“What’s that?”
“Who knows? Intellectually speaking, she’s out of my league, and I don’t know anyone loony enough to predict what crackpot plan B she’s got in mind.”
“I don’t like it,” he said. “I’m always suspicious when a theory fits the facts. All we need now is evidence.”
I almost said, I think I know where we can get it. I was tired, and I have a bad habit of talking in my sleep.
THIRTY-TWO
I woke up famished, rare event. All that talk about breakfast being the most important meal of the day clashes with all the talk about not eating when you’re not hungry. But there’s nothing like surviving a gun battle for jacking up the appetite. My stomach was doing cartwheels, happy to be secreting all its juices instead of spilling them out through a hole.
I’d slept, after a fashion. I kept hearing gunshots ringing off bare brick walls, seeing muzzle flashes and trying to return fire, but when the trigger didn’t pull I looked down at the gun in my hand, and it was a museum piece, like the flintlocks and Springfield rifles in the military museum; the parts were all fused solid. I kept waking up from that one, then sliding right back in, and then I didn’t want to go back to sleep, so I thought a hole into the bedroom ceiling until there was enough light to show me the little hairline cracks in the plaster.
The telephone rang while I was frying eggs in bacon grease. I slid them onto a plate to finish cooking on their own and picked up in the living room.
“You didn’t call, so I thought I’d call you. This is the postfeminist era, right?” It was Smoke.
“Been boning up on the Mesozoic, I see.” I yawned it.
“Am I calling too early?”
“No, I’m just shot.” I chuckled.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing at all. I’m giddy. I was up late.” My stomach growled. “Hang on a minute.”
I laid down the receiver, went back into the kitchen, topped off my cup from the pot, came back carrying it and the eggs, and sat in the armchair, cradling the receiver between my head and my shoulder as I ate.
“What’s for breakfast?” she asked.
“Unborn chickens stewed in cholesterol. You?”
“I never eat before noon.”
“Good for you.”
“What are you doing today?”
“Working.”
“Oh.” Pouty word. “I thought I might talk you into playing hooky and spending the day with me.”
“Maybe this afternoon.”
“What’s so important you’re up at the butt-crack of dawn?”
“I need to check something.”
“Come with?”
“Sorry.”
“Dangerous?”
“God, I hope not. But the less people know about it, the better it is for everyone all around.”
“Now you’ve piqued my interest. I’ll be quiet, I promise. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“Like hell I won’t.”
She made a throaty sound I felt in my testicles. “Well, maybe part of the time.”
“Rain check.”
“Hey, mister, I’m—”
“Lay off, Amber Dawn.”
“Whoa! Serious crap.”
“Call me after you eat.” I said good-bye through a mouthful and hung up. Shaving later after my shower, I looked at my reflection above the sink. “Stud.”
*
Before I went out I gave the .38 a good cleaning, turned the cylinder and dry-fired it to make sure all the moving parts worked. It had had some rough handling the night before, and the thing about nightmares is they come true more often than sweet dreams. I put in fresh loads and went out into what promised to be the first decent day of spring, with the sun turning the frost on the winter-killed lawn into dew. I thought I heard a bird singing, but it turned out to be a sanitation truck backing up in the next block.
It was still too early for guest activity at the Book-Cadillac Hotel. A vacuum whined in the lobby and the clerk behind the desk was doing his morning organizing in slo-mo. He didn’t look up as I crossed to the elevators.
There were four of them, three standing open. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Even in the Motor City there’s always an early riser getting set to go out for a run.
I got out on the floor where the agents from GOLEM had brought me from the car wash. Their room was to the left, but I turned right. A sharp stubborn stench clung to the constantly recirculating air in the hallway. It was like a burnt match held close to the nostrils, only not quite. It’s not quite like anything but what it is.
The elevator next to the one I’d used stood with its doors open; they have electric eyes now to keep them from closing when there’s an obstruction. I recognized the tan suitcoat on the back of the man who lay between them with one arm outside the car. A carton of unfiltered Camels lay just outside his reach, one end sticking out of the plastic drugstore bag in his hand.
The sulphur smell was stronger as I approached. Captain Asa Leibowitz lay on his chest with his head turned to one side, a tired, baggy profile against the sculptured carpet. His other hand was nowhere near his revolver, an Israeli knockoff similar to my Smith & Wesson but chambered for nine-millimeter, stuck in a clip on his belt where his coattail had fallen away from it. It was much smaller than his partner’s Desert Eagle, but it packed plenty of punch, when you had the chance to use it.
He hadn’t. The car had stopped, the doors had opened, and someone had been standing there waiting. There were no stains on the back of his coat. No exit wound meant a relatively small caliber. Well, it had been effective against Tony Pirandello at much greater range.
The skin of his neck was still warm. I thought at first I’d found something going on in the carotid, but that was just my own rapid pulse bouncing off dead tissue.
THIRTY-THREE
I frisked him and found his key card tucked between U.S. and Israeli currency in a square wallet he carried in his hip pocket.
There was no time to waste. I didn’t know who might have heard the shot or how long it would take him to decide he hadn’t dreamed it and call the desk, and the hotel was too respectable to put off calling the law after security investigated. I’d missed the killer by minutes, or I’d be hearing sirens already. We’d passed each other while I was on the way up.
Stepping lively, I turned the corner—and stopped in front of the Israelis’ door with the key card pointed at the slot. The smell of burnt powder was nearly as strong as it had been in front of the elevator. Instinctively I looked at my feet. Something yellow glittered between fibers in the carpet; an empty brass shell. I didn’t pick it up to look at it. I knew it would belong to a .30-caliber weapon.
Something was wrong with the glass peephole. All the others on that floor reflected light from the sconces in the hallway, but this one was dark. I settled the point by sticking my finger through it. No glass.
I knew what had happened then. I could map it out. I drew the Chief’s Special, knowing I wouldn’t need it but glad to feel its solid grip, tripped the lock with the card, and wheeled inside with the door to avoid being framed in the opening, just like swinging on a garden gate.
All the lamps were on. I smelled the humidity of the shower; that pair was strong on personal hygiene. But Major Lazara Dorn was fully dressed, in what I assume was the same suit she’d worn when she got the drop on me in the car wash, a smaller number than Leibowitz’s but from the same lot. She’d had it cleaned and pressed, but it did no justice to the graceful lines of her slender body. She lay on her back, in her stockinged feet, her coat and blouse rucked up to expose a narrow navel in a flat belly, her big semiautomatic lying two feet from her hand where it had landed when she let go. She’d been cautious enough to bring it along when she answered a knock at the door, but unwise enough to look through the peephole to see who was on the other side, just as she had when room service came my first time there. This time the visitor had fired through the hole, straight into her right eye. Her head was
turned that direction so I didn’t see the empty socket. I let it stay that way. I thought of her eyes, gray-blue with no mascara on the lashes.
I didn’t hang around long enough to look around. I hadn’t time, and there wasn’t any point. The killer wouldn’t have entered the room, but gone directly to the elevator and waited for Leibowitz to return with Dorn’s cigarettes. It had to have been in that order. An ejected shell meant a semiautomatic, a self-contained firearm, unlike a leaky revolver; all the noise would come out the end of the barrel, therefore inside the room, where it would be muffled from the neighbors. Assuming a suppressor wasn’t used, the second report, in an open hallway, might have drawn attention, requiring a quick exit on the part of the shooter.
That part was confirmed when I opened the door and heard the elevator bell ring on that floor. Whoever had called the desk had taken a few moments to decide the noise he’d heard was real, then several more to decide to do something about it. I eased the door into its frame until the latch caught, then went the other direction and took the stairs to the lobby, following the same escape route as the killer. At ground level I wiped both sides of the key card against my pants and flipped it through the hole in the bullet-shaped trash container next to the fire door. The cops could make what they liked of that, if the search was thorough.
*
Driving away from there, nicking lights and ignoring horns, I shook out my cell and called a number I’d recently committed to memory.
“Hi, you’ve got Smoke. Well, her disembodied voice. You know the drill.”
I waited for the beep, then told her to barricade herself in her apartment and not answer her door for anyone but me. When she didn’t pick up, I feared the worst, a tactic that’s worked for me over the years. I ended the call and speed-dialed Alderdyce’s cell.
When he came on I gave him as much as I could on the fly. There wasn’t anything to be gained by throwing wraps over the Israelis anymore. He was professional enough to take in the information and defer the usual threats about withholding evidence for another time.
“So you think these spooks had Elysian Fields under surveillance when the manager was murdered?” he asked when I finished.
“It doesn’t make sense any other way. Somehow Sing found out about Dorn and Leibowitz and now she’s cleaning up after herself. She’s getting ready to light out, or she wouldn’t be working so fast: First Tony, now the Israelis. You’d better jack up the security around Yummy. He may be next.”
“More likely you. You’re the easier mark. She just missed a twofer last night, and she’s past cute tricks like ringing in a phony Cecelia Wynn to take you off the case.”
“I’m still not sure why she went to the trouble. Maybe she thought I’d be one murder too many at that early stage. But there’s an easier mark yet.” I told him about Smoke Wygonik.
“What makes you think she can turn Sing? If it’s Sing. Unless you let her sign a false statement about her boss’s killing.”
“I didn’t coach her. I don’t think she knows anything. But somehow Sing found out about my interest in Cecelia Wynn; I think Smoke told her, or someone sent by her, and Sing needs to close that loophole. I’m on my way there now, but—”
“I’ll send a car. What’s her address?”
I gave it to him and punched off. My phone chirped then. I had a message.
“Hey, it’s Smoke. I just got in with a rotisserie chicken and a bottle of wine. Nice day for an indoor picnic, don’t you think? What’s this about locking myself in?”
Just then I was turning the corner onto Orleans, so I didn’t call her back. I left the Cutlass rocking on its springs by the curb and climbed the steps to the converted warehouse where she lived. There was no police cruiser in sight yet, but I’d had a head start on the fleet.
She buzzed me into the building and I rode the elevator up, revolver in hand; that might be the way I would ride them from now on. When the doors opened and no one shot at me I trotted between the unfinished walls to her door.
She opened it without asking who’d knocked. She wasn’t even holding her homemade bludgeon with the nail sticking out of the end.
I holstered the .38. “I told you to make sure—”
She swung the door wide, turning away from the opening in the same movement. Charlotte Sing was sitting in one of the unmatching armchairs. Her stockinged legs were crossed and a slim P-38 rested on her knee with her tiny hand wrapped around the butt.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Come in, Mr. Walker. Need I explain a gun in the hand is worth two on the hip?”
She looked like a porcelain doll in a Shanghai junk shop, but she didn’t sound like anyone who might have modeled for it. Everyone who speaks English has an accent of some kind, depending on place of birth or environment; everyone but Madam Sing. She had inflections, there was nothing mechanical about her, but an army of coaches had worked on her speech, perfecting its shape, the way a master cabinetmaker hand-rubs mahogany until the surface is flawless. It had an eerie effect, on me at least. Just hearing it slowed my pulse and lowered my body temperature to ninety-seven.
Of course, the speaker herself might have had something to do with that. She was wanted for capital crimes in most of the countries of the world, and she’d never spent a moment in the backseat of a police car. Her fingerprints and DNA were in no one’s file. The most recent photograph anyone had of her had been taken twenty years ago, when she’d applied for her passports: plural. She had more of them under different names than a deck has cards.
You could recognize her from that likeness, as old as it was. She was somewhere north of sixty, but cosmetic procedures, glandular injections, and a health regimen that made Cecelia Wynn’s herbal pills seem like a triple cheeseburger kept her a well-preserved forty, always and forever.
I didn’t wait for the order. I stepped inside far enough for Smoke to close the door, fished out the Chief’s Special between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, and laid it on a gateleg table, one of the items Smoke had furnished the place with from thrift stores. I stepped away from it.
“I’m sorry, Amos. She was here when I got back from the market. Who is she?”
“My poor manners.” The Amerasian relaxed her grip on the Walther, but kept her hand resting on top of it. “The name I was born with is difficult for most Americans to pronounce. You may call me Charlotte Sing—a bastard combination of my two nationalities, but convenient. I’m usually addressed as Madam. I don’t insist on it. My business is investments and imports.”
Smoke jumped on it. “You’re a smuggler?”
Sing smiled at me. “An intelligent young woman. You continue to impress me with your taste. A smuggler: Why not? It has a piratical ring I like.”
She was wearing a tailored suit, a muted rose, with a blazer that buttoned in the middle and a skirt that caught her just above midcalf, red patent-leather heels on her feet. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, blue-black and swept to one side. Knowing her, it would all be up to the current fashion, and expensive enough to feed a village in her native South Korea. Being an international fugitive wasn’t so hectic she couldn’t keep abreast.
A gauze patch made a triangular interruption above her left temple where the hair was shaved. Had I fired two inches to her right the night before, this meeting would never have taken place.
“It was heroin, last time,” I said. “Before that, it was human organs on the black market. Dope again, now. You’re repeating yourself in your dotage.”
If that hit home—and it should have, considering how much she’d spent in the war on gravity—she didn’t show it. “You should know by now I never do exactly the same thing twice. When we spoke most recently, the drugs were a weapon, to undermine your precious society. They’re still a means to an end, a pedestrian one this time. I need cash.”
Smoke made an unladylike noise. She was dressed for the street, in a blue V-neck blouse, artfully faded jeans, and ankle boots. A green parka with a fake-fur lining
lay across one arm of the sofa, next to a table holding up a woven cotton grocery sack. The neck of a bottle of white wine stuck out above the top. Her hair was loose, a little flyaway from static electricity. I couldn’t see what color her eyes had chosen that moment. She was looking at her uninvited guest. “So you’re a mule. I expected something more exotic.”
“The young are so cynical. They haven’t earned that privilege.” She was talking for her, but not to her. “Every campaign needs funding from time to time. At the moment I’m down to my last hundred million. It doesn’t go as far as it used to.”
“Don’t knock it, Charlotte,” I said. “You’ve come a long way from the hook shop.”
Now she looked at Smoke. “Mr. Walker’s referring to my unpaid internship. I came to this country to join my father; not one of the Few Good Men, I’m sorry to say. He sold me into slavery. By the time I was fourteen, I knew every way there was to please a man. I should be grateful, I suppose. I used what I’d learned to make a profitable match, which I parlayed.”
“You ran a good string,” I said. “Right up until the World Bank froze all your accounts.”
“Fortunately, I had the foresight to put a little aside. Enough, anyway, to buy my way into my current partnership.”
Monomaniacs can’t resist talking about themselves. I encouraged it. I’d been there less than five minutes, although it seemed longer. I didn’t know what time to expect the squad car Alderdyce was sending. “What happened at Elysian Fields?” I asked.
“Petty greed, and a mistake on my part. It’s not always good policy to keep the help in the dark. If I’d told him a portion of my plan, cut him in for a share of what he thought were the profits, he might have reconsidered selling so-called medical marijuana to pad his paycheck. I don’t live in the past, however. I took steps.”
“Lady, you’ve lived in the past so long you could use it as your voting address. Anybody else would’ve moved on after he made a billion off gambling and prostitution and human trafficking. You had to throw in with every crackpot who thinks the Statue of Liberty’s a middle finger to the rest of the world. So you had the manager killed—or maybe you did it yourself, like you did Tony Pirandello—but before you could dispose of the body, the cops raided the place and found him. That burned your plan to use the health-food store as your base of North American operations. That was kind of too bad, because that little deal you pulled, substituting Alison Garland for Cecelia Wynn to get my nose out of your business, that was sweet. More like the old Madam Sing.”
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 20