American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (13 page)

We reconvened—Alderdyce, the security man, the sheriff’s lieutenant, and I—in the living room area of the lake house, a cheerful arrangement of rattan chairs and a sofa upholstered with a palm-leaf print, that felt like the waiting room in a funeral home: Fuller’s mood, dampened by the recent presence in the house of Deirdre, was contagious. Streaks left by the spray powder the fingerprinters had used contributed to the cloud of gloom. The lieutenant, whose name was Phillips, had made arrangements with Alderdyce to match them with Bairn’s prints on file from his apartment.

“Wilson Watson,” Alderdyce said, seated on the sofa in a
crouch, scraping his palms between his knees. “His name didn’t come up last night.”

I said, “It didn’t seem to matter then. You already figured Bairn was in trouble with the sharks and casinos around.
Who
didn’t really matter, if he was desperate enough to blow his shot at two million just to keep the dogs from snapping at his heels.”

“You don’t get to choose what matters. If you
had
that privilege, you lost it when Bairn put a bullet in Watson’s boy Esmerelda. I could’ve put a tail on him and we’d have Bairn in custody instead of sending another local thug on his way to cold storage.”

“If it
was
Bairn,” I said.

“Not much of a jump. He knows by now we’re looking for his car, and he had to get rid of the body anyway. It was just his sore luck it didn’t sink. His streak’s been holding for a long time now.” Alderdyce looked at Fuller. “Did you keep a gun here?”

“This is the first time I’ve been here in twenty years. I gave Dee-dee a pistol when she got a place of her own, a nine-millimeter. It’s registered in my name.”

“It’d take a nine-millimeter minimum to punch through that door and still be lethal.” Loudermilk untucked his necktie from his uniform shirt and used the end to polish his sunglasses. His eyes were blue and protruberant, like pop rivets. “Unlucky or not, he did okay for an amateur. One bullet straight through the pump, with a door between. You’d think he planned it.”

Alderdyce looked at me. “You still carrying around that Luger?”

I’d gotten it back from Fuller and put it back in the car. I
went out and brought it back. The inspector checked the load and sniffed the barrel. “Everytime I take this from you I think I shouldn’t give it back. You ever get around to registering it?” He stuck the butt my way.

“I left the legal piece back in town.” I slid it under the elastic of my borrowed sweats.

“Who says it wasn’t planned?” Phillips dabbed a folded handkerchief to the scabby red patches on his face and examined the results on the fabric. “This Esmerelda had his toolbox with him. He must’ve thought he had an appointment.”

“Someone else might have tipped him Bairn was here,” I said. “Everything Bairn’s done up to this point is reaction to something someone else did. You can’t lay a trap for a pro like Esmerelda without experience, beginner’s luck or no.”

“Where’d Watson say Bairn got cash from one of his ATMs?” Alderdyce asked me.

“He didn’t.”

“Guess.”

“Not in front of the law. That half-assed I’m not.”

He watched me, putting two fingers to his lips in a gesture made meaningless by the fact there wasn’t a cigarette between them. It isn’t nicotine that brings people back to their bad habits so much as all the silly leftover movements without a prop.

Phillips said, “Question is, if it’s Watson that Bairn was hiding from, who killed Mr. Fuller’s daughter?”

Fuller said, “He killed her all right. When she told him to walk, took away the jackpot he was counting on, he struck out like the scared skunk he is and ran.” He’d moved on to the anger stage.

“Brings us back to him laying a trap,” Loudermilk said. “How’d Watson find out otherwise?”

“Maybe Walker told him.” The lieutenant resumed treating his rash. Up close it didn’t look transient enough to have been caused by heat and chafe. It was some kind of eczema or psoriasis.

“It wouldn’t much matter if I did,” I said. “When Deirdre wound up dead all over the news, he knew he wasn’t going to get a penny out of Bairn, so he sent his chief crucifixionist to make an example.”

Loudermilk wiped the legs of his glasses. “I don’t think that’s a word.”

I looked at him. I wondered what his story was. Most rented heat would have been sent on its way by this time.

Alderdyce went back to scraping his palms. They sounded like two sanding blocks. “Time of death will tell us whether Esmerelda had time to come looking for him after the story broke. You’ve got a good coroner’s office in this county,” he told Phillips.

“We ought to. We got the biggest tax base in the state and half as many murders as Detroit. Bairn can’t get far on foot,” he added. “His picture’s faxed to every unit a hundred miles around.”

Loudermilk looked at his watch, put on his sunglasses, said he had rounds to make, and shook hands all around. After he left I told the lieutenant, “You were pretty patient with him.”

“He had my job before the administration changed. It doesn’t do to get too close to the sheriff when the next election might turn him out of office.”

“You don’t look worried.”

He smiled. “I’m thinking of running myself next time. I’ve been married to the same woman for twenty-seven years and I don’t sleep with the help.”

We went outside, where the forensics team was packing up. The morgue wagon had gone and the crowd of onlookers was smaller. They’d begun to return to their cabins to resume their vacations. The smell of grilling meat reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day.

“You going to be in your office later?” Alderdyce asked.

“After I catch a bite.”

“Make it hearty. This time you’re going to tell me everything you did and everyone you talked to since you took this job and everything they said.”

“Most of it won’t do you any more good than it did me. It’s full of dead ends and feathers.”

“And you’re full of shit.”

I went to the edge of the lake and smoked a cigarette while he and the lieutenant were talking to the lab crew. Phillips was going to have a hard time getting into office with that face.

My fisherman was nowhere in sight. Something, a pike or a snapping turtle, poked its head above the surface near the middle of the open water and disappeared. I watched the ripples it made until they, too, vanished in the reeds. I wished I hadn’t been kidding about bringing a rod and reel. It would have been nice to stand there making casts while I waited for my pants to finish drying on the deck. The point of the practice wasn’t to catch anything, necessarily. It would have been a nice change.

Darius Fuller came down to join me.

“You don’t have to wait,” he said. “The inspector offered me a ride to a hotel. I can’t stay here.”

“He wants to question you some more.”

“He would anyway. Maybe this way I get let alone quicker.”

“We’re finished, then.”

He took out the envelope, counted out some bills, and stuck them at me. “I’ll come around to your office for the ring.”

I took a thousand. “Keep the other five hundred. I only worked two days.”

He put away the extra bills and offered his hand. I took it. “I’m sorry again.”

“Not as sorry as the sorry son of a bitch that killed my girl. I hope the cops here don’t catch him. I hope he runs to Texas or Oklahoma and kills somebody there, not somebody’s daughter, just some no-account, and they slip him the needle. I’ll pay forty-nine thousand for a seat in the dugout.”

When he left I snapped my cigarette stub out over the water. It had barely touched the surface when something—my pike or my snapping turtle—struck at it. The ripples it made were just enough to set bobbing a little motorboat tied to a dilapidated pier behind the empty shack next door, its outboard tilted forward and covered with brown canvas. I turned toward the road, and as I did I saw the checked curtains in a near window, tucked around the edges of the frame and sill the way people do when they aren’t coming back for a while and don’t want anyone snooping inside. One of the panels moved just a little.

A strip of shingle-sided buildings stood a couple of hundred yards up the road, just far enough back for customers to park and buy tackle from the hardware store and fresh fish from the market to take home when they bombed out on the lake. For the rest there was the Wooden Duck Bar, a windowless dive, and the Chain O’ Lakes Diner bookending the little commercial center on the other side. I went in and sat at the
counter and ate a ham sandwich and clam chowder from a can. The coffee at least was fresh and I drank three cups. I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to the shack. The sheriff’s lieutenant had left two deputies and a cruiser in front and they had a clear view of the lake until the sun went down. No one was coming out before then.

I hadn’t lied to John Alderdyce when I’d told him I’d be in my office later that day. I hadn’t known then the shack next door wasn’t empty.

The proprietress, a colorful old party with a cataract patch under her bifocals, took suspicious notice of my pants, wrinkled and still damp. I paid and went out and drove around the lake. About a third of the way around, the road surface improved and the lots got bigger, no stretching your arm out the window to straighten the kinks and punching your neighbor in the ear. The bigger places had carports, decks as big as any of the houses near Fuller’s, and fresh asphalt on the boat landings. I spotted three more signs offering places for rent or lease by Peninsular Realty, the same firm that owned the shack I was interested in. It advertised an 800 number and a Web site,
www.pleasantpeninsula.com
. Just in case anyone was looking I got out in front of a couple of the available properties and knocked on the doors. If anyone answered, I was an interested buyer. No one did, and the doors were locked. No open houses at Peninsular. I figured the company had three or four million tied up in Black Squirrel Lake alone.

When the sun bled over the water I cruised past Fuller’s place and the shack, found a space between a brace of battered pickup trucks parked next to the Wooden Duck Bar, and strolled back down the road. My pants chafed my thighs and had shrunk a little. The Luger pressed against my belt like a tumor.

The two deputies were outside the prowl car. One of them sat on the front bumper smoking while his partner emptied his bladder behind a jack pine contorted into a sideshow shape at the end of the driveway near the road. His urine steamed a little. The nights can be chill in that lake country even in summer.

I waited in a patch of shadow. When the light goes and there’s no traffic noise, bodies of still water turn into amphitheaters, magnifying a single footstep on loose gravel into an avalanche. I was stuck in that spot as long as they stayed outside the car.

But I had allies.

Something went
twee
in my ear, then stuck a tiny needle into my cheek. I flinched but let it drink its fill and stagger off through the air, full as a tanker and drunk on hemoglobin, the red-blooded American detective kind. When another stung my forehead I reached up and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the pop and the wetness of my own blood. There in the reeds they grow them as big as crows, but not as big as in Southeast Asia, and that was never far from my thoughts. The two men in uniform were only old enough to have read about it in school. If I had to wait much longer I’d be lumped all over, but I didn’t think I had that much longer to wait.

From their direction I heard the first wet smack of a palm on the back of a neck, then another and another. It sounded like two Bavarians dancing.

“Son of a
bitch
!” The deputy from the driveway swung open the door on the driver’s side and threw himself into the seat. His partner spiked his cigarette into the grass and joined him a moment later. Doors slammed.

I gave it another minute, then stepped away from the road
into a gap between the tile-and-tar-paper shack and a redwood fence belonging to a converted mobile home two doors from Darius Fuller’s cabin. There I stopped and began a new period of waiting. Out on the lake, the last blush of the sun faded. What light remained lay like bright metal on the water, then began its slide toward the horizon. A bird singing out its boundaries stopped in midmeasure as if a switch had been thrown. Crickets played their kazoos and somewhere in the isthmus of weeds that separated the top half of the figure eight from the bottom a bullfrog gulped. Everything out there was hungry or on the make or both. I was the only thing around without some sort of plan.

When I could no longer distinguish my nails from the tips of my fingers I started toward the lake. Dew clung to the grass with the consistency of mucilage, soaking through my shoes and socks. It was dark as hell. The moon was new, a black hole punched in a spray of stars, and starlight is a poet’s conceit. After traveling forty billion miles there was barely enough to illuminate themselves.

But no one is ever in complete darkness where people live. Buttery squares showed among the houses on the far shore, a blue mercury dot atop a tower, a lantern at the end of a dock. My pupils gathered it all in, backlighting trees, structures, the little motorboat lying as still as a toppled idol alongside the Krazy Kat pier behind the shack. I picked my way down the slope that ended at the water, steadying myself with a hand against the pilings, and selected my spot, leaning against the one second to last in the shadow of the warped decking above my head. I folded my arms, crossed my ankles, wanted a cigarette, and took my satisfaction from the craving.

It might have been fifteen minutes, it might have been five
or thirty. I was pretty familiar with the lake’s breathing patterns by then, the plops and slaps and occasional startling gasp of some aquatic mammal coming up for air between dives, a woodchuck or a muskrat, and the new sound was nothing like any of those. It was a long drawn-out note, a climbing chord; the tension spring of a screen door pulled to its limits when the door opened, three feet above my head. A long time seemed to go by before the door bumped back into its frame, guided gently by a hand to avoid a bang. The Luger was in my hand by then. I didn’t remember drawing it.