EIGHT MILE AND DEQUINDRE
by Loren D. Estleman
<an Amos Walker story>

1
The client was a no-show, as four out of ten of them tend to be. She had called me in the customary white heat, a woman with one of those voices you hear in supermarkets and then thank God you're not married, and arranged to meet me someplace not my office and not her home. The bastard had been paying her the same alimony for the past five years, she'd said, and she wanted a handle on his secret bank accounts to prove he was making twice as much as when they split. In the meantime she'd cooled down or the situation had changed or she'd found a private investigator who worked even cheaper than I did, leaving me to drink yellow coffee alone at a linoleum counter in a gray cinder-block building on Dequindre at Eight Mile Road. I was just as happy. Why I'd agreed to meet her at all had to do with a bank balance smaller than my IQ, and since talking to her I'd changed my mind and decided to refer her to another agency anyway. So I worked on my coffee and once again considered taking on a security job until things got better.
A portable radio behind the counter was tuned to a Pistons game, but the guy who'd poured my coffee, lean and young with butch-cut red hair and a white apron, didn't look to be listening to it, whistling while he chalked new prices on the blackboard menu on the wall next to the cash register. Well, it was March and the Pistons were where they usually were in the standings at that time and nobody in Detroit was listening. I asked him what the chicken on a roll was like.
"Better than across the street," he said, wiping chalk off his hands onto the apron.
Across the street was a Shell station. I ordered the chicken anyway; unless he skipped some lines it was too far down on the board for him to raise the price before I'd eaten it. He opened a stainless steel door over the sink and took the plastic off a breaded patty the color of fresh sawdust and slapped it hissing on the griddle.
We'd had the place to ourselves for a while, but then the pneumatic front door whooshed and sucked in a male customer in his thirties and a sport coat you could hear across the street, who cocked a hip onto a stool at the far end of the counter and asked for a glass of water.
"Anything to go with that?" asked Butch, setting an amber-tinted tumbler in front of him.
"No, I'm waiting for someone."
"Coffee, maybe."
"No, I want to keep my breath fresh."
"Oh. That kind of someone." He wiped his hands again. "It's okay for now, but if the place starts to fill up you'll have to order something, a Coke or something. You don't have to drink it."
"Sounds fair." 
"This ain't a bus station." 
"I can see that."
Nodding, Butch turned away and picked up a spatula and flipped the chicken patty and broke a roll out of plastic. The guy in the sport coat asked how the game was going, but Butch either didn't hear him or didn't want to. The guy gave up on him and glanced down the counter at me.
"You waiting for someone too?"
"I was," I said. "Now I'm waiting for that bird."
"Stood you up, huh? That's tough."
"I'm used to it."
He hesitated, then got down and picked up his glass and carried it to my end and climbed onto the stool next to mine. Up close he was about thirty, freckled, with a double chin starting and dishwater hair going thin in front. A triangle of white shirt showed between his belt buckle and the one button he had fastened on the jacket. He had prominent front teeth and looked a little like Howdy Doody. "This girl I'm waiting for would never stand anyone up," he said. "She's got manners."
"Yeah?"
"No, really. Looks too. Here's her picture." He took a fat curved wallet out of his hip pocket and showed me the head and torso of a blond in a red bandanna top, winking and grinning at the camera. She stank professional model.
"Nice," I said. "What's she do?"
"Waitress at the Peacock's Roost. That'll change when we're married. I don't want my wife to work."
"The girls in steel-rimmed glasses and iron pants will burn their bras on your lawn."
"To hell with them. Rena won't have anything to do with that kind. That's her name, Rena."
"I think it's dead now," I told Butch.
He landed the chicken patty on one half of the roll and planted the other half on top and put it on a china saucer and set the works on the linoleum. Howdy Doody finished putting away his wallet and stuck his right hand across his body in front of me. "Dave Tillet."
"Amos Walker." I shook the hand and picked up the sandwich. As it turned out I couldn't have done any worse across the street at the Shell station.
Tillet sipped his water. 'That clock right?"
Butch looked up to see which clock he meant. There was only one in the place, advertising Stroh's beer on the wall behind the counter. "Give or take a minute."
"She ought to be here now. She's usually early."
"Maybe she stood you up after all," I said.
"Not Rena."
I ate the chicken and Tillet drank his water and the guy behind the counter picked up his chalk and resumed changing prices and didn't listen to the basketball game. I wiped my mouth with a cheesy paper napkin and asked Butch what the tariff was. He said, "Buck ninety-five." I got out my wallet.
"Maybe I better call her," said Tillet. "That phone working?"
Butch said it was. Tillet drained his glass and went to the pay telephone on the wall just inside the door. I paid for the sandwich and coffee. "Well, good luck," I told Tillet on my way past him.
"What? Yeah, thanks. You too." He was listening to the purring in the earpiece. I pushed on the glass door.
Two guys were on their way in and I stepped aside and held the door for them. They were wearing dark wind-breakers and colorful knit caps and when they saw me they reached up with one hand apiece and rolled the caps down over their faces and the caps turned into ski masks. Their other hands were coming out of the slash pockets of the windbreakers and when I saw that I jumped back and let go of the door, but the man closest to it caught it with his arm and stuck a long-barreled .22 target pistol in my face while his partner came in past him and lamped the place quickly and then put the .22's twin almost against Tillet's noisy sport coat. Three flat reports slapped the air. Tillet's mouth was open and he was leaning one shoulder against the wall and he hadn't had time to start falling or even know he was shot when the guy fired again into his face and then deliberately moved the gun and gave him another in the ear. The guy's buddy wasn't watching. He was looking at me through the eyeholes in his mask and his eyes were as flat and gray as nickels on a pad. They held no more expression than the empty blue hole also staring me in the face.
Then the pair left, Gray Eyes backing away with his gun still on me while his partner walked swiftly to a brown Plymouth Volare and around to the driver's side and got in and then Gray Eyes let himself in the passenger's side and they were rolling before he got the door closed.
Tillet fell then, crumpling in on himself like a gas bag deflating, and folded to the floor with no more noise than laundry makes skidding down a chute. Very bright red blood leaked out of his ear and slid into a puddle on the gray linoleum floor.
I ran out to the sidewalk in time to see the Plymouth take the corner. Forget about the license number. I wasn't wearing a gun. I hardly ever needed one to meet a woman in a diner.
When I went back in, the counterman was standing over Tillet's body, wiping his hands over and over on his apron. His face was as pale as the cloth. The telephone receiver swung from its cord and the metallic purring on the other end was loud in the silence following the shots. I bent and placed two fingers on Tillet's neck. Nothing was happening in the big artery. I straightened, picked up the receiver, worked the plunger, and dialed 911. Standing there waiting for someone to answer I was sorry I'd eaten the chicken.

2
They sent an Adam and Eve team, a white man and a black woman in uniform. You had to look twice at the woman to know she was a woman. They hadn't gotten around to cutting uniforms to fit them, and her tunic hung on her like a tarpaulin. Her partner had baby fat in his cheeks and a puppy mustache. His face went stiff when he saw the body. The woman might have been looking at a loose tile on the floor for all her expression gave up. Just to kill time I gave them the story, knowing I'd have to do it all over again for the plainclothes team. Butch was sitting on one of the customers' stools with his hands in his lap and whenever they looked at him he nodded in agreement with my details. The woman took it all down in shorthand.
The first string arrived ten minutes later. Among them was a black lieutenant, coarse-featured and heavy in the chest and shoulders, wearing a gray suit cut in heaven and a black tie with a silver diamond pattern. When he saw me he groaned.
"Hello, John," I said. "This is a hike north from headquarters."
John Alderdyce of Detroit homicide patted all his pockets and came up with an empty Lucky Strikes package. I gave him a Winston from my pack and took one for myself and lit them both. He squirted smoke and said, "I was eight blocks from here when I got the squeal. If I'd known you were back of it I'd have kept driving."
John and I had known each other a long time, a thing I admitted to a lot more often than he did. While I was recounting the last few minutes in the life of Dave Tillet, a police photographer came in and took pictures of the body from forty different angles and then a bearded black homicide sergeant I didn't know tugged on a pair of surgical gloves and knelt and started going through Tillet's clothes. Butch had recovered from his shock by this time and came over to watch. "Them gloves are to protect the fingerprints, right?" he asked.
"Wrong. Catch." The sergeant tossed him Tillet's wallet.
Butch caught it against his chest. "It's wet."
"That's why the gloves."
Butch thought about it, then dropped the wallet quickly and mopped his hands on his apron.
"Can the crap," barked Alderdyce. "What's inside?"
Still chuckling, the sergeant picked up the wallet and went through the contents. He whistled. "Christ, it's full of C-notes. Eight, ten, twelve-this guy was carrying fifteen hundred bucks on his hip."
"What else?"
The celluloid windows gave up a Social Security card and a temporary driver's license, both made out to David Edward Tillet, and the picture of the blond.
"That Rena?" Alderdyce asked.
I nodded. "She waits tables at the Peacock's Roost, Tillet said."
Alderdyce told the sergeant to bag the wallet and its contents. To me: "You saw these guys before they pulled down their ski masks?"
"Not enough before. They were just guys' faces. I didn't much look at them till they went for the guns. The trigger was my height, maybe ten pounds to the good. His partner gave up a couple of inches, same build, gray eyes." I described the getaway car.
"Stolen," guessed the sergeant. He stood and slid a glassine bag containing the wallet into the side pocket of his coat.
Alderdyce nodded. "It was a market job. The girl was the finger. She's smoke by now. Dope?"
"That or numbers," said the sergeant. "He's a little pale for either one in this town, but the rackets are nothing if not an equal opportunity employer. Nobody straight carries cash anymore."
"I still owe a thousand on this building." Butch's upper lip was folded over his chin. "I guess I'd be dumb to pay it off now."
"The place is made," the sergeant told him. 
"Yeah?" The counterman looked hopefully at Alderdyce, who grunted.
"The Machus Red Fox is booked into next year and has been ever since Hoffa caught his last ride from in front of it."
"Yeah?"
The lieutenant was still looking at me. "When can you come down and sign a statement?"
"Whenever it's ready. I'm not exactly swamped."
"Five o'clock, then." He paused. "Your part in this is finished, right?"
"When I work I get paid," I said.
"How come that doesn't comfort me?"
I said I'd see him at five.
The morgue wagon was just creaking its brakes in front when I came out into the afternoon sunlight and walked around the blue and white and a couple of unmarked units and a green Fiat to my heap. I was about to get in behind the wheel when I stopped and looked again at the Fiat. The girl Dave Tillet had called Rena was sitting in the driver's seat, staring at the blank cinder-block wall in front of the windshield.

3
I opened the door on the passenger side and got in next to her. She jumped in the seat and looked at me quickly. Her honey-colored hair was caught in a clasp behind her neck, below which a kind of ponytail hung down her back, and she was wearing a tailored navy suit over a cream-colored blouse open at the neck and jet buttons in her ears, but I recognized her large smoky eyes and the just slightly too-wide mouth that was built for grinning, although she wasn't grinning. The interior of the little car smelled of car and sandal wood.
She snatched up a blue bag from the seat and her hand vanished inside. I caught her wrist. She struggled, but I applied pressure and her face went white and she stopped struggling. I relaxed the hold, but just a little.
"Dave's dead," I said. "You can't help him now."
She said nothing. On "dead," her head jerked as if I'd smacked her. I went on.
"You don't want to be here when the cops come out. They've got your picture and they think you fingered Dave."
"That's stupid." Her voice came from just in back of her tongue. I didn't know how it was normally.
"It's not stupid. He was expecting you and got five slugs from a twenty-two. The cops know where you work and pretty soon they'll know where you live and when they find you they'll book you as a material witness and change it to accessory to the fact later."
"You talk like you're not one of them."
"Get real, lady. If I were we wouldn't be sitting here talking. On the other hand, if you set up Dave deliberately you wouldn't be here at all. It could just be you're someone who could use some help."
Her lips twisted. "And it could just be you're someone who could give it."
"We're talking," I reminded her. "I'm not hollering cop."
"Who the hell are you?"
I told her. Her lips twisted some more.
"A cheap snooper. I should have guessed it would be something like that."
I said, "It's a buyer's market. I don't set the price."
"What's the price?"
"Some truth. Not right now, though. Not here. Let's go somewhere."
"You go," she said. "I've got a pistol in this purse and when I pull the trigger it won't much matter whether it's inside or outside."
I didn't move. "Guns, everybody's got 'em. After a killer's screwed one in your face the rest aren't so scary."
We sat like that for a while, she with her hand in the purse and turned a little in the seat so that one silken knee showed under the hem of her pleated skirt while a cramp crawled across the palm I had clenched on her wrist. The morgue crew came out the front door of the diner wheeling a stretcher with a zipped bag full of Dave Tillet on it and folded the works into the back of the wagon. Rena didn't look at them. Finally I let go of her and got out one of my cards and a pen. I moved slowly to avoid attracting bullets.
"I'll just put my home address and telephone number on the back," I said, writing. "Open twenty-four hours. Just ring and ask for Amos. But do it before the cops get you or I'm just another spent shell."
She said nothing. I tucked the card under the mirror she had clamped to the sun visor on the passenger side and got out and into my crate and started the motor and swung out into the street and took off with my cape flying behind me.

4
I made some calls from the office, but none of the security firms or larger investigation agencies in town had anything to farm out. I bought myself a drink from the file drawer in the desk and when that was finished I bought myself another, and by then it was time to go to police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien, or just plain 1300 as it's known in town. The lady detective who announced me to John Alderdyce was too much detective not to notice the scotch on my breath but too much lady to mention it. Little by little they are changing things down there, but it's a slow process.
In John's office I gave my story again to a stenographer while Alderdyce and the bearded sergeant listened for variations. When the steno left to type up my statement I asked John what he'd found out.
"Tillet kept the books for Great Lakes Importers. Ever hear of it?"
"Front for the Mob."
"So you say. It's worth a slander suit if you say it in public, they're that well screened with lawyers and holding corporations." He broke open a fresh pack of Luckies and fired one up with a Zippo. I already had a Winston going. "Tillet rented a house in Southfield. A grand a month."
"Any grand jury investigations in progress?" I asked. "They're hard on the bookkeeping population."
He shook his head. "We got a call in to the feds, but even if they get back to us we'll still have to go up to the mountain to get any information out of those tight-mouthed clones. We're pinning our hopes on the street trade and this woman Rena. Especially her." "What'd you turn on her?"
"She works at the Peacock's Roost like you said, goes by Rena Murrow. She didn't show up for the four p.m. shift today. She's got an apartment on Michigan and we have men waiting for her there, but she's empty tracks by now. Tillet's landlady says he's been away someplace on vacation. Lying low. Whoever wanted him out in the open got to Rena. By all accounts she is a woman plenty of scared accountants would break cover to meet." "Maybe someone used her."
He grinned that tight grin that was always bad news for someone. "Your license to hunt dulcineas still valid?" "Everyone needs a hobby," I said. "Stamps are sissy." "Safer, though. According to the computer, this damsel has two priors for soliciting, but that was before she started bumming around with one Peter Venito. 'Known former associate,' it says in the printout. Computers have no romance in their circuits."
I smoked and thought. Peter Venito, born Pietro, had come up through the Licavoli Mob during Prohibition and during the old Kefauver Committee hearings had been iden-tified as one of the five dons on the board of governors of that  fraternal  organization  the  Italian  Anti-Defamation League would have us believe no longer exists. "Venito's been dead four or five years," I said. "Six. But his son Paul's still around and a slice off the old pizza. His secretary at Great Lakes Importers says he's in Las Vegas. Importing."
"Anything on the street soldiers?"
"Computer got a hernia sorting through gray eyes and the heights and builds you gave us. I'd go to the mugs but you say you didn't get a long enough hinge at them without their masks, so why go into golden time? Just sign the statement and give my eyes a rest from your ugly pan."
The stenographer had just returned with three neatly typewritten sheets. I read my words and wrote my name at the bottom. "I have it on good authority I'm a heartbreaker," I told Alderdyce, handing him the sheets.
"What's a dulcinea, anyway?" asked the sergeant.

5
The shooting at Eight Mile and Dequindre was on the radio. They got my name and occupation right, anyway. I switched to a music station and drove through coagulating dusk to my little three-room house west of Hamtramck, where I put my key in a door that was already unlocked. I'd locked it when I left that morning.
I went back for the Luger I keep in a special compartment under the dash, and when I had a round in the chamber I sneaked up on the door with my back to the wall and twisted the knob and pushed the door open at arm's length. When no bullets tore through the opening I eased the gun and my face past the door frame. Rena was sitting in my one easy chair in the living room with a .32 Remington automatic in her right hand and a bottle of scotch and a half-full glass standing on the end table on the other side.
"I thought it might be you," she said. "That's why I didn't shoot."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence."
"You ought to get yourself a dead-bolt lock. I've known how to slip latches since high school."
"All they taught me was algebra." I waved the Luger. "Can we put up the artillery? It's starting to get silly."
She laid the pistol in her lap. I snicked the safety into place on mine and put it on the table near the door and closed the door behind me. She picked up her glass and sipped from it. "You buy good whiskey. Keyhole peeping must pay pretty good."
"That's my Christmas bottle."
"Your friends must like you."
"I bought it for myself." I went into the kitchen and got a glass and filled it from the bottle.
She said, 'The cops were waiting for me at my place. One of them was smoking a pipe. I smelled it the minute I hit my floor."
"The world's full of morons. Cops come in for their share." I drank.
"What's it going to cost me to get clear of this?"
"How much you got?"
She glanced down at the blue bag wedged between her left hip and the arm of the chair. It was a nice hip, long and slim with the pleated navy skirt stretched taut over it. "Five hundred."
I shrugged.
"All of it?"
"It'd run you that and more to put breathing space between you and Detroit," I said. "It wouldn't buy you a day in any of the safe houses in town."
"What will I eat on?"
"On the rest of it. You knew damn well I'd set my price at whatever you said you had, so I figure you knocked it down by at least half."
She twisted her lips in that way she had and opened the bag and peeled three C-notes and four fifties off a roll that would choke a tuba. I accepted the bills and riffled through them and stuck the wad in my inside breast pocket.
"How's Paul?" I asked. "He's in Vegas," she answered automatically. Then she looked up at me quickly and pursed her lips. I cut her off. "The cops know about you and old Peter Venito, may he rest in peace. The word on the street is young Paul inherited everything."
"Not everything."
I was lighting a cigarette and so didn't bother to shrug. I flipped the match into an ashtray. "Dave Tillet."
"I liked Dave. He wasn't like the others that worked for Paul. He wanted to get out. He was all set to take the CPA exam in May."
"He didn't just like you," I said. "He was planning to marry you."
She raised her eyebrows. They were darker than her hair, two inverted commas over eyes that I saw now were ringed with red under her makeup. "I didn't know," she said quietly.
"Who dropped the dime on him?" Now her face took on the hard sheen of polished metal. "All right, so you tricked me into admitting I knew Paul Venito. That doesn't mean I know the heavyweights he hires."
"You've answered my question. When a bookkeeper for the Mob starts making leaving noises, his employers start wondering where he's going with what he knows. What'd Venito do to get you to set up Dave?" "I didn't set him up!"
I smoked and waited. In the silence she looked at the wall behind me and then at the floor and then at her hands on the purse in her lap and then she drained her glass and refilled it. The neck of the bottle jingled against the rim. She drank.
"Dave went into hiding a week ago because of some threats he said he got over his decision to quit," she said. "None of them came from Paul, but from his own fellow workers. He gave me a number where he could be reached and told me to memorize it and not write it down or give it to anyone else. I'd gone with Paul for a while after old Peter died and Paul knew I was seeing Dave and he came to my apartment yesterday and asked me where he could reach Dave. I wouldn't give him the number. He said he just wanted to talk to him and would I arrange a meeting without saying it would be with Paul. He was afraid Dave's fellow workers had poisoned him against the whole operation. He wanted to make Dave a cash offer to keep quiet about his, Paul's, activities, and that if I cared for him and his future I'd agree to help. I said okay. It sounded like the Paul Venito I used to know," she added quickly. "He would spend thousands to avoid hurting someone; he said that was bad business and cost more in the long run." "Who picked the spot?"
"Paul did. He called it neutral territory, halfway between Dave's place in Southfield and Paul's office downtown."
"It's also handy to expressways out of the city," I said. "So you set up the parley. Then what?"
"I called Paul's office today to ask him if I could sit in on the meeting. His secretary told me he left for Las Vegas last night. That's when I knew he had no intention of keeping his appointment, or of being anywhere near the place when whoever was keeping it for him went in to see Dave. I broke every law driving here, but-"
The metal sheen cracked apart then. She said, "Damn," and dug in her purse for a handkerchief. I watched her pawing blindly through the contents for a moment, then handed her mine. If it was an act it was sweet. "Did anyone follow you here?" I asked. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose as discreetly as a thing like that can be done, and looked up. Her cheeks were smeared blue-black. That was when I decided to believe her. You don't look like her and know how to turn the waterworks on and off without knowing how to keep your mascara from running too.
"I don't think so," she said. "I kept an eye out for cops and parked around the corner. Why?"
"Because if what you told me is straight, you're next on Venito's list of Things to Do Today. You're the only one who can connect him to that diner. Have you got a place to stay?"
"I guess one of the girls from the Roost could put me up." "No, the cops will check them out. They'll hit all the hotels and motels too. You'd better stay here."
"Oh." She gave me her crooked smile. "That plus the five hundred, is that how it goes?"
"I'll toss you for the bed. Loser gets the couch." 
"You don't like blonds?"
"I'm not sure I ever met one. But it has something to do with not going to the bathroom where you eat. Give me your keys and I'll stash your car in the garage. Cops'll have a BOL out on it by now."
She was reaching inside her purse when the door buzzer blew us a raspberry. Her hand went to the baby Remington. 1 touched a finger to my lips and pointed at the bedroom door. She got up clutching her purse and the gun and went into the bedroom and pushed the door shut, or almost. She left a crack. I retrieved my handkerchief stained with her makeup from the chair and put it in a pocket and picked up the Luger and said, "Who is it?" 
"Alderdyce."
I opened the door. He glanced down at the gun as if it were a loose button on my jacket and walked around me into the living room. "Expecting trouble?"
"It's a way of life in this town." I safetied the Luger and returned it to the table. 
"You alone?" He looked around. "Who's asking, you or the department?" 
He said nothing, circling the living room with his hands in his pockets. He stopped near the bedroom door and sniffed the air. "Nice cologne. A little feminine." 
"Even detectives have a social life," I said. 
"You couldn't prove it by me."
I killed my cigarette butt and fought the tug to reach for a replacement. "You didn't come all this way to do 'Who's on First' with me."
"We tracked down Paul Venito. I thought you'd want to know."
"In Vegas?"
He moved his large close-cropped head from side to side slowly. "At Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Stiff as a stick in the trunk of a stolen Oldsmobile."

6
The antique clock my grandfather bought for his mother knocked out the better part of a minute with no competition. I shook out my last Winston and smoothed it between my fingers. "Shot?"
"Three times with a twenty-two. Twice in the chest, once in the ear. Sound familiar?"
"Yeah." I speared my lips with the cigarette and lit up. "How long's he been dead?"
"That's up to the M.E. Twelve hours anyway. He was a cold cut long before Tillet bought it."
"Which means what?"
He shook his head again. His coarse face was drawn in the light of the one lamp I had burning.
"My day rate's two-fifty," I said. "If you're talking about consulting."
"I'm talking about withholding evidence and obstruction of justice. The Murrow woman is getting to be important, and I think you know where she is." I smoked and said nothing.
"It's this tingly feeling I get," he said. "Happens every time a case involves a woman and Amos Walker too." 
"Christ, John, all I did was order the chicken on a roll." 
"I hope that's all you did. I sure hope." We watched each other. 
Suddenly he seized the knob and pushed open the bedroom door, scooping his police special out of his belt holster. I lunged forward, then held back. The room was empty.
He went inside and looked out the open window and checked the closet and got down in push-up position to peer under the bed. Rising, he holstered the .38 and dusted his palms off against each other. "Perfume's stronger in here," he observed.
"I told you I was a heartbreaker." 
"Make sure that's all you're breaking."
"Is this where you threaten to trash my license?" 
"That's up to the state police," he said. "What I can do is tank you and link your name to that diner shoot for the reporters until little old ladies in Grosse Pointe won't trust you to walk their poodles."
On that chord he left me. John and I had been friendly a long time. But no matter how long you are something, you are not that something a lot longer.

7
So far I had two corpses and no Rena Murrow. It was time to punt. I dialed Great Lakes Importers, Paul Venito's legitimate front, but there was no answer. Well, it was way past closing time; in an orderly society even the crooks keep regular hours. I thawed something out for supper and watched an old Kirk Douglas film on television and turned in.
The next morning was misty gray with the bitter-metal smell of rain in the air. I broke out the foul-weather gear and drove to the Great Lakes building on East Grand River.
The reception area, kept behind glass like expensive cigars in a tobacco shop, was oval shaped with passages spiking out from it, decorated in orange sherbet with a porcelain doll seated behind a curved desk. She wore a tight pink cashmere sweater and a black skirt slit to her ears.
"Amos Walker to see Mr. Venito," I said.
"I'm sorry. Mr. Venito's suffered a tragic accident." Her voice was honey over velvet. It would be.
"Who took his place?"
"That would be Mr: DeMarco. But he's very busy."
"I'll wait." I pulled a thermos bottle full of hot coffee out of the slash pocket of my trench coat and sat down on an orange couch across from her desk.
The porcelain doll lifted her telephone receiver and spoke into it. A few minutes later, two men in tailored blue suits came out of one of the passages and stood over me, and that was when the front crumbled.
"Position."
I wasn't sure which of them had spoken. They looked alike down to the scar tissue over their eyes. I screwed the top back on the thermos and stood and placed my palms against the wall. One of them kicked my feet apart and patted me down from tie to socks, removing my hat last and peering inside for atomic devices. I wasn't carrying. He replaced the hat. "Okay, this way."
I accompanied them down the passage with a man on either side. We went through a door marked P. venito into an office the size of Hart Plaza with green wall-to-wall carpeting and one wall that was all glass, before which stood a tall man with a fringe of gray hair and a neat Vandyke beard. His suit was tan and clung like sunlight to his trim frame.
"Mr. Walker?" he said pleasantly. "I'm Fred DeMarco. I was Mr. Venito's associate. This is a terrible thing that's happened."
"More terrible for him than you," I said. He cocked his head and frowned. "This office, you mean. It's just a room. Paul's father had it before him and someone will have it after me. I recognized your name from the news. Weren't you involved in the shooting of this Tillet person yesterday?"
I nodded. "If you call being a witness involved. But you don't have to call him 'this Tillet person.' He worked for you."
"He worked for Great Lakes Importers, like me. I never knew him. The firm employs many people, most of whom I haven't had the chance to meet."
"My information is he was killed because he was leaving Great Lakes and someone was afraid he'd peddle what he knew."
"We're a legitimate enterprise, Mr. Walker. We have nothing to hide. Tillet was let go. Our accounting department is handled mostly by computers now and he elected not to undergo retraining. Whatever he was involved with outside the firm that led to his death has nothing to do with Great Lakes."
"For someone who never met him you know a lot about Tillet," I said.
"I had his file pulled for the police."
"Isn't it kind of a big coincidence that your president and one of your bookkeepers should both be shot to death within a few hours of each other, and with the same caliber pistol?"
"The police were here again last night to ask that same question," DeMarco said. "My answer is the same. If, like Tillet, Paul had dangerous outside interests, they are hardly of concern here."
I got out a Winston and tapped it on the back of my hand. "You've been on the laundering end too long, Mr. DeMarco. You think you've gotten away from playing hardball. Just because you can afford a tailor and a better barber doesn't mean you aren't still Freddy the Mark, who came up busting heads for Peter Venito in the bad old days."
One of the blue suits backhanded the cigarette out of my mouth as I was getting set to light it. "Mr. DeMarco doesn't allow smoking."
"That's enough, Andy." DeMarco's tone was even. "I was just a boy when Prohibition ended, Walker. Peter took me in and almost adopted me. I learned the business and when I got back from the war and college I showed him how to modernize, cut expenses, and increase profits. For thirty years I practically ran the organization. Then Peter died and his son took over and I was back to running errands. But for the good of the firm I drew my pay and kept my mouth shut. We're legitimate now and I mean for it to stay that way. I wouldn't jeopardize it for the likes of Dave Tillet."
"I think you would do just that. You remember a time when no one quit the organization, and when Tillet gave notice and you found out young Paul had arranged to buy his silence instead of making dead sure of it, you took Paul out of the way and then slammed the door on Tillet."
"You're fishing, Walker."
"Why not? I've got Rena Murrow for bait."
The room got quiet. Outside the glass, fourteen floors down, traffic glided along Grand River with all the noise of fish swimming in an aquarium.
"She set up the meet with Tillet for Venito," I went on. "She can tie Paul to that diner at Eight Mile and Dequindre and with a little work the cops will tie you to that trunk at Metro Airport. She can finger your two button men. Looking down the wrong end of life in Jackson, they'll talk."
"Get him out of here," DeMarco snarled.
The blue suits came toward me. I got out of there. I could use the smoke anyway.

8
I was closing my front door behind me when Rena came out of the bedroom. She had fixed her makeup since the last time I had seen her, but she had on the same navy suit and it was starting to look like a navy suit she had had on for two days.
I said, "You remembered to relock the door this time."
She nodded. "I stayed in a motel last night. The cops haven't got to them all yet. But I couldn't hang around. They get suspicious when you don't have luggage."
"You can't stay here. I just painted a bull's-eye on my back for Fred DeMarco." I told her what I'd told him.
"I can't identify the men who killed Dave," she protested.
"Freddy the Mark doesn't know that." I lifted the telephone. "I'm getting you a cab ride to police headquarters and then I'm calling the cops. Things are going to get interesting as soon as DeMarco gets over his mad."
The doorbell buzzed. This time I didn't have to tell her. She went into the bedroom and I got my Luger off the table and opened the door on a man who was a little shorter than I, with gray eyes like nickels on a pad. He had traded his windbreaker for a brown leather jacket but it looked like the same .22 target pistol in his right hand. Without the ski mask he looked about my age, with streaks of premature gray in his neat brown hair.
I waved the Luger and said, "Mine's bigger." 
"Old movie line," he said with a sigh. "Take a gander behind you."
That was an old movie line too. I didn't turn. Then someone gasped and I stepped back and moved my head just enough to get the corner of my eye working. A man a little taller than Gray Eyes, with black hair to his collar and a handlebar mustache, stood behind Rena this side of the bedroom door with a squat .38 planted against her neck. His other hand was out of sight and the way Rena was standing said he had her left arm twisted behind her back. He too had ditched his windbreaker and was in shirtsleeves. The lighter-caliber gun he had used on Tillet and probably on Paul Venito would be scrap by now.
It seemed I was the only one who needed a key to get into my house.
"Two beats one, Zorro." Gray Eyes's tone remained tired and I figured out that was his normal voice. He stepped over the threshold and leaned the door shut. "Let's have the Heine." He held out his free hand.
"Uh-uh," I said. "I give it to you and then you shoot us."
"You don't, we shoot the girl first. Then you."
"You'll do that anyway. This way maybe I shoot you too."
Mustache shifted his weight. Rena shrieked. My eyes flickered that way. Gray Eyes swept the barrel of the .22 across my face and grasped the end of the Luger. I fired.
The report gulped up all the sound in the room. Mustache let go of Rena and swung the .38 my way. She knocked up his arm and red flame streaked ceilingward. Rena dived for her blue bag on the easy chair. Mustache aimed at her back. I swung the Luger, but Gray Eyes was still standing and fired the .22. Something plucked at my left bicep. The front window exploded then, and Mustache was lifted off his feet and flung backward against the wall, his gun flying. The nasty cracking report followed an instant later.
I looked at Gray Eyes, but he was down now, his gun still in his hand but forgotten, both hands clasped over his abdomen with the blood dark between his fingers. I relieved him of the weapon and put it with the Luger on the table. Rena was half-reclining in the easy chair with her skirt hiked up over one long leg and her .32 Remington in both hands pointing at Mustache dead on the floor. She hadn't fired.
"Walker?"
The voice was tinny and artificially loud. But I recognized it.
"We're all right, John," I called. "Put down that bullhorn and come in." I told Rena to drop the automatic. She obeyed, in a daze.
Alderdyce came in with his gun drawn and looked at the man still alive at his feet and across at the other man who wasn't and at Rena. I introduced them. "She didn't set up Tillet," I added. "Fred DeMarco bought the hit, not Venito. This one will get around to telling you that if you stop gawking and call an ambulance before he's done bleeding into his belly."
"For you too, maybe." Alderdyce picked up the telephone.
He'd seen me grasping my left arm. "Just a crease," I said. "Like in the cowboy pictures."
"You're lucky. I know you, Walker. It's your style to set yourself up as the goat to smoke out a guy like DeMarco. I had men watching the place and had you tailed to and from Great Lakes. When the girl broke in we loaded the neighborhood. Then these two showed-" He broke off and started speaking into the mouthpiece.
I said, "My timing was off. I'm glad yours was better."
The bearded black sergeant came in with some uniformed officers, one of whom carried a 30.06 rifle with a mounted scope. 
"Nice shooting," Alderdyce told him, hanging up. "What's your name?"
"Officer Carl Breen, Lieutenant." He spelled it.
"Okay."
I let go of my arm and wiped the blood off my hand with my handkerchief and got out my wallet, counting out two hundred and fifty dollars, which I held out to Rena. "My day rate's two-fifty."
She was sitting up now, looking at the money. "Why'd you ask for five hundred?"
"You had your mind made up about me. It saved a speech."
"Keep it. You earned it and a lot more than I can pay."
I folded the bills and stuck them inside the outer breast pocket of her navy jacket. "I'd just blow it on cigarettes and whiskey."
"Who's the broad?" demanded the sergeant.
I thought of telling him that's what a dulcinea was, but the joke was old. We waited for the ambulance.
The surviving gunman's name was Richard Bledsoe. He had two priors in the Detroit area for ADW, one conviction, and after he was released from the hospital into custody he turned state's evidence and convicted Fred DeMarco on two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. DeMarco's appeal is still pending. The dead man went by Austin Grant and had done seven years in San Quentin for second-degree homicide knocked down from murder one. The Detroit police worked a deal with the Justice Department and got Rena Murrow relocation and a new identity to shield her from DeMarco's friends. I never saw her again.
I never ate in Butch's diner again, either. These days you can't get in the place without a reservation.