American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (12 page)

“Come take a look at this.”

Fuller had gotten onto the porch to fish the key out of one of the hanging plants. The tone of his voice brought me back up the worn path in the grass I’d wandered down for a closer look at the lives of people who took vacations. He stood with his back to the driveway, the silver garment bag hanging from his hand to the boards. As I stepped up beside him he withdrew his index finger from a neat round hole in the front door, a third of the way down from the top and an inch right of center.

“Squirrel?” he asked.

“Squirrel,” I said. “If someone shot it from a gun.”

“There’s no hunting here. The lake owners’ association has its own security.”

“Not many people hunt from inside a house. This bullet was traveling our way.” I pointed to a bristle of splinters pointing out.

“What the hell.” He aimed the key at the lock.

I grasped his wrist before he could turn it. “Those splinters are fresh.”

He got it. He let the bag slide the rest of the way to the boards and we backed off the porch.

On the ground I pointed to a corner of the house out of direct view from the windows and he took up that position while I opened the door on the passenger’s side of the car and released the spring that opened the little hatch under the glove compartment. The Luger came free of the metal clips with a twist. I checked the magazine, heeled it back into the handle, chambered a round, and circled the house on foot with the barrel raised, seeing what I could of the inside through the windows from ground level. It was useless unless the shooter was careless enough not to stay away from them, but it beat charging the place without a plan. When I got to where Fuller was waiting, I got the key from him and told him to stay put a little longer. Then I crept back up the steps to the porch.

I turned the knob slowly until it stopped. The door was locked. I slid in the key without scraping the sides and turned it just as slowly until the dead bolt slid back with a snap. Then I tightened my grip on the pistol and went in.

No one shot at me, not in the open floor plan of the kitchen and dining and living room areas or in either of the two bedrooms, one larger than the other, or the bathroom that was just big enough for a sink, shower stall, and toilet. The place was tidy, with a piny smell throughout and personal items here and there I didn’t bother to stop and study. There was no telephone
or television, no video games, just a few paperbacks and a stack of board games in ratty cardboard boxes stacked in a closet to distract the occupants from the entertainments offered by the lake. A genuine getaway spot.

A sliding doorwall let me onto a shallow deck overlooking the water, with an old-fashioned wooden chaise longue, a green resin chair, and a white wicker love seat, where one could sit on the faded cushions, sipping a drink and smacking mosquitoes and watching speedboats razz about and the pontoon boat from the wilderness mansion across the way cruise in circles, leaking dance music and the clink of cocktails being stirred. I poked the Luger under my waistband and leaned on the railing. That gave me a fresh angle on the near shore, and a look at the boxy rear end of an orange Aztek sticking up out of the water.

W
hen we got down there, I pointed out the twin tracks where the Aztek’s tires had flattened the grass from where it had been pushed or driven off the driveway down to the shore. I’d walked right across them on my patrol around the house, but they weren’t obvious and I hadn’t been looking at the ground. Where the grass ended and the earth sloped to the water’s edge, two furrows led through the mud to the lake. The vehicle had rolled a few yards into the water and hung up with its front two-thirds submerged and the hatch pointed skyward at a thirty-degree angle. I took out my pistol and offered Fuller the butt. “Know how to use one?”

“I grew up on Erskine. Wasn’t for baseball I’d probably be doing my time in Jackson. What you want me to shoot?” He took it.

“Whatever moves when I open the hatch.” I’d left my coat in the Cutlass. I sat down on the grass, took off my shoes and socks, and rolled my pants above my knees. It didn’t make me feel a bit like Huckleberry Finn.

“What’s the odds something will?”

“Zero.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“My arithmetic’s not that good.”

“Is it Bairn’s? There’s plenty of these around.”

“Not with his plate.”

“So this is where he’s been hiding. He must’ve spent some time out here with Dee-dee.”

It was another hot day and the water was only a few degrees cooler, but it chilled me like a blast of liquid oxygen when I waded in. The bottom was mucky and oozed between my toes; I might have been walking on a bed of earthworms.

Despite the precautions I was soaked to the waist when I reached the car. I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned against the back window, but the glass was tinted and I saw only shadows. Nothing seemed to be moving around inside. I reached down for the handle. If the hatch was locked I’d have to go back and leave it for the cops. I should have left it for them anyway, but my judgment’s not often better than my arithmetic.

It wasn’t locked. The latch clunked when I lifted the handle. I raised the hatch until the hydraulics took over, then got out of the way of anything that might come at me from inside.

Nothing did. I hadn’t expected it to, but I’d been shot once for my expectations. There was plenty of cargo space behind the rear seat, which folded down when extra was needed. It wasn’t. The man who lay there with his knees tucked into his chest looked to be only average height and underweight for that. It gave his cheeks that hollow starved look you see in cologne advertisements; his cocoa-brown suit, creased and wrinkled now, would have hung handsomely on his delicate frame.
The face was Latin, the disarranged hair thick and black and growing far down on the forehead, the beard blue beneath the skin, lashes long and curling where the eyes stared through them at nothing. He’d bled a little from the hole in his shirt, leaving an oblong patch on the carpeted deck like rusty water stain.

“Who is it, Bairn?” Fuller had a good view from shore.

“No.”

Tucked behind the bent knees like an afterthought was a black enamel toolbox the size of a small tackle. I turned up the hinged latch with a knuckle and tipped back the lid. Inside was a stainless-steel hammer with a black neoprene grip and a box of three-inch spikes.

I felt a foolish little pang of disappointment. I’d psyched myself up for a different sort of introduction to Ernesto Esmerelda, Wilson Watson’s chief enforcer. It was like cramming all night for an exam, only to find out in the morning it had been canceled.

While we were waiting for a response to our 911 call, Fuller gave me a towel from the linen closet in the house to sponge off the muck and a pair of sweats from his duffel to wear while my trousers hung to dry over the railing of the deck. They were too long for me and I bunched them up around my ankles while my feet appreciated the dry warmth of a pair of white gym socks. We sat on the deck, which bore no visible evidence of Deirdre’s occupancy. He’d been sitting less than two minutes when he sprang up, muttering something, and went back inside. I watched a fisherman in an aluminum boat trying his luck among the reeds. My mood brightened when Fuller came back with a bottle of Polish vodka and two barrel glasses pinched between the fingers of one hand.

“Private stash,” he said, pouring. “It’s been aging all this time under a couple of loose floorboards. I had a leetle problem when I had my slump.”

We touched glasses and I drank. The pure grain alcohol scorched my throat going down and vibrated the molecules in the floor of my stomach, producing heat on the microwave principle. “First drink’s best, East or West.” I’d heard it in an old western.

“First and last,” he said. “Everything in between’s just something you got to get through.”

“Like a slump.”

“Hell on earth. Them big bonuses is just an ulcer waiting to bleed. You don’t live up to ’em, it’s back to the minors. Only they ain’t so bad as the worrying about it. Wilson Watson. Seems to me I heard of him.”

“He’s a gambler,” I said. “Also a gangster and a labor leader, which aren’t always the same thing. He made a killing on your no-hitter.” I’d brought him up to date on the way back from the lake: Charlotte Sing, Hilary Bairn’s plunge at Detroit Beach that had put him under Watson’s thumb, the stolen watch, Esmerelda’s reputation, Watson’s visit to my house that morning. I thought laying out the facts might put everything into perspective, but it left me more confused than ever. I took another drink. It was as disappointing as he’d said.

He shuddered. “Gambling, no word’s scarier. You can dope or carouse, commit rape, manslaughter, and still get your shot at Cooperstown if you won enough games, but make one call to a bookie and you wind up greeting at Wal-Mart. Look at Pete Rose.”

“Showboat.”

“Well, then, Denny McLain. First thirty-game winner since
Dizzy Dean and the last we’ll ever see, but he broke some legs for a gambler and did time, and that’s all she wrote. If it’d been for a politician it’d been different.”

I let him go on. Sports are always safe. We were up to the World Series That Never Was, a running sore with Fuller, when the fuzz came.

Semifuzz, as it turned out. His name was Fred Loudermilk, and he introduced himself as a captain with security in the service of the Black Squirrel Lake Owners’ Association. His Jeep Cherokee was painted sky blue with a lightning-bolt insignia on a white circle on the doors and orange lights clamped to the roof. He wore the lightning-bolt in patches on his sleeves, sky blue also, and a ball cap with the bill bent into a horseshoe curl framing a lean tan face, mirror-finish sunglasses, and a sandy moustache trimmed and trained to follow the curve of the bill. He stood four inches shorter than I on the front porch. “Which one of you placed the call?”

“I did,” I said. “I thought I was talking to the sheriff’s department.”

“We monitor all nine-one-one calls placed from the lake. I’m also an officer in the sheriff’s reserve. That means I’m qualified to investigate criminal complaints.” He thumbed open a notebook with a spiral on top. “You’re Amos Walker, a private investigator? Did you know the victim?”

“Not personally. His name’s Esmerelda. He ran errands for Wilson Watson, a semiracketeer in Detroit.”

“What’s a semiracketeer?”

“A punk who hasn’t been caught yet.”

He didn’t look up from the notebook. “Says here he was killed on the premises. What makes you think so?”

“You’re standing on the spot.”

He stepped back, lifting his glasses for the first time to stare down at the porch. Neither Fuller nor I had noticed the rusty smear until we’d come back for a second look.

“Bullet came from inside,” I said. “There’s the hole. He didn’t even give him a chance to knock.”

“You’re Darius Fuller, a retired ballplayer? What’s your connection?”

“I built the place. I’m using it on my ex-wife’s invitation.”

“Call sheet at the office says a Deirdre Fuller is the primary resident. That your ex-wife?”

“Daughter. She’s dead.”

Captain Loudermilk knew that. “I’m sorry for your loss. May I see the victim?”

We took him around back. He went as far as the water’s edge, getting mud on his glossy black elastic-sided boots and satisfying himself with the view through the Aztek’s open hatch. He asked about the vehicle’s owner and we gave him that part of the story too, but he already seemed familiar with most of it. He was a recording cop.

“It’s easy enough to work out,” he said. “Shooter got him from ambush, stowed him in back of the SUV, drove it up to the drop, put it in neutral, and got out and pushed it over the edge, counting on it rolling all the way into the lake. Either he didn’t hang around to see it get stuck or fled when it did. No telling how long it would’ve gone undiscovered if it hadn’t. These are private lots.”

He was still speculating when a sheriff ‘s cruiser came our way across the grass, following the tracks left by the Aztek. It stopped short of the drop. The door came open on the passenger’s side and Inspector John Alderdyce got out.

W
hat’d you use, a helicopter?” I asked.

Alderdyce shook his bucket-loader head. He wore gray gabardine with a dusty pink stripe and a pink shirt. He looked as effeminate as a Chevrolet short block. “I can straighten out the surface roads when I get a call that interests me. But I can’t hold a match to these county boys, so I left the city car this side of the line and hitched a ride.”

That was all the conversation we had for a while. He went over to join the conference with Loudermilk and the sheriff ‘s lieutenant who’d driven the cruiser, a redhead on a heavy frame with a face like a bruised apple, patched all over with heat rash. The lieutenant spent most of his time listening, which was uncommon when dealing with private security. A few minutes later the morgue wagon came, discreetly camouflaged as an overlong station wagon painted slate gray, then the forensics team, and deputies who put on rubber waders and helped the morgue crew haul the body to shore on a stretcher, holding it clear of the water. A tow-truck team parked out of the way while the detail squad took pictures of treadmarks and looked for footprints and broken
pen points, then backed the truck around and one of them waded out and found a place for the hook on the Aztek’s frame. The winch clanked. In a few minutes Hilary Bairn’s ride sat on shore, galled with primordial muck to its rear axle and streaming green slime from the top of its windshield. The sheet metal appeared undamaged.

By this time spectators had gathered, made up of Darius Fuller’s neighbors in shorts and T-shirts, drawn by the unusual activity. No one came out of the small shack on the closest lot, with a galvanized roof and swatches of tar paper showing where tile had been stripped off for replacement; a scaffold stood in front and stacks of composition siding lay on wooden pallets next to the driveway, and I noticed for the first time a
FOR RENT
sign and the name of a realty firm stuck in the lawn. It was the beginning of the gentrification of that side of the lake, only a generation removed from tacky wigwams and bide-a-wee lodges with outhouses in back. Under normal circumstances, protecting the building materials from theft would be Loudermilk’s biggest responsibility.