American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (8 page)

“Am I supposed to be impressed by your detective work?”

“Don’t bother. The fact is you work for Charlotte Sing, who made her case dough from the massage business. A lot of these self-made millionaires make it a point to promote from within. I winged the rest. Except you do have strong hands.”

“Eight hours a day at a computer keyboard will do that, too. But if you want to discuss hand jobs—yes, I know the basics. Another?” she said brightly.

I followed her gaze to my empty glass. I didn’t remember drinking. I said no thanks and set it on a table.

Just then the dryer stopped howling. At the end of a loud silence the bathroom door opened and a woman came out
wearing paper slippers and a terry robe. She was as small as her assistant; the fluffy white material wrapped around her nearly twice and brushed her insteps. Her hair was cut straight across her eyebrows in blue-black bangs, dyed probably, and stopped abruptly at the corners of her jaws. She was about the same age as the other woman but showed it more in the beginnings of jowls and lines in her neck. She looked at me without smiling, then at the assistant. “Mai, please go in and check my dress for wrinkles. They should be steamed out by now, but if not, you’ll need to run the shower a bit longer.”

“Yes, Madame.” She went into the bathroom and pushed the door to.

“Alone at last.” I grinned.

The woman didn’t. “You fulfill the common expectations of an American detective. Which raised my suspicions. Most things genuine aren’t what you expect. May I see your credentials?”

I gave her the flapper. “Ignore the badge. I only carry it for ballast.”

She slid the photo card out of its window, inspected both sides, and put it back. My concealed weapons permit was folded inside and she took that out too and unfolded and read it, front to back, then returned it. “Are you armed at present?”

“No. It didn’t seem like that kind of hotel.”

“Unconvincing.”

“Frisk me. While you’re at it, I’ve got a touch of bursitis in my left shoulder.”

But she didn’t anger that easily. “I meant this.” She stuck out the folder between two fingers. “There’s a laser shop on every corner, and the card isn’t a challenge to duplicate to begin with. Anyone can obtain permission to carry a gun in this state if he doesn’t have a criminal record.”

“On the other hand,” I said, pocketing the folder, “who’d want to impersonate an American detective?”

“Tell me about the Fuller killing.”

“So you did look it up.”

“Mai did. It was just breaking. There weren’t many details. Are you working for Hilary Bairn? You said you had a proposition for him, but that could have been a Trojan horse.”

I reached over and circled a finger inside my empty glass. It gave off a flat hum. It looked like fine crystal, but appearances aren’t the test. “I’m saving that answer for Mrs. Sing.”

Her face gave me nothing, not even a hum.

I said, “It was a clever switch. The dress thing was a little clumsy. You don’t need a home wrinkle remedy in a hotel with a valet service. Her voice is a little deeper, with less accent, but you both did a good job of disguising the differences. Anyway, I fell for that once today, so I disregarded it as evidence. But I was already wise. You lost me at the door.”

“At the door? But—” She interrupted herself to glance toward the bathroom. It was the first crack in the smooth surface.

“Mai is a Vietnamese name,” I said. “She’s Korean. I spent three years shooting at your relatives and getting shot at by them.” I licked the Scotch off my finger and waggled it at her. “You knew that, Mai. You looked me up for your boss.”

Her voice went up a register. “I don’t—”

“It’s all right, Mai,” Charlotte Sing said. “Will you fix me a drink, please?”

She’d ditched the coolie rig and came out dressed for the evening in deep, dragon’s-blood garnet, with bare shoulders and a slit in the skirt that exposed her sheer hose to mid thigh. She looked taller in heels, had an athletic figure, and whoever she’d gone to to swindle the forces of gravity hadn’t left any
scars or folds. In that outfit the skinned-back hairstyle looked aristocratic, not just something to keep her hair out of her eyes while she took dictation. She looked younger and more confident.

I tested that. “You made the same mistake before, when you said you all looked alike to us. It backfired and made you famous.”

“Another prejudice gone. We aren’t all infallibly intelligent. Thank you, Mai.” She accepted a glass poured from a pony bottle of vodka and a can of Canada Dry. “This time it wasn’t a joke. The variety of ways the authorities have sought to entrap me is infinite. Sometimes the seams are easier to detect from an oblique angle.”

“Watching and listening,” I said. “When they’re watching and listening to someone else.”

“It’s all very time-consuming. You can see why I hide.”

“Nice camouflage.”

She glanced down at her dress. “If I don’t make an appearance now and then, I risk becoming an enduring mystery. They’d never let me alone.”

Mai hovered. “Do you need me to take notes?”

“Go in and get dressed. I won’t need you anymore tonight.”

She glanced back at me, not so sure of that. But she went into the bathroom and shut the door.

“How much can she hear?” I asked.

“Everything. She’s very dependable. And very confidential.”

“You’re paying her, I’m not. I’ll wait. Okay if I raid the refrigerator?”

“Be my guest.” There was a love seat perpendicular to the chair. She made herself comfortable, crossing the exposed
leg over the other and sipping from her glass, while I found the last bottle of Glenlivet and filled mine the rest of the way from the can of ginger ale. It’s a terrible thing to do to a premium label, but I hadn’t eaten and she was smarter than a fresh coat of varnish. I took my time, stirring it with a plastic straw from the coffee setup on the low bureau, until Mai emerged in the clothes her boss had been wearing and let herself out of the suite. When the door snicked I went out to make sure she hadn’t hung back and to double-lock it. When I returned to the bedroom, Charlotte Sing said, “Are you always this careful, or are you showing off?”

“A little of both. I’ve got just over four hours before I have to give up my client’s name or something of equal or greater value to the cops, and if Mai gets to them first with the same information, my bargaining chip’s busted; they’ll say I dragged my feet and find something else to hold me on just on principle. If I’m a little flashy about the precautions, you’ll get the point a lot stronger than if I just told you it was important.”

“You may be right. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for anyone to be more circumspect than I am.”

I stepped over and touched my glass to hers. Then I sat down. “I’m working for Darius Fuller, the dead woman’s father. He hired me to pay Bairn fifty thousand dollars to get out of her life.”

“I understood Fuller’s in bankruptcy.”

“There’s broke and broke. Bairn stood to share in a two-million-dollar trust fund if he married Deirdre Fuller. If you’re the romantic type, you could say he loved his daughter and wanted whoever married her to do it for her, not her money.”

“But I am the romantic type,” she said. “My life is a romance, if you overlook the X rating. I’m also a businesswoman. Why settle for a candle when you can have the whole cake?”

“Time, for one. He had creditors pushing him for cash now. The pressure must have been tight, because he took the chance of blowing his relationship with Deirdre by conning her into trying to pawn a watch he’d shoplifted somewhere.”

“Darius begins to look like Father of the Year. Why didn’t Bairn pawn the watch himself?”

“The obvious answer is he’d tried it before, with other merchandise, and got his hand smacked the same way a broker in Ypsi smacked hers when she tried it there. Those fellows run a tight network. They don’t mess with cops if they can avoid it, and contrary to popular opinion they’d rather do business than break bones. When they catch you trying to fence something, they pin you down, take your picture, and blanket all the shops in the area with copies. I assume now they subscribe to a Web site or something and save postage. If that happened to Bairn, he needed a ringer. If you’re deep enough in Dutch to try to scam the pros, it stands to reason you’re fresh out of friends who’ll do it for you. That left Deirdre.”

“How much of this is established fact?”

“The important part. The watch part. The rest is speculation based on observation. What I came here to find out is what you did that scared him so badly he’d risk a sure two million to get you off his back.”

I didn’t expect her to throw herself to the floor and chew through to the suite below, but what she did was almost as satisfying. She lifted her glass and took a sip. Before it had been just a prop. Now she needed something to break eye contact;
not to conceal guilt, just a change in body temperature that would prove she was made of organic material like the rest of us.

“Again, you’ve mistaken the properties I own for what stands upon them. You should be having this conversation with Victor Cho. If Mr. Bairn owes money in Detroit Beach, he’d be the one to collect.”

“Bairn’s appointment was with you, not Cho.”

“Did Bairn tell you that?”

“His apartment did. I’m not trying to entrap you, Mrs. Sing. Now that the state and the city are in the gambling business, I don’t care who blows the rent money where. I’m only interested in staying out of jail.”

“By attempting to put me there in your place?”

“They don’t have to know anything about this conversation. They’re all fired up to charge Bairn with manslaughter, but I complicated things by calling him on his phone and knocking on his door. All I have to do is convince them the job I was doing for Darius Fuller hasn’t anything to do with what happened to his daughter.”

“How do you know that?”

“That part’s trickier. I have to convince myself first.”

She stood her glass on the nightstand beside the bed and sat back, or at least returned to upright; her back never touched the cushions. “If I said Bairn came to me for help, a stranger with means who’d known her share of hardship and injustice, would you accept that, purely as a hypothesis?”

“I might try it for a block or two. I’m not sure how a load like that would hold turning a corner.”

“There would, naturally, be compensation down the line for my assistance.”

“The problem would be confirming it. It wouldn’t be like Deirdre Fuller signed a contract promising to marry him and make him her mutual beneficiary.”

“That would not be the problem, because the request would be refused. The return would be usurious, and would play directly into the hands of those individuals who have taken an unhealthy interest in my future. It’s very exhausting, the number of directions they find to come at me. Am I so tempting a target, in a world full of terrorists and drug dealers?”

“You’re a headline. Offer a public prosecutor money and he’ll put you in the pokey, but a teaser at the top of the news will get you the liquor concession in the City-County Building. The lawyer who bags Charlotte Sing can be the next governor.” I changed hands on my glass. “So when you turned Bairn down, killing his last best hope, he slid back into old habits.”

“He might have, if the conversation had actually taken place.”

“Yeah. Do you mind if we switched tenses? I always had trouble with subjunctive.”

“As long as it’s understood we’re still speaking in generalities. Even an innocent and indirect connection to an accidental killing would expose me to publicity, and the cycle would begin all over again.”

“Did he mention who was putting the screws to him?”

She regarded me, an exotic cat with fangs covered and claws retracted.

“Wilson Watson,” she said. “I think that was the order. Interchangable Christian names challenge me. Are you familiar with it?”

“I would be.” I sucked hard at my drink, trying to separate the alcohol from the fizz.

H
e’s a gangster,” she said.

“Labor leader, he says. Do you know him?”

“We have a mutual acquaintance in Victor Cho. Watson’s been trying to organize workers in unlicensed casinos for years. Cho’s had his agitators forcibly ejected several times. This is hearsay. The only interest I have in any of the establishments that operate on my property is the rent.”

“He tried the same thing in the licensed joints in Detroit, but the gaming commission won’t let him in the door. He has a felony record going back to the sixty-seven riot. If he comes within five hundred feet of a legitimate gambling operation, back to jail he goes.”

“How does one dictate wages and benefits to an enterprise that’s criminal to begin with?”

“With clubs and axes and the occasional unexplained fire. Did Bairn say how Watson got his hooks in?”

“He did, but it was hard to follow. He went broke at Detroit Beach and went to an outside automatic teller machine for cash, which he lost also. The next thing he knew, Watson’s
people were pressuring him. Is it possible for a private individual to operate his own ATM?”

“Possible. Not legal. They buy obsolete machines at auction, retrofit them to their own specifications, and put them up in public places. People think they’re withdrawing their own money, but they’re really giving up their account numbers and PINs to a stranger. Looks like in Watson’s case he’d rather soak them like some state-of-the-art loan shark than just clean them out once like an honest thief. You can steal someone’s whole life with just those two little numbers. You don’t even have to threaten to break his fingers if he doesn’t pay. It’s a new racket. Up till now he’s made his money collecting dues from casino employees who can’t work in the straight places, and squeezing the crooked places for protection. The union only exists in the owners’ worst nightmares.”

“Nothing about it sounded right, so I gave Mr. Bairn my regrets. The only reason he came to me is the delusion I’m actually involved in Detroit Beach.” She glanced at a tiny diamond watch strapped to the underside of her wrist. “I must be on my way. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”