“Ordinarily it’s just the lake, but someone’s out sick. There’s a terrific restaurant up there, if you don’t mind the extra mileage.”
“We’ll meet there. Where is it?”
“It’s hard to give directions to over the phone. Let’s meet at the house and you can follow me from there.”
“I’m a detective. I can usually stumble into a place if I walk a straight line.”
“No straight lines lead to this place. Trust me, it’s worth it. The ribs alone make up for the hassle.”
I wrote down the address of the show house, said goodbye, placed some business calls, and wrote down the information, then threw away my notes. I figured I’d remember them. I went home to scrape off the day and put on my best suit, which was the only one I had left. It needed pressing; so did I. I’d had the coat cut long as usual and it hung over the gun without ostentation.
Going through the normal motions when you’re the star attraction in a shooting gallery is as tough as walking across a stage without tripping over your tie bar. I didn’t crack the curtains more than three times to check out the street and tried not to duck when I backed out of the garage and bumped over the curb, something I hadn’t done in all the years I’d lived there. At the first stoplight I unholstered the revolver and counted the cartridges. There were five, same as three minutes ago. I swung the cylinder back into the frame and laid the gun on the passenger’s seat where I could get to it without dislocating my shoulder.
I felt a little better when I left the surface roads and entered I-75 northbound. By then the air conditioner was running at full capacity, the steering wheel no longer felt slimy, and the area’s constant state of rush hour had receded temporarily, giving me room to maneuver. You can keep a dogfight running a long time with several lanes to choose from and a thirty-mile-an-hour scale to slide up and down.
But the situation didn’t last long. It was Friday night of a holiday weekend, and I’d dodged the nightly homebound traffic only to plunge into the glut of wild-eyed motorists bulling their way north to the straits and Mackinac Island and all the campsites in both peninsulas. Up past the zoo we slowed, then stopped, stuck at the bottom of the concrete drainage ditch south of Auburn Hills like grease in a trap. With the evening sunlight slanting in and the motors idling and drivers’ faces turning red it was a hundred degrees easy, and I couldn’t take the chance of keeping the air conditioner running and overheating the engine. I turned it off and cracked the window on my side, just enough to let in automobile exhaust and keep out bullets. One sniper up on the surface was all it took to turn the place from a junkyard into a cemetery. When a traffic copter puttered overhead I ducked again, then switched on the radio to hear what the guy had to say. No accidents, no construction, just plain physics. You can’t squeeze a crate of oranges through the same strainer at the same time. I dialed up a classical station to flatten my nerves and listened to Chopin and the sound of my own sweat bursting out of my pores. Once again I counted the shells in the revolver. When I caught the passenger in the car to my left goggling, I grinned and showed the county star. The passenger, a woman in her sixties with a shag of pale yellow hair like a bathmat, settled back in her seat and said something to the driver, a man of the same vintage in a tam-o’-shanter with cocktail glasses printed all over it. He glanced my way, then tightened his knuckles a quarter turn on the wheel. Neither one of them looked like a hired killer.
One lane started inching ahead, then stopped, then another advanced a few yards. Cars crossed the line to join the express, passed me, only to be passed by me a few minutes later when my lane got the nod. Brake lights went on and off like marquee bulbs. It went like that for the better part of an hour. I made ten yards in thirty minutes. I hoped Violet Pershing didn’t require punctuality in a date. The copter crossed back the other direction with jets running, headed for the hangar. Movement started again, the lanes took turns more often, we picked up speed. I passed the exit sign I’d been looking at since Tuesday. Then the flood broke and we swung around the long curve that slanted up and out of the bowels of the earth. A succession of truckers leaned on their air horns. I wound up the window and put the air conditioner on turbo. The sweat evaporated on the back of my neck. On the radio a pair of coloratura sopranos were scrambling over each other on the way up the scales; they sounded like casters mating. I laid the station to rest. Over on the oldies side young rockabilly Elvis was putting his hips through their paces in jail. I accelerated with him, on parole. I’d been stuck in traffic jams longer, but never as long as that.
I took the Sashabaw Road exit, coasting down to legal speed for the benefit of the occupants of a county cruiser parked on the apron. The holiday fundraiser had begun.
Pine Knob was built to match its name, a bump in the gently rolling landscape of a glacial plane, built with sand and fill dirt on a pile of junk cars with evergreens planted on top to keep it from washing away. Ski lift lines run up from the redwood-and-plateglass lodge at the base to the crest like thread to a bobbin, and in the winter when the snow machines are blasting rooster tails of blue-white crystal, the bunnies and hot dogs swizzle down the slopes, stomp their boots, and soldier back up to the bar on the second story, making as many trips as it takes before the place begins to look like Aspen. It’s a beginner’s hill with a liquor license, also an entertainment tax. There’s a stage where spavined rockers and electronically enhanced country singers go to die. In the summer it’s just a crumple of green pile and a gin mill attended almost exclusively by locals. I went past the half-dozen cars parked in front and followed the directions I’d been given through tree-tunneled roads paved with asphalt, clay, limestone, and corrugated earth, each of which was named after a lake. The country was rotten with them, and I’d had my fill of lakes. It was enough to make me want to move to Arizona and open a reptile house.
The sun was guttering, and the first dotted neon lines of fireworks showing against the purple, when I slid to a stop at the end of a glossy black driveway like vinyl and peeled my back off the front seat to stand in front of three thousand square feet of goldenrod stucco and rosewood timbers masquerading as a cottage in an English glen, with hawthorne bushes planted in front and what looked like genuine mullioned windows on both stories. A Peninsular sign was pegged in the lawn. There was a red Taurus parked in the driveway. I’d seen it in front of Violet’s house on Black Squirrel Lake.
I pretended to stretch while I stuck the Chief’s Special in its holster behind my right hip and shook my coattail down over it. Then I stretched for real. Every muscle I owned was cinched tight.
The crickets were in voice, but I plowed a furrow of silence between them to the porch, small in proportion to the rest of the house but as big as my living room. It smelled of sawdust and fresh paint; the building hadn’t existed at the beginning of the year. I paused with my finger on the button to read a peach-colored sticky note fixed to the door:
Amos,
I’m upstairs, making beds. The customer insisted on trying out all three. Make yourself comfortable in the living room.
V.
It looked dashed off in a hurry, slanting heavily left. I remembered Violet was left-handed. She would carry around notepaper and pens for contingencies, also a roll of duct tape in case a pipe sprang a leak.
Cozy English rooms are as popular in America as British cuisine. The entry was a great room with a coffered copper ceiling, opening onto a seating area that would accommodate twenty in front of a stone fireplace with flames in the hearth, at war with the air-conditioning. All the lamps were lit on a dimmer system to slow the traffic-harried heart, and someone, Violet probably, had been baking apples in the kitchen. Nothing in the manual had been overlooked to dress the place up for a customer visiting from a cluttered apartment reeking of grilled cheese and toast. Some coffee-table books, but no intimidating shelves of volumes, and no television in sight. A cedar armoire took care of that. The floors were ceramic where they weren’t carpeted in deep plush and there were j
ust enough antiques spotted around to anchor the place to the ground without appearing spinsterish. A lounging robe casually flung across the arm of a sleek blue leather sofa matched the rose lamp shades. The lady was an artist of her kind.
The armoire I’d thought concealed a TV turned out to be a completely furnished liquor cabinet. A pale pink fluorescent tube winked on when I opened the door, setting aglow rows of bottles on glass shelves, with most of the labels I knew and a few I’d never heard of. A flap swung down to function as a serving shelf, exposing crystal and stainless-steel barware. I slid out a cut-glass old-fashioned and poured an inch of Glen Keith into the bottom, just to straighten out the kinks.
“Oh, you found the bar,” Violet said. “I forgot you’re a detective. Can you make a Manhattan?”
I hadn’t heard her coming across the thick carpet. Also she was barefoot. She’d paused to scoop the rose-colored robe off the end of the sofa and was tying the sash as she approached. She hadn’t much on underneath; cologne, possibly. I’d missed the show.
I said, “I don’t know. I never tried. Is that the outfit you wear when you show a house? You must make a pile in commissions.”
“I got sweaty building that damn fire. If I’d said in the note I was taking a shower, I might’ve scared you off.”
“Naked women don’t frighten me as much as they used to. Where do you keep the cherries?”
“Skip it, it’s too much conversation and too little actual drinking. Bourbon and soda will do.”
“How much fizz?”
“Sst. Like that. Fill the rest from the bottle.”
“Aren’t we driving?”
“I changed my mind about the restaurant. It was going to be my treat, but I didn’t make the sale. I put some things in the refrigerator to make the place look homely. We can fix something later. Is that all right?”
“It’s swell. I never did like following people when I wasn’t being paid for it.” I took another glass up to within a half inch of the rim with Maker’s Mark, picked up a ruby-colored seltzer bottle, and leveled it off. When I turned from the bar she sat half reclining on the blue sofa, one bare leg crossed over the other. I take a special interest in attractive women’s feet. How well they care for them says a lot about character. Hers were slim and ivory, the least bit long for her height, but the Great Wall had been standing a long time since Asians bound the feet of infant girls. I liked them fine. Not so much her legs; there was a little too much muscle there, like a ballet dancer’s. I have a policy against going out with women who can kickbox me to death. I asked her if she was a gymnast.
“Does it show? I had Olympic aspirations when I was younger. I grew out of it; most people do, but in my case old training habits die hard. I still put in an hour a day on the infamous treadmill. Full-time athletes always seem adolescent, don’t you think? No matter how white their hair or how bad their arthritis. Emotionally bonsai.” She accepted her glass and touched it to mine when I sat down next to her.
“Darius Fuller spent money like a kid when he had it.”
“My point. The other reason I lost interest was racial. When you’re small and have Asian blood, people expect you either to work the pommel horse or be a whiz at math. I happen to have a head for figures. That was as far as I cared to go to reinforce the stereotype.”
“I didn’t think Asian when I first saw you. Egyptian, maybe. Old Kingdom.”
“Just a couple of anachronisms. You look like you stepped off the cover of American Detective”
“I don’t think there was such a magazine.”
“Before my time. Pulp magazines and detectives. I don’t see how you make ends meet.”
“It’s the same as real estate. People need what people need. How’d you come to work for Charlotte Sing?”
“Peninsular was the first place I tried after I got my Realtor’s license. I thought a firm owned by a woman and an Asian offered the best opportunities.”
“How’d you know she owned Peninsular? Lieutenant Phillips of the sheriff’s department didn’t know it.”
“I did my research. We forgot to drink to something,” she said. “A successful conclusion to your investigation?”
“If you’re sure. I’m superstitious about toasts. Some of them come true.”
“I don’t know what that means.” She drank. She looked like a kitten lapping at a saucer of milk.
I said, “I did some calling around today. I couldn’t find a Violet Pershing registered with the National Association of Real Estate Boards.”
“I wasn’t Violet Pershing when I got my license.”
“I thought of that. Violet isn’t a common name among women who don’t go on senior junkets to Casino Windsor. There were two registered. One was black, the other failed to renew her license after forty years in the business.”
She reached up and set her glass on a table behind the sofa. “I didn’t think I made that much of an impression this morning.”
“It doesn’t happen as often as it used to,” I said. “Maybe I’m losing my looks. Once in a dozen cases, a beautiful woman I’d just met would purr and rub herself against my legs. It almost always wasn’t sex she was after. That was just the common coin.”
Her elongated eyes were shards of black ceramic, harder than steel. “Don’t flatter yourself. We were pretty relaxed with each other that first time. I thought I could let my hair down an inch, forget I wasted my afternoon on a pair of looky-loos who never had any intention of buying any sort of house, let alone this one. You seemed like good entertainment. I lied about being a realtor. I’m just a real estate agent, a flogger without credentials. Are you going to report me to NAREB?”
“Nothing that drastic. Just the cops and the U.S. Marshals.”
She shifted a little, drew the robe over her leg. She said nothing.
“You didn’t come to Charlotte Sing looking for work,” I said. “She came to you. She told me herself she hires her people first on their merits, then on whether they’re Asian. If a licensed realtor with Eastern blood was all she wanted there are plenty of Asian names registered. You came with other skills.”
“Man trap?” Her smile would frost a flower bed.
“Among others. I’m holding the bait. You don’t stock a show house with liquor you can only get in Scotland.” I sniffed the old heather in my glass, but didn’t drink. I put it on my end of the table. “I don’t think many moves ahead. By the time I find out I’m playing chess and not Parcheesi, it’s usually too late. Meanwhile I have to fake it and keep my eyes open. I didn’t put it all together until you showed up in that robe. Sometimes the camouflage calls attention to itself. But not in Esmerelda’s case.
“It’s no wonder he didn’t see you coming,” I went on. “He wasn’t expecting a woman in a company blazer.”
She’d been lounging with one arm dangling off the arm of the sofa. When it moved I reached for my holster. I had the revolver on her before she cleared the cushions with the shiny .44 she’d planted there.
TWENTY-FOUR
I wondered how you’d worked it,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d put all your chips on one number, but you couldn’t hide a pen knife under a kimono that thin.”
She let the magnum slip back between the cushions and rested her hand on the arm of the sofa. “You might’ve been gay or impotent. Are you?”
“That won’t work either. I’ve been called worse by my friends. Was the plan to do me right here or wrap me up to go?”
“Right here. I like things simple.”
I shook my head. “You’d lie to the hangman. With a realty sign out front you never know when someone might come to browse. Better to pin me down until the reinforcements get here and take me out after dark. That’d give your boss time to land in San Francisco and be seen there.”
“You’re smarter than Bairn. He came straight to me after the deputies shifted their search away from the lake, just like I told him when I left him. He thought the enemy of his enemy was his friend.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “I wasn’t in on that end. I only came in when it looked like he might run to cover at the lake. That was a lucky bounce. Madame Sing has us spotted all over to cut down on response time, but the job doesn’t often come to the jobber. Esmerelda was my first real assignment since I came to work for her. I’ve made a lot more money off sales commissions than I did off that job. Actual rental fees.”
“Deep cover’s like that. No one can afford to maintain a full-time force of killers otherwise. But why take one off the leash on Bairn’s behalf? What’s a bookkeeper with a courier service have to do with smuggling illegal aliens into the country?”
“That’s not my end either. The work’s strictly need-to-know.”
“Whose end is it?”
The ceramic shards she used to see through took a sharp jig, then returned to center. Her will was as hard as her eyes, but she hadn’t been able to kill the reflex. I leaned back to broaden my field of fire. I was too casual about it, too goddamned sure of my ability to adapt to a sudden change in the status quo. Movement flashed in the corner of my eye and my head went flying off my shoulders.
TWENTY-FIVE
I welcomed the nausea. You have to accept it anyway if you’re going to enjoy a mild concussion, and when you’re throwing up you’re not dead.
I’d experienced that lightbulb-in-the-throat sensation enough times to be able to swallow it and keep it down with my teeth gritted until it washed away with the tide. Light came dusky pink through my eyelids, but I kept them shut. I sensed eyes on me, and if I opened them, came either another knock on the head or The Speech, and I wasn’t up to either with my brains trying to squeeze out through the throbbing pulpy patch on the back of my skull. Fortunately it’s thickest there, a combination of scar tissue outside and calcium reinforcement inside, supplied by my own chemistry to fill the gap where the gray matter had shrunken away from the bone. It slowed my thinking, but helped protect me from some of the consequences.
American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Page 16