“You cops have no ambition. The trunk’s full of tricks but you’re too lazy to dig down.”
“So dig. I’m a quick study.”
“I’m swimming solo on this one,” I said. “It will be less awkward if you don’t ask me why.”
“Why?”
I stubbed out the butt. “Because you’re an officer of the court, and you won’t have to answer so many embarrassing questions if you don’t see me hang him out a fourth-floor window by his shoelaces.”
“Do you think four floors are enough?”
“It’s all I’ve got to work with at the Alamo. You need to pay me out some line, Lieutenant. I’ll never hear the end of it if you wind up walking the halls of the Hotel Nobody Gives a Shit talking to yourself on a Motorola.”
“Such language in front of a lady. You did have a tough night.”
“I’m sorry.”
When she laughed, genuinely laughed, she did sound like a girl. “Cheer up, Walker. Jitterbug’s back and so will you be, someday. Just don’t hand me that bull about my career. You want to cowboy the job.”
“That’s the second time in two days somebody’s called me a cowboy. I can’t think why. I don’t know a fetlock from a Yale.”
“It was an observation, not a criticism. I gave up trying to corrige the incorrigible when I passed the L.T.’s exam.”
“Tell that to Allison Booth.” I looked at the fan to make sure the blades were still turning. They didn’t seem to be stirring any air. “You know, you can’t answer all the lost voices. If you start trying, in the end you won’t be able to answer even one.”
“That sounds like a pep talk you give yourself.”
“Another lost voice.”
A swivel chair squeaked on its rocker. “Just tell me what you found out when you find it out, okay? Forty-year-old police business is still police business. And you need to do downtown a favor. It’s been a while. You don’t call, you don’t write. Next time you need the latchstring left out, Mama might not be home.” She hung up.
24
The talk with Lieutenant Thaler made me change the order of things. I try not to lie to women. I dug out Lowell Birdsall’s business card and dialed his number at the Alamo. His machine played five seconds of sirens and machine guns—a scratchy old transcription from Gangbusters—then an announcement that sounded like Jeanette MacDonald doing an impression of Humphrey Bogart, asking me to leave a message. I didn’t leave one.
My watch read a couple of minutes past nine. He might have been sleeping in after the trip back from Cleveland. It was all of a two-hour drive, but for a man who worked out of his apartment it would seem like the Bataan Death March. Anyway it freed me up to go back to my original plan.
Grand River Avenue extends most of the way across Michigan. If you don’t like expressways and don’t mind traffic lights and construction delays and can avoid the occasional stygian detour, you can drive from downtown Detroit almost into Lake Michigan without ever using a turn signal; but you’d need a week to spare to get the thing done. Fortunately I needed less than fifteen minutes, because Russell Fearing and I worked in the same ZIP code.
I’d probably driven past the building a couple of hundred times and hadn’t noticed it. A dozen blocks west of the little pocket canyon of skyscrapers in the heart of the business district, it stood a story high and a block long, built of white-painted cinderblock, and contained a half-dozen businesses separated by interior partitions. A beauty school operated out of one end with its name in white on a blue plastic awning over a display window with wigs on Styrofoam heads inside, while a store that sold plumbing fixtures advertised a sale on flush valves on a sandwich board on the other end, the sign holding open the door to offer the throngs easy access. Accordioned between were a hearing-aid shop, a Christian Science reading room next to a medical supply outlet, and RUSSELL FEARING SECURITY SERVICES lettered in tasteful gold on a glass door that sparkled from polishing. Only when you parked in the cramped lot and stood in front of the door could you read R. I. Fearing, U.S. Secret Service, Ret’d, etched in one corner.
A pleasant little buzzer sounded when I pushed open the door. The reception room was a perfect square, carpeted in silver-blue pile, with soundproof navy panels on the walls and four white scoop chairs cornered around a glass table containing the usual magazines. In the corner opposite sat a woman of about sixty, sitting straight-backed before a small computer screen. She wore her gray hair short in back and swept into a Woody Woodpecker crest in front and glasses with heavy black frames. She hadn’t an ounce of fat on her. She had on a red blazer with black patches on the lapels and a white silk riding-stock around her throat, and when she looked up alertly and asked if she could help me, I wasn’t surprised to hear a Mayfair accent.
“Fearing,” I said. In the right mood there is something about Merrie Olde England that brings out the Detroit in me.
“He’s in a meeting at the moment. Is he expecting you, Mister—?”
“Drummond. You can call me Bulldog.” I twisted the knob on the door at the rear marked PRIVATE and went on through. She squeaked and got up to stop me, but there’s never any sincerity in that. They teach elementary physics even in British public schools.
Fearing’s office wasn’t any bigger than the waiting room, and less comfortable. There were no seats for visitors, only a plain chunk of desk holding up desk stuff and the man himself sitting behind it in his shirtsleeves holding a slim black telephone receiver. There was a color photo framed on one wall of a younger, less bulky Fearing shaking hands with Gerald Ford and a glass case mounted on the wall adjacent with a Remington pump shotgun and a teargas gun with a wire barrel in racks and a number of revolvers and automatic pistols on pegs. It had a large round brass lock and the glass was gridded with alarm wires. Aside from those things there was no decoration, not even a window. The carpet and walls were the same as in the other room, as if whoever decorated the place had not bothered to draw a line between public first impression and personal privacy. Fearing had made all the decisions himself and hadn’t taken five minutes doing it.
He looked up at me with those hard sad eyes in that nut-brown face, as surprised as a turtle at the dawn, and said, “I’ll call you back, Mr. Ford.” He placed the receiver on its shallow standard and looked at the woman vibrating in the doorway behind me.
“He just walked right in, Mr. Fearing. Should I call the police?”
“No. That would be poor advertising. Leave us, please. I know this fellow. He answers to Tom Mix.”
“Tom Mix?”
The tight smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and gave up. “Well, Errol Flynn.” “Robin Hood?”
“I was thinking of Virginia City. The one where he was a cowboy?”
“You Americans and your westerns. You’d think the frontier never closed. Even we Brits let go of the Empire finally.” The door banged shut.
Fearing said, “You should put some steak on that eye.”
“That’s an old myth. Anyway, T-bones are six bucks a pound. I thought you bodyguard types never bothered with the face. Too hard on the hands when an undercut to the stomach’s just as good.”
“That’s true. Are you telling me you were hit by a bodyguard? Just how many celebrities did you harass over the weekend?”
“One seemed to do the trick. How often do you eat at the Blue Heron?”
“Twice in the last four years. I was working both times. Am I being accused of something?” He sat with his palms up on the desk, a gesture of wary submission known only to certain related fields of endeavor. It added a split-second to one’s fast draw—unless he had a spring rig up a sleeve. The French cuffs of his white shirt looked pretty snug for that. I let a little of the tension out of my shoulders; about enough to add a split-second to my fast draw. I’d come armed.
“Your client Eddie Cypress asked me to lunch yesterday. Two men I never got a good look at pinned me with my own car door and played a fast game of hacky-sack with my head. They left t
hese behind.” I slid my left hand into my side pocket and laid the twisted and smashed pair of glasses on his desk.
He looked at them without touching. “Did you check the prescription?”
“I don’t have to prove anything in court. When I find Sargent Hurley I’ll try them on him, just like Cinderella. Then I’ll turn him into a pumpkin.”
“You said they pinned you with the car door?”
“They cracked a couple of ribs doing it, but I’m not beefing about that. I need my head to hold up my hat.”
“You’re not wearing a hat.”
“I’m keeping my options open.”
“Get them taped up?”
I shook my head.
“Right. Why pay the AMA by the yard? Either way they knit. Well, that explains why they hit you in the face. The door was in the way. You must have made Glad Eddie pretty sore at the bookstore. I’m sorry I was stuck outside. It would’ve been worth getting fired off the job to see you wipe the smile off his face.”
“I didn’t. It’s nailed on. What’s the matter, didn’t his check clear?”
He sat back then and smoothed down his necktie. It was clipped to his shirt with a gold clasp bearing the Secret Service seal. He folded his hands across his flat middle.
“I’m a gentleman so far,” he said. “You bust in, frighten my assistant, accuse me of a Class-A violation of the civil code, and I don’t raise my voice. One thing the service teaches you is patience, along with every home remedy ever invented to cure piles. But the cures don’t all work, and right now nobody’s paying me to be patient. I took a call from New York saying a celebrated author was coming to town and his security needed an extra man at the door. I didn’t hire on for any other kind of work, and I wasn’t asked, then or yesterday. I’d heard of Cypress, but I hadn’t thought anything about him either way: What business is it of mine how many mob lowlifes he stamped out or how much legit money he gets paid for writing about it? We’ve got presidential advisors advising the president to accept campaign money from the enemies of our country and cashing their government paychecks in the same bars in Washington where I used to cash mine. Okay, I don’t like him when I meet him. If I only worked for people I liked, I’d be buying my ammo with food stamps. I put up with what I have to put up with to pay my overhead. That doesn’t include putting up with characters like you. It doesn’t cost me a penny to show characters like you the door at forty miles an hour.”
I looked at his boxer’s face, the thick skin on his cheeks and the hard sad eyes made for looking up from under with his head sunk into his shoulders like a turtle’s, and I relaxed. It would have been a sin to put a hole through an arrangement like his, and my draw might not have been fast enough anyway. The fisted black combination butt of what would be a short-barreled revolver stuck out of a holster behind his right hipbone.
“ ‘R. I. Fearing,’ ” I said. “What’s the I stand for?”
This time he let the smile run out a little before taking in the hitch. “Icarus. My old man could barely read and write his own name, but he was a nut on the classics. So now you’ve got three names for me and I’ve got none for you.”
“Amos Walker. My old man named me after half a radio show.”
“You’re way too white for either half. Is that private cop I smell?”
“I’m going to have to buy a better brand of soap.”
“Wouldn’t help. It’s the way you hold your head and how you let your right hand hang open and the questions you ask that don’t count, like a polygraph expert getting a level. You’re not a cop or I’d have seen a shield before this. Given the choice between his metal and pictures of his grandkids, a cop will go for the metal every time.”
“Sweet.”
“Reflex. After fifteen years in Washington I can’t see a kid licking an ice cream cone without looking for a wire running from the cone to his shortpants pocket. It’s ruined me for Norman Rockwell.”
“The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.”
“You got that right. Can’t admire an apple without seeing the worm.”
“How come you got your picture taken with Jerry Ford if you never worked the White House?”
“Whip Inflation Now rally. Chief of Staff was afraid not many people would show up for the photo op. The order went out for warm bodies. I don’t vote Republican but the wife thought the kids might like a memento of their old man in case I got run over by a surveillance van. It attracts business. I think you’ve got a level by now.”
I accepted the invitation. “Were you at the restaurant?”
“No. My job was to work the door at the bookshop. It ended when Cypress finished signing. Where he went from there nobody told me and I didn’t ask. Hurley handed me my check on the spot. I went home to drink beer and sleep and wait for the bank to open. You can check with my wife on that, not that you’d believe her or I’d give you my number at home. If you get it from any other source I won’t go to court. I’ll come see you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay means what?”
“It means you probably wouldn’t lie in your own ballpark. Also it means I don’t want to go another round with this eye. It would just give you something to work on. Finally it means I think you’re too smart to throw in with Hurley on a job not connected with your specialty. He probably wouldn’t even ask. He’s got Herb.”
“Herb. The service turned away a hundred Herbs a week, and fifty Hurleys. Did he tell you he’s Eddie’s publicist?”
“Eddie told me.”
“I know a bit about the work from hanging around the press corps. He couldn’t write a release if you held a knife to his throat and dictated. When a strongarm starts to slow down, you either kick him upstairs or put him out to pasture. Hurley knows how to put studs in a dress shirt, so he didn’t go to the Old Pugs’ Home. He loves his work. I doubt he’s married. He sits home at night and cleans his gun.”
“Did he and Herb fly out with Cypress?”
“They didn’t fly out. They’re still in town.”
That left me silent for a minute. I hadn’t expected that big a break. “Where and why?”
“He’s doing an interview at the NPR station in Ypsilanti this afternoon. They’re running a network feed to New York on account of he’s flying out to the Coast tonight and working his way back east at about five cities per week. He’s sharing a suite with the Brothers Karamazov at the Pontchartrain.” He gave me a number on the twelfth floor.
“Why are you so good to me?”
“I’ve been at this twenty-two years, counting government service and private. I held up my right hand and swore and I didn’t cross any fingers when I did it. People who do ought to be called down. I can listen to a coon joke and not turn a hair, but jokes about gorillas in blue suits make me want to spit. Guys like Hurley and Herb are the reason those jokes get told. Are you figuring on carrying that piece into the suite?”
I bought my jackets and coats one size too big so the tail would hang over the gun without snagging; to someone like Fearing, that was the same as if I had on crossed bandoleros. “I was thinking about it. The last time I left it off I was mishandled.”
“If you wear it in I’m going to call the suite as soon as you leave here and tell them you’re coming. That thing I swore to included not being an accessory to murder. I don’t know you that well.”
I unsnapped the holster and placed it and the Chief’s Special on the desk.
“Good arm,” he said, again without touching. “I’m glad to see you’re not one of the cannon boys. A bullet ought to stay inside the man you fired it at if it’s going to do any good. We used half-loads in the service. The PR was to avoid blowing a hole through a bad guy and hitting an innocent. There’s things I miss about Washington, but PR isn’t one of them. Put it back on. Just try not to use it.”
I returned it to my belt. “Guess you know me better than you thought.”
“If you’d beefed about leaving the gun I’d have known just as much. I don’t sup
pose it’s any of my business to ask what this is all about.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good to know it. So far all it’s done for me is gotten me slapped around and made me the toast of two police departments.”
“City?”
“One city, one county.”
He sucked air through his teeth. “Those rural boys hunt to eat.”
“I can stay out of that county. It’s the Detroit cops I’m worried about.”
“Need a side man?”
“I don’t hire muscle.”
He got mad for the first time. “I wasn’t drumming up business. I was thinking of taking an early lunch.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I get my own dirt on my own hands.”
He backed off. “Not many of you left.”
“For obvious reasons.”
He raised a hand. It wasn’t quite a gesture of benediction but it increased the distance between the hand and his gun, so I took it in that spirit. On the way out through the reception room I smiled at the woman seated at the computer. She stared back hard. No benediction there.
25
No ghosts wander the halls of the Hotel Pontchartrain. It was named for the hotel where shortly after the turn of the twentieth century Ransom E. Olds, the Dodge brothers, and even teetotaling Henry Ford gathered in the bar to discuss their dreams of an industry based entirely upon the manufacture and sale of automobiles, but the original building in Cadillac Square was torn down in 1920. The one at Jefferson and Washington was built in 1965, in the middle of a decade known more for free love than architecture. Its 450 rooms climb a glass wall perched on a horizontal base like one domino stood atop another. I crossed through a lobby that Russell Fearing might have decorated when he was preoccupied and shared the elevator as far as the fifth floor with an old woman in a long white canvas coat like a duster with her hand on the collar of a Rottweiler with a clouded left eye who didn’t like me by half. From there on up to twelve I had the car to myself. They say the hotels will be full when the casinos come. This one hadn’t run out of vacancies since the Republican National Convention in 1980.
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Page 18
