“I’m only tough when I have to be,” Child said. “It ages you. You know what’s behind me and what it can do if you think you can outsmart it.”
I said, “If I were that smart I wouldn’t be working this job. The system’s Bugs Bunny. I’m strictly Elmer Fudd.”
“Bugs is clever. We’re not. We’re just there. All the time, day and night, weekends and Christmas. We’ll wear you down like a river running through rock.”
My smile tasted bitter. “G’wan with you, Lieutenant. You’re a poet after all. I only mentioned Alderdyce to keep the conversation going. If I thought my past associations put a thumb on your scale, it would mean I haven’t learned anything about the police in thirty years. If this were the Middle Ages you’d each be forted up behind a stone fence with your own personal moat. You don’t break cases by avoiding stepping on the toes of your brothers in blue.”
“You got me wrong, Walker. I’m not an ambitious man. But every now and then I got to break one just to show I’m not just drifting toward retirement. A thing like that can get you canned just before your pension’s ready to kick in. I got just enough ambition to want to prevent that. Any idea what Haas wanted to talk to you about and why not here?”
“No on both counts.”
“Guess.”
“Uh-uh. The G in that one stands for gullible. If it turns out to be wrong, a by-the-book type like you could blow it up into lying to a cop.”
“I’m not that hard to get along with. It’s just this face. Tell it like you heard it from somebody else.”
“Okay. Just on a hunch I’d say he’s nervous about this Sentinel Building deal, or maybe he’s been nervous about what he and Fannon have been doing for some time and it’s just the straw that broke the yak’s back. Not knowing this dump, he couldn’t be sure no one might be listening in, so he chose a deep dark place with unbroken concrete walls.”
“What’s a plutocrat like him got to be nervous about? Money can buy everything. Don’t let ’em tell you any different. Ask the man who hasn’t any.”
“Like I’ve got another office on Lake Shore Drive. I only keep this one to fool people into thinking I’m honest. What’s he got to be nervous about? How he makes his money, to begin with. If the last few years have taught us nothing else, they’ve taught us that all those piles of cash a man’s got salted away can vanish like a slug in the sun once the feds open a file on him. You know Cecil Fish?”
The crowded features pinched closer together yet. “We met when he was the city prosecutor in Iroquois Heights, before they busted him. I hear he’s some kind of paid lobbyist now. Crooked politicians are like black locust. Chop one down and he sprouts back up from the stump.”
“He’s been making noise about Velocity Financing fronting for foreign interests when it acquires property in Detroit. That’s a big stink to hang under the public’s nose, ‘foreign interests.’ Could be China or Portugal or those maniacs in turbans who think they invented decapitation. It wouldn’t work in Europe, where they live cheek-by-jowl, but here it’s a popular phobia. So far he hasn’t proof or he’d have swung it by now, but it could be the talk has got Haas worrying too much because his partner doesn’t worry enough.”
I waited while he looked at that from all sides. Down in the street a sanitation truck scooped up a Dumpster with a bang they heard in Baghdad. Finally he spoke.
“That’s pretty specific for a stab in the dark.”
“Still that’s all it is.”
“I wonder.”
Cops. Tell them the truth straight out and they never appreciate it. They like it better when you try out a couple of lies on them first. If this one was a priest he’d grill you for an hour before giving Last Rites.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll take another couple of swipes. Fannon found out Haas was going behind his back, rigged up that trip to Beijing as an alibi intending to eliminate him, and Haas turned the tables. That would mean there was something to Fish’s accusation. Or Haas intended for Fannon to find out about our meeting so he could lure him into that vault. Was I right about cause of death, suffocation?”
“At a glance, unless he used purple nail polish. Of course, we’ll have to wait till the lab monkeys tell us what we already know, with some pig Latin thrown in.” He blew a gust of air. “I’ve been in this racket too long. The CID used to own the crime scene. Now we have to stand around with our thumbs up our asses while some fresh punk in paper shoes goes over the place with a black light, and in the end what do we know? As much as we did just in the door. In ten years we’ll all be coming to work with stethoscopes instead of guns and wearing scrubs over our Kevlar. Not me, though. I’ll be fresh retired, if they don’t bounce me first.”
His exhaustion was contagious. I’d have felt like retiring myself, if I didn’t know that dead-dog weariness for a cop ploy, older even than that Jekyll-and-Hyde routine they played out in interrogation. Brother, I’m so far gone I wouldn’t hear you even if you confessed to killing Hoffa. Five minutes after he left my office he’d be tap-dancing down the street whistling Gilbert and Sullivan.
I said, “If I’m right about the murderer and the motive, it would mean Haas had the proof Fish hasn’t.”
“Why drag you into it at all?”
“Whoever shut that door fixed the time lock to open it just after I arrived for our appointment. Maybe Haas wanted to implicate me somehow to draw lightning away from him. And maybe that’s why I made with the feet so I could wrap the whole thing up in Christmas paper with a fat bow, just like Nero Wolfe, before my license got bent.”
It was his turn to shake his head. “It all fits the facts, but there are holes in it you could drive a bus through. Airlines these days are more careful than ever about checking the manifest. They’d know Fannon missed that plane before it got off the ground. The guy logged enough frequent-flyer hours to know that. The rest is just hot air—except the part about you getting scared and rabbiting the scene. That part’s as solid as that vault.”
A set of nicotine-stained fingers fumbled a crumpled package of Pall Mall straight-ends out of an inside pocket. I waited until he fired one up off a throwaway butane lighter, then struck a match and put it to one of my own. We sat breaking the law for a couple of minutes, then he shot twin gray jets out of his tiny nostrils and planted his hands on the arms of the chair. The cigarette went on smoldering in a notch in his lower lip.
“It goes way against the grain, but since you’re the last person I know for sure laid eyes on Emil Haas, you won’t make much good bait eating County hash for forgetting your civic responsibilities. You’re no killer, that much I know about the people Alderdyce chooses to hang with. I’ll tell the chief you took fright, then on reflection decided to make an honest citizen out of yourself and made the call. He’ll chew my ass off, but if there’s the smallest chance Haas creeps out of his corner to do over that meeting, we need you out in the open where he can get to you.”
He levered himself to his feet, seemed to realize he too was smoking, snatched the butt loose, and flung it in a corner, where it burned a new crater in the linoleum. “If he does show, don’t be shy this time.”
“I won’t. All right if I do a little poking around myself?”
He stood with his suitcoat hanging open and the checked butt of a semiautomatic in cross-draw position in a clip on his belt. God, he looked beat; I almost offered him a lie-down on the bench in my waiting room. “Depends on where you poke and what you poke it with.”
“I’d like to pay a call on Fish. We met more than once. We can discuss old times and maybe I can find out if he’s holding a full house or just a fistful of feathers.”
“What’s the percentage? Your client’s dead.”
I didn’t tell him I had two others, one who’d bought me cheap, the other strictly honorary. He hadn’t thought to ask about Gwendolyn Haas.
In a pig’s eye he hadn’t. I was supposed to walk the high wire waiting for that particular shoe to drop. No, Lieutenant Child didn’t like being tough. Neither does a grizzly. He just is, and he’s patient enough to wait for his opening.
But that clean I wasn’t ready to come just yet. “Fannon paid me to find Haas. If Fish has anything, it might flush him out and I can spend the retainer without looking away, like a guy cheating himself at solitaire.”
He took a comb from his shirt pocket, but he didn’t comb his hair. He tapped it against the palm of his other hand. “Honest Abe, that’s you. I bet when you were a kid you hiked ten miles to return a book.” He put away the comb, noticed his coat was open, and buttoned it with a shrug. “Anything to spare me five minutes with that kisser. Don’t forget to tell a guy what you find out; even if it’s nothing but feathers. I only make new mistakes. Never the same one twice.”
He left. I got up, picked up the butt, and laid it in the ashtray to smoke itself out. Under the smear of ash was a picture of Traverse City. I tried to remember the details of when I’d been there. It seemed to me I was in trouble that time too.