Here I was, back where I’d started, an eon or two ago, and not in dog years. I felt like one of those plastic racehorses on a slotted oval track like they used to sell in the toy department at the five-and-dime. Only this horse was too broken down to get out of the gate.
The cops had taken away all the caution tape, leaving the Sentinel Building much as it had been when I’d first entered it, minus the surprise in the basement. The plastic canopy erected to shield pedestrians from falling masonry had acquired another coat of soot, and wind howling through the man-made canyon downtown had made a fresh deposit of waxed-cardboard cups, candy bar wrappers, crack capsules, and spent condoms on the pile inside the threshold of the padlocked front door, but that was an urban condition only a controlled demolition could reverse. I looked up at the ribbed façade and wondered all over again why they put ledges on tall buildings. Window-washers and sandblasters use scaffolds. Ledges are for suicides in search of an audience.
I went into the alley and looked around, but time hadn’t gone backward and Frank Nelson wasn’t there, showing off his tattoo and asking for money to buy frankfurters. I hadn’t expected that; but hoping for the best is what keeps people off ledges. It’s funny who the solitary life will make you miss. I was down to panhandlers and sleazy lawyers.
I’d thrown away the key Emil Haas had given me, but Madam Sing had overlooked nothing; the fire door wasn’t locked. Once again I walked across the cardboard taped over the Pewabic, but this time I took the stairs up instead of down; even so just entering the well leading to the vault where Fannon had gasped out his life drew an arpeggio up my spine. Lately I’d been spending a lot of time on stairs, and they always led to something nasty.
She hadn’t said to come alone, and I hadn’t asked; we didn’t want to insult each other’s intelligence, after all. I’d have rung in the National Guard if she wouldn’t stick a needle into Gwendolyn Haas at the first sight of a Sherman tank.
What did Gwendolyn Haas mean to me? We didn’t even like each other. But one way or another I was responsible for three deaths on this case alone, if only because I’d entered the freeway late and had spent the time since accelerating desperately to keep up with the rest of the traffic. No matter how fast I drove, Sing had seen me coming and jammed down on the pedal, running over anyone who crossed her path. Her time as a slave had convinced her that life was as throwaway as a broken toaster.
There was no window to admit light between the walls that flanked the staircase. I leaned against one to fish out my flash. Something poked into my shoulder; a light switch. The electricity had been on before, to power the laborers’ halogens in the basement. I straightened and laid a finger on the switch, but snatched my hand away as if one of the wasps that still lived in the walls had stung it. In Arson/Murder 101 they teach you how to replace a regular switch with the arcing type, open the gas valves, and let the spark dispose of whoever turned on the light.
Sing seldom worked the same gag twice; but I’d bucked her system before. Even she wasn’t crazy enough not to recognize when a rule has outlived its usefulness. I put on the flash, drew the Chief’s Special, and started up, this time avoiding contact with the handrail. Poison was her new thing. She wasn’t above coating the surface with a topical variety. She wasn’t above anything you could name.
I prayed this was the finish, for more reasons than one. Another encounter with the gorgon and I’d be as paranoid as she was.
It took me most of a half hour to climb six floors. I stopped every few steps to hold my breath and listen. One of the advantages of stalking someone in an old building is it tells you who’s moving around within earshot. One creak of a warped board and I’d shoot whoever belonged to the foot that caused it the moment he or she showed.
No creaks. In the silence I could hear horns honking several streets over, the whine and gulp of a heavy-duty transmission shifting up and down the scale and the huff of hydraulic brakes. I was as disconnected from all that life as an appendix suspended in a jar of formaldehyde.
I resumed climbing. I’d have traded those convenient stairs for the haul up the stuffy air shaft back at the Liberty Inn.
Rounding the fifth landing, I saw light and put away the flash. I leaned against the wall again, switched the revolver to my other hand, mopped my palm on my pants, then switched again and mopped the other. By then the butt was getting slippery again. I ascended the rest of the way crab-fashion, flattening my back to the wall with my gun arm stretched out along it. When I reached the top step I leapt the last six inches, pivoting right, then left on the bare wooden floor, gripping my weapon in both hands. An empty hallway yawned at me.
Either Detroit’s plague of scrap rats hadn’t made it up that far or the current owners had begun restoring the hardware. A series of fixtures shaped like women’s breasts and paneled with mica shed orange light from the ceiling. A tarnished brass rectangle from the building’s hotel incarnation directed me with arrows to Suites 600–620. I stood there with the .38, still in both hands, at my waist, for a minute. It was getting old, this business of waiting for my brain to catch up with my respiration.
Six-oh-four was near the end facing cross-town. It wasn’t a corner suite. There was some comfort in that, until I reminded myself that Sing almost never repeated herself.
I knocked and struck the same pose, hugging the wall with my arm stretched along it, muzzle pointing at the middle of the door.
“Mr. Walker?”
That same male voice, a mix of Industrial North and Deep South.
“Uh-uh,” I said. “Fooled me once. This time you open the door.”
There was a silence while a drop of sweat crawled down my back, disguised as a fire ant. Then a latch grated in its socket. I pushed away from the wall, placed my right foot close to the threshold, and leaned my shoulder against the door. When it cracked open I shoved it with everything I had. The man with his hand on the knob stumbled backward, and was fighting for balance when I spun on the ball of my foot and swept my gun arm backhand, all the way from my left shoulder. I was Miguel Cabrera, swinging for the suburbs. The loaded cylinder—the heaviest part—caught him square on the right temple. He slung a thread of saliva across my shirt and went down hard enough to shake the building.
Standing in a crouch I eyeballed the room. We lacked two of a quorum, if that was where Sing was holding Gwendolyn, and all the doors were closed except the one I’d come in through. I slammed it with my heel, twisted the latch, and knelt to check the heap on the floor for a pulse. His eyes were all white as I pried back the lids. He was alive, and out like the cat.
He was a biggish black man, even-featured, with a shaved head that shone like a polished walnut bowl, a haze of gray lurking in the shadow under the skin. His right temple was bleeding blood, not brains, for all my effort. He wore a nylon jogging suit, blue with a broad white band that went diagonally from his left shoulder to his right hip and a narrower stripe down the outside seams of the pants. Air Jordans on his feet: white, new, and expensive. I patted him down, but I didn’t expect to find a firearm. His weapon of choice was more sinister.
The right hand was partially closed. I pried open the fingers and looked at a slim glass hypodermic syringe. The naked needle glittered.
I’d sooner handle a live cobra in that condition. I looked around, found something shiny in the deep nap of the carpet, and carefully slid the glass cap over the point. I took the instrument out of his hand then, got up, carried it to a glass-topped table, and stashed it behind a bowl of cut flowers. If he came to while I was frisking the place, I’d have time to put him down again before he found it.
Neither the table nor the flowers nor the carpet made sense in a suite in a deserted skyscraper. The floor was cloaked wall-to-wall in snow-white lamb’s-wool, giving off a chemical smell of fresh adhesive. Slim black-enamel floor lamps with umbrella-shaped metal shades made soft pools on its surface and the furniture was upholstered in pliant blue leather that lay back and begged you to make a running dive into it. What at first glance looked like pictures on the blue-and-silver-striped wallpaper shimmered and changed images: I blinked at Monet’s water lilies, van Gogh’s blazing haystacks, a Caravaggio, a Rembrandt, a couple of minor Picassos, and something that might have been a Klee; beyond ten feet, my eye for fine art needs a foghorn. It was some kind of trick holographic display on monitors in picture frames, wired to all the great art museums on six continents.
I didn’t spend time admiring brushstrokes. I opened doors and stuck the gun into empty rooms: a mother-of-pearl bathroom with a sunken tub and rose-colored mirrors reflecting an aging and badly scared man, a master bedroom with a headboard six feet high with holes chewed in it by worms dead three hundred years, a closet I could park my car in, stocked with shoes too skimpy to be anything but Italian and clothing for every occasion and climate; all women’s.
Small and slight as she is, Charlotte Sing couldn’t have crawled into the toe of a Jimmy Choo. She’d given me the slip again; but why should I be any more special than the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, the French Sûreté, Scotland Yard, and the North Korean death squads?
And where was Gwendolyn Haas?
The last door was locked. It would connect to the room next door. Just to be sure I wouldn’t be interrupted, I dragged up a Louis-the-Somethingth chair, tilted it, and jammed the back under the knob. The syringe was where I’d left it, the man in the jogging suit too. I picked up the syringe.
He stirred a little, winced, rolled his head to the side opposite the injured temple, and then his face went flat. His eyes flickered, but didn’t open.
The revolver was superfluous now. I stuck it in its clip and thumbed the cap off the needle. I grinned at the shiny lethal point and squirted a thin arc of fast-acting poison to clear the barrel of air.
It was the first thing the man on the floor saw when he opened his eyes.
He got his elbows under him. I made a gesture with the needle and he stopped. He fixated on it. I could be any one of the heads on Mt. Rushmore for all he cared. The needle was the thing to watch.
“Where is she?” I asked.
His lips moved, but nothing came out. He licked them, cleared his throat, and said, “Who?”
“Mrs. Bigfoot, who else? Look at that.” My hands were shaking. It wasn’t an act. “I’m getting old. Time was when you could blow me up, kill my client, a homeless innocent, and a lawyer, and I wouldn’t twitch an eyelash. Tell me where she is—the hostage, too—or I’ll find out just how quick this stuff works.”
He said nothing; but his eyes slid toward the connecting door. They weren’t standing out any farther than cue balls on brown felt.