American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (3 page)

I settled in to wait in a fifteen-minute zone across the street. Darius Fuller’s fifty thousand and World Series ring sat in my bank box, a brisk walk from where I was staked out. The reason most private agents charge three days’ pay in advance is it takes at least twenty-four hours to check the client’s story. For all I knew the Hilary/Deirdre romance was
a blind to cover the fact I was the mule in a drug deal or a contract killing.

So far everything checked out. Bairn lived straight up for a fish on the extreme right end of the food chain, but that’s not so hard to do in a plastic society. The credit check I’d run said he’d missed two payments on the Aztek, had paid off his American Express bill on a Discover account, and spent next to nothing on the six hundred or so square feet he rented in a block of Woodward Avenue undergoing gentrification. Detroit had fallen off the list of the nation’s ten most populous cities and landlords were waiving leases and damage deposits right and left just to make expenses. You could live like a king in the Motor City if you could put up with the meth lab in the palace down the hall.

The fifteen minutes ran out, and fifteen more, and no one rousted me. All four lanes filled with cars making the run home north to the developments and south to Jefferson and the Pointes. A mounted officer clip-clopped up the sidewalk looking for unbuckled seat belts and passed me right by. My guess was he wasn’t going to discourage anyone who’d decided to stay put in town. I busied myself monkeying with the cellular telephone I’d bought to replace my electronic pager and the answering service I’d used for twenty-five years. The gizmo came with a forty-page manual translated by someone who’d learned his Japanese in a Greek restaurant and his English in Mexico City. Its nearest relay tower was assembly-required; it stopped sending and receiving signals every time its aircraft light went off and on. I had a two-year service contract.

After forty minutes all the air had begun to rush out of rush hour, and Hilary Bairn came out of the building jiggling his keys. He’d ditched the suit and put on a pair of pressed
cargo pants and those running shoes that wink at you from the heels. When the Aztek nosed out into the uptown lane I turned over the engine and fell in two cars behind.

Entering westbound I-96 we nudged our way through a knot that had tied itself to observe a motorist changing a tire on the right shoulder and lockstepped through eight miles of barrels and barricades and no construction going on. West of Dearborn Heights we opened up to eighty-five, passing a few and getting passed by a lot. I hung back between eight and twelve car lengths, changing lanes only when it became necessary to avoid crawling up the trunk of a daisy-picker doing seventy. So far as I could tell, Bairn never looked up into his rearview mirror. We swirled down a ramp that turned into a complete circle, coasted into the town of Plymouth, and crept along streets made into tunnels by shade trees past gift and antiques shops and strollers in flip-flops and shorts. It’s a painted-tin community, strictly for the amusement of transients and for commuters from Detroit and the college towns to the west to lay their heads.

Finally he turned into a square lot next to the Mayflower Hotel, a convincing example of Tudor architecture near the main four corners, and slid into the last slot. I drove around the block and found a spot next to the curb. All the meters had been pulled up by the roots years before to encourage trade. Inside, the chief attraction was the restaurant, cool and timbered and paneled with piano music treacling from the direction of the bar. Bairn was seated in a booth at the back, chatting with a waitress filling his water glass from a pitcher. I went to the bar, took a stool, and asked the chunky party who came up to me for a Corona.

“Lime?”

“No, I’m watching my weight.”

He forged a die-cast bartender’s smile and clunked down a bottle and a glass on a square napkin. Smoke curled from the neck and beads glistened like freshwater pearls on the outside of the bottle. I let the glass stand and drank directly from the source. The cold seared my teeth.

A few minutes later Deirdre Fuller came in, paused to let her eyes catch up with the light, then smiled and walked Bairn’s way. She wore her straight black hair in a diagonal across her forehead, bending out just below the ears, and a white summer dress that clung to all the hollows and drifted around her knees. Her shoulders and arms and legs were bare, her feet bare in white cork sandals, an even caramel in contrast. She was a living hot-fudge sundae.

Bairn smiled up from his seat, didn’t rise when she slid in opposite him, and when the waitress returned ordered for himself first. That buried whatever sympathy I might have had for Hilary Bairn. I nursed my beer while they ate and conversed in low voices lost in the rustle as others came in to dine. When the bartender asked if I wanted another I started to shake my head, then caught the movement out of the tail of my eye when Bairn leaned over to take something from a pocket in his cargo pants. I nodded and pushed aside the first bottle, which had grown tepid.

The something was a small humpbacked box. I seemed to have happened upon a momentous occasion. But the box was too big for an occasion that large.

He let her open it. It contained a gold watch with a blue dial and a link band, too heavy for the feminine wrist. She snapped the lid shut without comment and slid it into her purse, woven white leather with a rolled handle. The meal finished in silence. When the check came, he paid for it with a card, got up finally to kiss her, signed the receipt, and went
out past the bar with her on his arm. A light scent of sweet almonds came behind her.

I paid for the beers and stood outside the entrance from the parking lot tapping a cigarette on the back of the pack as Bairn and Deirdre separated, he to the left, she to the right, toward an emerald Mini Cooper with a white convertible top. I made up my mind to let Bairn go, trotted to my car, and followed the smaller vehicle. That watch had me curious. Several blocks ahead, Bairn’s Aztek turned onto the expressway headed home, but Deirdre continued past and swung south on Beck Road. Her father had said she clerked in a law office in Westland but kept an apartment in Ann Arbor, where she’d entered the law program at the University of Michigan last fall. She took I-94 west in that direction. She exited in Ypsilanti.

In Depot Town, a Bohemian neighborhood of pubs and curiosity shops that had sprung up around the old train station, we parked on gravel and I watched her trot around the corner of a pawnshop. I had my hand on the door handle to follow her on foot when she turned in at the pawnshop door. I settled back and cracked a window to smoke.

Just as I poked the stub out through the crack she came back out, cork heels clocking, both hands on the purse held in front of her and a pinched look on her face. She underhanded the purse into the Mini Cooper’s passenger seat, got in, ground the starter, and sprayed gravel backing around and powering out into the street. The driver of a light pickup chirped his brakes to avoid getting clipped and made a mincing little noise with his horn.

I didn’t follow Deirdre. Instead I got out and went into the pawnshop. A buzzer sounded when I opened the door. There were bars on the windows and the counter had a steel cage
on top with a gate that slid to one side to allow the free exchange of goods and currency. You can tell a lot about an enterprise from its fixtures. This one was tricked out like Jackson State Prison.

The man behind the counter was a young Arab with a blue chin. I didn’t mess around with a story or the honorary sheriff’s badge. Pawnshop clerks have heard them all and seen every star and shield. I poked a twenty-dollar bill through the cage. He didn’t look at it, only at me. His face assumed a patience of biblical proportions.

“A light-skinned black woman was just in,” I said. “Buy anything from her?”

“No.” He snatched the bill from between my fingers before I could exert counterpressure. From there on in it was up to my personal charm—and whatever else I had in my wallet.

“Why not?”

He said nothing.

I blew out air. “You guys. Why do you have to make it a chore? A couple of bars doesn’t make you a hard guy. A monkey’s got those.”

He reached under the counter and clonked a Glock on top. It had a brushed-metal finish and black composition grips.

I showed him my ID. “I’m working for her father. Darius Fuller, maybe you know the name. Follow sports?”

His face changed then. You could have knocked me over with a mortar. It was like watching the toughest head on Rushmore crack a grin.

“I was in the bleachers when he threw the no-hitter,” he said. “No joke, that was the Fuller Brush Man’s little girl?”

“If you’d bought the watch you’d have a souvenir.”

The face shut back down. “The price tag was still in the box. Whoever lifted it was too dumb to tear it in half.”

I put away the ID folder. “Thanks, brother.”

“Famous men’s kids. You know?”

“She wasn’t the one who lifted it. If it makes any difference.”

He thought about that. “It checks. She seemed madder about it than I was.”

“Report it?”

“To who, the police? I reported every funny customer I’d be on the phone all day. I’d report you,” he said.

I thanked him again and left.

I drove back to Detroit, stopped in the office to pay some bills and study the cell phone manual again under a bright light, decided that knowing how to retrieve messages wasn’t a high priority in the current business climate, and went home to a sandwich, a drink, two hours of police drama and funny home videos of cats on fire, and bed.

Sleep took its time coming. The Fourth of July was still days off, but that didn’t keep some of the neighbors from test-firing the ordnance they’d smuggled in from roadside stands in Indiana: There were thumps, stuttering strings of firecrackers, and now and then the bass note of a shotgun. I lit a cigarette without turning on the light and blew smoke at a ceiling that glimmered from time to time in the reflective burst of a bottle rocket, wondering if all those stories I’d read and movies I’d seen about misunderstood suitors were full of hooey. The worst part of the work is on some level you always hope the client is wrong.

Next day I did all the morning stuff, put on my second-best suit, and took my spot in the loading zone across from Hilary Bairn’s apartment house just in time to watch him leave for the office in Mt. Clemens. Then I rode up to his floor in a brass Otis on a smooth new cable and let myself
into his apartment with my nifty pocket burglar kit. I wasted time on Bairn’s underwear drawer and medicine cabinet and porno library, then looked at his appointment calendar, fixed with a magnetic strip to the refrigerator in the toy kitchen. He’d drawn a line through his most recent appointment, the day before yesterday:

2:00 P.M. Sing

Nothing in Bairn’s profile had indicated any particular interest in music; but in the circles I turned in,
Sing
meant something else.

M
ost Detroiters have never heard of Detroit Beach, a quiet little sun-faded community where gulls and sun-worshippers go to avoid the crowds on Belle Isle and at Port Huron. Few of them know they owe the spot to the pioneers who chopped down trees four generations ago to land high-powered boats loaded to the gunnels with whiskey smuggled from Canada; by then the Detroit riverfront was filled with U.S. Coast Guardsmen with their hands out, and nearby Monroe with rival machine-gunners. The balmy days of Michigan are few, and bright umbrellas tend to sprout on every bloody patch of shore.

In summer it’s a good place to go to watch girls in cutoffs and bandanna blouses riding skiffs and old men with faces heavy with time fishing for walleye. The big auto and tech money is five hours north on the Michigan Riviera, polishing the brass on their boats in Grand Traverse Bay and taking horseback riding lessons on Mackinac Island. But today the never-idle rich were missing a bet. The weatherwonks were reporting thunderstorms up there while Lake Huron was sliding into Detroit Beach in long creamy swells like
poured pudding. I parked in a public area and went down to the water first, taking off my coat and walking along the damp stain left by the tide with the coat over one shoulder, smoking and feeling my sodden shirt separate itself in patches from my back in the breeze across the bay. The mist felt like a veil of cool silk on my face.

A tatty little arcade just up from the beach sold ice cream and tackle, and behind it stood a blue-and-white-striped pavilion designed to look like a Hollywood version of a sultan’s tent. In the days of the big bands it had sheltered a ballroom, and for a little while a roller-skating rink. A snapletter sign stuck in a swatch of grass identified it now as a community recreation center, where seniors played bridge and bingo and youths shot pool. That was the chamber of commerce’s interpretation. Natives and the grapevine along the I-75 corridor knew it as a place to bet on sports and the turn of the wheel without having to share one’s winnings with Lansing and Washington. The legislators who swung the vote for legal casinos and the state lottery said such places were obsolete, but they failed to count on the universal American faith in the left-handed dollar.

I climbed a rickrack set of steps angling steeply up from the beach and followed the decking around to the entrance, which fronted on the Dixie Highway. Cars were parked on the broken asphalt set aside for them, and on the edge under shade trees a double-bottom tractor-trailer rig idled, as long as the arcade. Out on the highway apron a pair of gulls squared off over a greasy Taco Bell sack, fluttering at each other and falling back to regroup. I flicked my cigarette butt their way, just to see if it would change the dynamic. A bird hopped over to investigate, pecked at the butt, and returned to the field of battle just in time to prevent the other gull
from taking off with the sack. They fought, squawking like rusty car doors, and then things were back where they’d started. It was an
Animal Planet
moment.

I didn’t have to contend with a peephole panel or a bouncer at the door; I barely had to contend with a door. It stood half open, blocked by a homemade boat anchor fashioned from an iron ring sunk in a paint bucket filled with cement. Famously, the pavilion wasn’t air-conditioned, like Wrigley Field before they installed lights. The dealers and customers counted for ventilation on the crossdraft between highway and lake, where glass doorwalls opened on screens looking out on the beach. Air circulated, as a matter of fact, but it smelled of crapshooters’ armpits and the sour pulp of mildew from the green baize on the game tables.