American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  It lifted me without character to the top floor and let me out into a carpeted corridor that smelled like a new car, filled with future and promise and disinfectant. Recessed fixtures shed brushed-bronze light on pictures of milk wagons on Woodward and B-24s at Willow Run, Ty Cobb stealing a base, Tom Harmon throwing a pass, Isiah Thomas slamming a dunk; past and memory come in cans also. I followed scrolled brass numerals to an alcove at the end, and here I was, standing with knuckles raised in front of another door.

  You can’t work my job without becoming a connoisseur of doors, and a diviner of what was waiting on the other side: oak and stained glass—a kleptomaniac heir and a fat retainer; chipboard and printed veneer—a deadbeat dad and a rubber check; peeling paint—a cheating spouse and a tetanus shot; solid mahogany—an embezzler and a coverup; rusted screen—a shotgun and a running start. There were quaint Dutch doors that swung out in halves, seducing you with the smell of warm bread and a lonely restless woman at the oven; walnut-paneled doors that led you across fifteen feet of pile cuff-deep to a senior executive seated behind marble and glass, silver-haired, with a golden parachute and a stomach made of perforated tin; towering double-sided doors made from old-growth forest with Tiffany and Waterford in case lots behind them and no way to collect on what you had coming; steel-core doors, quilted on the reverse to lay the lunatic head against; swinging doors the orderlies bumped open with your gurney when you’d knocked on the wrong one; sliding doors, revolving doors, electric-eye doors, doors with bars, doors that moved up and down on tracks; doors that were just doors, something handy to push shut against a cancerous world, with bolts and latches and braces, and God help you if you came to it to ask for information, because it might come in the form of a forty-grain slug, fired by someone who was just a little more afraid than you were (see: swinging doors).

  I’d stood in front of all of them at one time or another—behind them, too, in the case of the ones with bars—never without butterflies in my stomach, like a kid on his first Halloween; wondering if this was the Door To End All Doors, the one that would burst into yellow splinters and let a bullet tear into an organ I held dear.

  This one, ordinary pine with an oak stain, felt something like that.

  I didn’t expect a bullet, really. Nothing so final and clear-cut. It was just a clammy mounting dread that came with the cold call, the blind search, the random shot, and the conviction that once I laid bone against wood, whatever I found on the other side would change the case, and probably my life. I’d listened to that warning whisper once already that same day and had walked away from it, surprising myself; only to keep my appointment in Samarra anyway when the cops sprang their trap.

  So maybe the destiny people knew what they were talking about, and all this dithering was just a waste of my time and the client’s money.

  Nice pep rally. Give me a W.

  I knocked. It opened. I didn’t even duck.

  EIGHT

  Mr. Walker? My name is Mai. I’m Madame Sing’s personal assistant.”

  She had a little trouble with her rs and ls, but since I don’t speak a second language myself I wasn’t making judgments. She was a small creature in the prime middle years—no wrinkles, just a mature hardness in the lines of her cheeks—with black hair skinned back into a bun behind her head, in a pale yellow blouse with the square tail out over formfitting black slacks, tiny unpainted feet in open-toed pumps without heels, five feet and ninety pounds stripped and soaking wet. It might have been her voice I’d heard over the telephone; I’d been fooled once and so didn’t jump to that conclusion.

  “Am I early?”

  “She’ll be out in a minute. Please come in.”

  For all the chamber of commerce hysteria about a new hotel in town, it was just a two-room suite like most, with a sitting room and a larger bedroom beyond. There was a king-size bed, made up tight as a trampoline with a quilted, peach-colored spread, a white faux Queen Anne desk with bowlegs, a fax machine, and all the necessary twenty-first-century ports, upholstered chairs and love seats, and identical black twenty-seven-inch TVs in both rooms. Prints on the walls with scenes of the Detroit riverfront and Impressionistic daubs of the Fox and State theaters. Fresh flowers erupted out of tall vases and a complimentary fruit basket done up in gold-tinted cellophane with a card in an envelope no one had bothered to open. The drapes were open, with a fine view of Harmonie Park and beyond it the music hall. From this side of the tinted Plexiglas it looked like a picture postcard, no indication of the punishing heat and general dearth of people.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Mai made a gracious openhanded gesture toward the minibar, a half-grown refrigerator with a microwave oven on top. I said a Coke would be great.

  “Not something stronger?”

  “Okay, Mountain Dew.”

  She hesitated, smiling, eager to please. “You are a detective, yes? You drink rye, with a bourbon chaser. I learn my English from Turner Classic Movies,” she apologized.

  I smiled. I wanted to wrap her up and set her on the mantel between the Balinese dancers. “Scotch, then. Do you have ice?”

  “I can call down for some.”

  “Let’s not bother them. They’re only getting half a week’s pay for one hour.”

  She laughed, an adorable little tinkly giggle like ceramic skulls banging together, and broke the hundred-dollar seal on the refrigerator door. The little plastic bottle of Glenlivet took up a cubic inch and a half of the glass she handed me. At least it was glass. When I was comfortable in a recliner with my drink she smoothed the front of her slacks and said, “Please excuse me while I check on her.”

  She went through a plain door behind which a hair dryer roared, mincing around the edge, and pushed it shut. I took a ten-dollar sip and then she came back out, reversing the movement. She walked as if her feet had been bound in infancy. “She’ll be one minute. Shall I turn on the TV?”

  “I bet you could, but let’s not. These hotels get eighty channels and forty of them are Designing Women. What sort of boss is Mrs. Sing to work for?”

  “Madame Sing,” she corrected. “She pays very well and she treats her employees with respect.”

  “Not like the Kyoto Health Spa out by the airport.”

  Her face went as dead as turned wood. “You only say that because I’m yellow.”

  “Partly. I admit it. In my work you judge by the folder and make adjustments as necessary. The rest is experience. You’ve got strong hands. The knuckles are splayed like a scrubwoman’s, but smooth, with no dirt in the creases. That comes from working them in oil.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed by your detective work?”

  “Don’t bother. The fact is you work for Charlotte Sing, who made her case dough from the massage business. A lot of these self-made millionaires make it a point to promote from within. I winged the rest. Except you do have strong hands.”

  “Eight hours a day at a computer keyboard will do that, too. But if you want to discuss hand jobs—yes, I know the basics. Another?” she said brightly.

  I followed her gaze to my empty glass. I didn’t remember drinking. I said no thanks and set it on a table.

  Just then the dryer stopped howling. At the end of a loud silence the bathroom door opened and a woman came out wearing paper slippers and a terry robe. She was as small as her assistant; the fluffy white material wrapped around her nearly twice and brushed her insteps. Her hair was cut straight across her eyebrows in blue-black bangs, dyed probably, and stopped abruptly at the corners of her jaws. She was about the same age as the other woman but showed it more in the beginnings of jowls and lines in her neck. She looked at me without smiling, then at the assistant. “Mai, please go in and check my dress for wrinkles. They should be steamed out by now, but if not, you’ll need to run the shower a bit longer.”

  “Yes, Madame.” She went into the bathroom and pushed the door to.

  “Alone at last.” I grinned.

  The woman didn’t. “You fulfill
the common expectations of an American detective. Which raised my suspicions. Most things genuine aren’t what you expect. May I see your credentials?”

  I gave her the flapper. “Ignore the badge. I only carry it for ballast.”

  She slid the photo card out of its window, inspected both sides, and put it back. My concealed weapons permit was folded inside and she took that out too and unfolded and read it, front to back, then returned it. “Are you armed at present?”

  “No. It didn’t seem like that kind of hotel.”

  “Unconvincing.”

  “Frisk me. While you’re at it, I’ve got a touch of bursitis in my left shoulder.”

  But she didn’t anger that easily. “I meant this.” She stuck out the folder between two fingers. “There’s a laser shop on every corner, and the card isn’t a challenge to duplicate to begin with. Anyone can obtain permission to carry a gun in this state if he doesn’t have a criminal record.”

  “On the other hand,” I said, pocketing the folder, “who’d want to impersonate an American detective?”

  “Tell me about the Fuller killing.”

  “So you did look it up.”

  “Mai did. It was just breaking. There weren’t many details. Are you working for Hilary Bairn? You said you had a proposition for him, but that could have been a Trojan horse.”

  I reached over and circled a finger inside my empty glass. It gave off a flat hum. It looked like fine crystal, but appearances aren’t the test. “I’m saving that answer for Mrs. Sing.”

  Her face gave me nothing, not even a hum.

  I said, “It was a clever switch. The dress thing was a little clumsy. You don’t need a home wrinkle remedy in a hotel with a valet service. Her voice is a little deeper, with less accent, but you both did a good job of disguising the differences. Anyway, I fell for that once today, so I disregarded it as evidence. But I was already wise. You lost me at the door.”

  “At the door? But—” She interrupted herself to glance toward the bathroom. It was the first crack in the smooth surface.

  “Mai is a Vietnamese name,” I said. “She’s Korean. I spent three years shooting at your relatives and getting shot at by them.” I licked the Scotch off my finger and waggled it at her. “You knew that, Mai. You looked me up for your boss.”

  Her voice went up a register. “I don’t—”

  “It’s all right, Mai,” Charlotte Sing said. “Will you fix me a drink, please?”

  She’d ditched the coolie rig and came out dressed for the evening in deep, dragon’s-blood garnet, with bare shoulders and a slit in the skirt that exposed her sheer hose to mid thigh. She looked taller in heels, had an athletic figure, and whoever she’d gone to to swindle the forces of gravity hadn’t left any scars or folds. In that outfit the skinned-back hairstyle looked aristocratic, not just something to keep her hair out of her eyes while she took dictation. She looked younger and more confident.

  I tested that. “You made the same mistake before, when you said you all looked alike to us. It backfired and made you famous.”

  “Another prejudice gone. We aren’t all infallibly intelligent. Thank you, Mai.” She accepted a glass poured from a pony bottle of vodka and a can of Canada Dry. “This time it wasn’t a joke. The variety of ways the authorities have sought to entrap me is infinite. Sometimes the seams are easier to detect from an oblique angle.”

  “Watching and listening,” I said. “When they’re watching and listening to someone else.”

  “It’s all very time-consuming. You can see why I hide.”

  “Nice camouflage.”

  She glanced down at her dress. “If I don’t make an appearance now and then, I risk becoming an enduring mystery. They’d never let me alone.”

  Mai hovered. “Do you need me to take notes?”

  “Go in and get dressed. I won’t need you anymore tonight.”

  She glanced back at me, not so sure of that. But she went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  “How much can she hear?” I asked.

  “Everything. She’s very dependable. And very confidential.”

  “You’re paying her, I’m not. I’ll wait. Okay if I raid the refrigerator?”

  “Be my guest.” There was a love seat perpendicular to the chair. She made herself comfortable, crossing the exposed leg over the other and sipping from her glass, while I found the last bottle of Glenlivet and filled mine the rest of the way from the can of ginger ale. It’s a terrible thing to do to a premium label, but I hadn’t eaten and she was smarter than a fresh coat of varnish. I took my time, stirring it with a plastic straw from the coffee setup on the low bureau, until Mai emerged in the clothes her boss had been wearing and let herself out of the suite. When the door snicked I went out to make sure she hadn’t hung back and to double-lock it. When I returned to the bedroom, Charlotte Sing said, “Are you always this careful, or are you showing off?”

  “A little of both. I’ve got just over four hours before I have to give up my client’s name or something of equal or greater value to the cops, and if Mai gets to them first with the same information, my bargaining chip’s busted; they’ll say I dragged my feet and find something else to hold me on just on principle. If I’m a little flashy about the precautions, you’ll get the point a lot stronger than if I just told you it was important.”

  “You may be right. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for anyone to be more circumspect than I am.”

  I stepped over and touched my glass to hers. Then I sat down. “I’m working for Darius Fuller, the dead woman’s father. He hired me to pay Bairn fifty thousand dollars to get out of her life.”

  “I understood Fuller’s in bankruptcy.”

  “There’s broke and broke. Bairn stood to share in a two-million-dollar trust fund if he married Deirdre Fuller. If you’re the romantic type, you could say he loved his daughter and wanted whoever married her to do it for her, not her money.”

  “But I am the romantic type,” she said. “My life is a romance, if you overlook the X rating. I’m also a businesswoman. Why settle for a candle when you can have the whole cake?”

  “Time, for one. He had creditors pushing him for cash now. The pressure must have been tight, because he took the chance of blowing his relationship with Deirdre by conning her into trying to pawn a watch he’d shoplifted somewhere.”

  “Darius begins to look like Father of the Year. Why didn’t Bairn pawn the watch himself?”

  “The obvious answer is he’d tried it before, with other merchandise, and got his hand smacked the same way a broker in Ypsi smacked hers when she tried it there. Those fellows run a tight network. They don’t mess with cops if they can avoid it, and contrary to popular opinion they’d rather do business than break bones. When they catch you trying to fence something, they pin you down, take your picture, and blanket all the shops in the area with copies. I assume now they subscribe to a Web site or something and save postage. If that happened to Bairn, he needed a ringer. If you’re deep enough in Dutch to try to scam the pros, it stands to reason you’re fresh out of friends who’ll do it for you. That left Deirdre.”

  “How much of this is established fact?”

  “The important part. The watch part. The rest is speculation based on observation. What I came here to find out is what you did that scared him so badly he’d risk a sure two million to get you off his back.”

  I didn’t expect her to throw herself to the floor and chew through to the suite below, but what she did was almost as satisfying. She lifted her glass and took a sip. Before it had been just a prop. Now she needed something to break eye contact; not to conceal guilt, just a change in body temperature that would prove she was made of organic material like the rest of us.

  “Again, you’ve mistaken the properties I own for what stands upon them. You should be having this conversation with Victor Cho. If Mr. Bairn owes money in Detroit Beach, he’d be the one to collect.”

  “Bairn’s appointment was
with you, not Cho.”

  “Did Bairn tell you that?”

  “His apartment did. I’m not trying to entrap you, Mrs. Sing. Now that the state and the city are in the gambling business, I don’t care who blows the rent money where. I’m only interested in staying out of jail.”

  “By attempting to put me there in your place?”

  “They don’t have to know anything about this conversation. They’re all fired up to charge Bairn with manslaughter, but I complicated things by calling him on his phone and knocking on his door. All I have to do is convince them the job I was doing for Darius Fuller hasn’t anything to do with what happened to his daughter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “That part’s trickier. I have to convince myself first.”

  She stood her glass on the nightstand beside the bed and sat back, or at least returned to upright; her back never touched the cushions. “If I said Bairn came to me for help, a stranger with means who’d known her share of hardship and injustice, would you accept that, purely as a hypothesis?”

  “I might try it for a block or two. I’m not sure how a load like that would hold turning a corner.”

  “There would, naturally, be compensation down the line for my assistance.”

  “The problem would be confirming it. It wouldn’t be like Deirdre Fuller signed a contract promising to marry him and make him her mutual beneficiary.”

  “That would not be the problem, because the request would be refused. The return would be usurious, and would play directly into the hands of those individuals who have taken an unhealthy interest in my future. It’s very exhausting, the number of directions they find to come at me. Am I so tempting a target, in a world full of terrorists and drug dealers?”

  “You’re a headline. Offer a public prosecutor money and he’ll put you in the pokey, but a teaser at the top of the news will get you the liquor concession in the City-County Building. The lawyer who bags Charlotte Sing can be the next governor.” I changed hands on my glass. “So when you turned Bairn down, killing his last best hope, he slid back into old habits.”