In summer it’s a good place to go to watch girls in cutoffs and bandanna blouses riding skiffs and old men with faces heavy with time fishing for walleye. The big auto and tech money is five hours north on the Michigan Riviera, polishing the brass on their boats in Grand Traverse Bay and taking horseback riding lessons on Mackinac Island. But today the never-idle rich were missing a bet. The weatherwonks were reporting thunderstorms up there while Lake Huron was sliding into Detroit Beach in long creamy swells like poured pudding. I parked in a public area and went down to the water first, taking off my coat and walking along the damp stain left by the tide with the coat over one shoulder, smoking and feeling my sodden shirt separate itself in patches from my back in the breeze across the bay. The mist felt like a veil of cool silk on my face.
A tatty little arcade just up from the beach sold ice cream and tackle, and behind it stood a blue-and-white-striped pavilion designed to look like a Hollywood version of a sultan’s tent. In the days of the big bands it had sheltered a ballroom, and for a little while a roller-skating rink. A snapletter sign stuck in a swatch of grass identified it now as a community recreation center, where seniors played bridge and bingo and youths shot pool. That was the chamber of commerce’s interpretation. Natives and the grapevine along the I-75 corridor knew it as a place to bet on sports and the turn of the wheel without having to share one’s winnings with Lansing and Washington. The legislators who swung the vote for legal casinos and the state lottery said such places were obsolete, but they failed to count on the universal American faith in the left-handed dollar.
I climbed a rickrack set of steps angling steeply up from the beach and followed the decking around to the entrance, which fronted on the Dixie Highway. Cars were parked on the broken asphalt set aside for them, and on the edge under shade trees a double-bottom tractor-trailer rig idled, as long as the arcade. Out on the highway apron a pair of gulls squared off over a greasy Taco Bell sack, fluttering at each other and falling back to regroup. I flicked my cigarette butt their way, just to see if it would change the dynamic. A bird hopped over to investigate, pecked at the butt, and returned to the field of battle just in time to prevent the other gull from taking off with the sack. They fought, squawking like rusty car doors, and then things were back where they’d started. It was an Animal Planet moment.
I didn’t have to contend with a peephole panel or a bouncer at the door; I barely had to contend with a door. It stood half open, blocked by a homemade boat anchor fashioned from an iron ring sunk in a paint bucket filled with cement. Famously, the pavilion wasn’t air-conditioned, like Wrigley Field before they installed lights. The dealers and customers counted for ventilation on the crossdraft between highway and lake, where glass doorwalls opened on screens looking out on the beach. Air circulated, as a matter of fact, but it smelled of crapshooters’ armpits and the sour pulp of mildew from the green baize on the game tables.
A sign at the door prohibited bare feet and swimsuits, but apart from that the dress code was casual, shorts and sandals. They went like hell with the Japanese lanterns and pastel murals of peacocks and cherry blossoms. The age of the players gathered at the rails and perched in front of the slots ranged from First Communion to Last Rites. An eighty-year-old woman in a red wig and a blue sundress gave a cigarette cough of a laugh when her dealer dealt her blackjack; a boy of fourteen in a black T-shirt that hung to his knees cursed and struck a one-armed bandit with the flat of his hand. The house men and women were almost exclusively Asian; illegal enterprises almost never feel compelled to conform to equal opportunity employment. Wild hair and piercings seemed to be banned, but Hawaiian shirts and short skirts were okay, depending on the amount of growth on the chest and the girth of the thighs. It was a resort place, they didn’t want to scare off customers sticky from the beach. The slots and poker machines chimed and cackled and played Bach’s “Toccata and Fuge in D Minor” on the organ, Phantom of the Opera style; Disneyland for the decadent middle class.
The pit boss by the roulette wheel was dressed to blend in with the customers, but they all run to 46 portly and haven’t a live nerve in their faces. I beckoned him over. He glided on rubber heels with his fingers curled under at his hips.
“Boss lady in?” I asked.
He had the face of a sumo wrestler, all ovals stacked one atop another, squashing his eyes nearly shut and his lips as tight as sliced bacon. He inserted his tongue between them to let words out. “Who’s that?”
“Mrs. Sing. The name on the bail ticket every time the cops push the place in.”
He said nothing for a glacial age, and when I remembered I had a summer tax bill due in September I foraged in the coat over my forearm and held out a card. “Give this to whoever’s watching the register.”
The wheel paid out twice, then one of the hands rose and I stuck the card between two stubby fingers. He turned and left, moving steadily and without haste, but making time. Once you get a boulder going there’s very little that can slow it down.
While I waited a couple of slots paid off, not big, and a pretty Asian waitress in wedge-heeled sandals with long muscles in her thighs came over and offered me a drink from a tray. I shook my head and poked a dollar under a tall glass of bourbon with a cube floating in it for garnish. Two of those and you lost track of where you’d parked the car, not to mention the odds and percentages. She smiled and prowled away.
“Mr. Walker? I’m Victor Cho. I own this establishment.”
He’d appeared at my elbow, coming up more quietly than the sumo: a slender Korean of sixty or so wearing a blue silk sport shirt, gray gabardine slacks, and glistening loafers with hard toes. He had a horseshoe of receding black hair and a polite smile that showed his eyeteeth.
The hard toes were the clue. There would be no stomping on them and taking him off guard. The big man with the wrestler’s face stood behind him, as distant and as close as Mt. Fuji.
“How do you do,” I said. “Actually, my business is with Mrs. Sing.”
“I don’t know anyone of that name in this country. Do you have a complaint?”
“I seem to have lost Mrs. Sing.”
“Someone is kidding you. Eliot will see you to your car.”
“Eliot?”
Mt. Fuji shifted its weight onto the balls of his feet.
As Mr. Cho turned to take himself out of the line of charge, I touched his wrist. “Eliot can probably take me,” I said. “He knows all the steps and I’m rusty. I left the sawed-off home. But we’ll bust up furniture, and you know how sound travels on the water. There’s always one cop who’s just looking for an excuse to bust up the rest, and at the height of tourist season.”
He brushed off my hand with a little movement. “Believe me, I’d like to help you out. I don’t know any Madame Sing.”
“Who said ‘Madame?’”
His expression changed then. The smile hadn’t let up even when I’d offered to renovate the place with Eliot. Now he looked solemn. “Madame Sing owns the property this pavilion stands on. My only contact with her is when I send the rent check to her post office box in Detroit. She has nothing to do with this business.”
“I didn’t say she did.”
He held up my card as if reading it for the first time. “You’re available at this number?”
“Not all the time.” I plucked it out of his hand, unclipped the pen from inside my coat, and wrote the cell phone number on the back. I returned the card. “That one’s good when it’s working. Tell her to keep trying.”
“Does she need to know what it’s about?”
“Hilary Bairn.”
“Who’s he?”
It was my turn to show my eyeteeth. “Strike two, Victor. Most people would’ve asked, ‘Who’s she?’”
He looked at me, but there wasn’t any satisfaction in it. It was like firing a shot into quicksand.
Heading back north I hit heavy traffic, with ribbons of heat rising as thick as blown glass from radiators and the back of drivers’ nec
ks, but the trip hadn’t been wasted. I’d have been disappointed if Madame Sing were as easy to see as the bay.
Charlotte Sing was an Amerasian, a refugee of the Korean Police Action brought to the U.S. through a sea of red tape by her father, an American serviceman who’d spent five years after the cease-fire looking for her after her mother died in an internment camp in Pyongyang; somesuch place like that, that sounded like a rubber band breaking. Legend said the father had wanted only an unpaid housemaid, and used his belt when the service was unsatisfactory. At age sixteen, Charlotte’s petition for emancipation had been granted and she’d gone to work for one of the Oriental massage parlors proliferating throughout the Detroit area.
Ordinarily her story would have ended there, and not with musical accompaniment. It was a yellow-slave racket, where truckers went to get their gears shifted by young women who’d been taken off their parents’ hands in Korea by sponsors who let them work off their debt as prostitutes. Most of the girls wound up in jail or dead of disease, but Charlotte was smarter than most, and turned what she’d learned inward. She married one of the sponsors, put her clothes back on, and took over the bookkeeping. When the law caught up with Andrew Sing, she’d taken the stand against him. She forgot her English when the defense tried to cross-examine. Sing was convicted.
The proceeds of his enterprises never surfaced. It was determined he’d reinvested everything and lost it all when the law cracked down. But two years after his appeals ran out and he began serving thirty years in the federal correctional institution in Milan, Michigan, Charlotte began buying up choice plots of real estate across the Great Lakes region, where in the course of time casinos and health spas and after-hours bars opened up, always illegal, but with no paper trail connecting the landlady to the businesses themselves. There’s no law against owning rental property where the tenants break the law. She charged astronomically high rents—according to the books she kept in her own hand—but none of her customers complained. In this way she managed to make millions off gambling and prostitution and declare every dollar on her Form 1040 without interference either from local authority or the departments of Treasury and Justice.
She lived in seclusion, it was said, dividing her time among her homes on Lake Michigan, in Bloomfield Hills, and north of San Francisco, and an office on Detroit’s West Side in a polyglot neighborhood populated mostly by Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants and their children. No driver’s license was on record in her name and her passport photo was generic Asian, ordinary almost to the point of invisibility. For drama, the press fell back on a forty-year-old image of a scrawny sixteen-year-old challenging her father’s custody in court.
The press didn’t take interest in her often; it had enough headline-happy multimillionaires to go around. But that was changing.
When a state attorney general who wanted to be governor tried to subpoena her to appear before a grand jury investigating vice, she’d hired two Asian women of her approximate age and build to accompany her everywhere she went, in outfits identical to hers. With no reliable photo and only a description to go by, the servers were at a loss to know whom to approach. “Well, we all look alike,” was her only comment when a writer for the Metro Times got a call through to her office. The jury’s term ran out and she returned to California and her army of realtors.
The device backfired. That human shell game was clever stage business, but it and her flip rejoinder were too colorful for the peace of mind of a woman who set a premium on privacy. Overnight she went from an object of vague curiosity to a celebrity, and a sinister one at that: a creature between Greta Garbo and Heidi Fleiss. Even her name and exotic title sounded like something out of a pulp magazine from the days of the Yellow Peril. When a bartender at the Union Street Saloon on Woodward assembled a drink from green tea and gin and christened it a “Madame Sling,” the patrons streamed in for a sample. Within a week, the establishment received a letter produced on expensive stationery, signed by a former justice of the Michigan State Supreme Court, demanding the name of the drink be changed. The bar complied and the customer flow ebbed to normal, but by then that old photograph of a teenage Charlotte had resurfaced and appeared in newspapers and over the shoulders of TV anchors across the country.
Charlotte Sing was one of the twenty wealthiest women in America, according to Forbes and Fortune. According to the calendar in Hilary Bairn’s apartment, he’d had an appointment with her the day before yesterday. Whatever a fortune-hunting petty thief with a bad bleach job had to talk about with the Queen of Vice, I doubted it was the double-entry system of bookkeeping.
FOUR
Just as the caged city overpasses began to close over my head, my cell went off for the first time. The musicians on the NPR station I listened to for jazz were teaching themselves something progressive, and for a moment I thought the tone was part of the melody. When it continued into the deejay’s commentary, I unholstered the instrument and said “Hello” into a dead signal. A moment later I got a different sort of ring that I figured out meant I had a message. Nothing I tried could retrieve it and I’d left the manual at the office. There, the telephone on the desk was ringing.
“I left word on your walkabout,” Darius Fuller said. “I had an easier time getting the general manager on the phone when I couldn’t put one over the plate in three games.”
I sat down in the swivel. “I said I had one. I didn’t say I knew how to use it. What’s the emergency?”
“That’s the word. Your two months just became two days. I had a fight with Dee-dee this morning, about you know who. She got mad and said she’s going to elope.”
“You hired me to handle it. I ought to charge you extra for helping, the way plumbers do.”
“This a joke to you? You got a kid?”
“No, I’ve been a detective all my life. Why two days? You can buy a ladder at Home Depot any time.”
“She’s got an oral exam tomorrow. I guess I should be happy she isn’t planning to give up the law and start shelling out little Dee-dees and Hilaries. I don’t feel happy.”
“Maybe that’s the point. She’s just trying to make you madder than you were already. She didn’t look any too pleased with her future intended when I saw her last night.”
“I’m paying you to see Bairn.”
“If they weren’t sometimes a package deal, you wouldn’t be paying me at all. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet. Bairn’s got problems. If they’re as bad as they’re starting to look, we might get him at your price.”
A rattling breath drew on his end. “You could be right, it could be a balk. A bluff. I can’t risk it. If they make it legal, that trust fund’s as good as in his pocket. I didn’t work my way out of the minors and get arterioscopic surgery twice to see her piss it all away on a foul ball like him.”
“There’s also your daughter’s happiness.”
“According to her mother, I bobbled that one a long time back. But I never heard Dee-dee complain until this morning. She asked me what right I had to give her advice on her life when I wasn’t around for most of it.”
“Those away games are hell on family.”
“Just between you and me and whoever’s eavesdropping on the line, it wasn’t just the away games. There’s a lot of temptation hangs around the locker room after a win. You got to have iron to resist. I used up all mine in the infield.”
“Tell her that?”
“I figured she had it from her mother. You going to brace Bairn?”
“I won’t stop for coffee. With two months to payoff, he’s taking risks he might not if he knows he can seal the deal with your daughter this week. If she’s bluffing, or if he hasn’t heard from her since before you two blew up, I might get him to take less than what you’re willing to put on the table. Otherwise—”
“You don’t need to waste time spelling it out. Get going and steal second.” The connection broke.
I called Bairn’s line at the courier service in Mt. Clemens. It was
a half hour until quitting, and if he hadn’t heard from Deirdre, I needed to get him away before he did.
The office voice mail kicked in after four rings. I went to the switchboard, got patched through to someone in his department, and found out he’d left early. That was a bad sign. He might be having an early dinner with his fiancée.
He didn’t answer his cell either. I clicked off at the beginning of a generic outgoing announcement and tried him at home. Someone picked up.
“Hello?”
I hadn’t heard him speak all the time I’d been following him. It was a tired sort of voice, not at all the tone of a man about to inherit a wife and a fortune. I took that as a good sign. Maybe she hadn’t told him the news, or maybe she’d been bluffing after all when she’d told her father.
“Hilary Bairn?”
“Yes?”
I told him my name and occupation. “The party I represent wishes to propose an arrangement that will benefit you financially and immediately. I’d like to discuss it with you in person as soon as possible.”
“How much is the benefit?”
“It’s substantial.” I clamped my mouth shut on the end of it. I couldn’t have made it sound more final if I’d popped a cheek with my finger.
“You know my address?”
I recited it. “I can be there in ten minutes.”
“Okay, Walker.”
I hung up on the dial tone and went to the bank.
A FedEx truck had the loading zone across from Bairn’s apartment nailed down. I dipped into equity for a spot in a lot around the corner on Lafayette and strode back, racing against time and Deirdre Fuller; the fact that Bairn was even in a mood to discuss money gave me hope and anxiety in equal doses.
The building had been a department store back when Detroit had them, with an iron front and three floors above the two-story ground floor where the money was counted and inventory recorded and for the general manager to tilt back and blow wreaths of blue cigar smoke from behind a desk the size of an emerging African nation. There was still a depression in the elevator floor near the push buttons where an operator had sat on a stool to work the lever. Old wood continued its aromatic deterioration under the new drywall and paint. I knocked on Bairn’s door, got no answer, and tried the knob just for the hell of it. I’d left the burglar kit at home. It makes a bad impression to jimmy your way in to a friendly business conference.
American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Page 3
