Sinister Heights by Loren D. Estleman Page B

especially the brief round on his doorstep. The fights you lose make better listening.
    â€œHe sounds horrendous. The little one is named Matthew? Well, he’ll go to college. Oxford, maybe, if he minds his grades. Are you checking out the shelters next?”
    â€œNot personally. Not here. I was stretching the blanket when I told Glendowning I knew them all. I used to know a couple around Detroit, but I’ve been off the wandering-wife beat for years now.” I rapped on the laminated wood of a Slim Jim display; I didn’t want to go back. “I’ll have to farm it out. It might take a few days.”
    â€œSounds more like a month.” She was stating a belief, not haggling over my day rate.
    â€œI doubt it. She’s from Michigan, and I have it on her mother’s authority and Glendowning’s she didn’t have any ties down here. She’d run to cover somewhere north. I know someone here who specializes in this kind of case. We’ll split my fee. It won’t cost you anything more than his expenses.”
    â€œI’ll cut you another check. How’s two thousand to start?”
    â€œI don’t need anything right now. The last I knew my credit was still good with the party I have in mind.”
    â€œWould I know the party’s name?”
    â€œNot unless you lied on that résumé you gave me yesterday. It’s not a nice party. But it works hard and it’s as good as its word.”
    â€œAll that was true of Ted Bundy.”
    â€œNot quite. Bundy didn’t blow his nose in his napkin.”
    The pause on her end was just long enough for a woman who had lived in Grosse Pointe, but not too long for a girl from Broadway. But she didn’t change subjects any more smoothly than I did. “What’s Carla like?”
    â€œLike every schoolteacher I ever had who cared if I knew ‘all right’ was one word or two. She’s bitter, though. It won’t be cheap.”
    â€œIn my bracket nothing is.” She said good luck and we were through talking.
    I found Jerry Zangara where almost no one else would, behind a battleship gray desk of booming steel in the airless little security office at the end of an outlet mall off I-75, square on the state line. He couldn’t walk the thirty yards to the pay office to pick up his check without paying income tax in two states. I tugged open a steel fire door with a NO ADMITTANCE sign on it in white and red enamel and had to walk around it to use the metal chair on the customer’s side. There were two metal file cabinets, gray like the desk and chair, and a set of gray bolted utility shelves holding printed regulations or typewritten reports or something held together with brads, or maybe they were old student dissertations rescued from a dumpster on the Ohio State campus and placed there for effect. The walls were gray too, and they had been painted recently; the sheen was still on them and the smell of turpentine was the first thing you noticed when the door drifted shut.
    The only decoration in the place was a large poster on one wall itemizing the legal rights of suspected shoplifters, with check marks in blue ballpoint beside all but a few. I couldn’t tell if someone had started to keep track and lost interest or had checked off the ones he’d decided he could do without. It was that kind of office.
    Jerry was a little fat guy with a nice head of wavy black hair, white teeth in a small shy smile bracketed by his apple cheeks, and shiny black eyes with no more expression in them than nailheads in Sheetrock. He had on a black-and-white cowboy shirt with pearl snaps and a bolo tie with the turquoise slide drawn up just under his double chin. When he recognized me he lifted himself an inch off his seat and stuck out his hand. It was like shaking hands with a boneless chicken breast.
    â€œAmos. How’s my favorite Michigander?” He knew I hated the term.
    â€œI’m okay,