He slid the client’s chair away from the desk, using both hands, and lowered himself onto it with a big sigh, as if he’d taken in too much breath for the job and had to blow some of it off. The chair wasn’t that heavy and he wasn’t that fat, but the effort on top of climbing two flights of stairs had sapped him plenty. He had bulk and not enough strength to lug it far. He was like a plant someone had overfertilized so that it grew too big too fast and wouldn’t last the season.
His voice was high and shallow. I had to lean forward to hear him. “Stop looking for me,” he said. “Am I lost?”
“Disoriented, maybe. I get a lot of that in here.”
“Well, I’m not that, either. I may not look like it, but I know where I am all the time and why.”
“I believe you. Now tell me and we’ll both know.”
“Our office manager is my main pipeline. I recruited her from the secretarial pool over Carl’s objections. He wanted a flashy blonde to rope in business. That’s back when Hollywood incentives were in place here; he thought we could unload a couple of hundred thousand square feet of dud industrial property we had in inventory to a pack of C.B. DeMilles to build studios. He’s changed his mind since Lansing threw out the incentives; but Brita’s loyalty’s still to me.”
“Brita isn’t a name I associate with an office drudge. Parents are prescient about such things. They rarely look at an Ethel in the cradle and christen her Brita.”
“Oh, she’s damn attractive, from the front row. Carl wanted something that would play to the balcony, all chrome and lacquer. But ours isn’t the kind of business you conduct at a distance. It’s long hours of discussing tedious details over buckets of coffee and long columns of figures. People like Brita take the edge off; she makes a tailored business suit look like a slinky ball gown.” His face shut down then; not that it had opened up more than a morning glory an hour before dawn. “Plus she can tell at a glance whether the customer’s the real deal or a looky-loo.”
“Good-looking women can,” I said. “That’s how they keep their good looks.”
The air outside was just heavy enough with humidity to carry sounds a long way, like across a calm lake; the fan brought them in along with the air from the street, syrupy sweet with fresh tar patch in the potholes. Tires splatted against asphalt, stereo speakers grunted pure bass, the wheels of a child’s stroller clicked over joints in the sidewalk, the traffic light at the intersection passed through its cycle with discernible clicks. A car alarm went off. No city medley is complete without that.
“Brita’s the one who made our appointment,” I said. “I’m guessing.” She hadn’t identified herself by name, but I remembered a cool mid-Atlantic voice that made an invitation sound like a done deal.
“I could recite the conversation word-for-word,” Haas said. “Carl never does anything I don’t know about, thanks to her. You might say she’s the cement that holds the partnership together.”
“Cement sticks both ways, you know.”
He lifted pale brows. Only the faint shadows cast by the bristles separated them from the skin of his forehead.
“You’re suggesting she’d two-time me. She might, if I ever did anything my partner thought would hurt the business. As it happens, I am the business. I control the money, I make the deals, my signature closes the decisions. Carl books hotels, arranges companionship, and spreads oil on the waters where the media dips its bill.”
“Like with that pushover at the radio station?”
“He didn’t have to. Why does the city bother having a chamber of commerce when that crew does the job for free?”
“There’s always a Carl, isn’t there?”
“It’s a special skill. Just because I don’t possess it myself doesn’t mean I think his contribution is less important than mine.” He sat back as far as he allowed himself, gripping the arms of the wooden chair with his thick sausage fingers; they would leave wet marks. “He’s distinguished, looks well in his clothes, and has a pleasant speaking voice. I consider that natural compensation for his deficiency in other areas.”
That was generous. Most Brainiacs saw it the other way around. “Why does he think you’re vanished?”
He scowled. “Terrible misuse of a verb. I took a room under an alias in the kind of motel where no one would ever look for me who knew my phobias. Not a fleabag; that desperate I’m not, but let’s say the chain it belongs to doesn’t advertise on Sixty Minutes. I thought it better to lie low and say nothing than postpone our meeting with the Sentinel people. I’d rather the mystery be about what hole I fell into than why I had misgivings.”
“What kind of misgivings?”
He shifted in his chair, winding up in the same position he’d started in. He seemed to live in a constant state of armed truce with his clothes and his environment, and possibly with the world in general. He was either a genius or a crackpot. I’d entertained both in that room, sometimes occupying the same chair at the same time. “Before I go into that, I need some assurance you won’t go running to your client with it.”
“He didn’t buy that, only some line on where you went off to. We didn’t discuss when I’d report.”
His chair creaked a little more, but this time he was just making room to fetch a billfold from his hip pocket. It was fat, brown, and tattered, with corners of currency and printed receipts and little colored tabs sticking out at all angles; I’d as soon have carried around a dead porcupine. He extracted a sheaf of bills and stood them on the desk in the shape of a tent. “That’s fifteen hundred.” He sat back holding the billfold on his lap in both hands like a woman’s handbag. “That’s your initial rate, isn’t it?”
“It’s my special introductory offer.” I didn’t move to scrape it up. “What am I selling?”
“Just twelve hours’ silence regarding this visit; and the promise to meet me tonight someplace where I know we won’t be overheard.”
“Strictly speaking, it’s legal until Fannon’s retainer expires, in three days minus a couple of hours and change.”
“We have an arrangement, then?”
I drew a new yellow pencil from the mug on the desk, navy blue with the Detroit Police Officers Association seal in gold; the department keeps a little gift shop on the floor of 1300 Beaubien, police headquarters, and gives them out when it’s feeling generous. I’d swiped mine from an interview room. The pencil was for tapping, not writing. I thumped the eraser on the blotter three times, then tilted forward, picked up the tent, and separated a twenty from it.
“This will cover my time, if we’re meeting anywhere in this area code. Keep the rest for seed and we’ll see if it sprouts tonight. Your room?”
“God, no. I’ve been sleeping on the coverlet. I’m afraid to touch even the light switches without wrapping my hands in Kleenex; which I brought in myself in the handy little packet Walmart sells in the travel section at a markup of three-hundred-fifty percent. You know where the Sentinel Building is, of course. Knowing Carl, he’d have been sure to take you past it on his way to the airport.”
“I know it anyway. My old man used to buy me candy cigarettes in the cigar shop when he went in to play the numbers. Can we get in?” I seemed to remember yellow caution tape across the entrance.
“Carl and I hired a crew to check the place out for structural failure. You don’t need to worry about rats; they’re too smart to hang around a place with no food. There’s a trouble-light setup in the basement, and I have a key to the fire door in the alley. I made a copy.” He reached inside the billfold again and slid something across the desk: flat copper with a round blank tab. “Nine o’clock?”
“You haven’t told me what the job is.”
He’d hoisted himself out of the chair. Now he tugged some of the wrinkles out of his clothes and touched a thick moist lower lip with the corner of the billfold, thinking through his answer. He was a man who’d give you the time of day, after confirming it with his watch, his cell, Greenwich, and the U.S. Naval Observatory.
“Nothing extravagant: just a background check. I could run it myself, but you can’t travel three inches across a computer monitor without leaving a trail of blinking lights. The check I tried to do on you came up empty from here to Silicone Valley and back. How does a man in your profession manage to stay off the grid in this century?”
“I crashed my first Etch A Sketch at ten. After that technology and I shook hands and said good-bye.”
He smiled then. Before that it had seemed to be one symbol not included in his personal emoticon.
“Which makes you the man for me. You leave no footprints and fly six feet under the radar. When your time comes, there’ll be no evidence you even existed. Please forgive me if I upset you by saying that.”
“I’m not so delicate as that, Mr. Haas.”
He frowned again. The thin latex of his skin wouldn’t stand up to much of that strain.
“If I seem circumspect, it’s the life I’ve led. I have the advantage of being an unattractive man. When a beautiful woman comes to someone like me with a proposition, I’m not deluded into thinking my good looks and charm have anything to do with it. There’s always something else. The same reasoning applies to business. A deal that looks too good to be true—is. This Sentinel acquisition is just the latest in a long line of such things. If Carl weren’t so persuasive I’d have gone with my instincts three deals ago, and sixteen million dollars to the good.”
I smiled as if I knew what he was talking about: Just two movers and shakers discussing business that affected the lives of hundreds. In the back of my mind I remembered my oil needed changing.
I stood and shook his hand, which was firmer than I expected and just firm enough to make me worry about what it had cost him, and watched him shamble on out, a man built like a bear, but who moved like a squirrel, hoping to cross the road before a car ran him over. Watching the door drift shut behind him I slid the twenty between two fingers to smooth out the crease and put it in my inside pocket next to the two hundred I’d kept out from Carl Fannon’s grand-and-a-half. I had a sudden urge to catch the red-eye to Atlantic City; but I had an appointment to keep in eleven hours.