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

  There’s a parking lot for each point on the compass, and a man could wander the concrete landscape for a week trying to remember where he’d parked; on any given day, bag-carrying patrons can be seen playing Marco Polo with their remote keys, looking for their cars.

  The veteran shoppers—the well-to-do ones, anyway—stake permanent claim on the lot outside Saks. The spot a customer selects says as much about his credit rating as the car he parks. I chose JCPenney.

  When we got out, the air was as heavy as atomic weight. Even the gulls were afraid to land on the steaming asphalt. Two minutes after we entered the store, the conditioned air wrapped us in wet cellophane.

  The food court sprawled across the groin where the corridors intersected. Mrs. Fields, Fatburger, Taco Bell, and Sbarro turned it into a bazaar of sizzling griddles, treacly music, and cross-conversation. The place smelled like fried everything.

  Barry wasn’t hard to spot, if you knew what to look for. When he goes sub rosa he never bothers with wigs and putty noses. Those things only work in the movies and on the stage, a mile from the audience with the lights just so. The trick is to wear clothes no one looks at twice; in this case the bright blue coveralls of mall maintenance and ROY scripted across the breast pocket. People who noticed him at all never got as far as the face. He was plowing his way through a Subway meatball sandwich and iced tea in a plastic cup the size of a silo.

  The menu wasn’t necessarily part of the disguise. When the all-you-can-eat places see him coming they lock their doors, turn off the lights, and hold their breath until he leaves. By rights he should weigh three hundred pounds; but he’s worn the same 170 on a five-eleven frame since Nixon came back from China. When he’s on the scent of a blackleg or a bomb-chucker or a holder of any public office, he can forget to eat for days, and sits down only when standing draws too much attention.

  Barry was just ham enough this time to stiff his barber, lay off shampoo, and let his sandy hair grow into a matted mop. Some attempt had been made at chin-stubble, but since he never had to shave more than twice a month, he’d settled for a couple of patches of silvery down. That was the only gray north of his collar, and possibly everywhere else; we don’t hang out in locker rooms.

  He didn’t look up as we crossed the court, but he’d come up with a signal for when it was okay to join him. He stretched a leg under the table and scraped the opposite chair a couple of inches into the aisle. I could never remember which leg was flesh and bone and which the product of modern medical engineering. I pulled the chair out the rest of the way and sat. Shane liberated one from a vacant table nearby and perched on the edge of the seat with his hands in his lap. Barry spun a bag of barbecue chips his direction.

  “You don’t have to eat any,” he said. “Just rummage around inside and pretend. You want to look like someone who eats in these dumps, not like you’re here to buy a phony Rolex.”

  Shane dove in, crunching with what sounded like an enviably full set of teeth. I wondered when he’d eaten last; wondered when I had, come to that. I helped myself to a Cinnabon wallowing in a crumple of paper sack and made introductions.

  “Long-term stakeout, from the looks of things,” I said. “You look like a high-school production of Our Town.”

  “It all comes off today, jackass. The guy I was watching got stood up and left a perfectly good falafel on his table. It was the no-show I was after. By now he’s halfway across the Gulf of Aden with a satchel full of high-grade Colombian coke.”

  Shane slid even farther forward. “Mr. Walker says you’re a journalist. You sound like a policeman.”

  “They put slugs like that in jail. I put ’em in print. And stop talking like a con planning a jailbreak: Speak up. Anyone might think you’ve got secrets to share. All the successful military coups begin in a public place with strangers all around.”

  Shane sat back and made a try at a grin. He raised the volume. “Sort of like ‘The Purloined Letter.’”

  “Literate.” Barry looked at me. “Your clientele’s improving. Next thing I know you’ll be bumming around with Dame Edna.”

  “What happened to the falafel?”

  “It’s a sin to waste food. What’s so important I had to sit on this torture rack till my ass felt like my tin leg?”

  I gave him what we had, Shane piping in from time to time to refine the details. Barry was right about the venue. None of the diners within possible earshot knew we existed. The ceiling was high enough to swallow Tarzan’s yell. Barry ate, drank, and looked more interested in the dinner than the show. To look at him was to feel sorry for the sap stuck listening to a couple of bores: all part of the camouflage.

  When we got to the dead man in the garage he sat back and wiped his hands on a coarse brown napkin. One of them had only two fingers and a thumb, but all that and the business with the leg had happened before he’d learned how to be invisible.

  “A murder with only one suspect wouldn’t make a game of Clue,” he said when we finished. “It was the whistle-blower with the rope in the chop shop.”

  “Not a rope,” I said. “More like fishline.”

  Shane’s eyes flared bright blue behind his glasses. “Where would she learn to do that?”

  “Sesame Street. Amos, is this kid for real?”

  “I overslept. By the time I got up all the good clients were taken.”

  “What you’re saying is ridiculous,” Shane said. “What’s more it’s slander. The whole reason she’s in trouble is she wanted to expose an injustice, not commit one of her own.”

  Okay.” Barry started to lean forward and fold his arms on the table, then caught himself and made more rude noises with his straw. “Let’s give her the benefit of almost no doubt at all and say somebody else squiffed the fed. Where’d she go, and how did she? Run out while Mr. X was choking him to death, or throw in with X afterward for the ride, or get snatched? And what are we supposed to do about any of that?”

  I said, “That’s the question we came here to ask. Once some derelict sniffs out those fast-food leftovers in the garage and stumbles over James Bond, Junior, in come the black op boys in Kevlar, looking for blood. We need to find her before they do, if just to get her side of the story.”

  “You knew the answer to that one before you came: You won’t. You’re outgunned.”

  “Custer was outgunned. We’re in the Roman Coliseum smothered in Purina Lion Chow.”

  “It’ll help to know which cat we’re up against. If it’s the FBI it’s one thing, CIA another; Department of Homeland Security something else again. They’ve all got methods they don’t share with their friends on the playground. And the amount of manpower goes up in the order I named them. You’re asking for a battle plan and you don’t even know who you’re fighting.”

  A boy carrying a plastic crate stopped at the table next to ours to clear away the debris. Barry swung the sack back around and foraged among the crumbs until the boy moved on.

  “Think that kid worries about getting old?” Barry said. “Regrets the choices he made?”

  “Stuff just as bad, probably, for him. Are we getting maudlin in our dotage?”

  “Just taking stock.” He assembled his trash. “I’ll see what I can find out. It’s going to mean using a series of Chinese boxes so it doesn’t get traced back to me. When it comes out on your end—if it comes out—the first I hear of it better not be on CNN.”

  “Goes without saying.”

  “Say it anyway.”

  I said it. He looked at Shane, who said, “I’m a print journalist, or hope to be. The networks are the enemy.”

  “Okay,” Barry said. “So I’m paranoid. It’s an asset that’s paid for itself a hundred times over. It better be good for one more round. This could be my last time in the Coliseum. Forget anything you’ve heard about the Bill of Rights; Washington renegotiates that contract every few years. This one needs to count so I’ll have something pleasant to think about on Death Row. You, too,” he said. “Both of you. And I’ll do us all a favor. I won’t move on this for forty-eight hours. Maybe everything will sort itself out by then. But remember the monkeys.”

  “Remind me,” I said.

  “‘See no evil’—this crew learned how to ensure that as far back as Valley Forge. ‘Speak no evil’—the conspiracy nuts took all the teeth out of that one. Nobody pays attention. ‘Hear no evil,’ now; that’s the one keeps them up nights. Silence is their stock-in-trade. Take it away and they’re just another bunch of government bureaucrats sucking on the tit. The last thing you want to be is the monkey in the middle.”

  * * *

  Traffic on the on-ramp to the Southfield Freeway stood still at that hour. There were eight cars ahead of us waiting their turn in the Cuisinart. While we sat, the clouds came down to the top of the radio antenna, a true lamp black. The wind came up and brought the iron smell of rain. I switched on the radio long enough to hear the orgasmic forecast (the more severe the better), broken up as it was by crackles of charged nitrogen, then turned it off. A lot of households were going to miss Gilligan’s Island tonight.

  The first drops smacked the windshield and flattened out like thumbprints; by the time we caught up with the hometown stream between shifts at Ford, we might have been driving through the whale tank at SeaWorld. The wipers whooshed and thumped like idiots, signifying nothing. I knew how they felt.

  All this time Shane was quiet. Then: “Your friend has a persecution complex.”

  I shouted above the rain thudding the roof. “There’s nothing complex about a prosthetic leg and a steel plate in your skull.”

  “You told me it was gangsters did that.”

  “That’s what the headlines said. He wasn’t in shape to write them at the time.”

  He changed the subject. People ge
nerally do when it’s that one. “Where are we going?”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “Won’t that be the first place they look?”

  “It would be the first place I looked. If you’re not there, they’ll assume you’re the killer and drop every other line of investigation. Also you’re better off meeting them there than on the street. Cops—all cops, federal, vegetable, or mineral—don’t like open spaces, so they try to contain the situation with bullets. They’re more housebroken indoors.”

  A flatbed semi carrying fifteen tons of steel pipe passed us, enveloping the car in propeller wash. I fought the wheel and slowed down to avoid hydroplaning in its wake. I sensed Shane’s panic. It wasn’t the thought of crashing that triggered it.

  “They’re not the Mongol Horde,” I said. “They prefer asking questions to cleaning up after a corpse. If they take you in, use your phone call. Don’t forget you’ve got a crackerjack lawyer, one who knows the Hunt case better than Abelia. She may tell you to keep your mouth shut, which means they’ll threaten to put you in custody. If she’s as smart as I know she is, she’ll make a deal: A full statement in return for your release. It’s Abelia they want. Washington doesn’t award appropriations based on the small fry the agencies snag in the net.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  So did I, but I didn’t say it. The rain wasn’t letting up and I had ditches to avoid. Not to mention a funeral to prepare for.

  ELEVEN

  The site chosen for the memorial service commanded the corner of Spring and Seminole Streets in Iroquois Heights, one zoned residential, the other part of the business district. The house had represented the worst of Edwardian taste for a century, with octagonal turrets and bay and bow windows and beach-striped awnings sticking out in all directions like Shane Sothern’s hair. At one time the hexagonal shingles, oak siding, and porches had been painted in a variety of pastels, but recent owners had switched to a leaden gray, saving time and money to replace the jigsaw arrangement of roofs. Still the place stood out among the neighboring renovations like a parade float. A sign pegged in the lawn read BARNHILL-OLSON FUNERAL HOME in black scrolling on white enamel.

  I knew the place, although I’d never visited it. The director had paid a bundle to a City Hall fixer for the contract to bury indigents and first dibs at expired public servants fit for a splendid lying-in-state. That was then, this is now. An entirely different crowd had committed its well-upholstered behinds to the leather-and-horsehair upholstery downtown, but a machine is a machine whether it runs on gas or electric current.

  The first party to occupy the place of honor in the bay window on the Seminole Street side was the man who had built the house, a stove-manufacturing magnate named Kronkhammer who blew out his brains during the Panic of 1873 with the Frontier Colt he’d carried while prospecting for iron in the Upper Peninsula; or maybe it was copper. Before his death, the old claim-jumper had been left in the dust by an early Michigan governor, who founded a syndicate with his cronies to buy up all the land in the area for about twenty-five cents an acre and sell to the developers at five dollars a pop.

  I didn’t know if either Barnhill or Olson was still running the business, if a son or sons had taken it up, or if it’s just that a new sign is an unnecessary expense. This one had been there since Prohibition, when like so many other local enterprises the mortuary moonlighted in the liquor trade. The big double side doors admitted barrels of sour mash as easily as coffins.

  Catherine Stokes (for a little while Catherine Walker) had never starved for friends. She sparkled in their company, as opposed to the dim glow she cast in private. The parking lot had overflowed into the street: glistening sedans, sporty coupes, luxury SUVs, and Hummers micro-parked in the slots and lining the curb bumper-to-bumper. She’d moved up in the world since divorcing a private operative without life insurance or a credit rating. I’d stopped resenting her for that; it was the right thing to do for who she was. My prospects hadn’t improved in the years since.

  I parked down the block where the regular commuters left their vehicles and got out, checking for mud on my cuffs. It was the suit I keep in dry-cleaners’ plastic for occasions of state.

  A post office van stopped on the corner to service a bank of mailboxes on a post. A puddle left over from yesterday’s downpour reached almost to its hubs. The air smelled clean and scrubbed and the sky was bright enough to rewind my hangover back to the beginning. Obsequies that take place in fair weather are more depressing than most. You always feel sorry someone missed such a nice day.

  I checked my phone for missed calls. It was blank. I had Shane’s number now. I’d called him twice already and he wasn’t in jail either time. There was nothing on the air or in the morning paper about the body in the garage. That might be the situation until he got ripe; maybe not even then, in that part of town, although sooner or later someone would spot his car and frisk the place for blocks around.

  Which might explain how he’d stumbled on Atlas Motors. An intelligence agent with intelligence would pick a place of desolation to mount a search; that would account for why the car hadn’t been parked by the garage. He’d have struck out on foot, looking for a frightened young woman and not an assassin with a noose. But for me there was nothing to be done until Abelia Hunt showed or the feds turned up the heat.

  The foyer was the standard arrangement of thick mauve carpet, indirect lighting, a guest book spread open on a lectern, organ music piped in from Bach’s rec room, and a black menu board with white snap-on letters:

  CATHERINE STOKES SERVICE 6 P.M. VIEWING ROOM B.

  She’d gone to her maiden name after she buried her second husband, and hadn’t married Guy Prosper, the man she’d been living with for a dozen years.

  I was a few minutes early, but this room, paneled in walnut and fairly large, was filling up. Couples and groups conversed in murmurs. I was almost the only man in a jacket and tie, but in our drive-in society I was used to that. I’d just wanted to get some wear out of the outfit before styles changed.

  A blue-and-gold-enameled urn stood on a pedestal table on velvet cloth. She’d have appreciated that center spot.

  An easel displayed a recent head shot blown up to poster-size occupied an easel next to the speaker’s podium. She’d aged well, even allowing for possible Botox and touch-ups: Some wrinkles, the merest beginning of a jowl, and her hair, which I’d seen auburn, strawberry with blond highlights, and once a startling platinum after a salon disaster, fell to her shoulders like spun silver. The eyes, not quite olive but close, still tilted away from the nose, giving a sad cast to the face even when it was smiling. I saw she’d gone ahead and put veneers on her teeth. We’d fought about that.

  It struck me then that she was dead. It’s always like that in a mortuary; on your way there you thought you were just paying respect to someone who didn’t mean very much to you anymore, and once inside, the picture and the receptacle and the mawkish music struck you like a blow to the heart. Not all the memories are bad, and even the bad ones aren’t as bad as they’d seemed.

  The last one wasn’t good. She’d come to me to ask if her then-husband had hired me to stalk her and the man she was having an affair with. It had turned out to be more complicated than that. The man, who introduced himself to me as Frank Usher—she knew him as Edgar Pym—was a CIA field agent who’d taken up with her in order to spy on the husband, a fellow employee who planned to quit the Company and was probably peddling its secrets.

  Catherine never had been especially lucky. Both her new men had actually turned out to be a step down from a struggling independent detective.

  The husband was dead, one of the growing number of murder victims in my personal collection, and after so many years I’d supposed Usher had moved on to that Checkpoint Charlie in the sky. Even back then he’d been close to sixty, a gray little man you wouldn’t remember five minutes after he stuck you up on the street. Which is the kind of recruit spymasters prefer. When he’d called the office to tell me about Catherine, it had taken me a moment to dredge him up.

  “Thank you so much for coming.”