Poison Blonde (Amos Walker Series #16)

One
 
 
The last line of security was a big Basque built like a coke oven. He wore a familiar face behind picador sideburns and a dozen-odd rivets in his eyebrows, nose, and the deep dimple above his lip. In another Detroit, under a different administration, he'd specialized in kneecapping Republicans. When the market went soft in '94, he'd scored work in show business, playing a succession of plumbers, janitors, and building superintendents in Spanish-language soap operas. I couldn't approach him without glancing down at his chest for a subtitle.
"Hello, Benny. I thought you'd be busy opening a supermarket."
He looked at me down the treacherous bends in his nose, one of which I claimed credit for. A caterpillar had taken up residence under his nostrils, which were as big as gunports. Fourteen-karat gold buttons gleamed on his mahogany double-breasted Armani. He looked like a tall chest of drawers. "It's Benito," he said.
"Benito like in Mussolini? I didn't know you were Italian."
"Benito like in Juarez. I'm Chicano."
"You were Colombian back when you smuggled cocaine aboard the old mayor's jet. You must have more passports than a soccer team."
"What you doing here?"
"Working, same as you. And for the same person. She's chilling me a bottle of Tecate right now." I showed him my pass. It contained no words, just a holographic image of Genesius, patron saintof theatrical performers. He looked at it, crossed himself out of habit, and reached behind his back to rap the door.
"Quién es?" A smooth contralto, deadened slightly by the panels.
"Benito, señorita. Es un visitador."
"Right on time. Hokay."
He worked the doorknob, again without turning. I had to walk around him to get through. On the way, he leaned down and called me a son of a whore in border Spanish. I grinned and patted his big face. It was like slapping a truck tire. His hand jerked toward his left underarm, also out of habit. He remembered where he was and let it drop.
Where he was was Cobo Hall, three hundred thousand square feet of convention arena, exhibition space, and concert facilities on the western end of the Detroit Civic Center, a white marble aircraft carrier of a building with a green granite section tacked on forty years ago and a curving covered promenade that looked like a furnace pipe with windows. Some history had taken place there, including the Republican National Convention of 1980, several decades of auto shows, and a couple of hundred body slams courtesy of the World Wrestling Federation. The incoming traffic plunged straight under the building by way of the John Lodge Expressway and parked on the roof, where the windshields shattered by homegrown vandals and tape-deck thieves tinkled down like fairy dust.
The dressing room I'd entered was one of the largest on the site, reserved in the past for presidential hopefuls, famous fat tenors, and the occasional evangelist and his mistresses. It had been done over more times than the government of Argentina. At present it was dressed in the colors of the flag of the island nation that had given birth to its present occupant, with some Roman Catholic bric-a-brac cast about and a portable bar as big as a pumpwagon, stocked with lethal-looking spirits with foreign labels. One of those gurgling mood recordings that make your bladder ache was playing on a hidden stereo system.
"Your name is Hamos, yes?"
The contralto was stronger without a door standing in front of it. It belonged to a tiny woman in a plum-colored kimono sitting at a Moorish vanity table, inspecting both profiles in a three-way mirror lit from behind. She looked both smaller and darker than she did in concert, but at close range it was the white-gold of her hair that made her caramel skin seem duskier than it was. With the waist-length waves pinned up in braids and no arcs or fills to bring out the glitter, she looked like a wellpreserved old lady. I had a bottle of Scotch older than she was, and I can't afford a vintage label.
"Amos," I said. "If it makes you uncomfortable, you can call me Mr. Walker."
She caught my eye in one of the mirrors. Hers were a very deep brown, almost black, but too warm to bridge that gap; but you can get any effect with contacts. Eyes had gone the way of lips, breasts, noses, and hair, as protean as a sandhill. I hadn't bothered to crack The Big Book of Facial Features since before I renewed my license.
"Comprendo. You don't want your picture took with me. Hokay. You like, let's see, the oldies but the goodies, no? The Platters, the Drifters, the Dave Clark Four?"
"Five. I'm not eighty. Your stuff's fine. It's got a beat and you can dance to it, if you've consulted your physician first. It's your personal protection I don't like. Big Bad Benny's turn-ons include arson and pulling the skin off DEA agents."
"Talk to my manager. He hired him." She smoothed an eyebrow with a little finger. A holy icon was painted on the nail in glittering red and gold. "I'm Gilia, but I guess you know that." She pronounced the name as if it started with H.
"I do. I saw you once on MTV when my Kay Kyser tape ran out."
She filled and emptied her celebrated lungs. "I apologize, hokay? In my country you were born either before the coup or after. Is a wide space between. You learn to translate."
I moved a shoulder. It would have taken more than an armed military takeover of her government or mine to draw attention from the Gilia phenomenon. She was Carmen Miranda, Ricky Martin, and the Baja Marimba Band all rolled into one ninety-six-pound package. They were splitting and splicing words in order to pigeonhole her: rock-salsa, Cuban hip-hop, jalapeno pop. She sang and danced in front of back-projected hydrogen bomb explosions in stadiums and concert halls and on military bases, owned a record label and a Hollywood production company, and had signed with United Artists to be the next Bond girl. Two years before, she'd made the rent on her fourth-floor walk-up in East L.A. by dubbing in the voice of a cartoon cat on Little Firskies commercials.
In the meantime she'd broken up half the storied marriages on the West Coast, served six months's probation for illegal possession of a controlled substance, and performed eighty hours of community service for running a red light, broadsiding a Bel Air cop, and spilling his coffee. The only thing the Christian Right and the Politically Correct Left had agreed on in years was the importance of tying a bell around Gilia's neck. That was why the security was so tight at Cobo and I was picking up cigarette money patting down people in line at the entrance for fragmentary grenades.
"I heard someone say you're a private detective. I didn't know they did this kind of work."
"I didn't either, until I bounced a check off Detroit Edison."
"What kind of work do you do when your checks don't bounce?"
"I look for people who went missing. As I recall."
"Oh." Her face fell as far as a face can fall on her side of twenty-five. But before that I caught a golden snap of light in her eye. She was going to do just fine in the movies.
I looked at my watch. I didn't have anyplace to be, but I'd drunk a Thermos full of coffee outside and the gurgling music had begun to have its effect. "If it's my fast draw you wanted to see, I haven't greased my holster since Christmas."
"Are you any good at following people?"
She'd stopped looking at me in the mirror. She'd half twisted my way, resting an elbow on the back of her chair and letting the kimono fall open to expose a caramel thigh. Her bare foot was stuck in a slipper that was just a strip of leather and a pompon. She had a high arch and a pumiced heel. That altered my opinion of her, a little. You can always tell a woman who works on her feet by how well she takes care of them.
"It's one of the things I'm best at," I said.
She studied my face for irony. Her brows were steeply arched as well, undyed black in contrast to her hair, and she had a good straight conquistador nose, a strong chin, and a fragile upper lip; no collagen there to turn it into a slice of liverwurst. The bones were good. Age would not harm her.
She said, "I have a thief in my employ. You can follow her, yes? Find out who she is stealing it for. I will pay you ten percent of the value of what she has stolen so far."
"How much has she stolen?"
"Seventy-five thousand dollars."
"I can follow her, yes," I said.
 
Copyright 2003 by Loren D. Estleman