Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (13 page)

Pancho Villa. Jean LaFitte. Robin Hood. The line between bandit and freedom fighter has never been more than a smudge, a pencil line erased by the stroke of a dollar bill, a letter of amnesty, the Declaration of Independence—all, curiously, made of paper, good for rolling cigarettes and printing money, two things Jeff knew a lot about. Claire Chennault. Cole Younger. Chuck Barris, host of
The Gong Show
. Stirring stuff, and also the stuff of high comedy.

I drove downtown from the hospital, letting my reflexes do the reacting while I turned my thoughts to other things. The street was Teflon, generations of frozen slush with a fresh layer of soup on top. The gutters were flooded. I hydroplaned over black ponds and flinched when passing SUVs slung brown rooster tails across the windshield. Snow fell with sullen determination. It heaped the sills of boarded-up windows and capped the rusty banks rucked up by the plows from the last big fall. The winter was shaping up to be one of those where the first snow of November is still there in April, covered by layers like lasagna, each dyed a different color by the soot and oxidized iron that has bled into it in varying amounts. Ugly doesn’t begin to describe it. Squalid is too kind.

I didn’t think Jeff had started out as an informant. I knew relative strangers better than I knew him, but I’d known his type, in the twilit streets best crossed at forty miles an hour and in the
Cambodian jungle and in the locker room at Detroit Police Headquarters. You can always spot the one unbroken horse in the paddock. If he’s wearing a harness, you can bet it’s his idea, and that he won’t be wearing it a minute longer than he has to. He’s wearing it for himself, not for you.

After all those years working closely with hijackers, venal store clerks, pliant cops, and his own wild breed, the first time Jeff had asked for help from outside his circle had been Christmas. That was just weeks after he’d scooped me up off that parking lot in Grayling. If he was in a crunch that only a jobber like me could get him out of, it was something new in his history. He knew how to handle crooks, and a lawyer could free him from any legal tangle he couldn’t bribe his way out of. I was sure it wasn’t terrorists. You knew you were in trouble with them only when the bomb went off or the sack fell over your head. They didn’t let you send greeting cards. That left pressure from above. That was something I knew a little about.

Chaos and order, black and white, the rock and the hard place. I’d built my business square between them. That makes me the only police force some people can turn to when they have a complaint. It’s a definite niche. The pay stinks, but the hours are long, and the benefits include county food, a cot, and free burial by the state.

My building is a brownstone slab with Gothic ambitions, on a block lodged halfway between small success and urban blight, like a scraggly bush clinging by one root to an eroding cliff. An ageless gnome named Rosecranz prowls its stairs and corridors, downgrading the wattage of the lightbulbs, letting his telephone ring, and pushing around the same cigar bands and Black Jack gum wrappers with a broom nearly as old and bent as he. The nine-inch Admiral TV in his office/apartment has been tuned to the same station since the Mutual Broadcast Network went bust,
and he hasn’t switched it off or turned the volume up above a murmur in all the years I’ve been doing business two stories above his head. Pigeons winter on the sills in their muted gang colors, and once every couple of years a woodpecker in from the sticks blunts its beak trying to pluck a caterpillar out of the solid stone face. My neighbors make false teeth for patients who can’t afford for them to fit, set up budget vacations in North Platte, and teach the foxtrot to customers who check their walkers at the door. Occasionally someone moves in for three months, monitoring auctions on eBay and offering the losers a better deal on the items they missed, then clears out before the FCC investigates the complaints. The tenant longest in residence is a deaf old man in a straw porkpie hat and a beautifully pressed suit, out at the elbows, who paints fiberglass fish and duck decoys for a mail-order firm in Toledo that donates 20 percent of its profits to lobby for the abolition of fishing and duck hunting in the United States. The rumor is he spent twelve years in prison in the state of Washington for painting and selling fake Vermeers, and that his old cell was covered wall to wall with a mural depicting the third and fourth books of the Old Testament. (Michelangelo held title to Genesis and Exodus.) Acrylic paint crusted his nails and he let himself down the stairs a step at a time, leaning on the rail, carrying a bundle under one arm for the post office, and humming “Rag Mop”; every time I passed him the song stayed in my head the rest of the day.

It’s a little Hogwart’s is what it is, if you know all about the false bottoms, trick panels, and salted queens of hearts. I’m Harry Potter. The wand’s in hock.

I parked at a thirty-degree angle with two wheels perched on a snow pile and approached the fifteen-watt twilight of the foyer. The frail illumination made a mirror of the plate glass with the night behind me as thick and dark as molasses. My overcoat sagged open like a pair of shattered wings, traces of mud and clay
from Paul Starzek’s grave still clung to my pants, and I was leaning heavily on the cane. I looked as old as the old fraud of a painter and not nearly as well turned out. I reached for the buzzer. I didn’t have the energy to dig for my keys.

Swift movement in the mirror then, and I turned and lifted the cane just in time to deflect a blow meant to cave in the side of my head. It glanced off the bone in front of my temple, striking a chime. I followed through with the cane, gripping the crook tight in my palm like a roll of quarters or the bar of a set of brass knuckles, and collided with the slope of a jaw that shut with a snap and crunching teeth. A hand the size of a rack of ribs snatched at the lapel of my coat. I inserted my free arm into the tight space between us, pushed, sliced down the cane, and used it as a lever between a scissoring pair of legs, bracing it against the shin of one and twisting so it caught the other behind the calf and lifted that foot high off the sidewalk. I was still pushing, and the solid mass of muscle and bone and hard fat fell away from me and hit the sidewalk with a slap and a whoosh like a hot-air balloon collapsing on impact. It wore a dark snowsuit or coveralls with some sort of emblem on the breast pocket.

He wasn’t through. I hadn’t expected him to be; his work involved a lot of climbing and I assumed he’d taken his share of falls and learned to absorb the blow. He threw one leg across the other, trying to trip me with my ankle caught in the pincers, and although I saw it coming he succeeded; I was exhausted and in pain and my reflexes were slow. It was like fighting in a dream or in deep water. I struck the door hard with my shoulder, but the plate glass held, rattling like a thunder sheet in its steel frame. I pushed off, leaning all my weight onto the ankle still pinned between his and hurling a red-hot bolt all the way to the top of my skull—it was my injured leg. Black shutters closed over my eyes.

He made a little noise then, a pep-talk of a grunt as he tried to
roll over and snatch my feet out from under me by sheer momentum. It held me from going under. I clamped my teeth down on my last ray of consciousness. Light returned in microseconds, not the minutes it seemed, and I twirled the cane, sliding my hand down toward the tip, and swung my arm across my body, connecting the heavy crook with the side of his head with a crack like an iceberg splitting. All of him sank then, as if the concrete and polar ice had turned to quicksand.

I kicked free of his slack grip, almost fell again, and braced myself with a hand against the door, panting while I waited for the man on the sidewalk to show some sign of life, or a gossamer copy of him to separate itself from his corpse and float to heaven, as in a cartoon. The principles of stick fighting were mired in the slag of decades that had slid down on top of my tour with the military police, but the object was to kill, not just neutralize.

He shuddered, groaned, stirred. I was definitely out of practice. I straightened up and tapped his shoulder with the cane. “Get up, Oral. I’ve done enough heavy lifting today.”

R
osecranz didn’t answer the buzzer. He never slept, so I assumed he was going through one of his periods of selective inertia. I disinterred my key and Oral Canon and I tracked dirty meringue onto the indestructible linoleum of the Perry Como era.

We stood for a full minute at the base of the stairs, I with my cane strumming under all my weight, the lineman holding his big bald head with one hand and looking as if all his air had escaped through the rip in the side of his slush-heavy Detroit Edison coveralls. The steps ascended steeply to base camp somewhere up in the shadows. Finally Canon spoke for both of us.

“Fuck it. There a place down here we can sit?”

I swayed over to the superintendent’s door, two square panels of pebbled glass in an oak frame painted in fifteen coats of peeling green. The brass letter flap was sealed with verdigris. I banged with the cane until the door opened on Rosecranz and the little Czech automatic he kept in his hip pocket with his blue bandanna handkerchief. It wasn’t that late; he’d heard the commotion outside. His eyes were wet circles of gray felt in the crumple of his
face and he’d pinned up the broken strap of his bib-front overalls with a button that read
WIN WITH WILLKIE
.

“He lost,” I said.

The wet gray circles floated past me to plop on Canon.

“Him, too,” I said. “I meant Willkie. FDR went on to two more terms and got to be played by Jon Voigt.”

His lips undulated a little before parting. “Ralph Bellamy.”

“No, that was before. When was the last time you went out to see a movie?”

He thought—I thought. His face had only two moving parts. “Esther Williams. At the Broadway-Capitol.” He brushed up on his Russian accent by listening to recordings of Khrushchev’s speeches.

“Both gone. Maybe not her, but she hasn’t had on a bathing suit in years. I need to borrow your place for an hour.”

“What is wrong with yours?”

“Yours is more homey.”

“Where will I go?”

“The bulb on the second-floor landing needs changing. I can see the floor.” I thrust a wad of bills at him.

He put up the pistol, took the money, and stuck it under his bib. Then he sidled around the door without opening it any farther and passed between us heading for the stairs.

His office had been a cigar stand. It still smelled like a moldy humidor. Behind it, a bedroom and bath shared space with a forced-air gas furnace in place of the mammoth old coal burner of earlier days. Under the original stale tobacco the place smelled of pipe dope, half-washed laundry, and the shag he burned in his charred briar, scented with apple and bug repellent. On rent day Rosecranz squeaked his swivel up to a service-station desk with rings on it made by cans of Valvoline and scribbled his sums on the paper blotter, a palimpsest of old figures, doodles, and spilled
Mogen David. The rest of the time he sat in a fistulated armchair to watch television and teach himself English from his crumbling stack of pulp magazines. The colonial TV set muttered in a scratched walnut cabinet, its picture flipping like a window shade with its cord caught in an electric fan.

There wasn’t room for anything else. In fact, there wasn’t room for what was in it; the door traveled twenty inches and stopped against a cardboard carton piled with decrepit copies of
Airborne Ace
and
Ranch Romances
.

I left the perpetual flame burning. Turning it off and on after all those years might have blown the picture tube. Canon dropped his heap into the armchair. I sat down at the desk and started opening and closing drawers.

“What are you looking for?”

“The wine cellar.” I twisted the cap off a bottle with Cyrillic characters on the label and sniffed. Pure grain alcohol lifted my hair off my scalp. I swigged, rubbed off the germs with the heel of my hand, and passed the bottle over to Canon while the heat blossomed in my belly.

He looked doubtful, but he wrapped his paw around it and poured an ounce down his throat. He coughed. “Holy shit. What is it, charcoal starter?”

“I don’t think the fire marshal would approve pouring this on a grill.” I held out my hand. He took another short pull, gagged again, and slapped it into my palm. A drop spilled on my pants, dissolving the dried Lake Huron clay on contact.

I drank. “How’s your head?”

“I fell four feet once and cracked it on a cement block. This is a little worse. How’s yours?”

“Mostly scar tissue. Your beef’s with Jeff Starzek, not me. But I wouldn’t choose him. He’s got the reflexes of a jumping spider.”

“Rose don’t sleep around.” He started to get out of the chair.

I pushed him back into it with the tip of my cane. It didn’t take much pushing. God knew how long he’d stood outside in the shadows, stamping his feet and pounding his chest to keep his toes and fingers from freezing. January in Michigan had done half my job.

“I didn’t say she did,” I said. “I started out doing divorce work. You get so you can spot a cheater from across the street. She loves you, you big pile of compost. A woman like her can love two men and her baby without breaking training. Jeffie’s yours, if you were worried about that. The great tragedy of the human genome is boys take after their fathers more than their mothers.”

“I know that. You don’t have to tell me that. I said what I said and I stand by it.”

“In that case, what are we doing healing our bumps and bruises with Russian rotgut?”

“You and me had a business arrangement. It didn’t have nothing to do with Rose. Well, it did, but it didn’t. When a guy lets a guy he hired run around asking questions behind his back and getting answers the guy’s wife wouldn’t tell the guy himself, what’s a guy supposed to do, I ask you?”

I took another hit. I was still too sober to sort that one out. I still had some White Castle in my stomach. It floated. “The husband’s always the last to know.”