Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro (2 page)

A woman with a puffball head of white hair with pink scalp showing through sat in a folding wheelchair, watching a couple in overalls spackling drywall on a sixteen-inch TV. The old woman had on trifocals, a pilled white sweater over a house-dress mottled with explosions of orange and green, and a man’s brown loafers with slits cut in the sides. I hadn’t seen Beryl Garnet in twenty years, but I accepted this as evidence that she was still here and eighty.

I spoke her name. The old woman didn’t turn her head or
blink. I raised my voice and tried again. For her I wasn’t there, and neither was the couple on the TV. She was staring at them with the detached fixity of a cat watching fish swim in an aquarium.

“There you are, Lettie. We were about to call out the National Guard.”

A woman younger than the redhead at the nurses’ station, wearing a similar flowered smock and slacks, crept in, swung the chair toward the hall, and pushed it out. The old woman responded with a stammering squeal, like a bad pulley.

Beryl Garnet came in a minute later. I didn’t know how I could have mistaken anyone else for her. She was still short and round and her hair was arranged in the soft, blue-rinse waves I remembered. Her complexion was paler, less like an enameled doll’s, and she was using a walker, but apart from that, the last two decades seemed to have gone right around her like water around a snag.

“Turn that off, please. I wouldn’t mind people wandering in and out if they wouldn’t leave that thing yammering when they left.”

I switched off the TV set. What sounded like the same program spilled out of several other open doors into the silence. Either home improvement was popular among the elderly or Grenloch got only one channel off cable.

She made her way over to the bed, sat down on the edge of the mattress, and spun the walker out of the way. I might have helped her if she’d asked. Maybe I should have anyway. You never know with old people. I did move over and push the door shut. That made the silence complete, if you ignored the crew jackhammering at the concrete outside.

She looked at me. She wore a dress of some pale green material like crepe, cinched at the waist with a wide belt of shiny red plastic or patent leather that matched her shoes, flat-heeled with tiny silver buckles on the sides. She was as tidy as a little
girl in dancing school. When she was sixty, her back parlor had been the main payoff point for the old city vice squad.

“You’re getting gray,” she said. “But then so is the rest of your generation. How do you like it so far?”

“I like it fine. You look about the same.”

She laughed. I’d forgotten that laugh; like Tinkerbell on crank.

“How would you know? We only saw each other that one time. How long has it been? On second thought, forget I asked. Who’s keeping score?”

“You’re hard to forget. You set your bouncer on me with a Great Dane chaser.”

“Dear old Ulysses. I had to put him down finally. His hip went out.”

I couldn’t remember if Ulysses was the dog or the bouncer, so I didn’t say anything.

She went on looking at me. I didn’t know what she was seeing. Her eyes were still like bits of bright glass buttoned into her face. Her mouth was small and delicately curved, tinted Titian pink. She was Mrs. Claus, Martha Washington, and the Marquessa de Sade all rolled up into one lump of Silly Putty.

“I was surprised you were still listed,” she said. “I thought you might be retired by now.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“Still the diplomat. Did you ever find that girl you were looking for?”

“She took a shot at me. It wasn’t one of my more restful cases.”

“I thought detectives thrived on danger.”

“That’s the gas company. Why the call, Mrs. Garnet? You can stroll down Memory Lane anytime with the clerks in Records and Information.”

“They wouldn’t remember me. I closed up shop when the police stopped arresting prostitutes and started arresting customers.
That was an open invitation to every streetwalker and call girl between here and New Orleans. With my overhead, I couldn’t compete.”

“You can confiscate a john’s car if he uses it to cruise for hookers. More money for the city.”

“I’m not complaining. I made a good living, and I spread it around.”

“You and Magic Johnson.”

She sighed. She was too good an actress not to have worked her way up from the bedsprings. If they all looked like Elvira there’d be no reason to leave home.

“Now you sound like a reformer. They were most of my overhead. Excuse me one minute.”

There was an oxygen set-up next to the bed, with a pair of torpedo-shaped tanks and a pressure gauge. She turned the dial, placed the transparent plastic mask over her nose and mouth, and took two deep gulps. Then she put the mask back on top of the contraption and turned it off.

She looked embarrassed, and she hadn’t the experience to put it over. “I have a touch of emphysema. My blood pressure would kill most people half my age, and three operations have failed to locate the source of my internal bleeding. I wear diapers, to put the comic point on it. It’s all been very dreary so far and not at all the adventure I’d been led to believe.”

I said nothing again. This conversation was outside my specialty.

She scratched the back of one plump pink hand. It had a Band-Aid on it. “I’ve made all the arrangements except one. I’d like my son to have my ashes.”

“So call him.”

“If it were that easy, I wouldn’t have called you. We haven’t had contact in thirty-four years.”

I added backwards. Everything in my life seemed to add up to that year.

“What happened in nineteen sixty-eight?”

“Vietnam. You might have heard of it.”

I said I had. I dreamed about it now and then, but not as often as I used to. “Draft dodger?”

“Such an ugly term. You can’t say it without sneering.”

“I didn’t coin it. I didn’t coin
amnesty,
either. He could have come back anytime in the last twenty-five years.”

“There’s a little more to it than that. The FBI has been looking for him all this time.”

“How hard?”

She laughed again, scraping a nerve.

“It’s funny. Del was a sickly boy. He missed a lot of school and only managed to graduate at the bottom of his class. No one would ever have predicted he’d place among anyone’s top ten.”

D
elwayne Garnet had worked his way onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list by default. The two bottom slots opened up when a pipe bomb went off prematurely in a car headed toward the Federal Building on West Fort Street in November 1968. Forensics experts scraped together enough organic material to identify a pair of fugitives sought in the bombings of recruitment centers on the campuses of Wayne State University and the University of Detroit, struck off their names, and added Delwayne’s. He had already been known to the Detroit field office as the one the local urban guerrillas sent out for coffee. Whatever else he knew about the internal organization besides who took sugar and cream and who drank it black was more important to Washington than Delwayne himself.

He’d been adopted by Beryl Garnet in infancy. She wouldn’t say who his birth parents were, but accidental pregnancies were as common in her work as cavities, so I didn’t press her for an answer. I’m not as curious as I once was about things I can’t use. There are worse ways to be brought up than in a brothel; there is always someone to babysit, and you get to have your own room outside business hours. Sometimes several of them. Possibly his early life had contributed to his choice of associations later—you
can’t watch your foster mother hand a fat envelope once a month to the officer on the beat without forming specific opinions about the nature of authority—but that was happening all over, with a lot less personal exposure to explain it. Whatever the circumstances were, at eighteen, Delwayne’s senior picture moved from the Murray-Wright High School yearbook to the nation’s post offices.

Beryl gave me a print of it from a drawer in her nightstand. It was a narrow, dusky, sullen face, possibly part black or east Indian. The expression looked furtive, but that’s not unusual in school. I didn’t think I’d like him, although not for any of those reasons, or even his background. To hell with what modern science says about the practice of physiognomy; certain faces belong in the dictionary next to
trouble
.

He’d moved out of the house on John R several weeks before the blast. Beryl didn’t know where to, but he’d been around to borrow money on a semi-regular basis, showing up each time with longer hair, scruffier whiskers, and less pleasant manners than the time before. The visits stopped about the time his picture appeared in newspapers. The prevailing wisdom was he’d fled to Canada under an alias with falsified documents to match, but that was just speculation because Windsor was only three minutes away by bridge or tunnel. That was the story on Delwayne Garnet so far as I could obtain from his next-of-kin. I’d found people on less, but not after the largest intelligence-gathering organization in the world had failed.

“I can get right on this if you want to hear from him,” I said, slapping shut my notepad. “No guarantees on whether I turn him or if he’ll do anything about it if I do. He might think it’s a trick to lure him into U.S. jurisdiction.”

“That won’t be necessary. Whatever we had to talk about would only depress me, and that isn’t how I intend to spend my time.” She took another hit of oxygen, bigger than before. Her age had begun to etch itself into her pallor.

“What do you want done with the ashes if I don’t find him?”

“Suit yourself. I just don’t want the State of Michigan disposing of them. I’ve stayed out of their hands this long.”

I looked at Delwayne’s face again, not liking it any more than I had the first time, then stuck it inside my notepad and put the pad in my pocket. “I charge five hundred a day, not counting expenses. They promise to go high on this one.”

“You can discuss all that with my lawyer. He has your number. He’ll be in touch.” She smiled primly; I remembered all her girls had called her Aunt Beryl. “Don’t worry about my estate going bankrupt. I didn’t turn it all back into sex toys.”

On my way out, I told the nurse at the desk that Mrs. Garnet was ready to be put to bed.

“Did you have a pleasant visit?”

I got out Delwayne’s picture and showed it to her. “Have you ever seen this man?”

She looked at it. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“Then no.”

Around the corner, Wendell of Detroit Edison had surrendered his seat to the maintenance man I’d seen earlier, who was eating his lunch out of a greasy paper sack. He didn’t have any words of wisdom for me, about pensions or anything else.

That was in March. I was running surveillance for Workers Compensation, collecting video on a bricklayer with a spinal injury claim that made me tired and sore just watching him play softball, paint his sailboat, and dip his wife on the dance floor at the Roostertail. The Comp people settled anyway. I also had a couple of dead-beat dad jobs outsourced from North Dakota and Texas, an employee theft at a Best Buy in Troy, some insurance work, and a credit confirmation that was probably the last one any private investigator ever got in the era of affordable software. I considered framing the check and hanging it next to my stuffed dodo. Instead I cashed it.

All this time no one shot at me or hit me on the head, I didn’t find any dead bodies, I stayed out of jail, and my license wasn’t
threatened even once. My luck couldn’t hold. Meanwhile I filed my notes on Delwayne Garnet and his picture under my blotter with the rest of the unfinished business and forgot about him. Inasmuch as any lone eagle can ever forget about paying work.

By June, the spring had dried up. Prom Night had come and gone without a single date-rape complaint, all the bridegrooms had been background-checked on behalf of all the fathers of all the brides, the philandering spouses were planning their separate vacations or patching things up for the sake of the cruise booked last Christmas. I couldn’t even score security work. It’s like that sometimes; just when you think you can afford to hire someone to arrange the magazines in the waiting room, a good wind comes along and blows nobody ill. I’d spent last season’s bounty on the cigarette tax and a new flush valve for the water closet. The superintendent who was paid to take care of that promised he’d reimburse me the next time he made contact with the out-of-town syndicate that owned the building. It was the only income on my horizon. When the telephone rang I went for it like the cord on the reserve parachute.

“A. Walker Investigations.”

“Amos Walker, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Is this Mr. Walker?”

“I asked first.” I like to throw three balls and then strike them out, the way John Hiller used to do for the Tigers. The difference in his case was they had to pay him even if he walked the side.

A throat got cleared. It sounded like someone riffling through Blackstone, always an encouraging sign in my work. “My name is Lawrence Meldrum, with Meldrum and Zinzser. We’re attorneys, representing the estate of Beryl Garnet. I believe Mr. Walker knows what this is in reference to.”

“In that case, I’m Mr. Walker.”

“Pardon?”

“When did she die?”

Water gurgled on his end. I was pretty sure it was water. It didn’t cut the phlegm the way alcohol did. “Last night, shortly after eight. She’d had a stroke and was paralyzed for two days. She’d prepared a living will, but she passed before the decision could be made to remove her from life support. She was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. Refreshing, really.”

“That’s what they said in Detroit Vice. When’s cremation?”

He said it had taken place, and we negotiated; he as if it were his money, I because it was mine. I stood firm at fifteen hundred to start up, and he waggled the white flag suddenly as if he’d been intending to do that all along. I had an idea I’d need a lawyer to sue the lawyers for the rest. Fortunately I knew a couple who sucked other lawyers’ skulls for practice.

Meldrum told me to expect a messenger that afternoon with a cashier’s check and the ashes. He called them “cremains.” The conversation was over before I could come up with a response to that.