The day was hot and sunny and the front door was wide open to let in the cool breeze that blew steadily from the ocean. I stepped inside and called out: “Hello?”
I heard his thongs slapping the tile floor before he appeared around the corner dressed in a pair of swim trunks. He had the unintelligent good looks and the lean, tanned body of a bid who surfed a lot and played volleyball on the beach and little else. His curly blond hair was wet.
“Hello, Chip.” I looked around the place. It was light and airy, with whitewashed walls and rattan furniture. A swimming pool was visible out back through the open louvered doors. No wonder he needed money. “I can say one tiling for you; you set yourself up well. What’s the rent like?”
He stared at me, open-mouthed. The words were barely audible. “Who are you?”
“A detective hired by your father.”
His expression turned to disgust and he threw both hands into the air and let them fall to his sides. “Shit. Dear old Dad. He even had to fuck this up—”
He was reverting to form — a whiner. “You’re lucky he did. Rhonda had no intention of bringing that $300,000 to you. Why should she when she could have it all? You’re legally dead and if you suddenly turned up alive, you’d be prosecuted for insurance fraud. By that time, she’d be long gone. She only agreed to send you money because she wanted to keep you placated and underground.”
“How did you know about the money?” he asked, surprised.
“I got a look at the envelope it’s being sent in. I knew that if the insurance settlement was held up long enough, you’d more than likely run out of money and have to send for some.” I paused. I wanted to savor the look on his face when I told him. “She got it from Arnie Phalen.”
His eyes widened. “Phalen?”
“He’s in for a piece now. He found out what the scam was and cut himself in. She’s even using his attorney. They’ve been having a good time together since you’ve been gone, by the way.”
His hands clenched into fists and he stepped toward me. “You’re a liar—”
I wasn’t going to stand for any of that stuff; I figured I could handle him one-handed if I had to. I sidestepped him and put my good hand on his chest and shoved him back, hard. His foot hit the bottom of one of the rattan chairs and he lost his balance and sat down. I moved forward so that he couldn’t get up without being hit. He didn’t try.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “You were had, boy, from the moment she set her sights on you. Your old man was right. She was only after the money.”
He stared up at me hatefully, like a beaten dog.
“Shit.”
“That’s what you’re in.” I turned and started toward the door.
“Hey!” he shouted after me. “Where are you going?”
I stopped and turned around. “To find a beach somewhere. I’ve been in the Caribbean twice in a week, and I don’t even have a tan.”
He jumped up out of the chair and his hand jerked up. “Wait. What about me?”
I shrugged. “I was hired to find out what happened to you, not babysit. I don’t think I’d care for that job.” I held up my cast. “You’re not my favorite person, boy. It’s because of you I have this.”
I started to go, then turned back.
“My advice to you would be to get your tail back to ‘dear old Dad’ as fast as you can and start doing some serious brown-nosing, because you’re going to need his money to pay for your lawyer. If you lay it out for the insurance company now, you might just get off with probation.”
I left him standing there and took the cab to the airport, where I called John Anixter. The phone connection was lousy, but it was good enough to get the message across. He sounded very happy at first to learn his son was alive, then he just got plain mad. He told me to “let the snot-nosed little sonofabitch find his own way back,” and informed me I could expect a bonus when I got back.
I caught a LIAT puddle-jumper back to Antigua and checked into a quaint, two-hundred-year-old hotel in Nelson’s dockyard on the isolated side of the island and spent the next four days soaking up some serious sun and a lot of rum punches and listening to the gentle lilt of steel bands. If there was trouble in paradise, it wasn’t going to find me.
Loren D. Estleman
Bloody July
“This one is special to me,” Loren D. Estleman writes about “Bloody July.” “I have long wanted to incorporate elements of Detroit’s Prohibition past into a contemporary story, and while it is a past the present city administration would rather pretend never happened, I contend that it is Detroit’s violent history that has created its unique modern character. In addition, the personal element in this one parallels an incident in the history of my own family, which for the sake of delicacy and domestic tranquility I would rather not detail.”
Estleman is a thirty-two-year-old newspaper reporter turned novelist. He lives in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, forty miles from Detroit where his detective Amos Walker works. The most recent of the Amos Walker novels is Sugartown (1984).
The house was a half-timbered Tudor job on Kendall, standing on four acres fenced in by a five-foot ornamental stone wall. It wasn’t the only one in the area and looked as much like metropolitan Detroit as it tried to look like Elizabethan England. A bank of lilacs had been allowed to grow over the wall inside, obstructing the view of the house from the street, but from there inward the lawn was bare of foliage after the fashion of feudal estates to deny cover to intruders.
I wasn’t one. As instructed previously, I stopped in front of the iron gate and got out to open it and was on my way back to the car when something black hurtled at me snarling out of the shrubbery. I clambered inside and shut the door and rolled up the window just as the thing leaped, scrabbling its claws on the roof and clouding the glass with its moist breath.
“Hector!”
At the sound of the harsh voice, the beast dropped to all fours and went on clearing its throat and glaring yellow at me through the window while a small man with a white goatee walked out through the gate and snapped a leash onto its collar. He wore a gray sport coat and no tie.
“It’s all right, Walker,” he said. “Hector behaves himself while I’m around. You are Amos Walker?”
I cranked the window down far enough to tell him I was, keeping my hand on the handle and my eye on the dog. “You’re Mr. Blum?”
“Yeah. Drive on up to the house. I’ll meet you there.”
The driveway looped past an attached garage and a small front porch with carriage lamps mounted next to the door. I parked in front of the porch and leaned on the fender smoking a cigarette while Leonard Blum led the dog around back and then came through the house and opened the door for me. The wave of conditioned air hit me like a spray of cold water. It was the last day of June and the second of the first big heat wave of summer.
“You like dogs, Walker?”
“The little moppy noisy kind and the big gentle ones that lick your face.”
“I like Dobermans. You can count on them to turn on you someday. With friends you never know.” He ushered me into a dim living room crowded with heavy furniture and hung with paintings of square-riggers under full sail and bearded mariners in slick Sou’westers shouting into the bow wash. A varnished oak ship’s wheel as big around as a hula hoop was mounted over the fireplace.
“Nautical, I know,” said Blum. “I was in shipping a long time back. Never got my feet wet but I liked to pretend I was John Paul Jones. That wheel belonged to the Henry Morgan, fastest craft ever to sail the river. In my day, anyway.”