I snapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “You’re a politician,” I said, “or you were. Maybe your license expired, but all the old skills wouldn’t. You remember me, I think.”
He lifted and resettled the spectacles, made wrinkles in the polished patches at the corners of his eyes. The sun came up behind a layer of smog. “An Old Testament name. Amos. A proletariat surname. Cooper? Wheeler?” He snapped his fingers, a sonic boom. “Walker. The Broderick case.”
I had the cigarette between my fingers. I put it back between my lips and clapped my hands three times. “For a minute there I thought they’d nicked your brain when they pulled your face back under your collar. I wasn’t sure if you’d see me. We didn’t part on the best of terms.”
He uncased two rows of teeth like polished headstones. “I can’t say I remember the circumstances, but I make it a practice never to hold a grudge. People who have met me on the way up recognize me on the way down, and I might need them when the situation reverses again. As it does; otherwise I wouldn’t be in a position to make an appointment with anyone.”
I bought that he didn’t remember the circumstances the way I bought the Ambassador Bridge. But if he was willing to let it drift, I wasn’t going to snag it back. “You know by now your beef with Velocity Financing just got cut in half,” I said.
“If you’re referring to Carl Fannon’s death, I do. Now that I’m no longer in public office I can afford not to express regret I don’t feel. A Quisling’s a Quisling, alive or dead.”
“What about Emil Haas?”
“It takes two to make a conspiracy. What’s your interest in this?”
“I’m in it three ways. Yesterday morning, Fannon hired me to find Haas. He disappeared, he said. Then Haas came along and hired me to meet him in the basement of the Sentinel Building last night. The ink on that one wasn’t dry when Haas’s daughter Gwendolyn showed up and asked me the same thing Fannon asked. Three clients in one case is a personal best.”
He made a wringing motion on the towel with both hands. “Wouldn’t that fall under conflict of interest?”
“It would if I were working for one of them not to do what the others had hired me for. I’m not sure what you’d call making the same deal with the first and third and taking a little money on deposit to hear what the second had to say.”
“Aren’t you? I’d say unethical would cover it.”
“No, just unusual. I didn’t take any money from Gwendolyn and if I don’t like what Haas wants of me I’ll give him back his twenty. In order to do that I have to find him first. Which is what the others want.” I took the cigarette out of my mouth, looked at it, and stuck it back in the pack. “I seem to be in some kind of conversational cloverleaf, talking my way right back around to where I started. I’m here to find out why Carl Fannon had a message from his office to call you. You didn’t seem so chummy while you were accusing him of fronting for foreigners.”
“That’s not what you told my assistant. You said you had specific information on that very point.”
“I also said my name was Frank Wiener. I didn’t make all that up, by the way, just the Wiener part. I gave the real Frank some money last night to buy a package of wieners. He may have seen who locked Fannon in that vault, either on his way into the building or on his way out. Maybe both. The cops don’t know that. I didn’t think about it until I was halfway through the interview and then I didn’t say it.”
He twisted the towel tighter. “You met a man named Frank and bought him frankfurters.”
“Yeah. Screwy enough to be true, isn’t it? With a possible eyewitness in your pocket, and your resources, you could score big with the authorities. They might even reinstate you to the Bar.”
“Why would I want that? I’ve got a job.”
The room had only one window. A car whisked past on the street without making any noise. The walls were soundproof and the window was triple-glazed at least.
“Maybe you forgot our beef, but you remember me. I remember you. You don’t care a fart in a whirlwind if Fannon and Haas sell Hart Plaza, Campus Martius, and the Detroit Lions to Russia and stick up a statue of Lenin in Grand Circus Park. You’re looking to get back into the game. Maybe this time the mayor of Detroit or governor of the state. But before you swing that, you’ve got to erase the blot from your record. That costs plenty, and Fannon had plenty to spare. What did you dig up on him that’d be worth the grease you needed to lay off him?” I told him about the message on Fannon’s wrist.
“So on top of nursing a hero complex I’m a blackmailer. What’s to stop me from finding this Frank person myself? I have the resources, as you said.”
“You don’t know what he looks like, or if Frank is his name. You could comb the neighborhood for a month, and all you’d get is the runaround, even if you pay for the information. They might not know who you’re asking about. That refrigerator-box crowd isn’t as close as in the days of the hobo jungle. Or he might be a drifter already on his way to Denver in the back of a furniture van. Without a good physical description, you’ve got as much chance of finding him and breaking this case as you have of beating a real tennis player on a real court.”
He slung the towel around his neck and hung on to both ends. “So why aren’t you looking for him right now and breaking the case yourself? As I recall, you could stand to make a few brownie points with the authorities yourself.”
“I stand to make more by keeping my nose out of an open investigation. All I’m interested in is doing what Fannon hired me for, finding Haas, and earning his twenty hearing what he has to say.”
“I’d like to hear it myself.” He stepped over to the window, and reached under the sill. Something clicked. In a little while the door opened and the pudgy feller came in, tucking his shirttail inside his pants. He was carrying his nifty portable phone.