American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Read online

  Behind Door Number One …

  I’d stood in front of all of them at one time or another—behind them, too, in the case of the ones with bars—never without butterflies in my stomach, like a kid on his first Halloween; wondering if this was the Door To End All Doors, the one that would burst into yellow splinters and let a bullet tear into an organ I held dear.

  This one, ordinary pine with an oak stain, felt something like that.

  I didn’t expect a bullet, really. Nothing so final and clear-cut. It was just a clammy mounting dread that came with the cold call, the blind search, the random shot, and the conviction that once I laid bone against wood, whatever I found on the other side would change the case, and probably my life. I’d listened to that warning whisper once already today and had walked away from it, surprising myself; only to keep my appointment in Samarra anyway when the cops sprang their trap.

  So maybe the destiny people knew what they were talking about, and all this dithering was just a waste of my time and the client’s money.

  Nice pep rally. Give me a W.

  I knocked. It opened. I didn’t even duck.

  Praise for American Detective …

  “Estleman’s prose is as gritty and compelling as ever as he lets fly razor-sharp dialogue, brings the Motor City to life, and combines a whodunit plot with traditional noir action.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Turn the page for more praise for American Detective….

  “Estleman delivers some outstanding stuff on the hazards of the profession, including a bone-chilling stakeout on a lonely lake in the dead of night, that could come only from an old pro.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Loren D. Estleman is one of a handful of candidates for the title of true heir to Raymond Chandler and Ross Mac-Donald. He is a great ‘American Detective’ writer.”

  —Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition

  “Estleman turns Amos Walker loose in a plot and it’s pure private eye all the way. In a great tradition, the gumshoe with an attitude. No one does it better.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “With sixty-something books to his name, I’d guess Loren D. Estleman had paid his dues, but I’d be surprised if he hadn’t been hitting them out of the ballpark from the start. In American Detective his spare prose flows like the best of them, meaning, of course, Chandler at the top of his game. This is a book to enjoy a chapter at a time, with breaks to watch the play again in slo-mo in your mind before the next inning. Highly recommended.”

  —Gumshoe

  … and Praise for Loren Estleman’s Gas City

  “Portrait of a city by an old master. The chronically undervalued Estleman serves up what just might be the best novel about urban political corruption since Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Estleman masterfully creates a wide and diverse cast of characters, and sympathetically portrays their struggles to survive on the mean streets…. The author’s achievement will justly be compared with that of James Ellroy’s Los Angeles noir mysteries and John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions. Admirers of unsparing crime fiction will hope that Estleman plans to visit Gas City again.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Each of the half-dozen plotlines is executed flawlessly and presented in a context of moral ambiguity in which every choice—whether self-serving or altruistic—has consequences both good and evil. A magnificent crime novel.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Estleman, in the leanest prose possible, brings to life not just his characters but the vices that fuel them and, in the process, exposes the gritty, ragged, sordid underbelly of urban life. He’s been called an heir to Chandler—and it’s easy to see why. A”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  Kill Zone

  Roses Are Dead

  Any Man’s Death

  Motor City Blue

  Angel Eyes

  The Midnight Man

  The Glass Highway

  Sugartown

  Every Brilliant Eye

  Lady Yesterday

  Downriver

  Silent Thunder

  Sweet Women Lie

  Never Street

  The Witchfinder

  The Hours of the Virgin

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  City of Widows*

  The High Rocks*

  Billy Gashade*

  Stamping Ground*

  Aces & Eights*

  Journey of the Dead*

  Jitterbug*

  Thunder City*

  The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*

  The Master Executioner*

  Black Powder, White Smoke*

  White Desert*

  Sinister Heights

  Something Borrowed, Something Black*

  Port Hazard*

  Poison Blond*

  Retro*

  Little Black Dress*

  Nicotine Kiss*

  The Undertaker’s Wife*

  The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion*

  American Detective*

  Gas City*

  Frames*

  The Branch and the Scaffold* (forthcoming)

  The Left-Handed Dollar* (forthcoming)

  Alone* (forthcoming)

  *A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  AMERICAN DETECTIVE

  Loren D. Estleman

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  AMERICAN DETECTIVE: AN AMOS WALKER NOVEL

  Copyright © 2007 by Loren D. Estleman

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5082-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-5082-3

  First Edition: April 2007

  First Mass Market Edition: December 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Robin Lynch.

  Heaven needed the humor.

  ONE

  The driveway was white stone, like a spill of salt between polished granite posts. A square of teal-colored lawn lay on either side, with furniture arranged on it in suites no decorator would approve: sectional sofas next to six-burner ranges, gold-plated bathroom fixtures among patio chairs carefully lichened with blobs of verdigris, stereo components deployed on top of plate-glass aquariums with no fish inside. A life-size statue of the property’s owner cast in bronze stood on a carved mound with one foot raised, winding up to pitch a baseball. With a realtor’s red-white-and-blue sign stuck in front of the quasi-neoclassical-Greco-Roman-Gothic-Art-Moderne house sprawled in the center of the lot, it was the most expensive yard sale since they put Soviet Russia on the block.

  Small platoons of people, dressed casually and expensively but always appropriate to the blue eye of Lake St. Clair ac
ross the street, drifted from one set of objects to another, swigging from their personal bottles of water and commenting on the owner’s taste or lack of it. I’d thought to take a drink from the tap before I left home, and so wandered empty-handed through spaces in between until I came to the statue. The baseball in the loose split-finger grip was real, common cowhide packed with horsehair and zipped up with thirty-three stitches, scuffed and dirty, with an illegible signature scrawled on it in indelible blue ink.

  “Sculptor got it wrong,” said the person who had stepped up from behind me, quiet as dew. “I knuckleballed the last three pitches in that game. But it looked too good to complain.”

  “That’s the actual ball?” I asked.

  “The one and only.”

  “Expensive setting.”

  “Not so much as the ball. I turned down a quarter million for it five years ago. How many no-hitters you see pitched by a man past forty?”

  I turned his way then. Darius Fuller at sixty looked fit enough to suit up and open for the Tigers that afternoon. He was tall and rangy, with gray eyes in a thoughtful brown face that seemed to look down at me from a mound he carried around with him. His hair was a silver haze mowed close to his skull, but aside from that he could pass for thirty, which was still old for a ballplayer, and ancient for a hurler. He’d hung up the glove after that no-hitter at age forty-two, at the end of his third best season since he’d graduated from reliever to starter. The sportswriters had called him “the Fuller Brush Man” for the way he swept aside the top of the order.

  He changed hands on a tall glass of something pale green and frosty and shook my hand. His grip was strong, with a punishing torque courtesy of a misshapen wrist—a feature not uncommon among longtime screwballers. It took a twist that turned the palm out when he let it hang at his side.

  “You’re Walker.” He made it sound like the end of an argument.

  I tipped my head toward the house. “Why couldn’t I be an interested buyer?”

  “You aren’t dressed for it.”

  “It’s a new suit.”

  “That’s what I mean. Rich folks dress like shit. They got nobody to impress.”

  “You’re dressed okay.”

  His navy polo shirt and putty-colored khakis fit him as snugly as the old uniform. He had on hundred-dollar sneakers and a clump of gold and diamonds glittered on his left hand. He twisted it with his right without spilling his drink. “I’m po’ folks now, ain’t you heard? Everything today brings in goes straight to Uncle Sam. I done got traded from the private sector for three ex-wives and a business manager to be apprehended later.”

  “A lot of people would be bitter about it.”

  His face, which had stiffened with controlled rage, cracked apart then to let out a grin. He’d had a lot of work done on his teeth since he’d stopped a line drive with his mouth in ′69. “Oh, hell,” he said. “So I do a couple seasons of fantasy camp and slap my name on a ballpoint pen that writes under six feet of goose grease and split down the middle with D.C. Broke and famous aren’t the same thing as being just plain broke.”

  “You should’ve taken the quarter million.”

  “It wouldn’t pay the interest.” He took a drink, watching me over the top of the glass. He appeared to be shaking off signals from the catcher, then nodded snappily and lowered the glass. “You’re like a priest or a lawyer, right? Whatever I say stays with you.”

  “I look at it that way. The cops don’t. I’ve been traded from the private sector a couple of times myself.”

  A short-haired blonde woman in shorts with a tennis bracelet came up on us holding a leather-bound book and a gold pen. He took them from her and twisted out the point. “This for you or a friend?”

  “It’s my checkbook. I want to buy the dining room set.”

  He stuck the items back at her. “You need to wait for the bidding, and then you don’t pay me.”

  She left. He frowned. “What the hell was I saying?”

  “Something about being broke but famous.”

  He’d started to raise his glass again. He lowered it. “You suck up to all your customers this way?”

  “Sorry. I see a hole and I drive on through. It cost me a business degree.”

  “Don’t apologize, it ruins it. A man that’ll insult you to your face is a man that’ll tell you the truth. I can tell you now I lied about that being the ball I threw in the no-hitter. I’ve got a dozen of them rolling around. When the auditor left I came damn close to selling every one as the ball and taking off for some island.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I can’t swim and I don’t tan.”

  I grinned.

  He didn’t. “Anyway, the real ball goes with me. Everything I ever bought may belong to the government, but the best moment in my career, that’s mine and nobody else’s. You can buy ten new suits with what they’ll pay you to pass that on to them.”

  “My closet’s only big enough for two and my gun. Where can we talk? Sound travels on the lake.”

  “The playhouse. It’s out back.”

  I followed his long stride around an east wing held up by columns and walled with glass into a backyard with a crescent-shaped pool sunk in green tile. Keeping pace was a challenge; I was younger, but not by enough to make much difference, and I’d taken a bullet through my thigh last November that hadn’t done anything for my running game. He unlocked the door to a miniature version of the house’s center section, nine feet high and eleven wide, and let me into a room just big enough to stretch out in on the hardwood floor. The walls were hung with school pennants, pictures of a gangling teenage ballplayer in a succession of unfamiliar uniforms, and shelves of tall trophies with brass athletes writhing on top of them. The place smelled like old magazines and was built solider than my three-room refrigerator box in Hamtramck.

  “This was my daughter’s,” Fuller said. “First wife. Gloria did it all up in pink and rag dolls; Raggedy Anns and Andys up the ass. I never liked ’em, their faces are like skulls. I liked ’em better after Dee-dee made a slingshot and took the head off every one. We swept up sawdust for a week. Had us a regular tomboy on our hands.” His chuckle died out like a motor stalling. “After Gloria left and took her with her I put up all my school stuff and made it my thinking room. I thought my way through two more marriages out here.”

  “You must think on your feet.” There wasn’t any furniture.

  “Everything’s out on the grass. The rest goes next. I guess the feds will put the trophies and shit up on eBay and clean up. You’d be surprised how much some yutz will drop in his own home on something he wouldn’t look twice at in a junk shop. You know, I had a chance to invest in Amazon at the start. They came to me. Know what I said? ‘Bookstores don’t make money.’”

  “My old man told the same story about Xerox. He put his trust in carbon paper. His old man sold horse fodder across the street from the first Ford plant in Dearborn. I was born running out of the money.”

  Fuller wasn’t listening. That part of the conversation had been over for a week. “I got your name from my ex-brother-in-law; third wife. He’s with security at the library.”

  “Emory Freemantle. He lets me in the back door when they lock the front. A lot more detective work gets done at reading carrels than you see in the movies.” I’d sprung Freemantle’s nephew from a bum carjacking charge a couple of years ago.

  “We still go to games. My track record with my in-laws is solid as hell.” He planed a palm over the stubble on his head. The clump of gold and brilliants on his hand struck sparks in the sunlight coming through a window. “Dee-dee is Deirdre, all the flesh I’ve got. She turns twenty-five this year. When that happens she’s got a trust fund coming to her in the amount of two million and change. The change being about what you’d need to live on for five years.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe I’ve got my own tax troubles.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as I never make enough to owe an
y.”

  “Emory said you smart off too much, but I don’t trust the big box agencies. My business manager had offices in America and Europe and wound up in Bimini. This is her.” He scooped a flat wallet out of a hip pocket, opened it, and handed me a snapshot. The girl had his gray eyes, but her coloring was lighter and her black hair was as straight as an Indian’s. I seemed to remember his first wife was white. It wasn’t as big a deal as it had been thirty years ago, but the outside pressure hadn’t contributed to the relationship.

  “She looks like a model,” I said.

  “I never could catch a break outside a stadium. Show me an ugly daughter and I’ll show you a father who’s at peace with the world.” But his brief smile was more proud than bitter. “I can’t touch the fund, thank God. I’d’ve sunk it in the restaurant chain and the car dealership and bribes to the Liquor Control Commission for the license I never got for the nightclub the city knocked down to put in another empty lot. That doesn’t mean I’ll stand around and watch her spend it on some puke who’s no better than her old man.”

  I saw the job then. “This a specific puke, or a possible puke from the puke pool?”

  “His name’s Hilary Bairn.” He spelled it, both names. “He says his family owns land in Scotland, but if they do it’s on the bottom of Loch Ness. He and Dee-dee met at a college reunion in Ann Arbor. Only the closest he ever got to attending Michigan was one semester at a community college in Ypsilanti. Business course. He’s good about money, especially at knowing who’s got it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like I’m the first man on this detail.”