“There are competing bidders,” he said, “including an emir, a pimply dot-com fatcat, and that bleeding-heart back East who says his kind doesn’t pay enough taxes and runs a stable of tax lawyers to make sure he doesn’t. But the papers are all drawn up and okayed by both sides; even the unions are on board. All it needs is Emil’s signature, and he’s chosen now of all times to go dark.”
“He’s done it before?”
“Six years ago. But he was going through a rotten divorce, and who can blame a man for keeping a roomful of family-service attorneys cooling their heels while he sits drinking in some dive?”
“Is he an alcoholic?”
“I’ve never seen him take a drink. I’m just saying I’d understand if he got drunk under those circumstances. His daughter finally found him in an Internet café, reorganizing the company’s computer files on his laptop.”
“Check the place this time?”
“I tried his loft on the river first. The neighbors haven’t seen him. The café had closed, but I sent people to all the others in the area: No one there recognized him from his description. I’m worried. He always gets keyed up just before a closing, as many times as we’ve been through it, but he’s never run out on one of those before.”
I asked when he saw Haas last.
“Friday, four days ago. We’d just left a meeting with the owners of the Sentinel and their lawyers. They were going to have the papers drawn up over the weekend and we’d be back in their offices yesterday for the signing. Emil shook my hand outside the office. He said he was taking his daughter out to lunch. They had reservations at the Blue Heron, but she says she waited in the restaurant for him an hour and a half and he never showed. She was pretty unpleasant about it; I take it he’d stood her up before.
“I had to cancel the signing,” he went on, “and the owners weren’t pleasant about that. The lawyers think we’re stalling to whittle down the price we agreed on.”
“What’s the daughter’s name?” I got out my pad.
“Gwendolyn Haas; at least I think she went back to her maiden name after her own divorce. I doubt she can tell you anything she didn’t tell me, but Brita will tell you where she can be reached. Carl and I have adjoining offices in the Parker Block. Brita keeps us from tripping over our own shadows.” He switched hands on his cigar and broke a slate-colored card out of a leather-bound case with his initials embossed on it.
I fondled the heavy pebbled stock. The V in Velocity Financing, sans-serif in outline, leaned radically to the right with wind-lines running through it. I stuck the card in the pad.
“I’ll need more.”
“Brita can give you everything you require. I’ll be in Beijing the rest of the week.” He looked sideways at me. “That pest Fish thinks anyone who ever got within spitting distance of the Great Wall is selling us out to the reds. China’s our country’s creditor, for God’s sake. Give it a rest.”
“I know Fish. You could buy him off for less than the ground floor of that wreck on Michigan.”
“Why should I?”
“No reason, Mr. Fannon. What I don’t know about your business would fill every vacant lot in this city.”
We followed the oval track around the airport to the Delta terminal, where Wayne County Sheriff’s deputies were directing traffic six deep. The driver slid into a loading zone on the rear bumper of a minivan wheeling out, pulled a two-suiter on rollers and a leather duffel from the trunk, and opened the door on Fannon’s side. He let the driver wait while he got out a long flat wallet that matched his card case and handed me a cashier’s check with the amount of my retainer spelled out in perforated characters.
“I’m beginning to think I made the right choice.” He put one foot on the pavement. “I like a man who says, ‘I don’t know.’ Do you have any idea how many people I meet who’d never admit that?”
“I don’t know.”
He frowned, got out, and shut the door in my face. I got the impression I’d said the wrong thing; but then I wouldn’t know.
Back on I-94 the driver ran down the partition and asked if I wanted to stop anyplace on the way back to town. I caught a strong whiff of reefer from the front seat. I inhaled deeply, grinned, and said, “No, thanks. Just keep the window open.”
* * *
The work sounds interesting, but the pattern’s as steady as a square dance: I deposit the check, keeping a couple of hundred out for bail and gasoline, and go back to the office to make arrangements to see the people I need to see in order to earn it. The people in Carl Fannon’s set are never impressed by calls made over cell phones that break up when you drive under a low-flying pigeon, so I passed through the stale air lock that is my reception room, unlocked the door to the Holy See, and used the landline on the desk. Sitting back waiting for someone to answer I contemplated the dark smear of extinct arthropods in the bowl of the ceiling fixture. The cleaning service came with the rent or I’d raise a stink about the way the Dustbusters never got higher than the chair rail.
A cozy little box, inside the larger box of a building that should have been torn down under Woodrow Wilson, in the larger box yet of a city that should have been condemned after the ’67 riots and replaced with a theme park devoted to the Underground Railroad. It came with my entire working life contained in ten green steel drawers, a fiberboard-framed print made from a historically inaccurate painting of a military disaster that could have been avoided with a little more firepower and a lot less ego, a Native American rug woven in the Republic of Indonesia, and a leatherette-upholstered chair mounted on a screw behind a desk that still contained the holes from where a pencil sharpener had stood on it in what was probably the same grammar-school class where I’d flunked Algebra; and what of that? So had Einstein. A rotary fan danced on the sill of the open window and made visible wrinkles in the air; it was that thick in Michigan in housefly season.
But even a steady pattern can throw you a curve now and then. A crisp feminine voice with a West End accent came on the line, asked if I could hold, and before I could answer handed me over to a Baroque concert. I was adding up the counterpoints in a fugue when someone knocked.
I called out an invitation. He opened the door just wide enough to sidle in around it, as if he were afraid it might bump into someone standing on the other side. That made him the brains of the outfit, probably; the really smart ones spend their lives in a constant state of apology.
He was big, that much was obvious; not hard, but not suety either, just a larger than usual helping of humanity. The effect of bigness was lost in his general attitude. Although he was dressed as expensively as Carl Fannon, the best tailoring can’t really hang from a frame like his without looking like some kind of apron. He had short curly whitish hair that clung to his head like a knitted cap, and was as pale as my client was tan. His skin had a sickly translucence, like the skin that forms on scalded milk. He would apply sunscreen with a trowel. I’d never seen a photograph of him, but the quality of his suit and his famous diffidence and most of all the timing told me who he was. I’m no Amazing Kreskin, but I’m good at my job.
He was practically transparent. It explained why he needed a rooster like Fannon to strut his bright feathers and crow for the benefit of the admiring public. Vision and a good head for figures weren’t enough anymore; not in a society where the media sharks cut themselves in on everything as equal partners.
I cradled the receiver. “Thanks for dropping in, Mr. Haas. You just saved your firm a boatload in expenses.”