The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  It hadn’t been any of those, any more than a certain Bulgarian dissident had stumbled all by himself into the point of a toxic umbrella at the height of the Cold War.

  They wouldn’t have used that old gag; not on a high-profile lawyer who trailed death threats like Marley’s chains. One glimpse at a bumbershoot and he’d have been a moving target, jeopardizing the operation. It would be more simple even than that: a Detroit-style mugging with a fatal ending.

  I grasped the railing and pulled myself to my feet. I pantomimed the action, first taking Justice’s part, then his killer’s. That’s what you do when you’re a crack detective, play charades with the crime scene. He hadn’t taken the elevator. Either he’d suspected it would be turned off in response to the explosion or someone else had rung for it below and he hadn’t the iron will required to wait while it made its way back up. Encountering someone else in the stairwell, he’d have moved aside to let him pass. That was when he was grabbed, spun around, restrained with an arm across his throat—his shirt collar was rumpled, the knot of his gray necktie loose—and the needle or something similar injected in the artery. It would be a fast-acting poison, especially when introduced directly into the circulation. Ricin was trendy, the first choice of terrorists and would-be presidential assassins, but too slow. Unless someone had been monkeying around with it in a lab.

  And who might that be?

  TWENTY-NINE

  I heard them coming from as far down as the sixth floor, clanging up the steps with their equipment rattling like a suit of armor falling down. The first one to the brass ring looked like all the rest in gas mask, oxygen tanks, and fireproof tuxedo. He stopped when he saw the body, almost causing a chain-reaction collision among the rest of the firefighting team.

  “Smoke or burn?” The voice coming through the intercom built into his mask sounded like the window man at Wendy’s.

  “Poison.”

  “Repeat?”

  “I’m guessing. How far behind are the cops?”

  * * *

  Child got up from his squat and sat down next to me on the bottom step of the second flight of stairs. “Next time I might just put on a HazMat outfit to talk to you. You spread murder like the clap.”

  “He came to me, Lieutenant. You were there.”

  The stairwell smelled even more lethal than before; the exhaust from the chemical spray the firefighters had used to quell a blaze of unknown origin made the air mustard-colored. The din of axes, thundering boots, and shouted warnings and directions from the top floor had begun to die down. There were no more sirens down below.

  “Let’s take it again.” He jerked his chin at what I thought was the same uniform who’d opened the cell door at Homicide, a millennium ago. The officer flipped to a new page in his pad.

  They took it again, as they had the first two times. I’d learned from long experience not to use all the same words, but not to plug in too many new ones. It still sounded rehearsed, but I was too tired to put that throb in my voice that says so much. They wouldn’t have bought it in any case.

  The lieutenant’s first words upon recognizing the stiff were, “Well, hello, there, Counselor. We’re gonna miss you between the auto ads and vaginal sprays.

  “So you think the Sing character paid him to bait you into a fish-fry, then squiffed him to shut him up,” he said to me.

  “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. It worked in the Fannon and Nelson kills. Why change now?”

  “Why you? You didn’t know anything more about what she’s up to than we do. Assuming you didn’t hold anything back. You wouldn’t do that.”

  I waggled a finger in one ear. The roar was still there. “Sure I would. Not this time. That story Justice fed me could be true or part true or a load of compost.”

  “I never figured him for this kind of deal. Piss off a judge, always; suborn a jury, wouldn’t surprise me. Accomplice to murder? That one goes down sideways.”

  “It did for me, or I’d have seen it coming when he sent me in alone. But if he performed for her once he’d do it again, accepting more and more by degrees. Once you step off the edge you don’t start falling slower.”

  “Maybe we’ll know something once the M.E. figures out what did the job.” He shook his head. “I hate this cloak-and-dagger crap. Give me a good old-fashioned drive-by any day. I know where to start looking. Now come the G-boy toxicologists and then the band plays the Russian saber dance till they jerk the rabbit out of the hat. If you were getting close, this’d be the time to out with it. They make you behave in the federal box in Milan, not like our little bed-and-breakfast at the Third.”

  “I hit the wall before he came along. I’m thinking I was a side deal; repay me for that crippled hand as long as she was in the neighborhood.”

  “If she’s only half as smart as everyone says she is, she’ll let it lay now.”

  “Could be. If she were only half as insane as I know she is.”

  New light spilled down the stairs. An Adam-and-Eve EMS team carried a folding gurney with a zipper bag folded on top of it down to the landing.

  “Guess they got the elevator going again,” Child said. “Just when my BP got back to borderline.”

  “So take a pill.”

  “I do already. They say I need to eliminate some things from my diet. I’m thinking you for starters.”

  We stood to give the pair room. “Are we done?”

  “We’re done when you come down and sign a statement,” Child said, “is my fondest hope.”

  I went back the way I’d come. The firefighters had finished destroying the door to 1700 and were chasing down scattered flames with short businesslike whooshes followed by the throat-tightening stench of carbon tetrachloride. Underneath was a metallic odor, somehow more evil.

  “Magnesium and fulminate of mercury. Matches and gasoline aren’t in it anymore; not at this level.”

  I looked at the mind reader. I almost didn’t know him without his mask. Ray Charla wore his stiff fire-retardant coat and his helmet with its DPD insignia pushed back from his large parboiled forehead. He was leaning against the hallway wall with his arms folded and his metal toolbox on the floor at his feet, his tin mitts tucked under his belt.

  I offered him my hand. “Amos Walker, Inspector. We met when Sister Delia’s place burned down.”

  “If you say so.” He took it as gently as he handled glowing pieces of evidence at the scene of a suspected arson. At that his grip would bend steel.

  “You can tell what was used from the smell?”

  He laid a permanently black-nailed finger alongside his nose. “For now, though I’ll have to prove it with a chemical test before I put it in my report. I don’t know how many more I’ve got coming. Sooner or later us burn guys blow out our olfactory organs. Makes us just as useless as one of those dope-sniffing dogs that get hooked. But not just yet.”

  “Who has access to magnesium and fulminate?”

  “Not many. You need a license, which means a legitimate business that involves volatile material, and you leave behind a paper trail as long as the Miracle Mile. Still too many. Until the governor shut down that Hollywood incentives program, those special-effects boys went through the stuff like salt through a hired girl, as my old man used to say. There’s always some leakage after a run like that.”

  I thanked him and left, making a note to ask Barry Stackpole if Peaceable Shore included any movie studios among its holdings.

  Riding down in the elevator was a surreal experience. I couldn’t help thinking about who had shared the trip up. I’d had no love for Philip Justice to begin with, and I tend to hold grudges against people who conspire to murder me; but the feeling was like facing the first morning after the death of someone close. As detectives went, I was about as hard-boiled as a thirty-second egg.

  The police had evacuated the building, strung yellow tape, and set up barricades to hold back the crowd, shielding its eyes and pointing at smoke leaking from the blown-out windows in t
he corner room on the top floor. Film crews from all the local TV stations were pleading with the thin blue line erected behind the barricades; which in our city is pretty thick. They were as easy to argue with as the concrete barriers they resembled.

  I inspected the Cutlass from headlights to rear bumper, in the event Sing had had some blasting material left over and decided to hedge her bet; but there were no unexplained wires visible from outside or under the hood, and when I crawled onto the floor of the front seat found no new options under the pedals and nothing more than a fat spider dozing in its web under the dash. I squashed it, using my handkerchief, and shook it out onto the asphalt. That made me feel almost as bad as I felt about Justice. It had probably been in residence long enough to be granted an easement.

  The sun was waddling westward, scraping rooftops, while I let the wheel decide whether to turn toward the office or home. The office won; but that might have been the wheel misalignment I’d been putting off for a month.

  Why’d I let the car make that decision? All my clients were either satisfied or dead. With Gwendolyn’s money and what was left of Fannon’s I could afford to take some time off. But I owed it to the customers who lined up outside the waiting room every day to lock that door and hang out the GONE FISHING sign.

  At the first red light I got out the check Justice had given me, tore it in quarters, and stuffed the pieces among the butts in the ashtray. By the time the bank opened in the morning, the word would be out and all his assets frozen until Probate crawled from its snail’s burrow to parse them out in order of importance. Which was okay with me. If spending the advance on a contract on your own life isn’t considered bad luck, it ought to be.

  In the shallow foyer, I took my ruined suitcoat off my arm and stuffed it into the bullet-shaped trash can. I didn’t know why I’d bothered to carry it that far. Next to the can, the door to Rosecranz’s narrow-gauged office/apartment was open, with his plumber’s helper propped against it. That was for the cross-draft; he considered air-conditioning proof of western decadence. He existed without sleeping, working around the clock to keep the building from collapsing into the basement. He broke for a half-hour only, to eat and to shout answers to Jeopardy in Russian; I figured that way no one eavesdropping would know when he got one wrong. Sitting on a noisy rocking chair in front of a folding tray-table, he bellowed at his rabbit-ear set, slurping borscht from a bowl and drinking from a tumbler full of liquid too clear to be Detroit water. His back was to me, with the shoulder blades gnawing through bare skin. He wore only bib overalls and woolen socks. After thirty years I knew everything about him except his first name.

  When I got to the third floor the telephone was ringing in my office. That might have been going on for a while, with breaks in between. AT&T always interrupts to offer Repeat Dialing for a fee; otherwise it has to eat the expense of the bell. It stopped ringing, then started again. At the other end of the line was a patient and persistent finger. There was another pause before I could unlock the door marked PRIVATE, and then it started all over again. The little crackling silence was worse on my nerves than the ringing.

  “A. Walker Investigations.”

  “How was your luck in the Grand?”

  I’d been sweating ever since the stairwell where Philip Justice had died; now the perspiration wrapped me in a jacket of ice. A voice entirely without accent is an eerie thing. It wasn’t atonal, like something generated by a computer, but the best dialogue coach in the world couldn’t identify this one’s origins either by continent or by nation or by region. Its owner had spent nearly as much time and money on eradicating any such clue as she had building her fortune in the international underworld.

  “You know the answer to that,” I said after a moment. “This isn’t a recording.”

  “I’m relieved; truly I am. Don’t you hate it when a worthy opponent fails too easily?”

  “Not in this case.” I barely heard myself. My heart was pounding in my ears.

  “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  The receiver creaked in my grip.

  Another voice came on, shallow and rushed, as if the speaker had been running. “Mr. Walker, this is Gwen—”

  Madam Sing took back the phone. “That should be sufficient. I don’t want to insult your intelligence.”

  I leaned a hip against the desk. My own legs had given out. I asked the question for the second time that day. “When and where?”

  “Have you seen your gift basket?”

  My face felt hot suddenly. I set down the receiver, wobbled out into the waiting room, looked again at the card signed “G” attached to the basket; but then I hadn’t had an example of her handwriting for comparison. I lifted the basket and examined it all over. Finally I turned it upside down. I read the sticker on the bottom:

  GOODIES 4 U

  A Product of Tranquility Coast

  Suite 604

  Sentinel Building

  Detroit, Michigan

  I set it down as carefully as if it were booby-trapped; which it may have been. At one time that had been all the rage in Korea, and she wasn’t one to throw anything away just because its trend had passed; especially if there was death involved.

  If I lived long enough, I might see the day when she exhausted all the synonyms for Pacific Rim.

  If I lived long enough. I’d used up all my odds at the Grand.

  THIRTY

  Here I was, back where I’d started, an eon or two ago, and not in dog years. I felt like one of those plastic racehorses on a slotted oval track like they used to sell in the toy department at the five-and-dime. Only this horse was too broken down to get out of the gate.

  The cops had taken away all the caution tape, leaving the Sentinel Building much as it had been when I’d first entered it, minus the surprise in the basement. The plastic canopy erected to shield pedestrians from falling masonry had acquired another coat of soot, and wind howling through the man-made canyon downtown had made a fresh deposit of waxed-cardboard cups, candy bar wrappers, crack capsules, and spent condoms on the pile inside the threshold of the padlocked front door, but that was an urban condition only a controlled demolition could reverse. I looked up at the ribbed façade and wondered all over again why they put ledges on tall buildings. Window-washers and sandblasters use scaffolds. Ledges are for suicides in search of an audience.

  I went into the alley and looked around, but time hadn’t gone backward and Frank Nelson wasn’t there, showing off his tattoo and asking for money to buy frankfurters. I hadn’t expected that; but hoping for the best is what keeps people off ledges. It’s funny who the solitary life will make you miss. I was down to panhandlers and sleazy lawyers.

  I’d thrown away the key Emil Haas had given me, but Madam Sing had overlooked nothing; the fire door wasn’t locked. Once again I walked across the cardboard taped over the Pewabic, but this time I took the stairs up instead of down; even so just entering the well leading to the vault where Fannon had gasped out his life drew an arpeggio up my spine. Lately I’d been spending a lot of time on stairs, and they always led to something nasty.

  She hadn’t said to come alone, and I hadn’t asked; we didn’t want to insult each other’s intelligence, after all. I’d have rung in the National Guard if she wouldn’t stick a needle into Gwendolyn Haas at the first sight of a Sherman tank.

  What did Gwendolyn Haas mean to me? We didn’t even like each other. But one way or another I was responsible for three deaths on this case alone, if only because I’d entered the freeway late and had spent the time since accelerating desperately to keep up with the rest of the traffic. No matter how fast I drove, Sing had seen me coming and jammed down on the pedal, running over anyone who crossed her path. Her time as a slave had convinced her that life was as throwaway as a broken toaster.

  There was no window to admit light between the walls that flanked the staircase. I leaned against one to fish out my flash. Something poked into my shoulder; a light switch. The electricity h
ad been on before, to power the laborers’ halogens in the basement. I straightened and laid a finger on the switch, but snatched my hand away as if one of the wasps that still lived in the walls had stung it. In Arson/Murder 101 they teach you how to replace a regular switch with the arcing type, open the gas valves, and let the spark dispose of whoever turned on the light.

  Sing seldom worked the same gag twice; but I’d bucked her system before. Even she wasn’t crazy enough not to recognize when a rule has outlived its usefulness. I put on the flash, drew the Chief’s Special, and started up, this time avoiding contact with the handrail. Poison was her new thing. She wasn’t above coating the surface with a topical variety. She wasn’t above anything you could name.

  I prayed this was the finish, for more reasons than one. Another encounter with the gorgon and I’d be as paranoid as she was.

  It took me most of a half hour to climb six floors. I stopped every few steps to hold my breath and listen. One of the advantages of stalking someone in an old building is it tells you who’s moving around within earshot. One creak of a warped board and I’d shoot whoever belonged to the foot that caused it the moment he or she showed.

  No creaks. In the silence I could hear horns honking several streets over, the whine and gulp of a heavy-duty transmission shifting up and down the scale and the huff of hydraulic brakes. I was as disconnected from all that life as an appendix suspended in a jar of formaldehyde.

  I resumed climbing. I’d have traded those convenient stairs for the haul up the stuffy air shaft back at the Liberty Inn.

  Rounding the fifth landing, I saw light and put away the flash. I leaned against the wall again, switched the revolver to my other hand, mopped my palm on my pants, then switched again and mopped the other. By then the butt was getting slippery again. I ascended the rest of the way crab-fashion, flattening my back to the wall with my gun arm stretched out along it. When I reached the top step I leapt the last six inches, pivoting right, then left on the bare wooden floor, gripping my weapon in both hands. An empty hallway yawned at me.