you like, mister? Oh, Christ.”

This cheery greeting, altered when I turned to face him, came from a man mountain in a Chesterfield with velvet collar and a tweed cap, who answered to Killinger. He wore amber shades astraddle his Irish pug and an impressive set of handlebars that must have set him back an hour each morning in the bathroom. He topped off at six and a half feet, high normal among the Michigan State Police, and dressed out at around two hundred fifty.

“Evening, Lee,” I said. “This is a piece out of your pen, isn’t it? I heard you were commanding the Northville post.”

“Your hearing’s just fine. I’m meeting friends for dinner at the Machus Red Fox. Or I was.” He checked his watch, a steel aviator type. “They probably think I’ve pulled a Jimmy Hoffa by now. Anyway I caught the squeal and that makes me the ranking officer on the scene. What about you?”

“Just rank. I thought I had a client up in the Heights. If she’d said over the telephone her missing Ambrose was a pit bull I’d have saved a trip. Is that a K?” Two EMS attendants in navy were busy zipping up a vinyl bag on a stretcher on the gravel apron.

Killinger nodded. “Charbroiled in the can. The M.E., who’s been and gone, thinks male, between twenty and twenty-five, but he says he’s been wrong before. Sheriff’s men put out the fire. No skid marks. Poor son of a bitch came over the hill and met God.”

“What was the truck doing blocking the road?”

“We’ll know that when we find the driver. He might’ve jack-knifed and been trying to straighten out when the car came. Probably he was drunk. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that’s the case when somebody rabbits.”

“No witnesses?”

“Just rubberneckers. Video arcades must be closed.”

“What’d you get on the plate?”

He might have smiled under the moustaches. In any case, it wouldn’t have meant anything. “Rita Donato.”

“Seriously?”

“No, I always joke around whenever I help pull a Crispy Critter out from under a steering wheel in my supper suit.”

“Then that’d make this—?” I nodded at the bag being slid into the back of the van.

“At a guess, Albert. The son. Heir to the department store chain, currently in receivership while the widow of its late humanitarian founder stamps books in the library in Milan on a three-to-seven for income tax evasion.” Then he did smile. “Didn’t I call him a poor son of a bitch?”

Walter Donato, dead five years, had been named for his adoptive parents and reared in Dearborn, where he inherited his foster father’s five-and-dime at age thirty and within sixteen years ran it into the largest chain of cut-rate department stores in the Middle West. After spending several millions of his personal fortune probing fruitlessly into the mystery of his birth, he had diverted his energies toward the establishment of a foster-care foundation that became a model of its type and put his face simultaneously on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek.
When bronchial pneumonia took him at sixty-two, the President of the United States authorized an annual grant in his name to be awarded to deserving projects in the area of child placement. The local archbishop had been overheard to remark—and was censured by Rome for so doing—that he’d consider nominating Donato for canonization if he were anything but a Baptist.

The take on his widow was different. A former professional dancer, Rita had met Donato shortly after the death of his first wife, married him within six months, and buried him before their second anniversary. The terms of his will placed her in sole charge of the
store chain until the majority of his son Albert, a role she took far more seriously than those of helpmate and stepmother. She remodeled the stores from top to bottom, threw out all the no-brand merchandise, and replaced it with clothing lines named for TV miniseries actresses whom she hired to do commercial endorsements. In no time at all she had stores on both coasts and became a sought-after speaker at gatherings of women who wore shoulder pads and hyphenated their surnames. When the Democrats finally got into the White House there was even talk of a cabinet post.

Just about then someone in the IRS found out she hadn’t paid taxes in three years, each of which showed more profit than the chain had seen during Walter’s lifetime. After the usual protracted trial, appeal, and counter-appeals, reparations forced the Donato organization into Chapter 11 and Rita into the federal penitentiary at Milan, Michigan, pronounced Meye-lin, where at the time of the accident that took the life of her stepson Albert she had served eighteen months. In the meantime some things had come out about her general comportment that removed her name from
Cosmopolitan’s
list of the twenty most admired women.

Albert Donato’s death and its circumstances led all the local news reports and received heavy national play for the better part of a week. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Department traced the truck driver, one Owen Subject, to his house in the suburbs and arrested him for leaving the scene of the accident with a charge of manslaughter to follow, too much time had elapsed for a blood-alcohol test to be considered conclusive, and so no drunk-driving accusation was made. An independent trucker, Subject told the cops he’d been on his way home from delivering a diesel tractor to a farm implements dealership in Iroquois Heights when he swerved to miss a deer and wound up stalled across Square Lake Road. Albert Donato’s Chrysler LeBaron had slammed into him and burst into flames, panicking
him into running. Subject’s basset-hound features and freestanding black hair became a staple on the front pages of both Detroit papers for days. Then another one of the mayor’s relatives got caught dealing dope and the story went inside.

That was when a party named Sporthaven with caps on his teeth and a brown leather portfolio under one arm looked me up in my little toy office on West Grand River and asked me to drop in on Mrs. Donato in Milan.

• • •

“
Hell
no, I never said it. They made that one up at Channel 2 and all the networks took it and ran with it. That’s what convicted me. Otherwise I could have bought my way out.”

We were sitting in the visitor’s room—a not really uncomfortable place with orange scoop chairs and laminated tables that looked more like the cafeteria in an auto plant than a room in the House of Doors—Rita Donato, Lawyer Sporthaven, and the detective in the story. She had on a cotton blouse open at the neck, twill slacks, and loafers, no stripes or work denims. Things are a little more relaxed in the federal lockup, and if you can afford them you’d be surprised how much you’d be willing to pay for the simple comforts. They didn’t include hair dye, and hers had gone back to its natural gray, but it was done in a style becoming to her lean angular face, parted to the left of center and curling in at the base of her neck. She was fifty and looked it, but a patrician fifty, and the large round lenses of her glasses masked the bags under her eyes.

The question, asked by me and answered by her, was whether she had really been overheard to say that only losers pay taxes.

“Pity,” I said. “Nobody ever says what everybody says they say.” I lit a Winston and waited for the conversation to come to a point,
any point. So far all she’d done was sit across the table from me with her legs crossed, bouncing one foot and holding up one end of an interview for “Prime Time Live.” I had the impression she was starved for company.

“A man named Killinger gave me your name,” she said then, without transition. “I gathered he’s something with the state police.”

“Commander. He issued me my license the first time.”

“He was decent enough to come here in person and tell me about Albert before I heard it on the news. He mentioned your name and what you do. He didn’t say why. Maybe he knew the local authorities were going to sweep Albert’s death under the rug.”

“Are they?”

“Sporthaven tells me they’re about to drop all charges against Owen Subject.”

I looked at the lawyer’s young-old face: nipped, tucked, stitched, peeled, creamed, and smoothed by many hands until it had all the character of a rounded stone in a riverbed.

“I got it from a legal secretary at County,” he said. “Albert should have had his car under control. The trucker took adequate steps to avoid hitting an obstruction in the road.”

“What about his leaving the scene?”

“There was nothing anyone could do. The car was instantly engulfed. Even had he stayed and risked his life to pull Albert out of the car, a corpse would have been all he saved.”