Read Online American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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do. If I’m right about your calling in Bairn’s markers, he’d have told you all about the money he’s about to come into, to buy himself time. Two months, to be exact.”
“Again you force me to embarrass myself with my ignorance. But if the story’s that big, I won’t need to take up my time and your minutes asking for details. When are you free tomorrow morning?”
“If it’s tomorrow I won’t be free at all, in every sense of the term. I need to see you tonight.”
“One moment.”
While on hold I grasped the bottle, then let it alone. I had an idea I’d need every cerebral cell I had left just to keep from falling any farther behind. After what seemed a long time she came back.
“I’m attending a private reception tonight at the Hilton Garden Inn, to celebrate some small effort I made to arrange an exhibition of preimperial Korean art at the DIA this fall.”
“Is it formal? I keep my dinner jacket at a rental place downtown.”
“You won’t need it. You’re not invited. I’ve taken a suite upstairs to dress. If you’re there one minute past eight, you’ll miss me.”
“What’s the number of the suite?”
“I don’t know yet. My assistant isn’t available. Ask for Mrs. MacArthur at the desk.”
Detroit is never going to the Super Bowl, so it decided to invite the Super Bowl to Detroit. In order to prepare for fans from out of town, the Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau lured in outside investors to build 198 rooms in red brick in the old Harmonie Park neighborhood, close enough to walk to Ford Field—if the game didn’t take place in February—and Comerica Park—if anyone cared to see how the Tigers were doing. The Hilton Garden Inn is the first hotel to go up in downtown Detroit since the Atheneum in 1993, but older ones built of better material with more style had been blown up in the meantime.
A pretty black girl in a sharp blazer greeted me at the desk. She didn’t stir so much as a skin cell when I asked forMrs. MacArthur, but the tone of her voice when she called up said everything it had to about a guest who would book a two-hundred-dollar suite just to change clothes. She cradled the receiver like Baby Jesus and gave me the number. She even provided directions to the elevator.
It lifted me without character to the top floor and let me out into a carpeted corridor that smelled like a new car, filled with future and promise and disinfectant. Recessed fixtures shed brushed-bronze light on pictures of milk wagons on Woodward and B-24s at Willow Run, Ty Cobb stealing a base, Tom Harmon throwing a pass, Isiah Thomas slamming a dunk; past and memory come in cans also. I followed scrolled brass numerals to an alcove at the end, and here I was, standing with knuckles raised in front of another door.
You can’t work my job without becoming a connoisseur of doors, and a diviner of what was waiting on the other side: oak and stained glass—a kleptomaniac heir and a fat retainer; chipboard and printed veneer—a deadbeat dad and a rubber check; peeling paint—a cheating spouse and a tetanus shot; solid mahogany—an embezzler and a coverup; rusted screen—a shotgun and a running start. There were quaint Dutch doors that swung out in halves, seducing you with the smell of warm bread and a lonely restless woman at the oven; walnut-paneled doors that led you across fifteen feet of pile cuff-deep to a senior executive seated behind marble and glass, silver-haired, with a golden parachute and a stomach made of perforated tin; towering double-sided doors made from old-growth forest with Tiffany and Waterford in case lots behind them and no way to collect on what you had coming; steel-core doors, quilted on the reverse to lay the lunatic head against; swinging doors the orderlies bumped open with your gurney when you’d knocked on the wrong one; slidingdoors, revolving doors, electric-eye doors, doors with bars, doors that moved up and down on tracks; doors that were just doors,
“Again you force me to embarrass myself with my ignorance. But if the story’s that big, I won’t need to take up my time and your minutes asking for details. When are you free tomorrow morning?”
“If it’s tomorrow I won’t be free at all, in every sense of the term. I need to see you tonight.”
“One moment.”
While on hold I grasped the bottle, then let it alone. I had an idea I’d need every cerebral cell I had left just to keep from falling any farther behind. After what seemed a long time she came back.
“I’m attending a private reception tonight at the Hilton Garden Inn, to celebrate some small effort I made to arrange an exhibition of preimperial Korean art at the DIA this fall.”
“Is it formal? I keep my dinner jacket at a rental place downtown.”
“You won’t need it. You’re not invited. I’ve taken a suite upstairs to dress. If you’re there one minute past eight, you’ll miss me.”
“What’s the number of the suite?”
“I don’t know yet. My assistant isn’t available. Ask for Mrs. MacArthur at the desk.”
Detroit is never going to the Super Bowl, so it decided to invite the Super Bowl to Detroit. In order to prepare for fans from out of town, the Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau lured in outside investors to build 198 rooms in red brick in the old Harmonie Park neighborhood, close enough to walk to Ford Field—if the game didn’t take place in February—and Comerica Park—if anyone cared to see how the Tigers were doing. The Hilton Garden Inn is the first hotel to go up in downtown Detroit since the Atheneum in 1993, but older ones built of better material with more style had been blown up in the meantime.
A pretty black girl in a sharp blazer greeted me at the desk. She didn’t stir so much as a skin cell when I asked forMrs. MacArthur, but the tone of her voice when she called up said everything it had to about a guest who would book a two-hundred-dollar suite just to change clothes. She cradled the receiver like Baby Jesus and gave me the number. She even provided directions to the elevator.
It lifted me without character to the top floor and let me out into a carpeted corridor that smelled like a new car, filled with future and promise and disinfectant. Recessed fixtures shed brushed-bronze light on pictures of milk wagons on Woodward and B-24s at Willow Run, Ty Cobb stealing a base, Tom Harmon throwing a pass, Isiah Thomas slamming a dunk; past and memory come in cans also. I followed scrolled brass numerals to an alcove at the end, and here I was, standing with knuckles raised in front of another door.
You can’t work my job without becoming a connoisseur of doors, and a diviner of what was waiting on the other side: oak and stained glass—a kleptomaniac heir and a fat retainer; chipboard and printed veneer—a deadbeat dad and a rubber check; peeling paint—a cheating spouse and a tetanus shot; solid mahogany—an embezzler and a coverup; rusted screen—a shotgun and a running start. There were quaint Dutch doors that swung out in halves, seducing you with the smell of warm bread and a lonely restless woman at the oven; walnut-paneled doors that led you across fifteen feet of pile cuff-deep to a senior executive seated behind marble and glass, silver-haired, with a golden parachute and a stomach made of perforated tin; towering double-sided doors made from old-growth forest with Tiffany and Waterford in case lots behind them and no way to collect on what you had coming; steel-core doors, quilted on the reverse to lay the lunatic head against; swinging doors the orderlies bumped open with your gurney when you’d knocked on the wrong one; slidingdoors, revolving doors, electric-eye doors, doors with bars, doors that moved up and down on tracks; doors that were just doors,
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