Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro Page 3

  I told him the job. There wasn’t any reason not to. The client was dead and I was in charge of an ashcan.

  “Huh. I thought Aunt Beryl died years ago.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Better than she knew me. I put her place under surveillance after Delwayne rabbited. That was S.O.P. with a long successful history going back to Dillinger, but it hit the wall in the sixties. Those revolutionary types had discipline; cut off all ties to friends and relatives when they went underground. In most cases the ties were half cut already, but even so.” His eyes got a distant look. It didn’t last more than a second, and afterward I wasn’t sure it had been there at all. “You learn a lot of shit when you plant a bug in a whorehouse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He drank.

  I gave up waiting. There was more there than a couple of off-color stories, but I wasn’t going to get them then or ever.

  I took a swallow, teetered the can on my knee. “So did any of these files come home with you?”

  The den was small and pine-paneled, with a dartboard on the door, a half-grown rolltop desk, and more family pictures on the walls, most of them much older than those outside. A boy wearing a first draft of Burlingame’s square features posed in a cap and knickers in a monochrome snapshot with a pretty girl about fourteen, who might have been an older sister. I’d never heard him mention family apart from the one he’d started from scratch.

  He’d gone in five minutes ahead, then unlocked the door. A portable file box stood on the desk with its lid open. It had probably come from a floor safe, possibly under the desk where he’d have to pull out a bottom drawer to open it. Other security features would apply. He knew the black-bag boys back to front.

  The tabs were labeled AUTO, CHECKING, DENTAL, HOUSEHOLD; domestic dodges like that. They might have stood for ABSCAM, CASTRO, DALLAS, and HOFFA. Then again the files might have contained automobile receipts, checking statements, dentist’s bills, and his homeowner’s insurance policy. The file might have been a decoy to distract me from a secret sliding panel or a hidden midget with a photographic memory.

  “No computer?”

  He shook his head. “You can burn or shred paper, but no one can totally erase a hard drive. I gave notice the day I came back from lunch and found the office troll hooking one up in my office. I didn’t train to be a typist.” He handed me a gray cardboard folder with dog-eared corners.

  I looked at the tab. “ ‘office supplies’?”

  “Don’t waste time trying to figure out my code. It’s been tried. You’re holding the sum total of the Bureau’s knowledge on the subject of Delwayne Garnet.”

  I hefted it. It was an inch and a half thick, with a gusseted bottom to prevent bursting. “You collected this much on a punk fuse? Hoover must have sent the chairman of the senate appropriations committee a fruitcake that year.”

  “This is nothing. You should see your file.”

  With his deadpan, you could never tell when he was serious. “How long can I keep it?”

  “You can’t.”

  I stroked the plastic tab with the ball of my thumb. “We never did establish compensation.”

  “I told you I was bored. Did you think I was jacking you up? The file doesn’t leave this room. All I need is you getting broadsided by an Escalade on the way home and some cop finding it and tracing it back here. On second thought, give it back.” He stuck out a square hand.

  “Hang on, Red. A beer doesn’t make us brothers. I get jacked up so much they call me Jack. I was suspicious the minute you said you had all the money you need. Nobody does. And the last thing anybody ever gave me for nothing was a swat on the butt in the delivery room.”

  He withdrew the hand. “Well, you’re right about that. I want something back.”

  “How much?” I hadn’t stopped to cash Lawrence Meldrum’s check on the way from the office. It meant an extra round trip.

  “Not how much. What. Just let me know how it comes out.”

  “It?”

  “Delwayne.” He slapped the carry case on the desk. “I’ve got a box full of files with no last page. When I was contributing to society, I never once saw a case through from start to finish. At some point I stopped solving crimes and started cataloguing them. When you find Garnet, tell me, and tell me if he told you anything. At least then I can close one file out of fifty.”

  “That’s all you want?”

  “It’ll give me something to look forward to between now and when my daughter visits next Christmas.”

  I blinked. He was every retired car salesman who couldn’t keep from hanging around the lot. I hoped he wasn’t contagious.

  “It doesn’t promise to make much of a story,” I said.

  “I’d rather it was Deep Throat.” He rolled a shoulder. “But hell.”

  “Deal.”

  He closed and latched the lid on the file box and carried it out, shutting me in the den. The cloak-and-dagger may all have been for show. The rest of the stuff he’d spirited away from the field office might still have been sealed somewhere in the room, where even a fellow who is handy with a pick couldn’t get to it. For some people, a corkscrew is the shortest distance between two points.

  There was a comfortably shabby armchair in a corner, with an ashtray on a little table. I lit a cigarette, crossed my legs, opened the folder, and looked into the faraway eyes of a corpse.

  FIVE

  Eye, actually; the right was occluded by a dark sludge, unmistakable even in black and white printed on grainy nonreflective police stock. The left was staring at something halfway between it and infinity.

  It was a head shot, and until I knew what I was looking at I turned it sideways trying for vertical. The head lay on glistening asphalt, presenting a three-quarter view of a fine-featured, African-cast face with a thin Little Richard moustache that clung to the full upper lip like liner. A pale collar with long tabs encircled a muscular neck with custom-made fidelity, spread just enough to display a glossy knot and under it the top half of a medium-wide necktie with an Art Deco pattern. I saw one lapel of a houndstooth overcoat, broad and notched. The man wearing it looked surprised and knowing at the same time. I’d seen the expression before, always with a combination of envy and relief.

  I glanced at the back. A faded stamp read PROPERTY OCSD 12/31/49 DO NOT REMOVE FROM PREMISES. I didn’t know what an Oakland County Sheriff’s Department crime photo was doing in a folder with Delwayne Garnet’s name on it.

  The next item of interest was an original birth certificate issued by Wayne County, recording the appearance in Detroit General Hospital of Delwayne Lance West, boy, on June 11, 1950. The mother’s name was Fausta West. It rang a leaden bell somewhere in the part of my brain I kept shuttered with sheets over the furniture. The space for the father’s name was vacant.

  A smeary carbon bearing the heading of the Wayne County Probate Court, signed by a judge whose name I couldn’t make out, assigned guardianship of Delwayne Lance West, a minor infant, to Beryl Garnet, widow, aged 35. The document was dated June 14, 1950. She would have been waiting at the hospital exit when Fausta was released.

  Just for fun I paged through some other official-looking sheets, hunting for a record of formal adoption. There wasn’t any. Assuming the file was complete, it stood to reason. In 1950 it was a great deal more difficult for a single woman to adopt a child than to obtain a guardianship, particularly if the single woman kept a brothel. Delwayne West had become Delwayne Garnet through repetition rather than by court order. The process was just as legal. All you had to do was stop using the original name and use the new one exclusively.

  The file was a jumble, with no order and a lot of things that made no sense in any context, much like a person’s life. Transcripts from Murray-Wright High School reflected an academic career strong on English, history, and fine arts, and on its way out the back door as to science, math, and geography. I could rule out looking for him behind the counter in a pharmacy or at a bank window.
Not knowing where to find New Zealand on a map is no handicap except to explorers.

  There were two newspaper clippings, coarse-grained and brittle brown, both stamped CONFIDENTIAL. You had to wonder how the Bureau pulled that one off short of buying up every copy on the stands and mugging the delivery boy. Both were obituaries of sorts. One took up two half-columns to announce the suicide of Fausta West, a former MGM contract player who had appeared in the chorus of a number of Esther Williams musicals before her option ran out. She’d been employed for the past two years as a cocktail waitress in Long Beach, California, where the stunt gaffer she’d subleased her apartment from found her on the floor of her kitchen with all the gas jets open on the stove. A faded pencil notation on the bottom edge dated the clipping: “Sept. 9, 1952.” There was nothing to tell me what paper had carried it.

  I looked at the postage-stamp size picture that accompanied the article. It showed an unremarkable-looking blonde with a pretty face and an Ipana smile, the kind booking agents kept around in stacks of eight-by-ten glossies and used to plug mouseholes in their offices. How she’d landed even bits in A features was an argument in favor of the casting couch. Fade to black at twenty-seven.

  The other clipping, folded twice, had taken up most of the front page of the old Detroit Times on New Year’s Day 1950, with a banner:

  LOCAL FIGHTER SHOT TO DEATH

  Pictures included a pub shot for the sports desk of a smooth-muscled light-skinned black in satin trunks and lace-up boots, gloved fists raised in defensive position. He looked more focused without an eye full of blood. Another shot, horizontal, showed a sheet-draped gurney rolling through a crowd of beefy men in crumpled fedoras, baggy overcoats, and neckties that reached only to the second buttons of their shirts. One of them glared at the camera with his thumbs jammed inside his belt and a short cigar plugged into his face, eyes glassy in the Speed-Graphic flash. That closed out the composition. If police personnel hadn’t provided him, the photographer would have had to inflate one from his kit.

  I read the article, then turned it over and read a photocopy of an Oakland County Sheriff’s Department case file: fourteen pages typewritten by someone who would never be a Kelly Girl. It was filled with strikeovers, smeary erasures, and one whole line that had been produced from the wrong row of home keys. The clipping and the report told a complete story except for an ending. Curtis Smallwood, known to the sports page–reading public of 1948–9 as the Black Mamba, had been on his way to a lightweight championship with a 23 and 0 record (eight knockouts) when he dropped his guard and took an unjacketed .38 bullet through his right eye in the parking lot of the Lucky Tiger, a roadhouse seven miles north of Detroit in the wilderness that was then Oakland County, an hour short of midnight on the last day of the 1940s, making him the Motor City’s final murder victim of that decade. Plenty of witnesses had heard the shot and the squealing of tires indicating the killer’s escape, but none had seen the actual event, which had taken place after Smallwood parked his week-old Alfa-Romeo and before he got to the entrance. He was dead on arrival at the pavement.

  The suspects were in large supply. Archie McGraw, his manager, had had words with him over his flamboyant lifestyle, which included a relationship with Fausta West, a Hollywood starlet who’d been photographed with him at a Detroit nightclub during a personal appearance to promote a film. A producer at MGM named Wellstone, who’d been pruning West for a career as a featured player, was rumored to have threatened Smallwood with a drubbing by studio goons if he didn’t “lay off the white meat.” There was a name on the list I hadn’t thought of in years: Ben Morningstar, who had inherited the territory formerly belonging to the Purple Gang, including labor racketeering, drug peddling, and the local fight game. If you had a budding Joe Louis and you wanted to show him off against a legitimate contender, you had to go to Morningstar first. No animosity reported between him and Smallwood; being Ben Morningstar was suspicious enough when an acquaintance succumbed to lead poisoning in the open air.

  The file didn’t mention any arrests. A much smaller newspaper clipping without pictures told readers there were no new leads in the Curtis Smallwood killing. Nothing after that. There were too many other things going on in 1950 to allow room for a murder mystery without a solution.

  I could guess the thinking in the sheriff’s department. Archie McGraw hadn’t cracked, and a Hollywood honcho like Wellstone was always and forever outside their jurisdiction, or for that matter any jurisdiction that involved lawyers on retainer to a major studio. Morningstar bought inspectors and better by the package, like Gilette blades. Fausta West’s suicide two years later would have given them someone to point to later if they ever felt the need; dead people made handy horizontal surfaces to pile things on, without fear of complications. Even if they hadn’t evidence to close out the case based on that, they would be satisfied there weren’t any untagged murderers walking around. Contrary to fiction, even lazy cops prefer to tie things off, however loosely. I found a Long Beach Police Department photo of Fausta, pale with bruises beneath her eyes, stretched out on her back on the linoleum floor of her kitchen with her ankles crossed and her head resting on a sofa cushion with palm fronds embroidered on it. She looked peaceful.

  An FBI blowup of Delwayne Garnet’s senior picture followed. I thought he looked a little like Curtis Smallwood. Then I didn’t. I didn’t see any Fausta in him, except maybe a little around the eyes. You can’t trust a photograph. At best it’s a flat illusion of a three-dimensional reality.

  There was some sixties stuff: a mimeographed handout on yellow-jaundice paper with “fascist” misspelled three ways, inviting freedom-lovers everywhere to join something called the Moroccan Army of Liberation; front-and-profile mugs with fingerprints of Delwayne’s revolutionary colleagues from early arrests; color photos taken from different angles of a mangled van containing scattered body parts, what remained of the M.A.L. after the bomb went off prematurely and Delwayne fled. Pictures of whomp-jawed men in snapbrim hats standing behind a bed with pistols and revolvers and automatic rifles spread out on it, personal effects of the deceased. It all seemed more dated than the stuff from almost twenty years earlier, but then that whole decade smelled like bare feet.

  The feds had traced Delwayne to Toronto, where in 1987 he’d been putting his fine-arts education to use, drawing storyboards for local television commercials and assembling newspaper and magazine advertisements from clip books. Up there he’d gone by the name Lance West. It was as if he’d known he was pathetically easy to trace, so hadn’t bothered to wander too far afield when putting together a new identity. A contact sheet showed him at thirty-six, carrying a large portfolio along a bleak wintry street in long shot and telephoto close-up. He’d grown a chin beard and filled out a little, but his classmates would recognize him at a Murray-Wright reunion if he bothered to show up. I doubted he would, and not because he was technically a fugitive. Nothing about his background suggested the kind of young man who formed long-standing relationships.

  Law enforcement files are always the same. You always open them with the feeling you’ve been invited to visit an exclusive club, and close them thinking you’ve seen it all before, in a better version.

  I drummed the material together, slipped it back into the folder and the folder onto the desk, and returned to the living room. Red Burlingame had his recliner fully extended and was cable-flipping with the remote: half-second explosions of bilious congressmen, stick-figure cartoons, self-important authors, reheated romantic comedies, dumbed-down documentaries, marathon breast-cancer discussions, a clever but unpleasant scifi comedy, and country music videos with no country and music that had supported different lyrics in more talented throats. He gave up finally, long after I would have, and settled on a 1970s sitcom whose entire cast was long since dead or in jail. The laughtrack was borrowed from I Love Lucy.

  “This how old G-men spend their time?” I asked.

  “I thought about greeting at Wal-Mart. Too drafty. Who do you
like for Curtis Smallwood?”

  “Ben Morningstar.”

  “Yeah, me, too. I was ready to take him down on a couple of hundred years’ worth of RICO violations when he up and died on me.”

  “Ungrateful son of a bitch.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “I worked for him once. That’s how I met Beryl Garnet.”

  He squashed the POWER button with his thumb. The picture on the tube folded up and blipped out in the middle of an abortion gag. “What did you do for that crumb?”

  “Blew up a bus full of kindergarteners. It was an insurance job.”

  “Okay, pardon the hell out of me. I assumed you had standards.”

  “Standards are for steady work. I’m saving up for a bail fund.” I sat on the sofa. “A girl he had custody of went missing. I went looking in the usual places. That restore your faith?”

  “Find her?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Dead?”

  I shook my head. “She may be out now. It’s been twenty-two years, and all she did was commit a couple of murders. It didn’t have anything to do with this. Was Curtis Smallwood Delwayne Garnet’s father?”

  “Could be. He was born six months after Smallwood was killed. Oakland County sent investigators out to Hollywood. They ran into a very polite brick wall. Miss West was shooting on location in Italy, some little mountain village without telephones, inaccessible by automobile. You read the report.”

  “It didn’t say if they bought it.”

  “It might’ve been true. She was only back in Detroit for the birth later, and she was probably registered here under a phony name. By the time the certificate became public record, she’d have been back in L.A., minus one baby and getting back her figure for some part she’d never land.”

  “Why leave L.A. at all?”

  “Press, probably. Hospital staff out there didn’t live on their paychecks even then. Here, no one expects picture people to check into a public facility. All she had to do to become invisible was lay off the peroxide.”