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

Department case file: fourteen pages typewritten by someone who would never be a KellyGirl. It was filled with strikeovers, smeary erasures, and one whole line that had been produced from the wrong row of home keys. The clipping and the report told a complete story except for an ending. Curtis Smallwood, known to the sports page–reading public of 1948–9 as the Black Mamba, had been on his way to a lightweight championship with a 23 and 0 record (eight knockouts) when he dropped his guard and took an un-jacketed .38 bullet through his right eye in the parking lot of the Lucky Tiger, a roadhouse seven miles north of Detroit in the wilderness that was then Oakland County, an hour short of midnight on the last day of the 1940s, making him the Motor City’s final murder victim of that decade. Plenty of witnesses had heard the shot and the squealing of tires indicating the killer’s escape, but none had seen the actual event, which had taken place after Smallwood parked his week-old Alfa-Romeo and before he got to the entrance. He was dead on arrival at the pavement.
    The suspects were in large supply. Archie McGraw, his manager, had had words with him over his flamboyant lifestyle, which included a relationship with Fausta West, a Hollywood starlet who’d been photographed with him at a Detroit nightclub during a personal appearance to promote a film. A producer at MGM named Wellstone, who’d been pruning West for a career as a featured player, was rumored to have threatened Smallwood with a drubbing by studio goons if he didn’t “lay off the white meat.” There was a name on the list I hadn’t thought of in years: Ben Morningstar, who had inherited the territory formerly belonging to the Purple Gang, including labor racketeering, drug peddling, and the local fight game. If you had a budding Joe Louis and you wanted to show him off against a legitimate contender, you had to go to Morningstar first. No animosity reported between him and Smallwood; being Ben Morningstar was suspicious enough when an acquaintance succumbed to lead poisoning in the open air.
    The file didn’t mention any arrests. A much smaller newspaper clipping without pictures told readers there were no newleads in the Curtis Smallwood killing. Nothing after that. There were too many other things going on in 1950 to allow room for a murder mystery without a solution.
    I could guess the thinking in the sheriff’s department. Archie McGraw hadn’t cracked, and a Hollywood honcho like Wellstone was always and forever outside their jurisdiction, or for that matter any jurisdiction that involved lawyers on retainer to a major studio. Morningstar bought inspectors and better by the package, like Gilette blades. Fausta West’s suicide two years later would have given them someone to point to later if they ever felt the need; dead people made handy horizontal surfaces to pile things on, without fear of complications. Even if they hadn’t evidence to close out the case based on that, they would be satisfied there weren’t any untagged murderers walking around. Contrary to fiction, even lazy cops prefer to tie things off, however loosely. I found a Long Beach Police Department photo of Fausta, pale with bruises beneath her eyes, stretched out on her back on the linoleum floor of her kitchen with her ankles crossed and her head resting on a sofa cushion with palm fronds embroidered on it. She looked peaceful.
    An FBI blowup of Delwayne Garnet’s senior picture followed. I thought he looked a little like Curtis Smallwood. Then I didn’t. I didn’t see any Fausta in him, except maybe a little around the eyes. You can’t trust a photograph. At best it’s a flat illusion of a three-dimensional reality.
    There was some sixties stuff: a mimeographed handout on yellow-jaundice paper with “fascist” misspelled three ways, inviting freedom-lovers everywhere to join something called the Moroccan Army of Liberation; front-and-profile mugs with fingerprints of