American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Do it now. You’ve got a cell.”

  I shook my head. “If the answer’s no, you’ll just confiscate it and check the log.”

  Burrough spoke up. “We can wait till the phone here’s dusted, then you can use that. I got people checking on Bairn’s location. Nothing else to do till they report, right, Inspector?”

  I said, “Then you’ll get the number from Ma Bell.”

  Alderdyce’s face went as smooth as it could short of sandblasting. “Long distance, is it?”

  “Yeah, you tricked it out of me. Narrows it down to the cops and the crooks and the people who can’t afford to live outside this exchange.”

  “You live in it.”

  “Work it out. I’m not a cop and I don’t have a record.”

  “Just a fistful of charges for withholding and obstruction. You’ve been behind bars so many times you’ve got grill marks on your ass.”

  “Can I quote you in my Yellow Pages ad?”

  We went back into the kitchen. Officer Ransom’s long bony face was flushed; he’d made a discovery. “Check out the calendar on the fridge, Inspector. This guy Bairn thinks it’s September.”

  July and August were missing, including Bairn’s scribbled appointment with Charlotte Sing, if that’s what it was. Alderdyce looked. “Could be nothing,” he said. “But good work, Officer.”

  The Mexican cleared his throat, almost too softly to hear.

  “It was Ordoñez pointed it out,” Ransom added, nearly as softly.

  Alderdyce turned to the partner. “Why two pages, Officer?”

  “In case somebody wrote something in July hard enough to make an indentation in August. Somebody’s been watching Charlie Chan.” The Mexican’s smile withered short of full bloom.

  “Well, like I said, it could be a dry hole.” But Alderdyce sounded impressed. He looked at me. “I don’t guess you noticed.”

  I shrugged and shook my head. This brought me into eye contact with Ordoñez. His were intelligent, mahogany-colored, and just as hard. He’d seen me looking at the calendar, all right; seeking it out. I’d led him right to it.

  “Pick up your shit,” Alderdyce told me. “Call that client you don’t have. I don’t hear from you by the end of the shift, you start the next in Holding.”

  Ransom said, “Sir, I know he’s your friend—”

  “Stand down, Officer,” snapped Burrough.

  Alderdyce addressed Ransom as if the detective hadn’t interrupted. “He’s a fucking hemorrhoid is what he is. But he’s closed more police cases than you read in training. You learn to be half the cop he is, I’ll put you in for plainclothes. You start to mouth off like him, I’ll bust you down to khaki. Do like your partner, keep your trap shut and listen.”

  “Yessir.” And an enemy was born.

  I started scooping stuff back into my pockets. Alderdyce snatched up the envelope as I was reaching for it. “We’ll hang on to this for now. You’ve got enough for gas.”

  “When do I get it back?”

  “End of the shift.” He smiled.

  “How about a receipt?”

  He looked at Burrough, who scribbled in his pad. When he hesitated before signing it, Alderdyce took the pad and mechanical pencil, scratched his name, tore out the sheet, and stuck it at me. I still have it:

  Received from A. Walker: $50,000 cash.

  I’m thinking of getting it framed.

  Waiting for the attendant to pry my car out from behind a monster truck, I leaned against the plywood booth, the only shade in the lot, and tapped out a number on my cell. The signal went to a tower in the suburbs and from there to the ear of Darius Fuller, telling him he wasn’t a father anymore. I listened to him gasping for breath, then mouthed the worthless words of sympathy and said the police would be in touch soon with details.

  “What about you?” He sounded older than sixty now, dragging his glove back to the bullpen, beaten by the side.

  “They want to know who I’m working for. If they see me with you, they’ll know.”

  “It don’t much matter now, does it?”

  “I’d like to poke around a little. They’ve got Hilary Bairn all wrapped up for it, and maybe they’re right. She was mad enough the last time I saw her to start a fight. But the cops don’t know the whole story and it’s not mine to tell.”

  “Why do you care? The job ended when—Oh, God.” It broke then. You never know when it will or how bad. I took the telephone away from my ear until it subsided.

  When it did I said, “There’s something else. If they find out what the job was and that you had a fight with Deirdre, it puts a whole new face on the investigation.”

  “You don’t think they’ll think it was me? She’s my daughter, for Christ’s sake!” Now he was mad.

  “They know that. Pretty soon they’ll know about the two million she had coming to her. Who gets it in the event she didn’t live to collect?”

  He paused. “Her heirs and assigns. If she didn’t make other arrangements, that’d be me and Gloria. Her mother. Even split. What the hell are you saying?” Mad at me now. Hormones were colliding all over the place.

  “I’m talking about the cops, not me. I just asked the question first. When they put the answer together with the fifty grand you gave me to pay him to walk away, they won’t see it as a father’s concern for his daughter’s welfare. They’re not paid to.”

  “You said it was an accident!”

  “That’s where the fight comes in. You didn’t let it end there—where was it, by the way?”

  “Here in the house, but—”

  “You followed her to Bairn’s place, they’ll say, or went looking for her there. It started all up again. There was a scuffle. That’s manslaughter, or at worst wrongful death. Money makes it something else. If the right one don’t get you, the left one will. Prosecutor’s dream.”

  “Jesus.” It sounded like a prayer.

  I paused. The attendant had brought up my car and got out to look at me, waiting for his money. He had a ball cap on backward and half a tin of Skoal under his lower lip. I stared at him until he turned, spat, and went into his booth. I walked a few yards away and lowered my voice. “There’s something else.”

  “You already said that,” Fuller said.

  “The cops confiscated the fifty.”

  “Shit. Detroit cops? Shit.”

  “They’re not all bent. I’ll get it back, but if you tell them I’m working for you they’ll reconstruct the whole thing like the archaeologists they are, and the rest will play out like I said.”

  “You’re something,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know what, exactly, but when a man goes out of his way to tell someone not to help him stay out of jail, you got to trust him like a good catcher. How you figure to stay out long enough to do squat?”

  “Same as always: Keep fouling ’em off till I get the pitch I want.”

  That was the end of the conversation. He started to say something, choked, and clicked off after a second of dead air.

  I hoped it wasn’t an act. I was out on the same old dead limb and I didn’t bounce as well as I used to.

  SEVEN

  When the day starts to run down there’s no place like the office for a think. There are no clever decorative touches to distract the tired brain, no witchy PC to dangle the temptations of a walking tour of the hanging gardens of Babylon or a pornographic website in Milwaukee, no flashing lights on the telephone; just the same old dust-trap desk and file cabinets and scrap rug and flakes of cigarette ash waltzing in the current from the electric fan on the windowsill. The half-dozen other businesses that hung on three floors like leaves on a dead tree had closed for the day and down in the street the feral dogs crossed against the light without incident. Some of them still wore collars; the U of D and Wayne State University students had neglected to remove them when they turned their pets loose at the end of the term. The Dogs of Summer were a problem. They roamed in packs, scattering garbage, preying on small pets, and mau
ling children. Meanwhile the city had discontinued Animal Control on weekends to save money.

  After I locked the door to the outer office I unzipped the compartment in the lining of my belt and took out the paper Darius Fuller had given me to have Bairn sign once money had changed hands. As evidence it was dynamite, and I couldn’t count on the cops not making a more thorough search next time. The safe was good only for prop comedy. I opened a desk drawer, dumped the staples out of the stapler, gave the paper another fold lengthwise, and laid it in the narrow channel inside. I figured it would escape discovery unless someone decided to staple something.

  I returned it to the drawer and put the swivel to work, with a glass in my hand and two inches of charcoal starter in the bottom. Soon it was in my stomach and the coals were warming up.

  Deirdre Fuller was a sad surprise. If anyone had an early expiration date stamped on his forehead it was Hilary Bairn, who swiped expensive watches and tried to pawn them through his girlfriend to support his champagne tastes, which probably included gambling debts. Deirdre had survived celebrity parentage and a broken home, had two million dollars coming, and yet had still been studying for a profession. She’d smelled of sweet almonds, a scent I approved of in a world drenched in honeysuckle and lilac. I couldn’t forget the expression on her face in Bairn’s apartment, that look of weary acceptance that said she had the answers I needed.

  One of them was what had happened to the watch. I hadn’t seen it in either the kitchen or living room and Detective Burrough hadn’t mentioned finding it in her handbag, a man’s wristwatch in a woman’s purse. If she’d gone there to confront Bairn over turning her into a fence for stolen merchandise, starting a fight that got her killed, it stood to reason she’d have had the evidence with her, to throw in his face. She wouldn’t have tried to pawn it after the first time; love is blind, not stupid, and she hadn’t the makings of a crook, not with an inheritance coming and her still committed to the law program at Michigan.

  I could ask Bairn, if the cops didn’t arrest him first. I’d start with where he went after he left the office early. Or I could ask Darius Fuller where he went after he fought with Deirdre at his house in Grosse Pointe. No wristwatch might mean she’d already said her piece to Bairn and he’d apologized and they were friends again and that was why she was waiting for him in his apartment. That would take the heat off the boyfriend. The father had sounded convincing on the telephone, but if her death was an accident he wouldn’t have had to fake grief. It would also explain why no one else was home when the police investigated the disturbance. Most domestic killings are tied up on the spot, with the perpetrator waiting next to the corpse to be taken into custody. Intruders panic and leave.

  I hoped it explained nothing. If it wasn’t Bairn I hoped the case was a complicated one involving a mysterious hooded stranger and smuggled rubies, with parrots and a map and hot-air balloons and a Soviet sleeper agent who hadn’t gotten the memo; cryptograms and bookcases that pivoted out to reveal secret passageways, or anyone or anything else but Darius Fuller. I’d gotten used to seeing sports heroes at their arraignments more often than on the field of play, but I liked it when parents didn’t kill their children, even by accident. There wasn’t liquor enough in the city for me to take on that kind of case.

  The cigarette carton in the deep drawer of the desk was as empty as the pack in my pocket, and I’d only bothered to pick that up in case the forensics team found it in Bairn’s apartment and thought it was a clue. They’d have plenty enough to go on once they lifted my fingerprints from places Bairn himself hadn’t touched. That was going to cost me if I didn’t have something to put on Inspector Alderdyce’s desk before he went home at midnight. I tipped the carton into the wastebasket and got up to go out for more, and maybe a lead or something. I had all of six hours.

  A telephone rang. Out of habit I lifted the receiver off the one on the desk and spoke my name into a dial tone. I put it down and broke loose the one on my belt.

  “Is that Mr. Walker?” Female, with a musical sort of accent: Asian. When I said that was what it was, she said, “Please hold for Madame Sing.”

  I’d almost forgotten about her. The only reminder I’d had since I’d left my number with Victor Cho at the casino in Detroit Beach was the missing section from the calendar on Hilary Bairn’s refrigerator, with her name scribbled in July. He might have gotten rid of it himself since that morning, or there might have been another notation in August that someone didn’t want the cops to see; the name Sing had excited me so much I hadn’t bothered to turn up the page. While I was waiting I tilted another inch into my glass and then into my mouth and rolled it around. It prickled my tongue like a tiny electric charge.

  “Why Detroit Beach, Mr. Walker?” greeted another Asian voice, lower register, with the accent farther back. “I haven’t been there in years.”

  I said, “I didn’t expect to find you there. The joint’s the closest one you’ve got to Bairn’s place. If you had a debt to collect, that would be where he ran it up.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that, Mr. Walker. I own real estate, not gambling houses.”

  “Are you saying Hilary Bairn didn’t have an appointment to see you day before yesterday?”

  “I have many appointments. I don’t keep them all personally. I maintain assistants for less important meetings.”

  “Is that what Bairn was?”

  “I don’t know the gentleman.”

  “Victor Cho tried to stall me the same way. He made a mistake. He said, ‘Who’s he?’ It’s not a common name for men. Offhand the only other one I can think of is the man who climbed Mt. Everest; but that was his last name, so he doesn’t count.”

  The pause on her end crackled with intelligence. “What is your interest?”

  “This morning I needed background for a business proposition I was handling for a client. Tonight it’s a criminal case. Bairn is being sought for questioning in a homicide.”

  “I wasn’t aware private investigators involved themselves in police cases.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes?”

  “That that would be the first thing you were curious about. Most people, when they hear the word homicide, want to know who was killed.”

  “The answer to that is irrelevant until I’m satisfied as to the reliability of the source.”

  I was beginning to understand her success. The vast majority of refugees who wash up on American shores vanish quickly into the soup, either dissolved into the stock or gathered in clumps with others of their nationality. Some float to the top all by themselves, others sink to the bottom and feed off the sediment. The ones who float to the top have to overcome prejudice, culture shock, barriers of language and custom, and all the usual forces that combine to prevent overcrowding at the highest level even among the natives. Charlotte Sing had had all that to contend with as well as her gender, yet had shot straight up from the sediment; if some of it still clung to her, you needed to have faced many of the same challenges to find fault, and even then you had to allow that she thought to ask the questions most people only assume they know the answers to.

  I said, “If you don’t know who I am by now, everything I’ve heard about you is an exaggeration.”

  “It probably is regardless. These things tend to take on a life of their own.” She drew breath she didn’t need. People like her—like me, too—prefer to have people think they’re less certain than they are. “I’ve seen your military record, license renewals, marriage certificate and divorce decree, and a rather bloody swath through the local media. My privacy is more than just a comfort, Mr. Walker. Without it I can’t function. I’m not convinced I can afford to involve myself with such a colorful character. In fact, I’m convinced I can’t.”

  “It’s me or the cops. They’re not as gaudy, but their records are open to the public. And it isn’t your backyard domestic homicide. The victim’s father is a national celebrity.”

  “Would I know his n
ame?”

  “I think you already do. If I’m right about your calling in Bairn’s markers, he’d have told you all about the money he’s about to come into, to buy himself time. Two months, to be exact.”

  “Again you force me to embarrass myself with my ignorance. But if the story’s that big, I won’t need to take up my time and your minutes asking for details. When are you free tomorrow morning?”

  “If it’s tomorrow I won’t be free at all, in every sense of the term. I need to see you tonight.”

  “One moment.”

  While on hold I grasped the bottle, then let it alone. I had an idea I’d need every cerebral cell I had left just to keep from falling any farther behind. After what seemed a long time she came back.

  “I’m attending a private reception tonight at the Hilton Garden Inn, to celebrate some small effort I made to arrange an exhibition of preimperial Korean art at the DIA this fall.”

  “Is it formal? I keep my dinner jacket at a rental place downtown.”

  “You won’t need it. You’re not invited. I’ve taken a suite upstairs to dress. If you’re there one minute past eight, you’ll miss me.”

  “What’s the number of the suite?”

  “I don’t know yet. My assistant isn’t available. Ask for Mrs. MacArthur at the desk.”

  Detroit is never going to the Super Bowl, so it decided to invite the Super Bowl to Detroit. In order to prepare for fans from out of town, the Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau lured in outside investors to build 198 rooms in red brick in the old Harmonie Park neighborhood, close enough to walk to Ford Field—if the game didn’t take place in February—and Comerica Park—if anyone cared to see how the Tigers were doing. The Hilton Garden Inn is the first hotel to go up in downtown Detroit since the Atheneum in 1993, but older ones built of better material with more style had been blown up in the meantime.

  A pretty black girl in a sharp blazer greeted me at the desk. She didn’t stir so much as a skin cell when I asked for Mrs. MacArthur, but the tone of her voice when she called up said everything it had to about a guest who would book a two-hundred-dollar suite just to change clothes. She cradled the receiver like Baby Jesus and gave me the number. She even provided directions to the elevator.