American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online

return.”
    Ransom said, “I was telling Detective Burrough we should house him, Inspector. Obstruction of justice.”
    I decided to get mad. “I made a telephone call and knocked on a door. Next thing I know I’m getting hosed down, slapped, and held without benefit of tobacco. I’m the one being obstructed.”
    Alderdyce didn’t stir a molecule. “Feel better?”
    “A little. I could use that smoke.”
    “It isn’t what you did,” he said. “It’s the number you called and the door you knocked on and the day you picked to do it.”
    “How was he killed?”
    Nothing. He’d built the wall over more than thirty years of interrogating suspects in rooms like that one and downtown and being interrogated by defense lawyers in the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. I said, “It’s homicide because that’s your detail. I’m having trouble getting from there to why a bookkeeper in Mt. Clemens draws a visit from the top brass in Detroit. Where’s Mary Ann?”
    “Lieutenant Thaler’s interviewing in Washington. Going to be a lady U.S. marshal.”
    “Sorry to hear it.”
    “I didn’t know you had a case against her.”
    “I don’t. I’ll miss her. All four of you guys are cute as shovels. I was looking forward to the treat.”
    “She won’t get the job,” he said. “The politicians make a lot of noise about equal opportunity, but it’s the bureaucratswho do the hiring. They’ll take one look at those big brown eyes and tell her her app’s on file.”
    “Not if they take a look at her folder.”
    “They’ll say it was sweetened. The chief ’s a woman.”
    “Bet you twenty she gets the job.”
    “Kind of lean, with fifty grand at your fingertips.”
    “I didn’t save it up being careless.”
    “You going to keep running with that?”
    “Until I get tired.”
    One of his big shoulders moved. It was like watching a water buffalo adjusting its load. “Always happy to take your money. Care to see the damage?”
    “I might as well. He didn’t pick these chairs for comfort.”
    “Showing our age, are we?”
    “Doing our best not to.” I got up, using my good leg for leverage. He rose smoothly and all of a piece. We’d been poking nails into each other like that since we were calves.
    A red-and-black wool rug covered the living room floor to within eighteen inches of the walls, exposing the original hardwood, two-inch strips sanded and stained golden brown and sealed with poly. The walls were eggshell, with mall prints in frames of giraffes and gourds and construction workers eating lunch on a girder twenty stories above the street. I couldn’t see a theme. The furniture was Pottery Barn, with wormholes drilled into it. Bairn had dropped more money he didn’t have on a liquid-crystal TV on a metal stand with drawers to hold the VCR and DVD player and a small collection of movies and CDs. I didn’t like the place any more than I had that morning, and the fact that someone had kicked over a lamp and a potted plant and knocked a picture off plumb was no improvement. The body on the floor wasn’t even Hilary Bairn’s.

SIX
    A lderdyce put on a pair of disposable latex gloves from his pocket, bent, and lifted the woman’s head from the floor to give me a better look at the face. She lay in a loose braid, on her back with her hips twisted sideways and her head turned so only her profile showed when you were standing over her. She’d exchanged the white summer dress for a yellow linen jacket and slacks and a knit black top. One of her open-toed pumps, black patent leather, was off her bare foot. Her flap of black hair fell down over one eye when her head was lifted. The other eye was looking at something way outside my range.
    “We never met,” I said.
    “Deirdre Jacqueline Fuller.” Detective Burrough read from a spiral pad. “Name on her driver’s license, and the photo checked. She had a key in her purse that fit the apartment door.” He tilted his Panama toward a shiny black handbag on an