American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (7 page)

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 name?”

“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.

It lifted me without character to the top floor and let me out into a carpeted corridor that smelled like a new car, filled with future and promise and disinfectant. Recessed fixtures shed brushed-bronze light on pictures of milk wagons on Woodward and B-24s at Willow Run, Ty Cobb stealing a base, Tom Harmon throwing a pass, Isiah Thomas slamming a dunk; past and memory come in cans also. I followed scrolled brass numerals to an alcove at the end, and here I was, standing with knuckles raised in front of another door.

You can’t work my job without becoming a connoisseur of doors, and a diviner of what was waiting on the other side: oak and stained glass—a kleptomaniac heir and a fat retainer; chipboard and printed veneer—a deadbeat dad and a rubber check; peeling paint—a cheating spouse and a tetanus shot; solid mahogany—an embezzler and a coverup; rusted screen—a shotgun and a running start. There were quaint Dutch doors that swung out in halves, seducing you with the smell of warm bread and a lonely restless woman at the oven; walnut-paneled doors that led you across fifteen feet of pile cuff-deep to a senior executive seated behind marble and glass, silver-haired, with a golden parachute and a stomach made of perforated tin; towering double-sided doors made from old-growth forest with Tiffany and Waterford in case lots behind them and no way to collect on what you had coming; steel-core doors, quilted on the reverse to lay the lunatic head against; swinging doors the orderlies bumped open with your gurney when you’d knocked on the wrong one; sliding
doors, revolving doors, electric-eye doors, doors with bars, doors that moved up and down on tracks; doors that were just doors, something handy to push shut against a cancerous world, with bolts and latches and braces, and God help you if you came to it to ask for information, because it might come in the form of a forty-grain slug, fired by someone who was just a little more afraid than you were (see: swinging doors).

I’d stood in front of all of them at one time or another—behind them, too, in the case of the ones with bars—never without butterflies in my stomach, like a kid on his first Halloween; wondering if this was the Door To End All Doors, the one that would burst into yellow splinters and let a bullet tear into an organ I held dear.

This one, ordinary pine with an oak stain, felt something like that.

I didn’t expect a bullet, really. Nothing so final and clear-cut. It was just a clammy mounting dread that came with the cold call, the blind search, the random shot, and the conviction that once I laid bone against wood, whatever I found on the other side would change the case, and probably my life. I’d listened to that warning whisper once already that same day and had walked away from it, surprising myself; only to keep my appointment in Samarra anyway when the cops sprang their trap.

So maybe the destiny people knew what they were talking about, and all this dithering was just a waste of my time and the client’s money.

Nice pep rally. Give me a
W
.

I knocked. It opened. I didn’t even duck.

M
r. Walker? My name is Mai. I’m Madame Sing’s personal assistant.”

She had a little trouble with her
r
s and
l
s, but since I don’t speak a second language myself I wasn’t making judgments. She was a small creature in the prime middle years—no wrinkles, just a mature hardness in the lines of her cheeks—with black hair skinned back into a bun behind her head, in a pale yellow blouse with the square tail out over formfitting black slacks, tiny unpainted feet in open-toed pumps without heels, five feet and ninety pounds stripped and soaking wet. It might have been her voice I’d heard over the telephone; I’d been fooled once and so didn’t jump to that conclusion.

“Am I early?”

“She’ll be out in a minute. Please come in.”

For all the chamber of commerce hysteria about a new hotel in town, it was just a two-room suite like most, with a sitting room and a larger bedroom beyond. There was a king-size bed, made up tight as a trampoline with a quilted, peach-colored spread, a white faux Queen Anne desk with
bowlegs, a fax machine, and all the necessary twenty-first-century ports, upholstered chairs and love seats, and identical black twenty-seven-inch TVs in both rooms. Prints on the walls with scenes of the Detroit riverfront and Impressionistic daubs of the Fox and State theaters. Fresh flowers erupted out of tall vases and a complimentary fruit basket done up in gold-tinted cellophane with a card in an envelope no one had bothered to open. The drapes were open, with a fine view of Harmonie Park and beyond it the music hall. From this side of the tinted Plexiglas it looked like a picture postcard, no indication of the punishing heat and general dearth of people.

“Would you like something to drink?” Mai made a gracious openhanded gesture toward the minibar, a half-grown refrigerator with a microwave oven on top. I said a Coke would be great.

“Not something stronger?”

“Okay, Mountain Dew.”

She hesitated, smiling, eager to please. “You are a detective, yes? You drink rye, with a bourbon chaser. I learn my English from Turner Classic Movies,” she apologized.

I smiled. I wanted to wrap her up and set her on the mantel between the Balinese dancers. “Scotch, then. Do you have ice?”

“I can call down for some.”

“Let’s not bother them. They’re only getting half a week’s pay for one hour.”

She laughed, an adorable little tinkly giggle like ceramic skulls banging together, and broke the hundred-dollar seal on the refrigerator door. The little plastic bottle of Glenlivet took up a cubic inch and a half of the glass she handed me. At least it was glass. When I was comfortable in a recliner
with my drink she smoothed the front of her slacks and said, “Please excuse me while I check on her.”

She went through a plain door behind which a hair dryer roared, mincing around the edge, and pushed it shut. I took a ten-dollar sip and then she came back out, reversing the movement. She walked as if her feet had been bound in infancy. “She’ll be one minute. Shall I turn on the TV?”

“I bet you could, but let’s not. These hotels get eighty channels and forty of them are
Designing Women
. What sort of boss is Mrs. Sing to work for?”

“Madame Sing,” she corrected. “She pays very well and she treats her employees with respect.”

“Not like the Kyoto Health Spa out by the airport.”

Her face went as dead as turned wood. “You only say that because I’m yellow.”

“Partly. I admit it. In my work you judge by the folder and make adjustments as necessary. The rest is experience. You’ve got strong hands. The knuckles are splayed like a scrubwoman’s, but smooth, with no dirt in the creases. That comes from working them in oil.”