The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

* * *

  I didn’t think Lieutenant Child had missed his regular barber’s appointment. More likely whoever had touched him up that day had been better with the brush. His collar was free of clipped hairs, but he smelled like a fresh-squeezed lime. He had on a flat cap with a plaid to match his suit, and damned if he didn’t uncover his head in the presence of the dead man. The woman from the medical examiner’s office was already at work with her tool kit, which included a temporal thermometer she passed over his forehead and a little tape recorder. “Ninety-two-point one. At a guess, he died within the hour.” She was talking to the gadget.

  The pillow lay where I’d found it, next to his head with a dent in it the size of his face. Bits of lint from the case clung to his stubble. His eyes were two white semicircles, the irises rolled all the way back, and his mouth was frozen in a silent scream.

  “And nobody saw nothing,” Child said. “How’s that?”

  I said, “Only reason anyone saw me was I asked for him. Killers do their own looking.”

  “How’d you know to look here?”

  “DPW. Frank was a champion rat-catcher.”

  “What else was he?”

  “A possible witness in the Fannon murder.”

  “Based on what?”

  I took a deep breath and told him how we’d met.

  “I’m just learning about this now why?”

  “At the time I didn’t know what was waiting for me in the basement. Later it slipped my mind.”

  “What jogged your memory?”

  “Cecil Fish. I traded him Frank for that Peaceable Shore tip I told you about.”

  “You fingering Fish?”

  “Much as I’d like to, this isn’t his style. I believed his assistant when he said he didn’t have any luck finding Frank.”

  “He said this when?”

  I told him.

  “You’re just a busy little bee, aren’t you? In too much of a hurry to stop and clue me in on my own goddamn investigation.”

  “It wasn’t my investigation when we spoke.”

  “What do you think Frank saw?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe whoever went in that building and came out before I showed up.”

  “What makes it your investigation all of a sudden?”

  “I’m working for Gwendolyn Haas to clear her father of the Fannon kill.”

  “I thought you were working on Fannon’s dime.”

  “That was then. On this case all I have to do is stand still and the clients come wrapping themselves around my ankles like old sports sections.”

  “Funny thing. Haas showed up in my office a little while ago with his lawyer, saying he wanted to do the same thing. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “I suggested it a couple of hours ago when we ran into each other in the Liberty Inn. I was going to tell you all about it after I talked to Frank. One of the reasons I came down here was to try to persuade him to go to you with what he knew.”

  “What brought you to the Liberty?”

  “Just a hunch. It’s where all the two-legged rats in the city wind up sooner or later.”

  Gwendolyn wouldn’t have thanked me for telling him she’d gotten a note from Haas on Liberty stationery. I didn’t know Child well enough to trust him not to slap her with a sheltering rap. I didn’t know any cop well enough for that, including cops I’d known for thirty years.

  “While I’m at it, tell Lieutenant Stonesmith she can stop looking for Barry Stackpole. I stumbled over him in Haas’s room. He took off on his own. No foul play involved.”

  “So you say. It’s so foul in here I could throw up, and I’m not talking about the stiff on the bed.” He started patting his pockets. “You’re under arrest, Walker. Withholding evidence to start. Got a Miranda card?” he asked the medical examiner.

  “Why should I? I don’t have any authority to arrest anyone. You’ve been watching too many episodes of CSI.”

  “Well, shit. You know your way around County,” he told me. “What they said last time still goes.” He reached under his coattail and jangled loose a pair of handcuffs.

  * * *

  Checking into Holding in the old Third Precinct was something I could cross off my bucket list. I’d spent enough time in the cage at 1300 to use it as my voting address, but that was before a chain of corrupt and inept mayors had let the place go to the birds and the beasts of the field. Homicide had been in those digs long enough to wear out that invigorating new-hoosegow smell, but the bars had a fresh coat of whitewash and the beige-painted walls weren’t yet scribbled over with the legacies left by former occupants. There was no steel grid to protect the bulb, but the LED fixture behind the opaque pebbled panel in the ceiling was too high for a Pistons center to reach. The toilet had a lid and the triangular corner sink drained like sixty.

  The bed was another story. Recently bankrupt cities don’t go to Art Van’s for new furniture when they move offices. I was pretty sure I’d used this one before, and my tired old muscles confirmed it. They hadn’t even bothered to change the walnuts in the stuffing.

  Jails are quiet, whatever you’ve read in books or seen on TV. The cell to my right was empty, the mattress rolled up at one end on naked metal slats, and my neighbor on the left slept more or less peacefully, making a little “pah” sound every time he exhaled. Sleeping’s the best way to pass the time in the can once you’ve committed all the graffiti to memory. You don’t even have to be sleepy: You just close your eyes and pretend you’ve got the flu.

  When Lieutenant Child to the dark tower came, accompanied by a uniformed officer, I was dreaming about hunting grizzlies in Alaska. I’d never been to Alaska, had never gotten any closer to a bear in the wild than Animal Planet, and nothing I’d been exposed to lately was even slightly related to what I dreamt. It was an episode from Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, dredged up from childhood. You know you’re past middle age when your brain’s too far gone to process anything but stock footage. The rattle of the officer’s key in the lock woke me.

  “Man, you were out,” Child said. “Must be them fine linen sheets.”

  “I just now dozed off. I think there’s a pea under the mattress.” I swung my feet to the floor and scratched my grouty scalp.

  Someone cleared his throat. I looked up. There was a second man with him, six-and-a-half-feet high with hair as sleek and as close to his head as a bathing cap. The color scheme he wore was the same as his office on the nosebleed floor of the Capital One Building in Southfield, gray gabardine on yellow silk with a steel-gray necktie. He had the distracting habit of blinking constantly, from exposure to all those hot TV lights, but he shut it down cold when addressing juries. I’d done some sleuthing for him in the case of a police-siege-gone-wrong, but it hadn’t worked out as well for his client as he’d hoped. Underdogs were his specialty, but he’d wound up exonerating the authorities, so he didn’t like me any more than I liked him.

  Philip Justice was his real name, and he swung it like an axe, in court and during press conferences. The founder of the family had represented Lucrezia Borgia or somebody like that, and the surname had been granted to him like a knighthood.

  “You’re sprung, Walker,” Child said. “You kind of left this one out of your references.”

  “If I knew the lieutenant forgot to Mirandize you, I’d have saved a trip to the Frank Murphy Hall for a habeas.” Justice’s voice lacked the rusted barbed-wire edge he reserved for witnesses on the stand. “But he volunteered that information, so I don’t see any reason to bring suit.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” I said.

  Child said, “Duke it out between you outside. I only tanked you because it’s good for my blood pressure. That wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d told me you got Charlotte Sing in your sights. Now I can dust my hands of this one, Carl Fannon too, right into Washington’s lap.”

  * * *

  We adjourned to a sports bar in the next block, a cop hangout. You could cut the testosterone with a kni
fe; and at least half of it was coming from female officers. A soccer game was playing on the big screen above the bar with the sound turned down. Not that anyone in the joint would listen any more than watch. A couple of talking heads were discussing the NFL drafts, with football season months away, and whoever was typing the closed-caption couldn’t spell.

  One lonely screen featured that day’s Tigers game in Atlanta, taped earlier and abridged to cut out the boring parts; like whenever the Braves came to bat. A waitress wearing a Tigers jersey over a bandanna skirt brought us spicy chicken wings and a beer apiece.

  “Let’s tip twenty percent,” I told Justice after she left. “She’s the only one in here who knows what season it is.”

  “I have a box, if you ever want to see a game. I got a utility infielder off a date-rape beef and he’s the grateful type.”

  He ate caveman style, one arm curled around his plate and looking up and around between bites. “We should’ve gone to my place in Southfield. Every time I come into one of these dumps I expect to get shot down fleeing arrest.”

  I said, “You can always bring suit from hell. You’ll have your pick of representatives. I’m too busy doing Child’s job to fight rush hour traffic. Who told him about Sing, you?”

  “That’d be a violation of client confidentiality.”

  “How would tipping him off to an international fugitive get you in Dutch with Emil Haas?”

  “Who said I’m representing him?”

  “I left him calling his lawyer. Since guys like him don’t normally truck with criminal attorneys, I figured his rep farmed it out to you.”

  He blinked more rapidly than usual. “We’ve never met. I’ve been retained by our mutual friend from Korea.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I dropped my napkin and stooped to pick it up. Not scrambling on my hands and knees out the fire exit was a test of character.

  We kept our voices down. The blare from the one TV with its sound turned up and from a whooping party of fans next to our table drowned us out from all but each other. “Why isn’t that a harboring rap?” I asked.

  “Rule of law. Attorneys of record are immune. Also she hasn’t been tried in an American court. Also she doesn’t exist technically. The government in Pyongyang issued her death certificate. Our State Department could make a case overruling all that, but until it does I’m well in the clear.”

  “You’re speaking in tongues, Counselor. If you implicated Sing in two murders, you violated privilege.”

  “I didn’t do either. When I went to Thirteen Hundred and identified myself as your representative, Lieutenant Child was screening surveillance video from the entrance to the Annunciation shelter. He didn’t throw me out, so I watched too. There’s a dead spot between the last legitimate visitor and when you showed up, lasting about ten minutes. Now, who has the technology to wipe material from a DVD while it’s being recorded, and from a distance?”

  “Child worked that out all by himself?”

  “Not just from that. You told him about Peaceable Shore, remember. You don’t think he just let that drop, do you? The Detroit Police Department has access to the same high-tech equipment as Emil Haas. When Pacific Rim came up, and with it links to some of the multiple corporations it owned, including a Japanese manufacturer of electronic equipment, and then he figured out that anyone with that connection could use it to commit a crime—well, I’d shred a hunch like that in court, but there’s no law against a cop keeping his nose to the ground until he roots up something solid.

  “I kept my mouth shut,” he went on. “You don’t have inside information on an ongoing investigation connected to your client drop in your lap and blow it by bragging about the important people you represent.”

  “So why stand up for me?”

  “Hear me out. She and I have never spoken or made direct contact. If I’m forced to divulge anything, I’d reveal the name of a legitimate venture capitalist in Grand Rapids who employed me to clear his technical expert of a hacking charge so he can advise him on how to protect his data from theft. I’m guessing he’s never had contact with Sing either. Her whole organization is a Chinese box, politically incorrect as that sounds. I couldn’t even swear under oath that I’m working on her behalf. Up till now everything’s been hints and innuendo; which the rawest public defender in the system could prevent from being read into the record without getting up from his desk.”

  “How do you know it’s her?”

  He’d stopped blinking during his speech. Now he resumed. “Who says cops cornered the market on hunches?”

  “Do you know our history?”

  “Of course. You were something of a local celebrity when she made all the wire services.”

  “Did it ever occur to you she sent you to flush me out into the open?”

  The sports fans next door let out another whoop and drank in unison. No one had scored; the rule seemed to be to take a shot every time the announcer told us what was actually happening in the game. At the current rate it would take them a week to work up a decent buzz.

  Justice sent over a scowl and returned his attention to me. “Did I say Sing sent me?”

  I waited. His habit of turning every conversation into a cross-examination was worse than the blinking.

  With his condition he wasn’t equipped to win a staring contest. “I’ve been summoned to a meeting,” he said. “I hardly think she’ll be present, but knowing what I do about her I’m more than a little leery. For all I know, one of my legal victories from before I knew she existed upset some scheme of hers, and if I go, I won’t be coming back. Knowing what you know about her, I can’t think of better security than to bring you along.”

  “I can. Don’t go.”

  “That would be unethical. I’d already performed several services—which appeared innocuous enough at the time—before I found out who’d hired me. That makes me attorney of record. I could be disbarred for refusing to meet my client. What’s funny?”

  I stopped in mid-chuckle. “Now every lawyer joke I’ve ever heard makes sense. There isn’t another species on earth that would choose death over forced retirement.”

  “And do what, write my memoirs? Don’t waste money on a legal eagle’s autobiography. The code of the profession demands he leave out the good parts. What else, join CNN? I’m too successful; you have to blow an open-and-shut case like O.J.’s to get an audition. I’d rather be dead. But just at the moment I’d rather be alive than dead.”

  “You don’t need me to hold your hand. You must have a carry permit.”

  Automatically he slapped the left side of his suitcoat. The way it was cut, I hadn’t been able to tell if he was armed. Some detective. Some tailor.

  “Of course I have. In my game you measure your success in death threats. But I’ve never fired it except at paper targets, which rarely return fire.”

  “You don’t want me. You want Wild Bill. The last time we crossed paths my weapon of choice was a wine bottle.”

  “You’re the only one who ever got close enough to her to use it.”

  The TV announcer described a play. A member of the big party knocked back his glass, stuck his muzzle into a bowl of French onion soup, and made noises in it like an outboard motor. If you can’t carry a load any bigger than that, you should give up sports.

  Justice had picked up a wing. Now he put it down without biting into it and used his napkin on his fingers, one by one, the way a dowager takes off her gloves. He slid a gray-and-yellow leather case out of the inside pocket opposite the shoulder rig, uncapped a gold fountain pen, scribbled, tore loose a rectangle of paper, and glided it across the table facedown.

  I left my wings on the plate, and my appetite with them. It had nothing to do with the guy playing Jacques Cousteau in his soup. I peeled up the hole card, peeked, and slid it back across the table.

  “Too many zeroes. You trying to put me in a bigger bracket?”

  Blink-blink-blink. “If you’re seriously worried about that, order two
more beers while I find an ATM.”

  “I haven’t finished mine.” I tapped the check. “You can hire a six-hitch team of professional bodyguards for that.”

  “Can I tell you a story? It won’t take as long as my summations.”

  “Does it have a happy ending?”

  “Depends on how you feel about Depression-era politics.”

  “I’m already laughing. Proceed, Counselor.”

  “In nineteen-thirty-five, an ear-nose-and-throat doctor with a grudge against Governor Huey Long of Louisiana stepped out from behind a pillar of the capitol building in Baton Rouge and plugged him. Long’s bodyguard and a police officer returned fire, and kept firing when the doctor was on the floor. Hit him fifty-nine times, reloading whenever the cylinders clicked. Guess what the coroner found when he sliced the governor open.”

  “From what I’ve read, a liver the size of New Orleans.”

  “The thirty-eight slug that killed him. The doctor’s gun was a twenty-five. Long could have survived that, but not a ricochet wound from a weapon fired by one of his own guards while they were chopping his assailant to pieces.”

  “I heard the same thing. I just wanted to hear how you told it. I also heard the bullet was from a forty-five, and that it didn’t happen that way. The smaller caliber did the trick.”

  “Maybe so, but the principle is sound, based on the law of diminishing returns: Every time you hire an extra guard your risk increases fifty percent.”

  The waitress came, and went away quietly while we were staring at each other. He was getting better at it. I said, “All it takes is one.”

  “I did my homework. You don’t lose your head in a tight situation.”

  “You’re making me blush; but I’ll pass.”

  “Scared?”

  “Petrified. I’ve played enough poker to know when someone’s trying to buy the pot. Cut it by two thirds and we’ll do business.”

  “You’re dickering in the wrong direction, Walker.”

  “Okay. Offer me three times as much. You got me out of custody and I’m grateful. Not that I was going stir-crazy after a couple of hours, but I can’t do my job from the bucket. If I took that check, it’d make me so damn grateful I’d have to drop everything I’m doing and come running whenever you whistle. If that’s what you want, you’re going to have to cough up a lot more.”