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

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 myselfinto 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.

THREE
    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 likepoured 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