Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (56 page)

“Keep talking,” he said. “You’re constructing an ironclad case for slander and invasion of privacy.”

“You need that quarter-million insurance money, Redding. It means surviving or staying out of jail, depending on which of your creditors gets to you first. Murder was a little out of your reach, and since your old friend Gendron wasn’t going to accommodate you by committing suicide, you decided to supply him with a good reason. So when you gave him his last physical you told him he had terminal cancer.”

“Now I know you’ve been drinking. He was in excellent health.”

“You knew that, but he didn’t. The symptoms of stress can be made to seem like the early stages of something much more serious, and he trusted you enough not to get a second opinion from another doctor. I found a well-thumbed self-help book in his office about living with death. It didn’t take, though. With your help he chose a sudden end over letting his insides rot away slowly.”

Redding smiled grimly. “Very inventive, but you forgot one
thing. Suicide would have voided the policy.”

“Only if it looked like suicide. Being an old friend, you planted a simple idea in Gendron’s head: Set up your own murder. He pulled the file on a man named Phil Hardy, a man he’d persuaded a client of his to fire in the interest of a better public image, a known armed robber who would organize the hit for an inducement—something up front, say, plus whatever he got away with from the robbery and a good attorney if he got caught.

“Jay Albert Matthews is the direct link. Gendron could supply the advance payment, but you had to hire Matthews to represent Hardy and his partners, because Gendron wouldn’t be around to do it once he kept his appointment in that drugstore, and if you reneged on the deal they’d spill the details. The law says Matthews doesn’t have to divulge his client’s name, but once it gets out you set the whole thing up, he’ll turn you to save his own reputation. Lawyers are like that. That’s where you went sour, Redding. You didn’t have the guts to arrange the kill yourself, so you let Gendron do it. Only in the end you had to get your hands dirty too.”

“I wasn’t Dick’s beneficiary, Walker. Lynn was.”

I looked at her on the sofa. “He’s trying to lay it off on you.”

The skin of her face drew tight. “The hell he will.”

“Shut up, Lynn.”

“I guess she’s in love with you, or thinks she is,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone along with it. A divorce would only have given her part interest in a car with three payments to go on it and half a house with a mortgage, but her husband’s death by misadventure was good for a quarter million. It would make a nice dowry when you two got married after a suitable interval. Don’t move, Redding. Let’s keep my gun in my belt holster and this conversation civilized.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. I was just reaching for a cigar.”

“That’s another thing. You really should have emptied the ashtray in your Citroen. I took the liberty of inspecting it on my way up to the door just now. The pink lipstick on the cigarette butts I found there isn’t your shade. Bet there are more in your house.”

“You’re a man.”

I looked again at Mrs. Gendron. Her glass was empty now but she was still holding it, her knuckles white. “You don’t know what it’s like being married to a dull man in a dull job who never took a chance in his life. Dick was horridly, stultifyingly
dependable.
Try living with that.”

“Don’t say anything more,” Redding warned her. “Matthews won’t talk and Hardy and the others don’t know either of us from Adam.”

“You should be grateful he was so dependable.” I lifted the receiver off the telephone stand near the door and used that same hand to dial police headquarters, keeping my gun hand free and my eyes on Redding. “Gendron took his responsibilities seriously, and hang the rules. That’s why he tried to see that you got his insurance money. He took chances, all right, but not like yours. All of his were for other people.”

The police switchboard put me through to the Major Crimes unit.

“Matthews won’t turn,” Deborah Stonesmith said. “Why should he? He’s not guilty of anything but being a lawyer. Even if he did talk it wouldn’t prove anything.”

We were seated in her office, waiting for the stenographer who had taken my statement to finish typing it up so I could sign it. The inspector had on a light blue suit today, over a white ruffled blouse that on her looked like a lace doily on an armored car. She was playing with the glasses on the chain around her neck.

I said, “Keep working on the Gendron woman. She might crack.”

“More likely it’ll be Redding. A funny thing happens in these in-equal partnerships when they go into Interrogation; they reverse roles. The strong one spills his guts and the weak one clams up tight. If it happens at all.”

“In any case, Midwest saves having to payoff. If your hunch is right and Hardy folds on Gendron, it’s suicide any way you slice it.”

“So why aren’t you happy?” she asked.

“Why aren’t you?”

She smiled. There was no joy in it. The light of a gray Detroit sort of day came through the window at her back and painted a red nimbus around her head of hard hair. “So it was just an ordinary domestic murder after all. Not a major crime.”

“They’re all major,” I said, admiring her halo through the smoke of my Winston. “Every last one of them.”

The bar in the new Hilton Garden Inn
in Harmonie Park is a pleasant place to sit and listen to the bartenders clinking their instruments and watch baseball on the liquid-crystal screen in the corner—two or three more games and it will be a year-round sport. I don’t go there often. I spend less on a bottle of red wine than the place charges for a glass of decent scotch.

That day I went. Ed Warburton had done me a favor as commander of the eleventh precinct when he could just as well have jailed me as a material witness, and had a round bought in his honor at the local cop hangout that evening. I’m unpopular there as a rule. The break had given me a chance to close out an my investigation I’d been working three weeks, and Warburton to clear up a police case that had hung fire for more than a year. When he called me at the office and asked me to meet him in the Hilton bar, I took out a loan and drove down.

I didn’t ask why he’d chosen a spot so far from his home park. When a cop stumbles and falls on his sword, his colleagues give him a door-busting going-away party in a private room above a saloon and then the dustoff. It isn’t that they’re ashamed, or disapprove of what he did. Cops are superstitious and convinced that bad luck is
contagious. No one is safe if a Detroit police commander can get caught with his thumb in the till.

Not that he had. Six officers from his precinct had gone up on charges of substituting confectioners’ sugar for twenty kilos of cocaine in the evidence room, and brass is expected to know about such things. Even then he might have come off with a reprimand and possibly demotion to inspector, but when the jury voted to acquit the officers, the department had had to let blood somewhere. He’d resigned after being relieved of his duties.

It was the middle of the afternoon. A man and woman in business dress had the bartender to themselves at the bar. No one was watching the game. Warburton lifted a hand, and when I went over to his booth raised himself six inches to shake hands. He was fifty and looked it with less hair than I remembered, and the stoop was new, but if I’d had twenty years on him I wouldn’t have chosen him. He stood six two with no body fat and his grip would bend a coconut.

“Thanks for coming, Amos. What are you drinking?”

I knew then the occasion wasn’t social. Cops only call me by my first name when they want something. “What are you?”

He held up his glass, a narrow tumbler half filled with sparkling water, with a lemon wedge straddling the top. “French fizzie. I haven’t had a nibble in a week.”

“Program?”

“Experiment. I like the stuff. I want to see if I need it. No pink eels yet.” He drank and made the sort of face a seasoned drinker makes over carbonated water. He had a long, humorous face, like the put-upon father in a 1950s sitcom. His suit was pressed but his tie was at half-mast. That and the teetotaling were his only visible concessions to his situation. I lured the help away from the couple at the bar and ordered a scotch.

“What’s your fee?” Warburton asked when I had it and we were alone again.

I drank. It tasted sweet, not like the paintstrip I kept at home. “Depends on the work. I can run a credit check in an hour, that’s forty. Otherwise, five hundred a day, with three days up front for seed. If you want me to scratch up dirt on the chief, I’ll need a little more. No hospitalization,” I explained.

“You wouldn’t have to dig too deep. She’s the mayor’s creature, and we know what he is. You never see those two apart. I wouldn’t take them on in a sack race.”

“She slam-dunked you pretty hard.”

“I don’t hold it against her. Not much. She’s got the feds sitting in her lap. A whole line of chiefs crooked the joint before she came along. I want you to put in a word,” he said. “It shouldn’t take three days.”

“I don’t know the chief. It would take that long to get past the reception room, and then I might as well hit her up for a personal loan while I’m there. I’ll get the same answer.”

“Not with the chief. With Inspector Alderdyce. You two go back.”

“Our fathers ran a gas station together. We entered training the same day. I washed out a week short, he stayed on. That’s our history. We swap favors now and then, but right now I’m in the red. Even if I weren’t, there’s no way an endorsement from either of us will put you back in charge of the eleventh.”

“I don’t want that. I’m asking you to ask him to ask the chief to green-light my application to rejoin the department at entry level.”

I drank again. “You want to get back into the blue bag?”

“I’ll take cadet if I have to. I’d rather not. They’re making those scaling walls higher than they did thirty years ago. I can file, hold down the front desk, get coffee for the C.I.D. Free up a younger man for the streets. I know I can’t be Supercop. See? No delusions. Next
week maybe I’ll go back to drinking beer.” He drained off his glass and set it down with a thump.

“What’s the gag?”

“It’s legit. I bit the moose hard; lost my pension, almost lost my wife. My daughter won’t speak to me. The twerp she married wants to be drain commissioner, but that won’t happen thanks to good old dad. I could write a book, or take security work, but I don’t want that. I want to go back to square one and this time roll the dice with the other hand.”

“The chief won’t go for it,” I said. “It’s like cutting the end off a blanket and stitching it back on the other end. They’ll fry her in the media.”

“Everybody deserves a second chance. That’s the spin. I’m physically fit, no misdemeanors or felonies, and it wouldn’t be the first time a middle-aged man was accepted for duty.”

“It’s her head if you screw up again. She won’t go for it.”

“She’s forgotten what it was like in the ranks. She put me down as incompetent because I couldn’t offer evidence against those six officers. It never occurred to her I wouldn’t because you don’t rat on a brother cop.”

“You knew?”

He frowned. “This conversation is like attorney-client privilege, right? To you, I mean; it doesn’t swing a flea’s weight in court, but I know you’ve gone into the cage over it in the past. Your file makes good reading at the dentist’s.”

“If I entertain you, I’ve done my job. I’m not writing my memoirs anytime soon, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Not worried. Just wanted to know how wide I can open up. I wouldn’t have to explain this brothers-in-blue business to Alderdyce. He may run Homicide, but his heart’s still in uniform.”

“So ask him to put the word in with the chief. What do you need me for?”

“You might have noticed I’m not shaking friends from the department off my lapels just now. Being seen with a disgraced character like me might not make a grease spot in his jacket downtown, but it wouldn’t win him points next time he comes up for promotion. A man like John wouldn’t refuse to see me, but I can’t do that to him.”

“I’m not exactly a photo op myself,” I said.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re a bug on the radar at best.”

“Since you put it that way, go to hell.” I drank off my scotch and slid to the end of the booth.

Warburton had the reflexes of a rookie. His hand clamped my wrist.

“Let’s not fight,” he said. “When you’ve been called six kinds of an imbecile where your wife and your kids and all their friends can see it, you let fly at whatever’s in range.”

I settled back against the seat. I still felt the pressure of his fingers on my wrist after he let go. “I have to work in this town,” I said, “which means getting along with chiefs and inspectors, inspectors especially. Forget about convincing the chief for now. First you have to convince me you’re not just dicking around.”

“My God, man, I’m degrading myself in front of the world. Why would I make it up?”

“It’s got Spike TV all over it. All you’d have to do is stick it out long enough to interest some hack, sell the idea to New York and L.A., and bug out before your appointment comes up for the department physical. That makes everyone else look like an imbecile, and guess who takes the heat? I don’t like security work any more than you do, but that’s all I’ll have left this side of a refrigerator box on Gratiot. That’s if they let me.”

“I’m not grandstanding. I took an oath to serve and protect, that’s the job. I got so busy trying to keep the job, I forgot to do it. This is the one shot I’ve to make up for it.”

If he’d popped a tear, or put a throb in his throat, or hauled out the speech about a man’s word being all he has left in the finish, I’d have paid for my drink and left there and then. But his face was as calm and clear as a reflecting pool. I believed him.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “That’s as far as the promising goes. Working on keeping jobs is the slogan they ought to paint on the squad cars.”

He reached inside his coat and slid out a checkbook bound in marbled blue leather. I stopped him before he clicked his pen.