Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  My hand came down on the gun.

  A shell racketed into a chamber then, very loud in my right ear. “Let go of it, Walker.”

  My lungs inflated slowly, feeding oxygen to my head. The hem of a tan coat drifted into and out of my peripheral vision. The two big men were both standing now, the one who liked to use his feet holding a slim automatic with a fat suppressor screwed to the end of the barrel. I couldn’t see the one pointed at my temple, but I calculated the odds that it had come off the same line. I lifted my hand and rested it on my thigh. The revolver was kicked away.

  “Steady, men,” I said. “I think we may all be working for the same woman.”

  “I don’t think so.” The man in the tan coat took a step back — the pistol was a match as I’d thought, right down to the suppressor — and opened a gray leather folder under my nose. The card identified the holder as Special Agent William Sahara. The letters CIA were superimposed on top of the fine print, a little too large for good taste.

  7

  THERE WAS SOMETHING different about the concourse at that moment besides the proliferation of weapons: We were the only people in it. I wanted to ask about that, but here was the balding fullback who had put me on the floor shoving out a hand to help me up. I took it. He still had all the leverage when with an efficient twist he turned me toward the wall and I had to place my free hand against it to keep my face off the tiles. My feet were kicked apart, not ungently, and he released my other hand so I could put it next to its mate. The frisk began.

  “Check all the way down,” said the man called Sahara. “He wears an ankle holster sometimes.”

  “He’s clean.”

  “Sorry, Walker. You have a slippery reputation. You can turn around now.”

  The guns were all out of sight. Sahara was an inch shorter than I and twenty pounds lighter, more lean than slender, although the cut of his clothes — off the rack but relentlessly altered — softened the angles. He had short brown hair, a straight nose, and a jaw inclining toward the lantern, and he wore aviator’s glasses with a light amber tint. The eyes behind the lenses were brown. Not a mahogany brown or a muddy brown or a nut brown, just brown, like the wrapping on an anonymous package. In looks he was as arid as his name, as memorable as a shifting dune; which is how they pick them in Washington.

  “My name you know,” he said. “This is Earl Moss and Dan Wessell. They’re not with the Company but they often help me out when I’m in Detroit.”

  Moss was the fullback, in his late twenties and running to fat but still muscular, who stood with his box-toed shoes well apart and his arms out from his sides in the classic weightlifter’s stance. Wessell was much thinner, although not thin, with a long neck and a rubber idiot’s grin and ears that stuck out under a velour hat with a feather in the band. He had a high crotch and small feet in soft tasseled loafers, well suited for his kick-boxing predilections. He was closer to forty. They looked friendly enough, like killer dogs at rest with their tongues lolling out.

  “I thought the CIA had no jurisdiction inside the United States,” I said.

  “We’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about a lot of things. But not here. Is anyone in your office right now?”

  “How the hell would I know? I’m not in my office right now.”

  “I meant are you expecting anybody.”

  “Am I?”

  Even his patience was forgettable. “Moss, get Walker’s gun.”

  The fullback retrieved it from the wall where it had come to rest, kicked out the cylinder, and tipped the cartridges into his palm. He flipped the cylinder back in place and handed it to me butt first. After all that showy familiarity I wanted to twirl it into its holster like Sagebrush Schultz, but I just stuck it there. I didn’t want to spook them into running or drop it on my foot.

  Sahara said, “I’ll make sure I’ve lost my tail and then I’ll see you back at your office. Moss and Wessell will keep you company.” He paused. “Don’t worry, you’re not standing anyone up. Miss Hope isn’t there.”

  “I guessed that the second I laid eyes on you.”

  He wasn’t one to have to have the last word. He left us, walking in the direction of the New Center Building the way he’d come. I started back toward the Fisher. My escort followed.

  When we got around the bend the maintenance man in coveralls spotted us and moved the sawhorse back to the wall. A buzzing clump of men and women in business dress hesitated, then came forward. A sign on the sawhorse read CONCOURSE CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. The dot over the i was a round yellow face with button eyes and a smile that reminded me of Wessell’s.

  “I was wondering how you rigged it,” I said.

  Moss grunted. “There’s another one on the New Center side. The guy there will move it when Sahara shows up.” He had a thin voice for his bulk and a delta drawl. A lot of athletes do.

  “The happy face was a cute touch.”

  “Sahara thinks of everything.”

  “Who the hell is Sahara?”

  He put a hand under my left elbow and we climbed the stairs to ground level. We were through talking now.

  The guard at the station, black with an Errol Flynn moustache and a copy of the current USA Today spread before him on the counter, looked up when I paused in front of him. He had on a brown uniform with green patches and a Sam Browne belt with the flap buttoned over the rosewood handle of a chromed Ruger Redhawk. The gun was probably a lot easier to get to that way than if he’d left it on the bus, but it still wasn’t encouraging.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “These two men are kidnapping me.”

  “Yeah? What’s the deal?” His eyes twitched left and right. He was wearing a half grin.

  Moss slid his hand up to my bicep and squeezed. I felt a familiar probing against my right kidney. A man ought to know his own gun when it’s pointing at him. Under the hum of pedestrian traffic in the marble arcade his murmur died inside of two feet. “I’ll blow your spleen through your belt buckle.”

  “Have a nice day,” I told the guard, turning away.

  “Fuck you.”

  We followed the arcade toward the side parking lot. I said, “I’m parked on the street.” There were people on the street.

  “You’re in the lot,” said Moss. “We parked one aisle over.”

  “You guys are good.”

  “Maybe you’re just bad.”

  “Nah.”

  My last best chance was the revolving door, but we didn’t take it. Moss maneuvered me to one of the others and we went out into the crisp air. I was a little relieved. I’ve been taken more places at gunpoint than a B actor, and at least it’s movement of a kind. Free, I was just another reasonably-priced detective adrift between leads. The survivor in me had to keep looking for angles, but the part of me that asks the questions didn’t want them. Guns almost always point to answers.

  Still another part of me wondered if this was the time they would point to the one answer I could just as soon wait to learn.

  I got in behind the wheel of my heap. Wessell let himself in the passenger’s side and Moss took the back seat. I caught his eyes in the rearview mirror — lively green eyes with long lashes like a woman’s, not at all like Sahara’s bland browns — and tilted my head toward Wessell. “Does he talk?”

  “Only with his feet. Start the car.”

  We took Grand to Woodward, drove downtown and then west on Grand River toward my building. At the stoplight on Warren a Metro blue-and-white slid up beside us and the officer on the passenger’s side, early thirties with a buzz cut and the ubiquitous shades, turned a bored face my way. Leaning forward and folding his arms on the back of my seat, Moss burrowed the muzzle of my revolver into the right side of my neck. The light changed, we crossed the intersection, and the prowl car turned at the end of the block and left us. Moss sat back.

  The hallway leading to my office was empty. There was no light behind the glass in the astrologer’s next door, but then I hadn’t seen her since the day she moved in, a big wo
man of sixty or so in man’s tweeds with a face like old wallpaper. Office life is like that: The neighbors come and go, you glimpse their lives in flashes as through a window from a moving train, and then it’s on to the next.

  The door to my waiting room was unlocked, the way I always leave it during the day, and we went on through the press of no clients at all to the private door on the other side, where I fished out my keys. Moss made an impatient sound and reached past me to twist the knob. The door opened.

  “You made good time,” said Sahara.

  He was sitting behind my desk, in just the gray suit and tinted glasses now, having hung his coat on the peg by the door. He had drawn the blinds, casting the office in gray light that enveloped him and almost consumed him. I had to strain to make him out, although it wasn’t that dark; it was just the way he was, like a plain rug on a plank floor. If he wasn’t born that way he had worked at it a long time. He was in either early or late middle age, and you could meet him three times in one day and not place him from one time to the next, unless he had Moss and Wessell with him.

  Moss said, “He didn’t give us much trouble.”

  “That’s because he wasn’t working at it. Sit down, Walker.”

  There was no getting comfortable in the customer’s chair, which suited me fine. I’d already tagged the brown-and-gray man as one of those sleepy-looking lizards you encounter in the desert that dart from their flat rocks to the meaty part of your leg in the blink of an eye.

  He drew a thick envelope from his inside breast pocket and skimmed it at Moss, who caught it one-handed. “Divide that as you like. If I need you again I’ll call.”

  The pair left. I’d miss Wessell.

  Sahara swiveled east and west, admiring the battered file cabinet and the olive-painted safe and Miss November on the wall calendar and the print of Custer’s Last Stand in its frame next to the door. “I like this office,” he said. “It’s functional and no nonsense.”

  “I sent the gumball machine out for repairs just this morning.”

  “Sorry about breaking in and commandeering your chair. I like to face doors.”

  “Sorry about the busted spring.”

  He touched the bridge of his glasses. It was his only mannerism. “Don’t think too badly of Miss Hope. She’s into the IRS for several fortunes and has no choice but to cooperate. She helped turn Sam Lucy three years ago.”

  “Turn how?”

  “Lucy held controlling interest in a couple of gambling ships off the coast of Chile and had government connections there. A certain high-placed official with Communist sympathies was creating serious obstacles for Company operations in the Andes. He was a devout Catholic. When he didn’t show up for church one Sunday his driver went looking for him and found him in his dressing room with two bullets in his chest and a third in his head. That was the driver’s story. Later, after he disappeared, the driver was identified as one Jorge Luis Molina, a former blackjack dealer on one of Lucy’s ships.”

  “What did Lucy get?”

  “Noninterference in his interstate video game racket, and the chance not to go to prison for using a stolen credit card. That was a little thing the Company cooked up with the federal organized crime task force.”

  “Tidy.” I lit a cigarette.

  “Not really. It could just as easily have gone sour and caused an incident. You increase the risk tenfold when you gamble on civilian help. The CIA should have used us.”

  “Hang on. I thought you were the CIA.”

  He smiled a gray-brown smile. “The credentials are real enough. You could say we work under the Company, but that doesn’t mean a Washington file clerk can order around one of our senior agents. Names have a way of showing up in memos, and memos have a way of getting into the hands of the press, so our little group has no name, officially. We’re just the cleanup crew the boys in power neckties call in when they don’t want to get dirt under their nails. Or anything else. We call what we do counterassassination.” He paused. “Does that amuse you?”

  I must have been grinning. I felt the tightness in the corners of my mouth. “It just sounds like a lot of unnecessary syllables for a hit squad. Where does Gail Hope figure in?”

  “She doesn’t. She was a bright bit of bait to see how far you could be trusted. Her — and this.” He removed a fold of paper from the same pocket that had held the envelope he’d given Earl Moss and put it on the blotter. I didn’t pick it up. I recognized the money order I’d handed Gail Hope. “We have a fairly complete file on you, but files often lie, and money never does. You look disappointed.”

  “I liked it better when I thought Gail had mortgaged herself to the eyes to buy her freedom. Now that I know it’s just this week’s allotment for screwdrivers for the Pentagon the money’s lost its shine.”

  “Our sources warned us you’re a romantic,” he said. “You’re still angry over being braced in the concourse. It was the only way I could set up this meeting without word getting back to certain parties. As it was I was followed there, but the sawhorse trick bought me the few minutes I needed. I’ve since shaken the tail, but tails always come back. Moss and Wessell got anxious when you reached for your gun; I apologize for their zeal.” He returned the money order to his pocket and drew out another envelope. I decided he wore his gun on the other side for balance. “There are ten thousand dollars in here. Cash, old bills. They’re yours if you can do something for me.”

  “I don’t know any South American dictators.”

  “I envy you. I don’t want to know any more of them. I’m sick of the whole racket. I’ve had my fill of signs and countersigns and code names and greasy little embassy men with their hands out and bilious congressmen demanding details on clandestine operations so they can broadcast them to their constituents and buy votes. I’m tired of doing business with people I should be putting handcuffs on. If I have to make love to one more lice-ridden slut of a female revolutionary for the freedom of man I’ll air-express my crabs to the director in Washington.”

  “So quit.”

  “It isn’t that easy.”

  I laid my cigarette in the souvenir ashtray from Traverse City and got up and hung my coat next to his. I took a box of .38 cartridges out of the middle drawer of the file cabinet, unholstered the Smith & Wesson, and loaded it, filling all six chambers. He watched me with sleepy interest. I went around behind the desk and excused myself and opened the top drawer and laid the gun inside it and pushed it shut. Then I returned to the customer’s chair and picked up my cigarette. I was ready for the whole sad story.

  “We’re an independent little group,” Sahara said. “True, the CIA itself has no authority in this country, but a dark horse outfit like the one I work for, without official status, is free to work wherever it chooses until it gets caught. Left to his devices in one place for a long enough period, a senior agent like me becomes something of a feudal lord, with his own private army of contacts, informants, and mercenaries like the two you met today. The attitude at the top is that sooner or later these individuals will take it into their heads to cause some damage on their own: strongarming, extortion, treating with the enemy — well, blackmailing the Company itself for the political dynamite it’s placed in his care. Then there are the renegades who write best sellers. A field man who wants to resign is a burning fuse. A burning fuse has to be snuffed out before it reaches the powder.”

  “What do they call that, counter-counterassassination?”

  He adjusted his glasses. “They already suspect me. That’s why I’m being followed. I’ve been based here five years, two years past the standard rotation deadline. I could disappear, but if I used any of the accepted Company methods of going underground, they’d track me down like a pencil in a drawer. To pull off a vanishing act they’ve never seen before I need a civilian mind, a good one that hasn’t been drilled into the procedural warp. That’s where you come in. As I said, I’ve read your file.”

  “Who does the ten grand belong to, you or the Co
mpany?”

  “It’s mine. I borrowed the seven hundred fifty thousand from the discretionary account. Seed money. I’ve bought presidents for less. Do you want the job? I don’t mind telling you I’ve gone to considerable lengths to consult with you. Far more than you know.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with ten thousand dollars, Mr. Sahara. Is that your name, by the way?”

  “It’s the one I’m using at present. The money isn’t meant to tempt you. If this works I’ll consider it well earned. I thought perhaps you might be swayed for reasons of sentiment.”

  I felt the tightness again in the corners of my mouth. “Flag and country?”

  “Wife and home. For a little while, anyway.” He touched his glasses a third time. “We’re related in a way, you and I. I’m married to your ex-wife.”

  8

  I PUT MY CIGARETTE out carefully, squashing it into a lump on top of Grand Traverse Bay and using the lump to tramp out the last glowing spark. “Where is she?”

  “In the area. I wouldn’t advise a visit. She’s under surveillance too.”

  “She gave you my name?”

  “Not in connection with this. She mentions you from time to time, although not as often now as in the beginning. We’ve been married three years. I knew you were a private investigator, and she was willing to admit you were dedicated. The rest I got from your file.”

  “Last I heard she was in Aruba helping somebody spend his inheritance.”