Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro Read Online Free PDF Page A

Department crime photo was doing in a folder with Delwayne Garnet’s name on it.
    The next item of interest was an original birth certificateissued by Wayne County, recording the appearance in Detroit General Hospital of Delwayne Lance West, boy, on June 11, 1950. The mother’s name was Fausta West. It rang a leaden bell somewhere in the part of my brain I kept shuttered with sheets over the furniture. The space for the father’s name was vacant.
    A smeary carbon bearing the heading of the Wayne County Probate Court, signed by a judge whose name I couldn’t make out, assigned guardianship of Delwayne Lance West, a minor infant, to Beryl Garnet, widow, aged 35. The document was dated June 14, 1950. She would have been waiting at the hospital exit when Fausta was released.
    Just for fun I paged through some other official-looking sheets, hunting for a record of formal adoption. There wasn’t any. Assuming the file was complete, it stood to reason. In 1950 it was a great deal more difficult for a single woman to adopt a child than to obtain a guardianship, particularly if the single woman kept a brothel. Delwayne West had become Delwayne Garnet through repetition rather than by court order. The process was just as legal. All you had to do was stop using the original name and use the new one exclusively.
    The file was a jumble, with no order and a lot of things that made no sense in any context, much like a person’s life. Transcripts from Murray-Wright High School reflected an academic career strong on English, history, and fine arts, and on its way out the back door as to science, math, and geography. I could rule out looking for him behind the counter in a pharmacy or at a bank window. Not knowing where to find New Zealand on a map is no handicap except to explorers.
    There were two newspaper clippings, coarse-grained and brittle brown, both stamped CONFIDENTIAL . You had to wonder how the Bureau pulled that one off short of buying up every copy on the stands and mugging the delivery boy. Both were obituaries of sorts. One took up two half-columns to announce the suicide of Fausta West, a former MGM contract player who had appeared in the chorus of a number of Esther Williamsmusicals before her option ran out. She’d been employed for the past two years as a cocktail waitress in Long Beach, California, where the stunt gaffer she’d subleased her apartment from found her on the floor of her kitchen with all the gas jets open on the stove. A faded pencil notation on the bottom edge dated the clipping: “Sept. 9, 1952.” There was nothing to tell me what paper had carried it.
    I looked at the postage-stamp size picture that accompanied the article. It showed an unremarkable-looking blonde with a pretty face and an Ipana smile, the kind booking agents kept around in stacks of eight-by-ten glossies and used to plug mouseholes in their offices. How she’d landed even bits in
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features was an argument in favor of the casting couch. Fade to black at twenty-seven.
    The other clipping, folded twice, had taken up most of the front page of the old
Detroit Times
on New Year’s Day 1950, with a banner:
LOCAL FIGHTER SHOT TO DEATH
    Pictures included a pub shot for the sports desk of a smooth-muscled light-skinned black in satin trunks and lace-up boots, gloved fists raised in defensive position. He looked more focused without an eye full of blood. Another shot, horizontal, showed a sheet-draped gurney rolling through a crowd of beefy men in crumpled fedoras, baggy overcoats, and neckties that reached only to the second buttons of their shirts. One of them glared at the camera with his thumbs jammed inside his belt and a short cigar plugged into his face, eyes glassy in the Speed-Graphic flash. That closed out the composition. If police personnel hadn’t provided him, the photographer would have had to inflate one from his kit.
    I read the article, then turned it over and read a photocopy of an Oakland County Sheriff’s