I heard them coming from as far down as the sixth floor, clanging up the steps with their equipment rattling like a suit of armor falling down. The first one to the brass ring looked like all the rest in gas mask, oxygen tanks, and fireproof tuxedo. He stopped when he saw the body, almost causing a chain-reaction collision among the rest of the firefighting team.
“Smoke or burn?” The voice coming through the intercom built into his mask sounded like the window man at Wendy’s.
“Poison.”
“Repeat?”
“I’m guessing. How far behind are the cops?”
* * *
Child got up from his squat and sat down next to me on the bottom step of the second flight of stairs. “Next time I might just put on a HazMat outfit to talk to you. You spread murder like the clap.”
“He came to me, Lieutenant. You were there.”
The stairwell smelled even more lethal than before; the exhaust from the chemical spray the firefighters had used to quell a blaze of unknown origin made the air mustard-colored. The din of axes, thundering boots, and shouted warnings and directions from the top floor had begun to die down. There were no more sirens down below.
“Let’s take it again.” He jerked his chin at what I thought was the same uniform who’d opened the cell door at Homicide, a millennium ago. The officer flipped to a new page in his pad.
They took it again, as they had the first two times. I’d learned from long experience not to use all the same words, but not to plug in too many new ones. It still sounded rehearsed, but I was too tired to put that throb in my voice that says so much. They wouldn’t have bought it in any case.
The lieutenant’s first words upon recognizing the stiff were, “Well, hello, there, Counselor. We’re gonna miss you between the auto ads and vaginal sprays.
“So you think the Sing character paid him to bait you into a fish-fry, then squiffed him to shut him up,” he said to me.
“It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. It worked in the Fannon and Nelson kills. Why change now?”
“Why you? You didn’t know anything more about what she’s up to than we do. Assuming you didn’t hold anything back. You wouldn’t do that.”
I waggled a finger in one ear. The roar was still there. “Sure I would. Not this time. That story Justice fed me could be true or part true or a load of compost.”
“I never figured him for this kind of deal. Piss off a judge, always; suborn a jury, wouldn’t surprise me. Accomplice to murder? That one goes down sideways.”
“It did for me, or I’d have seen it coming when he sent me in alone. But if he performed for her once he’d do it again, accepting more and more by degrees. Once you step off the edge you don’t start falling slower.”
“Maybe we’ll know something once the M.E. figures out what did the job.” He shook his head. “I hate this cloak-and-dagger crap. Give me a good old-fashioned drive-by any day. I know where to start looking. Now come the G-boy toxicologists and then the band plays the Russian saber dance till they jerk the rabbit out of the hat. If you were getting close, this’d be the time to out with it. They make you behave in the federal box in Milan, not like our little bed-and-breakfast at the Third.”
“I hit the wall before he came along. I’m thinking I was a side deal; repay me for that crippled hand as long as she was in the neighborhood.”
“If she’s only half as smart as everyone says she is, she’ll let it lay now.”
“Could be. If she were only half as insane as I know she is.”
New light spilled down the stairs. An Adam-and-Eve EMS team carried a folding gurney with a zipper bag folded on top of it down to the landing.
“Guess they got the elevator going again,” Child said. “Just when my BP got back to borderline.”
“So take a pill.”
“I do already. They say I need to eliminate some things from my diet. I’m thinking you for starters.”
We stood to give the pair room. “Are we done?”
“We’re done when you come down and sign a statement,” Child said, “is my fondest hope.”
I went back the way I’d come. The firefighters had finished destroying the door to 1700 and were chasing down scattered flames with short businesslike whooshes followed by the throat-tightening stench of carbon tetrachloride. Underneath was a metallic odor, somehow more evil.
“Magnesium and fulminate of mercury. Matches and gasoline aren’t in it anymore; not at this level.”
I looked at the mind reader. I almost didn’t know him without his mask. Ray Charla wore his stiff fire-retardant coat and his helmet with its DPD insignia pushed back from his large parboiled forehead. He was leaning against the hallway wall with his arms folded and his metal toolbox on the floor at his feet, his tin mitts tucked under his belt.
I offered him my hand. “Amos Walker, Inspector. We met when Sister Delia’s place burned down.”
“If you say so.” He took it as gently as he handled glowing pieces of evidence at the scene of a suspected arson. At that his grip would bend steel.
“You can tell what was used from the smell?”
He laid a permanently black-nailed finger alongside his nose. “For now, though I’ll have to prove it with a chemical test before I put it in my report. I don’t know how many more I’ve got coming. Sooner or later us burn guys blow out our olfactory organs. Makes us just as useless as one of those dope-sniffing dogs that get hooked. But not just yet.”
“Who has access to magnesium and fulminate?”
“Not many. You need a license, which means a legitimate business that involves volatile material, and you leave behind a paper trail as long as the Miracle Mile. Still too many. Until the governor shut down that Hollywood incentives program, those special-effects boys went through the stuff like salt through a hired girl, as my old man used to say. There’s always some leakage after a run like that.”
I thanked him and left, making a note to ask Barry Stackpole if Peaceable Shore included any movie studios among its holdings.
Riding down in the elevator was a surreal experience. I couldn’t help thinking about who had shared the trip up. I’d had no love for Philip Justice to begin with, and I tend to hold grudges against people who conspire to murder me; but the feeling was like facing the first morning after the death of someone close. As detectives went, I was about as hard-boiled as a thirty-second egg.
The police had evacuated the building, strung yellow tape, and set up barricades to hold back the crowd, shielding its eyes and pointing at smoke leaking from the blown-out windows in the corner room on the top floor. Film crews from all the local TV stations were pleading with the thin blue line erected behind the barricades; which in our city is pretty thick. They were as easy to argue with as the concrete barriers they resembled.
I inspected the Cutlass from headlights to rear bumper, in the event Sing had had some blasting material left over and decided to hedge her bet; but there were no unexplained wires visible from outside or under the hood, and when I crawled onto the floor of the front seat found no new options under the pedals and nothing more than a fat spider dozing in its web under the dash. I squashed it, using my handkerchief, and shook it out onto the asphalt. That made me feel almost as bad as I felt about Justice. It had probably been in residence long enough to be granted an easement.
The sun was waddling westward, scraping rooftops, while I let the wheel decide whether to turn toward the office or home. The office won; but that might have been the wheel misalignment I’d been putting off for a month.
Why’d I let the car make that decision? All my clients were either satisfied or dead. With Gwendolyn’s money and what was left of Fannon’s I could afford to take some time off. But I owed it to the customers who lined up outside the waiting room every day to lock that door and hang out the GONE FISHING sign.
At the first red light I got out the check Justice had given me, tore it in quarters, and stuffed the pieces among the butts in the ashtray. By the time the bank opened in the morning, the word would be out and all his assets frozen until Probate crawled from its snail’s burrow to parse them out in order of importance. Which was okay with me. If spending the advance on a contract on your own life isn’t considered bad luck, it ought to be.
In the shallow foyer, I took my ruined suitcoat off my arm and stuffed it into the bullet-shaped trash can. I didn’t know why I’d bothered to carry it that far. Next to the can, the door to Rosecranz’s narrow-gauged office/apartment was open, with his plumber’s helper propped against it. That was for the cross-draft; he considered air-conditioning proof of western decadence. He existed without sleeping, working around the clock to keep the building from collapsing into the basement. He broke for a half-hour only, to eat and to shout answers to Jeopardy in Russian; I figured that way no one eavesdropping would know when he got one wrong. Sitting on a noisy rocking chair in front of a folding tray-table, he bellowed at his rabbit-ear set, slurping borscht from a bowl and drinking from a tumbler full of liquid too clear to be Detroit water. His back was to me, with the shoulder blades gnawing through bare skin. He wore only bib overalls and woolen socks. After thirty years I knew everything about him except his first name.
When I got to the third floor the telephone was ringing in my office. That might have been going on for a while, with breaks in between. AT&T always interrupts to offer Repeat Dialing for a fee; otherwise it has to eat the expense of the bell. It stopped ringing, then started again. At the other end of the line was a patient and persistent finger. There was another pause before I could unlock the door marked PRIVATE, and then it started all over again. The little crackling silence was worse on my nerves than the ringing.
“A. Walker Investigations.”
“How was your luck in the Grand?”
I’d been sweating ever since the stairwell where Philip Justice had died; now the perspiration wrapped me in a jacket of ice. A voice entirely without accent is an eerie thing. It wasn’t atonal, like something generated by a computer, but the best dialogue coach in the world couldn’t identify this one’s origins either by continent or by nation or by region. Its owner had spent nearly as much time and money on eradicating any such clue as she had building her fortune in the international underworld.
“You know the answer to that,” I said after a moment. “This isn’t a recording.”
“I’m relieved; truly I am. Don’t you hate it when a worthy opponent fails too easily?”
“Not in this case.” I barely heard myself. My heart was pounding in my ears.
“I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”
The receiver creaked in my grip.
Another voice came on, shallow and rushed, as if the speaker had been running. “Mr. Walker, this is Gwen—”
Madam Sing took back the phone. “That should be sufficient. I don’t want to insult your intelligence.”
I leaned a hip against the desk. My own legs had given out. I asked the question for the second time that day. “When and where?”
“Have you seen your gift basket?”
My face felt hot suddenly. I set down the receiver, wobbled out into the waiting room, looked again at the card signed “G” attached to the basket; but then I hadn’t had an example of her handwriting for comparison. I lifted the basket and examined it all over. Finally I turned it upside down. I read the sticker on the bottom:
GOODIES 4 U
A Product of Tranquility Coast
Suite 604
Sentinel Building
Detroit, Michigan
I set it down as carefully as if it were booby-trapped; which it may have been. At one time that had been all the rage in Korea, and she wasn’t one to throw anything away just because its trend had passed; especially if there was death involved.
If I lived long enough, I might see the day when she exhausted all the synonyms for Pacific Rim.
If I lived long enough. I’d used up all my odds at the Grand.