Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde (12 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - P.I. - Hardboiled - Detroit

BOOK: Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde
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“You will find the monster who did this thing to my Jillian?” It was hardly louder than a prayer.
“I don’t know. I can try to prove that Gilia—the other Gilia—didn’t. The one might flush out the other, but I can’t swear to it either way. If the police decide to pin it to her, that’s as far as they’ll look. If she’s innocent, he’ll still be out there.”
She crossed herself and turned back around. I was staring at the back of her neck again. “Unless I am asked if the woman who calls herself Gilia is responsible for my daughter’s death, I will say nothing. For now.”
“How long is for now?”
I was pretty sure this time it was a shrug.
“
La Casa del Rubio
was never celebrated for its patience.”
I knew a curtain line when I heard it. The big church door drifted shut on the boy’s humming, sealing it off from the world I lived in. Out there all I got was the dog’s growling as I passed within two yards of where it was tethered.
A
famous calendar shot of the Detroit skyline shows the daytime scape reflected on the surface of the river at night, gray granite and blue sky above, black onyx and lighted windows below. As I drove away from Most Holy Trinity, the picture rotated on its axis, nightside up. Half of the city was going home from work and the other half was going to work from home, signing out squad cars with engines still warm from the eight-to-four and grasping the handles of drill presses still slick from the sweaty palms that had operated them by daylight. Every day the two half worlds pass each other on the Walter P. Chrysler and the John Lodge and the Edsel Ford freeways with only a narrow median separating them. I was the only one who belonged to both.
I didn’t feel like going home. I didn’t feel like going anywhere especially, and when I feel that way I go to the office.
It’s an old building even by local standards. John Brown might have ridden past it in a four-in-hand on the northern spur of the Underground Railroad. In any other city it would be an archaelogical treasure, and a slot for it on the National Register would be someone’s cause of the month, but in our town it’s just another empty lot in waiting. The corporation that owns it budgets just enough to prevent that, paying an old Russian Jew to bang on the radiators and a crew to sweep out the butts and unclog
the waterspouts shaped like griffins. I like it because they let you smoke in the offices. You can probably sacrifice a goat if you want to badly enough.
Old buildings, like old musicians, are never silent. The chords they strike after dark belong to a nocturne. I wasn’t the only one still working, but the typewriter chatter and booming file drawers had shifted to a minor key and the whir of a vacuum cleaner and bass note of a floor buffer came out front. When a telephone rang, it was no longer part of a chorus: more of a soprano solo. Probably it was just a telephone. Your head fills with fuzzy poetry when you work at night. It’s like drinking alone.
I got organized. I moved the dignified old Underwood from its lonely aerie to the desk and typed up a report on the Jillian Rubio case. The dignified old Underwood’s keys had begun to drift loose and it typed a wacky line that looked like sheet music from the score of a Looney Tune. It lent some pizzazz to the bald facts. I didn’t write that I had committed to solve a murder. That would have looked even wackier. It played silly enough inside my head.
I tore out the last sheet, drummed the pages even, read them through, snapped on a paper clip, and filed the report under
D
for delirium tremens. That was getting to be a thick file.
Just to keep the pink snakes at bay I broke the downtown bottle out of the desk and poured an inch into a glass. Good Old Smuggler. You can’t get it in Michigan, despite the fact it’s imported by my cousin-six-hundred-times-removed Hiram and bottled in Southfield, thirty minutes from where I sat warming my hands around its inner light. You have to follow a bigamist all the way to St. Louis and buy a couple of jugs from the liquor store across the street from the apartment where his second family sits around waiting for Dad to come home from his business trip to Detroit. It has a pirate on the label and you know it’s cheap because of the way your lips go numb when you sip it. In Edinburgh they use it to prep patients for root canals.
I decided to hold off sipping until I tried the telephone number I’d been carrying around in my head since I’d talked to Barry Stackpole in Greektown. I didn’t expect to get anything but an
empty ring or a recording telling me the offices at Columbia University were closed and please call back during normal business hours, in free verse if possible. It rang three times and someone picked up.
“Hello?” A mellow rounded voice, perhaps male, perhaps with an accent. You can’t get much more than that from hello.
“My name is Walker,” I said. “I got this number from Barry Stackpole. I didn’t know if anyone would answer this late.”
“Yes, Mr. Walker. I remember the name. I’m leaving on a business trip soon. The dinner hour is the best for clearing one’s desk.” He didn’t introduce himself.
“I’m calling about Mariposa Flores.”
I didn’t know if the name would mean anything; Gilia had said no names were used in the resistance. There must have been a leak, though, because I could almost hear the coin dropping into the pan. Some of the mellow went out of his voice.
“I cannot discuss this over the telephone, Mr. Walker. I would prefer not to discuss it at all, but Mr. Stackpole was very persuasive. Perhaps you could tell me why it’s important.”
“She’s under hack for murder. You may be the only person who can get her out from under.”
“I do not know this hack.”
I blew air. My next client and all his contacts were going to be one hundred percent American. Nothing less than the name of an ancestor on the
Mayflower
manifest would persuade me to take the case.
“Professor—” I said, and paused when someone gulped oxygen on his end. “It is Professor, isn’t it? Mr. Stackpole didn’t seem to think that was a secret.”
“It is possible I was not specific upon the point. Yes, I am a professor. Of Romance languages. A pretty term. Consolation, I suppose, for the loss of the Americas. Please go on.”
“There’s murder in the business, and a little matter of a visa obtained under a false identity. The State Department is more concerned with the visa. If they pull it, she goes back to stand trial for murder. You may be able to prevent that, if you’ll agree to answer one simple question.”
“I have been asked questions before, Mr. Walker. They are seldom confined to just one and they are almost never simple.”
I asked him to hold on one second. I hung the receiver on my shoulder, picked up my glass, and threw the Old Smuggler off the end of the plank. It pickled my throat tissue and brought a flush all the way to my ears. Conversation with the learned gentleman was enough to wean Henry Ford off weak tea. I plunked down the glass and got back on the line.
“Sorry, Professor. I had to answer another call. The question I’m proposing has nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln.”
He was silent so long I thought he’d hung up while I was fortifying my defenses.
“Just who are you, Mr. Walker?”
I got a psychic flash from six hundred miles away; a picture of a man touching a dead eye socket.
“I’m a private investigator, engaged at the moment in trying to prevent my client from being deported. There’s a hell of a lot more than a red-hot penny waiting for her at home.”
The silence this time was filled with someone’s memories of home. They didn’t come with harmonica music and the old swimming hole. I heard paper slithering.
“I’m flying out to California day after tomorrow,” he said. “One of those useless seminars that are just an excuse for grown academics to behave like college freshmen on spring break. Apparently it is my turn. I am changing planes in Chicago. How far is that from Detroit?”
“Four hours driving. Not much less flying, under current conditions. I don’t know if I can spare the time. When this thing blows it’ll blow all at once. What airline?”
“Northwest.”
“Detroit Metropolitan is Northwest’s hub in the Midwest. Their planes go in and out like buses. You could change there and we could meet in the airport.”
He took my number, said he’d see what he could do, and he’d call back. He sounded eager. I didn’t know what to make of that. I hoped it would do me some good. I wasn’t sure if I’d recognize it if it did. Once again I’d taken a straightforward missing-person
investigation and turned it into an abstract equation, a voyage of discovery, a
Bildungsroman
; as if there weren’t enough languages involved already, with no more romance to any of them than Punch and Judy. They ought to put me to work designing aptitude tests to be given out by companies that aren’t hiring.
What the job needed was a CPA. He’d sort all the facts into tidy piles, sweep them into envelopes, hang tags on them, and mail them out with a bill for services rendered. Thank you and please call again. I can help the next person in line.
I’d found Jillian Rubio. That was the job. Now I’d volunteered myself to wrap up two murders, or at least separate them from Gilia Cristobal
née
Mariposa Flores. That was not. My Pimpernel Complex was showing. I’d grown a tail that made me curious. A young woman to whom everything in life had come as hard as iron, even blood money, was dead, her body left out to season with the white pine. It all had something to do with the client, and before I handed it over to the CPA I needed to know if the job I’d finished had nailed a killer or framed an innocent. Maybe I was just bored. When it’s February in Michigan it’s been winter forever, and when something interesting comes bumping along in the sluggish current of the longest short month on the calendar, you snatch at it and hang on to see where it leads. Even if it’s a murder. Especially if it’s a murder. I collected them like driftwood. No two were ever alike and displayed together they made intricate tortured patterns, like the work of an alcoholic Swedish sculptor.
While I was waiting I tore open the mail I’d dumped on the desk earlier, kept some of it, and threw the rest away. Nobody wanted to give me something for nothing, there was no invitation to sail to an uninhabited island and raise a race of beautiful naked savages. There wasn’t even a second notice to indicate that a smooth efficient capitalist system had snagged itself on my empty checking account. If a letter drops through a slot and no one cares if it’s answered, is the stamp still good?
I figured the telephone call that interrupted this exercise in poetical philosophy had been placed by someone on business from Porlock.
“Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” I answered.
The professor was up on his English literature. He hesitated only a second. “Did I break in on
Kubla Khan
? A thousand pardons.”
“One would be too much. And thank you for not asking what gives.”
He chuckled; a dry academic sound, like a dusty thumb riffling through Newton’s
Principles
. “When you’ve sat in on a few Ivy League conversations, you learn to tune in quickly. What jackasses we must sound like to the janitor. Perhaps not, though. At Columbia the odds are better than even he has a Ph.D. in pre-Christian theology.” Stiff paper rattled. “My flight gets into Detroit at nine-ten A.M. Friday. The layover is two hours. Which, given the present security situation means we will have fifteen minutes. Satisfactory?”
“Tickles me pink.” I gave him the name of a bar and grill in the Davey Terminal. “Should I scribble PROFESSOR X on a sign and hold it up?”
This time he hesitated two beats longer. Making up his mind.
“Zubara
n is the name.” He spelled it. “Miguel. I doubt identification will be necessary, at least in my case. I have an idea you’ll know what to look for.”
I wrote the name on my telephone pad. Then I scratched it out thoroughly. I’d had to memorize even his telephone number. “Zubara
n like the painter?”
“I’m told there is no relation. You know a good deal about arcane matters for an American. How old are you?”
“Too old for your classes, Professor. My generation talks back.”
“It would be a refreshing change. All those sheep’s faces and their ubiquitous Walkmans sometimes make me want to vomit. I shudder to think what will happen to the world in hands such as theirs.”

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