What do you do with eleven hours to kill and no more credit at the corner liquor store?
I hadn’t had work in a month. The Internet had swooped in and snatched up all the jobs I used to do, free of charge. You could track down an old high school sweetheart, a deadbeat dad, your great-great-great-grandfather’s crib in the Old Country, complete with a virtual walking tour of his thatched hut. No phone time, no embarrassing conversation with a stranger, and best of all no bill. A couple more months like the last and I’d be calling people up at suppertime pitching time shares in New Mexico.
I could get a computer and learn to use it, but what was the point, if everyone else had one? My special skills were all I had to offer, and anyone with a tablet thought he had them already.
Oh, there was work to be had, as long as there were people left who cared about privacy. The concept itself was alien to a generation that posted its bong parties on Facebook and trashed the boss for everyone to read on the social network. Spouses went missing, sons and daughters too, and the clients in those cases weren’t interested in sharing the details with the neighborhood gossip. There was enough of that sort of work to keep me in cigarettes and sandwiches for the rest of my span, if I kept to a carton a week and didn’t look too closely at what went into the bologna.
I couldn’t remember when was the last time an Arabian princess had smuggled herself into my office rolled up in an Oriental rug or an accountant for the mob had sent me a stack of ledgers by parcel post To Be Called For or I’d found a tarantula swimming laps in my bowl of Frosted Flakes. My daily dose of danger had become a seasonal thing.
On the other hand, I couldn’t remember when was the last time I’d landed two clients in one day, and it was only mid-morning. That they both had to do with the same case belonged in that column with the widow in Sioux Falls who’d hit the Powerball for millions twice. Or maybe it cut the odds to fifty-fifty; if I were good at math I’d know the probabilities against making a living in my profession.
She had nothing on me, though, that old lady in South Dakota. My telephone rang before Emil Haas reached the street.
“A. Walker Investigations.”
“Amos Walker, please.” A woman’s voice, mezzo range.
“Speaking.”
“Oh.”
That was the usual reaction. I never knew what that meant, whether the caller was expecting a cool female receptionist or a menu: Press One for Cheating Spouse, Two for Crooked Partner, Three for Foreign Assassinations, Four for Credit Checks. Some kind of go-between. I should get one, but I don’t think the building could handle another landline.
Whatever it was, she recovered herself in a heartbeat. “My name is Gwendolyn Haas. My father is Emil Haas. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”
I’d lit a cigarette before lifting the receiver. It burned to my fingers while I picked up the new yellow pencil. “Spell it, please.”
* * *
She was a redhead; the genuine article, unlike the cranberry-dyed specimen at the radio station. The complexion’s always the giveaway, blue-white, like skim milk, something inherited from her father; if Emil Haas was her father. At first glance I was inclined to put that one on the back burner. She treated my door like a door, not like a possibly threatening stranger she had to maneuver her way around, and the olive-green suit she wore made an expert combination with her deep auburn bob and brilliant green eyes. She was just the least bit too thick in the waist and broad in the hips for my taste, but I wasn’t trolling for feminine companionship that season.
She slid out the customer’s chair with nothing like the effort Emil Haas had put into it, sat down, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on a burgundy leather handbag with a gold clasp and no designer label in sight. It was just big enough to hold the usual items and a Glock Nine, but not a sleeping bag and a bazooka.
“Gwendolyn Haas,” I greeted; “on approval.”
“What’s that mean?” It was the same voice I’d heard on the phone. The choir director would place her in the back row opposite the altos.
“I’d like to see some ID. I’ve been fooled before.”
“Oh, for—” But she jerked open the handbag and passed over a plastic folder containing a driver’s license and two credit cards. She’d smiled for the photographer at the Secretary of State’s office, but the specimen in front of me passed just the same. I thanked her and handed back the folder.
“What can I do for you, Miss Haas? Or is it Ms.? I’m rusty on Emily Post and divorce.”
“Who’s Emily Post?”
“A woman I investigated for murdering all her husbands. When she served fish she put the arsenic in white wine.”
“Miss is fine.”
“That’s fine. I’m fine, too. Everything’s fine.”
“Are you all right?”
“I will be, I hope. I’ve had a shock. Apparently it’s ongoing.”
She didn’t like that. That was also fine. I didn’t like her either, on no evidence at all. Life can be like that. I stopped questioning it a long time ago.
“My father stood me up for lunch last week. I’m used to that, but I don’t have to enjoy it. I stewed about it all weekend, then when I couldn’t reach him at his home I tried his office. His partner, Carl Fannon, said he’d get back to me, and when he didn’t, I called back. The office manager said he was away on business. She didn’t want to tell me anything else, but I kept at her until she got exasperated and said I should talk to you. I thanked her and said good-bye.”
“As long as everything’s civil.”
“It’s an ordeal. Those cool perfect beauties rub me the wrong way. Everything in this world just falls into their laps.”
“Not Brita’s fault. It’s hereditary, like money.”
She really didn’t like that, and almost said so. She changed her mind. “How’d you know her name’s Brita?”
“I’m a detective.”
“If you’ve spoken with her, you must be working for Velocity. You know, it’s no wonder you don’t have a nicer office in a better neighborhood. You can’t get much business treating customers the way you do.”
“You’re not a customer yet. I’m sorry, Miss Haas, but I can’t discuss current work with just anybody. If you’re worried about your father, I’ll be glad to ask around.”
“Wouldn’t that be taking money from two different clients doing the same work? Is that ethical?”
I grinned and lit a cigarette. She didn’t like that either, but she didn’t say anything about the state law regarding places of business. I disliked her a little less for that. “You ought to apply for a license,” I said. “If making a bald end run like that ever works.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I defended opening a missing-persons investigation on someone I was already looking for, you’d conclude I’ve been hired to look for your father. If I fell for that one, I wouldn’t be able to pay the freight on even this hole. The police can do what I do better and without charge, but their records are public property. That’s what put the private in ‘private detective.’”
Even I thought that was harsh. I put out the butt and fanned the smoke away from the vicinity. “Let’s start over, shall we?”
“Let’s.”
“When was the last time you saw your father?”
When she screwed up her face to think, freckles dived into the creases. “A month, I should say. He’s been busy on some deal. That’s nothing new, of course; there’s always something big doing at Velocity, but this one must be more important than most, because I usually hear from him more regularly, usually briefly and by phone. We go out to lunch—when he remembers—and he tries to be the concerned parent when life hasn’t been good to me. He was the rock I leaned on during my divorce, giving me moral support and offering to help me out financially, without bad-mouthing the other party or worse, reminding me I should have listened to his advice the first time. Of course, he had his own failures in that department, but I try to cut him some slack on the other. Like a lot of people with so much going on upstairs, he doesn’t find much room in it for social bonding.”
All I’d asked was when she’d seen him last.
“I’m worried,” she said. “He’s not quite the absentminded genius who can suss out the mistakes in Newton’s theory of the universe and gets lost changing buses, but the cutthroats he traffics with in the world of mergers and acquisitions have nothing on the sort of people who cut your throat for real. For all I know he pulled into an alley to argue a clause in some contract and got himself carjacked while he was too busy texting to pay attention to what was going on around him.”
“You tried to reach him?”
“Of course. He doesn’t answer any of his phones or messages, and when I went to see him at his condo on the river I wore out my thumb on the doorbell. His neighbors weren’t any help; he’s only been living there a few weeks, and it’s the kind of building where everyone’s forted up in his own affairs.”
She’d taken a handkerchief from her bag; not to wipe away tears she hadn’t shed, but just to have something to twist between her hands. Ten thousand dollars in orthodontia gnawed at her lower lip. Of a sudden she seemed to realize what she was doing, stopped both operations, and looked directly at me. “I saw your display in the Yellow Pages; I had to turn my place upside down to see if I still had one. You don’t advertise online. You specialize in tracing people, so I thought—”
“I also check credit histories and guard the gift table at weddings in Grosse Pointe. This isn’t New York or L.A.; there isn’t so much work lying around I can afford to turn up my nose at anything, except divorce cases.” I used a little finger to rearrange the butts in the tray so they didn’t re-ignite one another, and in the doing made a decision.
“It so happens I am working for your father’s partner. If in the course of talking to the people I have to talk to and going to the places I have to go I learn anything about Emil Haas, I’ll pass it along—after I’ve filed my report. Will that do?”
“It’s better than nothing. Oh!” She opened the bag again and rummaged around inside.
“No charge,” I said. “You’d be surprised what a fellow can make sitting on a toaster oven in Barbie’s Dreamhouse on Lake Shore Drive. The people that boost those places aren’t the same lunks that drive pickups into gas stations and make off with the ATM, so I hike my rates when I cross Eight Mile Road.”
“Who,” she said.
“Say again?”
“It’s ‘people who,’ not ‘people that.’ I make my living teaching grammar to professional communicators. I work, despite that crack you made about inherited wealth.”
She was her father’s daughter, all right; it was my second English lesson that day. “If you start splicing my infinitives, I may change my mind about a fee.”
She produced a checkbook.
“Joke,” I said. “You’re right about my sense of humor. It’s a plus on the street and a minus in the parlor.”
She dropped it back into the bag and snapped shut the clasp. “Is it possible I’ve misjudged you?”
“I hope so, Miss Haas. The job’s easier when people do. That’s another reason I don’t keep a ficus in the office or the office in Bloomfield Hills.”
She gave me a number in the Oakland County exchange and an address in a suburb I had to wash and wax my car in to keep the local cops off my rear bumper. When she went out, leaving me with an aroma of night-blooming berries I hadn’t noticed all the time she was there, I sat back and looked at my watch. The hands were straight up. The day was only half over and I had more work than I’d seen since the last snow.