The Amos Walker Mysteries Volume One: Motor City Blue, Angel Eyes, and the Midnight Man by Loren D. Estleman

Author:Loren D. Estleman [D. Estleman Loren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504047425
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

17

THERE WAS NO ANSWER, so I smoked another cigarette and tried again. Still nothing. I frowned at the instrument. I couldn’t afford to wait. By now Fitzroy was talking to a judge, and I didn’t want to be there when he and Cranmer got back with a warrant. I left the Reliance report behind for seed and went out to get my tank filled.

Afterward I got change from the attendant and pulled my car around to the side of the station and called the Herald a third time from the pay telephone. Same story. I looked at my watch. It was past one o’clock, but you never know when anyone’s at lunch these days. Then I remembered Albert Gold’s business card. I wasn’t sure I had transferred it to this suit along with everything else from the pockets of the one I’d been wearing the night before, but I found it finally and gave his home number in Lansing a try. The whole world was out today. I had no reason to expect him to cooperate anyway, even if he had access to his agency’s report on Janet Whiting, which I doubted. I used the same dimes on another stab at the newspaper.

“Huron Herald.”

It had purred only once before the brisk feminine voice came on the line. I blanked out for a moment.

“Huron Herald,” repeated the voice, a trifle irritated this time.

“Is this the Huron Herald?” Well, it was something.

“No, it’s the local office of the CIA. We answer the phone this way so the Communists won’t know we’re here. You aren’t a Communist, are you?” The woman’s tone rang with irony. It wasn’t a young voice, but it refused to be dated. There was a twang somewhere under the polished shell, maybe Kansas.

“Not at the moment.” I introduced myself. “I’m a private investigator engaged to verify information included in an employment application to my client’s firm. The applicant, a woman named Janet Whiting, claims to hail from Huron. I wonder if your newspaper might have anything on her in its files.”

“May I ask the name of the firm?” I heard the racheting sound of a fresh sheet being rolled into a typewriter.

“Michaeljohn International.” They had hired me once to look into a suspected employee theft.

Typewriter keys plock-plocked in the distance. “When does she say she lived here?”

I gave her the dates. She tapped them out.

“Her address in Huron?”

“Four-four-two-six Agar Lane. Sounds like it’s in the country.”

“It is. Or it was, until the subdivisions started gobbling up all the available farmland.” She was typing as she spoke. Only reporters and doctors can divide their concentration like that.

She asked me a few more questions on the same order and plucked out the answers as I gave them. The operator came on the line to tell me my three minutes were up. I was about to deposit some more coins when the woman said, “Save your money, Mr. Walker. This will take a while to check. Would you care to come out this afternoon? I should have the information by the time you get here.

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