Monkey in the Middle--An Amos Walker Mystery Read online

  I’d listened, sitting back in my swivel, inhaling carcinogens and contributing to the golden stain on the ceiling. When the silence stretched far enough to indicate he’d finished, I screwed out the butt in my ashtray. “How old were you when the planes hit the World Trade Center?”

  “Three; which is the age most experts agree is when we begin storing memories. My very first was of my parents crouched in front of the TV, watching the towers collapse. I was in my mother’s lap, and she was squeezing me so hard I couldn’t breathe. You could say my physical distress was symbolic of what everyone in the country was going through at the time.”

  “What I meant is that idea of yours is a chunk for someone your age to bite off.”

  The strategy was to put him on the defense. Nothing infuriates youth like drawing the age card. Everyone who comes into my office is a locked safe. Cracking it takes patience and study.

  But Shane Sothern was Fort Knox in a Ziploc bag, or thought he was. He sat back, smiling. He’d gored the bull, slain Goliath, shelled the pistachio nut without even a gap in the seam to get his thumbnail into. He spread his hands. “That’s my advantage. I’m just old enough to remember how much the earlier generation was shaken up by what happened that day, and just young enough to be able to bring a fresh viewpoint as to why. That’s the line I mean to take when I offer my book to publishers.”

  It was getting dark, and the temperature had dropped. I leaned over to switch off the fan, then put on the lamp on the desk. The light reflected off the varnish, leaving dark hollows where his eyes belonged and giving me a glimpse of how he’d look at forty. It wasn’t just a trick of the light. Whatever had brought him into my orbit had shaken him up as much as 9/11 had our two generations.

  I had him then. I asked him who was following him.

  THREE

  You can’t get a good reaction out of this generation. They don’t shock, or at least pretend they don’t; years of high-action films have taught them how to behave. Instead he slung another look back over his shoulder.

  “It’s a door,” I said, “not a clock. It doesn’t change. Who are you expecting to come through it?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess that’s why I’m here.”

  He stopped there, expecting—what? Concern? Sympathy? More omniscience on the part of a grizzled old gumshoe? That little heap of travel-worn scrip on the desk was looking more and more like rent for my patience.

  “Not the guess I’m looking for. What is it: man, woman, bloodhound, a cable bill? Pay-Per-View can haunt you the rest of your life.”

  “I haven’t actually seen anyone. It’s just a feeling I can’t shake.”

  I didn’t sneer. A man who follows people for a living, and is often followed by them, can’t claim sole title to that tingle at the base of the spine. “What else?”

  “Someone broke into my apartment and searched it.”

  “Take anything?”

  “Not that I could tell right away; maybe later, when I miss something I don’t use all the time. Somehow I doubt it. It isn’t something I could report to the police, even if I trusted them. I mean, whoever it was didn’t dump out drawers or rip up upholstery or pull framed pictures apart. The place was in the same mess I left it, nothing specifically out of order, but I have a way of folding clothes and stacking them, and I had the distinct impression they weren’t put back right. Well, can you picture the conversation if I made a complaint?”

  “What kind of neighborhood do you live in?”

  He got cagy again. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “Shane, I get paid by the day. If I spend most of this one giving you detective lessons, the PTA will file a complaint against me for teaching without a certificate. There are blocks in this town where the insurance premiums will cost you a kidney. If you live in one of them, move. That’s advice I won’t charge you for. Full-time bodyguards are another way to go, but they’re expensive, and they didn’t work for JFK.”

  “It’s a respectable building in a middle-class neighborhood,” he said. “There’s a Neighborhood Watch and a regular police patrol. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone was broken into.”

  “Good for you. What’ve you got that would interest a second-story man with something on his mind apart from loot? Writers make notes: records of interviews, hunches, plans for the week ahead. Any dynamite there?”

  He smiled, that same pain-in-the-ass smirk, and patted his chest. He was a mugger’s dream. “I keep all my notes on my phone, and it’s always with me. Whoever went through my place did it when I was out.” The smile twisted sideways and dropped through a crack.

  I nodded at that. “You’re scared he’ll come back when you’re not out. Back up your notes, put them in a bank safe-deposit box, delete all the dynamite from your phone, and give the phone to him if he comes back. If you’re the kind that keeps his mouth shut—and you sure have with me—he doesn’t know what you’ve got and what you haven’t. You go your separate ways, you report the home invasion to the authorities, and you stick this small fortune here in front of me in the same bank with the box. This is a one-time-only deal I’m offering, on account of I’m in mourning. I just found out an old friend died and I’m not in the mood to haggle.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend, Mr. Walker. I have friends too. That’s who I’m concerned about. Even if this person gets what he thinks he wants, he won’t stop there. I’m not alone in this thing.”

  I sat back again, stretching a fresh cigarette between my hands. I didn’t remember taking it out of the pack. “What is the thing? Give me nouns, names. If it’s terrorism, identify the terror.”

  “I can’t give details. Can’t you just follow me for a while, see who’s following me already, and go from there?”

  “That’s a conga line, not an investigation. What if you’re casting more than one shadow and I get in between them? I don’t spring back up as fast as I used to. I’m not Wile E. Coyote. Even when I was, I had a fair idea of what I was up against. Just because I put a price on my life doesn’t make it cheaper than yours.” I pushed the bills back across the desk.

  He left them there for a moment, then gathered them in his fist and stood.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted. It’s not mine to give. Going to the police would bring about everything I want to avoid. I won’t deny I’m afraid for myself, but I’m just as afraid for—other people.”

  The door was three steps away. He used up most of a minute getting there. That was supposed to give me a chance to change my mind.

  Someone had broken my cigarette in half. I dusted the loose tobacco off my palms into the tray. “Tell her good luck,” I said.

  He hesitated half a beat before letting himself out. I waited until I heard his feet on the stairs, then got up and went to work earning the money I’d given back.

  * * *

  Adventure fiction to the contrary, confidential detective work falls more or less equally into two categories: sitting and walking. There’s not a lot of romance in staking out some anonymous door, playing percussion on the steering wheel with your fingers, munching energy bars, and burning tobacco, if you’re lucky enough to be a smoker. And there’s not much more to be found in following someone who doesn’t know he’s being followed. You don’t even have the drama of ducking into doorways when he happens to turn around, or faking interest in a window display; that doubles your chances of being spotted. Instead you just keep on walking and fighting the urge to whistle.

  So far, Shane Sothern wasn’t a student of The Family Circus’s Jeffy: He plotted a steady businesslike course west along Grand River, walking briskly under the streetlights but in no apparent hurry, and never once slowed to look back in the direction he’d come from. It was as easy and uneventful a tail job as I’d had in months.

  Which put my back up. If he’d told the truth about being followed, he’d have turned top every few yards. It put my back up, but it didn’t surprise me. From start
to finish he hadn’t come any nearer the truth than a convict who’d found Christ. I was only shadowing him because curiosity’s the most important tool in my bag and it needs sharpening now and then. And I craved distraction.

  The foot chase ended at Woodward, where a cross-town bus blasted to a stop just as he got to the curb and he climbed aboard. The timing might have been accidental, but I didn’t think so; it would be the last load of the day. Only natives to the route know the schedule and measure their pace to avoid wasting time at the stop. The riddle had stumped more than one Nobel Laureate visiting from out of town.

  I boarded just behind him, while he was shopping for a seat with his back turned my way, and shoved over a passenger near the front, getting an enraged grunt for the effort, but also a place to sit. No further complaint, though; putting up with a certain amount of rudeness is worth what you save on taxi fare. My seatmate, an ursine type in a knit cap and wool coat that made me break out in a sweat from proximity alone, crowded closer to his neighbor and dived back into hibernation in his three-inch portable screen.

  It was the tail end of a long, sodden day that had begun at 5:00 A.M. at eighty-two degrees and humidity to match, with the city sweating through all its pores. The atmosphere hung with stale exhaust, cracked leather, and imperfect hygiene. You couldn’t smoke aboard anymore, but the specter of Chesterfields, Dutch Masters, and Zig-Zag papers fed your addiction from deep in the upholstery. Someone had a flask; a gust of fermented grain cut through the stagnancy like the wind from behind compost, and was just as quickly gone. The driver’s tired, pink-rimmed eyes searched the faces in his tilted mirror for the source, whether in disapproval or thirst wasn’t clear.

  It had been months since I’d used public transportation. I don’t know what keeps it going, apart from the would-be johns who’d had their cars confiscated for soliciting prostitutes on the street. In Detroit, even the poor drive automobiles, leaving the People Mover—the late Mayor Young’s electric train set—to tourists visiting Cobo Hall and the Fisher Building, and the buses to the elderly and weary, shuttling back and forth between corner markets, the casinos, and wherever they called home. In between were the blind pigs, numbers, girls, and maybe even a beer after the bars closed. Anytime, day or night, the city squirmed like nightcrawlers after a heavy rain.

  The last time for me—and it struck me like a blow to the chest—she’d been alive. It caught me looking. I had made my peace, or thought so. I’d gotten the call ninety minutes ago and it had felt as if she’d been dead a year. And here it was again, the wound burst back open and gushing.

  I turned then, coughing into my fist to cover the movement. It was unprofessional. Shane would have to pass me to get off; there was no need to risk tipping him that I was aboard. But I needed to derail my train of thought.

  Luck was with me. The kid who looked like he smelled of chalk dust was staring out his window three rows from the back, watching the scenery deteriorate from theaters and municipal buildings to public housing; the pipe dream of a dull-witted former governor who knew nothing of meth labs and crack houses, now waiting their turn at demolition; had been waiting for decades.

  The bus stopped. I turned back just as he got up, and when he walked past, steadying himself with a hand on the back of my seat, I found interest in what my neighbor was looking at on his phone. I got up before he could tell me to get my own and stepped off as the driver reached for the handle that closed the door, into the Third World of Northwest Detroit.

  FOUR

  I should’ve brought a flash. The streetlights there were spaced out like teeth in a jack-o’-lantern and a third of them hadn’t cast anything but a shadow since the days of the hanging chad. Sothern walked briskly at first, his reedy Ichabod Crane frame fluttering in and out of the scattered ovals of light. The numbness that sometimes replaced the pain in my left leg was wearing off, but I kept up. At least I didn’t have to worry about footsteps; the sidewalks were drifted over with dirt, and enough grass had taken root to anchor it. A fresh deposit of dew on the blades plastered my pants cuffs to my ankles and soaked my socks.

  We made a few right angles. There was no use memorizing streets; those that were posted belonged to housing developments that hadn’t hung around long enough to appear on a city map. I had a general idea of the direction we were going from the lights of the city to the southwest. Their steady reflection off the bellies of the clouds made a neon glow. Every third house was cloaked in an iron grid to keep out squatters, but here and there shivered a tiny flame—orange for kerosene, blue for Sterno. Those, a crowbar, and a pair of bolt-cutters will get you anywhere you need to be after sundown and hold you till dawn. They posed no threat here. The area didn’t attract enough foot traffic to tempt predators.

  Came a stretch where there was no local illumination at all. The sidewalk ended with a bump; the contractor had run out of money halfway through a pour. Now I navigated as much by the crunching of Sothern’s soles on gravel as by sight, and walked on the balls of my feet to keep down my own noise. By now his pace had slowed. Sometimes he paused—maybe to get his bearings in the dark, maybe not.

  I stopped when he stopped. I could hear him breathing sporadically, but I was better at holding mine from practice. This happened often enough to make his case that he was being tailed, or thought he was. He was wary suddenly. Maybe I’d lost my touch.

  He had manners. He kept off the grass where there was grass, even if five U.S. presidents had done their damage and moved on since anyone had bothered to post a sign. We wound along hypothetical streets and never so much as cut the corner off a burned-out lawn. Now and then a set of headlamps slung light our way, always two or three streets over and never head-on. They didn’t belong to our world.

  Suddenly he made a square turn; if I hadn’t been paying attention I’d have gone right on past.

  Now he was approaching a gray-white oblong, a structure only in theory, and one he’d easily have missed himself if he hadn’t been there before.

  In that instant, I knew where I was.

  It was a rounded mass of glazed concrete that might have been baked in a kiln right there on the spot. One day on your way home from work you passed a scalped empty lot, and the next morning the place was there and open for business; and business had been good for a long time. The bay doors had slid up and down to the constant clatter of chain pulleys as traffic moved in and out. The doors were missing now, snagged by scrap rats, making black open spaces like the gaping mouths of a row of ghosts. Die-cast metal letters had spelled the trade name across its front, but those too had gone to scrap, leaving only their hollow outlines: ATLAS MOTORS.

  It had had its day of infamy, then faded into a vague image on the edge of recollection, lost in a succession of scandals that had replaced one another with the speed of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. To most locals, it was the place where a woman’s body had been found pickled in an oil drum, or maybe where Jimmy Hoffa had stopped for gas on the way to his last supper. For sure it was something bad.

  The real story was more colorful.

  At its peak, Atlas was the Wall Drug, the Crossroads Mall, the Santa’s Workshop of chop shops. Crain’s Detroit Business compared it to the Ford River Rouge plant: A single set of stolen wheels rolled in one end and emerged two hours later a fleet, stripped, reassembled, and washed in the blood of the lamb with a brand-new Vehicle ID Number and a title that would hold up under a microscope. When it comes to cars, no place compares to the Motor City; none. But Atlas was unique. There, grand theft auto was just an illegal front for a bigger illegal operation.

  Under the Kilpatrick administration, it became the main payoff point for City Hall and the Detroit Police Department. Bureaucrats and detective inspectors stopped in for a tune-up and left with cash. Builders, on the other hand, stopped in with cash and left with a city contract.

  It couldn’t last; that’s one reality the grafters never understand. Atlas got off easy. When the mayor finally collided with the federal jus
tice system, the garage skimmed through with a minimum of notoriety: The press found the story just too big to report all the details and muddle the issue. When the FBI took over the city, the management and staff made the best of the confusion and relocated to New Orleans, where the corruption is open and aboveboard.

  Sothern’s feet scraped cement. I stopped at the edge of the pad that sloped up to the front of the building.

  At the top of the grade he spun and faced me. I could just make out his shape against the pale backdrop. I froze. I didn’t know how well he could see in my direction, but ducking for cover wasn’t an option. A mosquito whined in my ear, landed like a seaplane on a damp spot on the side of my neck, and pierced the skin. I let it drink its fill. After it left, drunken with bloat, the itching burned like a hot spark. I let that go on too.

  The city was never more quiet than it was in the thirty seconds we stood without moving; it was as if a frame of film had stuck in the projector. Then he turned back toward the building, and the picture jumped back into motion. He hadn’t seen anything.

  He spoke suddenly. It was like a firecracker exploding at my feet. But noise was all it was. His voice was too low to make out what he said from just a few yards away.

  A shadow shifted inside the building, or maybe it was just a sense that molecules were shifting. Whatever it was, it emerged from the bay far enough to cast a silhouette against the dirty white front of the garage. The figure turned its head slightly, and enough dusty light reflected off it for me to make out the profile. A hand touched his arm and the two turned and started inside.

  Just then a car turned a corner a block over. Its lights raked the front of the garage through a space where a building had stood until July 1967. The pair jumped. The woman—I saw now it was a woman—turned her head away. At the same time, Sothern swung square around, and we were face-to-face again; but the glare from behind me must have been too bright and his pupils too slow. When it left and darkness rushed back in, he turned back, but now he was alone. The cuckoo had ducked back into the clock.