American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel by Loren D. Estleman Page A

heavy lifter didn’t even try. He stood in front of the refrigerator, just another major appliance, with his arms bent and the scrap of paper with my address still in one hand. He seemed to have forgotten he had it.
    I plonked a mug down in front of his boss. “How do you take it?”
    “Black as my ass.”
    The big man grinned. “You ask, he’ll show you.”
    I was starting to like him. I asked him what his name was.
    “Ain’t got one,” Watson said. “I never have to call him, he’s right there all the time.”
    “Elron,” the big man said. “My mother was a Scientologist.”
    I said, “I think that’s L. Ron, with an initial. L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. You know he wrote science fiction.”
    “So what? Mohammed wrote poetry.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “I studied all the religions, Scientology’s still the best. I knew about L. Ron, so did my mother. Clerk that filled out the birth certificate was a Southern Baptist.”
    I liked him. I wondered where I could hit him that wouldn’t break my hand.
    Watson watched me fill his mug, then get out two more. “Don’t bother watering Elron. He only drinks protein, straight from the jug.”
    “Leetle powdered creamer,” Elron said. “Nondairy.”
    “Sorry. All I’ve got is milk.”
    “That tears up my stomach. Make it black.”
    “You can take pills for that.” I filled the other mugs.
    “I take eighty vitamins a day now. I got to piss sometime.”
    “Just let me know when you two finish fucking so we can talk,” Watson said.
    “Sorry, Wilson,” I said. “I forgot you were there. You want a cruller?”
    “Don’t want no cruller, no bear claw, no fucking Krispy Kremes. Call me Wilson again, Elron’ll sit on your head till it pops. You and I ain’t that close.”
    “Sorry again. I keep forgetting which one goes first.”
    “Neither one. My first name’s Woodrow, but you don’t call me that neither. You want to talk or just go on farting through your mouth?”
    “So talk.” I took a long slug. The caffeine rolled up its sleeves and went to work.
    “Sit down first. When I talk to somebody I look them in the eye.”
    There were several directions I could go with that, but it was too early in the day to have my head sat on by Elron. I slid onto the bench opposite Watson. He sat hunched overthe narrow table with both hands around his mug as if to warm them. I seemed to be the only one in the room who sweated.
    “How’s the labor business?”
    “Fuck you care? You belong to a local?”
    “No. The detective trade is strictly right-to-work, when you can get it. I was just filling an embarrassing lull in the conversation.”
    Elron chuckled. He sounded a little like Michael Jackson. I wondered if it was the vitamins.
    “Deirdre Fuller,” Watson said.
    I almost spilled my coffee. It came out “Dee-dee” the way he said it; Darius’s pet name for his daughter. But some people had trouble pronouncing it right. I set the mug down carefully. “She’s dead.”
    “She was dead last night on Channel Four. She was still dead this morning on CNN. I don’t read the papers, but I bet you the short money she’s dead there too. What I want to talk about is why you think I give a shit.”
    “I wasn’t sure, until you showed up here. If you didn’t, you’d be out picketing some gambling hell.”
    “I ain’t got the legs for it. I do give a shit, as it happens, strictly as a fan of her old man’s. It wasn’t for the sixty-eight Series, I’d of hung myself in my cell. It was my one bright light. I was in a bad way that year. The Man took me down for exercising my civil rights.”
    “You torched a Radio Shack with the owner lying inside with a concussion you gave him. Cops checked him into Receiving with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. I didn’t see anything about that in the Constitution.”
    “That was his choice. No one made him be there, sitting on his merch with a baseball bat across his