“How could you have come by that text?” she asked. “I sent it yesterday, just before closing. We spend a lot of money securing our communications from the outside.”
“It isn’t wasted,” I said, “so far as I can tell. I scooped up the communication from where it was addressed.
“He didn’t make it to China,” I added. “He didn’t make it ten blocks from where we’re sitting. Unless the cops are more on the ball and more subtle about it than usual, he’s lying where I last saw him, collecting dust in a vault in the basement of the Sentinel Building.”
Somewhere in the world a butterfly landed on a tasty blossom. In downtown Detroit a scrap of understanding drifted onto an office manager.
“Are you saying Carl Fannon’s dead?”
“He was as of last night, in the old bank vault in the basement of the Sentinel Building. I won’t go into the details of how I happened to find him there; that’s official business, as soon as the officials catch up to me. Either he got careless or someone helped him. I don’t guess it matters to a man who choked to death.”
She moved then, placing a well-kept hand to her own throat. “You’re wrong. He’s in China.”
“If you say so. Meanwhile we’ve got the business of how I came by this text.”
She rearranged the gewgaws on the desk, squaring the green marble pen set with the edge of the blotter, placing the stainless steel letter opener where Fannon’s hand would come to rest on it when it was needed, all these things done with the efficiency of an undertaker attending to the bereaved.
“The things we do when we don’t know what to say,” I said. “He’s beyond caring how his stuff is arranged.”
She smacked her hands on the desktop. “You didn’t know him. If I weren’t here to organize things, any potential investor would take one look at the rat’s nest where he worked and leave by the next available elevator.” She raised a hand to each temple, massaging it in circular motions. “Works, I mean; present tense. Now you’ve got me doing it.”
“I’ve got you believing it. I thought I’d have to go back and take a picture. I doubt it would make it into one of the swanky magazines in your reception area, but it might convince you your boss is dead. Todt. Muerto. Mort. Nekros. No pulse. D-E-A-D.” I spelled it out in sign language. “You know something? With people like you pulling for him he might snap out of it yet.”
“You’re taking a chance, Walker. If there’s been a murder and you knew about it and didn’t report it, you could be in for a laundry list of criminal charges.”
“I already am, if the cops think knowing about it twenty-four hours after the fact would do a damn thing toward clearing it up. This wasn’t a fatal carjacking, with some junkie gangbanger spraying clues all over the room like a tomcat. One of the reasons I came here was to pin you down as a suspect or eliminate you entirely. On brief acquaintance I don’t think Nick the Greek would expect you to foam at the mouth and throw this desk at me when I dropped the word ‘vault’ into the conversation. He played poker with his opponents’ faces, not cards. That’s one down, less than a million to go. If the thing spreads outside the city limits, I’m going to have to farm it out; but at least I’ve dealt you out of the deck. I’d say that’s a fair day’s work.”
“Isn’t that for the police to determine? Assuming you’re not making all this up just to wangle another fat retainer. The last I heard, private detectives didn’t investigate murder.”
“They do when they keep tripping over them. Maybe it’s my destiny, but there are days when I can’t take a stroll downtown without stubbing my toe on a cadaver.”
“Then isn’t it your duty as a citizen to hand it over to the people who are paid to find out how the cadaver became a cadaver?”
I dealt myself a cigarette, just to see if she rose to the assault on state law. She took it like the Berlin Wall took spray paint; from the western side. I didn’t light it. “As you implied, I’m carrying some of Fannon’s fat retainer on my hip. The rest is in the bank. I’d like to earn it. I’m too poor to go around giving refunds.”
“I processed that check, as part of my responsibilities to this firm. It was given you to find Emil Haas. Have you found him?”
“Not yet,” I said; again truthfully. I’d been walking a tightrope so long I ought to have qualified for a patent. “That’s the other reason I’m here. Has he turned up?”
“No. Have you spoken to his daughter?”
“She spoke to me. I had a busy day yesterday,” I said, walking the cigarette across the back of one hand. Her eyes followed it the way a dog follows any movement preceding a treat. “I’ve a hunch today will be no different. He was supposed to meet me last night in the basement of the Sentinel Building.”
She flattened her palms on the desk again, this time without the sound of a pistol report. “You’ve seen him? But you said—Just a moment.” She reached under the desk.
Something whirred and a section of paneling behind the desk slid into a pocket, exposing a lot of glass, crystal, and stainless steel. She got up, opened a dwarf refrigerator under the sink, tonged three ice cubes into each of a pair of thick-bottomed glasses, and filled them with golden liquid from a square bottle with a foil label. She came back, set one of the glasses in front of me, and sat back in the executive seat holding the other in both hands.
“I’m assuming you have no objections to Scotch.”
“I lost that fight in college,” I said. “Back then, if you didn’t have a glass in your hand, it was a mortal insult to your host. So I asked for Scotch, a drink I could nurse all night. The joke was on me. I discovered a taste for it.” I leaned forward to touch glasses, straining my arm with the effort. It was one hell of a desk. The stuff tasted like fermented honey filtered through Harris Tweed.
“A college man,” she said. “Who’d’ve thought?”
“Those days they let everybody in. Let’s take up where we left off. I said I hadn’t found Haas. He found me, and paid me another fat retainer—fat in the sense that twenty bucks is fat to a homeless person who lives on hot dogs.” I didn’t know why the drifter I’d treated to a package of wieners had popped into my head at just that moment; Frank, that was the name. “I took only that much even though he wanted to give me my standard advance.”
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” she said. “Five hundred dollars a day. That’s twenty-five hundred a week.”
“Since you’re so good at math, figure out what that comes to when I work six weeks in a year.”
She totaled it in an instant. “I’m still listening.”
“Depending on what he intended to tell me in the basement I might have collected the rest. He didn’t show. Fannon did, but as indicated previously, he wasn’t very helpful.”
She took a second sip, set down her glass, and lifted the receiver off the pinball machine at her elbow. “I think the rest of this conversation should involve the police.”
“I agree.” I stuck out my free hand and waggled the fingers. After an instant’s hesitation she pressed an unlighted key and handed the receiver to me. I pressed star nine-sixty-seven, canceling out the source of the call, and dialed three digits.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“Inspector Alderdyce, please. I want to report a homicide.”
The female operator spoke as if someone had forgotten to turn off the iron in someone’s apartment. “Your name, sir?”
“Amos Walker.”
“Spell it, please.”
“D.O.A.”
I handed back the receiver for her to cradle.
Her hand rested on it. “What do I tell them when they come to call?”
“Your life story, if you want. Nothing if you don’t. You don’t know anything. In fact I was never here.” I got up.
She tilted Carl Fannon’s chair forward, splaying her hands on the desk. She seemed altogether too comfortable in that office; but that was just the detective in me, always suspecting everything of everyone. In a few months I’d be accusing the Easter bunny of keeping a hen on the side.
“If you’re expecting me to cover for you—” she said.
“Nothing of the sort. Just trying to keep things less complicated for the cops. Good morning, Mrs. Palmerston. You know how to get in touch with me if you want.”
* * *
Inspector John Alderdyce, my go-to cop whenever I find a human being lounging around at room temperature, was on vacation, fishing for salmon in Alaska. The lap the case fell into was a lieutenant named Child; although if he’d ever been one he showed no indication when he came in and plunked himself down in the customer’s chair. He was about a yard wide across the shoulders and just over the minimum height for police duty. His head was built to scale; hatting it would be a challenge, so he didn’t. He had a nice growth of black hair striped with gray and took care of it. Fresh clippings were pasted to his shirt collar with something like bay rum. His face was too small for his head, with all the features crowded into the middle.
I didn’t know him. I figured he’d transferred over from another division, possibly the gang squad. The new chief had disbanded it recently; not because the gang situation had improved, but because the press could no longer tell the difference between the opposing sides. That’s how it was in guerrilla warfare, which is what the streets of our city became after sundown.
“Honest folks generally hang around when they come on a dead body.” His voice was shallow for his age—I put him a year or two past his twenty—and very, very gentle. I trusted that the way I trust a faith healer with a limp.
“Scared folks do,” I said. “I go all to pieces over roadkill.”
“Quick but not good. Try again.”
I was acting professional as all hell, slitting open junk mail on the desk. Since his phone call came announcing he was coming to see me about a little murder I hadn’t even lit a cigarette. It’s against the law in a place of business in our state, and I was in trouble enough.
I laid aside the penknife. “Emil Haas, the dead man’s partner, sat where you’re sitting yesterday morning, asking me to meet him in the Sentinel basement that evening. I was there, he wasn’t. Carl Fannon was. I wanted to talk to the office manager where he worked before reporting it, to see if I was the only one in on the secret.”
“Were you?”
“So far as I could tell. If you’ve talked to Brita Palmerston, you know she rattles about as easy as a big-time crook on his fiftieth visit to police headquarters.”
“I did. She didn’t strike me as any kind of a crook at all.”
“I didn’t say she was. It was a simile.”
“Three syllables. I guess you’re not your garden-variety window peeper.”
I looked at the card he’d given me: plain white stock, with only his name and extension on the department line in black block. “‘Childe Harold to the dark tower came,’” I said.
He bared his lower teeth in what I supposed he thought was a smile. “I get that sometimes. If my name was Lipschitz I wouldn’t know any poetry at all. You won’t get anywhere running on idle, Walker. No one ever does. That’s why they call it stalling. A fragile little thing like a license can get busted over failing to report a homicide.”
“Before that happened I’d have to put on a clean shirt and drive clear up to Lansing and face the board. Don’t waste time telling me you don’t know in what high regard those state troopers hold a city cop.”
“Go ahead, be a schmuck. It wouldn’t be my first choice when a city cop’s got me dead to rights, but the world’s full of characters.”
I parked his card under my phone. No telling when I’d need a friend on the force. “Why don’t let’s tear up the declaration of war and start over from scratch?”
“Too late, Jim. Something over eighteen hours too late. That’s the jump we’d’ve had on whoever it was forgot he had a rich multimillionaire on ice and left him gasping.”
“I had this conversation with Fannon’s office manager. The upshot was our absent-minded friend was long gone on the red-eye to Vegas or anywhere else when I opened that door. If this is a pinch, let’s have it. I’m out of work anyway, and it’s corned beef hash night at County. Your superior sent the chef up himself, straight from the four-star restaurant where he worked.”
He looked at the Bulova strapped to the underside of his wrist; I don’t trust men who wear their watches that way. It’s too easy to sneak a look at the time when you’re boring them to death. “I was wondering just how long it would take you to draw the Alderdyce card. I know you’re tight. Somehow I think you’re still loose enough for me to call that bluff.”
A good man with words, Lieutenant Child. I had the impression he’d read more of Byron than he let on.