Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde (18 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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“What was it?”
“In a minute. Did you catch the news today?”
“I saw a black detective on television saying Hector isn’t a suspect.
Muy fiero.
Ferocious.”
“That one I could have figured out.” It was as good a description of John Alderdyce as I’d heard in any language. “Not the local news. International.”
I watched her get sad. Maybe it was sad enough. She was in show business, so I was just wasting my time. “Poor Nico,” she said. “He was a bad general, I’m afraid. His one military victory was the work of his colonel, Fulgencio. Fulgencio died in the fighting. Had he not, the war might have ended differently.”
“No tears for Nico? He died in his cell.”
“He was the same as dead when they captured him. I did my crying then, when the news got here. It was Salazar, the Judas, who sold him to the government troops. Salazar was Fulgencio’s replacement.” You can spit a name like Salazar a long way. She got distance on it. “Nico was a healer. He walked out of medical school to organize a hospital strike. That was the beginning. He never went back. Even when he was living in the jungle he was a humanitarian first and a warrior second. That was why I loved him, not because he saved me from the troops at the radio station. People said it was because he was my hero, but I knew his weaknesses. I loved him for his strengths. He planned the prison escape, the one I cannot use to clear my name of his whore’s murder. Beyond that, beyond the courage of his convictions, he was a weak man, easily fooled. The whore would have betrayed him had she lived that long.”
She stopped talking. She’d seemed about to say more. She tossed her hair and looked at the window, as if she expected the little fellow in the red car to be peeping in from the ledge.
I said, “It’s a good thing you’re talking to me instead of the cops. You just gave them another motive for killing Angela Suerto.”
“I did not kill her. I would prove it to you, if I could. You are not the United States government. You would protect me.”
“Uncle Sam’s more flexible than you think. Immigration fraud isn’t murder. Does the name Miguel Zubara
n mean anything to you?”
She looked at me. No recognition there. “Should it? It is old Spanish, that much I know.”
“Very old. I looked up the surname in the encyclopedia. I’d heard it before, but didn’t know the details. Francisco de Zubara
n was a Spanish Baroque painter during the seventeenth century.
Religious subjects were his specialty. I thought you might have come across it sometime.”
“You said Miguel.”
“No relation, according to Miguel.” I moved a shoulder. “It’s not important. It was a long time ago—I’m talking about Miguel—and you said yourself you didn’t use names in the resistance. But if you knew of the original Zubara
n and happened to hear the name again you might have remembered it.”
Her pupils got very large. They made her eyes true black. She leaned forward and her nostrils seemed to flare. They didn’t, of course, but they wouldn’t have looked out of place if they had. “You spoke to someone.”
“Just briefly. We’ll have a longer conversation tomorrow. Like I said, there’s no reason you’d have heard the name if the revolution was so tight-lipped. But he seemed to know the name Mariposa Flores.”
“W
ho is Zubara
n?”
“That’s not my information to give away. I can tell you who he was. A university professor in your country.”
She seemed to expect that. She was still leaning forward. “How did you find him? Where is he?”
“Same answer. Right now I’m trying to find out why he knew your name if you didn’t know his.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t tell him. Our training was specific about that. You never knew who was your friend, or how long he would remain a friend. Even those who did, once they were captured—”
“Yeah. What you didn’t know you couldn’t tell Abe Lincoln. Someone told Zubara
n. It wasn’t my go-between. His history makes yours and Jillian Rubio’s play like the Olsen twins’.”
“You mustn’t meet with Zubara
n.”
“Uh-huh. Why not?”
“It’s a trap.”
I considered it. “Okay, say he’s some kind of undercover spook sent here to pose as the man you helped escape from prison, find out what became of Mariposa Flores, kidnap her, and take her back to stand trial. What makes her worth the trouble? In this country, women of easy morals are killed every day in double digits. Your population is a lot smaller, but the percentage
would be about the same. Why risk an international incident to bring back Suerto’s killer?”
“Perhaps they know I’m not her killer. They want me for what I did that night.”
“Same question. The revolution’s as dead as Nico. You don’t put down a rebellion and then turn around and antagonize a major world power just to scoop up the little fish that swam through the holes in the net.”
“You don’t know this government. It has a long memory and no concept of mercy.”
“It also has to worry about mundane things like the budget and road repair and moustache wax for the minister of information. Even Hitler didn’t spend all his time chasing Jews and crushing Poland. He had to make sure the Gestapo had enough rubber stamps. What makes you important enough to disrupt the daily bureaucratic routine? With apologies to university professors, that kind of government doesn’t rate them much higher than the Suertos of the world. When they step out of line, they just throw them in the dungeon, and when they escape, where they went and who helped them takes on less significance with time. That leaves only one reason why you don’t want me to meet with Zubara
n. Your alibi won’t hold up if I do.”
Very slowly she straightened in her chair. Her face lost all expression. She rose.
“You were hired to find Jillian Rubio,” she said. “You did that, and were well paid. There is no longer any business between us.”
“Sit down.”
She didn’t move. Standing there with her chin raised she looked tall. She looked tall onstage as well. I didn’t know how much of her was Mariposa and how much Gilia.
“Sit down, I said. I was ribbing you. I’m lied to a lot. Every now and then I’ve got to whack the pin
ata and see what comes out. If you’d gone on trying to convince me, I would’ve shown you the door.”
“You believe me?”
“The part about being afraid Zubara
n’s a ringer. I guess when
you’ve declared war on tyranny a little paranoia goes with the territory. The other part will have to wait until I’ve met with the professor.”
She sat down, her spine straight. “If you’d accused my great-great-grandfather of lying, he’d have invited you to the field of honor. I suppose it’s more civilized to take such insults without protest.”
“Miranda Guzman gave me almost the same speech. What neither of you has said is both your great-great-grandfathers bathed every other Easter, peed at the dinner table, ate with their fingers, and wiped the grease off on the servants. We have manners now, noble and peasant. We use paper napkins and antibacterial soap and when we run someone through for calling us a dirty so-and-so we do it with the knowledge we’ll answer for it later. I can’t fence, but I’m a pretty good man in an interview. That’s what you bought for fifteen thousand dollars. You probably spent that much greasing the help at the Hyatt to smuggle you out past the great unwashed, but it’s ten times the minimum I charge for a missing-person investigation. I can either spend some more of it trying to untangle your little immigration problem or refund all but fifteen hundred and expenses and you can throw it at a lawyer. It should cover his telephone calls for a couple of days. Get one anyway is my advice. If you have one already—Matador does, so I’m sure you do—tell him what’s going on. Otherwise he’ll have to start cold when INS comes calling.”
“If I do this, will you continue to investigate?”
“He might call me off. He probably has his own detectives, any one of whom keeps his fish in a tank bigger than this office.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I’m a nail biter. I get nervous when there are more questions floating around than answers. I’m also a community booster. Detroit had fewer homicides last year than it has had any year since before the riots in sixty-seven. I get more nervous still when a visitor is killed here. When there’s reason to suspect the killer commuted here to do it, whether it was from Milwaukee or sunny California or the third world, I get downright peeved.
Another such incident and I might just lose my composure. Yeah. I’ll continue to investigate, lawyer or no, until you call me off. Maybe even after that. My profit margin is so thin now I could operate for a year in the red before my creditors noticed anything unusual. I haven’t a thing to lose.”
“Except what Jillian Rubio lost.”
“I wouldn’t light any candles for her. She had some bad breaks. She would have anyway, whether you took her identity or not. She abandoned it, remember; you didn’t take anything she needed or wanted. She only became angry because you made better use of it. Nobody else put that chisel in her hand. It was her decision, and she paid for it. The job now is to find out who collected.”
“Even if it’s me?”
“Especially if it’s you. An attorney can afford to take on a guilty client. It’s considered part of due process. A private eye just looks like a chump.”
“It isn’t me.”
“I hope not. It’s hard enough getting the innocent ones to pay once expenses eat up the retainer.”
She shook her head, throwing off haloes. “You talk the good game,
hombre
. You don’t convince me you’re in it for money.”
“I didn’t try. The free exchange of currency for goods and services is what brought you to this country. I need some to keep the wolf from my door. If I needed more I’d be making my way through the classifieds. Hector Matador told me this morning my job will be extinct in five years. What do you think?”
“I think the same has been said of soldiers.”
“I’d be okay with it if it were true, about P.I.s and soldiers. There isn’t a good cop around who wouldn’t welcome becoming unnecessary. That’s the theory behind smart bombs and DNA fingerprinting and the Internet. But when all the indoor work is done somebody still has to wade in and clean up.”
She sat back in the chair and rested her hands on the arms. When she did that her beauty hit you like a blow to the heart. “You mentioned a rough spot in Miranda Guzman’s story.”
I was back on the clock. I tapped the typewritten report. “She
said her daughter came to spend Thanksgiving with her. Then she announced she had an urgent appointment, borrowed an overnight bag, and left. That was November 12, one day before she was to meet Matador in Milwaukee for her monthly bite. She only got half a block from the house, but that isn’t the point. Why interrupt her stay for a date that had been prearranged for months? Why not wait until after she’d collected, then come for the holiday? It was still two weeks off. She could have shaken down everyone in the Top Forty and still been here in time for pumpkin pie.”

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