Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Read online

  The Toyota turned down a side street and parked in a lot next to a building with a sign on it warning drivers in Spanish and English that it was for residents only. It was the sort of building that had been new when sharing the same roof with a few dozen other families was considered novel and suspiciously European; its sandstone corners were worn round as loaves of bread and the arched windows near the roof appeared to be holding up their skirts to avoid contact with the three rows of prosaic rectangles beneath their feet. But a decade ago the whole thing had been headed toward demolition, and most of the glass panes had only recently taken the place of weathered plywood.

  I drove past, turned around in the driveway of a Queen Anne house with a scaffold in front, and parked across the street from the apartment building. The Toyota was still there. Its driver was not.

  It was a clear winter night, no snow, but the moon was as bright as halogen. My breath smoked in the splintery air. On my way to the front door I made a detour and peered through the rental car’s windows front and back. There was no sign of the manila envelope on any of the seats.

  A Mexican in his forties, built close to the floor but powerfully, opened the gridded-glass door when I thumbed the buzzer marked SUPERINTENDENTE. He had on a navy sweat suit and black work shoes, but his face belonged between a sombrero and crossed bandoliers. It was broad and brown and wore two heavy black bars, one above the eyes, the other under the nose. He combed his thick black hair straight back without a part.

  “¿Habla inglés?” I asked. I hoped the answer was sı. I’d exhausted my high school Spanish.

  “A little.” It came out flat even with the accent.

  I gave him a glimpse of the sheriff’s star the county wasn’t using anymore. “Caterina Munoz.”

  “You don’t look like a Caterina Munoz.”

  “I’m laughing inside. Sixty, five-two, a hundred and sixty, red hair. She came in a minute ago. Which apartment?”

  “You ain’t no deputy.”

  “Neither was Alexander Hamilton.” I stretched a bill between my hands.

  He looked at it, then at me. “Fourteen C. By the elevator.”

  I gave him the ten-spot. He folded it into quarters, spat on it, and flicked it at my chest. It bounced off and landed at my feet. “There ain’t no fourteen C. There ain’t no elevator either.”

  I stepped back in time to avoid picking glass out of my face.

  I stood there sucking a cheek, then picked up the folded bill, wiped it off against the doorframe, and went back to the car. The wave of honesty that had begun to wash over the working class threatened to put me out of business.

  Ten minutes later I was still sitting behind the wheel, watching the door, when it opened and half of San Ignacio spilled out into the moonlight. All four men were built like the super, but they looked more like one another in the face than they looked like him, and they were younger by at least fifteen years. They bore a resemblance to someone else as well. I was working on just who when they spotted me. They fanned out like professional gunfighters and came my way, not bothering to look for traffic as they crossed. They wore construction workers’ uniforms, heavy-duty overalls over cotton twill shirts, and their heads were sunk between their shoulders in a way no one ever has to teach anyone. I popped open the special compartment I’d had built into the dash, took out the unregistered Luger, got out, and closed the door behind me with the Luger stuck under my belt in front where they could see it.

  That stopped them, but only long enough to run the odds. You have to be very good to place four slugs where they need to be placed in the time you need to do it. They decided I wasn’t that good. They came on. I drew the pistol and snicked off the safety.

  “Pedro! Pablo! Juan! Diego!”

  The names rang out in bursts like someone testing a machine gun. The men stopped on the center line. The woman who had shouted at them charged down the front stoop of the apartment house and crossed the street. The four parted to let her through and she closed the distance between us, pumping her arms and slapping the frozen pavement with the thin soles of her slippers. Her black eyes were fierce and her hair sparked bright copper above the ridiculous poncho.

  I put away the Luger. I know when I’m outgunned.

  THREE

  Big Bad Benny put down his prop copy of Don Quixote and got up from his chair when I came off the elevator. He’d changed into a windowpane plaid sport coat and brown turtleneck, but he still looked like a massive piece of furniture.

  I wasn’t in the mood for him. I hit him without missing a step and he tripped over his feet and fell back against the wall, jarring the whole floor. I used the meaty part of my fist on the door to the suite.

  The door swung away while I was pounding and I had to check myself to avoid hitting Gilia, not that the idea lacked merit. It was morning at the Hyatt, the drapes were wide-open, and she stood against the light in green-and-silver lounging pajamas with white espadrilles on her feet. Her hair hung free to her waist, casting a white-gold halo. “Mr. Walker,” she said.

  I lowered my fist and held up the eight-by-ten photograph I had in my other hand. It was a color shot of Gilia in her butterfly wings, with the suspending wires airbrushed out so she appeared to be flying under her own power. Someone had used a black felt-tip pen to write, “A Pablo, con amore de Gilia,” in the lower right-hand corner.

  “Caterina had eight of these in an envelope,” I said. “The others were signed to Pedro, Juan, Diego, and four of the lesser apostles. She said you signed them.”

  Her nose twitched. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Mescal. That’s what the Muñoz family serves in Mexicantown. We got on like Cisco and Pancho, once we moved past that business of wanting to beat me to death on a public street. But I slept it off, or tried to. You’re smelling it on my clothes on account of I couldn’t decide what shirt to put on this morning to come down here and throw you out a window. You shouldn’t have left the wings at Cobo.”

  Something tickled me behind the right ear. I knew it was a pistol. “Let’s go to the basement.” Benny’s breath was warm on the back of my neck.

  “Thank you, Benito. Mr. Walker and I have some things to talk about.”

  “I don’t think so, senorita. He’s no good for you.”

  “Should I call Hector and get his opinion?”

  There was a little silence. Then my ear stopped tickling.

  “Come in, Mr. Walker. Can I offer you breakfast? They always bring too much.” She turned and walked away from the door, leaving me to close it in Benny’s face. I wondered who Hector was and why I didn’t like the name. Benny hadn’t either, the way she drew it like a knife.

  The sitting room was as large as most complete hotel rooms, with fat club chairs, a love seat, a twenty-seven-inch TV set on a stand, and a round oak table with four sturdy chairs. The table was covered with dishes containing omelets, rashers of bacon, hash browns, slabs of toast, and a stack of pancakes wallowing in syrup. It all looked and smelled good to someone who hadn’t eaten since last night, but all I took was coffee. I put down the picture, poured from a white carafe into an unused cup, and put it away in a lump. It scalded my throat and burned away the last of the mescal. Juan—or maybe it was Diego; all four brothers looked alike—had made a production of fishing the worm out of the bottom of the bottle and swallowing it like a goldfish. He was the family comedian.

  “Do you mind if I get dressed while we talk? I’ll leave the door open.” Gilia spoke from the bedroom.

  I set down the cup and went through that door. “Go ahead. Pretend I’m your crew.”

  She’d taken a dress on a hanger from the closet. Now she thought better of it and hung it back up. Two people alone in a bedroom was not the same as a hundred people backstage. She was either a woman with facets or a woman who wanted me to think she had them. She sat on the upholstered bench at the foot of the king bed, pressed her knees together, and folded her hands in her lap. The room had a good view of Dearborn and the Gl
ass House, where Ford executives sat around long tables like in a New Yorker cartoon, chewing Mylanta and arguing about Tokyo and General Motors.

  “Caterina Muñoz’s nephews and their families live in Detroit,” I said. “That slipped your mind. It didn’t when you signed a picture for each of them.”

  “That was months ago, at her request. Before the betrayal.”

  “I’m not People magazine. You can’t brass this one out. I had a long talk with the wardrobe lady. Her English isn’t so good, but her nephews helped translate. One of Signor Garbo’s assistants took that shot of you in your Golden Globes dress with a James Bond camera and sold it to the tabloid. The designer fired and blacklisted the party, all sub rosa, because the publicity would ruin him and he’d have to go back to calling himself Manny Schwartz. Only he and the assistant and you and Caterina knew about it. She’s been with you since your first audition. That doesn’t mean so much, maybe, but you pay better than the tabloids.”

  “She’s worth it. I hope you didn’t turn her against me.”

  “That’s between the two of you. I’m not the one who rigged the frame. Why’s a good place to start.”

  She looked at me. She looked down at her hands. She looked at the Glass House and got no help there either, so she looked back up at me. At least she’d given up on the pidgin English. That had begun to get old when the job still looked legitimate.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Oh, I suppose you’ve heard the usual celebrity complaint, about privacy and how much you have to spend to have it. I made that trade in the beginning and I never missed it. But you make a little money, okay, a lot of money, and soon everyone you meet has a chisel. It seems I’ve never hired an orphan or an only child. Everyone has a mother or a brother or a cousin ten times removed who’s out of work, and they all wind up on my payroll. When someone told me I had a private detective working security with the experience to help me out, who wouldn’t spill the story to Access Hollywood for a couple of thousand bucks, I couldn’t go on just that. You might be someone’s uncle.”

  “Caterina was a dry run.”

  She nodded. Then she got up and hugged herself and looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door. Her hair made a pale golden fall to her seat. Without help it would be blue-black and full of mystery: Truth in Advertising. Her eyes found mine in the mirror.

  “If you’re waiting for some kind of apology, you’re wasting five hundred dollars a day. I owe it to Caterina, but except for the part that hurt her I’d do it again. There’s too much—on the line, is that how you say it? Too much on the line to take anyone’s word that you can be trusted. You found me out fast enough, but am I going to have to wait a week and not read about last night in USA Today to know I have your confidence?”

  “I could give you references,” I said. “You may even have heard of some of them. But then they’d have to give you references to vouch for them, and so on. It’s a conga line without an end. Somewhere you’ll have to take someone on faith. I’m not saying it has to be here, but it would save you a lot of time.”

  “My name’s not Gilia.”

  That brought me up short. I knew she’d make the decision, and I thought it would be on the side of trust, but I’d expected more of a stretch while she made it. But she’d come a long way in a small space of time; a minute to me was an hour in Gilia years, or whatever name she called them. She’d turned from the mirror and was facing me, still hugging herself, as if there were a draft. If anything the room was overheated, a climate she would find familiar.

  I went to the bedroom TV, hit the power button, found a cable news station, and ran up the volume. A woman correspondent in ugly glasses and a head scarf was standing in front of a cave in Afghanistan, describing it for viewers who didn’t know what a cave looked like. If Benny or anyone else had his ear pressed to the outside door, that was what he would hear. I shut the bedroom door and the cone of silence was complete.

  “My real name wouldn’t interest you,” said the woman who was not named Gilia. “I left it home for a reason, and, anyway, it doesn’t mean anything anywhere else. The woman of that name is wanted by the police.”

  “Ours or theirs?”

  “Theirs. My native soil grows two things very well: coffee and police. Each year the harvest is richer than the year before.”

  I gave her a helpful nod. I’d seen footage: Peaked caps, Sam Browne belts, truncheons; everything from the SS catalogue, summer 1940. They changed presidents with the sheets but never the uniforms or their tactics. That was a pocket of the world the Greatest Generation had overlooked.

  “What charge, enemy of the state?”

  “Murder.”

  “Ah.”

  She lifted her chin. She knew all her best features. “What’s that mean?”

  “American for olé. Murder’s something I know a bit about. For a minute there I was afraid I was going to have to recommend someone.”

  “We had a revolution five years ago. You might have seen something about it between the sports and weather; that’s about how long it lasted. The leader of the rebels, when he wasn’t firing his assault rifle and running backwards, shared his tent with two women. Well, one woman and one girl. The woman was killed. Poisoned, they said, by an injection of Stelazine. Do you know it?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve learned much about it since then. In small doses, it’s used to treat depression. In larger doses it causes drowsiness, convulsions, fever, hypotension, and cardiac arrest. All this starts to happen in twenty minutes if taken orally. Immediately when injected. The woman didn’t suffer from depression. Quite the opposite.” She pulled a face.

  I said nothing. I had a picture of bare brown shoulders, flying petticoats, white teeth, and tonsils. I’d seen The Wild Bunch a time too many.

  “Ordinarily,” she said, “a crime of passion wouldn’t have made the front section of the newspaper in the capital, but the government saw its opportunity to drive the rebels apart. A federal warrant was issued for the girl’s arrest.”

  “Would there be a trial involved, or would that be untidy?”

  “There would be a very public trial. Otherwise there would be no point in issuing the warrant. And the girl would get off.”

  That prevented me from finishing the story for her. In my version the girl was convicted.

  She was watching me. “Ask me on what grounds.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “On grounds of the first law of nature,” she said. “No one can be in two places at the same time.”

  “It’s not only a law, it’s a good idea. So why wouldn’t that come out, or am I getting ahead again? I’m supposed to ask if it came out.”

  “It’s okay. I’m tired of that game. There was no trial. The defendant ran away because her alibi was worse than the crime for which she was charged. Or at least it was in the eyes of the government. Either way she faced execution.

  “Someone slipped a needle into that woman’s neck while she was passed out on cheap wine,” she said. “At the moment that was happening I was three hours away at a small fishing harbor, helping a man down a path to a boat. He had trouble seeing the path. He had only one eye. Someone at the prison had placed a red-hot penny on the other one when he wouldn’t tell him who his friends were.”

  I said, “Ah!” again. The moment seemed worth being redundant.

  “They call it the Lincoln Question down there,” she said. “I couldn’t testify without condemning myself for smuggling political prisoners out of the country; Senor Cyclops wasn’t my first. And if I did testify, the witnesses I named to back me up would go to the gallows.

  “One week later I took the same path and got into a boat.”

  I lit a cigarette. It wasn’t a smoking room, but one eye had begun to itch. I needed the distraction.

  “What’s the blackmailer’s name?” I asked.

  “You are one smart hombre. I’m starting to think I made the right
choice.” She stopped hugging herself and did the hair-flip. The weight of it must have been pulling against her spine. “The blackmailer’s name is Gilia.”

  FOUR

  On TV, a man stood in a parking lot shouting about how many automobiles he had in stock. Why do they always have to yell? Everyone needs cars.

  “The blind begin to see,” I said, not to the man on TV.

  The woman who was living in Gilia’s hotel suite hugged herself again. “My country is like eBay. Anything’s available if you’re willing to bid high enough. A grubby little petty official sold me an original birth certificate, issued to a girl who’d died in infancy within a few months of my own birthdate. I applied for a passport under that name. It was Gilia Cristobal.

  “The rest was easy. Not the show business part. Back home, I sang on the radio at sixteen. I knew I had talent, but it took a long time for anyone to see that here. First I had to learn English. Paying for lessons exhausted my—what do you call it, the money you need to escape and establish yourself elsewhere?”

  “Disney dollars.”

  “No.” She scowled, deep in thought. “Stake, yes? Stake.”

  “Getaway stake. Case dough, if your friends call you Fast John. I don’t guess the lessons got that far.”

  “Sí, getaway stake. I cleaned houses, stuffed envelopes. For six whole months I telemarketed. I would rather roll cigars. At least you see the faces of the people who scream at you. People say I am an overnight success. Maybe, if you count the nights I slept on the Interurban. Four years is a very long time to wait for your break when they are filled with such nights.”