Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (53 page)

“Figure the son of a bitch gave them a running start,” the sergeant said as I joined him. “Maybe he told them if they made it to the trees they were home free.”

“Who found them?” I asked.

“Paper boy came to collect. When they didn’t answer his knock he went looking.”

“Anybody hear the shots?”

“It’s rabbit season. Day goes by without a couple of shotgun blasts...” He let it dangle. “Your name’s Walker? Ollie Springer. I command the substation here.” I could feel the wire strength in his grip through the leather glove. “What’d they hire you for?”

“To hooraw the Children of Solomon. Jeremy thought they were the ones who took a shot at him yesterday. Who identified them?”

“It’s them all right. I started running errands for the Cuttles when I was six and my parents knew them before that. If Comfort’s bunch did this I’ll nail every damn one of them to a cross.” His jaw muscles worked.

“Any sign of a struggle?”

“Trailer’s neat as a button. Judy was the last of the great homemakers. Bastard must’ve got the drop on them. Jeremy didn’t talk much, but he was a fighter. You don’t want to mess with these old farmers. But you can’t fight a jinx.”

“What kind of jinx?”

“The Stage Stop. Everybody who ever had anything to do with the place came to no good. Last guy who ran it went bankrupt. One before that tried to torch the place for the insurance and died in prison. I took a run at it myself once—nest egg for my retirement— and then my wife walked out on me. I guess I should’ve tried to talk them out of it. Not that they’d have listened.”

“Mind if I take a look inside the trailer?”

“Why, didn’t they pay you?”

“Excuse me, Sergeant,” I said, “but go to hell.”

He went over me with his cop’s eyes, grunted. “Go in with him, Gordy. Make sure he doesn’t touch anything.”

There was a door on that side of the trailer, but the deputy and I went around to the side facing the Stage Stop. Gordy should have set up his post closer to the road; the path to the door had been trampled all over by curious citizens, obliterating the killer’s footprints and those of any herd of Clydesdales that might have happened by. Inside, Judy Cuttle had done what she could to turn a mobile home into an Edwardian farmhouse, complete with antimacassars and rusty photos in bamboo frames of geezers in waistcoats and glum women in cameos. A .20-gauge Remington pump shotgun, still a fixture in Michigan country houses, leaned in a corner of the tiny parlor. Without touching it I bent over to sniff the muzzle. It hadn’t been fired recently.

“Jeremy’s, Ollie says,” the deputy reported. “He used to shoot pheasants till he slowed down.”

The door we had entered through had a window with a clear view to the tavern and the road beyond. The purse Judy had carried into my office lay on a lamp table near the door. The quality of the housekeeping said she hadn’t intended it to stay there for long. I wondered if they’d even had a chance to take off their hats before receiving their last visitor.

An unmarked Dodge was parked next to the patrol car when we came out. On the other side we found a plainclothesman in conversation with Sergeant Springer while his partner examined the bodies. Their business with me didn’t take any longer than Springer’s. I thanked the sergeant for talking to me and left.

So far the whole thing stank; and in snow, yet.

Judy Cuttle’s directions were still working. A houseboy or something in a turtleneck and whipcord trousers answered the door of a gray stone house on the edge of the nearby town and showed me into a room paneled in fruitwood with potted plants on the built-in shelves. I was alone for only a few seconds when Bertram Comfort joined me.

He was a well-upholstered fifty in a brown suit off the rack, with fading red hair brushed gently back from a bulging forehead and no visible neck. His hands were pink and plump and hairless, and grasping one was like shaking hands with a baby. He waved me into a padded chair and sat down himself behind a desk anchored by a chrome doodad on one end and a King James Bible the size of a hand-truck on the other.

“Is it Reverend Comfort?” I asked.

“Mister will do.” His voice had the enveloping quality of a maiden aunt’s sofa. “I’m merely a lay reader. Are you with the prosecutor’s office up north? I thought that tragic business was settled.”

“I’m working for Judy and Jeremy Cuttle. I’m a private investigator.”

He looked as if he were going to cry. “I told the officer none of the Children were near the property yesterday. I wish these people could lay aside the suspicions of the secular world long enough to understand it is not we but Solomon who sits in judgment.”

“I notice you refer to it as
the
property, not
their
property. Do you still hope to obtain it for your camp?”

“Not
my
camp. Solomon’s. All the legal avenues have not yet been traveled.”

“It’s the illegal ones I’m interested in. Maybe you’ve got a rebel in the fold. It happens in the best of families, even the God-fearing ones.”

“The Children love God; we don’t fear Him. And everyone is accounted for at the time of yesterday’s unfortunate incident.”

“Yesterday’s yesterday. I’m here about today.”

“Today?”

“Somebody shotgunned the Cuttles behind their trailer about an hour ago. Give or take.”

“Great Glory!” He glanced at the Bible. “Are they—”

“Gone to God. Knocking on the pearly. Purgatory bound. Dead as a mackerel.”

“I find your mockery abhorrent under the circumstances. Do the police think the Children are involved?”

“The police think what the police think. I’m not the police. Yesterday somebody potted at Jeremy Cuttle, or maybe just at his hat as a warning. Today he and his wife engaged me to investigate. Now they’re not in a position to engage anything but six feet of God’s good earth. I’m a detective. I see a connection.” I looked at my watch. “It’s three o’clock. Do you know where the Children are?”

Again his eyes strayed to the Bible. Then he placed his pudgy hands on the desk, jacked himself to his feet, and hiked up his belt, the way fat men do. “I have Solomon’s work to attend to. ‘Go thou from the presence of a foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.’”

“‘Sticks and stones may break my bones,’” I said, rising, “but any parakeet can memorize sentences.” I went me from his presence.

Ed Snilly, the lawyer who had recommended me to the Cuttles, lived in an Edwardian farmhouse on eighty acres with a five-year-old Fleetwood
parked in the driveway sporting a bumper sticker reading HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR HOGS TODAY? His wife, ffty-odd years of pork and potatoes stuffed into stretch jeans, directed me to the large yellow barn behind the house, where I found him tossing ears of dried corn from a bucket into a row of stalls occupied by chugging, snuffling pigs.

“One of my neighbors called me with the news,” he said after he’d set down the bucket and shaken my hand. He was a wiry old scarecrow in his seventies with a spotty bald head and false teeth in a jaw too narrow for them. “Terrible thing. I’ve known Judy and Jeremy since the Depression. I’d gladly help out the prosecution on this one gratis. Do you suspect Comfort?”

“I’d like to. Did you represent the Cuttles when they bought the Stage Stop?”

“Yes. It was an estate sale, very complicated. Old Man Herndon’s heirs wanted to liquidate quickly and wouldn’t carry any paper. Jeremy negotiated to the last penny. I also stood up with them at the hearing with the State Liquor Control Commission. A license transfer can be pretty thorny without chicanery. I’m not sure we’d have swung it if Ollie Springer hadn’t appeared to vouch for them.”

“I’m surprised he spoke up. He told me the place was jinxed.”

“I can see why he’d feel that way. Old Man Herndon was Ollie’s father-in-law. The Stage Stop was going to be a belated wedding present, but that ended when Herndon’s daughter ran out on Ollie. The rumor was she ditched him for some third rate rock singer who came through here a couple of years back. I think that’s what killed the old man.”

“So far this place is getting to be almost as interesting as Detroit.”

“Scandals happen everywhere, but in the main we country folk look out for one another. That’s why Ollie helped Judy and Jeremy
in spite of his personal tragedy. To be honest, I thought they were getting in over their heads too, especially later when they talked about digging a wine cellar and adding a room for pool. They were looking far beyond your usual mom-and-pop operation.”

“Is gaming that big hereabouts?”

“Son, people around here will go to a christening and bet on when the baby’s first tooth will come in. Phil Costa’s made a fortune off the pool tables in the basement of his bowling alley out on M-52. Lord knows I’ve represented enough of his clientele at their arraignments every time Ollie’s raided the place.”

“Little Phil? Last I heard he was doing something like seven to twelve in Jackson for fixing the races at Hazel Park.”

“He’s out two years now, and smarter than when he went in. These rural county commissioners stay fixed longer than the city kind. Phil never seems to be around when the deputies bust in.”

“So if the Cuttles went ahead and put in their poolroom, Little Phil might have lost business.”

“It’s a thought.” Snilly picked up his bucket and resumed scattering ears of corn in the stalls. “A thought is what it is.”

• • •

The Paul Bunyan Bowl-A-Rama, an aluminum hangar with a two-story neon lumberjack bowling on its roof, looked abashed at mid-afternoon, like a nude dancer caught under a conventional electric bulb. A young thick-shouldered bouncer who hadn’t bothered to change out of his overalls on his way in from the back forty conferred with the office and came back to escort me past the lanes.

Little Phil Costa crowded four-foot ten in his two-inch elevators, a sour-faced baldy in his middle years with pointed features like a Chihuahua’s. Small men are usually neat, but his tie was loose, his
sleeves rolled up unevenly, and an archaeologist could have reconstructed his last five meals from the stains on his unbuttoned vest. He didn’t look up from the adding-machine tapes he was sorting through on a folding card table when I entered. “Tell Lorraine the support check’s in the mail. I ain’t about to bust my parole over the brat.”

“I’m not from your ex. I’m working for the Cuttles.”

“What the hell’s a Cuttle?”

I told him. He scowled, but it was at a wrong sum on one of the tapes. He corrected it with a pencil stub. “I heard about it. I hope you got your bread up front.”

“Talk is Judy and Jeremy were going to add a pool room to the Stage Stop.”

“How about that. What’s six times twelve?”

“Think of it in terms of years in stir.” I laid a hand on top of the tape. “A few years back, two guys who were operating their handbook in one of your neighborhoods were shotgunned behind the New Hellas Cafe in Hamtramck. The cops never did pin it to you, but nobody’s tried to cut in on you since. Until the Cuttles.”

The farm boy-bouncer took a step forward, but Costa stopped him with a hand. “Get the bottle.”

It was a pinch bottle filled with amber liquid. Costa took it without looking away from me and broke the seal. “You a drinking man, Walker?”

“In the right company. This isn’t it.”

“I wasn’t offering. This stuff’s twenty-four years old, flown in special for me from Aberdeen. Seventy-five bucks a fifth.” He upended it over his metal wastebasket. When it gurgled empty he tossed in the bottle. “On their best night, that’s what the Cuttles’ room might cost me. Still think I iced them?”

“I’m way past that,” I said. “Now I’m wondering who takes out your trash.”

“You trade in information, I’ll treat you. Check out a guy named Chuckie Noyes. He’s a Child of Solomon, squats in the cemetery behind the Stage Stop property, the old caretaker’s hut. I knew him in Jackson before he got religion. He did eleven years for killing a druggie in Detroit. Used a shotgun.”

“Why so generous?”

He tipped a hand toward the adding-machine tapes. “I got a good thing here, closest I ever been to legit in my life. Last thing I need’s some sticky snoop coming back and back, drawing attention. Time was I’d just have Horace here adjust your spine, but if there’s one thing I learned on the block it’s diplomacy. Dangle, now. I open at dusk.”

“Seventy-two,” I said.

“What?”

“Six times twelve.”

“Hey, thanks.” He wrote it down. “Come back some night when you’re not working and bowl a couple of lines. On the house.”

• • •

For the second time that day, police strobes had beaten me to my destination. They lanced the shadows gathering among the leaning headstones in what might have been a churchyard before the central building had burned down sometime around Appomattox. Near its charred foundation stood a galvanized steel shed with a slanted roof and a door cut in one side. As I was getting out of the car, two uniformed attendants wheeled a body bag on a stretcher out through the door and into the back of an ambulance that was almost as big as the shed. Sergeant Springer came out behind them, deep in conversation
with a man six inches taller in a snap brim hat and a coat with a fur collar. The two were enveloped in the vapor of their own spent breath.

“I’ll want it on my desk in the morning,” said the big man, pausing to shake Springer’s hand before pulling on his gloves.

“Will do, Lieutenant.”

The lieutenant touched his shoulder. “Bad day all around, Ollie. Get some rest before you talk to the shooting team.” He boarded an unmarked Dodge with a magnetic flasher on the roof. The motor turned over sluggishly and caught.

“Chuckie Noyes?” I asked Springer.

He looked up at me, then down at his fur cap. “Yeah.” He put it on.

“Who shot him, you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He do the Cuttles?”

“Looks like.”

“You’re not the only one having a bad day, Sergeant.”

“Guess you’re right.” He fastened the snaps on his jacket. “I came here to ask Noyes some questions, thought he might have seen or heard something living so close. He had an antique pin on this chest of drawers by his bed. Judy wore that pin to church every Sunday. Don’t know how I missed not seeing it in the trailer. Noyes saw it same time I did. He tried for my gun.”