American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

paid off, not big, and a pretty Asian waitress in wedge-heeled sandals with long muscles in her thighs came over and offered me a drink from a tray. I shook my head and poked a dollar under a tall glass of bourbon with a cube floating in it for garnish. Two of those and you lost track of where you’d parked the car, not to mention the odds and percentages. She smiled and prowled away.
    “Mr. Walker? I’m Victor Cho. I own this establishment.”
    He’d appeared at my elbow, coming up more quietly thanthe sumo: a slender Korean of sixty or so wearing a blue silk sport shirt, gray gabardine slacks, and glistening loafers with hard toes. He had a horseshoe of receding black hair and a polite smile that showed his eyeteeth.
    The hard toes were the clue. There would be no stomping on them and taking him off guard. The big man with the wrestler’s face stood behind him, as distant and as close as Mt. Fuji.
    “How do you do,” I said. “Actually, my business is with Mrs. Sing.”
    “I don’t know anyone of that name in this country. Do you have a complaint?”
    “I seem to have lost Mrs. Sing.”
    “Someone is kidding you. Eliot will see you to your car.”
    “Eliot?”
    Mt. Fuji shifted its weight onto the balls of his feet.
    As Mr. Cho turned to take himself out of the line of charge, I touched his wrist. “Eliot can probably take me,” I said. “He knows all the steps and I’m rusty. I left the sawed-off home. But we’ll bust up furniture, and you know how sound travels on the water. There’s always one cop who’s just looking for an excuse to bust up the rest, and at the height of tourist season.”
    He brushed off my hand with a little movement. “Believe me, I’d like to help you out. I don’t know any Madame Sing.”
    “Who said ‘Madame?’”
    His expression changed then. The smile hadn’t let up even when I’d offered to renovate the place with Eliot. Now he looked solemn. “Madame Sing owns the property this pavilion stands on. My only contact with her is when I send the rent check to her post office box in Detroit. She has nothing to do with this business.”
    “I didn’t say she did.”
    He held up my card as if reading it for the first time. “You’re available at this number?”
    “Not all the time.” I plucked it out of his hand, unclipped the pen from inside my coat, and wrote the cell phone number on the back. I returned the card. “That one’s good when it’s working. Tell her to keep trying.”
    “Does she need to know what it’s about?”
    “Hilary Bairn.”
    “Who’s he?”
    It was my turn to show my eyeteeth. “Strike two, Victor. Most people would’ve asked, ‘Who’s she?’”
    He looked at me, but there wasn’t any satisfaction in it. It was like firing a shot into quicksand.
    Heading back north I hit heavy traffic, with ribbons of heat rising as thick as blown glass from radiators and the back of drivers’ necks, but the trip hadn’t been wasted. I’d have been disappointed if Madame Sing were as easy to see as the bay.
    Charlotte Sing was an Amerasian, a refugee of the Korean Police Action brought to the U.S. through a sea of red tape by her father, an American serviceman who’d spent five years after the cease-fire looking for her after her mother died in an internment camp in Pyongyang; somesuch place like that, that sounded like a rubber band breaking. Legend said the father had wanted only an unpaid housemaid, and used his belt when the service was unsatisfactory. At age sixteen, Charlotte’s petition for emancipation had been granted and she’d gone to work for one of the Oriental massage parlors proliferating throughout the Detroit area.
    Ordinarily her story would have ended there, and not with musical accompaniment. It was a yellow-slave racket, wheretruckers went to get their gears shifted by young women who’d been taken off their parents’ hands in Korea by sponsors who let them work off their debt as prostitutes. Most of the girls wound up