Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (16 page)

“I knew the first. I don’t like gangsters whatever their pedigree, but I’d rather take my chances with Jerry Morgenstern than Ben Morningstar.”

“God, don’t call him Jerry to his face. He was born Jerry Morningstar. He had it legally changed. He likes his roots.”

“I bet it’s the first thing he’s done legal since his bar mitzvah.”

“Please go in. He’ll take it out on me if you don’t.”

I grinned. “I bet you made those three dumb Micks dance the polka.”

I left her standing in the bedroom and knocked on the bathroom door.

“Enter!”

The room was all mirrors and chrome and white tile and sweating like the Brazilian rainforest. Moisture fogged the mirrors and made pools in the grouting. That cleared up the mystery of the soaking-wet stooges. In a deep square tub reclined a skeletal naked man with rhinestones of perspiration glittering in his curly black hair. He was sipping from a glass that was almost too heavy for his wrist. Soothing noises simpered from a mood tape playing somewhere in the room: whales mating, or possibly tuneup time at a French horn recital.

He peered at me through the billowing steam without moving his head. “Nicky admitted he roughed you over. He didn’t say anything about your face.”

“Razor burn. You didn’t have to send Siegfried and Roy. I left a number with Petunia.”

“You called her that? No wonder she hauled off and smacked you. What brand you smoke? I’ll send over a carton.”

“I’ll pay the tax.”

He chuckled. It sounded like a machine gun firing a test round. “Ben said you were a pain in the ass. I never thought I’d get the chance to see it for myself. I figured you’d be retired by now.”

“That was twenty years ago and change. I didn’t know I’d left that big an impression.”

“You came through on the job. He remembered that kind of thing.”

“The way I hear it, he remembered when it went the other way too. He went through more blow torches than Chrysler.”

“Toward the end he didn’t know who he was talking to one minute to the next, but he could tell you what kind of car he drove for six months in nineteen thirty-two. He even knew the mileage. The brain’s funny that way.”

“Hilarious. Is this going to take long? I’m done on this side.”

“That part’s up to you. You’re the one wanted to see me.” He took another sip, made a face, and set the glass on the edge of the tub. The Scotch must have been close to boiling. “Second switch on the right goes to the exhaust fan.”

I found it and flipped it up. The motor whirred behind a vent. The fog began to clear, which wasn’t entirely a good thing. There were no bubbles in the water. He’d been circumcised. “You were in the hotel when Delwayne Garnet was killed.”

“I already talked to a cop about that, beanpole named Hickok. I never knew nobody named Garnet.”

“Hichens. Your grandfather knew the woman who raised Garnet. He used to make his payoffs through the hookshop she ran downtown.”

“Before my time.”

“If he told you what kind of car he drove under Herbert
Hoover he probably told you about her. There’s another connection. A fighter named Curtis Smallwood.”

He seemed prepared for that too. Hichens had been thorough. “That
shvarze
cost Ben plenty. A quarter million in promotion and trainers’ fees went down the shitter when he got himself clocked. That was money then. The cops kind of overlooked that when they named Ben a suspect.”

“Rumor had it the fix was in on the Joe Candy fight. Smallwood bet against himself.”

“All the more reason to let the fight happen. You don’t fix a bout from the winning side. The loser’s people bet the opponent and clean up. Throw me a towel.”

I scooped a folded one off the rack and tossed it. He caught it and hoisted himself out of the water. His ribs stuck out and he didn’t have enough meat on him to support a tapeworm.

“There wasn’t any fix,” he said, rubbing himself dry. “That was a story cooked up by some cop who didn’t get his cut. There wasn’t any need. The game was golden. TV didn’t have the equipment to shoot football or baseball; couldn’t get it on account of the movie studios was boycotting the whole industry. But all you need is two cameras to show a couple of gorillas beating each other’s brains out in the ring. Viewers ate it up. The networks were pissing money at palookas that couldn’t punch a clock, just to fill out the hour. Ben said he made more money legit off the Friday night fights than he pulled down selling bathtub gin all through Prohibition. A good-looking kid like Smallwood, with a dynamite left, was worth what he tipped the scale in long green. Only a wrong gee with a death wish would take the chance of blowing a sweet deal like that with a crooked match.”

I knew then where Nicky got his dialogue. Barry Stackpole had said Morgenstern was a throwback. The act was strictly for the cheap seats and I didn’t buy it for a second. But what he’d said made sense.

“Smallwood was going out with a white woman, a movie
actress,” I said. “He got her pregnant. That was bad press in forty-nine. Networks canceled contracts for less.”

“It wasn’t anything you couldn’t paint over, and if you couldn’t, you could always can the son of a bitch and take the loss, deduct it from your ten-forty just like a solid citizen. If it’s bad press you’re worried about, you can’t get worse than a killing. Smallwood liked his quail pale, by the way. The Hollywood chippie was just a piece of ass in the crowd. If I was you I’d tag her for it. Or one of the others. Women was spilling blood for love a million years before there was a Cosa Nostra.” He stepped out of the tub, sat down on the edge, and mopped his feet. His toenails were neatly pruned. I wondered if pedicures were one of Pet’s responsibilities. I was in a rotten mood.

“I never heard about any other women.”

“Ben did. He kept tabs on his investments. He got chatty near the end. We had to be careful about who heard him. Anyway there was a band singer and a department-store model and I think a couple of cigarette girls. In those days there was always a bunch of dollies hanging around outside dressing rooms, sniffing around the dark meat. They liked it dangerous. I guess you couldn’t blame Smallwood for caving in, a kid from the ghetto suddenly surrounded by all that wet white pussy.”

I was getting my fill of Jeremiah Morgenstern, but I fought it. Lack of charm is a weapon too.

“We’re wandering astray of Delwayne Garnet,” I said. “He hired me to find out who killed his father. I don’t have to tell you who he was.”

“I heard stories. Ben never spent much time on gossip, even when his brains turned to shit.”

“When a hood like you—”

“Venture capitalist.”

“What’s the difference? When a venture capitalist whose grandfather came over on a rumrunner’s yacht checks into a hotel the same day a stiff turns up under the same roof—a stiff
with a history all tangled up with the venture capitalist’s—it opens a whole new world of investigation. What’s your business in Detroit?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“Pretend you trust me, Jerry, just for a minute. I didn’t give Ben to the cops when it would buy me a get-out-of-jail card.”

“The name’s Jeremiah, you dumb fuck.” He unslung a silk dressing gown from the hook on the door and belted himself into it. It gave him a little gravity. “You want to know why I keep guys like Nicky around? If I tell them to dump someone down an elevator shaft, all they ask is which floor do they start from.”

“I saw that one last week on E-Bay,” I said. “I wondered who’d bought it. When are you chimps going to start scripting your own material?”

The skin of his face shrank tight to the skull. There hadn’t been much airspace there to start. Suddenly he laughed. His mouth dumped open and the hee-haw rang off the tiles and scampered straight up my spine.

“I’m going to start calling you Dangerfield. You got it all up here and you hop around like Open Mike Night at the Improv. You don’t even use notes. Let’s go out and cripple the bar.” He stuck his feet into a pair of black velvet slippers with birds of paradise embroidered on the toes and opened the door. Conditioned air gushed in.

In the sitting room his gaze went from Pet sitting curled up on the sofa with her glass to the bottle of Scotch, whose level had dropped below the blue label. “Christ, we just broke the seal this morning. That ain’t Crown Royal.”

Pet sipped and said nothing. She held the glass in both hands like a shipwreck victim clinging to flotsam. I might have bought the act if she weren’t working so hard to sell it.

Morgenstern took down two fresh glasses, tonged ice into them from a chrome bucket, and poured liquor over the cubes. “You’re supposed to drink this stuff straight up, but I’m already sweating like a fish. You, too, I bet.”

“So take cold showers. Too-hot baths make you sterile.”

“Thank Christ. I got two kids. Ain’t a day goes by I don’t think about tying ’em up in a sack with rocks and dumping it in the Hudson.” He handed me a glass and led the way into the bedroom. He closed the door. “I don’t talk about work in front of Pet,” he said. “Thing like that can get complicated.”

“I thought it was her idea.”

“She’s smart. Ivy-league girl. She tell you how we met?” He sat in one of the leather armchairs and crossed his hairless legs.

I took the one facing his. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of the Jaguar’s back seat. I shook my head.

“She called me cold to ask for an interview. I don’t even know now how she got the number. She said she’d use the piece to angle a job on a city paper. She caught me in a good mood; I said sure. Halfway through the interview I made her a better offer.”

“She’s smart.” I drank. “Why the Marriott? The newer hotels in town are more comfortable and you don’t get the noise from the jets.”

“I didn’t choose it. I’m meeting with some people who like the convenience of catching a plane right after without going through security. They get that out of the way before. Makes for a more relaxing negotiation.”

“Negotiating what?”

He took a tiny sip. He was a careful man for all the volume. Then he grinned. Since it made him look more like Shock Theater than usual I let the question wither on the vine.

“Would these people be the same people I saw you having lunch with yesterday?”

“So that’s how you found out I was here. Those were my people. Pet and Nicky you met. I never leave town without my lawyer and my personal assistant, who has his own personal assistant. If I was a rock star I guess you’d call them my entourage, only we don’t trash hotel rooms.”

“Just P.I.’s.”

He frowned. “I told those lunks to use company manners.”

“Whatever deal you’re working, a new connection to an old murder wouldn’t improve your bargaining position.”

“I didn’t know Garnet was raking it up when I came here.”

“I left my lie detector in my other suit. If I’d thought to bring it, I’d be leaving now. If I thought you passed.”

“If I wanted you to leave I wouldn’t need it.”

It was my turn to grin. “Nicky?”

“Nicky keeps Shelly’s blood circulating. Shelly’s the one with the experience. Don’t let that cannon he carries fool you. It draws attention from his white hair.”

“If he stumbled badly enough to get knocked down from
capo
to common strongarm, how come it wasn’t bad enough to demote him to corpse?”

“I don’t retire people I can still use. I’ll tell you what happened, since you’re the curious type and don’t shoo. Shelly vouched for someone he didn’t know like he thought. A lot of key people went to jail. Some people learn from their mistakes. A good businessman takes that under advisement.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would make a mistake like that.”

“He was blinded by blood. The someone was his son.”

“So who tied the son in a sack and dumped him in the Hudson?”

He swirled his ice cubes and said nothing.

After a beat I got it. I was slow that year.

“So that’s why Shelly’s still around,” I said. “He made a trade.”

“He learned from his mistake.” Morgenstern shook his head. “Can’t help you, Dangerfield. If I knew Garnet was here and I wanted to pop him, I could’ve done it without leaving Manhattan.”

“That’s the conventional approach in your line. Being in the same building at the same time as the murder is just as good, if you make enough noise to alibi yourself while it’s going down.”

I didn’t say Garnet might have been killed as much as twenty minutes before the party sat down to lunch. I wanted to see how far he’d go to help me out. Killers can be over-accommodating.

“That’s rookie shit. Flash like that can get you life.”

“Maybe. Shelly wasn’t at your table. Garnet wasn’t shot with anything as big as a fifty magnum, but he’s smart enough not to sign his work.”

“He was on the road with the Jag all day yesterday.” He took another careful sip. I remembered my own drink and took a careless gulp. Liquor clears my head, up to a point. He said, “I’d be on the same block with those other mugs if I thought a fresh kill wouldn’t box me in worse than a hit that went down before I was born. Just sharing space with it could screw the deal.” He spat the words, as if he’d just realized their truth. He wasn’t that dull; he’d only reminded himself. “I didn’t know Garnet was in the country. I barely knew who he was, and I ain’t thought about him in years.”

“Somebody knew. He bugged my office to find out.”

I got a reaction, not the one I was looking for. His face went dumb as a bottle cap. Then he laughed; the raucous, braying laugh that stood my skin on end.

“Brother,” he said when he found his breath, “you’re still playing with pick-up sticks. I been bugged and tapped so many times I don’t even bother to sweep no more. It costs a bundle, and then when it happens again I have to start looking all over again from scratch. I ain’t used a phone in years except to make a dinner reservation, and I don’t talk business anyplace I pay rent. I don’t know nobody that does. If you’re idiot enough to open a hot conversation anywhere but out in the open where you can see who’s listening, you need to wear a helmet.”

“Okay. Thanks.” I took a last slow pull at my Scotch. I wasn’t likely to taste another like it for a long time. He hadn’t offered to send over a case of that.