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

Delwayne’s revolutionary colleagues from early arrests; color photos taken from different angles of a mangled van containing scattered body parts, what remained of the M.A.L. after the bomb went off prematurely and Delwayne fled. Pictures of whomp-jawed men in snapbrim hats standing behind a bed with pistols and revolvers and automatic riflesspread out on it, personal effects of the deceased. It all seemed more dated than the stuff from almost twenty years earlier, but then that whole decade smelled like bare feet.
    The feds had traced Delwayne to Toronto, where in 1987 he’d been putting his fine-arts education to use, drawing storyboards for local television commercials and assembling newspaper and magazine advertisements from clip books. Up there he’d gone by the name Lance West. It was as if he’d known he was pathetically easy to trace, so hadn’t bothered to wander too far afield when putting together a new identity. A contact sheet showed him at thirty-six, carrying a large portfolio along a bleak wintry street in long shot and telephoto close-up. He’d grown a chin beard and filled out a little, but his classmates would recognize him at a Murray-Wright reunion if he bothered to show up. I doubted he would, and not because he was technically a fugitive. Nothing about his background suggested the kind of young man who formed long-standing relationships.
    Law enforcement files are always the same. You always open them with the feeling you’ve been invited to visit an exclusive club, and close them thinking you’ve seen it all before, in a better version.
    I drummed the material together, slipped it back into the folder and the folder onto the desk, and returned to the living room. Red Burlingame had his recliner fully extended and was cable-flipping with the remote: half-second explosions of bilious congressmen, stick-figure cartoons, self-important authors, reheated romantic comedies, dumbed-down documentaries, marathon breast-cancer discussions, a clever but unpleasant scifi comedy, and country music videos with no country and music that had supported different lyrics in more talented throats. He gave up finally, long after I would have, and settled on a 1970s sitcom whose entire cast was long since dead or in jail. The laughtrack was borrowed from
I Love Lucy
.
    “This how old G-men spend their time?” I asked.
    “I thought about greeting at Wal-Mart. Too drafty. Who do you like for Curtis Smallwood?”
    “Ben Morningstar.”
    “Yeah, me, too. I was ready to take him down on a couple of hundred years’ worth of RICO violations when he up and died on me.”
    “Ungrateful son of a bitch.”
    “You ever meet him?”
    “I worked for him once. That’s how I met Beryl Garnet.”
    He squashed the POWER button with his thumb. The picture on the tube folded up and blipped out in the middle of an abortion gag. “What did you do for that crumb?”
    “Blew up a bus full of kindergarteners. It was an insurance job.”
    “Okay, pardon the hell out of me. I assumed you had standards.”
    “Standards are for steady work. I’m saving up for a bail fund.” I sat on the sofa. “A girl he had custody of went missing. I went looking in the usual places. That restore your faith?”
    “Find her?”
    “Kind of.”
    “Dead?”
    I shook my head. “She may be out now. It’s been twenty-two years, and all she did was commit a couple of murders. It didn’t have anything to do with this. Was Curtis Smallwood Delwayne Garnet’s father?”
    “Could be. He was born six months after Smallwood was killed. Oakland County sent investigators out to Hollywood. They ran into a very polite brick wall. Miss West was shooting on location in Italy, some little mountain village without telephones, inaccessible by automobile. You read the report.”
    “It didn’t say if they bought it.”
    “It might’ve been true. She was only back in Detroit for the birth later, and she was probably registered here under a phony name. By