American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Read Online Free PDF

in jail or dead of disease, but Charlotte was smarter than most, and turned what she’d learned inward. She married one of the sponsors, put her clothes back on, and took over the bookkeeping. When the law caught up with Andrew Sing, she’d taken the stand against him. She forgot her English when the defense tried to cross-examine. Sing was convicted.
    The proceeds of his enterprises never surfaced. It was determined he’d reinvested everything and lost it all when the law cracked down. But two years after his appeals ran out and he began serving thirty years in the federal correctional institution in Milan, Michigan, Charlotte began buying up choice plots of real estate across the Great Lakes region, where in the course of time casinos and health spas and after-hours bars opened up, always illegal, but with no paper trail connecting the landlady to the businesses themselves. There’s no law against owning rental property where the tenants break the law. She charged astronomically high rents—according to the books she kept in her own hand—but none of her customers complained. In this way she managed to make millions off gambling and prostitution and declare every dollar on her Form 1040 without interference either from local authority or the departments of Treasury and Justice.
    She lived in seclusion, it was said, dividing her time among her homes on Lake Michigan, in Bloomfield Hills, and north of San Francisco, and an office on Detroit’s West Side in a polyglot neighborhood populated mostly by Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants and their children. No driver’s license was on record in her name and her passportphoto was generic Asian, ordinary almost to the point of invisibility. For drama, the press fell back on a forty-year-old image of a scrawny sixteen-year-old challenging her father’s custody in court.
    The press didn’t take interest in her often; it had enough headline-happy multimillionaires to go around. But that was changing.
    When a state attorney general who wanted to be governor tried to subpoena her to appear before a grand jury investigating vice, she’d hired two Asian women of her approximate age and build to accompany her everywhere she went, in outfits identical to hers. With no reliable photo and only a description to go by, the servers were at a loss to know whom to approach. “Well, we all look alike,” was her only comment when a writer for the
Metro Times
got a call through to her office. The jury’s term ran out and she returned to California and her army of realtors.
    The device backfired. That human shell game was clever stage business, but it and her flip rejoinder were too colorful for the peace of mind of a woman who set a premium on privacy. Overnight she went from an object of vague curiosity to a celebrity, and a sinister one at that: a creature between Greta Garbo and Heidi Fleiss. Even her name and exotic title sounded like something out of a pulp magazine from the days of the Yellow Peril. When a bartender at the Union Street Saloon on Woodward assembled a drink from green tea and gin and christened it a “Madame Sling,” the patrons streamed in for a sample. Within a week, the establishment received a letter produced on expensive stationery, signed by a former justice of the Michigan State Supreme Court, demanding the name of the drink be changed. The bar complied and the customer flow ebbed to normal, but by thenthat old photograph of a teenage Charlotte had resurfaced and appeared in newspapers and over the shoulders of TV anchors across the country.
    Charlotte Sing was one of the twenty wealthiest women in America, according to
Forbes
and
Fortune
. According to the calendar in Hilary Bairn’s apartment, he’d had an appointment with her the day before yesterday. Whatever a fortune-hunting petty thief with a bad bleach job had to talk about with the Queen of Vice, I doubted it was the double-entry system of bookkeeping.

FOUR
    J ust as the caged city