American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (11 page)

“How’s the labor business?”

“Fuck you care? You belong to a local?”

“No. The detective trade is strictly right-to-work, when you can get it. I was just filling an embarrassing lull in the conversation.”

Elron chuckled. He sounded a little like Michael Jackson. I wondered if it was the vitamins.

“Deirdre Fuller,” Watson said.

I almost spilled my coffee. It came out “Dee-dee” the way he said it; Darius’s pet name for his daughter. But some people had trouble pronouncing it right. I set the mug down carefully. “She’s dead.”

“She was dead last night on Channel Four. She was still dead this morning on CNN. I don’t read the papers, but I bet you the short money she’s dead there too. What I want to talk about is why you think I give a shit.”

“I wasn’t sure, until you showed up here. If you didn’t, you’d be out picketing some gambling hell.”

“I ain’t got the legs for it. I do give a shit, as it happens, strictly as a fan of her old man’s. It wasn’t for the sixty-eight Series, I’d of hung myself in my cell. It was my one bright light. I was in a bad way that year. The Man took me down for exercising my civil rights.”

“You torched a Radio Shack with the owner lying inside with a concussion you gave him. Cops checked him into Receiving with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. I didn’t see anything about that in the Constitution.”

“That was his choice. No one made him be there, sitting on his merch with a baseball bat across his lap. He was lucky
I only hit him with it once. Lots of folks died of dumb that week.”

“It was going around,” Elron said.

“Shut the fuck up. You wasn’t even a stain on your daddy’s underpants when all that came down.”

“The owner was black,” I said. “But I guess some people’s rights aren’t as civil as others’.”

Watson uncurled a hand from his mug to make an expansive gesture. He had a mermaid tattooed on the heel of his palm. “Over and done and dead. I let go of my anger when my parole came through. They had a honey of a shrink at Jackson. He put me in touch with my emotions. They flew right out between the bars. You read Jung?”

“Young who?”

“Carl Jung, you ignorant son of a bitch. Freud was a dirty old Kraut. When he was running around telling everybody they was motherfuckers, Jung was busy discovering the collective unconscious. We all part of the whole, starting with the monkeys.”

“I thought that was Darwin.”

“He was an anthropologist. I read everything Jung wrote I could get through the prison library system. I started my own outside. You want to guess how many books been written just about him?”

“Don’t,” Elron said. “Wilson’s got a warehouse full in Sterling Heights. Costs him fifteen hundred a month just for storage.”

I said, “You should hang out a shingle. Most cons who read inside come out lawyers. A jailhouse psychiatrist could write his own ticket in this town.”

“Deirdre Fuller,” Watson said. “Think I had anything to do with that deal?”

“Which deal, the killing deal or the deal you had with Hilary Bairn?”

“He tell you about that?”

I took another pull from my mug. I felt my nerves tamping down. “I know he stumbled into your ATM trap. You sent your boy Esmerelda to talk to him, probably with his famous black toolbox for a visual aid, and Bairn told him about his relationship with Deirdre and the trust fund she had coming. You didn’t believe him, or thought two months was too long, long enough anyway for Bairn to figure a way to cheat you out of whatever cut he offered you. Maybe Esmerelda opened his box, maybe he didn’t, but whatever he did spooked Bairn into trying to raise cash in a hurry to keep him from driving a nail through his hand.

“Our incarceration system failed you,” I went on. “Another year or so of therapy and you might’ve developed patience. All you did was blow both your chances at a piece of a couple of million. When Deirdre found out he was using her as a fence, she broke off the engagement. They fought, she’s dead, and Bairn’s got worse problems with the law than he had with you.”

“Bairn tell you I turned him down?”

“I never got close enough to ask. He was the job, not the client.”

“Know where he is?”

I shook my head. “Neither do the cops. That’s what makes him their star.”

Watson took his first drink. He blinked both eyes and pushed the mug away. “Strong shit. No wonder you dream funny. Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I found out what I came here to find out. I got new
business with Bairn now his meal ticket’s getting sliced up downtown. He offered me ten percent of the two million when it came through. He started out lower, but I had Ernesto negotiate and we reached what they call accord. You’re still working if you want to know who’s still squeezing him. It ain’t me.”

“You wouldn’t lie.”

“What’s the point of bluffing when I got Elron in my hand?”

The big man emptied his mug in a jerk and plocked it down on the table. It looked like a demitasse in his paw. “Jesus. Why’n’t you just chew the grounds?”

“We got a rally to attend.” Watson slid to the end of his bench, spread his feet, and pushed himself upright. “You should consider joining the rank and file. No one should live like this.” He swiveled his yellow eyes toward Elron.

The big man curled four fingers around the back edge of the refrigerator, took in a deep breath that swelled his face and turned it red, and pulled. The refrigerator tipped forward in one smooth motion and shook the house when it struck the linoleum.

Elron seemed to notice then he was still holding the scrap of paper in his other hand with my address on it. He looked around as if for a wastebasket, then took a step and laid it gently on the table. He followed Watson out through the living room while I sat and finished my coffee.

H
ey, man.”

Fuller sounded a little less worn. Whatever he’d smoked the night before must have given him some rest in spite of the hard floor against his old bones.

I said, “I got a busy signal before. Does this mean you’re through making your calls?”

“They got self-help manuals for everything else. They ought to write one for dealing with funeral directors. How big’s your trunk?”

“Why, did you kill one?”

“No, I’m moving today. I don’t need much space to pack what the buzzards left me. How’s my credit with you?”

“Based on the advance you paid, I could move you to South America. What hotel did you pick?”

“That’s the thing. Just when you think you know someone you divorced, she turns out human. I called Gloria first thing this morning. We cried a lot, then she offered me the vacation house I gave her in the settlement till I can find a place of my own. She ain’t used it in years. Dee-dee went there sometimes,” he said after a moment.

“Sure you’re up to that?”

“I figure I should get it all out right at the start. Then maybe it won’t be so hard later. What do you think?”

“I think it’ll be hard regardless. Where’s the house?” If it was Detroit Beach I was going to back out.

“Black Squirrel Lake. Know it?”

“If it’s got
lake
on the end I’m shaky. Got directions?”

“I can drive it in the dark. We practically lived up there from postseason till spring training.”

“I’ll bring my rod and reel.”

“Hope you like pike. They ate everything else.”

I spent a little while getting my refrigerator back on its feet, then opened it to survey the damage. The lightbulb was broken and I’d lost four eggs and a six-pack of Stroh’s, but the compressor was still working. There’s something to be said for living the spare life of the bachelor. I mopped up the mess and climbed into the traces.

At Alter Street, where Jefferson Avenue stops and Lake Shore Drive begins, a derelict sat on the southeast corner surrounded by his shabby duffels and knotted Wal-Mart sacks, smoking a cigarette and watching a Micronesian gardener edging blue-gray sod on the northwest corner. The derelict belonged to Detroit, the gardener to the first of the private estates that grew progressively larger as the river slowed down and spread to form Lake St. Clair. Which was the dream and which was the reality depended on which way you were driving. When it came to situations, you couldn’t come up with a better name for a street in that particular spot than
alter
.

I drove past two miles of scrollwork, topiary, and fleets of stretches and two-seaters, then turned into the white-powder drive between the two gray stone pillars and the rectangles of
lawn that looked naked now without furniture, the grass trampled flat and shiny by hundreds of pairs of feet. Arcs of water erupted from underground sprinklers and drifted in apparently aimless patterns, making rainbows in the sunlight hammering down from above. Fuller caught me watching them with my hands in my pockets when he opened the door.

“Somebody forgot to call the water company,” he greeted. “I’m running up the bill for Washington. Give me a hand with these, okay? I ran out the warranty in my arm thirty years ago.”

He was holding a silver garment bag, a two-suiter, over one shoulder and had a Detroit Tigers duffel at his feet, Domino’s blue from the early days of the succession of pizza franchises that had owned the team. I leaned across the threshold and hoisted the duffel by its handle. Behind him the morning sun painted shimmering stripes on a polished walnut floor that swept uninterrupted to the walls. “Looks like they even sold the dust bunnies,” I said.

“They went last. Careful with that bag. I’m heading out with a year’s supply of lightbulbs.”

The duffel wasn’t heavy. “Anything else?”

“I thought about faucet handles, but I figured they’d come after me for those.”

“I meant personal possessions.”

He grinned, reached inside the slash pocket of the team Windbreaker he wore over his sweats, tossed a baseball up above his head, caught it without looking, and returned it to the pocket.

“
The
ball?” I asked.

“That’s what the
Sports Illustrated
photographer said when I let Dee-dee play jacks with it. He said I ought to be more careful with a historical artifact.” The grin evaporated.

“It looks like she didn’t feel anything. For whatever that’s worth.”

He nodded, but he didn’t appear to be listening. He didn’t look rangy today, but frail, and every bit of sixty. The gray eyes lacked luster in a face as weatherchecked as an old tire. His gaze drifted out over the lawn. “You missed the TV crews. I hid upstairs and called my lawyer, who’s got plants at the stations. Appears I left for California last night.”

“That’s going to cost.”

“When you don’t have it to pay you don’t worry about it.”

I took the envelope out of my breast pocket and stuck it at him. “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t reported. The cops have all the federal company they want these days without inviting more.”

“It’ll help.” He folded it one-handed without looking inside and put it in the same pocket with the no-hitter ball. “They find the son of a bitch?”

“If they did they’re not announcing it. I didn’t want to call and show too much interest. They think I’m off the case. Am I?”

“We’ll talk about it on the way. Is
that
your ride?” He squinted at the Cutlass in the driveway, its blue paint turning to chalk in the sun.

“Don’t let the dings fool you. There isn’t a thing about the engine that’s legal.”

We put his bags in the trunk and I slammed the lid. He started to get in on the passenger’s side in front, then withdrew his foot and walked down the driveway toward the street. About thirty yards from the house he turned around and stood looking at it for a full minute. Then he took the baseball out of his pocket and flipped it back and forth between his hands. A caterpillar climbed my spine in high heels.

He nodded, a short jerk of his chin, as if approving a signal from the catcher. He clasped the ball in both hands against his chest, then wound up, raising it above his head and lifting his left foot as high as his belt. His right arm swept down and around twice, then back, paused, and snapped out straight as he came down on the foot, lifting the other, putting his whole body into the pitch. The ball vanished from his hand. I heard a whoosh and then a pane jumped out of one of the mullioned windows to the right of the front door with a tinny tinkle.

I was behind the wheel when he came back up the driveway and slid in beside me. “Sure you wanted to do that?”

“It was like I was carrying around a anvil in my pocket.”

“We could go in and get it.”

He looked at me. “Now, what’d that do besides take all the point out of the stupidest thing I ever done?”

I didn’t have any argument for that. I’d never seen a more convincing suicide note.

I hadn’t been through that part of Oakland County in some time. Judging by the housing developments that had sprung up since then, it might have been forty years. We drove past sprawling villages of mammoth houses surrounded by baby shrubs, raw sections of upturned earth dotted with dozers and portable toilets and buildings in every stage of construction, and school after school with temporary classrooms towed in and propped up on blocks to handle the sudden overload. It was one big tribute to Tyvek. I braked twice to avoid colliding with deer looking for a new place to live.

Fuller broke the long silence. “How they figure to feed all these folks when the last farm’s plowed under?”

“Plant wheat in the empty cities.” A billboard rolled past calling our attention to the future site of yet another Fox Run.

Black Squirrel Lake made a figure eight on the eastern edge of Dodge Brothers State Park, girdled in the middle by a tangle of reeds and pussy willows with a channel running through it. We passed a tiny rustic settlement flanked by a bar and diner, turned at a sign obliterated by buckshot, and followed a gravel track ending abruptly in front of a rectangular house sided in redwood with a front porch running its length. Shaggy plants grew out of copper pots suspended from the roof. “Somebody’s going to have to water ’em,” said Fuller.

We got out. At around 1100 square feet it was one of the larger houses in its immediate neighborhood. Older tile-and-tar-paper shacks flanked it on narrow lots. A cedar lodge the size of the governor’s mansion took up several acres directly across the lake, with a deck overhanging the water and below it a pontoon boat tied to a private dock. Its nearest neighbors were a Cape Cod nearly as large and a Frank Lloyd Wright affair of gaunt girders and glass sheets. That seemed to be the more fashionable side of the lake.