Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (16 page)

“Because you know who did. Or have a good idea who did.”

“I don’t go to court.”

“If you got my number off my card you know I’m not the police. You don’t even have to talk to me if you don’t want to. But I’m not the only one who’s looking.”

“I know this. How much you pay for what I tell you?”

“Enough to get you out of town till the situation changes, if it’s good enough.”

“Is good enough. You know Marcus Garvey?”

I thought at first he was offering me a lesson in black history, but then I remembered it was the name of an unlicensed liquor den a brisk walk from Johnny’s hunting grounds; for Luis it would be a light sprint. Some former owner with a sense of humor had cast around for a patron saint and settled on an old-time black con man who’d bilked thousands from his own people promising to outfit a ship to return them to Africa in style.

“I know it,” I said. “When can I meet you there?”

“Is where I’m calling from.” The connection broke.

*   *   *

My taxi driver was three hundred pounds of muscle and suet in a bright dashiki with chrome grillwork on his teeth. He looked like a Buick towing a parade float. He shook his head when I gave him the address.

“I ain’t black enough for that neighborhood this time of night. Nobody is.”

“We’re bringing a president along.” I showed him a crisp fifty. “There’s another one of these for the trip back if you wait.”

“How long?”

“What do you drink?”

“Pure mineral water, with an Irish chaser.”

“You can wait inside and I’ll pick up your tab.”

“And find my hack stripped when I come out? Bring me out a pint.”

It was a tin Quonset hut built to protect construction equipment from thieves for a project that was never finished. If it had been any other kind of establishment, the current breed would’ve torn it apart starting with the privy roof and peddled it for scrap.

There were some cars lined up at the curb, but it wouldn’t start doing real business until the licensed bars closed at two A.M., and then it would be mostly walk-in trade. I gave the driver his fifty. He snapped on his reading light to count the threads.

“You better give me the rest now. No white man’s ever come out of there except feet first.”

I grinned, tore another bill in half, and gave him a piece. “You can go through my pockets for the other one.” I got out.

“Don’t forget that pint.” He tilted back the seat and settled into his folds of fat like a grizzly.

The roof didn’t slant quite low enough to knock my head on but I stooped a little anyway; the pressure when I entered was enough to press wine. Groups were gathered at tables made from cable spools and pieces of plywood laid across liquor cartons, brows and cheekbones visible only in the light of three bare bulbs swaying above the bar, an old store display case someone had dragged from a landfill and boarded up where the glass was broken. The stingy illumination wasn’t so much to save on electricity as to prevent customers from seeing the amount of wear on the labels of Jack Daniel’s bottles filled with Old Spleenbuster.

The conversation level flattened out as I approached the bar. Behind it a photo of Marcus Garvey clipped from an ancient newspaper clung to the wall with yellowing tape. It had been taken before he exchanged his Queen’s Admiral plumed hat and tunic for prison stripes on many counts of mail fraud. Mine was one of only two white faces present, but fortunately the other one belonged to Andrew Jackson. The bartender, a lean youth with pale freckles high on his brown cheeks, took the bill in trade for a small bourbon and a pint of what passed for Bushmill’s for the cab driver. No change back represented the cover charge.

My eyes by now had adjusted to the gloom. I spotted Luis Quincy Adams sitting on a stool in a back corner with a scarred piano bench serving as a sort of coffee table at his knee. He’d retrieved his red jersey jacket from where I’d disentangled myself from it, but I was a second making sure it was Luis. I’d never seen him not in motion.

I hauled over a stray ladderback chair missing a few rungs and sat down facing him, placing the glass and bottle next to his longneck on the piano bench. “How old are you?” I asked.

He lifted his lip and dropped it over the mouth of his beer. “Everybody’s twenny-one in here.”

I figured him for a tall twelve or a short fourteen. He was built like a flexible straw with a mop of curly brown hair stuck in one end. He had long lashes and a narrow rectangular jaw that would always make him look older than he was.

“Were you really named after a president?”

“I am named for my grandfather, Luis Tigrito, the greatest matador in Argentina.” He rolled his
r
’s and leaned heavily on his
h
’s for
g
’s, a young man desperate to hold on to his accent.

“How old is he?”

“He would be sixty, but he liked too much his cigarettes.”

“Too young.”

“
Sí
.” He nodded, pulling at the bottle.

“Not that. Argentina outlawed bullfighting under Perón.”

“
Sí
. But the Little Tiger’s grandfather taught him no other skills. A thing does not go away because a law is passed.”

“This place is proof of that. Ever run with the bulls?”

“It is my greatest wish.”

“The bulls don’t stand a chance.”

He looked ten when he smiled. “You run fast for an old man.”

“You should’ve clocked me before I got shot.”

He glanced at my clothes, a sweatshirt and jeans. “You bring that gun of yours?”

“A different one. The other’s day wear. I wasn’t going to shoot you yesterday. I just wanted to slow you down long enough to talk.”

“I wouldn’ be here if I didn’ think this.”

“Who gave you my card?”

“Arab behind a counter. He said you have money for me.”

I remembered the Sikh. “He wouldn’t take any from me. And he wouldn’t thank you for calling him an Arab.”

“Is all the same when they tie that dishrag around their head. Lemme see the money.”

The bourbon tasted like razor wire boiled in molasses. I clenched my teeth while it went down, then placed a folded hundred on the bench and stood the glass on top of it. “What were you doing at the shack?”

“I work for Juanito Toledo sometimes.” He made him sound like a Mexican trumpet player. He kept his eyes on the bill.

“I guessed that. He said he paid a kid to fetch him hot dogs. He also said he gave you a cell phone to check in with and make sure you didn’t buy turkey franks by mistake. His cell was missing when I searched. How much did you see?”

“His leg. I lift the chair and see he is dead. Then I hear you coming and put it back down. I go upstairs to wait until you leave.”

“And if I’d left, what then?”

“Then I leave too. Is nothing to keep me.”

“Nothing except Johnny’s money stash, wherever it is.”

He swigged beer, twitched a shoulder up and down. You had to come from old Spanish stock to shrug so eloquently. “Don’ do him no good now.”

“You can have the money, if the cops don’t turn it first. You’re probably the closest thing he had to an heir. It’s his cell I’m interested in. The only reason his killer would take it is if Johnny tried to call for help while he was being beaten. The killer needed the record of outgoing calls to find and eliminate a possible witness against him. You know ‘eliminate’?”

“
Sí
.” He unwrapped his index finger from the bottle, making a gun of his fist, popped his lips.

“You’ll wish he used a gun. You saw what he did to Johnny. He’s still looking, Luis.”

“I outrun him, I think.”

“I almost caught you, an old man like me. The man who chopped Johnny to pieces did the same thing to an able man in good health a day or two earlier. He can run rings around me, and he won’t stop until you’re a bag of bonemeal.”

The room started thumping like a boot in an automatic clothes dryer; the bartender had turned on Snoop Dogg on a ghetto blaster. For the next hour he’d charge entertainment tax. I leaned close to Luis and raised my voice a notch. “Johnny called you. I doubt you came back to help. I don’t blame you for that, or for taking advantage of the situation to toss the place for cash. All I want to know is what did he tell you just before he got his lights blown out.”

He shook his curls. “Not for no lousy hundred.”

I opened my wallet, lifted my glass, and laid another hundred on top of the first.

“How many more of those you got?”

“I have to know what I’m buying.” I put the wallet back on my hip.

He took his eyes off the bills then, looked around the room, tipped up his bottle until it gurgled empty like a downspout. No one was paying us any attention; when the bartender hadn’t put up a kick over me, the show was over, at least until the place filled up in a little while and I started taking up room with my one little drink. Everyone was content to let the monotonous pounding from the boom box and the effect of the trading-post liquor lift the tin shed off that bare lot to a station far off in space.

Luis plunked down the bottle, sealing a decision. He groped deep in a pocket of his baggy pants and came up with a clamshell cell identical to one I’d seen before.

“Is a camera phone,” he said, opening it, “same kind as Juanito’s, so I can send him pictures and he can send me.”

My face felt hot. The
bump-bump
from behind the bar throbbed in the nerve ends. It was a clammy autumn night and the place was unheated, but it was as if someone had opened a furnace door in front of me. I’d turned in my chair to take my shadow off what he was getting ready to show me, but it had its own source of light. That’s where the heat was coming from.

PART THREE

HIGH HORSE

EIGHTEEN

Sometimes I feel like I’m my own grandfather.

I’m old enough to remember when picture-taking was a big deal. The rest of the family got dressed up and gathered before the mother, who held a black box at her waist and gazed down interminably through the top-mounted viewfinder to get the composition Just Right while the smiles of her subjects set into concrete. Fifty years before that, a professional hunkered under a black cloth behind an instrument the size of an ammunition crate, squeezed a bulb, and ignited a hodful of magnesium in a blinding white flare. His predecessors packed mules up mountains and down canyons with a bigger box yet and a trunk filled with developing chemicals and glass plates, and used head braces to hold their parlor subjects still during an exposure that required sixty seconds without stirring to ensure a clear, grimly unsmiling image.

Now I sat in a tin can full of smoke and rancid music looking at a photo the size of a Christmas seal, captured with the twitch of a thumb and gathered from pixels that could put a man behind bars for the rest of his life.

Luis held the camera phone angled away from the nearest table of drinkers and just out of my reach in case I tried to lunge for it, but even at that distance the picture was sharp enough to identify the man in it if I ever saw him; and I was sure I would. He was a stranger to me, sheathed in a gray turtleneck and what appeared to be tight chinos, but that would be made of Lycra or spandex to give full range to his muscles and joints. At a glance, he appeared to be dancing, balanced delicately on the ball of one foot while raising the other to show the neoprene sole of a flexible shoe aimed straight for the camera. A narrow, youthful face that appeared to be at least part Asian twisted in a grimace, not of pain but of deep focus, with the lips curled back from the teeth in a tiger’s snarl.

It was a riveting shot, and the last thing Johnny Toledo had ever seen.

There were details enough in the background to place the location as inside Johnny’s squatter’s haven on the Northwest side. Even the golden cherub he’d set so much store by was visible, teetering on its folding TV tray an instant before it toppled off.

I sat back, fumbling out a cigarette and trying to get it going without looking as if it was the first one I’d ever smoked. “I saw something like that in a book once. A photographer in Africa snapped a lion, just before it snapped him.”

“Is not Africa.” Luis flipped the phone shut.

“Know him?”

He shook his head. “Never seen him around, neither.”

“He’s built like you, probably not much older. Could he be running with a gang?”

“Gangs I know don’t take yellows.”

I got my wallet back out and palmed some bills. “Ask you something?”

He shrugged again. There was a whole conversation there.

“How do you reconcile selling cigarettes on the street with how your grandfather died?”

“Reconcile?”

“Justify. You know what I mean.”

“I do not hold a gun to their head. No one held a gun to his.”