Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (12 page)

“Wayne County Hichens? That’s serious competition. He cracked the stewardess killing at the airport.”

“I thought Forensics cracked that one.”

“For the jury. Hichens collared the suspect a week after it went down. The guy walked for insufficient evidence. Modern science took eleven years to catch up with Hichens’ hunch. After the arrest, the department reopened fourteen old cases and got eight indictments based on DNA testing, all against
suspects who’d been interviewed and released. Hichens was investigating officer in all but one. That’s how he made captain.”

“He ought to be sheriff.”

“Sheriffs are politicians. If you’ve met him, you may have guessed he’s cuffed more hands than he’s shaken.”

“What makes him your hobby?”

“He threw me out of his office when I asked him how Frankie Acardo managed to board a nonstop flight to Phoenix the day he was subpoenaed to testify to a grand jury. I keep track of all my friends and enemies.” He slurped something, probably a Coke. He was on the wagon since throwing a chair through a control booth window at WXYZ and thought bottled water was for French bicycle racers. “This have anything to do with the Marriott shooting?” he asked.

“Not if it’s what it takes to get you that CBS gig.”

“I’m ahead on favors, Maigret. Throw me a bone.”

“Call you right after I call the cops.”

“When the cops get it, so does everyone else. Call me before.”

“I’ll put you on speed dial.”

“You mean I’m not already? What’s the question?”

“Jeremiah Morgenstern.”

“That’s an answer, not a question. The question is, ‘Who put the
M
back in Mafia?’ ”

I’d known there was something familiar about that tickle in my throat. “How come I never heard of him? I thought I knew all the players.”

“That’s because you’re weak in German. Morgenstern in English is Morningstar.”

“Oh, hell. I took Spanish. Ben Morningstar’s kid?”

“Grandkid. Jerry made his bones when everyone else his age was marching on Washington. He went to New York to beat the heat, opened up a branch of the family business, and muscled in on the concession racket in the Broadway theaters. Short hop
from there to costumes and set decoration, but all that was strictly for something to declare on his ten-forty. Jerry’s a throwback. The mob spent fifty years trying to go legit, and all it bought them was congressional hearings up the yazoo and racketeering laws they couldn’t kill or bribe their way around. He’s spent the last twenty getting back to basics: labor, numbers, drugs, smuggling. He’s got the corner on every carton of bootleg cigarettes that finds its way into high tax states like Michigan. I bet you’re smoking one now.”

I wasn’t, but I got out the pack I was working on and looked at it. “Mine’s got a stamp.”

“That’s the idea. When Lansing adopted it, it took all the profits away from the independents and put them back in the pockets of the boys who can afford the counterfeit presses. Give the seal a rub.”

I scrubbed it with the ball of my thumb. “It didn’t come off.”

“The state’s does. The printing contract went to the lowest bidder, just like it says in the charter. The Sicilians have more class. Those aren’t cubic zirconiums winking on their pinkies.”

“Morgenstern’s Jewish. Or Morningstar was.”

“Someone has to keep the books. Vegas and Havana were hemorrhaging greenbacks until Grandpa Ben got hold of the accounts.”

“Sounds like an anti-Semitic slur.”

“The mob never learned to spell ACLU. What makes the New York franchise your hobby?”

“He’s in town. Morgenstern is.”

“Detroit?”

“Metro. He’s staying at the Marriott.”

“He’s not your boy. He’s no Grandpa Ben but he’s got too many smarts to stay under the same roof with one of his hits.”

“Could be he’s counting on the cops thinking the same thing.”

“Uh-uh. You can’t work the Statue of Liberty play with cops. They’re too literal-minded. Anyway, he hasn’t handled
his own wet work for years. It’s more his style to brown his toes at Far Rockaway and let his buttons munch on the pretzel sticks in Economy Class.”

“Well, he’s at the airport and so’s a stiff. How come Hichens didn’t know him?”

“County only gets a connected case when a chiseler shows up cold in a trunk in Long Term Parking. Then they kick it over to Lansing or the Federal Bureau of Incompetency. Even so, I bet Hichens knows who he is by now. The captain’s the kind of cop who has his shield tattooed onto his chest in case he has to bust someone for picking pockets in the YMCA shower.”

I rolled my eyes at the ceiling and saw something there. “Morgenstern’s traveling with a redhead, a fox. Anything on her?”

“Nope. He married a Polish princess, black hair and breeder’s hips. The redhead would be this year’s travel model. You going to seduce her, make her spill her guilty secrets?”

“Yeah, I’m Jack Kennedy. Thanks, Barry. You saved me a morning with
Playboy’s Illustrated History of Organized Crime
.”

“That piece of—”

I never found out what it was a piece of, because I fumbled the receiver into the cradle without taking my eyes off the bowl fixture that hung from the ceiling—original to the building, not a hip nod to Lawrence Meldrum’s theory of postmodern regression. A new shadow had joined the collection of flies and ladybird beetles mummified on the other side of the milky glass. I wouldn’t have noticed it except it seemed to be suspended between the glass and the bulb, defying gravity. It might have been dangling from a strand of cobweb.

Well, the fixture was past due for cleaning. The crew that had the contract never worked higher than the doorknobs, and I had a swanky front to keep up. I planted the customer’s chair in place of the wheeled swivel, climbed onto it, and unscrewed the bowl.

It didn’t look like what it was, just a tiny cylinder no larger than a .22 short casing sealed in black plastic, perforated on the free end. Whoever installed it had connected it to the existing wiring. That made me mad. I don’t mind being eavesdropped on so much as paying for it on my monthly bill.

I
left the bug where it was, reinstalled the bowl, and went downstairs to talk to the superintendent. Rosecranz was older than sixty and younger than a hundred, and had evaded Cossacks and an NKVD hit squad in order to come to America, if he hadn’t gotten all his stories out of the adventure pulps he used to teach himself English. I hoped he hadn’t, because without them he was just a worn pair of overalls sitting in a little room filled with old-man fug and dusty shawls on every surface. He told me no one but the building cleaning crew was allowed inside the offices in the tenants’ absence. Under cross-examination, he admitted doors were left open for indefinite periods while the workers went out to empty wastebaskets and borrow supplies from one another, and that the turnover in personnel provided a constant stream of unfamiliar faces. An unauthorized stranger wouldn’t have had to train too hard to penetrate the inner sanctum.

“Something is missing?” he asked.

“No, something is added.”

He thought about that. Then he blew his nose rattlingly into a blue bandanna handkerchief and shook his head. “I will never learn this language.”

I told him I was struggling with it myself and asked to use his telephone for a long-distance call.

“How long?”

“Toronto. Take three or four minutes.”

He demanded two dollars. I gave them to him and he pushed a black steel rotary with a ballerina waist across the desk. The mouthpiece smelled of boiled parsnips. I was pretty sure no electronic listening device could stand up to them, even if my office wasn’t the only target. I made arrangements with the party on the wire, hung up, and left the old man to his tattered copy of
Soldier of Fortune
.

I drove to the City-County Building, unloaded the .38 Chief’s Special, gave it to the guard by the metal detector to look over along with my permit, got them back, and traded the revolver to a distracted-looking clerk down the hall for a receipt. I asked if Captain Hichens was on the premises. He directed me to another clerk, just as distracted, who kept me waiting while he prowled a computer screen with a mouse, then picked up a telephone and asked. He told me Hichens had returned to the airport after checking in with the sheriff that morning.

I went to Records and signed out the public documents on the deaths of Stuart Pearman and Karl Anthony Mason, the anti-war activists who had paid the ultimate price for the cause when their explosive device detonated prematurely.

There was quite a bit that hadn’t made it into the papers, but very little I could use. Both men were unmarried. Pearman was an orphan, without siblings or known associates apart from Mason and Delwayne Garnet. He’d left school in Ypsilanti at sixteen, and there was no one from his class who could say anything about him except that he kept to himself and didn’t participate in sports or other extracurricular activities; not the warning signs in 1968 they would become in light of more recent criminal history. His foster parents were elderly, and aside from filing a missing persons report when he ran away from home—about the same time he’d dropped out—hadn’t made
any effort to establish contact with him for years, ditto him with them. His grades went up and down, apparently according to his level of motivation. He seemed bright enough when they were up, particularly in reading and social studies. Garnet had said he was the idea man in their little revolutionary society. Mason’s story was as different as it gets: popular in high school and his freshman year at the University of Michigan, letter man in basketball and track, proficient in the sciences, chief among them chemistry, which had earned him a scholarship, forfeited when he left after two semesters. You can’t ace the midterm and make bombs at the same time. Parents divorced when he was five; father deceased, mother remarried.

The mother held promise. Thirty-eight years old when interviewed, Regina Babbage blamed young Karl’s dark turn on his late father’s infidelities. Stepfather Winthrop was too gentle (read
weak
) to have exercised any influence, positive or otherwise, and so the boy had turned to others his own age in search of a male role model. She was especially vocal on the subject of Delwayne Garnet, but then she’d have to have been, Stuart Pearman being dead and beyond reach of her lash. She told the interviewing officer she wished Michigan had the death penalty so that she could attend the event after Garnet was captured, tried, and sentenced, and root for the electric current. She was singing with a band when she’d met the departed Mr. Mason, a drummer, and her statement was peppered with words she’d learned on the road and behind the bandstand. She was a big pile of steaming hate. She’d be seventy-two if her temper hadn’t blown a plug in the meantime, aged well outside the demographic for revenge killers. But handguns aren’t all that heavy. I added her name and vintage contact information to my notes.

I returned the material to the young woman at the desk, an arrested adolescent with candy-striped hair and a copper brad through both nostrils, and went back outside, where if anything the sky was lower and the air dirtier than they had been that morning. I ate lunch at a counter and asked the attendant for a
metropolitan directory. He found it holding up a package of poppyseed buns, which as health code violations went didn’t even dent the surface locally. Looking up the number was just something to do while I was waiting for the carcinogens to kick in. I didn’t expect to find anything.

There was a W. S. Babbage listed in Royal Oak. I wrote the number on my napkin, made change for a ten, left a tip on top of the directory, and deposited the rest in the telephone by the door. Dialing the number was just something to do during digestion. I didn’t expect anyone named Winthrop or Regina to pick up.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, cigarette-roughened at the edges.

“Mrs. Babbage?”

“This is Mrs. Babbage.”

“Mrs. Winthrop Babbage?”

“That’s correct.”

“Regina Babbage.”

“Who’s asking, please?” Irritation had crept in.

I made a mental note to try the number on the lottery. “My name is Walker, Mrs. Babbage, calling from Detroit. I’m investigating an incident connected with the death of Karl Anthony Mason.”

The pause was shorter than expected. “Did they finally arrest that son of a bitch Garnet?”

“I can’t discuss details over the telephone. Is there a place we can meet?”

“How long will it take you to get up here?”

I said twenty minutes, if the lights were with me. She gave directions, which I shorthanded on the napkin under her telephone number. She broke contact without saying good-bye. This was going to be as much fun as poking grizzlies.

Woodward Avenue slices northwest from the Detroit River at a thirty-degree angle, passing the jeweled Fox and State theaters, the crater that was J.L. Hudson’s Department Store, the library
and art museum, and dozens of weedy empty lots before leaving the city. Several dimensions later it enters Royal Oak, a white-flight community of factory commuters and retired schoolteachers with a pocket-size downtown and housing developments that resemble architectural theme parks: false Tudor, faux Bavarian, Cold War ranch, and the ever-popular split-level, complete with step-down garage and a flight of redwood stairs to the ground floor. A lot of decent people live there, and they pay the city police a living wage to see it stays that way. If you pull into a school parking lot to change a tire, a cop will be along in two minutes with friendly advice and maybe a dope-sniffing dog. Every well-groomed town is a police state of some kind.

The neighborhood dozed in a cul-de-sac with a civilian patrol emblem mounted beneath the
NO OUTLET
sign, the one with Boris Badenov silhouetted in black to scare away prowlers. There were no Big Wheels or swing sets or basketball hoops, no cute two-seater convertibles, nothing to indicate that anyone under forty lived there or ever had. The vehicles in the driveways were large and sturdy, designed to ford the Amazon and scale K-2, and had probably never been driven above fifty even on the expressway. A very quiet place. I idled along at ten to hold down the rumble from my straight pipes. Even then I felt like a hospital visitor with squeaky soles.