Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Page 8

“Feed them,” Spitzer said. “We’ll wait.”

  “You look like fighters,” she said. “The skinny one especially. I don’t sell to fighters. It’s against the law, and even if it wasn’t I wouldn’t. You said over the phone you were interested in show dogs.” She had a little accent, most noticeable when her tone turned accusing.

  The wicker shade buckled and a square head the size of a toaster oven pushed a black snout up against the glass. A rosy tongue spilled out of a wide, wrinkled grin filled with ivory teeth. The head was looking out the top pane. Something rustled behind me. Spitzer was standing on the bottom step now.

  I said, “Is that dog standing on something?”

  A sheet of steel slid down behind the woman’s eyes. They hadn’t been soft to begin with. “You’re not the man I spoke to on the phone. He had a lilt.”

  “Maybe Fido ate his balls,” Spitzer said.

  I gave her one of my cards. “There’s a misunderstanding. I didn’t call you. Are you Mrs. Guzman?”

  “‘Investigations,’” she read. “I have all my papers. My dogs are tested regularly for CHD. If you take one home and it develops problems, I’ll replace it or I’ll refund your investment. I’m a breeder, not a puppy mill.”

  “What’s CHD?” I asked.

  “Congenital hip displacement. If you don’t know that, why are you investigating me?”

  “Again, a misunderstanding. We’re not with the kennel club. We’re private detectives. Do you have a daughter named Jillian Rubio?”

  She took that in. Then the door slammed shut. The dog, startled, began bellowing. The black snout dissolved into pink gums and flashing teeth. The glass fogged over. The window jumped against the frame and I joined Spitzer down on the ground.

  “Fish make good pets,” he said. “You don’t have to shut them up and when you get tired of them, you give ’em a flush. What’s the deal with the Rubio woman? She wanted?”

  I said, “We’ll come back after feeding time.”

  TWELVE

  “Blackmail, huh? Who’s the mark?”

  “Barbara Bush,” I said. “She used to dance topless at Planet Hollywood.”

  “Fuck off. You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t trust Corky, and I trust Corky. I wouldn’t have told you about the blackmail, except it’s possible you have a right to know what you mixed into. The dogs put an edge on the situation.”

  We were sitting at a table in the restaurant next to Miranda Guzman’s house. It was a square room lit with fluorescent troughs, with colorful bottles of hot sauce standing on a shelf that ran around the walls and a large Mexican in a clean undershirt stirring something lethal on the griddle behind the counter. The smell was making me rethink ordering just coffee. He’d just opened for lunch and he must have been a good chef because it takes an expert to keep all the spatters on the cooking surface.

  “Presa canario,” Spitzer said. “What kind of dog is that, do you think? She must’ve bred a Great Dane with a Clydesdale.”

  I looked at the photocopied flyer I’d torn off a crowded bulletin board inside the door of the restaurant. “Spanish breed, it says here. From presa español. Cortez used them to hunt Aztecs. This strain comes from the Canary Islands. They run a hundred to a hundred fifty pounds and they snack on pit bulls and Rottweilers.”

  “I bet she gets a lot of business here. They come for the fajitas and go home with a man-eater.”

  “It’s a complication.”

  “No shit. We had an eighth of an inch of glass between us and a torn throat. What would you have called that, a serious miscalculation?”

  “Every time I come here they sic something savage on me. Last time it was four big Hispanics. What this operation needs is a little less improvisation and a little more finesse.”

  “What it needs is a lot less me. I’m going back to St. Paul. Lawyers only tear you up on the witness stand.”

  “Suit yourself. We’ll get your duffel out of the trunk.”

  When the cook came with Spitzer’s burrito, he asked him to call a taxi.

  “¿Qué?” He had kind sad eyes in a big round face like the map of Sonora.

  “El cab-o, Pancho. Redtop. El grande remo. Today, if possible.”

  “¿Qué?”

  I said, “I think you just ordered a big canoe paddle.”

  “You ask him, then. I bet you know all the words to ‘La Cucaracha.’” He cut into the burrito with the edge of his fork and released a cloud of steam.

  I held a fist up to my ear and dialed in the air. The cook said, “Sí, pronto,” and trundled back around the counter. He returned with a cordless telephone. I pecked out a number I knew by heart and the dispatcher said he’d have a cab in front of the address in fifteen minutes. I gave back the instrument, told the cook gracias, and between hand signs, a scatter of leftover Spanish nouns, and his own superior command of English, I managed to get in an order for a pound of raw hamburger to go. He looked puzzled, but he had too much self-possession to shake his head on the way back to the kitchen. I recalculated his tip at twenty percent.

  “You better add this if you want to put the dogs out of commission.” Spitzer pushed a bottle of Mad Apache hot sauce across the table. The cap was floating a half inch above the container.

  “I want to make a friend, not kill an enemy.”

  “Good plan. That way you can be buried next to your wife and your parents.” He ate two forkfuls, emptied his water glass on top of them, and belched propane. “Man, I wouldn’t want to be the guy sitting next to me in coach.”

  A few minutes later, Alvin Spitzer gave his driver the duffel, got into the backseat, and rode out of my life without so much as a “hasta la Viagra.” I heard Sid Corcoran fired him sometime after, while he was in jail awaiting arraignment on a charge of assault and battery. He’d found a doorman he couldn’t con and a lock he couldn’t pick, all in the same week.

  I put my paper sack with the wrapped hamburger on the floor of my car, drove around the corner for the benefit of whatever dogs and mothers might be watching through Miranda Guzman’s window, and parked next to a Dumpster piled high with takeout cartons and shredded rims. The street that ran behind the restaurant and the tire shop and the house between was wider than an alley but just as vacant, and no more in need of repaving than a street in any other neighborhood, which meant that the cracks in the asphalt qualified for wetlands preservation.

  I was still improvising. I wanted a door with an easy lock, a look inside an unshaded window, a glimpse of something that might indicate there was someone living in the house besides Mrs. Guzman and her breeding stock. Even a Mr. Guzman would be a nice change, but I was counting on a set of luggage monogrammed J. R. or maybe Jillian Rubio herself, sipping a Tequila Sunrise and scratching the belly of an orgasmic hippo of a canine. The raw meat might work on Miranda, if the dogs weren’t having any.

  The block presented an encouraging lack of around-the-clock residents with time on their hands. Across the street was a lumberyard with stacks of boards protected from the weather by blue plastic tarping, with a circular saw zinging away inside the galvanized walls of the accompanying truss building. Vacant lots yawned on either side, where a couple of HUD houses had probably stood, never occupied and rotting, until the city knocked them down to discourage crack dealers from setting up shop inside. Detroit is a city of empty lots and lumberyards, churning out plywood to nail over the windows of unoccupied houses on their way to becoming empty lots. The odds of a concerned neighbor spotting a private agent snooping through windows in that vicinity were agreeably low.

  Getting to the windows was a problem. A rectangular backyard of winter-killed grass extended from a kennel built behind the house to the street, enclosed in a chain-link fence eight feet high with razor wire on top and a padlocked gate. Inside was a scatter of rubber dog toys and a well-gnawed hunk of bone and gristle that looked disturbingly like part of a human pelvis. It was probably a hambone. There was scarcely room to squeeze between the house and the
buildings on either side, and less opportunity to beat the street in the event of discovery. I couldn’t get that chewed-up hambone out of my mind.

  A knee-high door in back of the kennel slid up while I was contemplating the situation and the first of eight dogs ducked its huge square head to bound through into the yard. The rest came in all sizes, not including small, but the first was the biggest and the most impressively built: deep-chested, with a short bluish brindle coat, Chippendale legs, and a scooped-out belly like a greyhound’s. It made a beeline for the hambone, and after two or three seconds of scraping the surface with its teeth, down on its elbows and bracing the bone with its great round paws, something cracked, a sound that turned my bowels to water. The dog was the same one that had been watching me through the front window earlier.

  The cracking ended its obsession with the bone. It lowered its haunches, let its tongue hang, and amused itself watching the others with paternal interest. They romped, dug at the hard earth, licked themselves, wrestled, and pretended to worry at one another’s throat. The growling sounded serious, but in the absence of bleeding I assumed it was play. The other loner, a female slightly over two-thirds the top dog’s size, whined and yipped and clawed at the base of the fence facing the street, paused now and then just long enough to sniff the air, then went back to work with fresh enthusiasm. I figured she had caught the scent of a pheasant roosting in one of the empty lots.

  “What are you doing? What have you got in that bag?”

  I hadn’t seen Miranda Guzman sidling between the house and the tire shop. She was standing near the fence gate, wearing a heavy, hip-length sweater over her stretch pants. Her feet were stuck in an old pair of industrial work shoes whose steel toes had begun to wear through the cracked leather; either that, or the dogs had started on them when they got bored with their chew toys. Her hands were knotted into fists in the sweater’s pockets.

  I looked down at the sack. I’d forgotten I was holding it. “Leftovers. I never could finish a plate of Mexican in one sitting.”

  “You’re trespassing.”

  I was standing on a public sidewalk, but I didn’t make an issue of it. “I’m looking for your daughter. No one’s seen her in three months. Her friends are worried.”

  “She doesn’t have any friends. Did she send you?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t be estupid. The one who calls herself Gilia Cristobal.” The accent was thickening.

  “What do you know about Gilia Cristobal?”

  “I know she’s a whore that gets her picture taken in her underwear and parades it around in front of God and everyone. Dragging my daughter’s name through filth.”

  “When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

  “She came here for Thanksgiving. Get off my property.” She took her hands out of her pockets. She was holding a big ring in one with a key dangling from it.

  “If you saw her then, you’re the only one who has since the first part of November. Did she say where she was going when she left?”

  “She didn’t stay for the holiday. Happy?” She grasped the padlock on the gate and stuck the key in the slot. “If I were you, I’d start running now. These dogs can take down a horse in full gallop.”

  The dogs had stopped playing and were gathered on the other side of the gate, eyes bright and their stubby tails wagging; all except two. The big bull stood apart from them, staring at me with thoughtful anticipation. The bitch near the street was still trying to get out her own way. She was too preoccupied to notice what was going on.

  I reached back under my coat and pulled the revolver out of its holster.

  “Have it your way.” Miranda Guzman sprang open the lock and undid the latch. The bitch near the street heard the noise. Her big head swung that direction.

  I brought the Smith & Wesson around, at the same time taking hold of the paper sack by its bottom and shaking out the contents. The ground meat struck the sidewalk with a splat and separated. The woman must have thought it was poisoned, because she said something sharp in Spanish and tried to slam the gate shut. She wasn’t fast enough for the bitch. The dog was already running, and knocked two others sprawling and got her broad chest and shoulders through the space. For a moment she was pinned between the gate and the frame, but she twisted and got her hips free. The gate clanged to behind her, drawing yelps from one or two of the other dogs when the chain link struck their muzzles. The bitch slipped on the turn, scrabbled for traction, and came straight at me, ignoring the hamburger. I took aim on her chest.

  “Isabella! ¡Aqui!”

  The half-hysterical command was lost on Isabella. My finger was tensing on the trigger when she abruptly changed course and loped past me. A string of slobber detached itself from a pair of blubbery lips and plastered my left pant leg. Tires cried in the street; the bumper of a delivery van that had just turned the corner stopped an inch short of collision with a hundred pounds of muscle and flesh. The bitch, taking no notice, bounded over the curb on the other side, crossed a sidewalk, and stopped briefly when she came to the board fence that surrounded the lumberyard. Whimpering and yipping, she ran back and forth along its base, then found a narrow gap where a board had come loose and wriggled through on her elbows, jostling the board off its nail. It fell with a clank.

  I left Miranda fumbling with the padlock and trotted across the street. I was still holding the gun. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a pale face behind the windshield of the delivery van, which was still stopped in its lane. That wasn’t something that had anything to do with me. I wanted to know what was more interesting to a dog than trespassers and fresh meat.

  Ducking under the fence rail, I tore my coat on the bent nail, but I didn’t spend any time on it. The presa canario had followed her nose to one of the stacks of lumber covered in blue tarp. She clawed at the plastic, got a strip between her teeth, and pulled, snarling and whistling through her snout. I was moving that way in long strides, but Miranda Guzman overtook me, bustled past, seized Isabella’s thick nylon collar, and tugged with both hands. But the bitch set her feet. Her shoulders bunched as big as coconuts and the tendons in her neck stood out like guy wires. Her stubby ears lay flat and saliva cooked in her constricted throat. Nothing was going to move her from that spot this side of Gabriel’s horn or a slow mailman.

  I changed hands on the .38, got a grip on the tarp, and tore it free of the clothesline someone had tied around it. Something long and gray slid off the top of the stack of boards and flopped over the edge. Flakes of scarlet enamel still clung to the end, bright as cardinals in a winter landscape.

  “Madre de dios.” Miranda’s voice was a whisper. Only her hands on the bitch’s collar prevented her from crossing herself.

  I’d been wrong about a pheasant being the cause of the commotion. Pheasants don’t have fingers.

  THIRTEEN

  I hadn’t visited Inspector John Alderdyce’s office on its rarefied upper floor at Detroit Police Headquarters in many months. He’d been promoted practically out of my orbit, got his picture taken with chiefs and mayors and white city council hopefuls who needed the black vote in order to nod when the mayor spoke, and probably hadn’t visited a crime scene since Jeffrey Dahmer was in short pants. But the office hadn’t changed: The same academy class picture hung at the same crooked angle on the wall, the same framed photos of his wife and two children, now out-of-date, stood on the corner of the same gray steel desk. A credenza I remembered groaned beneath stacks of what might have been the same fat case files and yellowing reports.

  Alderdyce himself had changed, but in a straight predictable line. There were glints of silver in his close-cropped, tightly curled hair, he’d taken on baggage around the middle after the fashion of heavy-muscled former beat cops approaching their thirty, the eyes in the brutal face had gotten a little older and a whole lot less happy, if they’d ever been happy to begin with; I’d known him since childhood in the dear dead days of integration and couldn’t recall eve
r having seen him cut loose with so much as a yippee. His tailoring was always flawless, the material of his gray winter-weight suit in keeping with his upper-story salary and his necktie woven from equal parts spun silver and moonbeam.

  He sat in his chair without touching the padded leather back, listening to the receiver he held to his ear and looking straight through me as if I were a window to a view he didn’t care much about. After two minutes of almost complete silence on his end he thanked the caller and hung up.

  “Medical examiner.” He’d given up using initials like ME, APB, and GSW about the time Cops worked them into America’s everyday vocabulary. “Dead two months anyway, possibly three, intermittent bouts of cold weather considered. No visible wounds as yet. It’s hard to tell when you can poke your finger right through the rotten skin.”

  I nodded understanding. I’d stood back and burned tobacco to distract my nostrils while the morgue crew had shoveled the body of what appeared to be a young woman in an advanced stage of decomposition from the top of a stack of lumber into a rubber bag on a stretcher. Miranda Guzman had retreated into her house to throw up and possibly cry. I’d helped her haul a determined Isabella across the street and into the kennel, and had used the telephone in her front room to call 911. There had followed a cloud of uniforms, a plainclothesman and -woman from the local precinct, and then the lab rats, who had directed the photographers, examined some loose pebbles in the yard, and taken away the blue tarp and clothesline to check for prints, DNA, and Malay sailor knots.

  The cops had been polite enough, in their suspicious way; frowned a little when I said I’d have to check with my client before identifying said party and underlined the answer in their notepads, but made no mention of truncheons or hot irons or the Lincoln Question. The owner of the lumberyard, a knobby Dane in a Carhartt coat who looked like the man on the Brawny paper towels package, had stared at me throughout the operation as if I’d been smuggling out two-by-fours up my sleeves.