Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro Page 7

  I asked him to bring the check. I paid it, finished my drink, and walked out past the center table. The entrees had arrived and Mussel Man was scooping some of his pasta onto the cool redhead’s plate. At closer range he looked vaguely familiar, like a pale copy of an original that hadn’t been any too clear to begin with. The monogram on his cufflinks read J.M. I wouldn’t have noticed it except hardly anyone wears French cuffs these days.

  TWELVE

  The hallway on the third floor was quiet, with even the scream of accelerating jets muffled behind triple-paned windows and yards of insulation. It smelled of that sweetish disinfectant housekeepers use, made up of lilac, aniseed, and weapons-grade ammonia. A young Japanese in a gray uniform went up on tiptoe to beam at me over the top of the towels folded and stacked on her cart, then turned around and charged through an open door at her back armed with a toilet brush.

  I knocked on three-twenty-two and stood back to give Garnet a full view of the stalwart form through the peepsight. After thirty seconds I knocked again. I waited, then put my ear to the door. Nothing was moving around on the other side. I couldn’t hear a television or radio or a shower gushing. Something ran up the back of my neck on needle heels and vanished.

  I checked the number again for fun and strolled back to the housekeeper’s cart. The girl came out of the room, grasped a plastic squeeze bottle by the waist, and paused when she saw me. I smiled and opened my wallet, showing her the deputy’s star pinned to the bottom half.

  “Good afternoon, miss,” I said, still smiling. “We have some routine questions to ask the guest in three-twenty-two, but he won’t come to the door. Can you use your passkey?”

  Her eyes brightened. “Terrorist?”

  “Nothing so certain as that. Just a random check. His name came up in the lottery.”

  Her face fell. She shuffled through a collection of key cards on a ring, powered past me, and slipped one into the slot. She started to open the door, but I grasped the edge before she could push it more than three inches. I’d caught a bitter whiff from inside.

  “Thank you, miss. We’ll take it from here.”

  “ ‘We?’ ” She looked up and down the hallway.

  “Your country is grateful.”

  “Green card come up renewal soon.”

  I selected a business card from my wallet and held it out. It belonged to a satellite dish salesman who’d tried to hook me up last year. The company logo was an eagle with spread wings overlaid with gold foil. “Williams is the name. If you experience any difficulty, just call that number.”

  She took the card, stared at it long enough to convince me she didn’t read English, and stuck it away in her apron. “Okay.” She went back to her cart.

  I waited until she resumed cleaning, then stepped inside Garnet’s room and clapped the door shut behind me. The place reeked of sulfur and saltpeter, an odor you never forget, and which in my case is a headlong plunge through parts of my past I’d pay to avoid. It was fresh; I could almost hear the echo of the shot ringing off the porcelain in the bathroom.

  I didn’t want to move from that spot. I wished I’d thought to grab something off the housekeeper’s cart for protection. A squirt of bleach in a gunman’s face plays hell with his aim.

  From where I stood I could see into the bathroom on one side and half of the closet on the other. The shower curtain was open and the tub was empty. A man’s worn leather jacket drooped from a hanger in the closet. A pair of mirrored sliding doors hid the other half.

  I performed a swivel and a reverse, shoving the bathroom door until it banged against the tub and heaving the closet doors together along the track to the other side. I was prepared to throw myself either way if I flushed anything. Both spaces were unoccupied.

  That took off some of the pressure. Bathrooms and closets are the hiding places of choice of nine out of ten hotel felons.

  I walked into the room and hesitated near a lamp on the low bureau, but there was no one to throw it at. The place was standard size, with a pair of those beds that desk clerks think are queens, a nightstand between, and a maple hutch with the doors open to expose a nineteen-inch TV set. One of the beds was rumpled slightly, as if someone had been sitting or lying atop the spread, and the blinds were drawn over the window. Delwayne Garnet lay on his back on the carpet between the far bed and the TV. He was dressed pretty much as he had been the day before, in the gray college sweatshirt and distressed corduroys, but he’d traded the carpet slippers for sooty-looking Trainers. The sweatshirt had acquired two holes since I’d seen it last. He hadn’t done much bleeding through them because they’d stopped his heart.

  I leaned down far enough for a sniff. The shooter hadn’t stood close enough for the powder to burn the material. Garnet’s mouth was a little open. His eyes, open also, looked surprised and a little hurt, but wise with a knowledge we’re not to have until there’s nothing we can do with it. He never looked more like his father.

  I straightened. I was breathing through my mouth, and I could already feel my throat growing itchy from the brimstone air. For all that, it had already begun to fade. His skin would still be warm.

  He had a key card to the room in one pocket, nothing else on his person. The drawers in the bureau and nightstand showed only a Gideon Bible and two mammoth metropolitan directories. I looked under the bed and took another tour of the closet and bathroom. I wondered if the killer had taken his luggage.

  I found an airline ticket folder and a fat wallet in the leather coat in the closet. I opened the folder, holding it by its edge like a phonograph record, and read the return date. He had an aisle seat on a nonstop to Toronto leaving at 6:19 P.M. That explained no luggage. He had a U.S. Social Security card and a Canadian driver’s license in his wallet, both in Lance West’s name. The Social Security card was a good copy, but it’s a pathetically easy design to counterfeit, with the name typed on an ordinary typewriter. Fake credentials were a cottage industry during the sixties, when the demand among draft-dodgers and other fugitives was at an all-time high. If they were good enough you could use them to acquire all the legitimate papers you needed at your final port of call.

  The money compartment held a little over sixteen hundred in U.S. bills, nothing smaller than a fifty. After paying me my advance he’d have had just enough to buy a magazine for the flight home, and maybe a drink aboard. I didn’t find any credit cards. He’d probably paid cash for the room. I wiped off the wallet and put it back, money and all.

  A careful man, Delwayne Garnet; but then he’d had thirty-four years to practice. No wonder he looked so surprised when two bullets went into his chest.

  What a mesoblast.

  The TV remote lay on the rumpled bed near the foot. I left it there and pushed the Power button on the set with a knuckle. Bette Davis shrieked at me. I jumped and muted the sound. Filmed in black-and-white, she was talking with what looked like a trim British official in a room furnished in rattan with a fan turning slowly from the ceiling, a tropical set. I knew the film: The Letter. It was an early scene. The movie opened with a fusillade from a revolver. That would explain none of the neighbors reporting the shots. I switched off the set.

  I wiped off everything my fingertips had touched, conned the hallway, and went out. A vacuum cleaner whined in the room where the housekeeper was cleaning. I’d thought about hanging the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door of Garnet’s room, but decided against it. The police would probably consider that obstruction of justice.

  My young waiter was busing the table that had belonged to the noisy party of six, stacking soiled plates and silver on a butler cart. The diners had spilled drinks and food on the cloth, filled the ashtrays, and from the tight look on the waiter’s handsome dark face—quickly abandoned when he looked at me—hadn’t left much of a tip.

  “Just a guess,” I said. “Ten percent.”

  He smiled his brief smile. “It’s a privilege to work here on salary alone, sir. Would you like a table?”

  “I’d li
ke five minutes.” I held up a ten-spot folded into quarters.

  He resumed scraping crumbs. “I only serve food.”

  “I’m not a pervert, just ignorant. I seek enlightenment.”

  He looked around. The headwaiter was in conference with the woman at the reservation stand. Customers had begun to trickle out. We had the section to ourselves. He executed a graceful movement and the bill was gone. “Okay if I keep doing what I’m doing?”

  “Sure. You look like a fellow who can work and think at the same time. Boxer?”

  “I didn’t know I stuttered.”

  “I boxed a little in college. You learn what to look for.” I pointed at the bump on his nose. “Left jab?”

  “Steering wheel. I was sparring when most people my age were taking drivers’ ed. How much of the ten have I used up?”

  “That was small talk. You told me Mr. West called down to ask me to meet him in his room. Did you take the call?”

  “The hostess did.” He cocked an eyebrow toward the woman talking to the headwaiter.

  “She probably wouldn’t know if it was him calling. I doubt he came down after he checked in.”

  “Didn’t you ask him?”

  “There didn’t seem to be any point in it.”

  I was using my poker voice, but he had an ear for inflection. Hearing is almost as important in the ring as seeing. He stopped working and faced me.

  “Two from a nine-millimeter,” I said. “Maybe a thirty-eight. Anyway they were too big for a thirty-two, and forty-fives and magnums chew up more meat. He might have been the one who called down. It was pretty fresh.”

  He looked me up and down. “Police?”

  “Private. Whoever did it cost me a client.”

  “Then you can’t spare this. I don’t keep what I didn’t earn.” He slipped the ten from his apron pocket and held it out between two fingers. There was a little scarring on the knuckles.

  “You won’t get far in sports with that attitude.” I looked down at the table. A cork-tipped cigarette had smoked itself out in one of the ashtrays. The redhead wore pink lipstick to match her suit. “I’ll let you work it off. What name did the skinny guy sign on the check?”

  “Is he a suspect?” He put away the bill.

  “Not unless he could be in two places at once. He just caught my eye. Also my ears.”

  “He didn’t sign anything. He paid cash.”

  “Did he pay for anyone else?”

  “Everyone else.”

  “Who pays cash for a party that size at these prices?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. I just wait tables.” He dumped the ashtray into a lined bag attached to the cart.

  “Guess.”

  “Movie stars and gangsters. They don’t like to give away autographs.”

  I remembered the high-pitched bray of the man who insisted on sharing his meal with his guests. “Ever see this one in a movie?”

  “I work out evenings. I don’t see many movies.”

  “You wouldn’t have seen him if you had a season pass. That voice would knock the earphones off a sound crew.”

  His forehead puckered. “Wait, I remember someone at the table called him by a name. Something German. Morgenstern? Mr. Morgenstern.”

  It didn’t do anything for me, besides suggest he hadn’t borrowed the J.M. cufflinks. “Do you know if he’s staying in the hotel?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay. Where do you work out?”

  “Kronk.”

  “Good club.”

  “Great club. It turned out Tommy Hearns.”

  “You don’t have his reach.”

  “Neither did Ray Leonard. That didn’t keep him from wiping the canvas with Tommy.”

  “Twice.”

  “I don’t count the second time. That was a bad decision.”

  “Ever hear of a fighter named Curtis Smallwood?”

  He nodded. “The Black Mamba. He was way before my time.”

  “Mine too. So how come you heard of him and I didn’t?”

  “I’m a student of the art.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Joseph Sills.”

  I grinned. “Jersey Joe?”

  “I’m from Philadelphia.”

  “The Philly Kid.”

  “I prefer Joseph Sills.”

  “I’ll look for it on the bill at Cobo.”

  “Look fast. I plan to make my stake and get out while I can still do simple arithmetic.”

  “What then?”

  “Open a restaurant.” He finished stacking his cart and peeled up the tablecloth.

  On my way past the reservation stand, the hostess asked me if I’d had a pleasant meal. She had a big woman’s sense of fashion: strong colors, minimal makeup, and a bright scarf coiled loosely around her neck.

  “Tell you after the next course.”

  I went back up to Garnet’s room and found the hallway not as quiet as it had been. A gang of bellmen, black-suited security, and Wayne County Sheriff’s deputies in uniform were gathered in front of the room, whose door stood wide open. There were more inside, clustered around the Japanese housekeeper. She looked like an imported doll in a crowd of G.I. Joes. The tallest of them, a slick-haired forty in a suit blacker than all the rest, bent over her like a question mark to hear her broken English. She shook her head and spotted me.

  She pointed. “Him.”

  Shadows fell over me from all sides, like lowering clouds. The tall man who’d been asking the questions straightened, looked at me, and crooked a finger.

  THIRTEEN

  The tall man’s name was Hichens. He was a captain with the plainclothes division of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, whose jurisdiction covered everything at the airport not claimed by Washington. His suit was black enough to swallow galaxies. It looked as if it went on all of a piece, shirt, tie, and all, and zipped up the back. He had an ordinary sort of face, memorable only for its bleak eyes and hairline that went straight across the white marble forehead without a peak or a part. His hair was as black as his suit and glistened like a roll of unexposed film. I didn’t know you could even buy Brilliantine anymore.

  He ran six foot seven in loafers, and one look told me no one had ever asked him if he’d played basketball in college.

  “Ever play basketball in college?” I asked him.

  He worked his lips and held up a business card. It had an eagle with spread wings on it, overlaid with gold foil. “Who’s Aaron Williams?”

  We were seated on either side of a gray steel desk in a gray office in the Smith Terminal, a holdover from when the sheriff’s department ran all the security at the airport. The walls shone with fresh paint, without decoration except for a rectangle of paper the size of a bedsheet, spelling out the suspects’ rights. It was where they stripped and searched suspicious passengers.

  “Door-to-door hack,” I said. “He tried to sell me a sports package. I gave up sports when the Tigers moved out of the old ballpark.”

  “The maid says you told her you were Williams.”

  “She jumped to a conclusion. I told her Williams was the name.”

  He flicked the card a couple of times with a finger. Then he put it down and picked up my wallet. “Where’d you get the star?”

  “I used to serve summonses. Back then the department handed them out like plastic whistles.”

  “A long time ago. Now you can lose your license just for flashing it around. I think I’ll just hang onto it.”

  “Not without a warrant, and not until you quit the county, join the state police, and work your way up to lieutenant. My ticket belongs to Lansing.”

  He tapped each corner of the wallet against the desktop, rolling a square wheel. “I guess you read a book. Come across anything about the fall for impersonating an officer of the law?”

  “I memorized it. In order to find me guilty you have to show I told someone I was an officer of the law. All I did was show a badge and a card from a satellite company. I e
ven told her whose name was on the card. I can’t help it if she couldn’t read the rest.”

  “You’re missing the bigger picture. You’re our Number One for West.”

  “Garnet.”

  “According to you.”

  “It’ll check.”

  I’d spun him the tale twice: once in room three twenty-two and again there in the office. I’d started with Beryl Garnet’s ashes and finished with Delwayne’s corpse. There was no embarrassing either of them anymore. I’d even mentioned the cranked-up volume on the TV, which a deputy had confirmed by turning it on and taking it off Mute; the mood music behind Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall nearly blew all the buttons off his uniform.

  Hichens counted the bills in my wallet, ticking off points as he separated each with a thumb. “You con the maid into unlocking the door to the room. Ten minutes later she finishes cleaning the room next door, lets herself into West’s, and finds him, dead with two holes in his clock. She calls security, security calls us. You can still smell the powder stink, and the stiff is a long way from room temperature. We’re just nicely getting started when you wander back onto the set. You were gone just long enough to ditch the weapon.” He gathered the bills into a stack on the desk, smoothing the edges with the heel of his hand, tidy as a brick.

  “Or to ask the waiter who gave me Garnet’s message if he got it straight from Garnet.” I’d left out J. Morgenstern, whoever he might be. I couldn’t see a spot for him, and that would only aggravate a man like Hichens, who liked things in neat stacks.

  “You said. He’ll probably confirm it. I’d cover my ass the same way if I decided to go back up and brass it out. You still had time to toss the gun down a laundry chute.”

  “How’d I get it inside the hotel? My watch set off the metal detectors.”

  “You hear of people smuggling all kinds of hardware through airports. It happens at least twice a year, like the lunar eclipse.”

  “Damn lucky it happened the very day I came in to kill Garnet.”

  “Someone got it through.”

  “Why’d I do it? I can’t keep my murders straight.”