American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It’ll take getting used to,” I said. “It has a different meaning in this country, as I’m sure you know.”

  “In my culture it’s a simple sign of respect. Many of my employees are new to this hemisphere. If I preserve some of the old customs it makes the transition much easier.”

  “I’ll brush up on my tea ceremony.”

  “I’m curious to know what made you decide to accept my offer. You struck me as a man who prefers self-employment.”

  “That’s just another way of saying I’ve got a different boss every week. Also the travel opportunities are vastly overrated. Last month I was in Toledo three times.”

  “I think I can promise you something a bit less tedious. Not San Francisco, however; not today. I’ll be back after the holiday. There is some briefing involved, and my schedule is tight.”

  “I was hoping to get away for a while. I’m still keyed up over the Bairn case.”

  “I heard about it on the news. Does this mean you’re finished with it?”

  “Just a couple of loose ends to tie off. I was hoping to do that on the plane if you weren’t too busy.”

  “I? I told you everything I know.”

  “That’s not what Fred Loudermilk said. Well, bon voyage. Hope they serve fresher pretzels on chartered flights.” I cradled the receiver.

  The telephone rang again as I was retrieving the cartridges from the floor where Elron had tossed them. I had a box in the desk, but I was thrifty and in no real hurry. One of them had rolled out of reach behind the radiator and I got up to get a pencil and tease it out. The telephone went on ringing all this time. It was still ringing when I finished reloading the Chief’s Special and went to lunch.

  I ate at the Pegasus in Greektown. I didn’t particularly feel like Greek, but I’d found a parking space nearby and just around the corner from police headquarters, which didn’t offer a valet service like Trapper’s Alley, although it does better business. I put away a plate of stuffed grape leaves, chased it with strong coffee as thick as Valvoline, refed the meter, and walked to 1300. I took my time to avoid breaking a sweat in the heat. I was in no real hurry.

  John Alderdyce had set up camp at a desk out in the public ward, exposed on all four sides. The name on the trivet belonged to a sergeant on suspension pending an investigation into twenty-five kilos of cocaine missing from the evidence room. The inspector and Detective Burrough were bent over a multicolored pile of paper when I walked in. The third-grader wore seersucker, the other silk. If Burrough had put on silk, Alderdyce would have turned out in chinchilla, with diamond pendants on both ears. The pair seemed to be waging a war of sartorial one-upsmanship. It’s what passes for morale down there these days.

  “Don’t tell me they broke you down already,” I said. “I just heard about the reorganization.”

  Alderdyce looked up from under his rocky outcrop of brow. “Ceiling in my office fell in and took out the computer and fax machine. I had asbestos in my iced tea. Who told you the department’s reorganizing?”

  I stalled, working my teeth with the cinnamon stick I’d scooped up at the cash register in the restaurant. “You can’t keep a secret in a drafty old barn like this. Anything to it?”

  “Not if the union decides to grow a set of testicles. What the hell were you doing staking out Fuller’s neighbor on the lake? You said you were off the case.”

  “Curiosity. I saw a curtain move in the window and I followed it up.”

  “Without reporting it.”

  “Curtains move all the time. I didn’t know it was a violation.”

  “If you’d told the sheriff’s deputies, we’d have Hilary Bairn in lockup.”

  “On a slab, more likely. He’s got an armed-and-dangerous tag out on him on account of Esmerelda.”

  “It’d close the case,” Burrough put in.

  “They don’t close that easy,” Alderdyce said. “I don’t close them that easy.” To me: “What’d Loudermilk have to say to you?”

  “Bang, bang, bang. I think that was the order. I didn’t like where the conversation was going, so I went for a swim. He talking yet?”

  “He’s still under observation for concussion and a possible skull fracture. They moved him to a security floor with sheriff’s Lieutenant Phillips’ men and mine at all the exits. Everything’s awake but his mouth.”

  “That should tell you something,” I said.

  “His silence doesn’t back up your version of what happened.”

  “Phillips said the same thing. You law types keep tripping over each other’s lines.”

  Alderdyce scooped up a fistful of flimsies and shook them at me. “A bale of these arrived by messenger from Oakland County this morning. Another’s on its way. We’re going over every traffic stop and suspicious-person report filed with the sheriff’s department since the sun went down day before yesterday, trying to match a description with Bairn’s. Phillips’ men found the boat he used beached on the north shore. Do you have any idea how many cars are pulled over and suspicious persons reported over a thirty-six-hour period in a county that size?”

  “More than ten?”

  He smacked down the sheaf. A loose sheet drifted off the desk like a pink snowflake. “This is real police work, Walker. We get ten paper cuts to every GSW. We don’t get to turn up our collars and stroll down the waterfront whistling ‘St. James Infirmary.’ I could pick up that phone and smack you with a Sullivan for that contraband Luger. With shooting involved, that’s your license and eight months in Jackson for dessert.”

  “I didn’t do any shooting with it. If I hadn’t been wet and tired and scared I wouldn’t even have bothered to wave it around. Loudermilk wasn’t going anywhere under all that scrapwood.”

  “Felonious assault if he doesn’t back up your story. Attempted murder if the prosecutor’s got a hard-on that day.”

  “Property damage, too. Phillips suggested that. If Peninsular Realty presses charges, which it won’t. It’s going to come down on me from another direction, just like that pier.”

  That part of the room got quiet enough to hear termites munching the timbers. Burrough found his tongue first. “What the hell is Peninsular Realty?”

  “Charlotte Sing,” I said. “You’ve heard of her, probably, though chances are you think all she does is run hook shops and gambling hells. We just spoke over the phone. I pretty much invited her to come get me and give me the same thing she gave Ernesto Esmerelda.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  You kind of forgot to mention that,” Alderdyce said. “Twice.”

  “I came straight here with it,” I said. “Well, I stopped for lunch. I didn’t have much breakfast.”

  “You never do. You like to hit the ground running and screw me over early. I’m talking about before. Charlotte Sing’s name kind of never came up.”

  “I was sparing you extraneous detail. At the time it looked like she’d been dealt out of the hand.”

  “Except she hadn’t.”

  “One of her companies owns most of the frontage on Black Squirrel Lake. I got that from Phillips and confirmed it with Violet Pershing, the local Peninsular rep. That makes Madame Sing the majority member of the property owners’ association there, and security Captain Fred Loudermilk’s employer. He’d answer to her for little things like aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice and the assault on the odd private eye.”

  Detective Burrough pushed back the brim of the hat he wasn’t wearing today. “Odd is right. That’s a stetch and a half.”

  “Tell me about the part where she didn’t count,” Alderdyce said.

  I told him about Bairn’s request for a loan and Charlotte Sing’s response according to her. Then I told him the version where she agreed to the loan but tacked on provisions that frightened him off.

  The inspector tidied the papers on the desk, smoothing the edges carefully with his palms, and folded his hands on top of the stack. They were powerful hands, well-tended but corded with muscle. A thumb against either carotid
would black me out in less than a minute. “Tell me about the part where she’s more than just the owner of gambling hells and hook shops.”

  I’d gotten that from Mary Ann Thaler. She hadn’t told me to keep my mouth shut, about that or her interest in bailing Alderdyce out of early retirement; but then maybe she thought she hadn’t needed to. “Speculation,” I said. “She must be into something worse than that to put the fear of God into a punk like him.”

  “Keep speculating. What?”

  “She travels a lot. She offered me a job with her security detail and said I had to be prepared to pick up and leave town on short notice. Since she charters all her flights, she doesn’t have to mess with airport security as much as the rest of us, so she could be carrying anything aboard: drugs, weapons, stolen merchandise. Hopping state lines makes whatever it is federal. It scares me just thinking about it, and I’m not as close to it as he is.”

  “You used to be a better liar. And you know goddamn well there’s no smoking in this shit hole.”

  I looked down at the cigarette in my fingers. I put it back in the pack. “Nervous hands. I said I was scared. I’m a staked goat and I don’t even know what the lion looks like.”

  Burrough said, “What makes you such an important goat?”

  “Nothing, if I’m as bad a liar as John says. I told her I talked to Loudermilk.”

  “Did you?” Alderdyce asked.

  “No, but I paved the way for some honest blackmail. I said I was taking her up on the job offer. She doesn’t strike me as the type that would pay it. No hits, no errors if she thinks I’m bluffing, but if she sent someone to X out Wilson Watson’s boy Esmerelda, she’s not the type to just shake it off.”

  “Maybe Loudermilk did Esmerelda,” Burrough said. “If we can believe he used you for target practice.”

  “Could be. I don’t think he’s got the stones. He couldn’t take me out when it counted, and Esmerelda made Castro’s dignity squads look like Police Academy Four. She’d have a specialist for such situations.”

  Alderdyce said, “You’ve got a hole in your trap. If Loudermilk talked to you he could talk to anyone.”

  “I’d double that guard,” I said. “Without him it’s hearsay.”

  Burrough watched the inspector lift the receiver off the telephone on the desk. “You’re not buying any of this.”

  Alderdyce dialed and asked for Lieutenant Phillips. He got someone else and gave him the message. He hung up and said, “Out on a call. What’s all this got to do with what happened to Deirdre Fuller?”

  I said, “Either Sing had her killed to put the screws on Bairn or she took advantage of the situation when it happened. I don’t know what makes him so important; maybe his job.” I told him what I’d told Wilson Watson. I didn’t mention my most recent meeting with Watson. The story always seemed to work only when I left out Wilson Watson or Charlotte Sing. It was strung out so thin it wouldn’t hold both their weight at the same time.

  Alderdyce said, “Sing has her own organization in place if she’s distributing contraband. She wouldn’t need Bairn just because the company he works for deals in transportation. If she went so far as to provide a pro to shield him from Esmerelda, Bairn’s important to her plans.”

  “What’d you turn on that pistol Fuller gave Deirdre?” I asked.

  Burrough answered. “Beretta Nine. We turned up the paperwork in Lansing, but so far no piece. It’s not the weapon.”

  I put a curious look on my face. The inspector dug to the bottom of a stack and pulled out a carbon.

  “Ballistics took an unjacketed forty-four out of Esmerelda, probably fired from a magnum,” he said. “More than enough to penetrate a door and still pack a wallop. Forty-four mag’s the breakfast of champions. Twenty-two’s strictly for closeup and forty-five and up presents an accuracy problem. They don’t like semiautomatics because of all those ejected shells they spray around for the forensics team to find. Nothing in Bairn’s background indicates he ever held a firearm, much less used one.”

  “Any theft on his sheet?”

  “He hasn’t got a sheet. All we’ve got is school transcripts and interviews with acquaintances and coworkers.”

  “Just because it wasn’t reported doesn’t mean he didn’t jam himself up with the local pawnshops. They’ve got an Interpol all their own to identify fences.” I looked at Burrough. “Did a man’s watch show up in that bank box?”

  “Nope. That was the lot.”

  “I’m worried about that watch,” I said. “If Deirdre got mad enough to throw it at his head for mixing her up in a scam, it ought to have turned up at his place. Or in his car,” I suggested.

  Alderdyce said, “It wasn’t in the inventory we got from Phillips. We talked to the pawnshop owners and clerks, by the way. They all had Bairn’s picture on file. So all your theories aren’t so full of shit as they sound.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t say there wasn’t a heavy shit factor. You’ve got Charlotte Sing all rigged out as Fu Manchu on nothing more substantial than a single conversation with the chief suspect in the Fuller killing.”

  “I’ve got more than that if she takes a swipe at me for what I said about Loudermilk. That’s the whole point of why I’m here.”

  “Fine,” Alderdyce said. “We’ll law you up around the clock, or would you prefer something at County?”

  “Both those things wreck the purpose of setting myself up as bait in the first place.”

  “Then what is the point of why you’re here?”

  “Professional courtesy,” I said. “If one of those optimists drowning worms in the river lands a corpse that answers my description, you won’t have to start the investigation from scratch.”

  He riffled the edge of the stack with the ball of a thumb. It sounded like Bairn’s motorboat. “You don’t hang yourself out like a piece of cheese for anyone but a client. Who is it, if not Darius Fuller?”

  “That again.”

  “Again and again, till this whole historic pile of crap finishes falling down around my ears. And after that.”

  “Don’t threaten me with County again. That’s a summer rerun you don’t want to sit through any more than I do. Anyway, you’re curious to see whether I can get myself killed, and the chances for that are better on the outside.”

  Burrough said, “Jesus. Which one of you guys fucked the other guy’s wife?”

  “Walker’s my best friend,” Alderdyce said. “That should give you some idea of just how rotten my life is.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He had it a little worse,” I said.

  The telephone rang. Alderdyce speared it. I heard Lieutenant Phillips’ voice but couldn’t make out the words. Alderdyce said “yeah” a couple of times, listened for long stretches, then thanked him and broke the connection with a bang that made Burrough and me jump.

  “That was Oakland,” Alderdyce said. “Deputies found Hilary Bairn on the apron of M-fifty-nine, three miles from Black Squirrel Lake. Body’s still warm.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I wasn’t invited on a ridealong to the spot where someone had dumped Bairn out of a car where he was guaranteed to be found quickly, but then I wouldn’t have seen anything the deputies hadn’t and the Detroit police wouldn’t, and in any case the story broke big enough to follow on the car radio and in the little portable TV I kept in the office. The cops weren’t saying how he died, but there was enough blood on the ground—lovingly photographed by all three local crews—to indicate he’d taken a hit from a large-bore weapon. Since it was unlikely he’d been shot in such a public spot, it was too much for a small caliber or ordinary knife wound. I had my money on a .44 magnum.

  Charlotte Sing, if it was she, wasn’t letting the grass grow. However crucial Bairn had been to her operation, he’d become a ticking time bomb, more afraid of her than he was of the punishment that awaited him for killing Deirdre Fuller, and more likely than ever to talk if he were taken into custody. How quickly her people h
ad caught up to him after he fled the scene of the Esmerelda killing and how long they’d held him before the order came down from the top to cut their losses and throw him to the maggots, we might never know. But I was sure my last conversation with Madame Sing had put the period to Hilary Bairn.

  I didn’t feel as badly about that as I suppose I should have, and not just because he’d panicked and killed a woman during an argument. From petty thief to gold digger to murderer was a predictable progression that ought to have been stopped a long time ago.

  John Alderdyce’s first act upon getting the news was to dispatch a squad of uniforms to beef up the watch on Fred Loudermilk at Beaumont Hospital. If Sing was slicing away all lines to whatever could drag her down, he was one of them.

  So was I. But I was used to that.

  I got out the office bottle, but just to hold; from here on out I was going to have to jump fast and run hard, and liquor’s just for thinking. I smoked half a cigarette, put it out, and did one of the hardest things I’d done in my life. I went about living it.

  Peninsular Realty had a quarter-page ad in the Yellow Pages, listing all its sales representatives in the metropolitan area with their telephone numbers. I dialed one.

  “Peninsular Realty. ‘If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around.’”

  I said, “You may hear from Lansing. I think the State of Michigan holds title to that jingle.”

  Violet Pershing recognized my voice. “Not really. What Lewis Cass actually said, and what the motto on the flag says, is ‘If you would seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you.’ Our PR people took advantage of a popular misquote. Did you change your mind about the treadmill?”

  “I think they’re illegal in Detroit. You’re only supposed to use your feet on the brake and the clutch. Are you free for dinner?”

  She put me on hold while she checked her calendar. “I’m showing a place up by Pine Knob at six-thirty,” she said when she came back on. “I should be through by eight. Do you mind dining at a fashionable hour?”

  “That’s quite a hike. I didn’t know your territory was that big.”