Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (58 page)

Bet they wouldn’t. “Do you know where Miss Mainwaring is working? I can’t get an answer from her home phone.”

“Her new employer called us for a reference.” He slid the pointer down the side of one of those nifty message caddies and punched up the cover. “Ziggy’s Chop House on Livernois.” He gave me a telephone number.

I wrote it down in my old-fashioned notebook. “Do you always hang on to the new numbers of former employees?”

“Everybody has their own records system and they take it with them when they go. Calling them saves a lot of decoding time.”

“Can I see Cully’s office?”

“I’ll have Frances show you.” He picked up his telephone.

“Partners sometimes take out insurance policies on each other,” I said when he was through. “Anything like that here?”

“The premiums are too dear for the shoestring we operate on most of the time. His half of the business goes to his wife. Are you suggesting I did something nasty?” A pair of shard-like eyes glittered.

“Just sweeping out all the corners.” Someone knocked and the woman I’d spoken to outside stuck her gray head into the office. I stood. “Thanks, Mr. Webb. I’ll let you know if he turns up.”

He remained seated. “Just tell him to wash off the powder and perfume before he reports to work.”

Neil Cully’s office was a poor working cousin of his partner’s, containing a plain desk and file cabinet and an easel holding a pastel sketch of an embryonic building. The only personal items were a picture of Gay Cully on the desk and a framed movie poster on one wall for “This Gun for Hire,” with Alan Ladd looking sinister in four colors under a fedora. Frances stood in the doorway while I went through the file cabinet and desk. I found files and desk stuff. The message pad by the telephone was blank, but there were indentations in the top page.

“The police called this morning,” Frances said. “They said not to disturb anything in the office.”

I looked at my watch. “Okay if I call my answering service?”

When she said yes I lifted the receiver and dialed the number for Cully and Webb. The telephone rang in the reception area. Frances excused herself and withdrew. I laid the receiver on the blotter and tried the trick with the edge of a pencil on the message pad. It made the indentations clearer but not legible. I smoothed out some unedifying crumples in Cully’s wastebasket, found a sheet that had been torn off the pad, and got it into my pocket just as Frances returned. I cradled the receiver.

“Odd, there was no one on the other end,” she said.

“Kids.” I thanked her and left before she could work it out.

In the elevator I looked at the sheet. An unidentified telephone number. I tried it in a booth on the street.

“Musuraca Investigations,” wheezed a voice in my ear.

I hung up without saying anything. I knew Phil Musuraca; not personally or even by sight, but the way a hardworking gardener knows a destructive species of beetle. Where he had gone, no honest investigator could follow without risking having a safe drop on him with Musuraca’s name on it. What his number was doing in Neil Cully’s wastebasket was one for Ellery Queen.

“Hello?”

A low voice for a woman, with fine grit in it, like a cat’s lick. Conversations collided in the background with the snarling and cracking of a busy griddle. I could almost smell the carcinogens frying at Ziggy’s Chop House. “Vesta Mainwaring?”

“Speaking. Listen, I’m busy, so if this is another obscene call, get to the dirty part quick.”

I introduced myself and stated my business. I was looking across my little office at Miss August, kneeling in yellow shorts, high heels, and nothing else behind some convenient shrubbery on the calendar. I wondered if Miss Mainwaring ever trimmed hedges.

“Like I told Mrs. Cully and like I told the police, I haven’t seen Neil since last fall,” she said. “I got work to do.”

“Not seeing him doesn’t cover telephone calls and letters.”

“You forgot telegrams, which I didn’t get either. I lost one good job over that crumb, you want me to lose a lousy one too?”

There was no reason to play the card, just the fact I hadn’t any other leads. “What about Fat Phil, heard from him?”

The little silence that followed was like tumblers dropping into place. When she spoke again the background noise was muffled, as if she had inserted her body between it and the telephone.

“What do you know about him?”

“Meet me and we’ll swap stories.”

“Not here,” she said quickly. “Do you know the Castinet Lounge on Grand River? I get off at ten.”

“I’ll find it.” I hung up and checked my watch. Quitting time. Five hours to kill. I had dinner at a steak place on Chene and stopped at a video store on the way home to rent a VCR from a kid I wouldn’t have let follow me into an arcade after sunset.

At the ranch I fixed a drink, hooked up the recorder to my TV set with the help of the instructions and a number of venerable Anglo-Saxon words, and fed the tape of “Pitfall” I had borrowed from Gay Cully into the slot. It was a tight, black-and-white crimer the way they made them in 1948, starring Dick Powell as an insurance agent who has an extramarital affair with sultry Lizabeth Scott, only to run afoul of her embezzler boyfriend and a sex-driven insurance investigator played by Raymond Burr at his pre-Perry Mason heaviest. Powell kills the boyfriend and Scott kills Burr, but not before Powell’s marriage to Jane Wyatt is threatened, leaving their lives considerably darker than they were when first encountered. There were plenty of tricky camera angles and contrasty lighting and one clever scene involving Powell and Burr with guns in a room full of shadows and reflections.

It was a good movie. It wasn’t worth going off the deep end over, but then neither are most of the reasons men and women choose to walk away from a perfectly good relationship. When it was over I caught a rerun of “Green Acres,” which made more sense.

The Castinet Lounge was the latest in a series of attempts to perform shock therapy on Detroit’s catatonic nightlife. A foyer paved with blue-and-white Mexican tiles opened into a big room covered in fake adobe with a bar and tables, a dance floor, and a mariachi band in sombreros and pink ruffled shirts. At a comer table I ordered scotch and soda from a waitress dressed like Carmen Miranda who wouldn’t remember Sonny and Cher.

Ten o’clock came and went, followed by ten-thirty. A few couples danced, the band finished its set, rested, and started another. They were playing requests, but everything sounded like the little Spanish flea. I nursed the first drink. What I did with the second and third was more like CPR. I was sure I’d been stood up.

Just before eleven she came in. I knew it was her, although I’d never seen a picture or been given a description, and my opinion of Neil Cully went up a notch. Coming in from the floodlit parking lot she was just a silhouette, square shoulders and a narrow waist and long legs in a blue dress and a bonnet-like hat tied under her chin with a ribbon, but as she stopped under the inside lights to look around I saw eyes slanted just shy of Oriental, soft, untanned cheeks flushed a little from the last of the day’s heat, red lips, a strong round chin. If you were going to kick over the traces you could wait years for a better reason. When her gaze got to me I rose. She came over.

Seated, she took off her hat, shook loose a fall of glistening blue-black hair, and traded the hat to Carmen Miranda for a whiskey sour. When we were alone she said, “You don’t look like someone who’d be working with Phil Musuraca.”

“Never met him.”

“Did Neil tell you he was following me?”

“Who hired him?”

She seemed to realize she’d tipped something. She took a cigarette from her purse and fumbled for a light. I struck a match and leaned over. I didn’t smell onions. Whatever she had on made me think of blossoms under a full moon. She blew a plume at the ceiling. “You haven’t talked to Neil.”

“Me and the rest of the human race,” I said. “That part I’ve been spending time with, anyway. Tell me about Fat Phil.”

“First tell me why you’re asking.”

“I found his number in Cully’s wastebasket. Did Cully hire him?”

“I suppose you could find out anyway. Musuraca’s working for my ex-husband. His name’s Ted Silvera.”

“Where did I hear that name?”

“He pushed over a bunch of video stores downriver two years ago. They called him the shotgun bandit.”

“I remember the trial,” I said. “The prosecution offered him a deal if he agreed to tell them where he’d stashed the money.”

“Eighty thousand dollars, can you believe it? I keep telling Ziggy he should sell the griddle and rent out tapes. Anyway Ted spit in their face and he’s doing eight to twelve in Jackson. The police followed me around for a while, but when they got the idea I didn’t know what Ted did with the money they laid off.”

“But not Musuraca.”

“Ted’s jealous,” she said. “He got wind about Neil somehow and had his lawyer retain Musuraca to tail me. Then Neil’s wife found out and I got fired. Musuraca gave up after that. But a week ago I turned from the counter at Ziggy’s and there he was looking at me through the front window. He tried to duck, but he wasn’t fast enough. I’d know that fat slob in the dark.”

“Sure he’s working for Silvera?”

“I went to Ted’s lawyer and he said no. But you can’t trust lawyers. Who else would care what I do and who I see?”

“Dicks like Fat Phil are simple organisms. They don’t give up as easily as the police. Maybe he thinks you’ll lead him to that eighty grand.”

“If I knew where it was, would I be flipping burgers?”

I lit a cigarette for myself. “It’s only been two years. Inflation isn’t so bad you couldn’t wait a little longer for the coast to clear.”

“Thanks for the drink, mister.” She stood.

“Sit,” I said. “I don’t care if you’ve got the money sewed inside your brassiere. I’m looking for Neil Cully.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“What was he doing with Musuraca’s number?”

She sat. Carmen drifted over and I ordered another round. Our glasses were less than half-empty but it was that kind of night. Vesta said, “I don’t know why he’d still have it. I told Neil about Ted and Musuraca—well, before. After that I couldn’t get rid of him. He thought he was protecting me.”

“Did you know he had mental problems?”

“What makes him special? My father died when I was little and if I didn’t marry Ted when I was sixteen to get out of the house my stepfather would’ve hung me on his belt with every tramp in Detroit. When Ted got sent up I saved everything I made waiting tables to pay for my bookkeeping classes. Cully and Webb was my ticket out of places like Ziggy’s. Some protection job. Neil cracks up and goes to a cushy sanitarium and I’m back behind a counter.”

“He’s got a movie complex, his wife says. Your situation comes right off a Hollywood B lot. If he’s gone bugs again he might look up you or Musuraca to write himself in as the hero.”

“I haven’t seen him. I haven’t heard from him. I don’t know how to say it so you’ll believe it.”

“I believe it. Were you followed here tonight?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Musuraca doesn’t make a lot of mistakes.”

“Okay, go home.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get a look at Fat Phil.”

“You’ll be the first who ever wanted it.” She got up. “You know, I usually get taken home from this place.”

I held up a fifty-dollar bill. “That ought to cover gas.”

She didn’t take it. “I’m not a whore.”

“You’re a bookkeeper who waits tables. Put this in your ledger.”

She smiled briefly, took the bill, and left, carrying her hat. I crushed out my cigarette, put down money for the drinks, and went out after her. Out front the parking lot attendant held the door of a four-year-old green Fiat for her and she gave him a dollar and drove away. A moment later a pair of head lamps came on and a black Olds 98 covered with dings pulled out of the first row in the lot and burbled after her. By that time I was sliding under the wheel of my Mercury eight spaces over. I waited until the Olds turned left on Grand River, then swung out into the aisle behind it. Fat Phil and I had one thing in common: We never used valet parking.

Vesta Mainwaring lived in a house that had been converted to apartments in Harper Woods. She parked in a little lot behind the house and let herself in the back door. After a minute a light went on upstairs. The big Olds coasted to a stop.

I parked around the corner and walked back. The car was still there with its lights off. I got in the passenger’s side.

Fat men are often fast. He sprang the gun from its underarm clip with an economy that would have impressed Hickok. But I showed him my Smith & Wesson while he was still drawing and he let his hand fall to his lap with the gun in it.

“You should lock your doors this time of night,” I said.

“Who the hell are you?” It was a light voice for so much man. In the glow from the corner he had on a dark suit that could have been used for a drop cloth and a porkpie hat whose small brim made his face seem bloated. Actually it was in proportion with the rest of him. He would run three hundred stripped, a picture I got out of my mind as quickly as it came in. He had one eyebrow straight across and a blue jaw. I smelled peppermint in the car.

“Trade you my name for the cannon.” When I had it—one of those Sig-Sauer automatics the cops are so hot on—I put it on the dash out of his reach and lowered the Smittie. “So much gun for such a little girl. The name’s Walker. You wouldn’t know it.”

“Don’t count on it. The town ain’t that big and the racket’s smaller. What’s the play?”

“Who’s paying you to tail the Mainwaring woman?”

“Never heard of her. I was getting set to take a leak when you busted in.”

“They arrest you for that here. How about Neil Cully, ever hear of him?”

“Uh-uh.”

“He had your number written down in his office.”

“So what? I ain’t so busy I’m unlisted. Listen, I got a sour gut. There’s a bag of peppermints in the glove compartment.”

I opened it. The second my eyes flicked away his hand went up to his sun visor. I swung the Smith, cracking the barrel against his elbow. He yelped and brought down the arm. With my free hand I
reached up and slid a two-shot .22 off the top of the visor. “For a guy that knows nothing from nothing you’ve got plenty of ordnance,” I said. “What’s Vesta Mainwaring to you?”