“Bar’s open.” Barry laid the Taser on a table inside the door. “On the dresser.”
This was three drawers of printed wood grain supporting a seventeen-inch flat screen, the usual tray, ice bucket, and plastic cups, and a square bottle of Gentleman Jack.
“You didn’t get this from room service.” I stripped the cellophane off a cup and floated two cubes from the bucket. “You can call a lot of attention to yourself checking in with your luggage in a paper sack.” There was nothing hanging in the doorless closet and not even a backpack in sight.
“I haven’t checked into a hotel or motel in ten years, and I’ve stayed in plenty. I slipped Lawrence of Arabia downstairs a fifty to leave his little box of cards under the desk.” He stretched out on the bed and folded his hands behind his head. He was in shirtsleeves, slacks, and one sock. The other foot was titanium, shaped like an electric iron and attached by a socket to a metal rod. In the time I’d known him he’d gone from spruce to fiberglass to the stuff they use to build the space shuttle.
There was a talk show on TV, one of those where the guests make their point by throwing chairs at each other. The volume was low, but made enough murmur to keep anyone from following our conversation with his ear to the door. That was an everyday precaution for Barry.
“Hadaad’s selling himself short,” I said. “The going rate among the housekeeping staff is a hundred.”
“The way I hear it, you’ve been scattering C-notes all over town like grass seed. You must have a printing press in the garage.”
“Quit kidding, chum. I’d farm out all my work to you if I didn’t think I’d be watching it on the next news cycle. You know damn well who I’m working for or you wouldn’t be here, sitting on my latest lead.”
“You could have saved us both a lot of trouble if you’d trusted me in the first place. I worked my way backwards from Peaceable Shore. It holds the deed to this place. I filed all the details behind my firewall when it changed hands. You think I don’t keep track of what happens to the Liberty?”
“When did you make the connection?”
“Don’t worry, it was after we spoke. I had to check it out before I said anything. One bum steer can ruin a relationship.”
“You left every sign of an unplanned disappearance.”
“I’m glad you noticed. Once too many times I followed standard procedure and told a colleague where I was going. He sold me out, which is the reason I buy one shoe at a time. I can’t trust anyone with what I’m doing; not even you, Amos. Hell, there are days when I don’t confide in myself. But only an idiot plunges half-cocked into an investigation connected with a murder. If I stepped out unannounced, leaving my door open, someone—maybe the UPS man who delivers author’s copies of my books—will put my face on a milk carton.”
He rolled onto one shoulder, snared a can of salted almonds off the nightstand, and lay back, prying off the plastic lid.
“I’m glad it was you,” he said, “for what it’s worth. Sorry about that trusting crack.”
“Yeah. We should take up a line of work where we can depend on each other. Maybe the trapeze.”
I held up the bottle and sloshed it. He shook his head, munching. “I was saving it for you. Nuts are instant energy. I ride the wagon when I’m working.”
“I should too.” I made myself uncomfortable in a Naugahyde recliner and drank. I’m not a bourbon fan; it isn’t strong enough for rocket fuel and it isn’t sweet enough to pour on a waffle. But any Jack in a storm. It shinnied up my spine and started gnawing at my gray cells. “So what’d you get, apart from a suitcase stuffed with bottles of conditioning shampoo?”
“In this dump you bring your own. You first. I know you’re working for Velocity, but I don’t know which half.”
“Take your pick. Either way you’re right.”
“Strictly speaking there’s only one choice, with Fannon in the hospitality suite in the Wayne County Morgue.”
“Who says that rules him out?”
He nodded. “I forgot. When it comes to clients you don’t discriminate over whether they have a pulse. How much of the dead man’s money have you burned through so far?”
“Not much, in the greater scheme of things. These days I have to beat clients away with a blackjack. You haven’t figured out the riddle yet.”
“What’s to figure out? You found another moneybags, this one with moving parts.”
I swirled the contents of my plastic cup, but the ice didn’t make that crisp clink I associate with the rest of the pleasures of boozing. It doesn’t have to be cut crystal; a glass jar would do. “I’m all about the money. That’s why I’ve got a pack of gum on layaway at the IGA. Just now I’m lugging around a cool forty bucks in cash, courtesy of Emil and Gwendolyn Haas. At this rate I’m going to have to open an account in Switzerland.”
“What are you doing for all this plunder?”
“You can’t use it, Barry. Not now, and maybe not ever.”
He put the lid back on the can. “So it’s what we talked about?”
“I hope not; but until I can swear it isn’t, I’m sitting on top of a thousand-gallon tank of gasoline, playing with matches.”
“Okay. But when you can swear it isn’t, it’s mine.”
So I told him.
About Fannon hiring me to find Emil Haas to avoid queering the deal over the Sentinel Building, Haas slipping me twenty to meet him in that same location, and the twenty I got from Gwendolyn to locate her father and clear him of suspicion in his partner’s murder;
About my adventures with three outfits called Peaceable Shore, all of which offered possibilities—even the one that had closed—but none more promising than the others. Drugs or human misery or sex for hire, take your pick;
About Lieutenant Child.
“He’s using you for bait,” Barry said.
“Sure he is. When a cop tells you he’s not ambitious, you can bet he’s got his eye on Everest.”
“Man, you do more all day than I do before breakfast. All I have to show for my stay in this slick rattrap is the name of the person Velocity’s been fronting for all this time.”
I rolled the cup between my palms, watching the ice lose its sharp corners. So far I’d had only the one sip. “What’s this lesson in investigative journalism going to cost me?”
“This one’s on the house. I can’t use it anyway; I knew that when we made our deal. I’ve got as much stake in nailing this particular party as everyone else in civilization. I told Haas to write his daughter, using Liberty stationery. I knew if she showed it to anyone, it’d be you. With Daddy’s name all over the police news, she wouldn’t go to them, and the young ladies of her set don’t have any snoopers on speed-dial. She’d have gotten your name from his office.”
“I’d offer you a partnership, if there were enough work for two. I couldn’t get much out of Brita Palmerston there.”
“If you got anything, you got more than I did. The receptionist told me she went out for lunch and didn’t come back. But I was just touching base. After that I talked to Gwendolyn. I didn’t have to play pig-in-a-poke with her like you did. My partnership is with the First Amendment. The cops don’t like it, but I don’t have to tell them anything about my sources, even sources who are the subject of an all-points-bulletin. I read Haas’s note.”
I sat forward. “You found him?”
He gave me his baggy grin, put the lid back on the can of nuts, wiped his hands with a cheesy motel tissue, reached above the maple headboard, and rapped the can against the wall. A poorly set floor tile creaked under a footstep, the bathroom door opened, and Emil Haas stepped out.