The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  I used a glass handle and slogged through mint-green carpet to another sheet of glass on thin legs and a pair of human legs between them that hadn’t much more heft. The woman who owned them lowered her magazine, marking her place with a finger, and smiled. She was as thin as her legs. Her cheekbones were painfully obvious and the flat planes of her skull showed under a fringe of glossy black hair. Fannon must have recruited her from the floor of the North American Auto Show in Cobo Hall. Only professional models and concentration camp survivors can be that skinny and live.

  “Yes, Mr. Walker,” she said when I gave her my card. “Mrs. Palmerston is engaged at present, but if you’ll have a seat she’ll come out presently.”

  “Nice vocabulary. Who drilled you, Emil or Gwendolyn?”

  Her smile was skeletal. “Reader’s Digest.” She held up the copy she’d been reading. “Have you ever met a middle-aged receptionist?”

  “No, come to think of it.”

  “They all marry moles in cubicles and retire. Except this one. She’s breaking the chain.”

  I gave her another card. “For you. Remember me when you pass the Bar.”

  Smiling, she tucked it inside the back cover and went back to reading.

  In the reception room a black leather director’s chair put my legs to sleep in five minutes. I got up, watched a plant eat a fly in a brass birdcage big enough to hold a go-go dancer, and inspected the wall art.

  Blow-ups showcased spectacular old local buildings long since gone to wrecking bars and dynamite: the La Salle Hotel, J. L. Hudson’s, the Packard Plant, the original Pontchartrain—which in the impatience of 1920s progress the city had torn down just thirteen years after it was erected, the Olympia Stadium, a lot of structures from before even my grandfather’s time that looked like chandeliers and French pastry. The subliminal message was that had Velocity been up and running then, all those treasures would have been spared.

  Or maybe the pictures had come with one of its acquisitions, and the frames happened to match the molding. The trouble with being a detective is everything has to mean something. I sat back down.

  Miss Thin Mints seemed to find something of interest on every page of her magazine, even the Rosetta ads; but had turned over the back cover with a sigh and directed her attention to the finish on her nails when something buzzed. She didn’t pick up a receiver or flip a switch that I saw, just touched a button in one ear and handed me another of her ghastly smiles. “Mrs. Palmerston will be right out.”

  “Thank you so much.” I wanted to ask if I should rise or touch the floor with my forehead. That rug could choke a porpoise.

  “Mr. Walker? Brita Palmerston. I run the joint.”

  She wasn’t any taller than she had to be, but the monochrome business suit—black, with golden threads running through it—and modest heels gave the impression of female gigantism; I was a little surprised when I got up from my iron maiden and her forehead came just to the bridge of my nose. She had brown hair with coppery highlights she didn’t need. What’s wrong with plain brown? I associated it with good furniture, a stream brimming with trout, mellow whisky, and dark chocolate. I bet when she took out all the pins and let it go it would fall as far as her shoulder blades. The figure was good, the calves muscular where the hem of the skirt caught them, but not so much I didn’t think I could take her at Indian wrestling. I couldn’t tell if she wore hose or tanning lotion on bare legs. Something about her apart from the cool long pour of her businesslike demeanor made me want to take her shoes off and find out for myself.

  Then again, all that might just have been part of the front the place put up. As many civilizations had been built on sex appeal as had been brought down by them.

  “You have gray eyes,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to. Is that bad?”

  “Just unusual. They don’t pass them out with brown hair every day.”

  “Yours are hazel—I think. Darker.” She stepped closer. I felt her body heat before I smelled the light scent she wore. “No; it’s the whites. They’re a bit cloudy.”

  “Mysterious, you mean. Burst vessels. Case closed.”

  I grinned. After a beat, she did, too; if you could call the three inches of teeth she measured out anything so work-inappropriate. “Since this is about Mr. Fannon, perhaps we should use his office.”

  “Yes, let’s. We can compare square footage.”

  I followed her, and her scent, down a broad two-toned hallway plastered with more extinct architecture and through an unmarked door into a two-story flat outfitted for business. Width-wise it wasn’t any bigger than it had to be, but as for tall a working farmer would look at it and think in terms of silage, with sunshine tinkling through a stained-glass skylight at the top.

  Someone had pierced the ceiling to endow a library in the top-floor office that had separated this one from the skylight. A freestanding spiral staircase—an engineering marvel in itself, independent of the law of gravity—led to shelves of tall books with the names of celebrated architects, extinct also, lettered vertically on the metallic jackets. Under this canopy stood a Spanish galleon of a desk, a five-thousand-dollar showpiece in any upscale antiques shop, with claw-and-ball feet; a design I could never understand. Raptors have better things to do than play ball, such as swoop down on small unsuspecting rodents and tear them to pieces. One of the claws was ingrown and swollen. The featherweight computer monitor on the green leather blotter went with that piece of history like a spaceship in Queen Victoria’s dollhouse. All the keys on a combination intercom and telephone were blinking fit to bust.

  A lot of people wanted to get in touch with Carl Fannon. A lot of people were in for a winter of discontent; but for the moment I was the only one in possession of that gem. If I were financially astute I’d have sold out all my stock in Velocity Financing before the run. But if I were financially astute, I’d have owned some.

  The walls were paneled and hung with Renaissance prints in rich colors of titled frog-eyed characters with combs in their hair and lace cuffs, the men clawing away at enormous world globes and the women clutching small slim volumes of poetry bound in red leather. Guess which had steered the course of history?

  Brita Palmerston caught me admiring them. “Mr. Fannon commissioned the photos. He owns the originals; but of course you can’t hang a half-million in oils in a place of business. The insurance company would never stand for it.”

  “He probably keeps them in a vault.”

  I didn’t stress the last word: I wasn’t a player on stage, with the cheap seats at the back to consider. I pretended to study a portrait of a girl in a Bo Peep bonnet carrying a basket of flowers, but I could have saved myself the subterfuge. Brita shrugged a disinterested shrug. “No doubt. Personally, if I were to spend my hard-earned money on something frivolous, I’d want to show it off.”

  “I don’t suppose Mr. Palmerston would object to that.”

  When I turned to face her, there was no evidence that a smile could have fed off that face. “My father was killed in the first Gulf War.”

  “So sorry, on two counts. I thought the ‘Mrs.’ was significant.”

  “My ex-husband went by another name. But when you go back to Miss, the wolves slink out from every crack and hole.” She raised her left hand, ostensibly to push back a stray lock of brown hair. A thin gold band with a small diamond glittered on the usual finger.

  “The sexes aren’t so hard to sort out,” I said. “You just have to think of yourself and go opposite. Men slip off their wedding rings and stick them in a pocket. Women brandish them like a forty-five.”

  Her smile this time was more measured still, the lips tight. “Enough about me, Mr. Walker. Let’s talk about you.”

  NINE

  “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 abou
t 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.

  TEN

  “How could you have come by that text?” she asked. “I sent it yesterday, just before closing. We spend a lot of money securing our communications from the outside.”

  “It isn’t wasted,” I said, “so far as I can tell. I scooped up the communication from where it was addressed.

  “He didn’t make it to China,” I added. “He didn’t make it ten blocks from where we’re sitting. Unless the cops are more on the ball and more subtle about it than usual, he’s lying where I last saw him, collecting dust in a vault in the basement of the Sentinel Building.”

  Somewhere in the world a butterfly landed on a tasty blossom. In downtown Detroit a scrap of understanding drifted onto an office manager.

  “Are you saying Carl Fannon’s dead?”

  “He was as of last night, in the old bank vault in the basement of the Sentinel Building. I won’t go into the details of how I happened to find him there; that’s official business, as soon as the officials catch up to me. Either he got careless or someone helped him. I don’t guess it matters to a man who choked to death.”
/>   She moved then, placing a well-kept hand to her own throat. “You’re wrong. He’s in China.”

  “If you say so. Meanwhile we’ve got the business of how I came by this text.”

  She rearranged the gewgaws on the desk, squaring the green marble pen set with the edge of the blotter, placing the stainless steel letter opener where Fannon’s hand would come to rest on it when it was needed, all these things done with the efficiency of an undertaker attending to the bereaved.

  “The things we do when we don’t know what to say,” I said. “He’s beyond caring how his stuff is arranged.”

  She smacked her hands on the desktop. “You didn’t know him. If I weren’t here to organize things, any potential investor would take one look at the rat’s nest where he worked and leave by the next available elevator.” She raised a hand to each temple, massaging it in circular motions. “Works, I mean; present tense. Now you’ve got me doing it.”

  “I’ve got you believing it. I thought I’d have to go back and take a picture. I doubt it would make it into one of the swanky magazines in your reception area, but it might convince you your boss is dead. Todt. Muerto. Mort. Nekros. No pulse. D-E-A-D.” I spelled it out in sign language. “You know something? With people like you pulling for him he might snap out of it yet.”

  “You’re taking a chance, Walker. If there’s been a murder and you knew about it and didn’t report it, you could be in for a laundry list of criminal charges.”

  “I already am, if the cops think knowing about it twenty-four hours after the fact would do a damn thing toward clearing it up. This wasn’t a fatal carjacking, with some junkie gangbanger spraying clues all over the room like a tomcat. One of the reasons I came here was to pin you down as a suspect or eliminate you entirely. On brief acquaintance I don’t think Nick the Greek would expect you to foam at the mouth and throw this desk at me when I dropped the word ‘vault’ into the conversation. He played poker with his opponents’ faces, not cards. That’s one down, less than a million to go. If the thing spreads outside the city limits, I’m going to have to farm it out; but at least I’ve dealt you out of the deck. I’d say that’s a fair day’s work.”