Monkey in the Middle--An Amos Walker Mystery Page 4

  “Yes, sir?” Gray-green eyes took me in from the knot of my necktie down to counter level. I was too well turned out for a resident, but not well enough to dine with the mayor.

  I handed him the business card I’d selected from the assortment in my wallet. This one read:

  ADAM WARFIELD

  FAMILY LAW

  I told him who I was looking for. He looked at the card front and back, frowning a little, I thought, over the absence of postmodern data: Office address, telephone number with the traditional 313 area code; no cell, no web site, no e-mail address. I’d been carrying it since before Bill Gates had moved out of his parents’ basement; so long, anyway, I’d forgotten what Warfield looked like or why I had it. Garfunkel slid it into a polo shirt pocket—for chemical tests later, maybe—picked up the stack of envelopes he’d been holding, and shuffled them. “I remember Sothern. Checked out last month. They don’t stay long, as a rule. What’s it about?”

  “His aunt who raised him is a client. She’s in hospice and wants to see him one last time.”

  He smiled. His dental work was good for a minimum-wage job. “Leaving him a fortune, is she?”

  I showed him I took care of my teeth too. As often as someone busted me in the mouth, I kept a dentist on retainer. “Two other guys have had this same conversation.” I unshipped my imitation-leather folder and showed him the P.I. license.

  “Same initials,” he said. “How do I know you didn’t print that too?”

  “I only keep the cards with my initials; cuts down on the clutter. Anyway, who’d bother with a phony investigator’s ticket? The real thing doesn’t open any doors.” I put it away. When you have to, tell the truth, even if it’s too late. “He’s the client. We didn’t get into whether he has an aunt, rich, terminal, or otherwise. He’s in danger, and I don’t have any way to get into contact to warn him.”

  “Is it about the girl?”

  It could’ve been a trap, but I didn’t have anything to lose. “Yes.”

  He leaned forward, folding his arms on the countertop. “He was always taking calls from her on the house phone; from a booth, according to caller ID. I thought they’d all gone out with NSYNC.”

  “No kidding, they broke up?”

  He slid past that. “I heard just enough to know I heard it all before. Shane’s a good guy. I don’t get chummy with the residents, but he’s hard not to like. Maybe you can get through to him; I couldn’t, but then when did a friend ever where a woman’s involved?” He brought a metal recipe box up from under the counter, thumbed through the cards, and gave me an address in Dearborn. I took it down in my notebook, got out a ten-dollar bill, folding it in my palm out of sight of the surveillance camera mounted in a corner of the ceiling, and shook his hand. When I took mine back the bill was still in it.

  “My father’s on the GM board,” he said when I stared. “He’s the kind of man who buys people with chump change. It’s why I work here.”

  I told him I’d remember that, thanked him, and got out from under his scrutiny. The day was still young; I wondered how many more enemies I’d make before quitting time.

  SEVEN

  Henry Ford wouldn’t recognize Dearborn, the town he put on the map.

  Why should he? The world laughed when he predicted four lanes of automobile traffic on Woodward Avenue within a decade. Still, the brilliant old bigot would wander around lost among the minarets and Arabic signs on many of the shops. Now it contains the largest Arab population outside the Middle East. Whenever a truck loaded with fertilizer blows up in a busy neighborhood anywhere in the U.S., Dearborn crawls with undercover feds. To them, racial profiling is as American as chop suey.

  The address belonged to a Chaldean grill-and-swill in a cinder block box off Oakman, with a painted mural sprawled across the front showing a solemn black-bearded chef turning a lamb on a spit in a grove of palms with a lagoon in the center: A sign with scimitar-shaped letters read OASIS CAFÉ. The artist hadn’t stopped at the windows: Clouds and soaring birds of myth covered every pane. You had to know the place in order to find the door. The smell of grease and nutmeg spread all the way down the block. My stomach took up the grumbling refrain when I killed the engine. Breakfast bacon seemed a long time ago.

  The painted windows on the second floor would belong to apartments, but places like that don’t waste good dining space on staircases. I went down the narrow alley between the building and the discount auto parts shop next door. I had to turn sideways to get past the Dumpster parked outside the kitchen exit. On the other side of the brown steel door, a recorded string section was walloping hell out of something that ought to come with a belly dance.

  Behind the café, an outside set of stairs made a diagonal from a concrete slab up to a door on the second story. A gravel parking lot accommodated a half-dozen cars and pickups, some of which would belong to employees. The lunch rush wouldn’t start for half an hour. One vehicle, parked at an angle just off the drive from the street that ran alongside the building, was too new for minimum wage. It stuck out like something that was designed not to in any other neighborhood: a dishwater-gray four-door Chrysler with windows tinted too deep for state law.

  I stopped inside the alley. The shade felt good in the heat, but it was the dark I wanted. I was jealous of those black windows and the cover they offered to whoever was inside.

  If there was anyone inside. It gave the impression of something that had been there a long time, like an empty jar washed up on a deserted beach. Maybe that was the point. In any case it was spotless, in a town where things get dirty just in the act of existing.

  It didn’t have to mean anything. I couldn’t see a plate from that angle, so the car might have belonged to a customer from out of state, stopping to take advantage of the colorful local cuisine; someone on vacation from a job where they frowned on chrome and park decals and clever bumper stickers; an undertaking parlor or a Kingdom Hall. The food might be so good, the service so agreeable, and the company so pleasant, two hours can slip by with a finger to their lips. Not everything’s a clue.

  Not even when another gray sedan, identical to the first, pulled in next to it.

  Seconds later, a man got out of the other car and came around the hood of the second. Not dressed like a professional mourner or pamphlet-peddler, but subdued enough in a gunmetal leather windbreaker, charcoal slacks, and black oxfords. Short sandy hair and a clean-shaven face half obscured by black wraparound sunglasses. Nothing in that; the sun was bright enough to make your head ache. But I had a hunch the eyes behind them were on the prowl. I drew back farther into the alley from instinct.

  A tinted window glided down on the driver’s side. The man on foot propped a forearm on the roof and bent down to the window. There was a murmur of conversation, vague as the blur of white face inside the car, and then Windbreaker slapped the window post, spun around, and got in behind the wheel of the first car. The motor started as quietly as a lullaby. The car backed into a Y turn and swung out onto the side street. By now the window of the other car was back up, and peace settled over the lot like steam from the ventilator.

  But not before I got a glimpse of the first car’s license.

  * * *

  I backed away slowly, avoiding movement that would stir shadows, then turned around and retreated to the front of the restaurant. Shane Sothern was sitting on the passenger’s side of my front seat.

  He was dressed as before; either he had a wardrobe full of Son of Flubber outfits or he stood the ensemble in a corner and climbed into it like deep-sea diving gear. I slid in under the wheel. The little patch of shade I’d found to park in had lost ground, but he’d opened the window on his side, leavening the pressure-cooker effect. Still, there was a ripe sting of sweat that wasn’t all mine, along with a healthy dose of highly seasoned mutton.

  “What’d you do, shinny down the drainpipe?” I said.

  “I’ve been out all day. I stopped in to eat. I saw the car through the window when I went back to use
the restroom. I saw yours when I left the place. It seemed a good idea to get out of sight as fast as I could.”

  “You missed the changing of the guard. I wouldn’t worry about the Olsen twins. It’s an open tail or they wouldn’t be driving regulation wheels with government plates. When they tossed your place they made sure to leave signs they’d been there. One thing those spooks know how to do is intimidate. I think the Justice Department recruits retired mobsters as instructors, just like it smuggled in Nazi scientists for the space program.”

  “Mr. Walker, what can they possibly want with me? The kind of facts I dig up are public property. Anyone with a library card could find out the same information.”

  “Even where Abelia Hunt’s been hiding out for the last two weeks?”

  I pressed the point while he was still taking it in. “You knew before you came to me the Gap boys were trailing you with a brass band. They tend to get careless when they take that route, so it wouldn’t be impossible for an amateur to lose them. I had better luck shadowing you to Atlas Motors, but I was taking the basic precautions.”

  “Atlas Motors, what’s that?”

  “Before your time, possibly. What’s left of the sign is hard to read. That pile of blight on the northwest side. You need to be more careful, Shane. If those jumped-up clerks I saw in the parking lot suspected you’d actually made direct contact with an enemy of the people, they’d be off the job in a white flash and you’d be so lost in the system not even Johnnie Cochran would know where to serve the habeas.”

  He was still a human mood ring. His shocked pallor warmed to an angry flush. “She isn’t an enemy of the people! It’s the people she cares about.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “How can you not? You’re an American, aren’t you?”

  “That plea doesn’t go very far in U.S. District Court. You’re a material witness in a nationwide manhunt, and I’m the kind of well-intentioned idiot that always gets snagged along with the rest of the small fry in the first news cycle. Have you got a lawyer?”

  “No!” He started to say more, then swept both palms out to the sides, erasing an invisible slate. He sucked in a lungful of soggy air and let it out along with a gust of shish kebab; continued in a quieter tone. “Look, I—”

  “Stop there. Save the rest for someone who can tell the law to go chase itself.”

  “But what about you?”

  “All part of the plan. Put on your seat belt.” I took my eyes off the rearview mirror and twisted the key in the ignition. The big engine throbbed in the soles of my feet.

  He took things literally, letting loose a tumble of dead ladybugs when he pulled the passenger’s strap from the roller; I don’t get many passengers. “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere he won’t.” I jerked my head toward the mirror on his side, and in it the oyster-colored sedan that had just turned the corner onto our street.

  EIGHT

  I’d either overestimated myself or underestimated the other side; maybe it was a combination of both. In any case the result was the same. I’d been spotted in the alley, and my movements had been suspicious enough to persuade him to desert his post.

  Any hope that he’d overlook the car parked in front of the café went out the window when he coasted to a stop directly behind us, next to a fire hydrant.

  I didn’t wait for him to get out, if that was his plan. I pulled away from the curb and cruised at just above idle. He did the same, and we imitated the O. J. Simpson chase for three blocks. There was no reason to try to lose him. If the Chrysler came with an onboard computer, or if the driver just had a smartphone, he’d made me already from my plate.

  So of course I tried to lose him.

  Maybe it was because my passenger was breathing like a high-strung horse, hogging all the oxygen in the car, or maybe it was just to break up the monotony. Anyway I put pressure on the foot pedal and wound my way back to Oakman, a four-lane boulevard where the midday traffic was just starting to clot up. My shadow fell back two car lengths, letting a PT Cruiser with a cracked windshield slide in between us. It’s all covered in Chapter Six of the manual.

  Changing lanes, I swept dust off the fender of a Roadway van, then swung around the corner onto Haggerty without tripping my blinker. Horns brayed. But Chrysler was no rookie. He was back in my mirror before I crossed Manor. He knew what I was up to by then and closed the distance. Shane slumped down in his seat.

  “He won’t shoot,” I said. “It makes for too much paperwork.”

  “Let’s just get away from him, okay? Even if it’s just for an hour.”

  “Sounds sensible. We can use the fresh air.”

  “Fresh—” He slammed shoulder-first into the door on his side.

  I made the horseshoe turn on the outside edge of the radials and braked against the curb, hard enough to send the gas walloping around inside the tank.

  Chrysler didn’t panic. Half a block past us, he pulled over and slid to a stop alongside a young maple dying in a box on the sidewalk. We were facing different directions; the natural thing to do was burn rubber and hope to shake him while he was turning, but he hadn’t been trained to expect the obvious. He waited.

  We’d stopped beside a check-cashing place with a neon dollar sign for the S in its name. I popped open my door. “Let’s hoof it.”

  Shane caught up with me inside the building. There a clerk with a jaw that would support a flagpole watched us through bulletproof glass, both hands out of sight under the counter, where the pistol would be. I beat him to the draw with my ID folder. It was back in my pocket even faster; the badge wouldn’t fool a child. “Back door!” I barked.

  He threw his big chin at a steel slab with a sign that said FIRE EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND. “Stick your fingers in your ears.”

  “Perfect.” I crossed the floor in four strides and gave the crash bar a shove. They heard the clanging in Chicago. I swung around, intercepted Shane in hot pursuit, grabbing him by the shoulders and riding him like a toboggan all the way back to the entrance.

  We were standing against the wall next to the door when an athletic-looking character in a gray windbreaker and black shades loped in, spotted the fire exit, and broke into a gallop; he never turned his head our way. He looked so much like the man he’d relieved back at the Oasis I couldn’t have picked either one out of a lineup. We were outside before the metal door drifted shut, and halfway back to the Cutlass while the glass front door was still closing.

  I put three turns between us and the abandoned Chrysler, then slowed down. “That only works when they don’t travel in pairs,” I said. “You never know when a vehicular tail will turn into a footrace.”

  “You actually like this, don’t you?”

  “Admit it: You’re feeling pretty good yourself right now.”

  “Maybe a little. But where do we go from here?”

  I told him.

  He gawked, then shook his head hard enough to knock loose his glasses. He slid them back up his nose.

  “We can’t! I only went there last night to find out if she needed supplies. I was being careful, and still I led you right to her. What if that man back there wasn’t the only one following us?”

  “Rest easy. That wasn’t the only fire exit in town.”

  * * *

  Not everything looks better in daylight. At least at night you can’t see vacant lots turned into city dumps, read obscenities misspelled in Day-Glo on alley walls, witness meth deals conducted as openly as delivering pizza. There wasn’t a straight line or a right angle for blocks. Roofs sagged, chimneys leaned; every porch was seceding from the rest of the house. The air smelled of sodden ash, the signature scent of an arson investigation in progress. Ten minutes from the skyscrapers downtown, Detroit bore every sign of a civilization in hospice.

  I parked two streets over from Atlas; if our pet spy managed to pick up our trail it would stop at the car. Shane watched as I took the Chief’s Special in its holster from behind the false wall of the gl
ove compartment and snapped it on my belt. I dropped my shirttail over it.

  “Do you think we’ll need that?”

  “When I don’t have it is when I need it most.”

  Not everyone was away at work. Natives in undershirts drank beer on their stoops and in plastic lawn chairs, watching us change the routine in the neighborhood. It was too hot to do anything about it.

  A narrow street fenced off from extinct railroad tracks was all that separated the residential zone from the commercial. Once past that we went unobserved the rest of the way to the deserted garage. Approached from behind, it looked like one of those domes where MDOT stored salt to spread on winter roads. That side wasn’t tiled. Yellowed mortar crumbled like cornbread and made piles on the ground. Pillars of bald tires and dead batteries and heaps of empty plastic bottles lined the blank wall. The earth was stained orange with rust, but scrapyard scavengers had made off with the metal.

  There were no out-of-place cars in sight, no suspicious commercial vans, no helicopters black or otherwise. The romance had worn off, leaving only soggy heat.

  We circled around to the front, me trailing Shane with the caution of experience. A few yards short of the empty bays he held up and stuck a hand behind him, signaling me to stop. I waited while he identified himself in his clear light baritone. I’d almost forgotten there was anyone to hear it, the area was that desolate.

  There was no answer, no sound at all apart from the droning traffic on the freeway closest to us. He called again, waited; looked at me. I nodded and we walked the rest of the way up the concrete ramp. The revolver was in my hand. I didn’t remember drawing it.

  Inside was the kind of twilight reserved for windowless buildings at noon on a bright day. The place smelled dank; all traces of oil and grease and scorched radiator had gone the way of the previous tenant. That left the three of us alone, counting the dead man.