Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 07 Read online

  “Welcome home present. Where are you staying?”

  “Place called Mary M’s on St. Antoine. It’s a halfway house for working girls looking to quit. A friend of mine runs it.”

  I wrote it down and flipped shut the book. “You got paper on that iron in your purse? CCW is a thirty-day pop mandatory in this town.”

  She made as if to touch the clasp, then let her hand drop. “Eight hundred murders here last year, Mr. Detective. I’d rather face the bench than a slab.”

  “It’s not my business unless you say it is.”

  “Then I guess it’s not your business.”

  “Would the ring be?”

  She glanced down at the little diamond on the ring finger of her left hand. It was mounted in a plain spider-thin gold setting. “He’s a good man. He runs a one-boat charter fishing business out of Port Royal. We’re going to be married in May.”

  “He can’t help out with money?”

  “I wouldn’t ask him. He thinks I’m here visiting relatives. Which I guess I am if I find one.”

  “I’m glad he’s a good man.”

  “They’re a long time between.”

  I didn’t chase it. I parked the cigarette behind my right ear and constructed the sandwich from the tomato slices and lettuce on the side. The pale brunette lunged across the table she shared with the brush cut, mouth moving, and the brush cut tossed down his napkin and got up and came over. He was bigger and harder than he looked sitting down. The fat was just inertia.

  “Excuse me, but are you planning to smoke that cigarette?”

  I sat back, looking up at him. “Eventually.”

  “Could I borrow one? I left mine at home.”

  After a pause I produced the pack and tapped one partway out and held it up for him to take. I struck a match and he leaned down for me to light it.

  “Nonsmokers,” he said, straightening. “We don’t interrupt their meals asking them to not smoke.”

  “You’d think outliving us would be enough.”

  He moved his big shoulders and nodded to Iris and returned to his table trailing clouds. The brunette left shortly afterward. The brush cut put out the smoke then and finished his meal at a leisurely pace.

  3

  WESTLAND IS A WORNGMAN’S community, functional if it’s nothing else, and nothing else is exactly what it is. No restaurants of note, liquor stores with iron bars that fold over the windows at closing, pool tables and shuffleboard games in bars where the customers wear Hawaiian shirts and knock back boilermakers and play Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard on the jukeboxes. Bleak streets lined with bleak houses spreading out from the General Motors assembly plant, making a town as flat and gray as a concrete slab. We had had a lot of snow that month and it lay in rusty piles against the curbs under a battleship sky. In that season it looked like the kind of place where laid-off line workers massacre their whole families and then shoot themselves.

  I had offered Iris a ride home the night before, but she had borrowed a car, and I had caught my first full night’s sleep in a while and showered and shaved as if I were going someplace where they noticed such things. These days I was driving a new two-tone blue Chevy Cavalier, thanks to a bonus from a downtown legal firm whose client I’d cleared of a manslaughter charge. The interior still smelled like a plastic raincoat but the fuel injection and front-wheel drive were pleasant surprises. I hoped they lasted as long as the payments.

  Sweet Joe Wooding, as he was billed in the days when the Chord Progression on Livernois presented Harry James and Benny Carter to standing-room-only crowds in dinner jackets and pink chiffon, lived, or had lived, in a one-story yellow brick house on Venoy with attached garage and overgrown hedges on either side and a paved driveway he shared with his neighbor to the right. The place had a vacant look now, like an idiot’s face, and paint was curling away like dead skin from the wooden window frames. I parked in the shoveled driveway next to an exhausted-looking AMC Pacer belonging to the house next door. Some kids were building a snowman in that yard, making plenty of noise, and on the other side a fat boy in glasses and a red snowsuit was trying to coax some momentum out of an orange plastic saucer on a fifteen-degree slope. He bounced up and down and the saucer just sat there and flapped. His cheeks were as bright as Christmas bulbs.

  I peered through the dusty window into Wooding’s garage. No car. From the way the tools and junk were distributed on the concrete floor there hadn’t been a car for some time. I didn’t go to the door of the house. Instead I followed a shoveled path around to the back, where an old black man in a Russian hat and a dirty gray quilted coat was removing snow from in front of a sixteen-foot robin’s-egg-blue house trailer with a television antenna on the roof.

  I hesitated. It all reminded me of something. I thought of a big shaven-headed black man standing with a snow shovel in front of a house on John R, where I’d first met Iris. I thought of a house trailer in another place where Iris and I had gotten better acquainted. I was doing a lot of remembering lately. I resumed walking.

  “Josephus Wooding?”

  He went on shoveling with his back to me. I said it louder.

  “I hears you.” He got a medium load on the blade and put his back into it and threw it two feet to the side. He paused to rest.

  “My name’s Amos Walker. I’m looking for Little Georgie Favor. His daughter hired me.”

  “Man’s name was George. You call him Little Georgie he go upside your head with his horn case. That shit was just for the bill.”

  “Like Sweet Joe?”

  “No, my first wife called me that.” He threw some more snow and turned around to face me, leaning on the handle. His complexion was deepwater-black under a skin of sweat and his features were laid in rectangular blocks, the forehead resting horizontally on the vertical pillars of his cheeks with the lower jaw providing a footing and the flat nose doing keystone duty. He had a thin moustache that looked dyed and his eyes were white under the irises so that he seemed to be looking up from under his fur hat. “George’s girl sent you?”

  I held out a card.

  He went on looking at me. “Man, anyone can get one of them printed.”

  I produced the folder with my picture ID and the county buzzer I wasn’t supposed to have. They were a little harder to get, but not very much. Anyway he nodded.

  “Now I’m waiting on a reason I got anything more to say to you than I said to the girl.”

  “Maybe because her father left her mother like your last wife left you,” I said, “and you both want to know why.”

  The shovel blade came up very fast and knocked my hat crooked while I was getting under it. I kept going and grasped the handle in both hands and twirled it out of his grip while he was still following through. He sat down in the snow.

  I stuck out my hand and he looked at it a moment, breathing heavily, before he took it. He came up more easily than I was braced for. He didn’t weigh a whole lot more than the shovel. I gave it back to him to lean on.

  I said, “My wife left me after three years. For a long time I thought it was my fault.”

  “It was my fault.”

  He was still panting when he turned his back on me and started toward the trailer, using the shovel like a cane. After a moment I followed.

  He stood the shovel in the snow next to a set of wooden steps and we climbed them into a living room setup with an orange recliner-rocker gone grimy on the arms and a blue vinyl child’s-size sofa with metallic tape smoothed over the places where the vinyl had split and a new oval rug and a small painted bookcase containing magazines and a few thumb-smeared paperbacks. There were a sink and a two-burner stove with a built-in refrigerator at one end of the trailer and a heavy russet curtain at the other, behind which would be a bed and tub and toilet. The place was old-bachelor neat without pictures or anything to indicate that the man living there was a musician, retired or otherwise.

  Except for the marijuana smell that permeated the place like disinfectant in a public res
troom.

  The air inside felt chillier than outdoors. He took off his hat and coat and hung them on a peg next to the door and kicked a tin furnace set into the wall near the curtain. It cut in with a wheeze and a clatter of bent fan blades.

  Without his coat, the architectural effect was lost. He was thin to emaciation. He was several sizes too small tor his colorless shirt and old striped suitpants and the end of his narrow belt turned out, as if he’d had to make a new hole farther in. By contrast, his head with its thinning coil of black hair—it had to be dyed—looked huge. Whatever was killing him hadn’t wasted its way up past his neck. Nor had it affected his balance, or the big Ruger he wore hung on his right hip would have pulled him over when he kicked the furnace. It had a six-inch barrel in a stiff black leather clip and a slick walnut handle with indentations for the fingers and had to have set him back a month’s Social Security.

  He saw me looking at it and smiled for the first time, showing pink gums. He was breathing almost normally now. “Fanny.” He patted the weapon. “Named her for my second wife. You looked friendly enough coming around the house or I’d of knocked you down like a baby seal.”

  “At close range the shovel’s better.”

  “What I thought, but I ain’t got the muscle for more than one swing. I did last month. I don’t want to think about March, if I see March. I got it, son. It’s got me. I never thought it would, somehow.”

  “Seen a doctor?”

  “Seen two. They wanted to admit me, shoot me full of nuke juice and go to cutting on me like an apple with a brown spot. Shit. She tell you they robbed me?”

  “The doctors?”

  “Well, them too. These sonsabitches roughed me over and tied me up and took my axe. Only thing I carried out of the house when Henrietta upped and left. That was my third wife. They got my TV too, but the hell with that. That bass sang sweet as Mister B.”

  “They get in the house?”

  “No, they heard a sireen and cut out. I see them again they’s two dead niggers.”

  “Easier to talk about than carry off,” I said. “Or to get along with when it’s done.”

  “I won’t have to get along with it long.” He dropped into the recliner, hard enough to splay his legs. The chair dwarfed him. He hadn’t the leverage to tilt it back. “George Favor. Yes, that boy blowed good tailgate. Not great; I blowed some of it myself when they wasn’t no bass work and I showed him some licks he never heard of. We all of us doubled back then, not like now. I tripled on the box. What Georgie was was dependable. He was always straight and he never stepped on a man’s solo. Couldn’t run a band for shit, though, and it roont him.”

  “Ruined him how?” I sat on the sofa.

  “Man, you gots to be a ripe son of a bitch to lead a band. Tommy, Jimmy, Mister Miller—Hitler didn’t have nothing on them white boys. Georgie, he wanted everybody to like him. Nobody came to rehearsal twice in a row because he didn’t fall on them like a safe when they didn’t and they sounded like Canadian geese up there. Hell, they’d probably be a hit these days. Back then no place’d book them after a while and when George couldn’t pay them they took their horns and split. He never got over it, Georgie didn’t. Was all he talked about. He was solo by the time I knowed him and I never seen that big grin that was on all his pictures.”

  “He had it in Jamaica. They held the band over six weeks.”

  “Floyd Gleaner was probably still with him then. Played cornet and French horn and done the arranging and I hear he was son of a bitch enough for the both of them. He quit to work in pictures.”

  I wrote down the name. “Know where I can reach him?”

  “Forest Lawn. Blowed his brains out through that horn twenty years back and throwed hisself under a truck in LA.”

  I crossed it out. “Iris says you saw Favor four years ago.”

  “Just about that. Harold’s Hotcake Hacienda it was then. I was still driving then, parked my crate around back. When I come out after breakfast there he was emptying cans into the dumpster. I almost didn’t know him. Bald, and what he had was pure white—and him we didn’t call Blackie on account of his skin, like black patent leather that pomp was, oh my, with enough straightener in it to take the bends out of the Mississippi. ‘George?’ I says. ‘George Favor?’ And he looks at me but he don’t know me, but I can see now it’s him all right and I says, ‘Joe Wooding,’ and he still don’t know, but he says, ‘Oh, sure,’ like you do. I axed him was he working there, like he ain’t got on a apron that says kitchen help all over it. He says yeah, washing dishes and cleaning up. Well, he don’t look too ashamed, so I axed him was he still playing and he said he sat in sometimes at the Kitchen.”

  “Down in the warehouse district?”

  “Man, you know another Kitchen? Well, I went down there oncet or twicet after that but I never seen him and the waiters never heard of him, so I figure he just told me that so’s I didn’t think cleanup’s all he’s good for.”

  “You go back to Harold’s?”

  He shook his blocky head slowly. “They closed it not too long after and then someone turned it into the kind of place you got to scrub your nails and put on a clean shirt before they let you in the door. Henrietta cut out about that time and who gives a shit about Georgie Favor.”

  I did some scribbling. His eyes were burning holes in the crown of my hat.

  “That badge you carry worth shit?”

  “Just about.” I put away the notebook.

  He fumbled then in a pocket on the side of the recliner and drew out a Ziploc bag containing brown cuttings and a handful of Zigzag papers and rolled himself the neatest joint you ever saw, licking the paper and without twisting the ends. “I axe you to join me but I got just enough to take me through the end of the month.”

  I cocked a palm and he put away the makings and came up with a wooden kitchen match and fired it off his square thumbnail the way no one knows how to do it anymore.

  The cuttings caught quickly and the familiar stench thickened the air. He sucked in air and some smoke.

  “That the goods, yours cut out on you too?” The dope constricted his vocal cords. He had sounded like a man gargling washers to begin with.

  I said it was.

  “Leave a note?”

  I nodded.

  He took another drag. Then he rolled over onto the gun and pulled a frayed brown leather wallet out of his left hip pocket. The joint burned between his fingers while he separated a limp shred of paper from the rest of the contents. He held it out and I got up to take it.

  It was a half-sheet of ruled pulp torn from a tablet and folded in quarters. It had worn through at the creases and almost fell apart when I opened it. The message was written in smeared pencil in a round, childlike hand: “Joe, I sit here day after day watching you rub resin on that bow, stroking it like you used to do me and then putting it away without ever playing. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you. Don’t waste your time looking for me.” It was unsigned.

  “I did a lot of muggles that night,” he said. “That was taped to the mirror in the crapper when I rolled out around noon. I left it up there six months and took it with me when I closed the place up. That and my bass, that’s all I took. Everything else is still in there. I bought this place furnished and here I stay. What I get for marrying a girl was born the day I played the Astor.”

  I gave back the note. “Try to find her?”

  “I had the cops in. Fat sergeant looked at the note and told me to wait for the divorce papers. I never got them. I waited a couple of months and swallowed a bottle of Bayers. Threw ’em right back up. If I had Fanny then I guess we wouldn’t be talking.” He showed me his gums again. “Joke is, I ain’t been up to playing that big fiddle for ten years. I sit there holding it between my legs and I can’t get from one note to the next. Them two sonsabitches couldn’t of taken anything I got less use for. Maybe I should of told her.”

  “It wouldn’t have changed anything. Nobody leaves because of a bad habit. It�
��s just a screen.” Standing over him I was starting to feel hollow-headed. Whoever his source was, he wasn’t stopping at Acapulco. It was Bogotá or bust with him.

  “Really the blues, man.” He took in some smoke and held most of it and released the rest. “Hell of it is, I can’t even use them.”

  I hung at the door. “Do you need anything?”

  He looked up at me for a long time from under his mantel of forehead. He’d forgotten who I was.

  “A great big juicy slice of nineteen fifty-five,” he said. “That’s what you can get me. I ate it too fast the first time.”

  I thanked him for the information and let myself out into the yard, into the cold sweet air of the yard.

  4

  MY LUNGS COULD TAKE only so much fresh air. I lit a Winston off the dash lighter, deadening the new-car stink a little, and started the engine. The house Sweet Joe Wooding didn’t live in anymore didn’t look so empty as I left the driveway. It was as full as a sick old man’s skull and almost as dark.

  I took Ford Road onto the Edsel Ford and followed it into Detroit. The sky was pewter and the air tasted of it, promising more snow. The city under it, flat rows of houses and two-story shops bristling into a fistful of skyscrapers as I continued east, had a grainy look, like the pictures of Stalingrad after the siege, or of Berlin cowering under clouds of Allied bombers. The river was choppy and smoke-colored. Windsor was a line of broken shadows on the other side. Some of the drivers had their lights on downtown, pale yellow circles in the dusklike Michigan winter morning.

  When people come up missing you go to one end or the other to find them, never the middle. If you have a jumping-off point, a place where they were last seen or a person who had seen them last, you go there first, and I had done that. If that doesn’t turn anything you go back to where they were first seen, but I couldn’t afford the trip to Jamaica and Iris couldn’t afford to send me. What Wooding had told me about George Favor saying he sat in sometimes at the Kitchen was a thin place to try and get your thumbnail under. If Favor was lying to save face it wasn’t a place at all. But sometimes the lies are as good as the truth and anyway I had nothing else to scratch at but a thirty-year-old snapshot of a man who hadn’t looked like himself in years.