“There isn’t much to tell,” I said. “Most of it’s on the card I gave the receptionist.”
“You can get only so much on a card. These days, you need both sides just to list all the contact numbers. Here at Velocity we like to know a bit more about the people we do business with than just how to get in touch with them.”
We were sitting facing each other across the desk, which put us as far apart as the doomed American Indian lovers standing on opposite shores of Gitche Gumee. The padded number I sat in was comfortable, but the legs were just short enough to give her the high ground, resting her lovely hands on the arms of a winged tufted-leather chair that almost swallowed her; although if it had tried I had the distinct impression it would be like a bear trying to choke down a porcupine backwards. Just on our brief acquaintance I knew as much about her as I’d spilled about myself. I crossed my legs.
“I’m a private investigator, licensed by the State of Michigan, bottled in bond. I have been since whales had feet. I’m past middle age, but there should be a designation between it and geezer, like ‘young adult’ between teenage punk and mature stuffed shirt. I’ve been in jail a couple of times—okay, four, if you count three hours in holding, which is like dog years if you’ve ever experienced it. I doubt you have. I’ve been shot at, hit twice; the last is still with me and always will be, especially when I don’t live right, which I don’t as a rule. I have some impressive references, but I don’t like to bother them with just anyone calling to verify; otherwise I won’t have them long. I fought for my country, if that means anything these days, and I spent just long enough training for police duty to realize I didn’t belong there. The police agreed. I was married once, but you’ve been there, so I doubt I need go into that.”
“That’s one piece of personal information I wish I’d kept to myself. Tell me something else.”
“I once saw Frank Sinatra walking through Cadillac Square with his bodyguards. He was taller than I thought.”
“Something I’d care to know.”
“That’s the shebang, unless you want to see some scars.”
She passed on that, a bit to my disappointment. “Now that we’re on such intimate terms, tell me what you came to tell Mr. Fannon. Let’s not have any nonsense about confidentiality. I run this office. We can’t all be geniuses or media whores. Someone has to keep track of paper clips and bank deposits. I’m the one who suggested he consult you about Mr. Haas’s disappearance. Have you made any progress in finding him?”
“No,” I said truthfully. If she’d asked if Mr. Haas had found me before I’d begun looking for him, the answer would have been the same, with no truth in it at all. She wasn’t my client. Just then I was carrying so many on my back, one more would put me in traction. “I just wanted to bring Fannon up to speed on all the places I’ve looked where Haas isn’t.”
“I hardly think that would be helpful. Negative information is no information at all.”
“Not so. It takes an honest P.I. to separate negative from positive. The schemers run out that process as far as they can, going over old ground and burning the client’s money. In any case, I’d rather hear it from him. In a pure business sense, Fannon knows Haas better than anyone. Since we spoke yesterday morning, he’s had more time to think about where else I might look.”
“Are you suggesting he held out on you the first time?”
“Not intentionally. It’s like when you’ve had a break-in. In the heat of the moment you call the cops and report what was taken. Then when you’ve had a chance to cool down you start to notice some other things you missed missing the first time. If it’s your class ring from the University of Detroit, that’s something for the insurance company, nobody else. If, say, it’s a file on an employee you let go who might hold a grudge, that’s just the kind of thing a good missing-persons investigator can get his teeth into.
“Something like that,” I added. “I’d rather hear it from him. I’ve no reason to think a benevolent boss like Carl Fannon would have soiled his hands with something so trivial. I’m just opening a new avenue of pursuit.”
“You think cutting off someone’s sole support a trivial matter?”
I’d crossed my legs one direction. Now I crossed them in the other. “Let’s leave management-versus-labor to the folk-singing circuit. Gray matter has a way of spilling over to form gray eyes. You’re intelligent enough to know a hypothetical observation when you hear it. Anyone can overlook something important when he thinks it’s not connected to the matter at hand. It’s my job to see if there’s a connection, or if there isn’t, to run the thing down and eliminate it. I’d rather hear it from him.”
“Do you have to keep saying that?”
“Until I hear from him.”
The monitor on the desk chimed. I might have dismissed it as white noise, the kind of ambient music that scores any office in the twenty-first century, if I hadn’t heard the identical notes coming from Carl Fannon’s wrist-mounted Eniac. A pair of gray eyes flicked toward the monitor, narrowed, smoothed out. She sat back, rubbing the back of one lovely hand with the other. If I had a week to spare I’d have had all her tells in inventory—and probably known no more about what was behind them than I knew at that moment.
“I’m afraid we’re talking in circles, Mr. Walker. Until Mr. Fannon’s plane touches down and I can reach him—notwithstanding the time spent collecting his luggage and finding transportation to his hotel, and the dozen or so calls he’ll place en route—we can go no further.”
I recrossed my legs. Having a hole card is no good unless you know when to play it. I took a chance.
“What makes you so sure he’s in China?”
“It’s a long flight by any standards, with any number of possible delays. I can’t be certain he’s there until he touches base.”
To hell with it. I began laying out my hand.
“I imagine he’ll do that as soon as he gets the text you sent him.”
Three thin creases etched themselves against her perfect brow. “What text are you talking about?”
I’d been called; the time had come to spread out my cards. I uncrossed my legs, drew my notepad from my inside breast pocket, turned it to the page I’d written on most recently, and showed it to her.
Brita Palmerston didn’t move her lips when she read. If she had, I’d have given up my last shred of faith in whatever instincts I’d developed in the course of my calling. But I followed a pair of gray eyes as they read the lines I’d copied from the screen on the face of Carl Fannon’s wristwatch. Nothing of shattering import, in the text itself; just the text itself:
CALL C.F. THE MOMENT YOU LAND.
BP
I said, “C.F. is Cecil Fish, I assume. He’s the worm in Velocity’s salad. He’d be a worm even without the greens. I’m assuming the other set of initials belongs to you; unless Fannon’s interested in acquiring British Petroleum.”
I sat back as it sank in, flipping shut my pad. I felt like Kreskin, only without the sense of triumph. On further consideration, I felt like a state trooper informing a worried mother he’d just unwrapped her teenage son from around a light pole on I-94.