ONE
I sewed up the Dowling case in less than a day, and committed only one misdemeanor. That was the record.
Fred Dowling had chiseled half a million from the credit union where he was treasurer, converted it to paper, and headed toward Central America, but he got only as far as Cleveland; which if you wanted to make a joke of it was punishment in itself. I didn’t. You can’t get better pizza anywhere.
All the credit union wanted was its money back. That was all. I said sure thing. When you need the work the truth just gets in the way.
I paid a call on his wife in Royal Oak, and got a strike on the first cast. She’d been taking online courses in Spanish and Portuguese, depending on which country the couple wound up in; only when it came time to go, he forgot her along with the AC/DC converter. She found a phone number belonging to a Carmen Castor when she jimmied open a drawer in his desk. It was on the Cleveland exchange, but when she tried calling the number several times, no one picked up. Anyway it was a place to start.
The address was in a duplex in Lakewood, a suburb on the Erie shore. It was a Siamese twin of a building with identical front doors and windows in reverse mirror-image. Carmen’s bell didn’t answer. The woman who lived next door, whose features all tapered to a point, told me her neighbor’s business wasn’t any of hers; but I might try Black-and-White Taxi. That was the sign on the cab Carmen had piled into yesterday with about six months’ worth of luggage. Seventeen was the number of the cab. It wasn’t any of her business, she said again.
Black-and-White operated out of a tin hut on top of an underground garage. Rows of keys hung on the back wall, attached to miniature soccer balls. The red-headed dispatcher poked my twenty into a breast pocket with Larry scripted across it, ran a finger down his clipboard, and said the driver I wanted was off duty; another twenty would get me the address to his house. I got it from a hack I found smoking near the garage ramp for five. That took me back east toward Edgewater Park, but the contact there was more generous still, and directed me to the St. Clair Hotel downtown in return for half a pack of cigarettes; he’d run out.
Cleveland’s a good town that doesn’t know it isn’t supposed to be ugly, so it’s quaint. But the granite Indians flanking the bridge over the Cuyahoga always make my skin crawl. In addition to being unpretentious and comfortably dowdy, the place is haunted.
The St. Clair was built to accommodate the visitors that would throng to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and for a while they had. Then the novelty had turned dirty yellow along with the synthetic alabaster façade; but the hotel still attracted enough convention interest to keep up appearances, at least in the lobby. Deep braided chairs stood about any old way on machine-made Navajo rugs and the fleshy leaves belonging to the plants had holes chewed in them; you can’t fool bugs with plastic. Everything was just a little bit shabby, but still genteel, if only for the time being, like country tweeds broken in by the butler so they won’t whistle while the master strolls the grounds.
I screwed my flanks into the hollow in a cushion and waited. I had a view of the concierge’s desk. The sun was sinking and the supper crowd had begun to line up there to find out the best places to eat. Embezzlers had expensive tastes; I was counting on that. If Dowling didn’t show up there that night, I’d have to try something else.
It was the last week of September. The open air of the lobby was a little chilly; here in what the Coastals call the Heartland, we shut down the air conditioners on Labor Day and don’t turn on the heat before Halloween. A little pneumonia is a small price to pay for life on the Great Lakes. Most of those in line had on light topcoats.
The queue petered out just as it got dark outside. I was getting up to go out for a smoke when the elevator doors opened and Dowling came out with a blonde on his arm. She wasn’t tall, she had heavy features, and nothing she wore matched. That made her just the sort of woman a man who spent most of his time balancing numbers on his nose would choose to run off with. Round-faced and scowling, with a hairline that started practically at his eyebrows, he had on a knee-length gray coat with a fake fur collar. It looked a little well-insulated and way too bulky for the first frost of autumn, but maybe he was more delicate than he appeared. They crossed to the concierge’s desk.
“Mr. and Mrs. Donner,” he said to the woman sitting there. “We’re in four-twenty-seven.”
Just then a party of six came down the stairs, making enough noise to drown out the conversation. They were evenly divided as to sex, and whatever they’d been drinking was so thick it came with its own humidity. I didn’t try to get close enough to overhear what was being said at the desk. Instead I took a page from the detective’s manual and rode the elevator to the fourth floor.
Four-twenty-seven was designed to open with a magnetic card, but a latch is a latch. I pulled out the spring-steel strip that helped my wallet keep its shape, poked the end between the door and the frame, twisted the knob, and applied pressure until the latch snapped back into its socket.
The room was upholstered in ultra-suede, with a queen bed that had been romped on and then smeared all over with skirts and blouses and control-top pantyhose, the way some women unpack when they’re going out for the evening. There were more women’s clothes in the closet, a couple of men’s suits, luggage, and a small steel safe that opened with a tin key that would go out with the guest when he did. The suitcases gave me nothing and the bureau drawers could wait. The safe locked with a dead bolt, so I went to work with a set of dental picks I carry around for fun. It took ten minutes, and all I got was a flowered jewelry wrap that Carmen Castor filled with junk from a shopping channel.
I tossed the rest of the room, put everything back the way I’d found it, and let myself back out. I wasn’t disappointed; I might have been, if a man smart enough to bilk a financial institution with branches in six states was dope enough to leave the swag in a hotel room. Likewise, too many employees had access to the safe in the lobby for comfort. Dowling’s car was out, too. That was even easier to break into than a toy safe.
There was only one place left; but I’d known that right along. The rest was just routine.
I had to shake my head. Embezzlers are a slap in the face of honest crime. Their cleverness never extends beyond the act itself.
The concierge was a tiny woman of thirty or so, either Polynesian or part Japanese, in a smart suit with clear polish on her nails. She belonged on a key chain.
“I’m meeting Mr. and Mrs. Donner for dinner,” I said. “My secretary misplaced the name of the restaurant. Did they happen to stop by and ask you for directions?”
She looked at the card I’d given her. I didn’t remember who Adam Windsor was or how his card had found its way into my collection, but INVESTMENT COUNSELOR has the solid ring of probity.
“Are you a guest at the hotel?”
“I haven’t checked in yet. I got here late. A tanker rolled over in Dundee.”
She gave back the card. “Curious thing. Mr. Donner asked me to recommend a restaurant. He didn’t know what it was until I suggested it.”
I thought about the cash I’d brought. It’s as much a tool of the trade as a set of lock picks, but so’s instinct: She wasn’t for sale. I put on an embarrassed grin. “Busted. I’ve got just till the end of the month to make quota or I’m out. My daughter wants a big wedding.”
“And I’ll bet your mother needs an operation. Do I need to bother security?”
I said that wouldn’t be necessary.
A yellow SUV with ST. CLAIR HOTEL pulled up under the canopy while I was standing in front of the door weighing my options. The driver, middle-aged, in a brown uniform and baseball cap, got out. His face was a topographical map of broken blood vessels and his nose was running.
It was a hunch. Hotels that offer a shuttle service usually direct guests to theaters and restaurants who pay to be on their route. The driver was jumpy enough to need a toot, but alert enough to recognize the couple’s description. I had a fresh fifty twined around my forefinger. He slid it off without waiting for me to unwrap it. “Blue Giraffe.” He gave me the address.
“What sort of place is it?”
“They make you wear a tie.”
That was perfect.
I stopped at two men’s stores on the way. The first couldn’t help me. The next sold me a thigh-length gray coat with a fake fur collar. It was snug, but fit okay as long as I didn’t button it. I wore it to the restaurant.
It was a rambling building of many styles, set smack in the middle of a six-lane boulevard so that the traffic was forced to flow around it in both directions. The parking lot would have served a drive-in movie. It screamed roadhouse, but a valet parking stand and only the sky-blue silhouette of a giraffe on the canopy to identify it said the gentry had come along since Prohibition to rescue it from bad company.
I left the car where the rest of the skinflints parked to avoid tipping and thanked a character in a safari outfit for sparing me the ordeal of opening the front door. Inside was a buzz of pleasant conversation, a tasteful mural of animals that don’t usually get along gathered around a watering hole, and a podium for the hostess, an aristocratic six-one in a red sheath with a diamond clip on one shoulder strap. She wore some kind of glitter that drew attention to her collarbone; I wondered how she knew that was my weakness. I told her I didn’t have a reservation.
“We should have something in twenty minutes,” she said. “You can wait at the bar.” She tilted her highlighted head toward the coat check station.
“Thanks, I’ll keep it with me.”
“It’s required, I’m afraid. The fire code.”
I smiled and said thanks. Some days just keep getting better and better.
The coat check station was a square opening in a wall you had to walk around to get to the dining room. The clerk had on a bush jacket just like the doorman, without the leopard-band hat. It all seemed a long way to go to make a connection.
He stopped playing with his phone as I approached, a pallid type dressed for big game with not much hair on his head. He gave me a square of cardboard with a letter and a number on it and turned to slip my coat onto a hanger. An identical coat hung near it. While his back was to me I leaned in and spotted an open twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew on the shelf below the sill: another break.
I left him and took a seat on a bench by the front door. From there I could see the clerk when I turned my head. When you apply for an investigator’s license, sitting is part of the road test.
He went on monkeying with his phone, using just one thumb every time he helped himself to Dew. He had a bladder made of crocodile hide; but I was more patient. Against the smells from the kitchen, the drive-in at Wendy’s was a distant memory.
Finally he came out the narrow door next to the opening and turned down the hall to the restrooms without ever looking up from his gizmo. I stood, stretched, and strolled over to his station.
The door was unlocked. I stepped past where my coat was hanging and took its twin off its hanger. It was nearly twice as heavy as mine, but just to make sure I gave the nylon lining a slap. It might have been stuffed with supermarket coupons, but I doubted it. I shrugged into the coat, holding onto the scrap of cardboard as I stepped outside. If the clerk came back and caught me I could always claim I was in a hurry and mistook the coat for mine. A twenty folded around the check wouldn’t hurt.
The coast was clear, thanks to kidneys and caffeine.
I kept the coat on as I drove, sweating a little from the extra insulation. I didn’t take it off until I checked into a Holiday Inn Express near the ramp to I-80 and locked the door behind me. I used my pocket knife to pop a few threads, enough to pull out a pack of American Express traveler’s checks and riffle through them. There must have been several dozen packs like it, with stitches all the way around to keep each from shifting; an inexpert job, but thorough. I returned the pack to its niche and ordered pizza. The deliveryman frowned at my fifty.
“Got anything smaller?’
I grinned. “Sorry.”
Afterward I bunched up the coat to make a pillow while I slept. That was as far as it would get from my hands until I turned it over to the client.
I was a rich man for a night; but I should have driven straight home. Good-luck days never come back-to-back. The next is always as bad as they get.
TWO
The credit union had a branch office on Broadway, in a gunmetal brick building with black-tinted windows that wrapped around it like sunglasses. I put in there, not wanting to carry a dollar that didn’t belong to me across the city, much less the state line. Everything about the place duplicated the setup in Detroit, except the receptionist. This one was a young man with moussed hair that lay in flat rows like porcupine quills, who didn’t know anything about me or why I was there.
That was no surprise. If the brass didn’t want to prosecute Dowling, they didn’t want the news that the firm had been fleeced to get beyond the front office. So I sat in a spring-steel chair admiring three walls, one aqua, one salmon, and one Granny Smith while the phone-calling took place, half a million dollars in my lap.
Like most people who haven’t any, I respect money. Schlepping the treasure in the lining of a cheap overcoat seemed shabby, so I’d off-loaded it into an Indians gym bag I bought in the hotel gift shop. It was made of vinyl and canvas and smelled like a beach toy.
When the porcupine gave me the high sign I carried it into a private office, where I wandered the room admiring framed monochrome photographs of skyscrapers that no longer existed while a team of executives and accountants counted and recorded the amounts on the travelers’ checks. I had to ask the branch manager for my gym bag back after he gave me a receipt.
Maybe it was the name on the bag, or maybe it was too nice a day in late summer to fight my way through the eternal construction on the interstate; but instead of going home I drove to Jacob’s Field, where the Indians were hosting the Tigers for first place in the central division. It was one of Cleveland’s last games under its century-old name; after that, Custer’s job would be finished.
I sat in the nosebleed section of the bleachers, drinking watered-down beer and watching Detroit blow a three-run lead in the sixth. Then Cabrera, trying hard for that milestone home run, smashed one into my section that struck one of the wooden seats six feet behind my head with a noise like a mortar blast; it bounced twice and a fan in a Pistons jersey made a dive for it, body-surfing down the concrete steps in the aisle—woofing on each impact—to come up at last with the ball and enough cracked ribs for a neighborhood barbecue. A couple of his companions supported him between them on their way to Urgent Care. He was green-gilled and had lost most of the skin on one side of his face, but he had enough fight left to keep his friends from prying the ball out of his fist.
He got an ovation from that section. It would have been more lively if the ball had been in fair territory.
Cabrera struck out swinging and the side was retired. I finished my beer during the seventh-inning stretch. Cleveland was ahead by four and my watch gave me just an hour before the homebound traffic caught me in a vise. While I stood arching my back, a light-heavyweight picked his way up the steps in a black suit, white shirt, and black knitted tie, white socks on his ankles. An outfit that far out of place in that venue said he was there for me.
When he got to my tier he turned sideways, shouldering his way past the exodus to the bathrooms and concessions and stopped in front of me, sweating into his collar.
“Kind of formal for a hot-dog vendor,” I said, holding out my empty cup. “One for the road.”
He took that in better humor than it was intended; that funeral gear during “Take Me out to the Ball Game” annoyed me as much as the play in the outfield.
“I’m not with the park,” he said. “Mr. Yale would like to invite you to his suite.”
“Where is it?”
He rolled a head the size of a soccer ball in the direction of VIP country. I didn’t ask him who Mr. Yale was at all. If he was watching the game from up there, he wouldn’t waste time putting me straight.
I followed Black Suit down the steps to the next landing, halfway across the stadium, and up half a mile to the glassed-in section. He led with his left shoulder, the way he would in the ring. On weekends he’d wear a T-shirt that read KISS ME I’M A BODYGUARD.
Once inside the airlock, the conditioned climate drew fog off the broad back of his neck. Mine too, I supposed; but the aroma of shrimp cocktails, steak fajitas, and barrel-aged whiskey kept me from noticing. Windows all around gave a view of the field and all of Cleveland as far as the bridge. Caterers stood around waiting for someone to crook a finger. It was either the team owner’s private suite or Hollywood’s idea of the Roman baths.
Copyright © 2023 by Loren D. Estleman