Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Read Online Free PDF

sentenced him to life imprisonment for first-degree murder.

FIVE
    “W ell, well,” I opened; and no one ever sounded more like the second act of The Chambermaid’s Confession . “Has it been life already? I still have a license plate with your mark on it.”
    Matador found a crumb on his shirt cuff and flicked it off with a shiny-nailed finger. “Still a shitter. The cops liked someone else more than they liked me. I gave them what they wanted, and they gave me a parole. What a country. You ought to treat me with more respect. I recommended you for this job.”
    “I recommended you for your last one. How’d you land this gig, references from Noriega?”
    He pressed his lips tight and paled behind his pox scars. A sense of humor is one high they don’t export from Bógota.
    “Hector got me my first singing job,” Gilia said. “He was the man to see in Los Angeles if you wanted to bypass the man at the door.”
    “He always did have connections in Hollywood.”
    Light snapped in her eyes. “I feel like I walked in in the middle. He told me he’d seen your work close up.”
    “He had it backwards. I saw him put three slugs into Frankie Acardo across the street from my building some years back. The Cosa Nostra didn’t miss Frankie all that much, but we had a Renaissance going at the time. All those unclaimed bodies clogging the gutters don’t help the convention trade.”
    “Nobody saw who shot Acardo,” Matador said.
    “That’s true. You were just taking the February air in the shotgun seat of a stolen Camaro with the window down, five minutes before Frankie strolled out of my office into a lead storm.”
    “I did not know the car was stolen. You could not get good help even then.”
    Gilia said, “Hector told me all about his record. I could hardly hold it against him. Police are the same everywhere. A loose fit is tight enough to close their files.”
    “It took less than a week for the Colombians to sweep out the Sicilians after Frankie.” I wasn’t even listening to myself. I was tiring of the argument. Seeing Hector Matador ranging free was enough to tire out a tire. “You want another detective. I’m running a special this month on wardrobe mistresses. Write out a check for five hundred and I’ll find my own way out.”
    Matador’s smile was a paper cut in his narrow face. There wasn’t life enough in his dark eyes to sustain it that high up.
    “The lady has confided in you. Where would she be if every man she trusted with her secret just walked out? It is like apartment keys. The more of them that you allow to float about …” He shrugged a South American shrug.
    I smiled back. “You vouched for my good character.”
    There was an absence of verbal exchange, full of rattles and gongs rung backward. All it needed was a gaunt yellow dog and three more men in ponchos. Gilia let out a lungful of air.
    “Let him go, Hector. I’ll get my checkbook.”
    Matador didn’t look at her. “You can listen to me talk while she fills it out. In private. You have nothing to lose, gringo.”
    “Not in a hotel room,” I agreed. “An alley’s another country.”
    “I have a small suite across the hall. Just we two. Benito’s responsibility is to stand in front of Miss Cristobal’s door.”
    “I’m not worried about Benito. He comes at you from in front.”
    He opened his coat with a dreamy movement to show he had nothing beneath it but his shirt. There was no room for anything
else beneath it but Matador. His tailor worked in subatomic particles. “The restrictions of parole,” he said, almost apologetically.
    “After you, Dreyfus.”
    He didn’t know what that meant, but he resented it anyway. He rebuttoned his coat and turned his back on me.
    Out in the hall, Benny asked him a question in Spanish and he spat a stream back, too fast for me to follow even if Señora Lipschitz and her compound subjunctives weren’t as dead as ninth grade. The big man stiffened, graying a little, and nodded