Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Read online

  “Are you saying you don’t want the job?”

  “Not me. I don’t have any practice at that. Just being straight with a client I’d like to use as a reference next time I meet someone in a snazzy restaurant.”

  “No police. I said that.”

  “Okay. I’ll need a picture. And what was her maiden name? She may go back to it.” I shook loose my notebook.

  “Collier.” He spelled it. “And here.” He took a three-by-five photo printed on glossy stock from an inside breast pocket and sailed it across the table.

  I caught it. She was a redhead, and the top of that line, athletically built in a sleeveless top with one arm raised to smooth back her hair. She looked like someone who would wind up married to a full partner in an investment company with gray temples and an office with a view of two countries. It would be in her high school yearbook under Predictions.

  She knew how to work a camera from the supply side. Smiles can make you popular; pouts can make you rich. I stuck the picture in my notebook and asked him where I could find Lloyd Debner.

  “He’s with Paxton and Ring on West Michigan. But I told you he doesn’t know where Cecelia is.”

  “Maybe he should be asked a different way.”

  *

  The sun was as pale as if it had been dug up from the ground. Our January thaw had come right on time in mid-February, followed by another Arctic episode broken up by two days in the seventies, which were capped off by the biggest blizzard in years. We were three weeks short of Easter, and where the earth had turned to snot under the pavement, stalagmites of ice had formed in the potholes like miniature tiger traps. Everywhere else it’s called climate change. Here we call it Michigan.

  For once I’d been on top of the season, getting the radiator flushed of antifreeze during one of the warm days. Now I could smoke a cigarette in the time it took to start the motor.

  An Asian accent at Paxton & Ring told me over my cell that Lloyd Debner would be tied up in a meeting the rest of the morning. Since his building was a short hop from mine, I bribed the vagrant who lived in the grown-over parking area in front of the abandoned coffee shop across the street not to vandalize the Cutlass and went upstairs to throw away my mail. When I’d done that I called Barry Stackpole.

  “Who’s working the cop house since you kicked yourself upstairs to cyberspace?” I asked when we were through maligning each other’s family tree.

  “When you read the News, you know.” As always he sounded like a kid whose testicles had just dropped. We were born only a couple of months apart; but he hadn’t spent the time since then curing his vocal cords with tobacco.

  “I never know when to look for it on my doorstep. Is it Thursday and Sunday, or Tuesday and Saturday? I remember when news meant new.”

  “Also when ‘cyberspace’ was still in the dictionary. Who’s dead this time?”

  “Most of my cases don’t involve murder.”

  “Only the ones I read about.”

  “It’s a wandering wife job. I’m trying to find out if the cops pulled in any Jane Does in the past week, either horizontal or in the upright and locked position.”

  “Why ask the squirrels? Go straight to the tree.”

  “Officer Krupke answers questions with questions. The client wants it OTR.”

  “If clients didn’t, you wouldn’t have clients. FYI, I don’t gather most of my information from the Net just to put it back on the Net: That’d be like jerking off in front of a mirror. I still get it the old-fashioned way.”

  “You’re getting too old to B-and-E the FBI building.”

  “OMG, you’re dense. I hie myself down to Thirteen Hundred, or wherever the department’s outsourcing its officers these days, and read it off the blotter, just like Jimmy Olsen. GMD?”

  “I just ran out of alphabet. I don’t know that last one.”

  “Get My Drift?”

  “OK. F.U.”

  “What’s this Jane look like?”

  “I’ll fax you her picture.”

  “Bullshit. You notice I didn’t say BS.”

  “Shows how much you know, smart guy. There’s a chain drugstore down the street. They won’t sell me Vicodin anymore, but their fax service is for everybody. What’s your number?”

  “Hang on, I have to look it up.”

  “You?”

  “Shows how much you know. I only keep the machine for historical value. When the e-file came in, fax went to live with the crank-up phonograph.”

  I said he’d have it within a half hour, hung up, and sat looking at the wallpaper across from the desk. The butterfly wings had faded since I’d put it up, but the paste still held. Meanwhile a dozen technologies had hatched, fluttered for a while, and died. Some butterflies are born without mouth parts. They aren’t expected to live long enough to get hungry.

  Paxton & Ring occupied two floors of a respectable-looking building that had harbored a string of local banks dating back to Jesse James, with nonfunctional columns in front. It was coming on lunchtime, and a lobby the size of Carlsbad Caverns was a riot of men and women in knee-length coats and leather gloves breaking for the feedlot; but I had a hunch Lloyd Debner was the type of upwardly mobile junior executive who ate at his desk. There was no guard to direct me this time, just a square black menu with white snap-letters on the wall by the elevators. I listened to “Sweet Caroline” on the way up and for the rest of the day.

  On my way to the reception area I swept past a pair of men conversing in the hallway, almost missing it when one said, “I hear what you’re saying, Lloyd, but the Dow Jones is speaking louder.”

  I braked and spun about. A man in his early thirties with a fashionable five-o’clock shadow was listening to his grayhead companion with an elaborate show of patience, his hands in the pockets of his suit pants; I could see they were balled into fists.

  “Tim, the market’s a nervous old lady. When a coolie sneezes in China, it drops below ten thousand. Then he blows his nose, gets back to raking the rice, and it shoots up to fifteen. You can’t set your watch by a clock without an hour hand.”

  “Rice is grown underwater. I’m not sure you rake it.”

  I nosed in. “Lloyd Debner? Amos Walker. I’m—”

  “Second,” he said, without taking his eyes off the other man. “We’re talking a million, tops. Your firm spends more than that in a year on paper clips. This one will bring in a billion that same year. You know the difference between a million and a billion?”

  “I think I do. In first grade, when the other chaps were counting marbles, I was counting dollars.” I couldn’t figure out if his West End accent was real; that chaps stuck out like a monocle on a frog.

  “I wonder. A million dollars in singles would stack three feet high. A billion would reach the top of the Penobscot Building.”

  “Why would anyone ever want to stack them at all? Especially in the street, and in Detroit.”

  I said, “This won’t take long.”

  “Make an appointment. Tim, you can joke all you—”

  “It’s about Cecelia Wynn,” I said. “We can talk about her out here in the hall if you like. Tim won’t mind, will you, Tim?”

  Debner looked at me for the first time. His eyes were set close in a narrow face atop a body that looked as if he’d sprouted in an orchard with trees planted too close on either side, his shoulders pinched into peaks alongside his stalk of a neck. In that situation there’s no way to grow but up, but he hadn’t the material to reach beyond six feet. I couldn’t see what Cecelia saw; but I wasn’t married to Alec Wynn.

  He brushed a well-kept hand over his stubble. “Tim, I’ll catch you later.”

  “Maybe then we can guess the number of beans in a jar.” The grayhead chuckled as he went down the hall.

  “Who’d you say you were?” Debner’s earnest tenor became a spaniel’s bark when no billions were involved.

  “Amos Walker. I still am, but a little older. I’m conducting a private investigation on behalf of A
lec Wynn.”

  “You came to the wrong place—and incidentally may have destroyed a deal I’ve been working on for months, that will involve thousands of jobs. What happened between Mrs. Wynn and myself is all over.”

  “I’m interested in when it wasn’t.”

  He glanced up and down the hall, like a spy in a bad movie. There were a few people in it, men in suits, women in the same suits cut to exhibit their narrow waists and treadmill calves, hair plugs, tennis bracelets, and exposed elbows galore with cell phones clamped in place. “Come on. I can give you a couple of minutes.”

  “I might need more.”

  He led me into a men’s room two doors down, upholstered in white marble, with mahogany stalls and urinals you could walk into without ducking your head: GENTLEMEN was lettered in flecked black on a frosted glass panel in the door. We stared at a guy combing what was left of his hair in front of the long mirror over the sinks until he put away his comb and picked up a maroon leather briefcase and left for his loan appointment.

  Debner evidently was a fan of bad spy movies. He bent down to see if there were any feet in the stalls, flung open two at random to make sure no one was crouching with his feet on a toilet lid, straightened, and brushed again at his baby whiskers. Either shave or grow a beard; but mine had grown too gray for display just as the fashion came in, so I may be prejudiced.

  “Credentials,” he said.

  I unshipped the leather folder with the state ID and county sheriff’s star. He pointed at the bling. “Is that legitimate?”

  “Clap if you believe.” I put it away. “You can confirm it with Wynn, if you like. I put him on speed-dial.” I brought out the cell.

  He shook his head. “I believe you. I haven’t risen far enough in this profession to become the target of blackmail.” He looked in the mirror and moved his silver necktie a centimeter to the right. “I don’t see Cecilia when we pass on the street. I had all my phone numbers changed, my e-mail address, after we got back from Jamaica so she couldn’t contact me.”

  “Jamaica, that’s where you went?”

  “I rented a bungalow outside Kingston. Quaint word, bungalow: Sounds charming and inexpensive. Take my word, it’s much more the second than the first. They don’t mention poisonous snakes in the brochure.

  “Worst mistake I ever made,” he went on, “and I’m not talking about the vipers. I was headed for a junior partnership at Reiner when I happened to fall for the boss’s wife. Now I’m back to arranging back-door deals with corrupt Third World bureaucrats for pennies on the Euro.”

  “Who isn’t? How’d you and Cecelia get on?”

  “Like a couple of doves. So good we crammed a two-week reservation into three days and came back home.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Different drummers.” He found a stray hair in an eyebrow and plucked at it between finger and thumb. He kept missing it. Everyone does, in a mirror.

  “Not good enough.”

  He grinned; boyishly, if he was that stuck on himself. “I didn’t think so. To begin with, she’s a health nut. I run and take a little wheat germ myself sometimes—you don’t even have to point a gun at me—but I draw the line at dropping vitamins and herb pills at every meal. She must’ve taken sixteen capsules every time we sat down to eat. It can drive you blinkers.”

  “Blinkers?”

  “Sorry. Tim went to London once. His pseudo-Brit’s contagious. Batshit. People in restaurants probably thought she was a drug addict.”

  “Sure she wasn’t?”

  “She was pretty open about taking them if she was. She filled the capsules herself from plastic bags. Her purse rattled like a used car.”

  A fat character in a blue suit, pink shirt with a white collar, and lemon-colored tie came in, hesitated when he saw us standing near the sinks, and nodded at Debner. “Lloyd.”

  “Mr. Zinzser.”

  He looked at me, politely not moving his gaze below my chin to take in my ready-made suit, glanced toward the stalls, then washed his hands. Debner used the time to inspect his stubble for lint.

  “Owns the old Kern block,” he told me after the fat man waddled out.

  “You don’t have to be rich not to want to use the toilet in front of an audience.”

  “Look, I’m late for a meeting.”

  “Not at half-past noon. Your story’s leaky. You don’t cut a vacation short just because your bed partner does wild garlic.”

  “It just didn’t work out, okay?”

  “You were sleeping with the boss’s wife, a man who could come down on you so hard your great-grandchildren would be born midgets. It had to work out just to stop her from going to Wynn with her tale of scorn.”

  “Scorn. Seriously?”

  “The old sayings are always the best.” I waited.

  He finished grooming his pelt and grinned at his reflection. I bet that melted the widows looking for a place to stash the life insurance. “If this gets around I’m washed up. Not just with women. Don’t be fooled by all the marble and Armani; we’re in the jungle. Virility’s the real coin of the realm.”

  “Whether or not you can get it up doesn’t have to get around. I’m just looking for Cecelia Wynn.”

  “It wasn’t that,” he said; but he said it too fast. “Not the way you think. There’s not a thing wrong with the throttle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She said she wasn’t satisfied.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “You mean, ‘Yeah’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never had to pitch to a roomful of investors. In my line of work you don’t get much chance to expand your vocabulary.”

  “Yeah. Well, no one’s ever told me that before. I’m not used to complaints.”

  “So why take this one so hard? Excuse the expression.”

  “Damn it, I said it wasn’t that! Look, we never had this conversation, okay?”

  “As far as I’m concerned we never met. Except I have to report to Alec Wynn.”

  “I guess it’s okay if you tell him. He might give me a break down the line. One rejected lover to another, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  We shook hands. He squeezed a little harder than I figured he did normally.

  THREE

  I couldn’t get a signal through all the polished stone in the downstairs lobby. I dropped two quarters into a pay telephone in a bank of five, without any other customers, bombed out on Wynn’s cell, recycled the coins, and fought my way through two executive assistants before Alec Wynn came on the land line at Reiner, Switz, Galsworthy, and Wynn. His voice was a full octave deeper than it had been in person. I guessed it was that way in front of stockholders, too.

  “I had the damned thing turned off,” he said. “What news?”

  “If it was my wife missing I’d keep it on, but that’s just me. How come when I asked you about hobbies you didn’t tell me your wife was into herbs?”

  “Who’s Herb? She with him?”

  “Herbs; silent H.” I told her what Debner had said about the capsules.

  “I haven’t dined with my wife in months. Most of my business these days is conducted in restaurants, and she gobbles down Cobb salads or whatnot with the women she’s disposed to call her girlfriends. Really, what married couple eats at the same table now?”

  “I wouldn’t know. The last time I was married there was only one telephone company. I guess you can’t tell me the name of her herbalist.”

  “Herbalist?”

  “Sort of an oregano guru. Most people, when they get into the health jag, get into it up to their eyebrows. There’s no GPS yet to direct them to active old age, so they go to professionals.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I work this job, Mr. Wynn; it’s not a fantasy football league. A lot of the runaways I trace go to religion before they go off the radar. Some of them go to politics and sign up as volunteers. Others go to drugs. The
rest take their restlessness to whatever quack promises to improve their lives with branch water and underbrush served up in expensive containers.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that. I improve my life with single-malt Scotch.”

  My respect for him went up a degree. “What about her girlfriends?”

  “Possibly. All told I suspect she’s logged in more time with them than her husband of six years. Try Patti Lochner. That’s Patti with an i. I suppose you might call her the ringleader of their litter of cats.”

  I scribbled it in my book. “Not a friend of yours, I’m thinking.”

  “Nor of Cecelia’s. In every cadre of women, there’s one who’s poison to all the rest. The best poisons taste sweet the first time.”

  “I’m liking Patti. I’m just wondering why she wasn’t already in my book.”

  Air blew out on his end. “She should’ve been. This is like being burglarized. In the first shock of the event, when you report to the police, you overlook some of the most important things that were taken. You miss them only when something brings them to mind. Not that anyone would object to Patti’s absence; it’s a rotten metaphor.

  “Now that I think of it,” he went on, “I should have mentioned her first off. If anyone was born to cause trouble in a happy marriage, her name is Patti Lochner.”

  I turned to a crisp new page. “Tell me about Patti.”

  *

  The house in Grosse Pointe Woods was tucked just off the U of a cul-de-sac lined with baby grand mansions on wedge-shaped lots, a geometrical miracle: Local ordinances prohibited contractors from building too close to neighboring property lines. Dwarf trees squatted like Oompa-Loompas in tidy rows and there wasn’t a tiny windmill or whimsical mailbox in sight; the local property owners’ association would see to that.

  It was a doll’s house on steroids, at first glance a cute little construction of red brick with glass inserts on either side of the front door, reinforced with filigreed iron to discourage smashing and entering. Decorative rocks bordered flower beds dozing under straw pallets, with red cedar boxes under the windows.