“Not really, and it’s going to get less rare as land values increase. There’s a lot more money to be made from a longterm lease than a one-time sale. But I’m only an employee, trained to extoll the virtues of life on Black Squirrel Lake. If you want to know how Peninsular works, you’ll have to talk to Charlotte Sing.”
EIGHTEEN
I blinked. It might have been the glare off all those polished surfaces in eyes gritty from no sleep. “Charlotte Sing is Peninsular Realty?”
“Principal stockholder, anyway. I don’t suppose anyone actually owns a big company anymore. That sort of went out with Henry Ford. But she comes close. Not many of the others would vote their shares against her without giving it plenty of thought. That’s just a layman’s guess,” Violet Pershing added. “We’ve never met.”
“I’ve met her. You got it dead on. I thought she rented only to casinos and massage parlors and sex shops.”
“That’s her parent company, Pacific Rim Properties. Peninsular’s a subsidiary. She learned nothing from the last crash if not diversification. Opinion once again.”
“She know you’re this candid?”
She got rid of another waterlogged paper towel and crossed her arms. “I don’t kid myself anything I said about her wouldn’t get back to her, but I’m not worried. I’ve closed more deals for the firm than any other agent. She places results above blind loyalty.”
“Also you’re Asian.”
“Half Asian, like her. She has a preference, but it wouldn’t mean anything if all I did was sit on my nice tight butt. I saw you looking before,” she said. “This whole kitchen is one big mirror.”
“I’m a more accomplished lecher usually,” I said. “I didn’t get my eight hours.”
“I don’t mind. If I did I wouldn’t spend an hour on the treadmill every day. Would you like to see it?”
I didn’t have an answer for that right away. I was working at half speed.
“I mean the treadmill. The house has a custom gym, just a sample of how far Peninsular will go to make its tenants feel they’re home. You look like a man who stays in shape.”
“Don’t count on it. Half of my food groups are tobacco and alcohol. Thanks for talking to me, Mrs. Pershing. Any relation to the general?”
“Stuart thought so. He spent his Christmas bonus one year getting a genealogist to connect the dots. What is it with you men and war?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m a pacifist as of this morning.”
She discovered a stray crumb and flicked it off the sink counter with a neatly rounded nail. “Rain check on that house tour? You don’t have to look at the treadmill.”
“I thought you didn’t date detectives.”
“Who said anything about dating?”
I grinned and said I’d bring my sweats.
I needed to surf the Net, starting with pleasantpeninsula.com, the site listed on Peninsular’s signs. I didn’t own a board. Water trickled from my cell phone when I flipped it open; the LED was dark. I spent some change in the same place where I’d bought cigarettes, but Barry Stackpole, my resident Web sleuth, had a message on his machine saying he was away for a week. The machine was new. He wrote about big-time crime, so he might have been anywhere from Phoenix to Foochow. I drove home and set my alarm clock for next year.
Adrenaline had me twisting in the sheets. I got up and opened a bottle of something and brought it back with me to the bedroom. I drank just enough to dull the thud of my heart, put the cap back on, and stretched out spread-eagle in my underwear. Even the crickets were quiet. It was too hot to go looking for a date.
My neighbors’ fireworks swam my way through the dark shallow waters of Black Squirrel Lake. That made it night. I was having my old drowning dream, and the reports sounded like gunshots fired from shore, or maybe Wilson Watson’s man Esmerelda, hammering nails through someone’s hand in hell. At some point the noises got louder and more personal. Someone was knocking.
The room was dark. I figured if I didn’t turn on any lights my visitor would go away. He didn’t, but I still had hope. I groped my way through the living room without touching any switches and opened the door a crack, holding the first thing I’d thought to grab in lieu of a firearm, the bottle from my nightstand.
It was less than adequate to deal with someone like Mary Ann Thaler, a lieutenant until recently with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Detroit Police Department. She was a handsome woman still and would be for a great many more years, but it took me a second to recognize her without her glasses. She’d had the operation.
“Happy Fourth,” she said. “I hope you didn’t think you had to dress.”
I realized I was wearing only a pair of shorts, but it was too late to do anything about that. I said, “I thought you were in Washington, learning to be a marshal.”
“OJT. I know this jurisdiction.” She had one of those voices that sell lots of water beds late at night. “I came to find out what you and Madame Sing had to talk about the other day.”
NINETEEN
I put on a robe and slippers and a pot of coffee and sat opposite her in the breakfast nook. She was wearing her light brown hair longer these days and could have exchanged her government-approved grayish pink suit for a sweater and short skirt and infiltrated any high school cheerleading squad in the city.
“What’s Justice’s interest in Charlotte Sing?” I asked. “I thought your job was to transport prisoners and relocate snitches from L.A. to Squashed Possum, Nebraska.”
“It’s all been reshuffled so many times since that goddamn September, nobody’s quite sure who does what. That’s a newbie’s take, not to be confused with a statement of federal policy. As to Charlotte Sing, she’s been under surveillance for months, and that’s as much as I’m cleared to say.” She took one sip, said, “Jesus,” and spooned a heap of sugar into her cup.
“I like it chunky style.” I shook my head. “Not good enough, Lieutenant. Is it still Lieutenant?”
“For two weeks. I gave notice. It won’t be Marshal for a while. In order to place you in custody as a material witness, I’ll have to call my supervisor.”
“Your job’s changed, not mine. We’ve had this conversation before. I’m a natural-born citizen, no wants or warrants or parole restrictions. I go where I want when I want and I don’t have to lie about it even to my diary.”
“The country’s changed, don’t forget. Habeas corpus is starting to look like a quaint suggestion. The system’s all in a tangle, like I said. You could get snarled up in it for months.”
I drank coffee. It still had some bark on it, at that. “You want to make a good impression first time out. I’ve got a Rolodex full of lawyers and every one of them would give up the beach house in Malibu for a crack at the Supreme Court. You’re too small a fish to have something like that in your jacket. They’ll cut you into chum and throw you to the sharks.”
“So early in the day to start threatening each other. We don’t mellow, do we?”
“Maybe it isn’t too late to start.”
“You first.”
I grinned. “Okay. I was working a case for the father of a young woman who wound up dead. Deirdre Fuller.”
“I know the history. I kept in touch in case I bombed out in Washington. My father took me to see Darius Fuller pitch once. All I remember is I got mustard on my favorite skirt.”
“I bet it was a pinafore. Did you wear mary janes?”
“Yeah, we were guests of Calvin Coolidge. Charlotte Sing,” she prompted.
“The suspect in the investigation, which wasn’t an investigation then, showed all the signs of a man in deep with the kind of character they coined that phrase for. That suggested gambling, which led me to Madame Sing. It didn’t pan out, but she gave me Wilson Watson as a lead. It was a good one, because Watson paid me a personal visit after I tried to make contact. He had coffee too, right where you’re sitting. His boy Ernesto Esmerelda took a bullet on his way to visit my suspect at Black Squirrel Lake;
that’s in Oakland County.”
“I know where it is,” she said. “I knew it before the story broke last night. One of Sing’s companies owns most of the property there.”
“I wish you hadn’t been out of town. You could’ve saved me a lot of time and a dip in the lake. Now you go.”
She stirred her cup. “Gambling’s the least of it where her story’s concerned. If it were just that we’d leave it up to the state commissions. I think you know what we’re most interested in just now.”
“Shoe bombers.”
“That’s TSA’s headache. We’re concentrating on how they get in this country to begin with.”
“We’ve got the two longest national boundaries in the world. Start there.”
“That’s INS’s headache. We’re after the source. The income Madame Sing gets from the casinos and hook joints—through legal channels, no less, rental property with nothing to link her to the operations themselves—is just a stake to finance her smuggling business. She’s the single largest importer of illegal immigrants in the country, possibly the world; all the foreign agencies are in the same boat, keel over sail, so we can’t be sure of that. Except Israel, and they’ve got their hands full trying not to become illegal immigrants on their own soil.”
“I’ve been hearing things on the news,” I said. “Ordinary folk getting paid a few thousand by strangers to transport Asians across the bridge and through the tunnel. Kind of a reverse Chinese takeout.”
Now she smiled. “The P.I. P.I. If I were quoted saying something like that I’d be up before Congress.”
“Congress would never know what hit it. Those cases were lunkheaded. Even on short acquaintance I wouldn’t tie her to any of them.”
“They weren’t hers, we’re sure of that. The people she uses aren’t virgins and they charge the going professional rate. So far we can’t link her to card-carrying Islamic extremists, but they’ve been doing a lot of recruiting among Asians, many of whom share the same views of the Stars and Stripes as their neighbors in the Middle East. She’s been working her way up to the top of the food chain, priority-wise.”
She was even beginning to sound like a government spook. “She didn’t strike me as that type either,” I said.
“She isn’t. She’s an A-number-one capitalist, and those oil-soaked creeps have the deepest pockets on the planet. The poorer you start out, the richer you want to be, and she started out as a slave. The mystery we have to crack before we move in is where she’s getting her cash to invest. Gambling doesn’t begin to cover what she’s laying out. Did I mention all this is classified?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Don’t waste your breath. If I thought you could do anything with it I wouldn’t be here. I know from years of experience you’re a pump that needs priming.” She wrapped her upper lip over her cup, then set it down and pushed it away. “I hate sugar. So on the level, this Hilary Bairn character is all you talked about?”
She wasn’t letting me off the hook, and I was too tired to wiggle off. “Bairn went bust at Detroit Beach and wound up in hock to Wilson Watson, then went to her to borrow against what he expected to come into when he married the Fuller woman. Anyway, that’s what he told her, she said. When she showed him the door he tried to raise money to put off Watson. When that didn’t pan out, and his meal ticket died—by his own hand, probably, during a lovers’ quarrel—he fled to her mother’s place on the lake. Esmerelda tracked him there, with his toolbox; you know about his toolbox?”
“Everyone in Felony Homicide knows about the toolbox. You think Bairn shot him?”
“What I think stopped counting when Darius Fuller took me off the job. A sheriff’s lieutenant thinks it, and so does John Alderdyce. Esmerelda’s body in Bairn’s Aztek gives it some weight. Also I caught Bairn trying to escape from his hidey-hole in the shack next door.” I told her what had happened then.
She nodded. “I got all that from John. This security schmoe Loudermilk is government property, if he wakes up. You might have left a little more of him for us to work on.”
“I hit him just as hard as I could with the only weapon I had available. He still out?”
“He’s conscious, but his doctors are still stiff-arming us. But we’ve got as many lawyers as they have. I feel bad for John,” she said, apropos nothing. “You know they’re about to take his job away from him?”
I put down my cup. My brewing skills had deteriorated along with most of the others. “Not for the way he’s been handling this investigation. He wrote the book.”
“The mayor and the chief can’t read. They’re getting ready to reorganize the department: layoffs, of course, and they want to consolidate the precincts into districts. The worst part is they’re doing away with the rank of inspector. That means promotion to commander, if you’re close enough to city hall, but John’s been too busy doing his job to line up dates for the annual mayor’s convention on Mackinac Island, so he’s looking at lieutenant. He won’t stand for it, which is what they’re counting on, because inspectors are expensive to keep. They’ll shove him into early retirement without having to hike his pension.”
“He seemed a little thornier than usual. I thought it was the leaky roof downtown.”
“That’s part of it. It’s an old slumlord’s trick: let the facilities go to hell and drive out the tenants, then go condo. Why do you think I sent my resumé to Justice?”
“You didn’t sound as if you were committed to the job.”
“A girl has to keep herself in pantyhose. I tried to convince John to go with me, but he’s got a family, and Detroit’s in his blood. He said he wouldn’t last six months in historic Georgetown.”
“He’s right. He was born at Henry Ford.”
“What else you got besides this radiator flush?”
I got up, dumped out the cups in the sink, came back with two glasses, and poured us each three fingers from the bottle I’d brought from the bedroom. We clinked.
“Isn’t this breakfast for you?” she asked.
“Jet lag. Aren’t you on duty?”
She fluttered her lips and drank. “That’s not much better. You ought to be able to afford better with your overhead.”
“Everything’s relative.” I finished ahead of her and bought another round. “I’m not the office watercooler. Why bitch to me?”
“This Fuller case is high-profile,” she said. “He’s almost the only sports hero this town has left. If John can break it and break it big, the chief won’t have any choice but to kick him upstairs. Only he can’t, because we won’t let him. Not if it means jeopardizing the Charlotte Sing investigation.”
“Am I going to like where this conversation is headed?”
“If some concerned individual in the private sector should manage to lay his hands on Bairn and turn him over to the Criminal Investigation Division, there isn’t a whole hell of a lot Uncle Sam could do to reverse the gears.”
I turned that over with gloves on. All my prepared dialogue was based on people in positions of authority telling me to lay off. “Are you hiring me?”
“Not on a government salary. But a thing like that would go a long way to square you with Detroit.”
“And screw me with Washington. If I louse up the Sing case and they trace it to you, they’ll revoke both our citizenships.”
“Nothing that drastic, but we’ll probably both be audited. I’ll be out of a job, of course, but like the man said, I was looking for a job when I got this one.”
“What’s your end?”
She clattered a set of clear-polished nails on her glass. “If it weren’t for John Alderdyce, I’d still be in the blue bag on Stationery Traffic. The old mayor—you know the one I mean—had the son of a friend all lined up for the vacancy in Felony Homicide. I had the chops, but the son had the testicles. John threatened to bring in the union.”
“He went on suspension once. He wouldn’t talk about it.”
“That was part of the de
al to put him back on duty. He hadn’t been an inspector long enough to make demands, but the administration was in too bad a cess with the DPOA as it was to piss off the rank-and-file over one more issue. John won, but he knew he’d never make commander as long as anyone remembered what he did. Now I’m in a position to do him the same solid. You, too. He could’ve busted you down to a job with mall security a dozen times; the licensing board would’ve listened to him. Twice I tried to get him to do just that. I’m not asking any favor you don’t already owe.”
I took another hit, but it did nothing to stiffen my spine. I did need a better brand. “What else can you tell me about Charlotte Sing?”
“She’s my territory. Bairn’s yours.”
“They’ve overlapped twice now. I may have to bag her, too.”
TWENTY
It was Friday, the first day of the Independence Day weekend. That made for four days of deserted expressways downtown and in the suburbs and choked arteries to the North and West. A truck dumpover at dawn, a chain collision at seven-fifteen, and a police chase at eight had the outbound traffic backed up a total of twenty-seven miles. The chopper jockey on WJR could barely contain his glee.
I was out of just about everything, so after Mary Ann Thaler left I sopped up the alcohol with toast and a fresh pot of coffee I hadn’t strained through limburger cloth, boiled off the sweat and stink of Black Squirrel Lake with hot water, shaved, and put on a sport shirt, slacks, and loafers. It was Casual Friday in the detective business, but even that has its limits. I swung by the office to break the Chief’s Special out of the safe and snapped it to my belt under the shirttail.
From there I drove to the old Kern block and entered a narrow deep shop in Merchants Row, a thirty-million-dollar face-lift on a ninety-five-year-old commercial neighborhood with loft apartments erected atop 28,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, most of it filled with stepladders and draped canvas; when you build it they don’t necessarily come. The clerk behind the glass counter was a kid who couldn’t stop yawning. He tore off a bitter one and turned over the object I’d placed in his hand. “Man, you’re not supposed to immerse these in water.”
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