Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection Read Online Free Page B

her and got my hat and let myself out.
Five
    Xanthes had told me his half brother got off at four. At ten to, I swung by the market and bought two quarts of strawberries. The beefy bald man, whom I’d pegged as Butsukitis, the owner, appeared glad to see me. Memories are long in Greektown. I said, “I just had an operation and the doc says I shouldn’t lift any more than a pound. Could your boy carry these to the car?”
    “I let my boy leave early. Slow day. I will carry them.”
    He did, and I drove away stuck with two quarts of strawberries. They give me hives. Had Santine been around I’d planned to tail him after he punched out. Pounding the steering wheel at red lights, I bucked and squirmed my way through late afternoon traffic to Gra-tiot, where my man kept an apartment on the second floor of a charred brick building that had housed a recording studio in the gravy days of Motown. I ditched my hat, jacket, and tie in the car and at Santine’s door put on a pair of aviator’s glasses in case he remembered me from the market. If he answered my knock I was looking for another apartment. There was no answer. I considered slipping the latch and taking a look around inside, but it was tooearly in the round to play catch with my license. I went back down and made myself uncomfortable in my heap across the street from the entrance.
    It was growing dark when a cab creaked its brakes in front of the building and Santine got out, wearing a blue Windbreaker over the clothes I’d seen him in earlier. He paid the driver and went inside. Since the window of his apartment looked out on Gratiot I let the cab go, noting its number, hit the starter and wound my way to the company’s headquarters on Woodward.
    A puffy-faced black man in work clothes looked at me from behind a steel desk in an office smelling of oil. The floor tingled with the swallowed bellowing of engines in the garage below. I gave him a hinge at my investigator’s Photostat, placing my thumb over the “Private,” and told him in an official voice I wanted information on Cab No. 218.
    He looked back down at the ruled pink sheet he was scribbling on and said, “I been dispatcher here eleven years. You think I don’t know a plastic badge when I see one?”
    I licked a ten-dollar bill across the sheet.
    “That’s Dillard,” he said, watching the movement.
    “He just dropped off a fare on Gratiot.” I gave him the address. “I want to know where he picked him up and when.”
    He found the cab number on another ruled sheet attached to a clipboard on the wall and followed the line with his finger to some writing in another column. “Evergreen, between Schoolcraft and Kendall. Dillard logged it in at six-twenty.”
    I handed him the bill without comment. The spot where San-tine had entered the cab was an hour’s easy walk from where the bodies of two of the murdered women had been found.
Six
    I swung past Alex Santine’s apartment near Greektown on my way home. There was a light on. That night after supper I caught all the news reports on TV and looked for bulletins and wound up watching a succession of sitcoms full of single mothers shrieking at their kids about sex. There was nothing about any new stranglings. I went to bed. Eating breakfast the next day I turned on the radio and read the Free Press and there was still nothing.
    The name of the psychiatrist quoted in the last issue was Kor-necki. I looked him up and called his office in the National Bank Building. I expected a secretary, but I got him.
    “I’d like to talk to you about someone I know,” I said.
    “Someone you know. I see.” He spoke in cathedral tones.
    “It’s not me. I have an entirely different set of neuroses.”
    “My consultation fee is one hundred dollars for forty minutes.”
    “I’ll take twenty-five dollars’ worth,” I said.
    “No, that’s forty minutes or any fraction thereof. I have a cancellation at eleven. Shall I have my secretary pencil you in when she