The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  “So on top of nursing a hero complex I’m a blackmailer. What’s to stop me from finding this Frank person myself? I have the resources, as you said.”

  “You don’t know what he looks like, or if Frank is his name. You could comb the neighborhood for a month, and all you’d get is the runaround, even if you pay for the information. They might not know who you’re asking about. That refrigerator-box crowd isn’t as close as in the days of the hobo jungle. Or he might be a drifter already on his way to Denver in the back of a furniture van. Without a good physical description, you’ve got as much chance of finding him and breaking this case as you have of beating a real tennis player on a real court.”

  He slung the towel around his neck and hung on to both ends. “So why aren’t you looking for him right now and breaking the case yourself? As I recall, you could stand to make a few brownie points with the authorities yourself.”

  “I stand to make more by keeping my nose out of an open investigation. All I’m interested in is doing what Fannon hired me for, finding Haas, and earning his twenty hearing what he has to say.”

  “I’d like to hear it myself.” He stepped over to the window, and reached under the sill. Something clicked. In a little while the door opened and the pudgy feller came in, tucking his shirttail inside his pants. He was carrying his nifty portable phone.

  FOURTEEN

  The young feller’s name was Richard, and it turned out he wasn’t so young. He’d spent just enough time in medical college to find out he hadn’t the stomach for it, three years’ apprentice under a CPA until that party shipped out to Uruguay with a Cayman Island bank account number sewed inside his coat, dumb cluck that he was; Uruguay has an understanding with the U.S., and he’d spent most of what he’d chiseled fighting extradition. That was when Richard got the bright idea that his future lay in the law.

  “Not that I plan to spend my life there,” he’d said, while he was waiting for his phone to upload or whatever. “Most people in public office have an LLD.”

  Cecil Fish, who’d excused himself to shower after leaving specific instructions, came back on the end of this, pink as a tulip and wearing a taupe summer suit that looked as light as silk pajamas, moss-colored moccasins on his bare feet. He smelled of baby powder and the kind of cologne you put on with an eyedropper. “Most people in public office don’t share their life stories with strangers.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young man blushed to the ends of his fingers, then punched a key with one. “Here it is.”

  I held out my hand for it, but his boss snatched it from him, peered at it, then turned the screen my way.

  “‘Peaceable Shore,’” I read. “It sounds like the first line of a haiku. What’s it mean?”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t be sharing it. I’m hoping to make finding out part of our deal. You’re something of a bloodhound, if I remember right. It came up on Velocity’s e-mail correspondence, as a heading. They thought the account they used was impregnable, but even so it showed up just once and for less than thirty seconds before it vanished. I have to think it was read immediately and just as immediately deleted. In any case it was worth a fishing expedition—not to put the squeeze on him, but to see by his reaction if it was worth more digging on my part.”

  “How’d you get past Velocity’s security?”

  “My methods are my own. Rest assured they’re legal. The Internet depends on the airwaves, and the FCC says those belong to the public. Some judges aren’t so sure; but then when an independent moviemaker copied The Great Train Robbery scene-for-scene in 1903, the judge who heard the case ruled that since the original film wasn’t physically stolen, there was no theft involved. The medium was new. So’s the World Wide Web. I expect to be in my grave many years before it’s ironed out. But I’m not dead yet.”

  “Okay, you hacked it. I’m not on the grid, so I should care. I’m not convinced two words that don’t mean anything to any of us is worth what I offered in return.”

  “I don’t know that what you offered is worth what I just gave you.” He uncovered the headstones. “We’re just two farmers trading pigs in a poke, aren’t we?”

  “Why don’t I spend a day or so on it, then if it goes ding get back to you?”

  “What do you think, Richard?”

  “What do you want me to think, Mr. Fish?”

  He looked back at me. “You see, Richard agrees with me. Out with it, Walker; or I call the locals and charge you with blackmail. You came here under a fictitious name, intending to shake me down for some fuzzy connection to Carl Fannon’s murder. It so happens I spent last night on Mackinac Island, attending a political convention. I’m sure you heard of it. It was on every station.”

  “Make it stick,” I said.

  “I can’t. But until whoever you fall back on in these situations habeases you out; well, you know Iroquois Heights.” He leaned forward and placed his hands tightly over Richard’s ears. The assistant’s face assumed a torturous grin, as if he’d gone through it all before. “You’ve pissed blood in the past, I’m sure,” Fish whispered. “But none of us is getting any younger. Our kidneys don’t bounce back like tennis balls anymore.”

  I grinned. I like my kidneys as well as anyone, but I’d already decided to tell him what he wanted. I just wanted to see if he was as miserable a son of a bitch as he used to be, and that was worth seeing the performance. I didn’t buy that he’d found out about Peaceable Shore from the Internet. Postmodern technology spreads its legs for anyone, and it’s just too easy to blame every little spill on that. I didn’t buy it, but I was willing to rent it for the moment. Put two innocuous words together and they bent back the other direction. Put those two particular words together and they rang a note that I hadn’t heard for so long I’d almost forgotten it; but it hurt an eardrum as if someone had tapped the mastoid with a tuning fork.

  Couldn’t be. I put the thought so far out of my head I felt like you do when you forget something important and your brain goes pleasantly blank, as if the thing had never been an issue. The human brain is like that, wiping out something too horrible for your emotions to accept: Freud’s vacuum cleaner.

  I made a show of getting out my notebook, but I hadn’t recorded anything in it about Frank the wiener man; I hadn’t thought him worth the trouble at the time. I described him from memory.

  Richard looked up from the keyboard he was typing on. “Who’s Edmund Fitzgerald?”

  “I’ll buy you the Gordon Lightfoot album,” Fish said. “You’re sure the tattoo was permanent?”

  “A man who lives on ground-up hog snouts doesn’t spend a lot of time soaking and peeling decals.”

  The young man was still pecking away. He seemed to be taking down the entire conversation. “I can print up flyers, distribute them among the interns. They can pass them around the homeless, offer what, fifty dollars if one turns him up?”

  “Ten’s plenty. They sleep with one eye open just to make sure they don’t wake up naked. No sense keeping them awake around the clock.” He looked at his watch. “Hightail it down to Frank Murphy Hall before it lets out for lunch. Take my car. Don’t strip the gears. Ask for Roger Hurst. He sketches most of the trials where they don’t let in cameras. Give him a hundred to break any appointments he’s got this afternoon. Some of those bums can’t read or don’t know English. Don’t come back without him.”

  Richard frowned at “bums,” but got it all down.

  Fish looked at me. “You don’t mind hanging around to see he captures your man on paper.”

  “One hour in the Heights is already more than enough.”

  That was another thing I remembered about him, the color his face turned when the world didn’t turn properly to suit him. Liverish, it used to be called, and it was an apt description. Now it’s something else, probably no longer congestion; which is a word I associated with what happens in the outbound lanes when the whistle blows and everyone’s in a hurry to get the hell out of Detroit, for which who can blame them?
I’d been trying for forty years. But I’d dressed out my share of deer and stowed enough warm livers in the pouch I carried in my hunting coat to recognize that shade of purple.

  Just short of the blowup I took a stiff folded sheet out of a pocket and snapped it open. The charcoal sketch was faithful to Frank, right down to the shipwreck on his chest. “The son of an old client majors in Art at Wayne State. I stopped by his dorm on the way.”

  * * *

  I got away from there a little after three-thirty. The sheriff’s car I’d seen earlier or one like it picked me up on the main stem and followed me long enough to run the plate, then boated down a side street; I’d hit a pothole full of mud a couple of days ago, hadn’t stopped for a wash, and my car wasn’t made in the right decade for the local dress code, but I didn’t have any unpaid tickets or warrants outstanding and the deputy’s shift was almost over. For a block and a half there I’d worn my shoulders up around my ears. But for once I crossed the city limits without leaving any brain cells behind. Things were looking up.

  I didn’t know if Peaceable Shore meant anything. I hoped it didn’t mean what it might. At the very least I’d fobbed off investigating a homicide on someone who actually enjoyed chronic heartburn. At the very, very least I’d done the wiener man a good turn. He’d probably work a deal to swap out for whatever story he had to tell, spend a couple of hours in an air-conditioned room, maybe get a meal and a drink and a change of socks and underwear and enough cash to upgrade to Oscar Mayer for a week.

  That’s if he hadn’t spun me and when he took up a big enough collection he’d upgrade to high-grade heroin instead. That thought put a cloud across my rosy dawn.

  FIFTEEN

  I stopped back at the office just long enough to call Barry Stackpole. He was as high-tech as they came, but refused to discuss anything confidential over a cell: Walmart scanners pick up those conversations all the time. It was another example of the applied paranoia that had kept him alive all these years. At its height, he’d carried his toothbrush to new quarters once every few days.

  After five rings the recording kicked in offering to repeat-dial when my party was available. I hung up. Another thing Barry never did was use an answering machine.

  The bottom had fallen out of the city, dumping traffic in all directions. I crawled along with it and pulled into my garage just shy of five, ran some water into a glass in the kitchen and filled it the rest of the way from the bottle I kept in the cabinet above the sink. Municipal water direct from the tap is a hell of a thing to do to good liquor, but I was out of ice and feeling too frail to drink it straight.

  In the living room sitting in the only comfortable chair in the house I watched the news. A container ship and an Asian airliner were missing, the Middle East had taken another step back into the eleventh century, a priest was under indictment for building a thirty-room mansion from the poor fund, a movie star had come out of the closet, and a pitchers’ duel between the Tigers and the Blue Jays was threatening to bleed into football season. The rerun channel was playing a loud sitcom from the seventies. The rest was all zombies, all the time. I switched off the set and picked up the phone. This time Barry answered.

  “Peaceable Shore,” he said. “Sounds like a cult. Nothing else?”

  “You know how it is. Some days the leads come in gushers, others like cheese fermenting.”

  “It has a generic sound. Probably get a hundred hits.”

  “So would my source, which is why he palmed it off on me so easy. But he didn’t have the association I have with it, so it might not have clicked with him.”

  “Who’s the source?”

  “Our old friend Cecil Fish.”

  “Oh, Christ. What’s the association?”

  I told him. He said Oh Christ again. “Impossible. I witnessed her execution through the pirate feed from North Korea, along with millions of others.”

  “Me, too, along with millions more, cleaned up on TV for the squeamish. But these days you can’t trust your eyes. They can fake the Ayatollah scarfing down the blue plate special at Bob Evans and fool all his wives.”

  “Forensics experts were sent from every country that issued warrants. They came back satisfied.”

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  “DNA samples checked.”

  “I heard.”

  “Couldn’t be her,” he said.

  “Couldn’t be her,” I said.

  “Jesus, do you think it’s her?”

  “Can you deliver or not?”

  “Have I ever let you down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just what the hell are you working on, Amos?”

  “I’m sitting on that for now.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, you son of a bitch.” He said he’d call back and the conversation ended.

  I cradled the receiver, grinning. You can trust some people with money, others with your girl, and maybe one or two with your life; you can rarely trust any one of them with all those things, but I trusted Barry with them. But when it came to information, he’d pry open the poor box to buy it. I’d known him as a war correspondent, a newspaper columnist, a cable TV reporter, a web master, a blogger, and all the other things connected with spreading news through the process of modern evolution. He was absolutely fearless—three sticks of dynamite and a menu of missing parts had proven that—and I’d depend on him to defend me against any threat; but until I got a handle on the current client’s business I didn’t trust him with a crumb he could feed the big gaping maw of public curiosity.

  Not even me, who’d given him blood during the nine hours the surgeons at Detroit Receiving spent reassembling him.

  * * *

  I was turning off the lights when the phone rang. It wasn’t as bad as predicted, Barry said. Out of sixty-odd hits, all but eleven eliminated themselves on the face of the nature of their activities; one, a charitable foundation, listed the UN Secretary-General on its board of directors. Three of those were based in European countries on good terms with the U.S. and seemed safe to table. Four were scattered between five hundred and a thousand miles from Detroit; those I could put off until the rest bombed out, forcing me to split my fee with other agencies. Four were local. All showed promise. I thanked Barry, assured him he’d be the first in his field to know if there was anything juicy, and set my alarm for six A.M., early enough to fix an old-fashioned farm breakfast. There was no telling when I’d eat next.

  SIXTEEN

  The Cutlass started with a grunt of surprise; its motor hadn’t turned over at that hour of the morning in years. Yawning, I gave the steering wheel a sympathetic pat and pulled out of the garage onto asphalt pocked with holes and dark with dew. Drops sparkled on the grass. It would be an hour or more before it dried enough to wake up the sprinklers. Traffic was light in town, made up mostly of American-made cars driven by the red-eye shift at Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler with their lamps on.

  The first place on my list—because it was the farthest and the day was fresh—was in Warren, a stone’s throw from the GM Tech Center. That was a going concern around the clock. Test drivers shoved their shiny new plastic toys at top speed around the track and the city-size parking lot was packed fender-to-fender while the eggheads were climbing into their lab coats inside the huge dome-shaped research building.

  I passed a mile or so of chain link fence and left the pavement for a stretch of gravel bisecting what had obviously been a large dairy farm. The large whitewashed two-story farmhouse had a new metal roof and two silos flanked a barn the size and shape of an airplane hangar. A sign on a concrete slab showed a stylized sailboat floating on a wiggly blue line toward a mound with a palm tree sticking up from it. Under the picture:

  PEACEABLE SHORE

  A Haven for the Renewed

  Twenty-some people were hoeing rows of green plants in an acre of plowed ground, with two more manhandling panels of galvanized iron on the roof of the barn. The web site Barry had found advertised the place as a r
ecovery center of some kind.

  A gravel turnaround looped in front of a long front porch supporting a row of unoccupied bentwood rockers and a butter churn with geraniums sprouting from the top. Someone had taped a square of cardboard over the doorbell, asking visitors in block Sharpie letters to knock. Pigtails of red, yellow, and green wires spilled beyond the sign’s edges ending in wire nuts. I rapped on a screen door, releasing tiny helicopters of peeled paint from the wooden frame and a sifting of rust from the iron mesh. Darkness behind, broken up by geometric patterns of sunlight spilling in through windows on the other side of the house.

  A distant door opened, releasing just enough illumination to describe the boundaries of a long narrow hall dividing the ground floor into two halves. The rectangle of light framed a substantial body in a bell-shaped dress. Another door with a glass insert opened halfway along the hall, letting in more light and the same body, larger now in appearance. By the time it reached the screen door, it seemed to fill the passage from wall to wall. A bare arm the size of a leg of lamb reached up, tinkled a hook loose, pushed open the door against the grinding complaint of a spring, and I was face-to-face with the largest woman I’d ever seen. She balanced three hundred pounds on a six-foot-four-inch frame, with another hundred pounds of strawberry-blond hair falling to her waist on both sides of her print blouse. Her face was an assembly of ovals bunched around a pug nose and a tiny mouth painted fireplug red. Patches of rouge stained the ovals of her cheeks and her eyes glistened like pennies in a wishing well. A gust of the kind of perfume they stirred up in steel drums came out with the suction of the door opening.