Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Page 3

  “Some whole lives are filled with such nights.”

  “I know. I do not complain. I’m just saying, people see I’m young and famous and rich and so they think I am lucky. They say you must have lived to deserve so much. There are twelve-year-old prostitutes walking the streets of the city of my birth, girls whose parents died against walls because they gave food to a rebel. They have fifty-year-old faces. They have lived.”

  I leaned into the bathroom and flushed my cigarette stub. When I came back out she hadn’t moved. “When did Gilia Cristobal come back from the dead the second time?” I asked.

  She nodded, in response to nothing. She was still thinking about the child prostitutes. “I said you were one smart hombre. The death notice that appeared in the newspaper was inaccurate. She was close to death from infantile paralysis, but she recovered. After her parents separated, she came to America with her mother, using her mother’s maiden name. Here she is Jillian Rubio. She wrote me the first time a year ago. She enclosed copies of her birth certificate and immigration papers. Also a newspaper clipping in Spanish with the full particulars of the poisoning of the rebel leader’s woman.”

  “That took detective work.”

  “As I said, in my country everything is for sale. The official I bribed knew who I was, I could tell. He probably made as much money selling the information to the Rubio woman as I paid him.”

  “Bad move. He stood to earn a lot more from you for keeping it to himself.”

  “If he were smart, he’d have been in charge of much more than the office of records. The same cannot be said of Jillian Rubio. I’ve been paying her five thousand dollars a month for a year for the privilege of using her birth name.”

  “You could have paid to get her off your neck anytime. Why now?”

  “But I am not. I’m offering to pay to get her back on my neck.”

  The U.S. attorney general was speaking. Someone had tried to hijack a plane with a glue gun, and interior decorators had been added to the profile list. I switched off the set. I’d only turned it on to raise her confidence.

  “Does this suite come with a bar?”

  She shook her head. “I can call room service.”

  I shook my own head. “I thought maybe I’d been drinking and forgot. Let me back up a panel. The job’s to ask your blackmailer to go on blackmailing you.”

  “Yes and no. Is there much construction on the street where you live?”

  “I live in Detroit. No one’s constructed anything since Henry Ford was a junior.”

  “Bad example, then. Okay, maybe you’ve been stuck someplace where you had to put up with a constant noise. After a few minutes you think you’ll go crazy if it doesn’t stop. An hour goes by, then another. It goes on for a week, day and night. Suddenly it stops, and the silence is so loud you think you’ll go crazy if the noise doesn’t start up again.”

  I grunted. The murk continued to clear.

  “The details are simple. On the thirteenth of each month, I arrange to place the cash in small bills at Jillian Rubio’s feet. She goes away and I don’t have to think about her for another month. If I miss a payment, everything I’ve told you goes to the police. If anything happens to her, same thing. Remember, she thinks I’m a murderer, so she’s fixed things so the information will be passed along in the event of her death or disappearance for three months.”

  “It doesn’t take much fixing. All she needs is a safe-deposit box. In this country, a tax examiner has to be present when a box belonging to a deceased party is opened. Anything suspicious becomes public record.”

  “In my country, they pocket the loot. I’d prefer it in this case. Once it becomes known I lied on my visa application, I’ll be deported home, where I’ll stand trial, either for murder or treason or both. I might as well opt for both. They can only hang me once.”

  “The three-month bit could be a gag, or she could have left the stuff with a friend. Probably not, though. Any friend a blackmailer is inclined to make can be trusted as long as no one sneezes. Maybe her box rent comes due every quarter. The bank would have to have the examiner in to open it if she defaults. When did the noise stop?”

  “On the thirteenth of November. The money was there; she wasn’t. I thought she’d been detained and would be in touch to arrange another date. I have no way of contacting her. She always called me. She didn’t, and she also missed December and January. Next week is three months.” She made a hoarse little noise of amusement. “I ought to write a song about the situation; it’s ironic enough to go platinum. As long as she went on bleeding me, I knew I was safe. Now she’s stopped, and I can only wait for the other shoe to drop. That is the expression, isn’t it? The other shoe.”

  “Uh-huh. She might be in jail or the hospital. Or she might be sacked out at home in front of Days of Our Lives, letting you work up a lather while she gets ready to raise her rates. Her kind is very good at psychology. It’s their only weapon and they spend a lot of time polishing it.”

  “Or she might be dead.”

  “She might be dead,” I agreed. “Even a blackmailer can get run over by an innocent bus.”

  “The flaw in the system. Except I don’t suppose she cared about acts of God when she set it up. Can you find her? If she is dead and I know it, I can at least be prepared for what’s about to happen. I can always run.”

  She hadn’t convinced even herself of that. Her upper lip alone stood two stories high on billboards throughout the lower forty-eight, promoting her national tour, and you couldn’t tune in MTV without seeing her stamp holes in Standards and Practices on one of her videos. She’d need more than Groucho glasses and a fright wig to go underground anywhere in the free world.

  “Anyone can be found,” I said. “The catch is the deadline. The FBI has been looking for a couple of mad bombers since the sixties, and I’ve got exactly one-tenth of one-thousandth of a percent of their manpower. The only promise I can make is it won’t be next week. That would probably hold even if I knew where you’ve been meeting her to make the drop, but it would be a place to set up base camp. You haven’t told me.”

  “It hasn’t always been the same place. Anyway, I’m not the one who’s been making the drop.” She tasted the phrase “making the drop,” not without pleasure. Everyone likes to talk like Joe Friday if he doesn’t have to do it to eat. “You’ll need to ask my business manager about the more current details. I put it in his hands.”

  “Nice to have a business manager you can trust with a toy like your life. They have such a good track record with life savings. Did you sic him on Caterina first?”

  “I apologized for that.”

  She very specifically had not; but I let it flap. Unnecessary dead ends go with the work, like mad dogs and mailmen. Also I liked her. I liked the lift of her jaw and the way she looked at you closely when you talked, listening hard, and the snap of light in her eye when she heard something she didn’t like, which in another latitude might have been followed by a stiletto from a garter belt.

  Or a needle filled with Stelazine. Her Mata Hari defense had more holes in it than Mata Hari.

  “So what’s the name of this manager, and where do I find him? One missing person per case is my limit.”

  “Hector Matador.”

  This was a new voice, or rather an old voice in a new venue. I could have placed that guttural Hispanic accent, heavy on the H and dentilinguals, given the time and the circumstances, but as it was all I had to do was turn around. He’d let himself in the door from the sitting room, making no more noise than he’d made listening from the other side. Of course he’d have a key card to the suite.

  He’d put on a little weight on the block, but you could still thread a needle with his narrow hips and shoulders and narrower head, if you had the right size needle and resisted the temptation to turn it around and shove it through his heart. He still wore his hair in little-boy bangs, although these days the black was probably aged in the bottle, and he hadn’t lost his fondness for
fawn-colored suits, pink silk neckties, and bench-made loafers. It would be the great-grandson of the outfit he’d had on the last time I saw him, when my testimony before a Wayne County jury had sentenced him to life imprisonment for first-degree murder.

  FIVE

  “Well, well,” I opened; and no one ever sounded more like the second act of The Chambermaid’s Confession. “Has it been life already? I still have a license plate with your mark on it.”

  Matador found a crumb on his shirt cuff and flicked it off with a shiny-nailed finger. “Still a shitter. The cops liked someone else more than they liked me. I gave them what they wanted, and they gave me a parole. What a country. You ought to treat me with more respect. I recommended you for this job.”

  “I recommended you for your last one. How’d you land this gig, references from Noriega?”

  He pressed his lips tight and paled behind his pox scars. A sense of humor is one high they don’t export from Bógota.

  “Hector got me my first singing job,” Gilia said. “He was the man to see in Los Angeles if you wanted to bypass the man at the door.”

  “He always did have connections in Hollywood.”

  Light snapped in her eyes. “I feel like I walked in in the middle. He told me he’d seen your work close up.”

  “He had it backwards. I saw him put three slugs into Frankie Acardo across the street from my building some years back. The Cosa Nostra didn’t miss Frankie all that much, but we had a Renaissance going at the time. All those unclaimed bodies clogging the gutters don’t help the convention trade.”

  “Nobody saw who shot Acardo,” Matador said.

  “That’s true. You were just taking the February air in the shotgun seat of a stolen Camaro with the window down, five minutes before Frankie strolled out of my office into a lead storm.”

  “I did not know the car was stolen. You could not get good help even then.”

  Gilia said, “Hector told me all about his record. I could hardly hold it against him. Police are the same everywhere. A loose fit is tight enough to close their files.”

  “It took less than a week for the Colombians to sweep out the Sicilians after Frankie.” I wasn’t even listening to myself. I was tiring of the argument. Seeing Hector Matador ranging free was enough to tire out a tire. “You want another detective. I’m running a special this month on wardrobe mistresses. Write out a check for five hundred and I’ll find my own way out.”

  Matador’s smile was a paper cut in his narrow face. There wasn’t life enough in his dark eyes to sustain it that high up.

  “The lady has confided in you. Where would she be if every man she trusted with her secret just walked out? It is like apartment keys. The more of them that you allow to float about …” He shrugged a South American shrug.

  I smiled back. “You vouched for my good character.”

  There was an absence of verbal exchange, full of rattles and gongs rung backward. All it needed was a gaunt yellow dog and three more men in ponchos. Gilia let out a lungful of air.

  “Let him go, Hector. I’ll get my checkbook.”

  Matador didn’t look at her. “You can listen to me talk while she fills it out. In private. You have nothing to lose, gringo.”

  “Not in a hotel room,” I agreed. “An alley’s another country.”

  “I have a small suite across the hall. Just we two. Benito’s responsibility is to stand in front of Miss Cristobal’s door.”

  “I’m not worried about Benito. He comes at you from in front.”

  He opened his coat with a dreamy movement to show he had nothing beneath it but his shirt. There was no room for anything else beneath it but Matador. His tailor worked in subatomic particles. “The restrictions of parole,” he said, almost apologetically.

  “After you, Dreyfus.”

  He didn’t know what that meant, but he resented it anyway. He rebuttoned his coat and turned his back on me.

  Out in the hall, Benny asked him a question in Spanish and he spat a stream back, too fast for me to follow even if Señora Lipschitz and her compound subjunctives weren’t as dead as ninth grade. The big man stiffened, graying a little, and nodded jerkily. Neither of them looked at me and so I decided I was the subject of the conversation. Matador fished out a key card and let us into a room cater-corner from Gilia’s.

  The suite was as small as a suite could be and still share a floor with the one across the hall. The sitting room came with a pocket-size refrigerator and microwave and an armchair upholstered in stiff fabric, unused since the showroom. The bedroom was just a room with a bed and related furniture in it and on the top sheet lay a Franchi Magnum shotgun, assorted semiautomatic pistols with chrome and composition finishes, a couple of tasers, and a Korean assault rifle with plastic stock and handgrips and a magazine the size of a toaster. Boxes of shells and police-issue speedloaders finished making a mess out of the housekeeper’s hospital corners. Five men as large as Benny, one white, one black, the rest as brown as Mexican heroin, stood around the bed in shirtsleeves and clip-on neckties, monkeying with the cylinders and slides of additional handguns. They looked up when Matador entered.

  He threw them out with his chin. They belted and shoulderholstered their weapons, climbed into their Big-and-Tall suit coats, and left us, leaving deep footprints in the pile carpet.

  “I didn’t know singing was hazard work,” I said. “Or was that the chorus?”

  “Miss Cristobal averages three death threats per month. That is two more than John Lennon. She is permitted to carry a concealed weapon in every state, but where would she conceal it? All these men are licensed private investigators. Not that any of them has ever investigated anything. They serve but one client, and her full-time. The black fellow trained with the U.S. Marshals. He can punch a three-hundred-grain round through a two-inch oak board from six hundred yards.”

  “Handy, if she’s ever attacked by a dining room suite. What about close up?”

  “That’s Benito. He’s qualified in all the standard forms of Oriental dirty fighting. You caught him at a bad moment earlier. Yes, I am aware of everything that goes on within walking distance of Miss Cristobal. He has been reprimanded.”

  “And he’s still manufacturing hormones? You’ve mellowed. Does the parole board know about all this ordnance?”

  He leaned across the bed, grabbed the coverlet, and twitched it over the firearms. “This is between you, me, and the sheets. Strictly speaking, it is permitted as long as I don’t actually handle the weapons, but my p.o. has a linear mind. He thinks guns lead to shooting. And so this is a secret you have on me as well.”

  “Close friendships have been built on less,” I said. “But not today.”

  He sighed a Latin sigh. “You are an unforgiving soul, Anglo. The People of the State of Michigan have decided my debt is repaid. Is it not lonely to be the solitary holdout?” He perched himself at the end of a love seat covered in industrial-strength chintz, crossed his slim legs, and spent a minute adjusting the crease in his pants. All he needed now was a slim Cohiba, and he selected one from a calliope-shaped case made of glossy brown leather.

  “Lonely as the grave. Which is where I almost was when you turned my police bodyguard after I talked to the grand jury. I’m holding the grudge. Call me petty.”

  “That was not personal. Nor is the assignment Miss Cristobal has offered. Would you have accepted if I were not in the picture?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I haven’t that luxury. I do not know the Anglo mind. If I offered to remove myself from the situation, would you reconsider?”

  “I might, if you used one of those removers on the bed.”

  He looked sad. “You may select one, if that is truly how you feel. It should not be difficult for an experienced man such as yourself to arrange the evidence consistent with a self-preservation defense. It’s unlikely the Dearborn Police will lean very heavily upon the forensic anomalies. El muerto es solo verdad.”

  “The boys from the c
horus might be a little more difficult to arrange.” I wondered where the conversation was headed. People like him played Russian roulette with no empty chambers, and they were just too polite to go first.

  “They are paid to protect Miss Cristobal. If they took a bullet for anyone else they would be fired for moonlighting.” He made an elegant gesture with the cigar, which he hadn’t set fire to. “Since I cannot appeal to your emotions, perhaps your bank is the more direct route. Miss Cristobal promised you a bonus of ten percent of the seventy-five thousand dollars Señora Muñoz was alleged to have cost her. I offer you the entire seventy-five thousand in return for evidence that the woman who calls herself Jillian Rubio is alive or dead. This, too, is a bonus. You will receive your customary five hundred dollars per day and expenses meanwhile. But only until the thirteenth of this month. After that the point is inconsecuencial. Moot?” He lifted his eyebrows.

  I left them up there. His English vocabulary was better than Lord Cecil Harrumph’s and he knew it. “Does the lady of the house know what her money’s doing when she’s not around?”

  “She spent that much on a dress. You may mention the transaction to her. I insist upon it.”

  “If I took the offer, and I’m not going to, I couldn’t hope to collect without a place to start. I know five hundred a day is what she tips limo drivers, but they take her where she wants to go.”

  “I can provide what you need. Miss Cristobal is too famous to go skulking about with blood money in her purse; she cannot step out without trailing a string of paparazzi, which is a class I would eliminate if I were not such a reformed character. But I am speaking of paying extortion. It has never been my custom to entrust such an errand to anyone but myself. You may say that in my late profession we encouraged loyalty by slaying those who betrayed us. That is an expensive alternative, and hardly erases the original transgression. I am the one who made the drops.”