“And you consider me wicked.”
“You and Eugenia are both as screwy as a couple of dancing caterpillars. She thinks she can buy her way into Paradise, and you think you can bring the country to its knees with an army of strung-out drug addicts.”
“And how do I think I can do that?”
“I tried it out on a police inspector I know, before either of us suspected you were involved. If we had, he might’ve spent more time on it. As long as the dope keeps circulating, the worst thing the cops have to deal with is a hike in the mortality rate among junkies. They only get desperate when it stops. The price goes up and so does the crime rate. Once they’ve had a taste of that supersmack and they can’t get any more, every city in the country is in for a major crime wave, the president declares martial law, and the American idea is dead for at least a generation.”
“So that’s my plan. It seems sound.”
“I’m sure you thought so when you issued that recall. You explain too much to be a first-class liar. You didn’t underestimate the impact of prime cut on a place like Detroit. You shut off the tap here to see how well it worked before you went national.” I shook my head. “It isn’t sound. In fact, it’s shaky as hell. There’s always a Eugenia Pappas, a Johnny Toledo, a donkey wrangler in the desert, or someone on your own export team on the other side of the world; some greedy little leak to spoil the grand scheme. No one can interrupt the supply when there’s so much money to be made by keeping it flowing. In this case, one nut canceled out the other.”
“Do you imagine you can insult me by calling me insane?”
“Lady, you’re a loon. Take it or don’t.”
Something crashed in the distance; a gate flung open or a sledge hitting a fire door. Charlotte Sing turned her head.
I cocked the .38. The noise drew her attention back to me. I told her to hold still or I’d shoot. She smiled, shook her head, and backed into darkness. Tiny feet rattled on concrete and were gone.
TWENTY-NINE
“I don’t see why this man has to be here. He has no clearance.”
The party’s name was Messarian, or something similarly Armenian in origin, and he seemed to be flaking away before our eyes. Whenever he shook his head, a fresh fall of dandruff drifted to the shoulders of his charcoal-gray suit like snow in a globe. I never got his title or which Cabinet department he was with, but he gave the impression of having something to do with Homeland Security and Immigration. He was a sour thirty, with glasses and a flag pin.
John Alderdyce said, “At this point Walker’s the only witness who can place Charlotte Sing in Detroit. The boy, Luis, is being treated for narcotics poisoning; any statement from him is bound to be spongy, given the hallucinogenic properties of heroin and methadone. The Chinese is still on the table at Receiving Hospital, and we haven’t been able to locate Ouida Rogers. A neighbor heard her going out early this morning, but she never showed up at work. We’re questioning her employer, Eugenia Pappas, right now. Walker thinks she knows something about the missing dope.”
It was the first time I’d heard Ouida’s last name. I figured she’d gone off somewhere to take stock. There’s nothing like an overnight abduction to inspire you to reexamine your prospects.
“You’re placing a great deal of faith in just his word. I understand your own forensics team has yet to raise physical evidence that Sing was ever in the manager’s office or the equipment room at Tigers Stadium, much less this country. The assertion alone is a slap in the face to the officers who guard our borders.”
Mary Ann Thaler spoke up. “That includes all three of us, metaphorically speaking; personally, I can take a little smack in the kisser if it means making good on a blunder. And you’re forgetting the prints on that shipping carton. If Walker hadn’t gotten her to touch it, he wouldn’t have been invited to this meeting. That’s just about the only thing he did last night that wasn’t dumb.”
“Thanks,” I said. “The dummy’s right here, by the way.”
Here was a conference room in the MacNamara Federal Building, complete with a gold-fringed flag on a staff, portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and the current holder of their office, and upholstered chairs all around a walnut-veneer table you could play shuffleboard on. Thaler’s office downstairs was too small to sew a button on a shirt without leaving the door open and Messarian said his was filled with boxes of files he hadn’t unpacked yet. Apparently he wasn’t the first bureaucrat to hold his post since the beginning of the year, or even the second. The job involved directing traffic between the FBI and the headquarters in Washington and the local Arab community, the largest outside the Middle East, and the burnout factor was high. I was pretty sure the boxed files were an excuse and wondered where they’d hidden the microphone.
“Assuming he’s telling the truth and the carton wasn’t planted to throw us off the trail,” he said, “I don’t understand how the Sing woman managed to slip away. Didn’t you surround the building?”
“It takes more than the few minutes we had to surround one that size. The gates were designed to keep people out, not in, and there’s a separate exit for club members and staff. Have you ever been to a ball game?” Alderdyce had little patience with feds, even the personable ones. He and Thaler had been on thin ice ever since she’d jumped the fence.
“Well, she won’t get far. Her passport photo is at every airline counter and Customs checkpoint in the country. The borders are sealed tight.”
We all three laughed. Messarian’s ears reddened at the tips. It was a corner room, with windows looking out on Tigers Stadium and the narrow waterway separating the U.S. from the province of Ontario.
Alderdyce rose, his height and bulk tipping the balance of power in the room. The man from Washington seized upon this for diversion. “Where do you think you’re going? This meeting isn’t over.”
“It is for me. The dragon lady’s gone for sure. That makes her your problem now. Mine is tracking down those twenty kilos of goosed horse before they find their way into the veins of every junkie in the greater metropolitan area. That kind of quality in the hands of an experienced cooker could be in circulation for years.” He left without having spoken to me or looked my way. I was going to have to deal away a lot of favors to make him forget I’d lied about not inviting Deputy Marshal Thaler to last night’s tailgate party.
She was sore too, but right now she was angrier with the man at the head of the table. She rested a pair of unadorned wrists on the top. I wondered if the lack of jewelry and minimal cosmetics was a boardroom habit, as if she considered it a combat situation. “The reason these hypercriminals can waltz in and out of the U.S. with just a tip of the hat is we spend more time denying our failures than we do patching them up. When a citizen pitches in to help, we treat him like a suspect instead of an ally. If it weren’t for Walker, we’d still be scratching our heads over just which fanatic with his forehead on the floor of some mosque was behind that shipment of poison. We thought it was to raise money for future terrorist plots. We never stopped to think it was the plot. We’ve hung out a reward of a million dollars for Madam Sing’s capture and prosecution. So far no one’s claimed it, but if the information he’s given us leads that direction, we ought to cut him in.”
“It seems grabby,” I said. “I’ve already been paid twice for the same investigation.”
“Shut up. You’re not out of the woods. You’re hiding a witness. You didn’t take Chang out by yourself.”
I shut up. I wasn’t sure if a possible charge of vehicular assault wouldn’t spoil Gale Kreski’s defense in Guam. The law can be arbitrary even when the victim’s in custody on suspicion of two counts of murder. Leaving Bud Lite out had kept me in an interview room at Detroit Homicide until an hour ago. I felt like a hair ball coughed up by a cat.
Messarian scowled. “How much does the press know?”
“You can’t expect a blackout when you mount a joint-action armed offensive on a ballpark in the heart of the city. You need to call
a press conference before the speculation gets out of hand.”
“I wasn’t asking for your advice. Deputy.” He addressed me for the first time. “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t be giving interviews. Under the Patriot Act you can be booked on no charge at all and held indefinitely as a person of interest.”
“That completes the set. I’ve already been threatened with arrest by the cops and the U.S. Marshals.” I shrugged, not as eloquently as Luis Quincy Adams. “The paparazzi don’t know me from Eleanor Roosevelt. I have to pay up front to get in the classifieds.”
“Can we trust this person?”
“I don’t trust you,” Thaler said.
*
Out in the hall, she told me to walk and talk. She seemed always to be expected somewhere ten minutes ago. “Believe it or not, he’s an improvement over the two that came before him. Washington doesn’t assign you to Detroit as a reward for commendatory service. Why the double cross last night?”
“I thought you and John should kiss and make up. Ever see The Parent Trap?”
“Keep it up. I’m this close to feeding you to Messarian.”
“I got scared. I had nothing to bargain with but ten empty boxes. I’d’ve rung in the Coast Guard if the place was closer to the water.”
“You might have told me. We nearly fired on each other.”
“You and John made it a condition to freeze each other out.”
She rang for the service elevator. The media had been prowling the front lobby since the building opened. “So is Sing as crazy as they say?”
“Let’s say she’s consistent.”
“I don’t get this world-conquest jag. Do they ever stop to think what they’ll do with it once they’ve got it?”
“She doesn’t want the whole potato. She just wants to cut out the part she thinks is rotten.”
“She can take her place in line just like everyone else.”
The elevator came. We stepped aboard and she punched the button for the basement. The car was unfinished Sheetrock with a galvanized steel floor and smelled of forty-year-old cigars. The cables belched and shuddered and we started down hand under hand. “We’re invited to sit in on Eugenia Pappas’ interview,” she said. “Detroit’s claiming jurisdiction based on two murders and two kidnappings. The chief’s wrangling it out with Justice.”
“Can you tape it for me? I just spent four hours in that little room.”
“I’ll give Alderdyce your regrets.”
“No one has that kind of time.”
When we touched down, she pressed her thumb against the Doors Close button. “They don’t bother to bug the service elevator. This is between us. Charlotte Sing in the picture means I’m just keeping the seat warm until a full marshal takes over, so we’re two citizens talking. Who held your coat last night?”
“I said I was tired. I didn’t say my brain went to sleep.”
“I like to know how you work, for future reference. It doesn’t leave this car.” Her eyes were brown and level. “Consider it my price to recommend against your indefinite detention in a case involving national security.”
“Why does that phrase always make my skin crawl?” I put my hands in my pockets. “He’s busy staying out of the can himself. He’s out on bail on a charge of open murder.”
“Did he do it?”
“They say he used a gun. If he didn’t bring one last night, he wouldn’t have had one that day. The locals are starting to take interest in the victim’s own personal security. He made enemies the way Quaker makes oats. It’s federal,” I said. “It happened in a U.S. protectorate.”
I watched her as I said it. Her face showed no recognition. Well, it had been bumped below the fold by Saddam Hussein’s hanging. She said, “I may be able to help. That stunt you two pulled could just as well be interpreted as civilian assistance in an official investigation. It would look good on the character side of his sheet.”
“Why Santa Claus all of a sudden?”
“That clown upstairs thinks he can protect the Constitution by arresting everyone who looks at it crosswise. I think I can do as much letting a few of them go.” She took her thumb off the button.
The basement looked like a scaled-down version of the government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, stacked to the joists with cartons stenciled with number and letter codes, probably hard copies of files locked inside the computer system as backups in case the grid went down again. They’d cleared out the racks and iron maidens since Hoover’s day. We walked up a loading ramp leading down from the alley behind the building. The sky hung low and leaden and there was an iron smell of snow in the air. November always comes right on schedule.
“I’ll have to ask him,” I said. “I’m already getting a reputation as a gossip.”
“You and the Sphinx.” She took the plastic ID tag from the lapel of her blazer and put it in her handbag. “While you’re at it, tell him Bud Lite is a terrible name for a musician.”
*
I slept away the rest of the morning despite pains in both legs and would have slept away the afternoon too if the telephone hadn’t dragged me out of a fresh nightmare. I was in right field in Tigers Stadium and kept losing easy pop flies in the lights while the crowd screamed for my indefinite detention in a case involving national security.
I limped into the living room in my underwear and mumbled something into the receiver. It was John Alderdyce.
“I thought you might like to know we just kicked Eugenia Pappas,” he said without greeting.
“How many lawyers did it take?”
“Just one, and if he’d had his way we’d still be holding her. Against his advice, she volunteered to submit to a lie detector test. She passed.”
“A nut can beat those things.”
“A psychopathic nut. They can tell bare-ass lies all day without a blip. She’s a different kind of head case. Our department expert says she’s telling the truth about that missing heroin; it was news to her. Now we’re looking at her people, starting with that character in the warehouse.”
“He doesn’t know anything, including what’s going on ten feet from his desk. He’s just local color.”
“I put in for a warrant to seize Eugenia’s computer. Someone in her operation, maybe one of her charity workers, interrupted that shipment long enough to gut it. We picked up a trace amount of dope from those converters you recovered. It wasn’t serendipity, a carton falling off a forklift and dumping out its contents. They’d all been opened and resealed as neatly as they came. Someone in a position to know what was inside called the shots and someone else did the grunt work, for a cut or wages. If we find one, we’ll find the other.”
“Any luck tracking down Ouida? She knows Eugenia’s operation better than Eugenia does.”
“No. I was about to ask if you’d heard from her.”
My doorbell rang just then. Life can be awfully tidy when it wants to be.
THIRTY
It rang again while I was putting on a robe, followed by knocking as I strode to the door. I’d left the Luger in the office and the .38 in the car, but it was the middle of the day, and people like Madam Sing belonged to the night.
Ouida looked like Hollywood’s idea of a refugee from the Eastern Bloc. She had on a long dark cloth coat buttoned up to her chin, dark glasses, and a scarf tied over the brilliant cranberry of her hair. A leather bag the size of an overnight case hung from a strap on her shoulder. “Please, can you let me in quickly?” She was out of breath.
I stepped aside and she fled across the threshold. I closed the door while she drew off the glasses. Her eyes were scrubbed free of last night’s smeared makeup. Without it she looked twelve years old. They lit on the robe. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I was up. Have you slept?”
“I tried. I never thanked you for last night. You saved my life.”
“Maybe not. Lives don’t mean much to Charlotte Sing, but she doesn’t kill just for fun.”
“I don’t suppose they’ve found her?”
I shook my head. “They’re looking for you, too, but I guess you know that. Hardly anyone dresses like Bette Davis around here.”
“I was afraid they would be, that’s why I left home. I—I need a few days to myself before facing their questions. These past twenty-four hours have been a horror.”
“There’s a cure for that.”
I went into the kitchen, dumped ice into two squat mismatched glasses, filled the rest with spirits, and carried them with the bottle on a tray into the living room. She’d shaken her hair loose from the scarf and was sitting in the armchair with her coat off and spread behind her, holding the leather bag in her lap. I put the tray on the coffee table, handed her a glass, and sat down opposite her on the sofa with mine.
“You have a lot of books,” she said. “I didn’t figure you for a reading man.”
“I’ve been taking lessons.”
“I noticed you’re limping. Did that Chang creature hurt you badly?”
“Not as bad as the others. He ran into some bad luck himself. I guess he didn’t read his fortune cookie.”
“The news reports are all garbled. Nobody seems to know what’s going on.”
“Where’d you go after you left the house?”
“A motel. I paid cash and used a false name, but I suppose that wasn’t original. I heard some men asking the clerk about check-ins when I came out of my room to get a bottle of water from the machine. I went out by the side stairs.”
“Is that all your luggage?”
She glanced down at the bag, her fingers tightening on it. “Just some things for a couple of days. Could you put me up? I can pay you for your trouble.”
“I bet you can. Drink your drink. It eats through the glass if you let it sit.”
“Should we toast something?”
“Only after six. This time of day it’s medicine.”
We drank. She made the face women make and leaned forward to set her glass on the tray. She lifted the flap on her bag, reached inside, and laid a bank envelope on my side of the table. “I hope it’s enough.”
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels Page 19