The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  Even I thought that was harsh. I put out the butt and fanned the smoke away from the vicinity. “Let’s start over, shall we?”

  “Let’s.”

  “When was the last time you saw your father?”

  When she screwed up her face to think, freckles dived into the creases. “A month, I should say. He’s been busy on some deal. That’s nothing new, of course; there’s always something big doing at Velocity, but this one must be more important than most, because I usually hear from him more regularly, usually briefly and by phone. We go out to lunch—when he remembers—and he tries to be the concerned parent when life hasn’t been good to me. He was the rock I leaned on during my divorce, giving me moral support and offering to help me out financially, without bad-mouthing the other party or worse, reminding me I should have listened to his advice the first time. Of course, he had his own failures in that department, but I try to cut him some slack on the other. Like a lot of people with so much going on upstairs, he doesn’t find much room in it for social bonding.”

  All I’d asked was when she’d seen him last.

  “I’m worried,” she said. “He’s not quite the absentminded genius who can suss out the mistakes in Newton’s theory of the universe and gets lost changing buses, but the cutthroats he traffics with in the world of mergers and acquisitions have nothing on the sort of people who cut your throat for real. For all I know he pulled into an alley to argue a clause in some contract and got himself carjacked while he was too busy texting to pay attention to what was going on around him.”

  “You tried to reach him?”

  “Of course. He doesn’t answer any of his phones or messages, and when I went to see him at his condo on the river I wore out my thumb on the doorbell. His neighbors weren’t any help; he’s only been living there a few weeks, and it’s the kind of building where everyone’s forted up in his own affairs.”

  She’d taken a handkerchief from her bag; not to wipe away tears she hadn’t shed, but just to have something to twist between her hands. Ten thousand dollars in orthodontia gnawed at her lower lip. Of a sudden she seemed to realize what she was doing, stopped both operations, and looked directly at me. “I saw your display in the Yellow Pages; I had to turn my place upside down to see if I still had one. You don’t advertise online. You specialize in tracing people, so I thought—”

  “I also check credit histories and guard the gift table at weddings in Grosse Pointe. This isn’t New York or L.A.; there isn’t so much work lying around I can afford to turn up my nose at anything, except divorce cases.” I used a little finger to rearrange the butts in the tray so they didn’t re-ignite one another, and in the doing made a decision.

  “It so happens I am working for your father’s partner. If in the course of talking to the people I have to talk to and going to the places I have to go I learn anything about Emil Haas, I’ll pass it along—after I’ve filed my report. Will that do?”

  “It’s better than nothing. Oh!” She opened the bag again and rummaged around inside.

  “No charge,” I said. “You’d be surprised what a fellow can make sitting on a toaster oven in Barbie’s Dreamhouse on Lake Shore Drive. The people that boost those places aren’t the same lunks that drive pickups into gas stations and make off with the ATM, so I hike my rates when I cross Eight Mile Road.”

  “Who,” she said.

  “Say again?”

  “It’s ‘people who,’ not ‘people that.’ I make my living teaching grammar to professional communicators. I work, despite that crack you made about inherited wealth.”

  She was her father’s daughter, all right; it was my second English lesson that day. “If you start splicing my infinitives, I may change my mind about a fee.”

  She produced a checkbook.

  “Joke,” I said. “You’re right about my sense of humor. It’s a plus on the street and a minus in the parlor.”

  She dropped it back into the bag and snapped shut the clasp. “Is it possible I’ve misjudged you?”

  “I hope so, Miss Haas. The job’s easier when people do. That’s another reason I don’t keep a ficus in the office or the office in Bloomfield Hills.”

  She gave me a number in the Oakland County exchange and an address in a suburb I had to wash and wax my car in to keep the local cops off my rear bumper. When she went out, leaving me with an aroma of night-blooming berries I hadn’t noticed all the time she was there, I sat back and looked at my watch. The hands were straight up. The day was only half over and I had more work than I’d seen since the last snow.

  FIVE

  They’d built a translucent plastic tunnel over the sidewalk in front of the Sentinel Building, to protect strollers from falling gargoyles and such; which had as usual the effect of steering pedestrians to the other side of the street. A sudden shady stretch in broad daylight is nothing to sneer at in our city. Thousands of mosquitoes can breed in a teaspoon of water, and a hundred muggers and rapists in a city block of shadow.

  It was an impressive pile by most standards, designed they said by a student of Albert Kahn, the visionary whose Deco-neo-classical-Gothic wet dreams had rebuilt all downtown during the delirious twenties. But the master had disinherited it for its leaky roof and a structural failure that shattered the upper windows in a stiff breeze; Kahn was one of the last architects with engineering experience. Decades of costly reconstruction had resolved most of those issues, and the fluted tea-colored limestone and rows of windows fashioned after the mitre of the Archbishop of Canterbury made a bold statement against, say, the cylindrical glass towers of the Renaissance Center, built in the Disco era along the lines of a six-pack of Zima.

  But ten years of racial unrest followed by four solid decades of corrupt government and incompetent reform had emptied all the rooms and placed the building on the national register of Who Cares. A parade of potential buyers had come with brass bands and excited local talk-show hosts, and gone on the back end of the weather report.

  The prevailing mood was to level it and add yet another empty lot to a city that already looked as if a tornado had hopscotched across it, snapping its tail at this house, that corner market, leaving a square of crabgrass next door to practically everyone. The natives shot BBs at pheasants over their back fences, ten blocks from General Motors.

  Yellowing placards in all the windows on the ground floor declared the place off-limits; but not to someone with a key to the fire door in the alley. This was a slab of red-painted steel flanked on one side by a pile of dirty laundry with a man wearing it, spooning yogurt out of a plastic cup, and on the other by the Dumpster where in all probability he’d found it. I rolled a dollar bill around a finger and poked it into a pocket of the fisherman’s vest he wore over a tattoo of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

  “Thank you, brother. Tha’s half a package of wieners at Kroger. Frank’s the name. Ain’t that a stitch?”

  “Okay, Frank. Just don’t shoot up in the parking lot.”

  I inserted the key Emil Haas had given me, but the lock was a stranger to it. I pulled it out and examined it. It was a rough copy of the original, which had worn along with the tumblers. Whoever had duped it had neglected to file the edges. The raw shavings glittered in the sun. I scraped off what I could with my thumb and tried again, hauling back on the brass handle at the same time. The door sprang open so suddenly I had to turn my shoulder to keep it from smacking me in the face.

  Inside was darkness, sliced into slivers by gray light leaking in around the plywood in the windows, and a musk of old wood and rodent droppings. I took out my pencil flash and switched it on. The beam shot out through a smoke of dust, stirred up by the current of air I’d let in through the door. I eased it back into its frame, groped behind my back for the latch, and slid home the dead bolt. I was moving like a guilty man, but these things still seemed to make more noise than necessary.

  More plywood had been laid atop the floor and fixed with miles of wide brown tape to protect the Pewabic tiles from hobnail boots.
The wood creaked under my feet as I followed a long wide hallway and came out into the hub of the ground floor lobby.

  There was more light here, but only because there were more windows whose boards didn’t fit snug to the frames. They’d be leaded glass, diamond-shaped or hexagonal beveled panes no larger than reading lenses forming a honeycomb pattern. From the center of the ten-foot coffered copper ceiling hung an electric chandelier the size of a pool table, wrapped in tea-colored muslin fuzzy with dust. Elevators with copper doors, each crisscrossed with yellow CAUTION tape, occupied the wall beside a broad staircase rising between bronze gryphons and brass banisters to the mezzanine, where in times past a clerk with a carnation in his buttonhole had spread open the big ledger-like book and handed the guest a horsehair pen to register and a pair of black porters in plum-colored uniforms trimmed with gold braid waited to carry bags upstairs, the men selected to match each other, like the elevator doors. A lot of swirly green marble and burled walnut and exotic plants with fat leaves in copper pots sprinkled about, to cover the padding in the construction budget. All gone now.

  The place hadn’t entirely escaped the scavenging epidemic. The brass faceplates had been pried off the walls next to the elevators and the copper wiring attached to the controls carried away, leaving handy holes for an extinct generation of wasps to build their paper nests; in the end even the insects had given it up for better prospects.

  It had been a bank with a vault built into the foundation when Coolidge was in knickerbockers, then a hotel up until the Crash, then home to a succession of corporate offices, and for a brief period when democracy was in jeopardy worldwide a combination recruitment center and strategic complex where old warriors wearing medals won on San Juan Hill shoved toy tanks and destroyers across big tables with long-handled sticks like croupiers used to rake in cash; which was just how the tables might have been employed when the Purple Gang leased two upper floors for a gambling hell during Prohibition. A building as experienced as a stately old whore and with enough character to populate a city, empty now.

  If Carl Fannon’s anxiety about his partner’s whereabouts was genuine, there was a possibility Velocity Financing would be the first suitor not to bail out after it got its publicity fix. Most likely whatever they had in mind would involve a wrecking ball and a clean empty downtown site worth more for resale than a patch of real estate with an elderly structure cluttering it up. Buildings rise and fall, but there is only so much Planet Earth, and at the moment in Detroit it was going at closeout prices.

  I added cigarette smoke to the drifting dust and crushed out the stub on plywood among burn craters left by speculators and squatters. Haas had said the inspection crew had had lights set up in the basement, which was where he’d be waiting. I found the door in a shallow alcove next to one of the elevators, with wood grain painted on the metal and a wire grid in a small square window with flaking letters reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. It was unlocked, but it presented plenty of drag when I hauled on the handle. It would have been the door the bank employees had used to gain access to the vault.

  I’d snapped off my flash; there was enough ambient light in the lobby to make it unnecessary, and although I had permission to be there I hadn’t wanted to splash the beam around and attract the notice of a passing patrol unit and have to explain myself and empty the contents of my wallet. Now I put it back on, to make sure there were still steps for my feet.

  There were, paved with ribbed brown rubber and dust bunnies that jumped up to greet me like neglected Chihuahuas. I ran into something invisible that wrapped itself around my face with almost intelligent intent. The cobweb might have been there for ten years or ten minutes; the spider that wove it wasn’t paid by the hour. I swept it from my face and descended into a smell of damp unpainted concrete and more of that dry rat odor, as old as the last tenant’s departure. Rats have a healthy sense of self-preservation; they never hang around where there’s no food to be found.

  Steep steps led to a surface the color of flypaper, but not sticky. The stuff had enough grit mixed into it to keep me from falling on my face, but just enough slickness to make it easier to sweep with a push broom; some janitor had rolled polyurethane over the slab with that purpose in mind. But that had been a long time ago. The top coat had begun to peel and pill, rolling under my heels and clinging to them in shreds so that I had to stop every couple of yards and scrape them off on the toe of the other shoe. A fishy smell of rancid shellac joined the general effluvium in the ten-foot-high space under the ground floor. Twelve would have been no less claustrophobic.

  At regular intervals, plain steel posts scabbed with indoor rust supported the I-beams that kept the building from collapsing on my head. They looked to be sagging in the light of my flash, then they didn’t; then they did. When I waved it back and forth they danced to a tune played by the string quartet on the Titanic. I had an idea how that panda cub had felt just before its mother rolled over it in the zoo. The Sentinel Building hadn’t any more reason to want to crush me to death.

  Well, it had stood this long, as had I for a good part of it. I trained the circle of light on the floor and followed it without looking up again: same wisdom as walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls, only in reverse.

  Workers past had used the space to deposit demolished material. There were sheets of broken frosted ceiling panels, mounded heaps of dusty pink insulation I hoped wasn’t asbestos, packing crates that from their stenciled labels had contained replacement fixtures made in China and imported on the cheap: Band-Aids slapped on mortal wounds to limp the place along until it was time for the negotiations to fall through.

  The space seemed vast, more than twice the square footage of the ground floor. The flashlight’s shaft didn’t reach as far as the walls, creating an impression of limitless space. Finally it flattened out against a solid dimpled wall and I thought I’d gone as far as I could go. But I smelled a stench of burning dust and hot metal, as of a radiator that had overheated itself dry. I switched off the flash. When my eyes adjusted, I detected a dim source of light somewhere ahead and to my right, and saw a corridor leading that direction, where electric bulbs burned. I turned and walked toward the light.

  SIX

  The dry hot smell increased as I continued along the passage, as did the light of the bulbs that made it. I snapped off the flash and dropped it into my side pocket. Its shallow weight made me miss my revolver, but that was out of reach, in a drawer in my desk. I had a crazy urge to go back for the spare piece in the car, but I tamped it down. I was all grown up now, took spooky old basements in my stride.

  The atmosphere underground wasn’t as hot as above, but it was close and musty. I hadn’t gone many steps when I began sweating. I seemed to be recycling my own spent breath. A once-busy building near the center of the business district in a once-bustling city is emptier than most when it’s empty, and the space beneath it is emptier still. I was Howard Carter, wandering stone passages in search of the king’s chamber, inhaling air that hadn’t been breathed since a thousand years before Christ. It made me woozy.

  “Get a grip, Walker.”

  I jumped at the sound of the voice echoing off the walls. My hand was halfway to the place where I carry a gun, when I carry a gun, when I realized the voice was mine.

  When the hall opened into a room it was homely enough, more bare concrete with junk on the floor and across from me the dull shine of a six-by-three steel door. The handle opposite the hinges was a steel wheel with spokes on the outside, like a ship’s helm. Back when amateur acrobats balanced on flagpoles, this would have been tempered titanium two feet thick standing between me and ten million dollars in bills, sacks of coins, and negotiable securities, and no one knew how much in privately rented safe-deposit boxes. The concrete itself would be steel-reinforced, with state-of-that-era’s-art alarm sensors built in and connected to a direct telephone line to Detroit Police Headquarters. Now the wires would be corroded through, and if a message somehow managed to make it
across town, a robo-operator would inform the robo-caller that the line was no longer in use (and hadn’t been since the vault had held the box office receipts from Son of the Sheik).

  A group of halogen lights wearing football face guards was clamped to a scaffold in the center of the floor. Quaintly, they were trained on the door of the vault. For the hell of it I stepped close and looked at the old-fashioned digital time display set in beside the steering-wheel handle, printed in black on individual curved yellow Bakelite tabs. Just as I leaned in to read the faded numerals through the grime coating them, one of them turned over with a click.

  I jumped again.

  The sound wasn’t loud, but in the silence ten feet below the sidewalk and unexpected as it was, someone might have blown up a paper sack and slapped it between his palms next to my ear.

  Automatically I compared the time on the display to the watch strapped on my wrist. Two minutes’ difference. I was prepared to believe I was the one behind.

  Somebody—one of the inspectors, or maybe a partner—had killed a few minutes satisfying himself if the mechanism still worked by setting it. It was more than just doubtful it would have kept time since the first quarter of the last century all on its own. For one thing, I didn’t think daylight savings time would have existed back when the League of Nations was sitting. The argument between the clock and my watch would have been an hour instead of a couple of minutes.

  Or was that right? I had more important things to remember than whether it was “spring forward, fall back” or the other way around. Like making rent.

  While I was putting my brain to such constructive use, another minute dropped into place with a click. Then something went thunk.