The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  At the end of ten minutes I hoisted myself onto the second-story walkway by my elbows and looked up, square into the lens of a camera mounted directly above the shaft. I climbed to my feet, listening for the thunder of jackboots on the stairs, and when five more minutes had passed in peace I took a closer look at the camera. There were no cables connected to it.

  Romanian Annie might have told me it was a dummy; but it would probably have cost my dead client another hundred.

  The boards creaked underfoot, but there was nothing I could do about that. If Hadaad had orders to make sure Barry didn’t leave his room and no one came to rescue him, I just had to move fast. I took out the stiff vinyl strip ostensibly designed to reinforce my wallet, but before slipping the latch I tried knocking, and damn if the peg-legged rascal didn’t swing open the door and aim a Taser at my heart. He’d probably heard me coming ever since I started up the air shaft.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Bar’s open.” Barry laid the Taser on a table inside the door. “On the dresser.”

  This was three drawers of printed wood grain supporting a seventeen-inch flat screen, the usual tray, ice bucket, and plastic cups, and a square bottle of Gentleman Jack.

  “You didn’t get this from room service.” I stripped the cellophane off a cup and floated two cubes from the bucket. “You can call a lot of attention to yourself checking in with your luggage in a paper sack.” There was nothing hanging in the doorless closet and not even a backpack in sight.

  “I haven’t checked into a hotel or motel in ten years, and I’ve stayed in plenty. I slipped Lawrence of Arabia downstairs a fifty to leave his little box of cards under the desk.” He stretched out on the bed and folded his hands behind his head. He was in shirtsleeves, slacks, and one sock. The other foot was titanium, shaped like an electric iron and attached by a socket to a metal rod. In the time I’d known him he’d gone from spruce to fiberglass to the stuff they use to build the space shuttle.

  There was a talk show on TV, one of those where the guests make their point by throwing chairs at each other. The volume was low, but made enough murmur to keep anyone from following our conversation with his ear to the door. That was an everyday precaution for Barry.

  “Hadaad’s selling himself short,” I said. “The going rate among the housekeeping staff is a hundred.”

  “The way I hear it, you’ve been scattering C-notes all over town like grass seed. You must have a printing press in the garage.”

  “Quit kidding, chum. I’d farm out all my work to you if I didn’t think I’d be watching it on the next news cycle. You know damn well who I’m working for or you wouldn’t be here, sitting on my latest lead.”

  “You could have saved us both a lot of trouble if you’d trusted me in the first place. I worked my way backwards from Peaceable Shore. It holds the deed to this place. I filed all the details behind my firewall when it changed hands. You think I don’t keep track of what happens to the Liberty?”

  “When did you make the connection?”

  “Don’t worry, it was after we spoke. I had to check it out before I said anything. One bum steer can ruin a relationship.”

  “You left every sign of an unplanned disappearance.”

  “I’m glad you noticed. Once too many times I followed standard procedure and told a colleague where I was going. He sold me out, which is the reason I buy one shoe at a time. I can’t trust anyone with what I’m doing; not even you, Amos. Hell, there are days when I don’t confide in myself. But only an idiot plunges half-cocked into an investigation connected with a murder. If I stepped out unannounced, leaving my door open, someone—maybe the UPS man who delivers author’s copies of my books—will put my face on a milk carton.”

  He rolled onto one shoulder, snared a can of salted almonds off the nightstand, and lay back, prying off the plastic lid.

  “I’m glad it was you,” he said, “for what it’s worth. Sorry about that trusting crack.”

  “Yeah. We should take up a line of work where we can depend on each other. Maybe the trapeze.”

  I held up the bottle and sloshed it. He shook his head, munching. “I was saving it for you. Nuts are instant energy. I ride the wagon when I’m working.”

  “I should too.” I made myself uncomfortable in a Naugahyde recliner and drank. I’m not a bourbon fan; it isn’t strong enough for rocket fuel and it isn’t sweet enough to pour on a waffle. But any Jack in a storm. It shinnied up my spine and started gnawing at my gray cells. “So what’d you get, apart from a suitcase stuffed with bottles of conditioning shampoo?”

  “In this dump you bring your own. You first. I know you’re working for Velocity, but I don’t know which half.”

  “Take your pick. Either way you’re right.”

  “Strictly speaking there’s only one choice, with Fannon in the hospitality suite in the Wayne County Morgue.”

  “Who says that rules him out?”

  He nodded. “I forgot. When it comes to clients you don’t discriminate over whether they have a pulse. How much of the dead man’s money have you burned through so far?”

  “Not much, in the greater scheme of things. These days I have to beat clients away with a blackjack. You haven’t figured out the riddle yet.”

  “What’s to figure out? You found another moneybags, this one with moving parts.”

  I swirled the contents of my plastic cup, but the ice didn’t make that crisp clink I associate with the rest of the pleasures of boozing. It doesn’t have to be cut crystal; a glass jar would do. “I’m all about the money. That’s why I’ve got a pack of gum on layaway at the IGA. Just now I’m lugging around a cool forty bucks in cash, courtesy of Emil and Gwendolyn Haas. At this rate I’m going to have to open an account in Switzerland.”

  “What are you doing for all this plunder?”

  “You can’t use it, Barry. Not now, and maybe not ever.”

  He put the lid back on the can. “So it’s what we talked about?”

  “I hope not; but until I can swear it isn’t, I’m sitting on top of a thousand-gallon tank of gasoline, playing with matches.”

  “Okay. But when you can swear it isn’t, it’s mine.”

  So I told him.

  About Fannon hiring me to find Emil Haas to avoid queering the deal over the Sentinel Building, Haas slipping me twenty to meet him in that same location, and the twenty I got from Gwendolyn to locate her father and clear him of suspicion in his partner’s murder;

  About my adventures with three outfits called Peaceable Shore, all of which offered possibilities—even the one that had closed—but none more promising than the others. Drugs or human misery or sex for hire, take your pick;

  About Lieutenant Child.

  “He’s using you for bait,” Barry said.

  “Sure he is. When a cop tells you he’s not ambitious, you can bet he’s got his eye on Everest.”

  “Man, you do more all day than I do before breakfast. All I have to show for my stay in this slick rattrap is the name of the person Velocity’s been fronting for all this time.”

  I rolled the cup between my palms, watching the ice lose its sharp corners. So far I’d had only the one sip. “What’s this lesson in investigative journalism going to cost me?”

  “This one’s on the house. I can’t use it anyway; I knew that when we made our deal. I’ve got as much stake in nailing this particular party as everyone else in civilization. I told Haas to write his daughter, using Liberty stationery. I knew if she showed it to anyone, it’d be you. With Daddy’s name all over the police news, she wouldn’t go to them, and the young ladies of her set don’t have any snoopers on speed-dial. She’d have gotten your name from his office.”

  “I’d offer you a partnership, if there were enough work for two. I couldn’t get much out of Brita Palmerston there.”

  “If you got anything, you got more than I did. The receptionist told me she went out for lunch and didn’t come back. But I was just touching base. After that I talked to Gwe
ndolyn. I didn’t have to play pig-in-a-poke with her like you did. My partnership is with the First Amendment. The cops don’t like it, but I don’t have to tell them anything about my sources, even sources who are the subject of an all-points-bulletin. I read Haas’s note.”

  I sat forward. “You found him?”

  He gave me his baggy grin, put the lid back on the can of nuts, wiped his hands with a cheesy motel tissue, reached above the maple headboard, and rapped the can against the wall. A poorly set floor tile creaked under a footstep, the bathroom door opened, and Emil Haas stepped out.

  TWENTY-THREE

  He was dressed more casually than the one time we’d met—almost elaborately so—in a plain blue shirt, dark gray slacks, and black loafers, all screaming some Mom-and-Pop store where the merchandise was more expensive than in a big-box outlet, without any difference in quality. Had he shown his infamous face in Walmart or Meijer or any mall in the metropolitan area, the security footage would have been on TV and the Net inside an hour.

  He was a big man still, but the way he stood, shriveled inside himself, lessened the effect, and the absence of careful tailoring showed off his physical defects; he wasn’t noticeably overweight, but when it came to even a modest spare tire, cheap beltless trousers weren’t made with flattery in mind.

  I put aside my drink and climbed out of the recliner. “Next time you go underground, don’t try so hard to be invisible. If I just got back from Mars and hadn’t seen a paper or TV or been online, I’d still report you to the cops as a suspicious person.”

  He blinked a little, completing the image he projected. With his pale curly hair and Elmer’s Glue-All complexion, he could have passed for albino. It was ironic; in ordinary circumstances he was the original Mr. Cellophane, seldom noticed and instantly forgotten. On the lam, he stuck out like a snowy owl in a flock of crows.

  “Mr. Stackpole made me well aware of the conspicuous figure I cut,” he said in that shallow tone. It made you want to lean closer to hear him. Maybe that was his secret, what had attracted a charismatic character like Carl Fannon to him in the first place. From across a room, anyone polite enough to address him in conversation would look as if he were hanging on to every word he said. “You must understand I’ve had no practice.”

  I looked at Barry, sitting up in bed now with the can of nuts in his lap, tapping the plastic lid and turning it into a toy bongo. “Where’d you two crazy kids meet?”

  “Right in this room. He was checking out as I was checking in—figuratively speaking. His name wasn’t in Hadaad’s box any more than mine, but room sixteen was in the active file, the only blank card there. There were always at least a few under the old management. You boys threw away a gold mine when you canceled company policy regarding unregistered guests,” he told Haas.

  “Carl said the same thing, but I said we’d make many times that legitimately by razing the place and putting up a professional building. He said, ‘It’d take us three years to recoup the investment. Meanwhile the place is bringing in as much as the Hilton, and most of it under the IRS radar.’ I’d suspected his moral compass was out of whack, but it was then I decided to follow his paper trail.”

  “What took you so long?” I asked. “You two have been buying up the city for years.”

  “He always made a good pitch, and we cleaned up by flipping the property or renovating it and leasing space. I created a Frankenstein there. When we started out, he wanted to invest in sites in New York, Chicago, and L.A. I told him everyone did that, buying high when the local economy was booming and selling low when it went bust, when it should be the other way around. I reminded him of all those high-rise office buildings that sprang up in Houston like mushrooms when oil was selling at sixty dollars a barrel; when it dropped below thirty, the owners were offering three months’ occupancy rent-free to fill the empty space. In Detroit, you can buy a row of abandoned houses for a dollar apiece and back taxes, an empty industrial plant for less than the cost of a loft in Manhattan, and turn them over three years later for a million. When we started doing that, I saw no reason to question why the money came in so fast, or where the initial investment was coming from. I parked my nose in the black column and ignored the red as a temporary situation.”

  Barry said, “You can get in a lot of trouble not asking the questions you don’t want to know the answers to.”

  “I didn’t think to ask the questions. When Cecil Fish and his cronies started accusing Velocity of fronting for foreign interests, I started. Carl kept ducking the issues I kept bringing up, so I opened my own inquiries outside the office. We were right in the middle of the Sentinel Building deal when I found out about Peaceable Shore.” He turned to me. The blinking stopped. “That’s when I missed our appointment with the owners and went to see you instead. Things had gotten to the point where it was too dangerous to keep the secret to myself.”

  “Walker told you when you came to his office you’d saved a lot of people a lot of time and money. You could have saved a lot more if you’d said your piece there.”

  “A lot more,” I said. “Like your partner’s life.”

  “I told you I didn’t trust speaking out in a strange place.”

  I said, “You’ve got a half-interest in almost every empty hulk in town. You picked the Sentinel for what, sentimental reasons?”

  “Hardly. It’s closed to the public, the workers go home at five, and I had a key. Also the building was germane to the conversation. It was during our negotiations to buy it I found out just who we were dealing with. My meeting with you would be brief: One name.”

  “I was there. Where were you?”

  “Across the street in the first doorway I came to after I left the basement. I saw you talk to the derelict in the alley, then go inside.”

  “You left an Easter egg behind.”

  He nodded, and went on nodding. As large as his brain cavity was, it still wasn’t big enough for a bobblehead. “I thought it must have been you who found Carl, though no one said or wrote anything about who it was.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head now, “I didn’t put him there, but when I found the vault door was shut and discovered it was locked, I decided to get out. We’d left specific instructions to the workmen to remove the door to avoid just that kind of mishap. I’d have opened it myself if I knew anything about it. I suspected someone was trapped inside, a natural reaction; and I couldn’t afford to be found there under those circumstances. I panicked. I can’t deny it. Still, I don’t suppose I could have saved Carl in any case. Unless the police gave the media false information?” He looked like a man begging for scraps.

  “He’d been dead for hours.” I scooped my cup off the lamp table and drank. The ice was gone, diluting the bourbon. It tasted like one of those spiked lemonades kids drink when they think they’re boozing. “I’m no more safe cracker than you are. The lock let go while I was standing in front of it. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “Good God. I didn’t see a timer. Do you think someone set it to open while I was there?”

  “That was the first thing I thought; only I thought I was supposed to be the patsy. But if someone tipped the cops to stumble over one or the other of us red-handed, the message got lost. They didn’t show until after I told your office manager not to expect Fannon to check in from Beijing.”

  Barry had stopped thumping the can in favor of shaking it and rattling the almonds inside. “Not so far-fetched. There are nine-one-one operators I wouldn’t trust to remember to pick up my dry cleaning.”

  “Maybe. I’m still on the list for reporting the body late and not directly to the authorities. Maybe whoever put him in storage and set the clock thought that would happen. Or that I’d pretend I was never there and then they’d have something on me.”

  “My God.” Haas came the rest of the way into the room and lowered himself into the recliner. “And I thought legitimate business was Machiavellian.”

  “Forget Machiavelli,” said Barry.
“He was an Our Gang kid compared to Charlotte Sing.”

  I finished my drink in one steady draught and set it down with a bang. “There it is, damn it. I was hoping no one would mention the name. Now it’s real.”

  * * *

  Outside, a Volt or a Tesla or something equally electric and quiet hummed down the interstate. That’s how silent the room had gotten.

  Emil Haas broke it. “I didn’t even know who Charlotte Sing was until I ran a computer check on all the possible synonyms for Peaceable Shore. And I’d never heard of Peaceable Shore until I found it on Carl’s. He thought by erasing it from his hard drive, he’d eradicated it. He forgot I got my start designing programs. I traced Peaceable Shore to Pacific Rim. The images that followed were hellish. That company managed to turn terrorism into a commercial enterprise. And it was run by a woman.”

  “She’s not a woman,” I said. “She’s a pandemic in Prada.”

  Barry said, “I’ve been underestimating Cecil Fish. His computer guru must have found out about it the same way you did.”

  I was staring at Haas. “How could you not know who Madam Sing was? Six months before the North Koreans reported her arrest, sure, but six weeks after that she was Time’s Person of the Year, edging out Sheikh Killabunchachristians.”

  “If I came across her at all, I dismissed it as not important to Velocity. Had I known my own partner was financing us with funds provided by an international criminal, I’d have done the homework I’ve been doing since I found out about Peaceable Shore.”

  “She’s dead. You said it yourself, Barry. They hanged her in Pyongyang for every count in sixty-three countries.”