Angel Eyes (25 page)

I didn’t say anything. He reached out and pressed the Stop button. The car lurched to a halt between floors. He faced me, smiling again, not comfortingly.

“Your playing cop got people killed, Walker. The D.A. thinks it’ll complicate his cases against Billings and Clendenan if we charge you with obstruction of justice, so we’re to lay off. But you better hope you don’t get caught spitting on the sidewalk from here on in, because I’ll pull so many strings you’ll be dancing for the next ten years. Today a letter is going to State Police Headquarters in Lansing about your conduct. It’ll go into your file along with all the others. Someday there’ll be so many of them, they won’t be able to squeeze the folder back into the drawer. Which is when you stop being a private investigator in this state. On that day I’ll spring for champagne down in the squad room.”

“What if I had backed off?” I challenged. “How many more bodies would be clogging up the statistics while Janet Whiting went around covering her tracks and you sat around waiting for warrants?”

“I get it. You’re Zorro, right? A guy in a big cape on horseback swinging a sword to help out when the cops fall down.”

I said, “No, just a guy earning his living. A woman who called herself Ann Maringer hired me to find her. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t really want to be found. Every time I take on a job I mortgage a piece of myself to my clients and I can’t get it back until it’s paid off. I have to do that and yet try not to step on the toes of the people who keep me in business. Sometimes that’s impossible. I can’t help it; it’s the way I operate.”

“So you’re in it for the money.”

I sighed and gave up. “If that’s the only way you can handle it.”

“We want that diamond ring, by the way. Now more than ever, for evidence.”

“You know what I want before you get it. Signed by a judge.”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” he said flatly.

“That’s my excuse. What’s yours?”

We finished the ride in silence. He stayed on after I had alighted. My last impression of him was a smiling face with sparkling eyes just before a group of doctors and nurses entered the car, crowding it from view.

A dark blue Cadillac limousine was parked in the loading zone in front of the entrance as I came out. The rear window hummed down and Phil Montana leaned forward. “Care for a lift?”

“If my car’s still in the RenCen lot,” I replied.

“There’s a beat-up Olds Cutlass there registered to an A. Walker.”

I got in beside him. A uniformed chauffeur I didn’t recognize was sitting behind the wheel. As we pulled away from the curb I glanced from him to my traveling companion with eyebrows raised. He smiled sadly.

“I stole him this morning from a General Motors vice-president. Seen this?”

He handed me the morning edition of the
News
, folded to the society page. At the top was a two-column picture of Leola DeLancey and her attorney, Daniel Clague, smiling reservedly amidst a crowd on the steps of the City-County Building.
DELANCEY WIDOW WEDS LAWYER IN CIVIL CEREMONY,
proclaimed the headline. The edition would have hit the street before word of last night’s doings got out. I gave it back without comment.

“You could at least try to look surprised,” said the union chief.

“Why? I knew they had a thing for each other. Maybe she’s the reason he was willing to give the Judge advice on how to create a dummy corporation. Only a corporation lawyer would know all the ins and outs.”

“Conspiracy to commit fraud is a hell of a risk to take for a woman.”

“So’s murder. But it’s done all the time. With the Judge believed dead, Clague had a clear field. The courts must have come through with that death decree or she’d be guilty of bigamy.”

He nodded. “It’s on the front page. I wouldn’t want to be in their position right about now.”

I said nothing. Outside, clouds drifted in front of the sun, casting a gray pall over the city. It looked as if it was getting ready to snow. Michigan, phooey.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” he said. “If Janet wasn’t being held against her will by DeLancey, why did she leave so that he had to follow her to Clendenan’s house?”

“She didn’t. That was part of Clendenan’s story. I think the Judge had his stroke in the Troy apartment and she got her son to help bring him to Grosse Ile, which was a more secluded place to care for him. DeLancey never did have any flunkies; that was just something Clendenan said to make his story more plausible.”

Montana sat absorbing that. He was clean-shaven and looked fresh in a different suit. He had managed to squeeze in a few hours’ rest since his ordeal at police headquarters. “Happy?” I asked him.

He looked at me with his hard sad eyes. “Is there any reason I should be, with the closest thing I ever had to a son exposed as a traitor? A woman I cared about killed in the crossfire? My having killed two men?”

“I don’t read minds. I can’t say how you feel about what happened to the woman or to Clendenan. Or about having killed Tim. But you had plenty of time to prepare yourself before you iced DeLancey.”

He was still looking at me, but his eyes were no longer sad. Just hard.

“Maybe you’d care to explain.”

I settled back in the seat. “You get a lot of thinking done riding in the back of an ambulance. Crazy thoughts mostly, but once in a while something rational creeps in. Like about how a sick man, still in shock over a trusted employee’s treachery, can have the presence of mind to shoot another man who’s holding a gun on him. Or how that employee can forget to have his boss frisked when he knows he’s in the habit of carrying a gun.”

He said nothing. I resumed.

“Clendenan’s motives were obvious. He thought there was a will that he could share in, but the only way he could collect was if everyone went on thinking the Judge was dead. So he conveniently overlooked the fact that you were armed. That’s the whole reason he took us out there. Which means he had reason to believe you wanted DeLancey dead. It couldn’t be that old fraud thing. Too weak. It had to be something else, something that a supposedly faithful union employee like Clendenan might fall privy to. Something like a fraud of your own.

“You never did invest union funds in Griffin Carbide, did you? Or if you did, you didn’t sink as much in it as you claimed. Maybe you got your old friend Arthur DeLancey to issue some phony stock certificates and pocketed the balance. It didn’t hurt to stage an angry telephone conversation with the Judge when the so-called merger fell through, so that his stepson could overhear it. It was a sweet deal, but what made it sweeter was your going to jail for assault.”

He glanced at the driver, but the soundproof glass partition was in place between the front and rear seats. He relaxed slightly. “Goon.”

“It was set up from the beginning. You knew that the scandal would hurt your reputation, possibly cost your union presidency. Anyone else would have been content to give it up for the riches to be gained. But you were too much in love with the power. So you framed an employee with an embezzling rap, maybe with his consent, and slugged him in front of witnesses. The dedicated union man outraged at an attempt to steal bread from the mouths of the rank and file. To top it off you even went to jail. It got you re-elected by a landslide, even if you couldn’t do anything about it for a long while.

“Everything went beautifully, especially DeLancey’s unexpected disappearance. With him gone the threat of exposure was removed. It must have been a hell of a shock when he turned up again. What a break when he pointed what looked like a real gun at you and gave you an excuse to do what you’d been planning ever since you found out he was alive.”

We swung into the parking lot at the Renaissance Center. My car was parked where I had left it the day before. As we drew to a stop, a large crowd of men that had been clustered around the entrance to the building surged toward us. The group had grown since the previous night. There was an occasional picket sign, but most of these had been cast into a heap at the foot of the stairs leading up to ground level. They had recognized the limo.

“Your theory’s interesting,” said Montana, as the chauffeur got out to open my door. “But without evidence that’s all it is, a theory. If what you say is true, only Bill Clendenan could have backed it up. He’s been exposed as a murderer. Nothing he says is worth anything.”

We stared at each other. The windows were full of rough-hewn faces, the air alive with voices shouting Montana’s name. By now they had heard the early radio reports and were aware that their leader had in eliminating his secretary cut loose one of the men upon whom they blamed their troubles. He was their hero still.

“Good-bye, Mr. Walker,” he said.

I climbed out. The chauffeur snicked the door shut and got back under the wheel. A path opened up before me—I had been riding with the boss, after all—and closed behind my heels, filling up with bodies. It was past eleven-thirty. I had a telephone call to make, if Maggie was in the office. I watched the Cadillac purr away in the direction of the tiered garage, the crowd sprinting alongside it like Romans around a returning emperor’s chariot.

They kept chanting Phil Montana’s name in cadence.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.