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

  I jumped a little. Some detective I was. I’d been too tangled in the past to notice another man in a suit offering his hand.

  I took it. He had a solid grip and enough confidence in it not to twist my fingers together like pipe cleaners. “Mr. Prosper?”

  “Guy, please. We have something important in common. I’ve seen your picture. It’s one of the few things she never threw away. She wasn’t much of a pack rat.”

  “She wanted a house she could clean with a leaf blower.”

  His laugh was quiet, genuine. He was younger than Catherine, a well-set-up man of fifty. The suit looked out of place. He’d built a successful contracting firm from the ground up, and would look more natural in coveralls than he did in the suit: His head was made for a hard hat. The hair was crisp gray, thinning at the temples, and the long square-jawed face was tan and creased around the eyes by sun and wind.

  “Is he here?” I said.

  He knew who I meant.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never laid eyes on him, but from what she told me I guess I wouldn’t recognize him if I had.”

  “I can’t think why he called me. We hadn’t had any contact since he threw a blanket over that shooting downtown, the one that made Catherine a widow. I haven’t thought about him in years; he wasn’t worth the waste of brain cells. I don’t get on with killers, even when they carry a license.”

  “I’m still working on how he found out about her. This service is invitation only. She made out the list. I never met half these people before today. Assuming you were right about his connections, doesn’t the CIA have a mandatory retirement policy?”

  “They don’t confide in me. My guess is they let you go when they don’t need you anymore. One way or the other.”

  A thick vein pulsed on his forehead; until then I didn’t think anything would shake him short of an explosion in a construction elevator. “Do you mean to say they still work that way in the twenty-first century?”

  “No. They’re probably more efficient about it now: Deadly sonic waves through a cell phone, maybe, or an exploding vape. When someone invents a better tank, someone else starts a war.”

  We were interrupted by some people who came to shake his hand and purr sympathy. I smelled perfume with names I couldn’t pronounce and aftershave that didn’t come in a bottle with a Viking on the label. He steered the last one away with an elegant hand on a linen sleeve. The well-bred smile was gone when he turned back to me.

  “If he does turn up, I don’t want to deal with it. Can you?”

  “Is that what you wanted to discuss?”

  He started to say something, but just then a stout man in a clerical collar stepped up behind the podium and thumped a microphone with a finger. We joined the assembly taking seats in ten rows of folding wooden chairs facing front and the ghastly thing got going.

  TWELVE

  “Funerals are for the living, they say. I can’t think who they’re talking about.”

  I looked at Prosper through the steam rising from a bowl of pasta. After the group broke up we’d walked down the business block to the Villa Firenze, an Italian restaurant specializing in Northern cuisine, and taken a glass-topped table on an iron frame on an open terrace. Before our waiter left us he adjusted our umbrella to keep the sun out of our eyes. Here on the far edge of the Eastern Time Zone, in summer you can read the fine print on a mortgage agreement outside at midnight. It was pleasantly warm.

  I said, “I guess it’s like getting a splinter pulled from your thumb. It’s no fun while it’s going on, but when it’s done it’s done.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, she wanted it this way. As I said, those were mostly strangers to me. She worked with some of them; she was a buyer for a clothing store chain, you know.”

  “No surprise. She could throw together a red-carpet outfit in ten minutes.”

  “She bought me this tie. I never put it on before today. Some of the other people there she met socially, without me along. We led separate lives in many ways.”

  We hadn’t been exactly joined at the hip, either; but I didn’t chime in. I’d learned long ago to let them talk, whether it was business or personal. Meanwhile the fettuccini was good and the Chianti anesthetized the pounding in my skull. The prices on the menu reflected the gears the restaurant had to grease to set up in that location; but Prosper wouldn’t let me pay my share.

  “They seemed to genuinely like her,” I said. “I overheard some funny stories afterward.”

  “Any audience was her arena.”

  She hadn’t changed. Still, he’d outlasted me by a decade. There’d been something there for sure.

  “We were a mismatch,” I said. “The bitterness went on long after it had to. That was on me. She caught me on a bad day and it hung on for years.”

  “She said the same thing; about not being right for each other, I mean. You were just back from war, with all I suppose that entails, and formal police work didn’t suit you, which is why you didn’t stay long enough to get your badge.”

  That had been more the department’s decision than mine, but I didn’t correct him. It was something that had happened a lifetime ago, to someone I didn’t know very well.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “she was happy when you left the force. She never wanted you to join in the first place. It wasn’t snobbery, or a matter of expensive tastes. It was a dangerous time to be a policeman.”

  “It’s worse now.”

  He twirled a strand of linguini around his fork. It was as thin as floss. “It took her years to get around to telling me that. You might remember she wasn’t one to admit weakness.”

  I wished I’d known she had any. It would’ve been one thing we had in common. “It worked out in the end, seems like. You beat the odds.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I proposed. It was a conversation I was having all by myself. Two strikes, you know? Talk about odds! She knew her box scores.”

  “Strike Two made me look not so bad. I think that’s when the thaw started.”

  A polished green Corvette chirped its tires behind a truck stopped for the light. The noise was sharp enough to turn heads. I drained my glass and gave up on ever finishing an Italian meal in a restaurant. Pasta breeds and multiplies in the bowl. “Old times,” I said. “Nuts.”

  He kept busy with his fork and spoon, but he was looking at me, not his plate. His eyes were kind, faded gray from being left out in the weather, but there was steel behind them or he wouldn’t have been any use on a job site. He shoved everything away and folded his arms on the table. With his coat off and sleeves turned back he showed the forearms of an ironmonger. “These last few months?”

  He wanted me to say yes, I was listening. Instead I just listened.

  The steel was all that was there. Any kindness had been an optical illusion. “You didn’t have Catherine under surveillance, by any chance?”

  * * *

  Just then our waiter came to ask if we wanted anything else. We shook our heads and he took away our dishes.

  I shook a cigarette out of the pack and fooled around with it. It’s almost as bad a habit as lighting up, but my reading glasses were in my pocket and I had no excuse to take them out and wipe the lenses to barter for time.

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t. I wasn’t even sure she was still in the area, and anyway I’m not well enough off to haunt people just for fun. What’s been going on?”

  “She noticed it first. She asked me what I knew about it. Because of my work, you see; there’s no reason to try to convince anyone the construction business doesn’t brush up against some shady characters on a regular basis. We deal in explosives and concrete—that’s pork and beans to a certain element—and then there are the unions. I’ve been interviewed by the FBI because of some of my associations, but I pride myself on my records and bookkeeping, and I’ve never come close to being accused of anything. Still—well, it’s the nature of the beast. So when Catherine said she felt we were being watched, I didn’t discount it.”

  “Did she bring this up before or after she was diagnosed?”

  “After. I know what you’re thinking. If it weren’t for the trade I’m in, I might have attributed it to her illness. There’s still a lot medical science doesn’t know about cancer; hallucination hasn’t been ruled out, and in any case the very randomness of it all—the unfairness, as Catherine put it, considering all the attention she paid to her health—would cause the most levelheaded person to question whether she’s the victim of some kind of conspiracy.

  “After some time, when no evidence showed up to confirm her suspicions, I started to think that’s what it was after all, her imagination.” He took in air, held it like smoke from a joint, and let it out. “Well, you know what they say about just when you think so-and-so.…”

  I dropped the cigarette to my feet and ground it into the terra-cotta, just as if it had been burning, giving him time to go on; but he didn’t go on. “What did you see?”

  “A blue Buick. The same blue Buick, several times, on the way to Beaumont for her radiology and chemo treatments and on the way back. Only on those trips, when we were both in the car. Never any of the times I was alone running errands or off on business.”

  He watched me. Anything I’d seen of a gentle nature in that face was illusion. It was the face of a man who could drop an I-beam on a human head from forty stories up.

  “Walker, it was Catherine they were interested in: The woman I loved, and who once loved you. They were following her to and from the hospital all the time she was dying.”

  THIRTEEN

  When the waiter returned with the check, I asked for coffee, laying cash on the table to spare him the trouble of adjusting the bill. Prosper didn’t want any. I waited until it came and we were alone again. Then: “Sure it was a blue Buick?”

  “One of the newer models, yes. Why?”

  “Just confirming details.” Federal departments don’t mix their fleets; that makes it harder to tell friend from foe. The outfit tailing Shane Sothern was driving gray Chryslers. I wondered how many agencies were butting into my life this season, and what made me worth the expense.

  Or if they were feds at all. Abelia Hunt and Shane might have been separate situations, and neither of them had to have had anything to do with me or a wife I’d misplaced when they were still in Huggies. When it came to politics, Catherine thought liberal was an arts program and conservative a style of dress.

  “Can you think of anything she was involved with that would draw that kind of attention?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Anything that might be construed as other than, oh, say, an attempt to overthrow the government?”

  “Aside from the godawful things politicians’ wives wear to presidential inaugurations? No.”

  Some other time in some other circumstances I’d have admired his snark; this wasn’t it.

  I asked him if he got the license number, but that was just one of the questions at the end of chapter one of the primer. He shook his head. “I only saw the car from the front, in the mirror.”

  “Do you think you were meant to see it?”

  “Open tail, you mean.” A bitter smile creased the lower half of his face. “Yes, I watch TV. Maybe; but I’m pretty observant, and she spotted it first. How important is that?”

  “It means the difference between someone who knew what he was doing and a raw amateur. If it’s the first, it would help us narrow the field: either cops or an independent professional or the little gray army you and I and the rest of the taxpayers keep in uniform.”

  “And if it’s the second?”

  “Let’s hope it isn’t. Professionals at least are predictable. They run on rails.”

  “How can we—I—find out which it is?”

  He was good. I couldn’t tell if the pronoun slip was genuine. I sipped from my mug. The coffee had been boiling longer than Vesuvius. “We may not have to. If you’re right and she was the one Blue Buick is interested in, it stopped when she did.”

  Blood stained his bronze cheeks. His anger was palpable, and it was directed at me. Even then he didn’t shout.

  “We have to. Because it upset her at a time when she had more than enough to be upset about. Because no one has the right to interfere with the most personal thing a human being has to face. And because of me. I want to remember the woman I’ve spent my life with without a cloud getting in the way. Maybe mucking around in people’s private lives has made you numb to their emotions, but I’m not dead inside.”

  I set the down the mug with both hands like fine china. “Call me the next time you see the car, or any car you see more often than you should. That would mean whoever it is hasn’t found what he’s looking for. If he stays put for any length of time it will be a mistake, because I’ll nail him.”

  “What if I don’t see anything?”

  “I’ll muck around until I do.”

  “That was uncalled for, what I said. I should know better, the people I’m forced to work with on occasion.” He drew a checkbook in a silver leather case from an inside pocket. I held up a hand.

  “I don’t need anything. That’s my gift to Catherine. If the expenses get the better of me we’ll talk then.”

  We rose. I gave him a card with my cell number scribbled on the back and we shook hands. I asked if he needed a lift.

  “I’m walking. We’re—I’m local. The dot-commers have driven most of the older businesses out here to the suburbs. They call my block Little Detroit. Ever consider it?”

  “Considered. Rejected. Most of my customers share the three-one-three area code. They’d think I’m putting on airs.”

  On the way back to my car I rubbed the scar on my scalp, a souvenir of my last exchange with the Iroquois Heights Police Department; but I try not to knock a place a person calls home. In any case I’d poked a bear in mourning for its mate, which is rotten enough manners for one day.

  I made the trip back home without paying attention to the turns; I knew that route too well considering my history. I was more interested in searching the mirror for gray Chryslers, blue Buicks, and a ghost or two of my own invention.

  Her voice was vivid, as when someone shouts your name in a dream; clearly enough to wake you up.

  I wish you’d let me lay out your clothes, Amos. You’re the only one in the office. Why wear a suit every day?

  I didn’t think there was anything to what Guy Prosper had told me. Otherwise I might have taken money up front; a job is a job, and no one can live on bittersweet recollections.

  Catherine had never posed a threat to national security. She knew fashion and fabrics and which celebrity’s clothing line was going to break records, but she didn’t know Moscow from Muncie.

  The world’s full of blue Buicks; also grieving spouses. Prosper hadn’t earned the right to chronic suspicion, any more than I was qualified to sustain a healthy relationship for more than a week. Catherine had traded up in the end.

  * * *

  I picked up the News on the way home, but none of the corpses that had turned up since yesterday belonged to Gray Chrysler No. 1, and there was nothing about it on the evening TV report. That brought no comfort. Detroiters don’t go out of their way to discover dead bodies, but unless the stiff at Atlas Motors hadn’t clued in his partner on where he was headed from the Oasis Café, there was no reason Gray Chrysler No. 2 hadn’t gone straight there after we lost him. And if Gray Chrysler No. 1 played it that close to the vest with his partner, why?

  And was that the reason he was killed?

  And how long would it take for the cops to tow an abandoned vehicle in a moribund neighborhood to the impound, trace it to some bureau named from leftover tiles in Scrabble, and connect it to the murder victim when he finally showed up?

  And what made it my business anyway?

  Every day of every year, someone gets careless and pays the price. You read or hear about him all the time, and just because you never looked the party in the face you shake your head, turn the page or change the channel, and lose yourself in some other tragedy. I had as much right as the next guy to be apathetic.

  Except for the complication of a kid with a muckraker complex and a stack of Founding Fathers in the office safe.

  I thought I wanted a nightcap, but I couldn’t make up my mind even about that. At length I returned the bottle to the cupboard above the sink and went to bed. Fell asleep thinking about face-in-the-crowd men in plain-paper-bag cars and didn’t dream about them once. That was one for the shrinks.

  * * *

  How are you, Amos? You’ve gotten so gray. I know a hairdresser who can take off years.

  That’s kind of you, Catherine. You’re dead, by the way.

  What’s that to do with looking younger?

  You’ve got me there. I thought I had a good argument at dead.

  Did you and Guy get along?

  I liked him. Your taste is improving. Was improving; sorry.

  Don’t run yourself down, lover. You weren’t Husband of the Year, but you weren’t Ike Turner by a country mile. We had our moments.

  I meant your other ex.

  Oh, him. He took all the sting out of being a widow. That’s a long time ago now. Anyway I wasn’t asking what you thought of Guy. What about what he said?

  Dying is a surreal experience, and not just for the one who’s dying. You can’t always count on your perceptions.

  That sounded stilted, even in the dream.

  God knows you had your faults, but copping out wasn’t one of them. Of course, we haven’t been in touch for twenty years. Men rarely change for the better.

  We’re not in touch now. You’re dead.

  Don’t change the subject. You blew him off, I bet.

  I can’t build a house without nails.

  I was wrong, Amos. You haven’t changed. I’m dead, and you still manage to disappoint me.

  * * *

  I had a good argument for that, but just then I woke up. Something was different.