He left. I got up, picked up the butt, and laid it in the ashtray to smoke itself out. Under the smear of ash was a picture of Traverse City. I tried to remember the details of when I’d been there. It seemed to me I was in trouble that time too.
TWELVE
My watch said it was still morning. I scowled at the second hand, but it was moving. That was two days in a row I’d crammed what seemed like a full day’s work into a couple of hours. The smart thing to do was to call it that and go home and rest up for what came next. It was so smart I looked up the number of Cecil Fish’s consulting firm in Iroquois Heights and dialed it.
I got an eager-sounding male legal secretary or something who told me Mr. Fish was in a meeting. That was okay with me. I said, “When he’s free, I’ve got something he’ll want to hear.”
“Mr. Fish no longer practices law; but if it’s legal advice you want, we have several attorneys on staff.”
It was a genteel way of confirming his boss had been disbarred for life.
I made my voice gruff. It was getting easier to do by the day. I twisted out the butt I’d lit off the stub of the last. “I got all the advice I need. But if he wants to know who’s been bankrolling Fannon and Haas, he’ll see me.”
“Your name?”
“Frank Wiener.” I filled the brief pause on his end. “I’m kidded about it a lot. My parents wanted a girl.”
“Hold, please.”
The line went silent; or so I thought. After a couple of seconds Ravel’s Bolero began to surface, as timidly as a novice nurse knocking on the door to ask if you were undressed yet. The notes were becoming louder and more insistent when the voice came back on. “Thanks for holding, Mr. Wiener. Mr. Fish will see you today at two o’clock.”
That gave me time for lunch. An English-type pub had moved into the abandoned service station across from my office, with colored pennants flapping and a GRAND OPENING banner across the faux stone façade. I drank a beer and ate a cheese sandwich deep-fried in crankcase oil. There were darts stuck in a corkboard target in too-random order and the bartender wore a Union Jack vest and a black bow tie. In another week he’d break out the monocle. If he was still working then. Judging by the droves who weren’t fighting to get in I gave the place six weeks tops.
It was a shame. The same radio station that had interviewed Carl Fannon had given it the big buildup, with free nachos for the staff. I decided they worked for food.
For all its ambitions toward Evelyn Waugh the place had conceded to the twenty-first century and installed a big-screen TV, but with the sound turned down. There was a shot of Carl Fannon’s hand-lasted shoes poking out from under a sheet on a gurney wheeling out of the Sentinel Building, cutting to an earnest female face sweating through pancake with a microphone held to her mouth and nothing coming out. It was as good a way as any to cover an atrocity; better than most. I hoped it would catch on. My name didn’t appear, either in the banner rolling across the bottom of the screen or on the woman’s lips.
“Killer Unknown” joined the parade of letters sliding from right to left. That summed it up. The footage was just filler.
Killers. I’d become an expert on the type, purely by accident. I was a divining rod for locating stiffs, a compass whose needle always pointed six feet down, the human counterpart of a carcass-sniffing dog. I knew the people who supplied victims by species and subspecies, and at what point a subspecies acquired enough characteristics of its own to upgrade to species: the Darwin of Death. There were goons who stuck a gun at you while you were gassing up, just for your ride, and almost as an afterthought put one through your liver on their way from the curb. There were nail-biters who slew out of anger or rage or fear—“Raskolnikovs,” the cops who read called them. So many killed for personal gain they were filed by variety: the bank robber who shot his way out with his bag of dye packets, the nephew with gambling debts who helped his rich aunt downstairs with a shove, the wino who slew a fellow traveler over two swallows of Thunderbird. Sex killers, thrill killers, killers who should have murdered their abominable mothers when it counted, and spared the lives of dozens of women who resembled them in some way; mercy killers, pulling the plug on golden-anniversary spouses to spare them the long agony of terminal disease; and let’s not forget Kevorkian, a retired corpse-cutter so obsessed with death he painted grisly graveyard scenes and helped dozens of sufferers through the gate and got commended for it by the kind of doctrinarian who devalued life in the womb as well as in the wheelchair, but who was a glorified serial killer just the same. People who killed from boredom, to challenge authority, for fun, or on some sudden impulse, like squashing a bug going about its perfectly acceptable way in the grass at their feet. Revenge killers, looking to pay off an old grudge. Killers who killed to make a point: the mob thought they had the corner on that one, when some character ignored a warning or figured he was clever enough to steal from the no-necks because they couldn’t go to the cops; but the cops themselves had a piece of that action, killing killers who’d killed one of their own; execution posing as a firefight, only with no cameras around to confirm either version.
Amateurs, most of them. Homicide is the one crime most often committed by first offenders. The majority are cuffed on the spot, standing over their victims holding the weapon. Others try to dress the scene to look like robbery or random savagery, forgetting or not knowing that the people who investigate murders are wise to all the tricks and sit back like Lieutenant Child, droopy-eyed and only paying half-attention to all the leaks in your story until they strike like lightning. Three-toed sloths are that way, they say on When Animals Attack: hanging from their tree limbs like wet laundry, moving their limbs slow as the hands of a clock until suddenly a fistful of claws the size of a platter swats off the left side of your face.
Then there are the remote-control killers. Their weapon is a phone, or maybe just a nod over a table in a restaurant. Whitey Bulger was one of those. Eleven was the official count. In order to nail him the feds had let walk the man who actually got blood under his nails. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Yes, I did; but I could see their point, even if I disagreed with it. The small percentage of killers with professional experience almost never see the inside of a cell block.
Finally there are the worst killers of all: the ones who get away. Every homicide dick fears them the way he fears being laid off with a house under construction and a wife pregnant with triplets. With that detective in mind, I overtipped the server and felt like a chump going out the door.
Now that the lot was occupied I’d had to garage the Cutlass a couple of blocks down Grand River. I never found out what happened to the vagrant who’d slept in the station before they gave him the boot. Unlike Frank, he hadn’t been sociable enough to introduce himself, and I couldn’t pay him off with lunchmeat. The fee the garage charged was only a little more than what he’d extorted to protect the car from vandals—him—but getting it now involved three extra flights of stairs lit by forty-watt bulbs. You shouldn’t have to pack a revolver just to park your car in the Motor City.
Someone had sprayed green paint across the sign that read IROQUOIS HEIGHTS, HOME OF THE 1997 CHAMPION WARRIORS. There was a move on to change the high school team’s name because it offended Native Americans. I understood they were going to expel Indiana from the Union for the same reason. That should finish the job Custer started.
The city council had reconfigured the central street along the zigzag lines of a drift fence and plopped a roundabout smack in the middle of the main four corners just to increase the likelihood of fender-benders and tickets for careless driving. It’s that kind of place. Every few terms someone gets into office on a reform platform, but in between it always reverts to type. The bright storefronts and coach lamps are pretty to look at; so is purple loosestrife, which chokes out all the native vegetation and is just as ineradicable as the kind of politician who used to tack down his tie with a diamond and smoke cigars with the band still on. I’d played a walk-on ro
le in putting one former mayor in jail and a larger part in the mayhem that had destroyed the old downtown, but that was old, old news.
Cecil Fish, once the city prosecutor, ran his image-polishing firm in a part of the city I was unfamiliar with. I was reading street signs when a sleek blue cruiser with a five-pointed star stenciled on the side and on the hood squished to a stop in a handicap spot and a deputy got out and went into a tobacconist’s, hauling up his gun belt. He’d spend most of his day doing that because his belly would keep pushing it down. Shortly after the voters turned the old police headquarters into a sheriff’s substation, the command officer in charge had enforced the county fitness requirements, but that one got kicked under the radiator just days after he quit. There would be a direct line in the back of the smoke shop to the oddsmakers in Vegas and a little something extra in the deputy’s carton of Luckies. It’s that kind of place, until the population gets fed up again.
The building was a one-story ranch-type house with a long covered porch like an old-time general store, but the plate-glass display windows were masked by almond-colored Venetian blinds, a shade lighter than the tan brick. On each window, lettered in white in an arc:
C. T. FISH CONSULTING
The earnest voice I’d encountered over the phone belonged to a pudgy young feller in a J.C. Penney suit and a Trims R Us haircut whose big daily challenge seemed to be keeping his shirttail in his pants. I remembered being young; I’d been so for a long time, after all, but earnest was a long cast backwards into tangled reeds. The shirttail was still an issue, but I’d learned to look after that whenever I stood or slid out of a car seat.
“Yes, Mr. Wiener,” he said, hauling out a portable phone to check the clock. “Right on time. All the way back, last door you come to.”
I left him attending to his haberdashery and twenty-first-century pocket watch.
A beige hallway with nothing on the walls but a coat of oyster-colored paint ended in a door with all the features of a fire exit. Next to it on a plain steel panel was a red button like a poker chip. You just couldn’t resist pushing it. A buzz, a click, and I stepped inside a large square room with a wrestling mat on the floor and da Vinci’s naked man spread-eagled in a circle on the wall facing the door. In the middle of this, Cecil Thutmose Fish stood in tennis whites swinging a racquet one-on-one against a pixilated opponent on a computer screen that covered the wall opposite. I couldn’t tell who was ahead, but he played like someone who’d lost a set. The black-framed glasses he’d worn since seventh-grade debate class were fogged over and he’d stained his pale-blue sweats black. He spun on and kicked his two-hundred-dollar athletic shoes and grunted when he swung as if he were pitching a bale of hay from ground level into a loft.
He didn’t know I was there. The world didn’t exist while he was shadow-boxing Bobby Riggs in his prime. To me he looked like a man trying to put his pants on in a hurricane. If he were twenty years younger it would have been comical, but watching it made me wince for his brittle bones. Even Cecil Fish’s bones. I’m not without pity.
He hadn’t changed much. His blond hair, in bangs still, was graying when we’d met, but through a miracle of modern science it had gone all blond instead of the other way around. He’d had other work done as well, by someone who knew enough not to shrink-seal it in plastic, and what were probably regular workouts like today’s had kept the flab away, but apart from thick tennis soles and lifts there wasn’t anything he could do about being short.
I doubted he’d done anything about his main handicap. He wasn’t bent in the usual sense of the term; if you offered him a briefcase full of unmarked bills he’d probably throw you out of his office, after calling in camera crews from all the local stations so the tree didn’t fall unnoticed; but if you wrote a cashier’s check made out to his political campaign, any union problems you might have would evaporate. I don’t know if that laissez-faire attitude extended to brothels and horse parlors, but once you’ve grown accustomed to looking the other way you could get whiplash turning back. The only reason he wasn’t pressing shirts in Club Fed was he’d had the good fortune to lose his son in an auto accident during jury selection. No honest prosecutor could out-box that.
I don’t think the worst of people without proof. It was unlikely Fish would order a hit on his own flesh and blood; that specific kind of evil I associated with another party I’d known well enough to knock wood whenever her name came up. On the other hand, I wouldn’t shake his hand if he offered it while I was hanging from a cliff. It would probably be one of those joke mitts you hold by a handle and then let go.
The score came up on-screen. It didn’t look good for the favorite. He scowled, clawed a remote from a slash pocket, and switched off the monitor. He let the racquet fall to the mat at his feet and scooped a white terry towel off the handlebars of a stationary bike in a corner.
“Frank Wiener?” He used a corner of the towel to wipe his glasses, then mopped his face and the back of his neck. Most men who wear glasses look naked and weak when they take them off, but not this one. His eyes were fierce cobalt, custom-built for cross-examining defendants. “I imagine you get your share of ribbing with a name like that.”
“I would, if it was mine.”
He stopped mopping. The glasses were back on, but I felt the lasers just the same. For the second time on the same job I decided to turn up my cards. I was either a bad poker player or good enough to know when the other fellow had the hand I needed.
THIRTEEN
I snapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “You’re a politician,” I said, “or you were. Maybe your license expired, but all the old skills wouldn’t. You remember me, I think.”
He lifted and resettled the spectacles, made wrinkles in the polished patches at the corners of his eyes. The sun came up behind a layer of smog. “An Old Testament name. Amos. A proletariat surname. Cooper? Wheeler?” He snapped his fingers, a sonic boom. “Walker. The Broderick case.”
I had the cigarette between my fingers. I put it back between my lips and clapped my hands three times. “For a minute there I thought they’d nicked your brain when they pulled your face back under your collar. I wasn’t sure if you’d see me. We didn’t part on the best of terms.”
He uncased two rows of teeth like polished headstones. “I can’t say I remember the circumstances, but I make it a practice never to hold a grudge. People who have met me on the way up recognize me on the way down, and I might need them when the situation reverses again. As it does; otherwise I wouldn’t be in a position to make an appointment with anyone.”
I bought that he didn’t remember the circumstances the way I bought the Ambassador Bridge. But if he was willing to let it drift, I wasn’t going to snag it back. “You know by now your beef with Velocity Financing just got cut in half,” I said.
“If you’re referring to Carl Fannon’s death, I do. Now that I’m no longer in public office I can afford not to express regret I don’t feel. A Quisling’s a Quisling, alive or dead.”
“What about Emil Haas?”
“It takes two to make a conspiracy. What’s your interest in this?”
“I’m in it three ways. Yesterday morning, Fannon hired me to find Haas. He disappeared, he said. Then Haas came along and hired me to meet him in the basement of the Sentinel Building last night. The ink on that one wasn’t dry when Haas’s daughter Gwendolyn showed up and asked me the same thing Fannon asked. Three clients in one case is a personal best.”
He made a wringing motion on the towel with both hands. “Wouldn’t that fall under conflict of interest?”
“It would if I were working for one of them not to do what the others had hired me for. I’m not sure what you’d call making the same deal with the first and third and taking a little money on deposit to hear what the second had to say.”
“Aren’t you? I’d say unethical would cover it.”
“No, just unusual. I didn’t take any money from Gwendolyn and if I don’t like what Haas wants
of me I’ll give him back his twenty. In order to do that I have to find him first. Which is what the others want.” I took the cigarette out of my mouth, looked at it, and stuck it back in the pack. “I seem to be in some kind of conversational cloverleaf, talking my way right back around to where I started. I’m here to find out why Carl Fannon had a message from his office to call you. You didn’t seem so chummy while you were accusing him of fronting for foreigners.”
“That’s not what you told my assistant. You said you had specific information on that very point.”
“I also said my name was Frank Wiener. I didn’t make all that up, by the way, just the Wiener part. I gave the real Frank some money last night to buy a package of wieners. He may have seen who locked Fannon in that vault, either on his way into the building or on his way out. Maybe both. The cops don’t know that. I didn’t think about it until I was halfway through the interview and then I didn’t say it.”
He twisted the towel tighter. “You met a man named Frank and bought him frankfurters.”
“Yeah. Screwy enough to be true, isn’t it? With a possible eyewitness in your pocket, and your resources, you could score big with the authorities. They might even reinstate you to the Bar.”
“Why would I want that? I’ve got a job.”
The room had only one window. A car whisked past on the street without making any noise. The walls were soundproof and the window was triple-glazed at least.
“Maybe you forgot our beef, but you remember me. I remember you. You don’t care a fart in a whirlwind if Fannon and Haas sell Hart Plaza, Campus Martius, and the Detroit Lions to Russia and stick up a statue of Lenin in Grand Circus Park. You’re looking to get back into the game. Maybe this time the mayor of Detroit or governor of the state. But before you swing that, you’ve got to erase the blot from your record. That costs plenty, and Fannon had plenty to spare. What did you dig up on him that’d be worth the grease you needed to lay off him?” I told him about the message on Fannon’s wrist.
The Lioness Is the Hunter Page 7
