Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

“Are we a bigot?”

  I didn’t know if she caught it. As far as the muscles of her face moved she could have sat for a sculptor who worked in solid diamond. “You were seen visiting Elysian Fields while it was under our surveillance. You were in there thirteen minutes. Pardon me, you seem fit, but you do not strike me as the type who indulges himself in health supplements. What was your business?”

  “Not yours. I like to wreck my body the old-fashioned way, by shopping in liquor stores.”

  “You’re being intentionally evasive.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to be evasive by accident. Did you have the place staked out when the manager was murdered?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss all the details of an investigation. In any case, homicide is irrelevant except where it pertains to the matter at hand, and that hasn’t been decided in this case.”

  “In this country our various branches of investigation share information.”

  “And now you are being intentionally disingenuous. We know your history of internecine squabbles. But to respond: Once we’re satisfied that to confide in the local authorities will not jeopardize our assignment, we are eager to cooperate. The police can be territorial. Nothing can be gained by antagonizing them unnecessarily.”

  “Major, your country wrote the book on territorial.” I got up. Leibowitz spun my way, hands open at his sides. I wouldn’t have thought he could displace that much bulk so fast. I’d had him pegged for a regular at the Heart Attack Station. Dorn kept her seat. I had a hunch she was the dangerous one, naked and unarmed as she was under the robe. I picked up one of my socks, felt it. It was still a little damp, but I put on my shoes and socks and unrolled my cuffs, then returned to my chair. I felt like I’d been wading in wet grass. I could live with that. The captain wore thick-soled shoes on his gunboats and he looked like a stomper.

  “I’m looking for a missing wife. Not mine. She’s the type who indulges herself in health supplements, or she did. She took off from home without her personal pharmacy and I thought she might drop by the place to stock up.”

  “Is there anyone who can verify that?”

  “I suppose you can talk to the clerk, if you can find her. I forget her name.”

  “You seem absentminded for a professional detective.”

  “Her name is irrelevant to my investigation.”

  She rooted among the objects on the table, paged through my wilted notebook. “I studied stenography before I joined the service,” she said. “I worked in Hebrew, French, German, and English; we have many expatriates in intelligence. I’m not familiar with your shorthand.”

  “It’d be spooky if you were. I made it up. Sometimes I can’t read it myself.”

  “I suppose today would be one of those times.”

  I changed the subject. I was running out of banter. “It’s time you pooled what you’ve got with the locals. You’re duplicating efforts; the man who controls expenses back home won’t like that. If you’ve been watching the pill store you know it was raided. Detroit P.D. knows about the drug ring. What I can’t figure out is why Israel cares what a bunch of Mexicans and Chinese are up to.”

  “We’re interested in them only peripherally. It is their partners in the Middle East who concern us. They’re harvesting the poppy and coca fields in both hemispheres and selling the refined product in the United States in order to finance terrorist operations throughout the world, specifically in Israel. We’ve known for some time they’re shifting their emphasis from the West in order to carry out their traditional intention of wiping my country from the face of the earth.”

  “What is it about Detroit that all these thugs want to use it to destroy whole populations? Not long ago a nutjob with a billion dollars tried to flood the city with high-octane heroin, then cut off the supply and turn a couple of thousand hopheads into mass murderers. It’s—” I crossed my legs. I had a sudden chill; should’ve let the footwear dry a little longer.

  She cocked her head. If she were a bird of prey, that gesture would be talons in my throat. “It’s—?” she prompted.

  “I just thought of a piece of intelligence I can spare, but I need the same thing from you.”

  “We are not here to bargain, Mr. Walker. I have the authority to shelter you in a remote place for as long as it takes to penetrate your obstinance.”

  “Queue up, Major. I got the same speech a little while ago, with contractions. You cops need new writers.”

  “I am not referring to jail. In the place I have in mind, you will be deposited naked on a concrete floor in a room without heat or ventilation with not enough space to lie down. GOLEM is not subject to your progressive regulations regarding incarceration. You will not have the right to remain silent, you will be denied access to an attorney, and anything you do not say can and will be used against you. You will not be in America. No extradition proceedings will be implemented. We don’t need them. Are you familiar with the Eichmann case?”

  “How is it Meyer Lansky was before your time, but Eichmann wasn’t?”

  She turned her head, said something to Leibowitz in a language I will never understand. He produced a gadget the size of a pack of cigarettes from a coat pocket, stuck a bud in his ear, worked a key, listened, worked another key, unplugged his ear, and put the thing back in his pocket. Nodded.

  “As I thought. We have discussed relevance twice during this conversation. Mr. Lansky is not. Eichmann is, to every Jew on this planet. At the time he was arrested in Argentina and brought to Israel for trial and execution, there was outcry from most of the world powers about violation of international law, but he was hanged anyway. In your case, I severely doubt many voices will be raised. You will be—what is the Orwellian term?—a nonperson?”

  *

  We ordered room service. I needed a sandwich and a drink to float it in, and I figured it was time to find out if Leibowitz had vocal cords and if he was supposed to be the good cop. When I made the suggestion, a look passed between them. Maybe he was hungry, too, and maybe he had a blood-sugar problem. Anyway Dorn nodded her head, this movement taking up only a thirty-secondth of an inch, and he picked up the telephone. His broad Chicago accent had Yiddish edging, either inherited or picked up abroad.

  She interrupted the order. “And a carton of cigarettes. Camels.”

  Well, I hadn’t figured her for Virginia Slims.

  He added it to the list, frowned, took the receiver from his face. “No cigarettes. There’s a state law.”

  I grinned. “Kidnapping’s in, smoking’s out. The line has to be drawn somewhere.”

  “What strange people you are,” she muttered.

  When he got off the line she said, “Go out and find a drugstore. I will look after Mr. Walker.”

  He picked up the Desert Eagle in its rig and started to bring it to her.

  “No. Leave it.” She looked at me. “Do you accept that it is unnecessary?”

  I said sure. There wasn’t a brick handy to break and I didn’t want her proving it on my arm.

  “Alone at last,” I said, when he’d left. “What do Islamists need with financing? They wash their undies in oil.”

  “As you know, there have been great disturbances recently among the Arab governments. They’re reluctant to cooperate openly with terrorist organizations. The World Bank has frozen the assets of the billionaires who belong, and much of their remaining capital has vanished along with the couriers. Fanaticism and corruption are not mutually exclusive. And so Al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, and the PLO are forced to seek funding, like your banks and auto companies. To their mind, it is not an absurd analogy. They see themselves as performing a great service to mankind by wiping out a large portion of it. Is this the information you wished?”

  “Well, it’s all I’m likely to get. I figured you’d open up with Asa out of the room.”

  “Because I am a woman?”

  “Because you’re a woman working with a man who’s sure if the mission goes bust it’ll be your fault becau
se you’re a woman. I’m in the intelligence business, don’t forget. My expense account won’t cover super high-tech recorders that don’t depend on tape or discs and can pick up every syllable of a quiet conversation through a layer of worsted, but the commodity’s the same, back-scratching-wise. A man can work a swap without being called onto the carpet, but if Leibowitz thinks you’re soft he won’t be so quick to back you when it counts. If this is too much vernacular, I’ll try to put it in English.”

  “I understood enough of it. I am trying to decide whether to be insulted.”

  “Not by me. Women have been making a monkey of me all my life, and don’t get the idea from that fizzle in the car wash I’m as dumb as I look.”

  “And now what is your information? The name of your client would be a start.”

  “That’d tick off the client and waste your time besides. The cases don’t connect.”

  Her eyebrows, the only expressive things on her face, told me she was going to argue the point; but then room service knocked at the door. She got up, went to the nightstand, unholstered the massive semiautomatic, and went to check the peephole with it pointed ceilingward. When she was satisfied we weren’t under siege, she let it hang behind her right hip and let in a young waiter with a buzz cut in a red jacket pushing a cart. She stopped him before he could lift the covers off the trays for our approval.

  “Thank you.” Turning her back to use her body as a shield, she deposited the Desert Eagle in the nightstand drawer, retrieved a square wallet designed to hold foreign bills, signed the receipt he handed her, and gave him five dollars American. She stood with her feet spread just far enough apart to kick his testicles up into his throat if he made an unwaiterlike move.

  I was impolite. Without waiting for Leibowitz to return, I stood, twisted the cap off a fifth of Lauder’s, poured two fingers into two cut-crystal glasses, and sat back down with my steak sandwich on a plate in my lap. She inspected the whitefish, made a resigned little movement involving the surface of one shoulder, and drew her chair up to the cart to eat. She washed down each bite with bottled water, then sipped Scotch, then forked up another bit of kosher. A methodical type. She would dispose of a body using the same measured movements.

  “What have you to offer?” she asked, halfway through the entrée.

  I concentrated another moment on my meal. Hotel chefs hate applying heat to a prime cut of meat, so I’d ordered medium instead of my usual medium-rare. It had arrived beet-colored and bleeding; with a little first aid I could have resuscitated it. Instead I doused it with A.l. “In return for giving me a raincheck on that all-expenses-paid trip to Israel?”

  “You keep flexing your price, Mr. Walker. I have already given you something I was not prepared to give.”

  “Sure you were. Everyone knows what’s going on in your part of the world. The droolers are losing steam. Why else would they go into the drug trade if not to raise money for a direct assault? They want to wind the clock back to the palmy days of the Ottoman Empire, when men were men, women were camels, and infidel heads rolled like marbles. Undermining our moral fiber by flooding the market with primo cocaine and heroin is too subtle for their methods. And our countries are supposed to be allies, but the people you answer to wouldn’t send two experienced agents halfway around the globe to protect American interests, especially not with our politicians talking about returning your borders to where they were before the Six-Day War.”

  “As well reduce the United States to the original thirteen colonies,” she said. “Among holders of public office, inanity is the universal language.”

  “Not an original thought. The point I’m making is I’d have put it all together sooner or later. All you gave me was time.”

  She swallowed a piece of fish and chased it with Scotch, then water, all out of order. It was the equivalent of Lady Macbeth wringing her hands. “Amnesty would require indication in advance that what you have to trade has value.”

  “That’s not much room to wiggle, but I’ll take a stab at it.” I ate half my sandwich, letting the masticating motion stimulate my brain, but chewing the undercooked meat made my jaws ache. I put it down and reached up to slide the plate onto the cart. There was broccoli, which normally I like, but I ignored it in favor of diverting blood flow north of my neck. “Any operation involving Mexico, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East needs someone at top. It can’t be run by a committee. Can we agree on that?”

  “Certainly. The inefficacy of the United Nations is evidence in favor of the theory.”

  “I can give you her name.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Her’?”

  “You shouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “Isn’t every baby girl and boy in Israel military property from birth?”

  “I did not say I was surprised. Continue.”

  “MacArthur Industries. That name ever pop up?”

  “An international conglomerate, based somewhere in Asia. Just where seems to depend upon the calendar date. The Bamboo Curtain is as impenetrable as ever, despite the economic changes there. In many ways it’s a feudal system, with much moving around. Manufacturing. Investment. Real estate. Communications. A firm so large and diverse is bound to appear in any investigation regarding financing. I understand there was some question about its former chief operating officer, but there has been a reorganization since.”

  “Too close to the vest, Major. The cops in Detroit know what MacArthur was up to, and their budget’s a lot tighter than yours.”

  “Very well. You are speaking of Charlotte Sing. She is wanted in most of the countries of the world for illegal trafficking in human organs, drug dealing, and racketeering.”

  “You left out murder.”

  “I should not have to remind you that domestic homicide is a local issue.”

  “I don’t like to give another guy advice about his work, but maybe if you’d spent a little more time in the beginning on piecemeal killing, you could have prevented a couple of hundred in a school or hospital.”

  “I am sorry you felt compelled to engage in a practice you dislike.”

  There was a knock. She repeated her actions of fifteen minutes earlier. When she saw it was Leibowitz, she opened up and returned her pistol to the nightstand. As her partner sat on the edge of the bed and drew the cart close to dig into his meal—chicken and potatoes, with coleslaw in a saki cup—Dorn opened a window, used a disposable lighter on a Camel from the carton the captain had brought, and held the pack out to me. I used her lighter and watched the smoke drift out toward Michigan Avenue.

  “If Madam Sing is out to pasture, someone who thinks a lot like her is warming her chair. The cops have traced Elysian Fields to MacArthur. Don’t feel bad,” I said, although I’d gotten no reaction. “While you were thinking globally, Detroit Homicide was working the neighborhood. First order of business is to establish ownership of the place where an employee turns toes up.”

  Leibowitz left off eating to watch us. He was trying to catch up on what he’d missed while he was out.

  “Assuming for the moment you’re right,” Dorn said, “what interest would an illegal trader have in bringing down Israel?”

  “She’s an illegal trader the way Stalin was a practicing Marxist. Savvy Stalin?”

  “‘One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.’ The Jew who does not know this is unworthy of his heritage.”

  “Sing lost interest in turning a profit after she made her first billion. That was capital enough to wipe out the white race, or at least increase the majority of all the others. She’s the daughter of a South Korean national and an American GI who bought her a ticket to the U.S. only to turn her into a sex slave in a massage parlor—modern term for a whorehouse. She got out of that by marrying the owner of a chain, turned it into a real-estate business renting property to customers looking to build unauthorized casinos. That allowed her to charge astronomical rates without risking arrest; if you can’t prove the owner of a piece of ground where laws are broken k
nows what’s going on, you can’t prosecute. By the time she was forty, she had enough set aside to create MacArthur.”

  “Why MacArthur?”

  “She told me she had a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about General MacArthur because he was the first American to leave Korea.”

  “You’ve met?”

  “Couple of times. No matter how ready you are, though, you always jump when you see a snake. She never got over that slave thing, and she blames everyone who isn’t Asian. She isn’t alone; anyone who’s been through what she has might feel the same way. But just anyone doesn’t have her resources. She’s rich, brilliant, and as crazy as a Mexican jumping bean. As long as she’s loose, the world’s on the receiving end of a game of Russian roulette.”

  “Russian. Asian. Mexican. American English is so much more cosmopolitan than I was led to believe.” She was silent for a moment. “The Korean conflict was many years ago. She must be elderly.”

  “So was Eichmann. Anyway, between modern medical science and the magic of cosmetic surgery, her curdled brain is just about the only body part that’s original to her.”

  “You make her sound supernatural.”

  “I wish she were. I’d stock up on silver bullets and garlic.”

  “Such a person, sought all over, would find it difficult to travel. Who are her agents?”

  I ground my cigarette out on the glass top of the lamp table, concentrating on the action. “Your guess is as good as mine. She uses every ethnic type, but the only ones she really trusts look like her.”

  “You’ve made quite a study.”

  “More the other way around; not that I’m more than a gnat swimming in her beer, but no one likes that. A microscope is glass on both ends. When you’re being watched, you watch back.”

  Leibowitz struggled through something in Hebrew. He hadn’t been speaking it long enough to think in it. I got the impression from Dorn’s response in the same language that she was bringing him up to speed. How she handled the part about exchanging sensitive information I couldn’t tell and I didn’t care. Somewhere in there my fate was being discussed, and from the way the captain pulled a frown whenever he looked at me I had a handle on where he stood. At the end he started to say something, sputtering like a motor looking for a spark, but she cut him off with a single word, without raising her voice. He picked up his fork and poked at his chicken, sulking. The distance between them seemed broader than a single military rank; but I suppose other things were involved. Notches, maybe.