Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde (21 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

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BOOK: Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde
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“I’m not certain.” He was frowning. “It could be. So much has happened since that night.”
I had a brainstorm. I should have thought of it before. I took a ballpoint pen out of my inside breast pocket, leaned across the table, and drew a bold dot to the right of the dimple above Gilia’s upper lip. I sat back and waited. It was worse than waiting for Fritz to make his move back at the office, but on that occasion I’d been pretty sure of the outcome.
He pushed the picture away suddenly, dropping his chin the way he had when he’d spotted me in the bar. I caught the beer glass before it toppled. One more noise and we’d be up to our eyebrows in the National Guard. “It is she.”
“Sure?” My heart was bumping like a square wheel.
“Yes. A bit older, and much less tomboyish. She’s done something with her hair, and whoever she had remove that mole never practiced in our country. But this is the woman who led me down the path to the boat. If your murder was committed at that time, someone else committed it.”
“Would you testify to that?”
The color slid from his face. The white patch lost some of its contrast.
“Not back home,” I said. “Here, if it comes to that. Back home it’s the rope either way.”
“For both of us. There’s no crime worse than demonstrating the fallibility of the government prison system.” He looked at his watch a third time. “Yes, I’d swear to the authorities here that what I have told you is the truth. I really must get into line now.”
I put the picture back in the envelope. We rose together and shook hands.
“What is the problem of the birds?”
He pulled up the handle of the carry-on. “It was a long walk. We knew we couldn’t very well introduce ourselves, but the silence was oppressive. She asked me if I taught mathematics. I said no and she said that was a pity, because it was a mathematical
story problem that she most remembered from her own education. It seems there were fifteen birds perched upon the wall of a mission. After a while three more birds joined them, then one flew away. The question was how many birds remained.”
“Seventeen.”
“That was the answer I suggested. She said it was the same answer her teacher gave when she asked why her answer had been marked incorrect. Her answer was zero.”
He started toward the security line, pulling the case behind him. I laid some bills on the table and caught up. “Why zero?”
“When one bird flies away from a wall, all the others fly away with it. Everyone with eyes knows this. Even those with just one eye. Abstract knowledge does not apply to the world outside the classroom.”
“Pretty smart for eighteen,” I said.
“Is that how old she was? She has accomplished much in a short time.”
We stopped at the end of the line. I looked at him.
He smiled broadly then, showing some goldwork in his molars he hadn’t had done stateside. He never looked more like a buccaneer of the old Spanish Main. “Please tell the young lady I am a very big fan.”
D
riving back into the city I couldn’t keep a happy song from playing inside my head. It didn’t matter that I was crawling through a white squall that had my fellow motorists crunched over their steering wheels, grinding their teeth and peering through one swipe of their wipers at a time. I had an innocent client who could afford my rates.
One murder down, sort of. I knew who
hadn’t
done it, and I could prove it. It was up to a foreign government to find out who had. I thought I knew who it was, if they cared to ask me. They probably wouldn’t. Cops are cops, no matter if they lecture their suspects on their rights or throw them in a leaky basement and forget about them until it’s time to clean house with a handy suicide. Once they nail someone they like, they hang up the hammer until the next case. Their desks are piled just as high the world over. They can only afford to spend so much time and money on each item of business, and there’s no budget for quality control, not like Ford or GM or Toyota. If it comes off the line with a faulty starter and doors that fly off every time someone taps the brake, it takes a lot more than Ralph Nader to fix what’s wrong.
What I had on Angelo Suerto’s killer wouldn’t hold up in an American court. The monkeys who wore the robes in the place that held jurisdiction had built capital cases on shakier foundations,
but even they wouldn’t bother to build one on what I had to offer, because the perpetrator was beyond justice of the mortal variety.
One down. One to go.
Which was the point at which the song stopped playing.
The best coroner in America, armed with the latest equipment, couldn’t pin down the hour when someone had pumped death into Jillian Rubio’s veins. It could have happened anytime between the moment she left her mother’s house and one of Miranda Guzman’s dogs first caught a whiff of something that wasn’t knotty pine seasoning under plastic on the other side of the fence across the street. Good sense said she’d died within minutes and that the lumberyard was handy, but the maximum-security wings are full of killers who wouldn’t recognize good sense if it jingled in their pockets. Someone could have kept her prisoner for a week before working up the gumption to finish what he’d started, or driven around with her corpse in the trunk for days, then returned to the scene of the abduction and dumped the evidence. A suspect with Gilia’s means and talent for disguising herself could have buzzed in on a red-eye, taken care of the business, and buzzed back to L.A. or Vegas or wherever, and no alibi would protect her. Or she might have hired it done. Some of her associates needed character witnesses in order to appear in court as a character witness for her. Hector Matador had scaled the Colombian corporate ladder by performing bloody errands for the guy on the next rung up.
The cops—my cops—wouldn’t need much more than the Stelazine to make up their minds. Gilia was the only human link between two murders committed several thousand miles and two years apart, and that was worth running out, at least until they hit the wall. The same poison showing up in both cases was the kind of evidence that made walls disappear. Getting her off on the first murder wouldn’t convince anyone whose business it was to run down the most obvious trail. He’d just say that’s where she got the idea. When a blackmailer dies violently, the steps you have to follow practically glow in the dark, and lead only one direction.
I might have followed them myself, and would have, if they hadn’t used Stelazine. Anyone smart enough to point out that birds seldom follow the rules of simple arithmetic is smart enough to come up with something that didn’t spell out her name in lights.
Then again, maybe the cops were right. The teacher had been right about one from eighteen leaving seventeen. You can get too clever with an idea and fail the test.
It doesn’t pay to think too much about cops when you’re driving. They don’t set much store by telepathic communication, but they can smell fear. I had exited the Lodge onto Jefferson when a DPD blue-and-white loomed up out of the flying snow in my rearview mirror. When I made the turn onto Woodward, it turned behind me. Its lights struck firefly patterns off the swirling flakes, its siren growled. I drifted over in front of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center and braked. The blue-and-white swung in behind, bouncing red and blue off the sad streaked face of the statue of the Spirit of Detroit.
They usually let you sit and stew while they run your plate number through the onboard computer. Not this time. Someone tapped on my window and when I ran it down I looked out at two hundred pounds in a glistening leather jacket and snow piling up on a plastic cap shield. The cop had his semiautomatic half out of its holster. I couldn’t think of any of the fifteen traffic violations for which you can get pulled over while making a turn downtown that would make an officer draw his sidearm. I kept my hands on the wheel.
“You Amos Walker?” The voice was a tight tenor.
I said I was Amos Walker.
“Homicide’s got a BOLO out on your car. You want to follow me or ride in back? You won’t like the third choice.”
I said I’d follow. It was only a few blocks. You’re never more than a few blocks from a cop anywhere you go in this world.
T
he things you see sitting in a squad room at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters:
—A homeless guy wearing a filthy red Santa Claus coat over a Nine-Inch Nails sweatshirt, possible witness to a driveby, snoring and using a stack of arrest reports on the booking officer’s desk for a pillow.
—A city worker on a stepladder, replacing a fluorescent tube in the ceiling, with his pants down around his hips and an object I swore was a crack pipe sticking up out of his back pocket.
—A very attractive detective third-grade with Domestic Disturbances, shucking out of insulated snow pants and smoothing the wrinkles out of a red skirt that caught her at mid-thigh. I figured she was drumming up business.
—A dinosaur from the old STRESS crackdown squad, last of his kind, evidence gloves on his hands, cleaning a twelve-gauge shotgun with what looked like antiseptic gauze and laying out the pieces on a newspaper spread over his desk, doing everything but powdering the butt with Johnson & Johnson’s.
—A local Action Newswoman on a color TV no one seemed to be watching, interviewing a manic fan waiting for Gilia to emerge from a trailer on West Vernor, where the city had finally agreed to let her shoot her video, interviewer and interviewee
both covered with snow and apparently seriously expecting her to step out into it.
—Gilia in the flesh, got up like Julie Christie in
Doctor Zhivago
in expensive fake furs, signing an autograph for one of the officers who had brought her in for questioning.
It’s pretty much like that all the time, give or take a visiting superstar. I’m not there every day, but I’m not important enough for a floor show. For all I know they shoot pigeons off the window ledges Fridays.
Gilia didn’t see me. There was a roomful of desks and chairs and computer consoles between us, and it’s a big room, about the size of a 1950s high school gynmnasium and even smelling a little like Red Devil varnish and basketballs. After she handed back the pen, someone took her gently by the elbow and conducted her down a hall out of sight. Some of the magic went out with her. It was just a room after all, and detectives are just clerical workers with guns.
There was no sign of any of her people, not Benny and certainly not Matador, who was probably back at the Hyatt placing a call to Gilia’s attorney in Beverly Hills, or wherever the better California lawyers were hanging their briefs these days. She wouldn’t be under arrest, though, so there would be little the legal team could do, apart from making polite threats in Latin. They wouldn’t know about the two years Inspector Alderdyce spent in prelaw at the University of Michigan before joining the academy in Detroit, and they might not be aware of them even after the conversation, unless they forgot their manners and called him a dumb flatfoot. Maybe not even then. He was the kind who didn’t mind losing a hand or two as long as he cleared the table at the end of the evening.
I only knew for sure Alderdyce was involved because I was sitting in a plastic scoop chair outside his office, and I’d caught a glimpse of him looking my way briefly from near the windows, where he was in conversation with a detective sergeant I’d met before, but whose name had never stuck. One look, no more. I might have been a tile that needed replacing. After a moment he’d parted company with the sergeant and gone down the same
hall the uniforms escorted Gilia down a few minutes later.
I got it. I was being shunned.
It’s an old trick and may even predate good cop/bad cop and the Wedding at Cana. The theory was you ignored the victim until the knowledge of his own guilt got the better of him and he confessed. Don’t laugh until you’ve been through it. Cops have squeezed full statements out of thugs with pickled hides just by drumming their fingers on a steel desk in a tiny room, bouncing random circles off a ceiling from a flashlight, chewing tinfoil. The first time the strategy worked had probably been an accident; one of Pilate’s lieutenants on the Plain Toga Detail got stuck for a tactic and was working on the problem when the character sweating it out on the broken-down divan opposite him suddenly cracked. Two thousand years later they would have a Greek name for it and an explanation, along with the suspect’s psychiatric profile in a folder and a table of figures predicting how long it would take. The table in my case being as long as the Bayeux Tapestry. The Long Wait hadn’t a thing on the Lincoln Question. I balanced my checkbook in my head and when that got too depressing I looked at my nails.
The patrolie who had brought me in and plunked me down in the chair was long gone, back on the beat or down in the locker room changing into dry socks. I’d been sitting there about an hour and a half when the sergeant whose name I’d forgotten came up and kicked a leg of the chair.
“You’re up, big fella.”
He looked to be my size until I stood. He was a well-proportioned scale model of a full-grown man, no big head or short arms to give him away until you stood next to him. His burgundy shirt, olive drab safari necktie, and gray pinstripe pants could have been bought in the boys’ department at Jacobson’s. The Glock in his snap-on belt holster looked as big as a Frontier Colt sticking out behind his miniature hipbone. He must have lied about his height to join the department. He had red hair, freckles, and pale lashes. Maybe he was related to a token Irishman on the city council.
I followed him across the room. On the way past the worker
on the stepladder, he reached up and poked the crack pipe down below the edge of the pocket. I figured he was a pet.
We went down the hall to the same Bermuda Triangle that had claimed the others. I knew the hall, of course, just as I knew every other square inch of 1300 including the basement, where they used to conduct interrogations outside of Eleanor Roosevelt’s earshot. The corridor was lined with framed photographs of dead police commissioners, dead retired football greats who had served on the Police Athletic League, dead Hollywood celebrities with tenuous connections to Detroit who’d had their pictures taken with police officials who may or may not be dead by now. Valleys had been worn in the marble floor by eighty years of wing tips, brogues, high heels, sneakers, and hobnails. The building has always been too elegant for the characters who work in it. No serious architect who wants to remain sane ever looks back at what became of his designs after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. There were tobacco stains on the Carrara that had seniority over the chief.
The sergeant went up on tiptoe to peer through a grated window in a door, then opened it, told me to have a seat, and closed it behind me. I couldn’t tell if it was one of the rooms I’d been in before. Such rooms aren’t planned. They spring up like mushrooms, indistinguishable from one another, from the two-way mirror to the heavy-duty plastic over the ceiling fixture to the furniture, three mismatched chairs and a particleboard table with one fuzzy rounded corner that looked as if it had been gnawed by rats. (Not a fanciful notion; when another Albert Kahn construction, the Packard plant, was imploded, an army of rodents the size of Chihuahuas swarmed across East Grand like British infantry.)
They’re not interrogation rooms anymore. That term went out with cattle prods. Now they’re interview rooms, a name that went about as deep as the new beige paint on the walls, the turpentine smell covering decades of sweat and cop spittle. As sterile as it looked, the room was as heavy with fear and misery as a hospital and as empty of hope as the walk from a morgue. Transferring me there was just the next chapter of the Wait. I’d
skipped five circles of hell, all the way from limbo to the burning plain.
Only one new feature had appeared since my first acquaintance: an industrial-design camcorder on a tripod, aimed at the table area. It had replaced the old suitcase model reel-to-reel tape recorder, which in its turn had nudged out the stenographer, who for many years had been the only feminine presence in that entire seven-story monument to patriarchy. Even the most mannishlooking of the species had managed to introduce a note of hope into the whole bleak experience, like the first tentative birdsong heard at the end of a long winter. They took down your statement efficiently, with a show of disinterest, but if you wanted to hard enough you could hear sympathy in the scratching of their Eberhard Fabers. They were with the department but not of the department. I missed them the way I missed Checker cabs, cigarette billboards, and Captain Kangaroo.
Alderdyce came in right on cue in the middle of this maudlin muddle, followed closely by the miniature detective sergeant. Today the inspector wore a sharp blue pinstripe suit and polkadot tie, white on red, on a shirt so white it hurt to look at it. He might have come straight there from a job interview at Fifth Third Bank. He strode straight to the other side of the table and smacked down a gray cardboard folder. The sergeant planted himself in front of the door like a toy bouncer.
“Angela Suerto,” Alderdyce said.
I’d expected that. He’d given me too much time to sift through all the reasons I might have been tagged. I didn’t mention before that the delaying tactic misfires as often as it works.
I said, “And a very Angela Suerto to you, too. Elena Verdugos all around.”
“Nobody said you could talk.”
I didn’t look at the sergeant. It’s always a mistake to make eye contact with little yappy dogs.
Alderdyce said, “Let him talk. Talking’s what he’s best at, didn’t you know? This one can talk his way through rings of flame. It’s a sight to see.” He flipped open the folder. On top was a smudgy eight-by-ten photograph printed on fax paper. A
professional like Fritz Fleeman wouldn’t have bothered to reproduce it, but police photographers in the third world work on salary just like their brothers in the U.S. Their best work spends most of its life locked away in metal file cabinets.
The Suerto woman was a disappointment. From what I’d heard I’d expected a combination of Yvonne DeCarlo and Jennifer Lopez, one of those overripe Latina beauties with exotic lips and cheekbones and high arched brows, a mane of curly black hair and more curves than a bobsled run. The woman in the photograph looked like something you saw pushing a supermarket cart in an unfashionable suburb, a dumpy forty with a bulldog face and lank hair, gray along the part. But then the photographer hadn’t caught her at her best. It was a morgue shot of her pale flaccid body lying naked on a steel table with a drain at the foot. A row of numbers written with chalk or a white grease pencil in one corner contained the date and the order of admittance.
“Stingy end to a gaudy life,” Alderdyce said. “Amateur model, cantina dancer, pavement princess, mistress to a revolutionary,
Cada
ver numero setentatres
in the mortuary in a city named for a virgin. You supply the irony, I’m fresh out.” He peeled aside the picture. The sheet underneath was typewritten, another blurred fax. “Officer Gonzales is translating all this. I got the gist over the phone from a captain whose name I won’t try to pronounce because I can’t roll my
r
s the way he did. His English wasn’t much better than my Spanish, but we worked it out.”
“Cops are on the same page the world over,” I said.
“See what I mean, Ohanian? You wouldn’t want to have missed that.”
Ohanian. No way would I have guessed Armenian. Alderdyce went on. “Jillian Rubio came to this country as an infant. We got that from her mother, but nobody thought to ask if that was the name she went by in the old country. We checked with Immigration. They dug in the basement and came up with her birth name. You want to talk now, take a guess at what it was?”
“You’re having too good a time telling it,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to step on your punch line.”
Ohanian made a noise in his throat.
Alderdyce slapped the folder shut. A gust caught the faxed photo and it slid out between the covers, perched on the edge of the table for a second, then floated from there to the floor like the last leaf of autumn. I knew how it felt.
“Gilia Cristobal,” he said. “Hell of a coincidence. We got a Gilia Cristobal down the hall. Which is one too many, but wait. Her name isn’t Gilia Cristobal. But then the plot thickens, because both Gilias were born in the same country, which begs the question why did they come all the way to Detroit to fight over who gets to keep the name? What’s the matter, lost your taste for conversation? You’re making me out a liar in front of Sergeant Ohanian.”
“How much of this did she tell you?”

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