Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels Read online

  “What was taken?”

  He sipped from his cup. He’d kept the spoon in it and braced the handle with his thumb to keep from poking himself in the eye. The gesture reminded me of my father, in a kitchen much like his. “How much do you know about high-definition television?”

  “I know I can’t afford one.”

  “Many can’t, but they’re going to have to scrape up the money soon if they don’t want to abandon their reality shows. By federal law, every station in the country is switching to a high-def frequency. That’s the end of analog broadcasting. If you have a regular cathode-ray set like we’ve had since the dawn of television, you won’t get a signal.”

  “You’d think Washington had enough to keep it busy without that.”

  “The excuse is the government wants to reserve the analog frequency for emergency transmissions in the interest of national security, but some of us suspect the flow of campaign money from the manufacturers of plasma and liquid-crystal television receivers helped nudge undecided legislators off the fence. The home electronics industry stands to make trillions—not billions; trillions—from that decision over the next ten years.”

  “Not to mention give aid and comfort to enemy extraterrestials.”

  He stirred his coffee with deep concentration. “I’m a small businessman, not a conspiracy nut. If I went around lining hats with Alcoa wrap I wouldn’t have any time left to balance my books. But even an idiot might ask what’s to prevent a terrorist from getting hold of a 1965 Curtis Mathes and tuning in to the latest from NORAD.”

  “Can we start with your situation, and work our way up to the Pentagon?” I was starting to think the morning was wasted, and I had a lot more of those than dollars.

  “Sorry. I’m a little paranoid today. Somebody broke my stuff and made off with some of my other stuff. That’s the stuff I’m getting around to. I wasn’t quite accurate when I said you couldn’t watch HDTV on an analog set. I sell a type of converter box that unscrambles the transmission. It won’t deliver HD quality, but it allows you to watch anything broadcast over the new frequency at a fraction of the cost of updating your existing equipment. That’s what’s missing.”

  “They stole a converter box?”

  “They stole twenty-five, the entire shipment I took delivery on last week. They were still in the shipping boxes.”

  “What are they worth?”

  “Fifty apiece, wholesale. I’d planned to sell them for seventy-five.”

  I’d gotten most of this from Mansanard, but raw data only, and he hadn’t seemed to have grasped the concept of just what had been stolen. If politics hadn’t knocked him out of the Criminal Investigation Division, his lack of imagination would have sooner or later.

  The loss came to just under nineteen hundred, less than four hundred over my standard retainer for any job that looked as if it would take longer than a day. “A fifty percent markup seems low for retail.”

  “It was going to be a come-on: Buy an analog set and I’d throw in the converter for seventy-five. A hundred for the box alone.”

  “Extended warranty?”

  “Of course.”

  The morning was looking up. “Have you got a picture of one or something so I’d know what I was looking for?”

  “I’ll show you one in person. I bought it to try out before I took the plunge.”

  We left our cups behind and I followed him through a door and down a flight of plain wooden steps in a narrow well that smelled like potatoes. The place had been a Michigan basement at one time—meaning a hole in the ground with a house on top of it—and no matter how you finish one of those and what kind of equipment you install to change the air you can’t quite get rid of that homely funk. I’d never liked it since the day my mother sent me to the potato bin for a big baker and I grabbed a live rat.

  At the bottom, Crossgrain palmed up a row of wall switches. There was a pause, then four rows of fluorescent tubes in ceiling troughs fluttered on, pouring icy light into a room the length and width of the house. Three oak timbers supported a massive beam that prevented the first and second floors from collapsing into the basement, where aisles invited visitors to inspect the inventory: vintage suits and dresses on pipe racks, incomplete sets of furniture, radios encased in walnut and Bakelite, bolts of curtain material, curved steel toasters, squat oil burners, wallpaper in rolls, men’s and women’s hats on Styrofoam heads, cartons of flatware, portable record players, and two rows of TV sets with tiny picture tubes in big oiled-wood cabinets with speakers covered in gold cloth. The twentieth century was having a rummage sale.

  Everything was arranged more or less neatly, some of it in stacks that would have to be dismantled to get to the items on the bottom. Here the fetor broke down into a compost of mildew and dry rot, old furniture polish and the unique stench of scorched electrical insulation.

  Crossgrain turned off a loudly whooshing dehumidifier. The room fell silent except for the insect buzz of a faulty light fixture. I said, “People buy this stuff, I guess.”

  “Can’t get their fill. I’ve got a customer who drops in at least twice a week, which is ten times more often than I make significant changes in the stock. Once he bought a whole bedroom suite, birch and bird’s-eye maple. Some days he leaves with just a spoon. He’s as gay as a bishop, but heteros are just as hot to make a fetish of the past. Every time Bill Gates or Steve Jobs announces a new iPod, I get a flood of orders for steel phonograph needles. Here.” He lifted a black rotary telephone off a dusty plant stand. “Two years ago I couldn’t give these away. Now I’ve got a waiting list. The sheer therapeutic pleasure of actually dialing a number—even if that number belongs to a cell phone—can be as relaxing as a day in a hot tub.”

  “Until you run into an electronic menu on the receiving end.”

  “Then I sell them one of these.” He put down the telephone and slid a gizmo smaller than a cigarette pack from the pocket of his bowling shirt, turning it to show me a keypad on one side and a tiny speaker on the other. “You hold it to the mouthpiece and press the buttons, just like on a touch-tone.”

  “The simple life’s getting more complicated by the day.”

  “Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a trip around the barn.”

  Breaking that one down and combing through it for sense took too much time. “Anything else missing?”

  “No. They seemed to know just what they wanted.”

  “Who knew you had them?”

  “I told some people at the Chicago show, but don’t ask me who. I didn’t get the name of everyone I met there. I ordered them through an eight-hundred number. That’s not exactly a secure line, but it beats using the Internet.” He scampered two aisles over and trotted back carrying something metal and rectangular from the TV section. For a tall man he moved around like a fighting cock.

  The box was the size of a desk humidor, lighter than it looked. It had a power button, no other controls, and two ports in back for plugging in cables. A copper plate on the back contained a twelve-digit serial number and the name “MacArthur Industries,” followed by a post office box in Southfield. Just then the name meant nothing to me, but time had passed and I’d either forgotten or blocked it out. It brought no chills.

  THREE

  “I never made five hundred dollars on my best day,” Crossgrain said.

  “What about the bedroom suite you sold the bishop?”

  “I said he was as gay as a bishop. He’s a landscape architect. Okay, I guess that would be my best day. That was two years ago. Can you guarantee you’ll recover my merchandise so I can earn it back?”

  “What guarantee did you get from the cops?”

  “They’re paid either way.”

  “So am I, but you get my whole day for the price.” I gave him back his box. “Three days in advance, for wear and tear.”

  His egg-shaped head flushed from crown to chin. “I don’t figure to make much more than that from the lot. What kind of wear and tear?”


  “Tires, long-distance bills, cranial surgery. I don’t expect the trail to lead to the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.”

  He turned his attention to the row of Admirals, Dumonts, Tele Kings, and a Philco that shared a monster blonde cabinet the shape and size of a coffin with an AM radio and a three-speed record changer: space-eaters all, without a converter to pick up a signal. Ten minutes later, back on the ground floor, he came out of a den off the hallway waving a check to dry the ink from a fountain pen. I wondered if he’d worn sleeve protectors while he was drawing it up. He held it back, leaving my hand flapping. “What if the police recover my property before the three days are up?”

  “You get back what I don’t spend.”

  He gave me the check then. I frowned at the signature. “Is Crossgrain your real name?”

  “I get that a lot. Yes, it is. I don’t pretend it wasn’t an influence.”

  I put away the check and said I’d report. Making me grab air the first time was going to cost him, but he didn’t have to know that.

  *

  I put a thousand in savings and held out the rest for graft. Some of it went to a pawnbroker on Willis who had a clean ticket downtown because he reported everything from the hot sheet that showed up on his counter, or enough anyway to fill suspicious silences. He wouldn’t touch a shoplifted watch or a Turkish rug that had vanished from a house in Birmingham, but if the price was right he’d direct whoever came in with it to the fence that would give him the best deal. Several search warrants had failed to turn up an incriminating piece of evidence because he kept all the merchandise in his head. He’d put a daughter through Princeton and his son was at Annapolis. Neither had spoken to him in years.

  The place was built like a bank, as most things are in a town where even the sidewalk Santas go heeled. The cash lay untouched in the sliding steel tray while his eyes scanned my retinas through bulletproof Plexiglas. He was a West Indian, with dreads and a set of those chin whiskers you could scrape off with a thumbnail.

  We’d been through this before. I said, “Where’ll I go tomorrow if I roll over on you today?”

  “Once is all it takes.”

  I made a move to retrieve the bills. I almost lost fingers. The tray banged in and back out empty, a magic act.

  “’Lectronics is a big field.” Thirty years in Detroit had erased the island from his speech.

  “Give me three names to start, off the top.”

  “Bud Lite.”

  “Real names.”

  “I don’t know the real one. That was his hip-hop tag till he washed out.”

  “I didn’t know you could.”

  “Felony murder.”

  “Is that a prior or the name of another rap artist?”

  “This one stuck. Through the preliminary, anyway. He’s out on a million dollars’ bail, but the corpse belonged to the owner of a record label, so he isn’t in show business anymore. He runs a storefront op uptown, dealing hot components to pay his lawyer.”

  “I must’ve been away on vacation when that story broke. Except I haven’t had a vacation in twenty years.”

  “It went down in the corpse’s house in Guam, same day they hanged Saddam Hussein. I think it ran after the weather.”

  “Which storefront?”

  He gave me an address from memory. I repeated it, committing it to memory. I’d sooner have drawn a pistol there than a notebook. He kept a fowling piece under the counter.

  “Johnny Toledo.”

  These were actual names. I don’t make them up.

  I shook my head. “I know Johnny. Scavenging’s his lay.” He was one of those scraphounds Sergeant Mansanard had been griping about.

  “He’s diversified since the accident. Second-story windows aren’t wheelchair accessible.”

  “Still in the same place?”

  “Till they knock it down.”

  “Who’s left?”

  “Eugenia Pappas.”

  “Eugenia, how’d a Eugenia get in there?”

  A buzzer announced a customer at the door. He glanced at a monitor connected to a security camera outside and hit the electronic lock. A squat dark party in a Red Wings cap and a dirty quilted jacket inappropriate for a mild day shuffled in trailing a pair of loose shoelaces, hesitated when he saw me, then picked up his pace as I stepped away from the counter. He had something bulky under the jacket.

  It turned out to be a toaster oven with the cord wrapped around it. When he set it on the counter, the pawnbroker unlatched and slid the Plexiglas shield to one side and transferred the oven to a shelf on his side. He peeled two bills off a roll he took from his pocket. The money disappeared inside the dirty jacket and the man scuttled on out.

  I reached up and closed my mouth.

  The shield slammed back into place with a savage jerk. “Mr. Walters from down the street. Still paying for his wife’s funeral. His apartment must be pretty empty by now. What’s that last thing you said?”

  “Eugenia.”

  “Nick Pappas’ widow. He sold the first stolen eight-track player in Michigan. His old man hijacked truckloads of TVs in forty-eight. His grandfather smuggled crystal sets into the U.S. piece by piece in the assholes of German POWs during World War One. Nick didn’t have any kids of his own, so Eugenia’s carrying on the family business.”

  “She’s practically legitimate.”

  “She’s fucking royalty, and you better treat her that way if you don’t want to wind up picking asphalt out of your teeth.”

  Her address was on a residential street I knew in St. Clair, bang on the river within spitting distance of Ontario, Canada; although no one who lived there ever spat unless he got a mouthful of bad beluga. I’d told Crossgrain wrong. I hadn’t expected a simple smash-and-grab affair to lead anywhere that close to the silk.

  “I’ll be back if those don’t pan out.”

  “Your client’s got deep pockets.”

  “Paris Hilton deep; her personality, not her purse. It shouldn’t cost him another cent. A story like poor Mr. Willis’ could draw every sad sack in three stories to your door with a small appliance under his arm.”

  His face clouded. It doesn’t take long for some people to smell blackmail. “You’re a son of a bitch.”

  I felt like one; but I lit a cigarette and waited.

  He scratched the pubic patch under his lip. “I gave you the cream. Converter boxes are the latest hot ticket. Bud, Johnny, and Mrs. Pappas are always first in line.”

  “Okay. How much to redeem the toaster oven?” I took out my wallet.

  “Forget it, it’s busted. This is the second time I bought it from Willis. He goes through the Dumpster out back.”

  “Sucker.”

  “Just for that I’ll take your money next time.”

  *

  St. Clair seemed a good place to start. It was a nice day to drive and I was dressed for the neighborhood.

  The sun spanked Anchor Bay hard as I circled the shore, drawing bright rings that stung my eyes even through dark glasses. Dorsal-shaped sails leaned steeply into the wind from the Dominion of Canada. It was a little cold out there for the size of the traffic, but the season was drawing to a close. In a few weeks the blue would turn to white and only the canvas and plastic yurts of ice fishermen would break up the Arctic landscape.

  I knew a bit about the Pappases. Alexander, founder of the clan, had taken the experience he’d gained smuggling in crystal sets and invested it in the liquor trade when demand was at its peak. He’d run with the Oakland Sugar House Gang for a spell, then when the largely Jewish Purple Gang took over Detroit and enrolled its children in the highly regarded Catholic school system in St. Clair Shores, moved his base of operations farther north to establish the first Greek Orthodox Church in St. Clair County. He was also credited, when a subordinate stood trial for murdering a Purple, with importing the Texas Defense to Michigan, winning acquittal on grounds that the victim’s death served society’s best interest. No plaque commemorated either event.r />
  The house was one of those German Bauhaus designs that look as if they started out on separate drawing boards. Everything—windows, doors, the slope of the roof—was off-center, making the stately Cape Cod on either side appear even more orderly by comparison. It was an arrangement of cream-colored brick worn smooth at the corners by seventy years of lashing winds and water, overlooking the channel connecting Lake Huron to the rich man’s wading pool of Lake St. Clair, and sized modestly by later standards, six thousand square feet at the outside. No iron horse heads or midget windmills interrupted the clean blue-green sweep of the front lawn. The mailbox at the end of the black asphalt driveway was a duplicate of the house in miniature, with a tiny Greek flag on a pivot.

  I parked to the side of a four-car garage and used a knocker fashioned in bronze after Zeus’s head. With each generation, it seemed, the Pappases had drifted deeper into their cultural heritage. By all accounts, Alexander had applied for U.S. citizenship as soon as he was eligible and forbade everyone in his household from speaking any language other than English.

  Once I’d lifted that knocker I had all I could do to let it fall back against the brass plate. There was still time to lower it gently and skedaddle. It seemed I’d spent my life in the company of gangsters and their children and their grandchildren’s widows, and the conversation was always the same: stalls, threats, and warnings, sometimes naked, sometimes buttered with the watery margarine of store-bought culture, but always to the same point. The family lines of Washington and Shakespeare had played out, but the boys in silk undies seemed never to run short of seed, and whatever the combination was of chromosomes and conditioning that had made them what they were in the beginning, it passed from father to child and from spouse to spouse like the family silver. I’d begun to feel like the tradesman to a specific kind of royalty, with permission to use the coat-of-arms in my Yellow Pages ad: a tommy gun rampant on a field of cement overcoats. I could apply for a pension any time, if they paid off in cash instead of dum-dums.