American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (16 page)

“Your father was Vietnamese?”

“Laotian.”

I poked that into one of the pigeonholes inside my skull. It didn’t have to mean anything. “I’m investigating the shooter, not the shooting. May I come in?”

“If you don’t mind my removing the breakfast things while we talk. A toast crust and coffee rings can queer a rental.”

“I’ll help.”

“You’ll watch. Nothing gets in the way worse than a man trying to make himself useful in a strange kitchen.”

I agreed to the terms and followed her through a living room done in smoked glass and putty-colored fabrics into a gleaming kitchen. She cleared a granite counter of a saucer of crumbs, a jadeite mug, and a cut-crystal juice glass, wiped down the top, and placed the items in a dishwasher with a control panel full of twinkling colored lights. When she pressed a panel to turn it on it made no more noise than a goldfish swimming laps in a bowl. I sat at the counter and admired the long firm line of a haunch when she bent to deposit a paper towel in the wastebasket under the sink.

“Does anyone else live here besides you and Mr. Pershing?”

“Mr. Pershing lives in Miami with the Cuban woman who used to clean our house. We’re divorced.”

“Sorry. About the housemaid, I mean.”

“Thank you. I don’t date detectives, private or otherwise.”

“We have that in common, at least. Lieutenant Phillips with the sheriff’s department says you spoke in favor of Fred Loudermilk’s character.”

“His character never came up. I said he was efficient at his job.”

“So you don’t like him.”

She tore another paper towel off a roll on a marble spindle and wiped down the sink and faucet. “It happens I don’t, but I didn’t say that. If I hired someone I liked to look after the security of the residents and he wasn’t any good at the job, it would mean I’m no good at mine. I don’t like men who swagger, but perhaps the way he conducts his responsibilities gives him that right. I thought you said you were investigating that man Bairn.”

“That was a different shooting. I’m trying to find out why Loudermilk shot at me.”

That stopped the cleaning frenzy. She left the towel on the drain board and turned my way. “I hadn’t heard anything about that. You’re sure it was Fred?”

“Both times. The second time an ambulance took him to Beaumont Hospital. I had a little help from gravity.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It did to him, but he isn’t explaining himself until the doctors patch up the bruise on his brain. Actually, I lied: I know why he shot at me. I’m the only one who can testify in court that he helped a suspect in two homicides escape arrest.”

“Hilary Bairn? Impossible. I heard about him on the news.
He’s nothing more than a desperate fortune hunter. What could he offer Loudermilk to take a risk like that?”

“I hoped you could answer that one. Loudermilk answers to you.”

“He answers to the association. The owners elected me to bang the gavel when we meet and to sign checks on the joint account for security and maintenance.”

“That’s another question I had. Why’s it called the lake owners’ association when so few of them actually own property on the lake?”

“The name’s a holdover from when most of them did. After Peninsular bought them out it didn’t seem worth the trouble and expense of having new stationery printed on a technicality. Anyway, ‘lake renters’ association’ doesn’t carry the same authority. And there are a few single owners left. Gloria Fuller’s one. She owns the house where I understand that man was shot. Her ex-husband is Darius Fuller, the retired baseball player. Ah.” She nodded. “You’re working for her.”

“Him, actually. That’s about to become public knowledge if it hasn’t already. Right now, though, I’m working for myself. The pay stinks, so I’d like to wrap it up quick. Isn’t it rare for a realty firm to deal only in rentals?”

“Not really, and it’s going to get less rare as land values increase. There’s a lot more money to be made from a longterm lease than a one-time sale. But I’m only an employee, trained to extoll the virtues of life on Black Squirrel Lake. If you want to know how Peninsular works, you’ll have to talk to Charlotte Sing.”

I
blinked. It might have been the glare off all those polished surfaces in eyes gritty from no sleep. “Charlotte Sing is Peninsular Realty?”

“Principal stockholder, anyway. I don’t suppose anyone actually owns a big company anymore. That sort of went out with Henry Ford. But she comes close. Not many of the others would vote their shares against her without giving it plenty of thought. That’s just a layman’s guess,” Violet Pershing added. “We’ve never met.”

“I’ve met her. You got it dead on. I thought she rented only to casinos and massage parlors and sex shops.”

“That’s her parent company, Pacific Rim Properties. Peninsular’s a subsidiary. She learned nothing from the last crash if not diversification. Opinion once again.”

“She know you’re this candid?”

She got rid of another waterlogged paper towel and crossed her arms. “I don’t kid myself anything I said about her wouldn’t get back to her, but I’m not worried. I’ve closed more deals for the firm than any other agent. She places results above blind loyalty.”

“Also you’re Asian.”

“Half Asian, like her. She has a preference, but it wouldn’t mean anything if all I did was sit on my nice tight butt. I saw you looking before,” she said. “This whole kitchen is one big mirror.”

“I’m a more accomplished lecher usually,” I said. “I didn’t get my eight hours.”

“I don’t mind. If I did I wouldn’t spend an hour on the treadmill every day. Would you like to see it?”

I didn’t have an answer for that right away. I was working at half speed.

“I mean the treadmill. The house has a custom gym, just a sample of how far Peninsular will go to make its tenants feel they’re home. You look like a man who stays in shape.”

“Don’t count on it. Half of my food groups are tobacco and alcohol. Thanks for talking to me, Mrs. Pershing. Any relation to the general?”

“Stuart thought so. He spent his Christmas bonus one year getting a genealogist to connect the dots. What is it with you men and war?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m a pacifist as of this morning.”

She discovered a stray crumb and flicked it off the sink counter with a neatly rounded nail. “Rain check on that house tour? You don’t have to look at the treadmill.”

“I thought you didn’t date detectives.”

“Who said anything about dating?”

I grinned and said I’d bring my sweats.

I needed to surf the Net, starting with
pleasantpeninsula.com
, the site listed on Peninsular’s signs. I didn’t own a board. Water trickled from my cell phone when I flipped it open; the LED was dark. I spent some change in the same place where
I’d bought cigarettes, but Barry Stackpole, my resident Web sleuth, had a message on his machine saying he was away for a week. The machine was new. He wrote about big-time crime, so he might have been anywhere from Phoenix to Foochow. I drove home and set my alarm clock for next year.

Adrenaline had me twisting in the sheets. I got up and opened a bottle of something and brought it back with me to the bedroom. I drank just enough to dull the thud of my heart, put the cap back on, and stretched out spread-eagle in my underwear. Even the crickets were quiet. It was too hot to go looking for a date.

My neighbors’ fireworks swam my way through the dark shallow waters of Black Squirrel Lake. That made it night. I was having my old drowning dream, and the reports sounded like gunshots fired from shore, or maybe Wilson Watson’s man Esmerelda, hammering nails through someone’s hand in hell. At some point the noises got louder and more personal. Someone was knocking.

The room was dark. I figured if I didn’t turn on any lights my visitor would go away. He didn’t, but I still had hope. I groped my way through the living room without touching any switches and opened the door a crack, holding the first thing I’d thought to grab in lieu of a firearm, the bottle from my nightstand.

It was less than adequate to deal with someone like Mary Ann Thaler, a lieutenant until recently with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Detroit Police Department. She was a handsome woman still and would be for a great many more years, but it took me a second to recognize her without her glasses. She’d had the operation.

“Happy Fourth,” she said. “I hope you didn’t think you had to dress.”

I realized I was wearing only a pair of shorts, but it was too late to do anything about that. I said, “I thought you were in Washington, learning to be a marshal.”

“OJT. I know this jurisdiction.” She had one of those voices that sell lots of water beds late at night. “I came to find out what you and Madame Sing had to talk about the other day.”

I
put on a robe and slippers and a pot of coffee and sat opposite her in the breakfast nook. She was wearing her light brown hair longer these days and could have exchanged her government-approved grayish pink suit for a sweater and short skirt and infiltrated any high school cheerleading squad in the city.

“What’s Justice’s interest in Charlotte Sing?” I asked. “I thought your job was to transport prisoners and relocate snitches from L.A. to Squashed Possum, Nebraska.”

“It’s all been reshuffled so many times since that goddamn September, nobody’s quite sure who does what. That’s a newbie’s take, not to be confused with a statement of federal policy. As to Charlotte Sing, she’s been under surveillance for months, and that’s as much as I’m cleared to say.” She took one sip, said, “Jesus,” and spooned a heap of sugar into her cup.

“I like it chunky style.” I shook my head. “Not good enough, Lieutenant. Is it still Lieutenant?”

“For two weeks. I gave notice. It won’t be Marshal for a
while. In order to place you in custody as a material witness, I’ll have to call my supervisor.”

“Your job’s changed, not mine. We’ve had this conversation before. I’m a natural-born citizen, no wants or warrants or parole restrictions. I go where I want when I want and I don’t have to lie about it even to my diary.”

“The country’s changed, don’t forget. Habeas corpus is starting to look like a quaint suggestion. The system’s all in a tangle, like I said. You could get snarled up in it for months.”

I drank coffee. It still had some bark on it, at that. “You want to make a good impression first time out. I’ve got a Rolodex full of lawyers and every one of them would give up the beach house in Malibu for a crack at the Supreme Court. You’re too small a fish to have something like that in your jacket. They’ll cut you into chum and throw you to the sharks.”

“So early in the day to start threatening each other. We don’t mellow, do we?”

“Maybe it isn’t too late to start.”

“You first.”

I grinned. “Okay. I was working a case for the father of a young woman who wound up dead. Deirdre Fuller.”

“I know the history. I kept in touch in case I bombed out in Washington. My father took me to see Darius Fuller pitch once. All I remember is I got mustard on my favorite skirt.”

“I bet it was a pinafore. Did you wear mary janes?”

“Yeah, we were guests of Calvin Coolidge. Charlotte Sing,” she prompted.

“The suspect in the investigation, which wasn’t an investigation then, showed all the signs of a man in deep with the kind of character they coined that phrase for. That suggested
gambling, which led me to Madame Sing. It didn’t pan out, but she gave me Wilson Watson as a lead. It was a good one, because Watson paid me a personal visit after I tried to make contact. He had coffee too, right where you’re sitting. His boy Ernesto Esmerelda took a bullet on his way to visit my suspect at Black Squirrel Lake; that’s in Oakland County.”

“I know where it is,” she said. “I knew it before the story broke last night. One of Sing’s companies owns most of the property there.”

“I wish you hadn’t been out of town. You could’ve saved me a lot of time and a dip in the lake. Now you go.”

She stirred her cup. “Gambling’s the least of it where her story’s concerned. If it were just that we’d leave it up to the state commissions. I think you know what we’re most interested in just now.”

“Shoe bombers.”

“That’s TSA’s headache. We’re concentrating on how they get in this country to begin with.”

“We’ve got the two longest national boundaries in the world. Start there.”

“
That’s
INS’s headache. We’re after the source. The income Madame Sing gets from the casinos and hook joints—through legal channels, no less, rental property with nothing to link her to the operations themselves—is just a stake to finance her smuggling business. She’s the single largest importer of illegal immigrants in the country, possibly the world; all the foreign agencies are in the same boat, keel over sail, so we can’t be sure of that. Except Israel, and they’ve got their hands full trying not to become illegal immigrants on their own soil.”

“I’ve been hearing things on the news,” I said. “Ordinary folk getting paid a few thousand by strangers to transport
Asians across the bridge and through the tunnel. Kind of a reverse Chinese takeout.”

Now she smiled. “The P.I. P.I. If I were quoted saying something like that I’d be up before Congress.”

“Congress would never know what hit it. Those cases were lunkheaded. Even on short acquaintance I wouldn’t tie her to any of them.”

“They weren’t hers, we’re sure of that. The people she uses aren’t virgins and they charge the going professional rate. So far we can’t link her to card-carrying Islamic extremists, but they’ve been doing a lot of recruiting among Asians, many of whom share the same views of the Stars and Stripes as their neighbors in the Middle East. She’s been working her way up to the top of the food chain, priority-wise.”

She was even beginning to sound like a government spook. “She didn’t strike me as that type either,” I said.

“She isn’t. She’s an A-number-one capitalist, and those oil-soaked creeps have the deepest pockets on the planet. The poorer you start out, the richer you want to be, and she started out as a slave. The mystery we have to crack before we move in is where she’s getting her cash to invest. Gambling doesn’t begin to cover what she’s laying out. Did I mention all this is classified?”