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

  I left then. I couldn’t risk his giving up and coming back my way. I swung back south, taking it easy on the torn quad and scratching my neck like an old dog with young fleas. After a few blocks I lit a cigarette and let the smoke drift on the humid air.

  A pulsar flickered in my brain, then was gone, like all of my high-school French. Just where I’d seen that female profile before would continue to itch long after I’d forgotten all about the mosquito, and something about it was as bad as a pernicious infection.

  FIVE

  Home.

  A lifetime ago, the furniture and décor had been selected with the kind of care usually reserved for casing a bank: pastels or primaries, throw rugs or wall-to-wall, paper or paint. I hadn’t any part of it, aside from holding out on my choice of armchairs. The chair’s still there, and I suppose so is most of the rest, not counting what had decamped with the other half of the arrangement; cars had shrunk and Ma Bell had metastasized into a dozen different servers since I’d paid any attention to what was on the walls and floor. Function had replaced form. The visitors I entertained wouldn’t notice if I’d dug a moat around the living room.

  I found a bottle of beer and the makings for a sandwich and had dinner and a show in front of a reboot of a detective series I’d managed to miss throughout its original run. I’d left the remote next to the TV, and just the thought of getting up to switch channels made my leg throb. Anyway the half-baked plot and witless dialogue were an improvement over thinking.

  The phone rang. I let it, even though it was on the end table within easy reach; but my patience was no match for the caller’s. I picked up, started to say, “A. Walker Investigations,” then turned it into a hello in low gear.

  The voice on the other end was younger than its owner. Baby Boomers don’t sound like their fathers at the same age; maybe it has to do with not so much shouting on loading docks.

  “Mr. Walker, this is Guy Prosper. We haven’t met. I’m—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Prosper. Catherine mentioned you once in a Christmas newsletter. Please accept my sympathies on your loss.”

  “That’s very kind of you. It was tough near the end.” Something caught in his throat, but he swallowed it. “I suppose you heard about it from a friend.”

  “We didn’t have any friends in common. Frank Usher called.”

  The silence this time was free of glottal discomfort. When he spoke again his tone was wrapped in an ice-cold sheet. “I didn’t know you were in touch.”

  “Not in twenty years. I’d assumed he was dead. He must be around eighty by now.”

  “I wouldn’t know. She didn’t talk about him much, or her late second husband either, just what they both did for a living. She and Usher—she still called him Pym—never spoke, so far as I know. I can’t imagine how he found out.”

  “Sure you do. If she told you about his job.”

  “I suppose so. I didn’t want to say it. You never know who’s listening nowadays, do you?” His chuckle sounded like someone crumpling cigarette cellophane.

  “People always joke about that. Why, do you suppose?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe they hope whoever is listening will think they don’t mean it and let them alone.”

  I dropped the subject. “He didn’t say much, beyond telling me what happened. The details weren’t ironed out yet.”

  “Naturally, since I’m the one whose responsibility they are.” Now his tone was genuine. It hadn’t been, even when he’d tried to sound sad. Grief is awkward in our buttoned-up century. It almost always comes across like a tour guide’s chant. “I wonder why he told you.”

  I said I didn’t know, but I did. Usher and I had met maybe three times, a third of my life ago, but what had happened in that stretch would figure big in anyone’s memoirs.

  “Catherine didn’t want a funeral, in the usual sense of the term,” Prosper said. “I guess not that many do, these days. She’s been cremated. The memorial service is on Thursday at six P.M., in Iroquois Heights. The Barnhill and Olson home. Do you know it?”

  “Yeah.” I kept my tone neutral. The Heights was my favorite suburb after The Garden of Earthly Delights. “I’m not sure I can make it, Mr. Prosper.”

  “Guy, please. We have something important in common, after all. I’d be very grateful if you could come. I have something I’d like to discuss.”

  I wanted to say I was tied up, but even I couldn’t wrestle enough truth into my tone to make it fly; my activities of the evening fell closer to stalker than detective. I said I’d try, repeated my condolences, and cradled the receiver before he could press his case.

  My eyes went to the table where a picture used to stand in a kickstand frame; how it had found its way back there after decades in a drawer I couldn’t remember. I probably wasn’t the first to wonder if the death of an ex-wife meant a man was single again or still divorced.

  * * *

  One of the advantages of being the last dodo in the ecosystem is you don’t have to wait your turn in the periodicals section of the Detroit Public Library. Newspapers are like pay phones, branded extinct and forgotten by society, but somehow still available if you have the patience to seek them out.

  Bright and early the next morning, stoked on caffeine, tomato juice, and sowbelly, I walked past a queue loitering in front of a computer and browsed among back numbers of the News and Free Press, draped neatly on wooden dowel rods like towels on a drying rack; the librarians kept them in rotation, the latest up front, the earliest placed in storage before going to microfilm, in hypnotic lockstep like robot servants in a science-fiction story, years after the humans they served were dead and buried.

  When I figured I had enough material to start, I carried January through March to a vacant table, stacked them on one end, and sat down to spread them out, one issue at a time.

  I ignored the text, concentrating on the photos. I was on my own time, and considering what I charge by the day, I couldn’t afford me without cutting corners. Anyway it was a face I was looking for. The name could come later.

  It promised all the pitfalls of thumbing through mug books at police headquarters. After a while all the faces looked alike, stick-up artists and holders of public office especially. The visiting celebrities were cut even more obviously from a single bolt: Male and female, they swept past in a blur of cosmetic surgery and plastic smiles. The fact that I was looking for a woman narrowed the search, but after a half hour I had to flex my brain to hang on to what I’d seen last night.

  Then I turned a page and dawn broke.

  It was in the City section: I knew then that’s where it would be, too late to matter.

  If I hadn’t seen the face in profile I might not have made a connection. That was the angle presented to the photographer as the owner was coming down the steps of the McNamara Federal Building at Michigan and First. Her head was turned toward her lawyer, a tall woman elevated further by five-inch heels and a glistening all-weather coat that came down to mid-calf. The wind that day was coming strong off the river, whipping the counsel’s coattails about her legs. The camera caught her client drawing her jaw-length hair back from her face, exposing a slightly bulbous forehead, pug nose, and round chin. Taken one by one there was little in those things to attract, but together they added up to more than the sum of their parts. It was a face you remembered, even if you forgot the circumstances.

  The usual gaggle of print reporters, Action News standups, Steadicam operators, and sound crews with their Popsicle mikes on long sticks swarmed around the pair, moon-walking backwards down the steps with their backs to the cameras. It was the biggest local story since the discovery of the electric car.

  Twenty inches of copy under a two-column head laid out the details; but the caption summed up the story.

  Abelia Hunt had been released on a $100,000 bond following her arraignment for suspicion of leaking U.S. government secrets to the press. That victory over the U.S. attorney’s push for holding her without bail was plum advertis
ing for the defense lawyer, Janet Grasso. A bail bondsman had put up the amount on a ten percent surety. The defendant’s mocha skin looked lighter in the illumination of TV camera reflectors than it had in last night’s dusky light, but there was no mistaking her, not for a trained sleuth like me, or for that matter a panhandler with cataracts in both eyes.

  If it had been Grasso in that garage, I’d have made the connection sooner. Since the item had become a manhunt, she’d been the go-to guest on every morning talk show in the country, making appeals to her client to come forward. A hundred PR flacks working around the clock couldn’t have gotten her better exposure.

  I reassembled the newspaper and returned it to the stack. The issue had run late in March. I didn’t have to browse any further to remember that the “Hunt for Hunt” had begun a few days later, when she’d vanished from under the noses of the federal agents assigned to her surveillance.

  That was on April 1. No wonder I’d remembered the date.

  She was the product of a common government glitch, known inside the Beltway as a “Washington Particular”; a clerical worker necessary for the collation and filing of classified data, but who was too far down on the totem pole to require top-secret clearance. That was the bureaucratic black hole through which thousands of reams of super-sensitive material had dropped since Benedict Arnold was a Cub Scout.

  Probably it had as much to do with her posting in Detroit, a city long accustomed to being written off by the rest of the world.

  The names of undercover agents may or may not have been involved, no one knew for sure with a federal gag order in effect. And just what use Abelia had made of the information, whether to raise her bank balance or blow the whistle or throw the country under the bus just to hear the splat, was up for argument, and would be until she stood trial.

  That didn’t look as if it would happen soon.

  Tourists had seen her in Caracas, Tehran, and Moscow, where she was suspected to have been given political asylum, and Beijing got innings. A sales rep for Walmart spotted her in Dubai, sharing figs with the Taliban; but not even an op-ed writer with a sense of ethics had placed her within a thousand miles of Atlas Motors. That was a secret I seemed to share with Shane Sothern.

  SIX

  The lot behind the library was a griddle. I climbed into the car long enough to open windows on both sides and found a triangle of shade to smoke in while the steam was escaping. I didn’t know if the air conditioner still worked; it had run out of coolant and the kind it used had gone out with the Berlin Wall.

  When the sizzling stopped I sealed myself inside and called Barry Stackpole, but even his NASA-quality setup failed to raise a phone number for a Shane Sothern, listed or unlisted, anywhere in the state. I was going to ask for another number, but he told me if I intended to go on using him for tech support we should discuss a retainer and broke the connection. I blamed the heat.

  So I bit the bullet and called Russell Feather in Lansing. He’d been hired two administrations ago as liaison between Michigan and Hollywood when the state was offering cash incentives to film here. The terms were the best in the country, so for a while our restaurants and lakefronts resembled a spread in People. It couldn’t last, and when the administration changed the program was dropped; but the legislature overlooked Feather, who stayed on salary playing Candy Crush in a corner office down the hall from the governor. Tax breaks come and go, but a jack-up is forever.

  He answered in the deep guttural of a three-quarter-blood Ojibway: Tonto marinated in peyote oil. His ancestors had misdirected Cadillac to the site of Detroit when he was looking for the Northwest Passage, and it still tickled him.

  “Walker, Chief,” I said. “I’m still waiting for that call-back from Paramount. When do I get my screen test?”

  “Amos! I thought you’d retired when they stopped making keyholes.”

  “Not yet. I’m after a phone number. It will be unlisted.”

  “If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be calling. You know my rates?”

  “This one’s a minor celebrity by your standards. How about a break?”

  “You misdialed, pal. You want Mother Waddles.”

  “It might turn into something, a second client with deeper pockets. We can renegotiate then.”

  “Either way, that’s one expensive cold call.”

  “This number doesn’t belong to the client. I’m hoping he can help me reach the party I’m after.”

  “Let’s start with who it does belong to.”

  “Gerald Rickey.”

  “The writer? I think we can do business. Nobody cares about writers. I can give you a package deal, throw in Bret Easton Ellis and Amy Tan.”

  I told him to hold the Ellis and Tan. We burned five of my not-unlimited phone minutes coming to a figure I could swing by hocking a couple of fillings. He ran a drumroll on some keys, then gave me a number on the Oakland County exchange. I thumbed off and tried it.

  “Mr. Rickey’s residence.”

  A female voice with an island lilt. It made me thirsty for a drink with a parasol in it.

  “Mr. Rickey, please.”

  “Your name?”

  “It wouldn’t mean anything. Tell him it’s about Shane Sothern. He’s in a jam and I’m trying to get him out.”

  “Jam?”

  “A pickle. A tight spot. A bit of a sticky wicket. Miss, he’s in trouble.”

  “I’ll see if Mr. Rickey is in.”

  She put down the phone. I heard heels on hardwood or possibly tile, a sports broadcast somewhere in another part of the house: the crack of a bat, followed by cheering. If it was a Tigers game the other team must have been up.

  Something clicked; an extension line. The baseball game was louder where he was; he spoke up above it. This voice I recognized, from interviews on radio and television, a light uncracked tenor; regular usage in public had kept it from drying out. “This is Gerald Rickey. Who says Shane’s in a mess?”

  That was one synonym I hadn’t thought of. “My name’s Amos Walker. I’m a private investigator. He came to me yesterday. He thinks he’s being followed.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong person. I’m not one of those writer-adventurers you read about sometimes. I can barely work out the problems I make up myself.”

  “I wouldn’t ask. We parted company before I could find out how to get in touch with him. I can’t find a number for him, listed or otherwise. I hoped you could help me.”

  “How’d you get my number? I go to a lot of trouble to keep from being disturbed.”

  “I’m a good investigator.” I’d prepared myself for a curmudgeon. The wrong way to treat one is to be polite.

  A beat, then the game cut off. “What’s he got himself into this time?”

  “I didn’t know it was a habit.”

  “He’s quixotic; not necessarily a fault exclusive to youth, but it’s more common. He can’t seem to develop the shell of objectivity crucial to writing. That’s one of the reasons I told him he’ll never make it in the field. He tends to take sides, and is always surprised when the other side resents it. I’ve saved him a lawsuit and a couple of beatings through diplomatic conversation.”

  I’d never heard quixotic out loud before; I assumed Rickey was correct in pronouncing the x. “One of the drawbacks of youth, I suppose,” I said.

  “Not exclusively, although more common. Our society coined the phrase ‘old fool’ for a reason. You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Walker.”

  “He thinks he’s being followed. He’s right. I followed him last night after he left my office. More on that later. He says his place was broken into and searched. I believe him. Whatever he’s working on, it’s got him in over his head and mine.”

  “That’s not vague.” Irony dripped off the clear tenor.

  “It has to be. Did your housekeeper or whoever I spoke to mention I’m a private investigator?”

  “That was my secretary,” he snapped.

  I’d offended him somehow, or maybe he
just liked to play the part of the neighborhood crank who wouldn’t give a kid back his basketball. Either way a friendly lesson in diplomatic conversation would not be forthcoming. I ran through my card catalogue of tactful rejoinders, but he was too impatient to wait.

  “Try the YMCA,” he said. “If he’s left there, I can’t help.” The connection went away.

  He was a very prolific author. No one ever risked interrupting his routine twice.

  * * *

  Shane hadn’t been living at the YMCA; at least not when he was broken into, if that wasn’t another of his misdirections. The accommodations were as intimate as a bus station, with traffic to match. I had enough self-esteem to think anyone who had the good sense to come to me for expert help was too smart to leave behind anything useful to an amateur snoop, much less a professional.

  But a good detective never overlooks anything.

  I ground the starter, swung back north on Woodward, and took Adams to Witherell, where the full name YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION was still chiseled in stone over the entrance to the institutional building.

  The interior smelled slightly of soap and damp towels, with an undercurrent of mildew too stubborn for even the locally manufactured industrial-strength disinfectant to eradicate. The shallow foyer was simple but sturdy, built to Edwardian-era specifications, with community service plaques on the paneled walls. A clerk stood behind a wooden counter sorting mail into old-fashioned pigeonholes. He was young, but his forehead was advancing through a bush of red hair blown straight out from the scalp, Art Garfunkel style.