The young feller’s name was Richard, and it turned out he wasn’t so young. He’d spent just enough time in medical college to find out he hadn’t the stomach for it, three years’ apprentice under a CPA until that party shipped out to Uruguay with a Cayman Island bank account number sewed inside his coat, dumb cluck that he was; Uruguay has an understanding with the U.S., and he’d spent most of what he’d chiseled fighting extradition. That was when Richard got the bright idea that his future lay in the law.
“Not that I plan to spend my life there,” he’d said, while he was waiting for his phone to upload or whatever. “Most people in public office have an LLD.”
Cecil Fish, who’d excused himself to shower after leaving specific instructions, came back on the end of this, pink as a tulip and wearing a taupe summer suit that looked as light as silk pajamas, moss-colored moccasins on his bare feet. He smelled of baby powder and the kind of cologne you put on with an eyedropper. “Most people in public office don’t share their life stories with strangers.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man blushed to the ends of his fingers, then punched a key with one. “Here it is.”
I held out my hand for it, but his boss snatched it from him, peered at it, then turned the screen my way.
“‘Peaceable Shore,’” I read. “It sounds like the first line of a haiku. What’s it mean?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t be sharing it. I’m hoping to make finding out part of our deal. You’re something of a bloodhound, if I remember right. It came up on Velocity’s e-mail correspondence, as a heading. They thought the account they used was impregnable, but even so it showed up just once and for less than thirty seconds before it vanished. I have to think it was read immediately and just as immediately deleted. In any case it was worth a fishing expedition—not to put the squeeze on him, but to see by his reaction if it was worth more digging on my part.”
“How’d you get past Velocity’s security?”
“My methods are my own. Rest assured they’re legal. The Internet depends on the airwaves, and the FCC says those belong to the public. Some judges aren’t so sure; but then when an independent moviemaker copied The Great Train Robbery scene-for-scene in 1903, the judge who heard the case ruled that since the original film wasn’t physically stolen, there was no theft involved. The medium was new. So’s the World Wide Web. I expect to be in my grave many years before it’s ironed out. But I’m not dead yet.”
“Okay, you hacked it. I’m not on the grid, so I should care. I’m not convinced two words that don’t mean anything to any of us is worth what I offered in return.”
“I don’t know that what you offered is worth what I just gave you.” He uncovered the headstones. “We’re just two farmers trading pigs in a poke, aren’t we?”
“Why don’t I spend a day or so on it, then if it goes ding get back to you?”
“What do you think, Richard?”
“What do you want me to think, Mr. Fish?”
He looked back at me. “You see, Richard agrees with me. Out with it, Walker; or I call the locals and charge you with blackmail. You came here under a fictitious name, intending to shake me down for some fuzzy connection to Carl Fannon’s murder. It so happens I spent last night on Mackinac Island, attending a political convention. I’m sure you heard of it. It was on every station.”
“Make it stick,” I said.
“I can’t. But until whoever you fall back on in these situations habeases you out; well, you know Iroquois Heights.” He leaned forward and placed his hands tightly over Richard’s ears. The assistant’s face assumed a torturous grin, as if he’d gone through it all before. “You’ve pissed blood in the past, I’m sure,” Fish whispered. “But none of us is getting any younger. Our kidneys don’t bounce back like tennis balls anymore.”
I grinned. I like my kidneys as well as anyone, but I’d already decided to tell him what he wanted. I just wanted to see if he was as miserable a son of a bitch as he used to be, and that was worth seeing the performance. I didn’t buy that he’d found out about Peaceable Shore from the Internet. Postmodern technology spreads its legs for anyone, and it’s just too easy to blame every little spill on that. I didn’t buy it, but I was willing to rent it for the moment. Put two innocuous words together and they bent back the other direction. Put those two particular words together and they rang a note that I hadn’t heard for so long I’d almost forgotten it; but it hurt an eardrum as if someone had tapped the mastoid with a tuning fork.
Couldn’t be. I put the thought so far out of my head I felt like you do when you forget something important and your brain goes pleasantly blank, as if the thing had never been an issue. The human brain is like that, wiping out something too horrible for your emotions to accept: Freud’s vacuum cleaner.
I made a show of getting out my notebook, but I hadn’t recorded anything in it about Frank the wiener man; I hadn’t thought him worth the trouble at the time. I described him from memory.
Richard looked up from the keyboard he was typing on. “Who’s Edmund Fitzgerald?”
“I’ll buy you the Gordon Lightfoot album,” Fish said. “You’re sure the tattoo was permanent?”
“A man who lives on ground-up hog snouts doesn’t spend a lot of time soaking and peeling decals.”
The young man was still pecking away. He seemed to be taking down the entire conversation. “I can print up flyers, distribute them among the interns. They can pass them around the homeless, offer what, fifty dollars if one turns him up?”
“Ten’s plenty. They sleep with one eye open just to make sure they don’t wake up naked. No sense keeping them awake around the clock.” He looked at his watch. “Hightail it down to Frank Murphy Hall before it lets out for lunch. Take my car. Don’t strip the gears. Ask for Roger Hurst. He sketches most of the trials where they don’t let in cameras. Give him a hundred to break any appointments he’s got this afternoon. Some of those bums can’t read or don’t know English. Don’t come back without him.”
Richard frowned at “bums,” but got it all down.
Fish looked at me. “You don’t mind hanging around to see he captures your man on paper.”
“One hour in the Heights is already more than enough.”
That was another thing I remembered about him, the color his face turned when the world didn’t turn properly to suit him. Liverish, it used to be called, and it was an apt description. Now it’s something else, probably no longer congestion; which is a word I associated with what happens in the outbound lanes when the whistle blows and everyone’s in a hurry to get the hell out of Detroit, for which who can blame them? I’d been trying for forty years. But I’d dressed out my share of deer and stowed enough warm livers in the pouch I carried in my hunting coat to recognize that shade of purple.
Just short of the blowup I took a stiff folded sheet out of a pocket and snapped it open. The charcoal sketch was faithful to Frank, right down to the shipwreck on his chest. “The son of an old client majors in Art at Wayne State. I stopped by his dorm on the way.”
* * *
I got away from there a little after three-thirty. The sheriff’s car I’d seen earlier or one like it picked me up on the main stem and followed me long enough to run the plate, then boated down a side street; I’d hit a pothole full of mud a couple of days ago, hadn’t stopped for a wash, and my car wasn’t made in the right decade for the local dress code, but I didn’t have any unpaid tickets or warrants outstanding and the deputy’s shift was almost over. For a block and a half there I’d worn my shoulders up around my ears. But for once I crossed the city limits without leaving any brain cells behind. Things were looking up.
I didn’t know if Peaceable Shore meant anything. I hoped it didn’t mean what it might. At the very least I’d fobbed off investigating a homicide on someone who actually enjoyed chronic heartburn. At the very, very least I’d done the wiener man a good turn. He’d probably work a deal to swap out for whatever story he had to tell, spend a couple of hours in an air-conditioned room, maybe get a meal and a drink and a change of socks and underwear and enough cash to upgrade to Oscar Mayer for a week.
That’s if he hadn’t spun me and when he took up a big enough collection he’d upgrade to high-grade heroin instead. That thought put a cloud across my rosy dawn.