NECESSARY  EVIL
by
Loren D.  Estleman
<an Amos Walker mystery>

1.

ROSECRANZ, THE BUILDING SUPER, met me in the foyer. He was the oldest thing in the place after the plumbing, and whether he existed outside it was a mystery no one had yet paid me to solve. At midnight and change he had on the same greasy overalls and tragic expression he wore at noon. At the moment it was directed at the ruins of the front doorframe, shot to splinters by a solid professional kick to the deadbolt lock that had torn the screws from the pre-Columbian wood.
"You didn't hear anything?" I said by way of greeting.
"I had on MASH. It must have been during the shelling."
"Uh-huh." I didn't elaborate. Whatever the corporation that owned the building was paying him, it didn't cover acts of valor. "How many offices got hit?"
"Just yours."
"Uh-huh."
I got the rest during the climb to my floor. After the sitcom rerun had finished, he had stepped outside his office/apartment to check the front door before bed and had found it in its present condition. He'd snatched up the monkey wrench he kept around for pipes and crackheads, tried the doors to all the offices, and learned that mine alone had been forced. By then the intruders had left. He'd called me instead of the police on the theory that they hadn't changed since they put him in the hospital for attending a rally for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1922. I couldn't see any holes in the theory.
The lock to my outer office-the one with a. walker investigations on the door-had been slipped with a credit card or a strip of celluloid. The furniture and magazines inside were undisturbed. I'd secured the door to my private brain trust with a deadbolt, but they're only as sound as the woodwork; the white gash where the frame had shattered was so worm-tracked it looked like Sanskrit.
"You went inside?" I asked. Rosecranz nodded.
I believed him, but I unlimbered the Chief's Special and poked the muzzle into all the holes and corners. A good break-in artist can hide behind a dust bunny.
Mounds of papers leaned at Daliesque angles atop the old desk, crumples lay around the kicked-over wastebasket, the blinds hung crooked over the window. Everything just the way I'd left it when I locked up the evening before.
Everything except the two green file cabinets.
Even there they'd made a tidy job, springing the two simple bar latches that secured all the drawers, the same way every file case had locked since Eve hired Cain to get the goods on Adam. All the missing files had been scooped from the top drawer of the second cabinet, between Beeker and Day.
"Something?" The super's sad eyes had followed every movement like a dog's.
"Something." I slammed the drawer shut with a boom they heard in Alberta.
"Police?"
"Why? I've already been robbed."
He called Detroit headquarters downtown anyway, for the insurance company. I skinned him a twenty to forget all about my office when he filed his statement, and got to work.

2.

I couldn't get to who without going through why, and why wasn't worth banging my head against until I figured out what. That meant identifying which files were gone.
With the back of the customer chair tilted under the doorknob for privacy, I sat on the floor surrounded by spiral pads and transposed my notes onto a legal tablet, focusing on the names of clients that fit the hole. As experiences go it was about as nostalgic as cramming for a tax audit.
When I finished the room was full of daylight and cigarette smoke. My throat burned and my eyes felt pickled. I wrenched open the window, sucked in my morning's helping of auto exhaust, and sat down at the desk to place the first of many telephone calls.
It was wild goose season. Two of the older numbers were invalid. Owen Caster's machine answered and I left a message asking him to call me back. April Berryman hung up; divorce case. I wound up with six no-answers, four new-parties-at-old numbers, and three appointments for interviews. That was swell, provided I could think of some questions.
3.
"Amos Walker. I hoped I'd never hear that name again."
Evelyn Dankworth met me at the Caucus Club. Her deep auburn hair and mahogany-colored eyes went with the stained-glass and paneling, her tall highball with her two-fisted legacy. Her great-grandfather helped found General
Motors and drank himself to death in 1930. Her parents had gone in an alcoholic murder-suicide, and after a long custody battle she had been raised by an uncle who later stood trial for drunk driving and manslaughter. These days she divided her time between Betty Ford and a clinic in Toledo where cosmetic surgeons removed the fresh burst blood vessels from her cheeks.
"I get that a lot," I said. "I'm only bothering you to prevent someone else from bothering you worse." I told her about the burglary.
"I hired you to rescue my daughter from a cult. You didn't deliver. That's hardly a scenario for blackmail."
"You hired me to find her. When I did you tried to pay me to kidnap her and deliver her to some professional de-programmers you'd hired to scare the cult out of her. I turned you down because she was eighteen and an adult. I'd have stood trial for abduction."
"In any case I haven't heard from her in two years. She might be dead."
"Someone who knew about the situation might want to shake you down. That case file would help."
"You know my family history. Do you honestly think I could be hurt if any of this were made public?"
I sipped at my Scotch, a single-malt that tasted like the smoke from an iodine factory. "I wasn't talking about blackmail. Someone might make contact with you and offer to deliver her for a consideration. A phony who got all his inside information from the stolen file."
"Very well. You've told me and I'm forewarned. May I now consider our association to be at an end?"
I said that was fine with me, but reminded her I was in the book in case she heard from someone. She climbed back into her sable wrap and left. She wasn't in such a hurry she forgot to finish her drink.
4.
I found Chester Bliss sitting on a broken foundation on Woodward, eating his lunch in what was left of the third largest department store in the world. He was one of the workers hired by the city to clear away the debris after a demolition crew blew up J. L. Hudson's to make room for a mall or a casino or maybe just another empty lot. The big black face under the yellow hardhat was a mass of bone and scar tissue. He'd sparred with Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson and quit the ring in 1962 after a kid named Clay laid him on his back forty seconds into the third round. When he spotted me wading toward him through the dust and broken bricks, he put down his sandwich and took my hand in a grip I can still feel.
"They're selling those bricks for five bucks a pop down the block," I said when I got it back. "You could slip one in each pocket and wait for the market to rise."
"Suckers. Bricks ain't history. My foreman said you called. Don't tell me you found it after all this time."
I hated to shake my head. Fourteen months earlier I'd spent a week on his retainer trying to track down some items that had been stolen from his apartment. The only one he really cared about getting back was the Golden Glove he'd won in 1954. "Someone pushed in my office last night and made off with some files, yours among them. I wanted to let you know in case someone called and offered to sell you back your Glove."
He grinned. He had all his teeth-a testament to how good a fighter he had truly been-but there was no sunshine in the expression. "They wouldn't eat out on what they got. All I own's my pride, and they can't have that."
"The B-and-E community's pretty tight. If I turn up this clown he might know who hit your place."
"You think?"
I shook my head again. "Not really. It's just something I'm supposed to say."
He picked up his sandwich then and resumed eating. He managed dignity without stained glass and paneling.
5.
My third appointment showed up at the Scott Fountain on Belle Isle just as I was getting ready to leave. The gunmetal-colored stretch limo crunched to a stop alongside the two-lane blacktop that circled the island and stood there with no one stirring inside while I finished my cigarette. That was apparently as long as it took to determine there were no snipers in the trees or FBI men within eavesdropping range. The driver, six-three and two-fifty in a camel's hair coat and dark glasses on an overcast day, got out then and opened the rear passenger door.
Boy Falco gestured to the driver to stay with the car and trotted up the steps to the fountain, swinging his club foot out in a half-circle with each step. He'd dropped the d from the end of his first name about the time of his first face lift. Scuttlebutt said he hoped to win the sympathy of the grand jury with the illusion of innocent youth. They'd voted to indict anyway. He was out on bond pending a new trial; a witness had recanted.
"Entertain me." He stuck his hands in his alpaca pockets and leaned back against the railing.
"Aren't you supposed to shoot at my feet?"
"I forgot you're a comic. Somebody cut out my sense of humor in the shower at Jackson. This about that stolen credit card?"
"You used the name on the card, Cruickshank, to fly to
Miami and pick up a shipment from Bogota. The client died while I was working the case, bum ticker. I proved he wasn't on that plane so the Widow Cruickshank wouldn't have to pay the bill. There was no reason to ID you as the card user."
"There was one damn good reason not to. You shaking me down after all this time?"
"What would it buy me, a better coffin? No one would see it. The file walked out of my office last night. I don't want your boys coming to me in case someone calls you looking for Christmas money."
"That could be a fancy P.I. way of putting the sting on me without fingering yourself as the stinger."
I moved a shoulder. "Don't pay."
"I never do. In money." He pushed himself away from the railing. "If that credit card turns up in court, you won't."
"I thought you'd say something like that. I'd hoped it would be more original."
"The old ways are the best. That's why they're the old ways." He went back down the steps and swung his club foot into the car.
6.
The telephone was ringing when I got back to the office. It was Owen Caster, replying to the message I'd left on his machine that morning. He was an investment broker with a juvenile theft conviction that had been sealed for thirty years. On his behalf I'd broken a couple of things in the living room of the former court stenographer who'd tried to sell him a duplicate transcript and the threat had gone away.
"Someone else called after you," Caster growled. "He offered to sell me my file for a thousand."
I sat up. "What did he sound like?"
"I'm not even sure it was a he. It was a whisper. Twice I had to ask him to repeat himself. It might have been a woman."
"Disguise. Anything unusual?"
"Foreign accent, maybe. Probably another disguise. Tell me, do I have to hire you again to clean up your own mess?"
"This one's on me."
"I'm starting to think I should have paid the stenographer and kept you out of it."
"You'd still be paying him."
"Him, Mr. or Miss Whisper, what's the difference? What's the P stand for in P.I., Pandora?"
"Paradox. Clients hire me to take away their grief. Most of the time I manage to do that. Sometimes I just exchange it for a different kind of grief. I'm a necessary evil at best."
"Maybe not so necessary. Call me when you sort this out."
"When I do, can I get a tip on the market?" I was talking to a dead line.
7.
The receiver rang right out from under my hand. A jovial Chester Bliss told me he got a call after his shift asking him how badly he wanted his Golden Glove. The old fighter had danced around with the caller for a minute, but the party got suspicious and hung up.
"Man or woman?"
"Woman, I think," he said. "She was whispering."
"Did you notice any kind of accent?"
"Couldn't say. I don't hear so good over the phone. Patterson busted my eardrums good."
"Thanks, Chester."
He hesitated. "You don't suppose she really has my Glove?"
"I wish she did."
8.
"Mr. Walker."
"Did you get a call, Mrs. Dankworth?" I'd just had time to get a cigarette going. I flipped the match at the ashtray.
"Ten minutes ago. When I asked for a description of my daughter, they quoted from the one I gave you. I hung up."
"Was it a woman?"
"Certainly not. I can tell a man's whisper from a woman's, even if he was European."
"What kind of accent was it?"
"Oh, I don't know. One of those eastern countries we're always sending food to. What are you going to do?"
"Make a call."
9.
Boy Falco was a while coming to the telephone. He didn't have one in his office above the meat-packing plant he owned on Michigan and took all his messages through the realtor next door. So far, federal judges don't okay wiretaps on instruments belonging to gangsters' neighbors. "This better be something," he said.
I asked him if he got a call.
"You mean besides this one?"
"That answers my question. There's a good chance you will. Whoever copped those files has been running up his bill all day. When he calls you, I want you to arrange a drop."
"Be glad to." He sounded too pleased.
"I'm not setting up target practice for your boys. Once he agrees to the details I want you to forget all about them."
"What if I don't?"
"Then I'll send my notes to the Federal Building."
"What do you want done with the ashes?" he snarled.
"You'll be too busy sweeping out your cell in the Milan pen to make the arrangements."
"Where do you want the drop, meat?"
"Four thirty-one Howard."
There was a long silence. "That's the DEA!"
"He'll feel safe there."
"I sure as hell won't."
"That's the idea, Boy. If your word were your bond, the judge wouldn't have had you put up half a million to stay out."
He had me repeat the details several times; writing things down wasn't his long suit. "I want those notes," he said then. "The file too, when you get it back."
"Too rich."
"I ain't asking."
"You've got enough on your plate without hanging me up on one of your hooks," I said. "You know a lot of people. A client of mine had his Golden Glove stolen a little over a year ago. He wants it back."
"Baseball?"
"No, the other one. Boxing."
"Trophies are tough to unload. I might know a fence with a soft heart. I ain't promising nothing."
"Me neither. I may not get that file back."
"I'll make some calls."
"Don't tie up the line," I reminded him.
10.
I killed the time browsing through the Yellow Pages for a locksmith whose name I liked to replace the deadbolt on my office door. The telephone rang while I was deciding between Sherlock's Home Security and Lock You.
"The puke called," said Falco by way of greeting. "It's set for seven-thirty tonight."
I wrote down six o'clock. I trusted Boy like pro wrestling. "How much?"
He snorted. "Thousand bucks in small bills, brown envelope. I got no respect for leeches in general but I got less than no respect for a cheap one."
"Was the leech male or female?"
"Male. I guess I know a chick when I don't hear one. That whispering dodge has got hair growing out of its ears." He paused. "I think I found your Glove thing. There's a name engraved on the plate. Sailor Jack Moran."
"Wrong name." I winched my heart back up where it belonged. "Wait. Does your fence do engraving?"
"Not for free."
"I'm good for it. Tell him to match the plate." I spelled Chester Bliss's name.
11.
I left the office in plenty of time to buy a current TV Guide at Rite-Aid, check a listing, and call Channel Two from a public telephone to confirm something. Then I drove to Howard Street.
There was a wire city trash basket on the corner near the plain building with the flag flying out front. I slid the brown envelope under a Little Caesar's pizza box and walked around the corner out of the pool of light from the lamp. I came back on the shadowed side of the street and pegged out a spot in a doorway across from the basket. An empty crack phial crunched under my foot, ten yards from the Detroit office of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
It might have been the trouble he was in, but for once Boy Falco kept his word. In an hour and a half a handful of people walked past the trash basket and not one of them was packing a tommy gun. I had a palpitation when an old woman in a knitted cap and a torn and filthy overcoat stopped to root through the trash, but she stopped when she found a piece of petrified pizza in the Little Caesar's box, claimed it, and moved on.
Seven-thirty came and went. The temperature had dropped since sundown and I had begun to lose all feeling in my toes when he showed up.
He had on a shapeless fedora and a faded mackinaw over his old overalls. His breath frosted in the air while he poked among the newspapers and Styrofoam cups in the basket, then lifted the pizza box, plucked up the thick envelope, tested its heft, glanced around, and stuck it in a side pocket. He turned and started back the way he'd come, his heels scraping the sidewalk.
I crossed the street and fell into step behind him. I followed him a full block before he turned his head.
He didn't try to run when he recognized me. Instead he leaned against the lamppost, collapsing a little like a sack of old fruit. I circled around to stand in front of him and held out my hand. I had my other hand in my coat pocket with the Chiefs Special, but it didn't come out. He slid the envelope out of his mackinaw and laid it in my palm.
"What is inside it?" Rosecranz asked. "Not money."
"TV Guide."  I put it away. "You shouldn't have trusted it. MASH was listed last night, but it didn't air. A programmer at Channel Two told me the president's speech threw off the schedule. The last half hour of Steel Magnolias ran in that time slot. That soundtrack wouldn't have drowned out a mouse's burp, let alone a burglar kicking in two doors."
The building super moved a shoulder. "The same thing runs every night at the same time for two years. Who knew?"
"What did you need the money for?"
"I didn't. I don't." He leaned his cheek against the lamppost, sliding his hat off center. "I am eighty-six Friday. I never did nothing. Nothing since I came to this country."
"What about Sacco and Vanzetti? You were arrested at a rally."
"That was my cousin. I tell that story. I never did nothing. Nothing in eighty-six years."
"You're hell on locks."
"I smash the deadbolts with a monkey wrench. Forty years I have spent opening file cabinets when tenants lose keys."
"You shook down a fighter, an heiress, and a racketeer. That's not nothing. What did you do with the files you took?"
"I will show you."
I drove him back to the building, where he unlocked his single room on the ground floor, complete with steel desk, Murphy bed, and a teenage soap playing out in black-and-white on his ancient TV set. His tools lay in a pile on a folding table designed for lonely dinners in front of the tube.
He moved a stack of Popular Mechanics, and there were the manila folders in a dilapidated egg crate. I went through the files quickly. Nothing was missing.
"Comfy set-up. Ralph Kramden ever drop by?"
I turned around. With Boy Falco and his family-size driver standing inside it, the room was barely big enough for oxygen. Rosecranz was watching them without hope.
"See what happens when you leave the front door open?" I said.
"You're a laugh hemorrhage." Falco's smile was dead on arrival. He was looking at the stack of folders in my hands. "Mine in there?"
When I hesitated, the driver unbuttoned his overcoat. The fisted handle of his magnum stuck up out of a holster two inches left of his navel. I shuffled the stack and gave Falco the folder tabbed cruickshank. He riffled through the pages, paused to examine the signature he'd forged on the airline receipt-all the feds needed to tie him to the Miami drug scene-then put it back and stuck the file under his arm.
"What's it doing in here?" His tone was almost pleasant.
"I asked Rosecranz to hide the files in his place until I get a better set of cabinets."
"Thief give you any trouble?"
"Trouble's my name. I changed it to Amos when the other kids laughed."
He wasn't listening. He was looking at the super.
"Whisper something," he said.
Rosecranz looked sad. "What should I whisper?"
"That's the accent." He jerked his chin at the driver. The magnum came out.
"You got what you came for," I said. "What's the point?"
"The point is I don't get crapped on by private creeps and janitors. Make it neat. I'll be in the car." He turned toward the door.
As he passed in front of the big man, I snatched the monkey wrench off the folding table, the same wrench Rosecranz had used to demolish the front door lock and the one to my office. It was fourteen inches long and as heavy as a handtruck; it swung practically without help. The case-steel head struck the knobby bone on the driver's wrist with a crack and the gun went flying.
That was it for the muscle. He doubled over, gripping his shattered wrist between his knees, and I stepped around him and laid the wrench alongside Falco's head, a little more gently. I didn't want to crush his skull, God knew why. He folded like a paper fan.
When I turned around, Rosecranz was covering the driver with the magnum.
The big man wasn't paying much attention. He was still bent into a jackknife and his face was gray. Rosecranz looked as tragic as ever. The hand holding the gun was shaking. I took it from him, put it in my pocket, and drew out my own .38. I have a thing against playing with someone else's clubs. I told the old man to search Falco for weapons while I kept an eye on the driver.
Rosecranz knelt beside Falco and rose a minute later hefting a paper sack. "He had this under his coat."
I went that way, still holding the gun, and peered inside the sack. I reached in with one hand and drew out the heavy object. The engraved brass plate was riveted to the base.
"Whaddaya know," I said. "He spelled Chester's name right."
The super looked around. "Just like NYPD Blue."
"You do need to get out more." I reached over and turned off the TV.
"Police?" he asked.
I nodded. "Police."
"Me?"
"No."
He didn't look any happier. "Why?"
"You're a necessary evil." I put the Golden Glove back in the sack, pocketed the .38, and picked up the Cruickshank file from the floor while Rosecranz worked the rotary dial on his old telephone.