Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde (11 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - P.I. - Hardboiled - Detroit

BOOK: Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde
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E
astern Standard Nighttime lay on the cophouse steps as stiff as a dead cat, dragging down the thermometer and turning the afternoon thaw into a sheet of glaze. Blue salt crystals scattered by a city employee were eating holes in the ice and eventually the marble underneath, but I hung on to the railing and tested each step before committing my weight to it. I hadn’t dodged a bullet inside just to break my neck out front.
A ticket was frozen to my windshield where I’d parked in a slot reserved for police vehicles. That angered me; the phony MEDICAL EMERGENCY sign I’d clipped to the visor was plainly visible. I chipped the ticket loose and stuck it in the glove compartment with its near relations. I’d pay them when the lid would no longer close.
Just for a driving exercise I remembered the telephone number Barry Stackpole had given me, a number without a name that belonged to a professor at Columbia with the power to corroborate or destroy Gilia’s alibi for the night Angelina Suerto danced her last tango. He wouldn’t be there at this hour, and anyway I had another more urgent hole to plug. It was named Miranda Guzman.
The Matador gambit had an expiration date. His connection with Gilia wasn’t public and he would know how to keep it that way, but I had a few days at most before the cops gave up on
him and dug back far enough in Jillian Rubio’s history to find out she shared a name with the hottest Latina entertainer since Charo cooched her last cooch. But I didn’t have even that much time if Jillian’s mother decided to spill what she knew. So I had to persuade a grieving mother to lay off on the woman who by now she may have convinced herself had something to do with her daughter’s murder. I should have brought more raw meat.
I rang the buzzer, got some barking from the direction of the kennel behind the house, but no Miranda. The boss dog didn’t come to the window and I missed its deep bass among the others. I thumbed the button a second time just for laughs. I stepped down to the sidewalk and put my hands in my pockets.
I pictured Miranda’s living room, where I’d used her telephone to report the body in the lumberyard. It ran pretty much to type: sofa and love seat, a little worn but a matched set, clean and with those arm-condoms in place to slow down wear and tear, a wicker coffee table with picture magazines on top, not too much of a chore to read for a resident who spoke English but thought in Spanish, a Spanish Bible on a side table with a rattan mat, an elaborate crucifix on one wall, carved in meticulous detail from what looked like ancient ash. That would have come over with her and Jillian. A votive candle guttering on a decorative shelf underneath. A religious person, Mrs. Guzman. I bet she and Mr. Guzman, whoever and wherever he might be, had discussed long into many a night the merits of Jesus’ claim to messiahhood. Maybe I’d lose my bet. There are probably a lot of Roman Catholics named Guzman, just as there are plenty of Jews named O’Reilly, Presbyterians named Washington, and Muslims born in Salt Lake City.
Three Catholic churches serve the growing Hispanic community, and all three are a hike from the heart of Mexicantown; but a bus ride to Mass is nothing compared to an old-time pilgrimage, even when it’s in a city bus. I logged up a bunch of blocks on the Cutlass’ odometer, committed more parking violations outside Most Holy Redeemer and Most Blessed Sacrament, got no Guzman in either place, took my leave. Nearing Most Holy Trinity, I hit the brakes and almost lost control in the
slush. Someone had tied up a dog the size of a library lion in front of the stark Norman facade.
I found a space on Porter with a sign saying it was reserved for expectant mothers. I didn’t know if that was enforceable, and I toyed with the VISITING PRIEST sign I keep for variety, but with a steeple so close I figured God already had the range, so I put it away.
Most Holy Trinity was the second Catholic parish founded in Detroit, a palm for the Irish when they came by the boatload from the potato famine of the 1830s. The present building has been standing nearly 150 years. The presa canario bull, unimpressed, lifted a leg against the bottom step as I passed. The dog looked miserable and was probably thinking of the hambone it had left at home. It seemed a pretty valuable property to leave out on the street, but the rippling growl that had come from its throat as I’d approached the church reminded me it came with its own security.
Inside the entrance, a bronze plaque depicting an angel and a departing soul in a gondola in relief contains the names of the twelve altar boys and five adults who died when their excursion boat collided with a steamer on the Detroit River in 1880. The pastor, a survivor, called it the Massacre of the Innocents. I took off my hat.
No service was taking place. Miranda Guzman and I had the cavernous interior to ourselves. She was in the third pew from the back, kneeling on the padded rail with her head down and her hands clasped in front of her. She had on a cloth coat with a monkey collar and a lacy black scarf covered her hair. I slid into the pew behind her and waited.
I’m not a Catholic. I’m not anything, although I spent two years of Sundays reading Bible stories at St. Paul’s Episcopal on Woodward and waiting for something to take. Still, it’s tough to remain an agnostic in the presence of so much ancient iconography. There are no atheists in foxholes, and very few in Most Holy Trinity. I thought holy thoughts and wondered if Miranda intended to break for supper.
After a little while she crossed herself, rose from her knees,
and sat back. She never turned her head, and gave no indication she knew I was there until she spoke.
“Why are you here? Can a woman not pray for her child’s soul in peace?”
She was looking straight ahead, toward the life-size crucifix behind the altar. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
I said, “I’ll go if you ask me to, Mrs. Guzman. I need to speak to you tonight. You choose where.”
She was silent for a long time. I didn’t know if she was thinking or praying.
“You can do your speaking before the Lord,” she said finally. “If you have the courage.”
“Did your daughter tell you about her arrangement with Gilia?”
“No one of that name exists. Not now.”
Her tone had a steel rod through it.
“Fair enough. We’ll call her something else. How does Mariposa sound?”
Not being able to see her face I was at a disadvantage. The back of her neck seemed to redden a little, but the red might have been there a while and I’d just noticed it. A church that size has drafts no matter how hard you try to heat it in winter.
“My daughter told me very little about her life in Minnesota. That was her stepfather’s fault. Noah Guzman was a cruel man. I suppose I am to blame also. I did not interfere with his cruelty. It drove her away from us when she was seventeen.”
“Are you divorced?”
“It is not permitted. He died. Strong drink was the cause.”
“Did Jillian’s father die? You and she came to this country without him.”
“He had our marriage annulled so he could wed another. Such things are possible in the country of my birth, if you are willing to meet the bishop’s price. He made me
una puta
and his daughter
una bastarda
. It is why we had to leave, and why I changed her name.”
“If she was staying with you near the end, you and she must have reconciled.”
She seemed to shrug. She might have been adjusting her coat.
“I think she told you what she was up to,” I said. “Or you guessed. You knew there was an entertainer running around using your daughter’s birth name. It would be a topic of conversation between a mother and her estranged offspring; safer than something closer to home. Even if she didn’t tell you everything, you would’ve been able to supply the rest. You’re nobody’s idea of a dumb wetback.”
“I’m not a wetback!” It made an echo. An altar boy or something who had come in through a door near the front looked our way briefly, then genuflected before the altar and set to work with a scraper removing bits of wax from the rail. Tiny orange lights flickered in the soles of the running shoes under the hem of his robe. Miranda lowered her voice to its former level. “I’m not a wetback. My great-great-grandfather was a marquise. Your ancestors would have been flogged for failing to lower their heads when a member of
La Casa del Rubio
rode past.”
“Yeah. Scratch a rolled
r
and doubloons spill out like gumballs. Your land grant’s shrunk to a kennel in Mexicantown and you swapped your sceptre for a pooper-scooper. Let’s confine the conversation to something since Galileo. Are you planning to put the bite on Gilia, or are you going to the cops?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know this bite.”
“The tariff. The tithe. The bee. You know: El Grande Suckarino. It’s all in the breeding. Blue blood, blackmail.”
“
¡Puerco!
” It rang clear up in the clerestory. The altar boy dropped his scraper. He looked at us again, crossed himself, picked it up, and resumed scraping. It sounded like a jazzman brushing a snare drum.
Miranda had swung around, resting an elbow on the back of her pew. Bright patches glowed on her cheeks. She had a firestoked beauty that would be with her on her deathbed. Beside it, Gilia’s was all youth and cosmetics.
Sen
or
Cristobal had been a donkey to throw it away. “I would kill you if we were not in the house of the Lord.” It came out in a hissing whisper.
I nodded. “Okay. I apologize, Mrs. Guzman. I was just playing
picador. What we call needling. I was tired of looking at the back of your neck.”
“Speak of me as you will. You did not know my daughter, what she went through just to cross a room or climb a flight of stairs. When she was six months old they said she would never celebrate her first birthday. When she was a year old they said she would never walk. Until she was two, she did not know a day without hot and cold compresses on her poor withered legs.”
“You nursed her?”
“She had nurses. We had money. The Rubio women were raised to marry well, nothing else. When she was twenty, she still used a cane. She was using it when she came to visit me in November. This woman who calls herself Gilia was born with the gift of health, and what does she do with it? She dances half-naked on the stages of the world. It is right that she paid.”
The boy hummed in time with his scraping, clearly and with unpracticed accuracy. His vibrato resonated in the nave. In New York or L.A. or Branson or Nashville, some producer with a confession to make—there were plenty of those—might have heard him and talked to his parents and signed him up for lessons and a recording contract. But it was Detroit, and the boy would sing in the choir and scrape wax until his testicles dropped.
“So you knew,” I said.
She closed her eyes, then opened them. It was a kind of nod. “I knew. I did not judge, and I did not take any of the money when she offered it, even though all I have is my house and the dogs Mr. Guzman left. I do not blackmail. I go to the—cops—instead.” She tasted the colloquialism, didn’t like it. It was as alien to her as the thought of nursing her own daughter.
“What would that do?”
“Avenge Jillian. Gilia. My Gilia. Who would kill her if not that whore of an imposter? She has killed before.”
“The whore of an imposter is in town this week. Your daughter died three months ago.”
“Then so was she. Or an assassin in her employ.”
There was no reason, when she said “assassin,” that Hector Matador came into my mind, except that his picture should appear
in Webster’s next to the definition. “Your daughter made arrangements to expose the secret in the event of her death. Killing her wasn’t an option.”
Her eyes flickered slightly. Then she raised her chin. It hadn’t been low to begin with. “I ask again: Who if not her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ha!”
“It will take some time to find out,” I said. “You’re the only one who can give me that time. It runs out when you tell what you know.”
“Who are you that I can trust you?”
“Not the police.”
It was just something I’d said to plug a silence that scared me more than her dogs, but it worked on a level I hadn’t thought out. “Police” didn’t mean the same thing to her that it meant to me. To me it was an annoyance at worst. Cops; a joke term for an occupational liability. But twenty years away from home hadn’t been enough to wipe out pictures of dignity squads in Gestapo caps and jackboots wading through peaceful assemblies with clubs and hauling motorists out of their cars and slamming the doors on paddy wagons that only carried their cargo one way and never came back except to take on a fresh load. And if she did manage to forget, we had more than enough of that kind of thing on video here in the U.S. of A. to remind her.

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