Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (7 page)

“That was a feature piece about a lot of dead cases.” I stapled the report. “What did he want with me?”

“¿Quien
sabe?
Maybe he thought this was the elephant graveyard for old Ford workers. I’d care if he died any way but natural.”

“Okay if I look into it?”

“Why? There’s no one to stand your fee.”

“He came looking for help with something. I’d like to know what it was.”

“It’s your time.” He opened the door.

“Thanks for coming down, sergeant. You could have called.”

“I’m on my way home. I dropped off a uniform to drive Gooding’s car to the impound. We found it in the lot next door.”

He went out and I got up to file my carbon of the report to the woman with the generous husband. The window behind the desk started chattering, followed an instant later by a massive hollow
crump
that rang my telephone bell. At first I thought it was the ancient furnace blowing. Then I remembered it was June and got my
.38 out of the desk. I almost bumped into Blake standing in the hall with his Police Special drawn. He glanced at me without saying anything and together we clattered down three flights to the street. Something that wasn’t an automobile any longer squatted in a row of vehicles in the parking lot next to my building with its hood and doors sprung and balls of orange flame rolling out of its shattered windows, pouring black smoke into the smog layer overhead. Sirens keened in the distance, years too late to help the officer cooking in the front seat.

Shadows were congealing when I got away from Headquarters, dry-mouthed from talking to a tape recorder and damp under the arms from Sergeant Blake’s enthusiastic interrogation. The bomb squad was still looking at the charred husk of Gooding’s car, but it was a fair bet that a healthy charge had been rigged to the ignition. Gooding was Homicide’s meat now and my permission to investigate his interest in me had died with the uniformed cop. So I called an old acquaintance in Personnel at the City-County Building from a public booth and asked for information on the old man’s brief employment with the Road Commission; if I’d had brains to begin with I would have invested in two chinchillas instead of a license and waited for spring. My acquaintance promised to get back to me next day during business hours. I hung up and drove to Dearborn, where no one working the late shift at the Ford plant had ever heard of Emmett Gooding. The turnover in the auto industry is worse than McDonald’s. I caught the personnel manager just as he was leaving his office, flashed my ID, and told him I was running a credit check on Gooding
for a finance company. Reluctantly he agreed to go back in and pull the old man’s file.

The manager was small, with a shaved head and a very black pointed beard that didn’t make him look anything like the high priest of the Church of Satan. He scowled at the papers in the Manila folder.

“He was a steady worker, didn’t take as many sick days as you might expect from someone nearing mandatory retirement. Turned down the foreman’s job twice in eighteen years. No surprise. It’s a thankless position, not worth the raise.”

“Is there anyone still working here who knew him?” I asked.

“Probably not. A robot’s doing his job these days.” He winced. “I had a computer expert in here recently bragging about how the machines free workers from inhuman jobs to explore their true potential. In my day we called it unemployment.”

There was nothing in that for me, so I thanked him and got up. His eyes followed me. “What’s a man Gooding’s age want with a loan?”

“He’s buying a hot tub,” I said, and got out of there.

That was it for one day. I had a bill to make out for the bigamist’s wife, and contrary to what you read, private stars don’t often work at night, when most sources are closed. The bill complete, I caught a senile pork chop and a handful of wilted fries at the diner down the street from my office and went home. There was just a black spot on the parking lot pavement where Gooding’s car had stood.

After breakfast the next morning I drove down to the City-County Building, making a gun out of my index finger and snapping a shot at the statue of the Spirit of Detroit on my way in. The Green Giant, as we call him, was still threatening to crush the family he was holding in one hand with the globe he was gripping in the other. The blunt instrument symbolized Progress.

I owed my contact in Personnel to having sprung his younger brother from a charge of assaulting a police officer upon producing evidence that the cop had a history of trying to pull moving violators out of their cars through the vent windows. It had cost me some good will at Police Headquarters, but the access to confidential records was worth it. My man looked like 14 trying to pass for 40, with freckles, hornrims, and short sandy hair parted with a protractor. Never mind his name.

“What you got?” I slung my frame into the treacherous scoop chair in front of his gray metal desk and lit up. He pushed a spotless white ashtray my way. He was one of those non-smokers who didn’t mind a little more pollution in a sky already the color of sardines. “Not a lot,” he said. “Gooding was with the Road Commission off and on, mostly off, for only about five months before taking a medical.” He told me which months. I took them down in my notebook.

“What sort of worker was he?”

“How good do you have to be to hold up a sign? Nothing remarkable on his work sheet; I guess he was reliable.”

“Where’d he work?”

He started to read off street names, quadrant numbers, and dates from the printout sheet on his desk, then swore and slid it across to me. I wrote them down too, along with the foreman’s name and home telephone number. “Anything else?”

“Nothing the computer noticed,” he said.

“Okay, thanks.” I got up, shook his hand, and went through the door, or almost. Blake and Fister were on their way in. The sergeant’s fist was raised to rap on the door. When he saw me I pulled my head back out of range. He hesitated, then uncurled his fingers and smoothed down one side of his Fu Manchu. He said: “I should have guessed. The guy in Dearborn said someone was around asking about Gooding last night.”

“Good morning, Sergeant,” I said. “Officer.”

“Let’s clink him for interfering in a police investigation,” suggested Fister. His long upper lip was skinned back to his gums, exposing teeth the shade of old plaster.

Blake ignored him. “You’re screwing around with your license, Walker.”

“Not technically, since I’m not working for anyone.”

Fister said. “The law ain’t in books, pal. It’s here standing in front of you.”

“Don’t let us walk on your heels a second time,” the sergeant said evenly. “We’ll bend you till you break.”

He walked around me into the office, followed a half-second later by his trained dog.

The foreman’s name was Lawler. I tried his home number from a booth, got no answer, and called the county dispatcher’s office, where a dead-voiced secretary informed me Lawler was due at a road construction site on Dequindre at two. That gave me three hours. I coaxed my heap up Woodward to the Detroit Public Library and spent the time in the microfilm room reading copies of the
News
and
Free Press
for the dates Gooding had worked flagging cars. No major robberies or hits had taken place in those vicinities at the time. So much for the theory that he had seen someone driving through whom he was better off not seeing. Rubbing floating type out of my eyes, I put a hamburger out of its misery at a lunch counter on Warren and took the Chrysler north to Dequindre. On the way I flipped on the radio in the middle of a news report on the bombing outside
my office building. The announcer managed to get my name right, but that was about all.

A crew of eight were taking turns shoveling gravel and Elmer’s Glue into a single pothole the size of a dimple at Remington. They would tip the stuff into the hole, pat it down, then walk half a block back to the truck for another load. Even then it didn’t look as if they could make the job last until quitting time, but you never know. A hardhat crowding 50, with a great firm belly and sleeves rolled back past thick forearms burned to a dark cherry color, stood with one work shoe propped on the truck’s rear bumper, eyes like twin slivers of blue glass watching the operation through the smoke of his cigarette. They didn’t move as I pulled my car off to the side a safe distance from the county vehicle and got out. “Mr. Lawler?”

His only reaction was to reach up with a crusted forefinger and flick ash off his cigarette without removing it from between his lips. Since the gesture seemed more positive than negative, I gave him a look at my license photostat and told him what I was doing there. “Gooding ran interference for your crew,” I wound up. “What can you tell me about him?”

“He knew which side of the sign said STOP and which said SLOW.”

“Anything else?”

“Anything meaning what?” He still wasn’t looking at me.

You run into him in every profession, the one bee in the hive who would rather sting than make honey. “Look,” I said, “I’m just earning a living, like you and the lightning corps here. You look like someone who’s talked to investigators; you know what I want. How did the old man get along with the other workers? Did you notice if there were any he was especially friendly with, or especially not friendly with? Did you overhear one of them saying something like, ’Gooding, I don’t
like you and I’m going to blow you up in your car’? Little things like that.”

He flicked off some more ash. “I talked to investigators,” he acknowledged. “Two years ago I seen a car run a stop sign on Jefferson and knock down a kid crossing the street. When I was getting set to testify against the driver his lawyer hired a detective to follow me from bar to bar and prove in court I was a drunk and an unreliable witness. Yeah,” he said, spitting out the butt, “I talked to investigators.”

He walked away to look down into the pothole. I stood there for a moment, peeling cellophane off a fresh pack of Winstons. When he didn’t return I put one in my mouth and went back to my car. A lanky black with a scar on his jaw and his hardhat balanced precariously on the back of his head climbed into the passenger’s seat.

“I heard you talking to Lawler, mister,” He talked through a sunny grin that brightened the interior. “He’s not a bad dude; he’s just had a run of bad luck.”

“Must be tough.” I touched a match to my weed and shook it out. Waiting.

“I knew Emmett Gooding some,” he said.

I waited some more, looking at him. His grin was fixed. I got out my wallet and held up a ten-spot between the first and second fingers of my right hand. When he reached for it I pulled it back. He shrugged and sat back, still grinning.

“Not enough to say much more than ’Hello’ to,” he went on. “There’s like a wall around those old men, you know? Except to Jamie.”

“Jamie?”

“James Dunrather, I think his right name was. White dude, about twenty-two. Long greasy blond hair and pimples. Lawler canned him a couple of weeks back for selling dope on the job.” He shook his
head. “Ugly scene, man. He kept screaming about how he could get Lawler killed. Lawler just laughed.”

I scraped some dust off the dash with the edge of the bill. “Dun-rather and Gooding were friends?”

“Not friends. Jamie had a way of talking at you till you had to say something back just to get him to stop. I seen him talking at the old man that way on lunch break. Not the old man exclusive, mind you, just anybody close. Gooding was the only one that didn’t bother to up and walk away.”

“What’d he talk about?”

“Mostly he bragged about what a bad dude he was and all the bad dudes he knew. What you expect to hear from a part-time pusher. Then Gooding got sick and quit. But he come back.”

“To work?”

He shook his head again. “He come to where we was tearing up pavement on Eight Mile. It was about a week before Jamie got canned. Man, Gooding looked about a hundred, leaning on them canes. He talked to Jamie for maybe ten minutes and then left in that beat-up Pontiac of his. Rest of us might’ve been in Mississippi for all the notice he took of us.”

“You didn’t hear what they were talking about?”

“Man, when that Rotomill starts ripping up asphalt—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where can I find this Dunrather?”

He shrugged, eyeing the sawbuck in my hand. I gave it to him.

“Hope that’s worth the job.” I nodded through the windshield at Lawler, watching us from beside the pothole. My angel grinned with one foot on the pavement.

“Affirmative Action, man,” he said. “It’s a sweet country.”

I made contact with Barry Stackpole at the
News,
who kept a personal file on street-level talent for his column. Jamie Dunrather had a record as long as Woodward Avenue for pushing pot and controlled substances, but no convictions, and an alias for each of his many addresses. Recent information had him living in a walkup over an adult bookstore on Watson. I promised Barry a dinner and tooled downtown.

There was a drunk snoring on the bottom step inside the street door with flies crawling on his face. I climbed over him and up a narrow squawking staircase with a gnawed rubber runner between mustard walls sprayed all over with words to live by. The upstairs hallway smelled of mold and thick paint that was fresh when Ford started paying five dollars a day. The building was as real as a stained Band-Aid on the floor of a YMCA pool. I rapped on Dunrather’s door and flattened out against the wall next to the hinges, gripping the butt of my .38 in its belt clip. When no bullets splintered the panel I tried the knob. It gave.

Unclipping the gun, I pushed the door open slowly, going in with it to avoid being framed in the doorway. The shade was drawn over the room’s only window, but enough light leaked in around it to fall on a ladderback chair mottled with old white paint, a dented table holding up a dirty china lamp and a portable TV, and a bed with a painted iron frame. The man dangling from the overhead fixture cast a gently drifting shadow as he twisted in the current of air stirring through the open door. He had a flexible wire like they hang pictures with sunk in the flesh of his neck, and his frog eyes and extended tongue were pale against his purple face. He was wearing faded jeans and track shoes and a red T-shirt with white letters that said MAKE ONLY BIG MISTAKES. You had to smile.