The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Isn’t that for the police to determine? Assuming you’re not making all this up just to wangle another fat retainer. The last I heard, private detectives didn’t investigate murder.”

  “They do when they keep tripping over them. Maybe it’s my destiny, but there are days when I can’t take a stroll downtown without stubbing my toe on a cadaver.”

  “Then isn’t it your duty as a citizen to hand it over to the people who are paid to find out how the cadaver became a cadaver?”

  I dealt myself a cigarette, just to see if she rose to the assault on state law. She took it like the Berlin Wall took spray paint; from the western side. I didn’t light it. “As you implied, I’m carrying some of Fannon’s fat retainer on my hip. The rest is in the bank. I’d like to earn it. I’m too poor to go around giving refunds.”

  “I processed that check, as part of my responsibilities to this firm. It was given you to find Emil Haas. Have you found him?”

  “Not yet,” I said; again truthfully. I’d been walking a tightrope so long I ought to have qualified for a patent. “That’s the other reason I’m here. Has he turned up?”

  “No. Have you spoken to his daughter?”

  “She spoke to me. I had a busy day yesterday,” I said, walking the cigarette across the back of one hand. Her eyes followed it the way a dog follows any movement preceding a treat. “I’ve a hunch today will be no different. He was supposed to meet me last night in the basement of the Sentinel Building.”

  She flattened her palms on the desk again, this time without the sound of a pistol report. “You’ve seen him? But you said—Just a moment.” She reached under the desk.

  Something whirred and a section of paneling behind the desk slid into a pocket, exposing a lot of glass, crystal, and stainless steel. She got up, opened a dwarf refrigerator under the sink, tonged three ice cubes into each of a pair of thick-bottomed glasses, and filled them with golden liquid from a square bottle with a foil label. She came back, set one of the glasses in front of me, and sat back in the executive seat holding the other in both hands.

  “I’m assuming you have no objections to Scotch.”

  “I lost that fight in college,” I said. “Back then, if you didn’t have a glass in your hand, it was a mortal insult to your host. So I asked for Scotch, a drink I could nurse all night. The joke was on me. I discovered a taste for it.” I leaned forward to touch glasses, straining my arm with the effort. It was one hell of a desk. The stuff tasted like fermented honey filtered through Harris Tweed.

  “A college man,” she said. “Who’d’ve thought?”

  “Those days they let everybody in. Let’s take up where we left off. I said I hadn’t found Haas. He found me, and paid me another fat retainer—fat in the sense that twenty bucks is fat to a homeless person who lives on hot dogs.” I didn’t know why the drifter I’d treated to a package of wieners had popped into my head at just that moment; Frank, that was the name. “I took only that much even though he wanted to give me my standard advance.”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars,” she said. “Five hundred dollars a day. That’s twenty-five hundred a week.”

  “Since you’re so good at math, figure out what that comes to when I work six weeks in a year.”

  She totaled it in an instant. “I’m still listening.”

  “Depending on what he intended to tell me in the basement I might have collected the rest. He didn’t show. Fannon did, but as indicated previously, he wasn’t very helpful.”

  She took a second sip, set down her glass, and lifted the receiver off the pinball machine at her elbow. “I think the rest of this conversation should involve the police.”

  “I agree.” I stuck out my free hand and waggled the fingers. After an instant’s hesitation she pressed an unlighted key and handed the receiver to me. I pressed star nine-sixty-seven, canceling out the source of the call, and dialed three digits.

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “Inspector Alderdyce, please. I want to report a homicide.”

  The female operator spoke as if someone had forgotten to turn off the iron in someone’s apartment. “Your name, sir?”

  “Amos Walker.”

  “Spell it, please.”

  “D.O.A.”

  I handed back the receiver for her to cradle.

  Her hand rested on it. “What do I tell them when they come to call?”

  “Your life story, if you want. Nothing if you don’t. You don’t know anything. In fact I was never here.” I got up.

  She tilted Carl Fannon’s chair forward, splaying her hands on the desk. She seemed altogether too comfortable in that office; but that was just the detective in me, always suspecting everything of everyone. In a few months I’d be accusing the Easter bunny of keeping a hen on the side.

  “If you’re expecting me to cover for you—” she said.

  “Nothing of the sort. Just trying to keep things less complicated for the cops. Good morning, Mrs. Palmerston. You know how to get in touch with me if you want.”

  * * *

  Inspector John Alderdyce, my go-to cop whenever I find a human being lounging around at room temperature, was on vacation, fishing for salmon in Alaska. The lap the case fell into was a lieutenant named Child; although if he’d ever been one he showed no indication when he came in and plunked himself down in the customer’s chair. He was about a yard wide across the shoulders and just over the minimum height for police duty. His head was built to scale; hatting it would be a challenge, so he didn’t. He had a nice growth of black hair striped with gray and took care of it. Fresh clippings were pasted to his shirt collar with something like bay rum. His face was too small for his head, with all the features crowded into the middle.

  I didn’t know him. I figured he’d transferred over from another division, possibly the gang squad. The new chief had disbanded it recently; not because the gang situation had improved, but because the press could no longer tell the difference between the opposing sides. That’s how it was in guerrilla warfare, which is what the streets of our city became after sundown.

  “Honest folks generally hang around when they come on a dead body.” His voice was shallow for his age—I put him a year or two past his twenty—and very, very gentle. I trusted that the way I trust a faith healer with a limp.

  “Scared folks do,” I said. “I go all to pieces over roadkill.”

  “Quick but not good. Try again.”

  I was acting professional as all hell, slitting open junk mail on the desk. Since his phone call came announcing he was coming to see me about a little murder I hadn’t even lit a cigarette. It’s against the law in a place of business in our state, and I was in trouble enough.

  I laid aside the penknife. “Emil Haas, the dead man’s partner, sat where you’re sitting yesterday morning, asking me to meet him in the Sentinel basement that evening. I was there, he wasn’t. Carl Fannon was. I wanted to talk to the office manager where he worked before reporting it, to see if I was the only one in on the secret.”

  “Were you?”

  “So far as I could tell. If you’ve talked to Brita Palmerston, you know she rattles about as easy as a big-time crook on his fiftieth visit to police headquarters.”

  “I did. She didn’t strike me as any kind of a crook at all.”

  “I didn’t say she was. It was a simile.”

  “Three syllables. I guess you’re not your garden-variety window peeper.”

  I looked at the card he’d given me: plain white stock, with only his name and extension on the department line in black block. “‘Childe Harold to the dark tower came,’” I said.

  He bared his lower teeth in what I supposed he thought was a smile. “I get that sometimes. If my name was Lipschitz I wouldn’t know any poetry at all. You won’t get anywhere running on idle, Walker. No one ever does. That’s why they call it stalling. A fragile little thing like a license can get busted over failing to report a homicide.”

  “Before that happ
ened I’d have to put on a clean shirt and drive clear up to Lansing and face the board. Don’t waste time telling me you don’t know in what high regard those state troopers hold a city cop.”

  “Go ahead, be a schmuck. It wouldn’t be my first choice when a city cop’s got me dead to rights, but the world’s full of characters.”

  I parked his card under my phone. No telling when I’d need a friend on the force. “Why don’t let’s tear up the declaration of war and start over from scratch?”

  “Too late, Jim. Something over eighteen hours too late. That’s the jump we’d’ve had on whoever it was forgot he had a rich multimillionaire on ice and left him gasping.”

  “I had this conversation with Fannon’s office manager. The upshot was our absent-minded friend was long gone on the red-eye to Vegas or anywhere else when I opened that door. If this is a pinch, let’s have it. I’m out of work anyway, and it’s corned beef hash night at County. Your superior sent the chef up himself, straight from the four-star restaurant where he worked.”

  He looked at the Bulova strapped to the underside of his wrist; I don’t trust men who wear their watches that way. It’s too easy to sneak a look at the time when you’re boring them to death. “I was wondering just how long it would take you to draw the Alderdyce card. I know you’re tight. Somehow I think you’re still loose enough for me to call that bluff.”

  A good man with words, Lieutenant Child. I had the impression he’d read more of Byron than he let on.

  ELEVEN

  “I’m only tough when I have to be,” Child said. “It ages you. You know what’s behind me and what it can do if you think you can outsmart it.”

  I said, “If I were that smart I wouldn’t be working this job. The system’s Bugs Bunny. I’m strictly Elmer Fudd.”

  “Bugs is clever. We’re not. We’re just there. All the time, day and night, weekends and Christmas. We’ll wear you down like a river running through rock.”

  My smile tasted bitter. “G’wan with you, Lieutenant. You’re a poet after all. I only mentioned Alderdyce to keep the conversation going. If I thought my past associations put a thumb on your scale, it would mean I haven’t learned anything about the police in thirty years. If this were the Middle Ages you’d each be forted up behind a stone fence with your own personal moat. You don’t break cases by avoiding stepping on the toes of your brothers in blue.”

  “You got me wrong, Walker. I’m not an ambitious man. But every now and then I got to break one just to show I’m not just drifting toward retirement. A thing like that can get you canned just before your pension’s ready to kick in. I got just enough ambition to want to prevent that. Any idea what Haas wanted to talk to you about and why not here?”

  “No on both counts.”

  “Guess.”

  “Uh-uh. The G in that one stands for gullible. If it turns out to be wrong, a by-the-book type like you could blow it up into lying to a cop.”

  “I’m not that hard to get along with. It’s just this face. Tell it like you heard it from somebody else.”

  “Okay. Just on a hunch I’d say he’s nervous about this Sentinel Building deal, or maybe he’s been nervous about what he and Fannon have been doing for some time and it’s just the straw that broke the yak’s back. Not knowing this dump, he couldn’t be sure no one might be listening in, so he chose a deep dark place with unbroken concrete walls.”

  “What’s a plutocrat like him got to be nervous about? Money can buy everything. Don’t let ’em tell you any different. Ask the man who hasn’t any.”

  “Like I’ve got another office on Lake Shore Drive. I only keep this one to fool people into thinking I’m honest. What’s he got to be nervous about? How he makes his money, to begin with. If the last few years have taught us nothing else, they’ve taught us that all those piles of cash a man’s got salted away can vanish like a slug in the sun once the feds open a file on him. You know Cecil Fish?”

  The crowded features pinched closer together yet. “We met when he was the city prosecutor in Iroquois Heights, before they busted him. I hear he’s some kind of paid lobbyist now. Crooked politicians are like black locust. Chop one down and he sprouts back up from the stump.”

  “He’s been making noise about Velocity Financing fronting for foreign interests when it acquires property in Detroit. That’s a big stink to hang under the public’s nose, ‘foreign interests.’ Could be China or Portugal or those maniacs in turbans who think they invented decapitation. It wouldn’t work in Europe, where they live cheek-by-jowl, but here it’s a popular phobia. So far he hasn’t proof or he’d have swung it by now, but it could be the talk has got Haas worrying too much because his partner doesn’t worry enough.”

  I waited while he looked at that from all sides. Down in the street a sanitation truck scooped up a Dumpster with a bang they heard in Baghdad. Finally he spoke.

  “That’s pretty specific for a stab in the dark.”

  “Still that’s all it is.”

  “I wonder.”

  Cops. Tell them the truth straight out and they never appreciate it. They like it better when you try out a couple of lies on them first. If this one was a priest he’d grill you for an hour before giving Last Rites.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take another couple of swipes. Fannon found out Haas was going behind his back, rigged up that trip to Beijing as an alibi intending to eliminate him, and Haas turned the tables. That would mean there was something to Fish’s accusation. Or Haas intended for Fannon to find out about our meeting so he could lure him into that vault. Was I right about cause of death, suffocation?”

  “At a glance, unless he used purple nail polish. Of course, we’ll have to wait till the lab monkeys tell us what we already know, with some pig Latin thrown in.” He blew a gust of air. “I’ve been in this racket too long. The CID used to own the crime scene. Now we have to stand around with our thumbs up our asses while some fresh punk in paper shoes goes over the place with a black light, and in the end what do we know? As much as we did just in the door. In ten years we’ll all be coming to work with stethoscopes instead of guns and wearing scrubs over our Kevlar. Not me, though. I’ll be fresh retired, if they don’t bounce me first.”

  His exhaustion was contagious. I’d have felt like retiring myself, if I didn’t know that dead-dog weariness for a cop ploy, older even than that Jekyll-and-Hyde routine they played out in interrogation. Brother, I’m so far gone I wouldn’t hear you even if you confessed to killing Hoffa. Five minutes after he left my office he’d be tap-dancing down the street whistling Gilbert and Sullivan.

  I said, “If I’m right about the murderer and the motive, it would mean Haas had the proof Fish hasn’t.”

  “Why drag you into it at all?”

  “Whoever shut that door fixed the time lock to open it just after I arrived for our appointment. Maybe Haas wanted to implicate me somehow to draw lightning away from him. And maybe that’s why I made with the feet so I could wrap the whole thing up in Christmas paper with a fat bow, just like Nero Wolfe, before my license got bent.”

  It was his turn to shake his head. “It all fits the facts, but there are holes in it you could drive a bus through. Airlines these days are more careful than ever about checking the manifest. They’d know Fannon missed that plane before it got off the ground. The guy logged enough frequent-flyer hours to know that. The rest is just hot air—except the part about you getting scared and rabbiting the scene. That part’s as solid as that vault.”

  A set of nicotine-stained fingers fumbled a crumpled package of Pall Mall straight-ends out of an inside pocket. I waited until he fired one up off a throwaway butane lighter, then struck a match and put it to one of my own. We sat breaking the law for a couple of minutes, then he shot twin gray jets out of his tiny nostrils and planted his hands on the arms of the chair. The cigarette went on smoldering in a notch in his lower lip.

  “It goes way against the grain, but since you’re the last person I know for sure laid eyes
on Emil Haas, you won’t make much good bait eating County hash for forgetting your civic responsibilities. You’re no killer, that much I know about the people Alderdyce chooses to hang with. I’ll tell the chief you took fright, then on reflection decided to make an honest citizen out of yourself and made the call. He’ll chew my ass off, but if there’s the smallest chance Haas creeps out of his corner to do over that meeting, we need you out in the open where he can get to you.”

  He levered himself to his feet, seemed to realize he too was smoking, snatched the butt loose, and flung it in a corner, where it burned a new crater in the linoleum. “If he does show, don’t be shy this time.”

  “I won’t. All right if I do a little poking around myself?”

  He stood with his suitcoat hanging open and the checked butt of a semiautomatic in cross-draw position in a clip on his belt. God, he looked beat; I almost offered him a lie-down on the bench in my waiting room. “Depends on where you poke and what you poke it with.”

  “I’d like to pay a call on Fish. We met more than once. We can discuss old times and maybe I can find out if he’s holding a full house or just a fistful of feathers.”

  “What’s the percentage? Your client’s dead.”

  I didn’t tell him I had two others, one who’d bought me cheap, the other strictly honorary. He hadn’t thought to ask about Gwendolyn Haas.

  In a pig’s eye he hadn’t. I was supposed to walk the high wire waiting for that particular shoe to drop. No, Lieutenant Child didn’t like being tough. Neither does a grizzly. He just is, and he’s patient enough to wait for his opening.

  But that clean I wasn’t ready to come just yet. “Fannon paid me to find Haas. If Fish has anything, it might flush him out and I can spend the retainer without looking away, like a guy cheating himself at solitaire.”

  He took a comb from his shirt pocket, but he didn’t comb his hair. He tapped it against the palm of his other hand. “Honest Abe, that’s you. I bet when you were a kid you hiked ten miles to return a book.” He put away the comb, noticed his coat was open, and buttoned it with a shrug. “Anything to spare me five minutes with that kisser. Don’t forget to tell a guy what you find out; even if it’s nothing but feathers. I only make new mistakes. Never the same one twice.”