The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  The space was shared, like the building itself, by the News and Free Press, formerly fierce competitors, but now grafted together by a Joint Operating Agreement intended to stave off the inevitable. They share advertising, confidential sources, and pączkis on Fat Tuesday. Most of their circulation eats supper at four o’clock and is in bed by nine. What will we use to wrap our fish and line our birdcages when the last newspaper turns out its lights?

  Somewhere on the far edge of the universe a metal drawer rumbled open and banged shut a minute later. A couple of light years after that, the woman reappeared carrying a stack of gray cardboard folders and thumped them down on the counter. She handed me a clipboard.

  I read the top sheet at arm’s length. It was a receipt threatening me with all sorts of action if I failed to return the material. I signed it with the pen attached to the clip, thanked her, and started to gather up the files.

  “Uh-uh. They stay here.” A chin as solid as a doorstop jerked toward a laminate elbow–school desk in a corner.

  I started to say that wouldn’t do me any good, but her suspicion was already aroused; it would light up in the morning and hum at low power all night. I off-loaded the stack to the corner.

  It didn’t seem as if any local business could fill as many file folders as the Islamic State, but there were bundles of photos of Carl Fannon, derelict buildings getting ready to change hands, and Velocity’s plush headquarters, taken at all angles and marked up for cropping. What they mostly didn’t contain was any visual proof that Emil Haas existed. I’ve said he was camera shy; that was an understatement. He’d appeared on film about as often as Count Dracula. On the evidence he’d never traveled outside the country, so hadn’t posed for a passport photo. I’d checked with Lansing: The Secretary of State’s office had no record of a driver’s license in his name. He was God’s gift to limousines, taxi, and Uber. I went through three folders before I saw an elbow in a houndstooth sleeve that might belong to him on the edge of yet another picture of Fannon shaking hands with some suit. The brains and conscience of the company was every bit the gray eminence he’d claimed to be, at home with his numbers and prognostications while the flashy other half sucked up the spotlight.

  All of which made him look more guilty than he might have. Why go to such lengths to avoid cameras if you weren’t planning to take it on the lam?

  My eyes were watering and the smell of rubber cement was giving me a contact high when I finally hit pay dirt. I almost missed it; Fannon’s barn-door grin front and center and hand resting on the shoulder of an East Indian in checked Armani might have been patched in from all the previous shots. I was about to toss it in the deadwood with the rest when I recognized the face of the man standing in the background and to the left, as noncommittal as his hands folded monk-fashion in front of him. His right ear was partially cut off by the frame, and black Sharpie lines directed the production staff to crop him out entirely, but it was a good likeness. I could spend a month down there and never find better.

  I glanced over at the gatekeeper. She was reading her computer screen through a pair of glasses with tiger-striped rims. I closed the folder in front of me without making any noise and slid it onto the discard stack with one hand, blocking her view as I slipped the photo into an inside breast pocket.

  Which, in case anyone wonders, is why I wear a suit every day.

  * * *

  The day was getting on, and so was I; but the nature of the establishment that made that ugly stationery available to its guests didn’t offer much hope that the man who’d sent it was there for the long haul. A Syrian refugee who’d crawled through barbed wire, slept in a trench, and stowed away in a freezing luggage compartment would check out of the place in days, in search of better accommodations. That was management strategy, just like the uncomfortable seats in fast-food restaurants: Move ’em in, move ’em out. Dive that it was, it hadn’t turned on the VACANCY sign in a decade. There were always a couple of rooms held in reserve for someone who’d fled to the Midwest for his health and liberty. The fact that it was currently named the Liberty Inn must have galled the authorities.

  It was the Larkspur the first time I saw it, but it had changed names more often than an unpopular government project. The premise was that anyone familiar with its reputation might assume it was under new ownership; but even the Arab behind the registration desk had been there since before the first Gulf War, and his paychecks still came by way of an empty drop box in Omaha, en route from only the FBI knew where. It would be a party they could nab any time, but why throw away five more years investigating to find out who took his place?

  The motel’s new name was blocked out on a shield-shaped wooden sign facing the access road alongside I-96, with stars on a blue field at the top and vertical red-and-white stripes below. The color scheme had been applied to the wooden siding and outside staircases leading to the second-story porch, and the shake shingles and fancy coach lamps were new since my last visit. It all looked spruce enough to have cost plenty, but the material was cheap and the paint had all the indelibility of face powder. That gave the management the excuse to redo the place every three years, with meticulous bookkeeping to show that only the best quality went into the job. If the linens were laundered as thoroughly as the money that passed through the place, the Liberty Inn would be in Michelin.

  The lobby had been redone too, along the Federal line, with star-spangled bunting on the windows, Colonial-type seating—flimsy-looking, but it wasn’t as if anyone ever sat in it—and a gilded wooden bald eagle spreading its wings across the front of the desk. The Arab clerk showed no recognition as I crossed the Betsy Ross flag enameled on the floor tiles and gave him the friendly smile. He was handsome and dusky with his black hair in carefully unkempt curls and the promise of a splendidly Bedouin beard lurking just under the outer epidermis of his cheeks and chin. His blazer was tailored to resemble a Minuteman’s tunic, blue with white facings on cuffs permanently turned back. He asked, in a deep voice without accent, if I had a reservation.

  “Lay off, Hadaad. I’ll stay here when the SEC comes after my Apple stock.” I gave him a card anyway. He glanced at it and slid it into the slot in the desk top where he disposed of old registration cards. A shredder whined briefly. “I’m looking for a recent arrival.”

  He reached for the photograph I showed him, but I jerked it back before he could send it after my card.

  He smiled at me. Some of that freshly washed cash had gone into the kind of dental work you see in dentists’ billboards twelve feet wide. “Some trick. I guess it’s no longer classified. Washington’s shifted all its attention to terrorists, I guess.”

  “Huh?” I didn’t think anything I heard in that building would stop me that cold.

  “‘Recent arrival.’” Did I just come in with a carload of figs?” Ignoring Emil Haas in the background, he pointed at the East Indian grinning at Carl Fannon. “Chacharan Dilawar. He owns the joint. Or he did before he sold it.”

  “Who’d he sell it to?” I asked; but I knew the answer.

  * * *

  Getting a look beyond the lobby was high on my Things to Do list that day, but there were thirty rooms and I’d made too many unsuccessful runs at those shredded registration cards to waste time trying. Hadaad had the eyes of an African eagle and an iron bladder; either that, or the brand of adult diapers issued by NASA. He never left the desk, or for that matter sat down.

  The unofficially designated smoking area was the southeast corner of the empty lot beyond where the Dumpsters were parked, one of hundreds of chigger-hatcheries in the Renaissance City, with more being added every month. When I entered it the only occupant was a maintenance worker, a very tall, very thin man with dirty white hair and a strawberry mark that started at his hairline and dived down inside the collar of his green work shirt, sucking on a Virginia Slim.

  I took up space beside him and tapped a Winston against the pack. “I thought that brand was for women.”

  He smoked sil
ently for a moment, then cleared his throat, making no more noise than a jackhammer bouncing down the side of a scaffold. “Me, too, until a tough-guy crime writer came around a couple of years ago soaking up atmosphere. He gave me one. Smooth as the balls on a two-year-old.”

  I didn’t know whether to chuckle at that one. He might have pictures on his personal computer.

  We stood shoulder-to-shoulder like a couple of cons in the yard, poisoning our lungs with first- and secondhand smoke. After a little I took the photo from my pocket, folding Carl Fannon and Chacharan Dilawar to the back, and showed him Emil Haas. “Ever see this one in the motel?”

  A blue eye floating in burst vessels drifted toward the picture, then back to the vacant space between where we were standing and the back of the building. “You a writer?”

  “I can make my way through a postcard, but that’s about all. I’ve been soaking up the atmosphere in this town so long I sweat it out my pores. I’m working with the cops on a missing-persons case. The guy’s daughter wants him back.”

  “Reward?”

  “Couple of hundred.” If she balked at that I could make it up out of Fannon’s advance.

  “That ain’t much.”

  I put away the picture. “You saw his suit. You don’t pay for that kind of tailoring by spraying the cash all around town.”

  He’d burned the cigarette down to the filter. He plucked it from between his lips, let it drop, mashed it into the dirt with a steel-tipped toe, and started back toward the motel.

  To his back I said, “She might go three.”

  “And next week, then what?” he said without stopping or turning his head. “Rate this town’s going, there won’t be another maintenance job left after I’m canned.”

  Left alone, I watched a sheet of clouds dirtier than his hair unroll across the sky like an infield tarp, heard an approaching whoosh I knew well from hunting days before the pheasants ran out, and sprinted for the Dumpsters just as the rain swept across the lot with the force of a sandblaster. The drops were already bouncing up off hard earth and pattering my cuffs as I reached the shelter of the narrow pass-through under the second-story porch. A pair of women in gray housekeeping uniforms came down the open wooden steps, hooting at the sudden downpour with its rush of cool, iron-smelling air, and joined me, fishing packs out of their apron pockets.

  I smiled at them, but said nothing. Squealers never come in sets. You have to get them alone. This pair burned their way through a butt apiece without even commenting on the rain, and when they went back upstairs trailing the last throatful of noxious gas I felt like Tom Hanks hanging out with his pal the basketball.

  I was so busy watching the first flake of cheap paint separate itself from the siding I didn’t realize I had company until a feminine voice with a guttural Eastern European accent asked me for a light. She must have come out the steel door marked STAFF ONLY NO ADMITTANCE on the far end of the pass-through, a small woman in her thirties with her hair pulled into a bun so tight her face shone like smooth plastic. She had a unibrow and a trace of moustache, and if a smile ever appeared under it, it was after the end of her shift.

  I struck a match, shielding it from the damp wind with my palm, and set fire to the brown tube of tobacco stuck in a corner of her lips. She thanked me in that same deep voice and hugged herself. There were goose bumps on her bare arms.

  “How you getting along with Velocity?” I asked.

  “Yes?”

  “The new owners.”

  A shoulder moved. She untangled her arms long enough to tap ash off her cigarette without taking it from her lips, then refolded them. “Is nothing change.”

  I showed her the picture. She paled a shade under the sheen.

  “Police?”

  “Friend.”

  “No.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was arguing with me or didn’t recognize Haas.

  “He’d be new,” I said. “His people are looking for him. A hundred dollars just for the room number.”

  “Nobody new but one. Not him.”

  “Can you describe the new guest?”

  She got rid of more ash without removing the cigarette, then said something in a language that sounded like English played backwards.

  “I don’t speak Russian,” I said.

  “Is Romanian. It means cripple.”

  * * *

  A tractor-trailer rig rattle-banged up the ramp to I-96, the Walter P. Chrysler Freeway, hiccuping up through its infinity of gears. The vibration made the soles of my feet itch. That was a fresh series of potholes in the making. After cars and undeveloped real estate, Detroit majors in shattered infrastructure. Japanese automakers come halfway around the world to make plaster-of-Paris molds for import to their proving grounds.

  I looked down at the fresh cigarette smoldering between my fingers. I didn’t remember ditching the last one, let alone lighting up another.

  “What kind of cripple?”

  “He limps.”

  “Lots of people limp. Could be just a sprain.”

  “One leg is false.”

  “You can tell that from just a limp?”

  “Where I come from everybody limps. A broken bone is different from a clubfoot is different from a leg that is missing. The combine, the grain elevator, they have a mind of their own, and it is not always—charitable; this is a word?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in Romania.” She rolled the R with a sort of snarl.

  “Fair hair, medium build, about five-eleven, looks younger than he probably is?”

  “Maybe. I do not see his hair. He wears a hat.”

  He never wore a hat except when he went incognito. His photo had run with his column when he had one and his face had appeared on cable and on the Internet. A porkpie or a ball cap can alter a look.

  “Was he missing any fingers?”

  “I do not look at hands checking in, only checking out, in case there is a tip.”

  “Southern accent?”

  The tip of her cigarette glowed as she drew on it, thinking. She blew twin plumes of smoke out her nostrils, shook her head. “He says, ‘Pardon me’ when he slides past my cart in the hall. I can’t tell from two words only.”

  He’d spent six months embedded in the Dixie Mafia without carrying away so much as a twang. I’d thrown her that one just to see if she was gussying up her story for the cash. “Which room?”

  A pause while she threw another butt on the ground and replaced it from a cardboard box sporting a picture of a character in a spiked helmet and handlebars. The silence continued after I lit her up. I got the hint then. I took two fifties out of my wallet and held them up with the corners showing. They went into an apron pocket just short of giving me a paper cut.

  “Sixteen. Corner room, second floor, end of the hall.”

  I was detective enough to find the room; they all bore shiny copper numbers. It remained to be seen whether I was detective enough to learn how Barry Stackpole had traced Emil Haas when I hadn’t even told him I was looking for him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  This last was a philosophical problem, best worked out before a roaring fire with my feet in worn slippers steaming on the fender and a glass of cognac growing older and mustier in one hand. The first order of business was to get past Hadaad.

  The homey look of the Liberty Inn was deceptive. Beyond the whitewashed wood and open porches skulked a state-of-the-art security system, complete with cameras, motion sensors, and cameras behind the cameras activated by body heat. More than in most hostels, the guests there were the most precious thing on the premises; one tip toward the feds in the MacNamara Building downtown to the present whereabouts of a Ten Most Wanted, and someone paid with his hide. The humble desk clerk earned close to the salary of any General Motors board member, but his golden parachute had a hole in it as big as the RICO Act. It led six feet down in the poured foundation of the Red Wings’ new arena.

  I was sixty feet away from Barry’s room where the informati
on the late Carl Fannon had paid me for was waiting; not counting Emil Haas’s and daughter Gwendolyn’s retainers, however cut-rate. A five-minute walk any other day, but today it was the 500 K. Hemingway had said something along those lines while revisiting the scene of his wounding during the First World War; thirty-some yards that had taken more than a year and 75,000 casualties to cover.

  The Romanian housekeeper gave me some hope. The rustle of the two fifties in her apron pocket whenever she shifted her weight from one foot to the other had thawed the snowcaps of the Carpathians. She offered me one of her cigarettes. It was a Turkish knockoff, oval-shaped to fool the uneducated eye, but probably Nigerian in origin, laced with lead and toxic runoff from some off-shore operation based in New Jersey. A veteran could burn a thousand of them without effect, but six puffs by a pampered American could put him in Intensive Care.

  I accepted it, of course. You never turn down hospitality on the job, at least not on my job. When I put flame to it, it burned a third of the way down its length and ignited the tobacco—or whatever it was stuffed with—in a pyrotechnics display of sparks and glowing bits of metal, probably steel shavings. I tried to exhaust as much of it out the corner of my mouth opposite the one where it rested. I preferred to fill my lungs with homegrown poison.

  “Is there a back way up to the second floor?” My throat felt tight; the stuff corrugated the lining.

  She drew the last of her latest to the floor of her lungs, took it from her lips, contemplated what was left, took one last puff, and let it fall to the ground. A gust of smoke escaped her mouth.

  “You have another suit, yes?” She evaluated mine with the gimlet eye of an Odessa tailor.

  “Yes. But this is my best.”

  “Too bad.”

  * * *

  I’d done worse, but not since Saigon fell.

  Local codes had mandated an air shaft through the center of the construction, to supply ventilation to the second floor. Architecturally speaking, it was a hollow square leading from ground level to the roof, furnishing a handy place for the incessant parade of renovators to dispose of unrecyclable waste. Piles of broken Sheetrock, drywall, and acoustical ceiling lay at the base of a rectangular shaft broken only by ledges of mortar squeezed out between two-by-fours. They made convenient handholds: for Spider-Man. For a somewhat-past middle-aged detective, they represented stripping out of his suitcoat, frequent deep breaths, and disgruntled spiders.