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all the tone of a man about to inherit a wife and a fortune. I took that as a good sign. Maybe she hadn’t told him the news, or maybe she’d been bluffing after all when she’d told her father.
    “Hilary Bairn?”
    “Yes?”
    I told him my name and occupation. “The party I represent wishes to propose an arrangement that will benefit you financially and immediately. I’d like to discuss it with you in person as soon as possible.”
    “How much is the benefit?”
    “It’s substantial.” I clamped my mouth shut on the end ofit. I couldn’t have made it sound more final if I’d popped a cheek with my finger.
    “You know my address?”
    I recited it. “I can be there in ten minutes.”
    “Okay, Walker.”
    I hung up on the dial tone and went to the bank.
    A FedEx truck had the loading zone across from Bairn’s apartment nailed down. I dipped into equity for a spot in a lot around the corner on Lafayette and strode back, racing against time and Deirdre Fuller; the fact that Bairn was even in a mood to discuss money gave me hope and anxiety in equal doses.
    The building had been a department store back when Detroit had them, with an iron front and three floors above the two-story ground floor where the money was counted and inventory recorded and for the general manager to tilt back and blow wreaths of blue cigar smoke from behind a desk the size of an emerging African nation. There was still a depression in the elevator floor near the push buttons where an operator had sat on a stool to work the lever. Old wood continued its aromatic deterioration under the new drywall and paint. I knocked on Bairn’s door, got no answer, and tried the knob just for the hell of it. I’d left the burglar kit at home. It makes a bad impression to jimmy your way in to a friendly business conference.
    The knob turned without resistance. I took my hand off it and knocked again.
    Nothing. I put my ear to the door, but they hadn’t replaced it with a modern hollow-core and it was like trying to listen for signs of activity from outside a bank vault.
    For once in my life I went with my first instinct and walked away from an unlocked door. Unlocked doors are nogood, not in a city where kids chain their skateboards to parking meters. There, only two kinds of people don’t lock up when they’re expecting a stranger, and Hilary Bairn wasn’t a tourist. I’d had plenty enough of the other kind to kill my curiosity.
    I didn’t make it back to the elevator, of course. The cops had set their trap from behind another door across the hall and came out with guns drawn.

FIVE
    T he cop who’d pretended to be Bairn when I’d called was a large black detective third-grade named Burrough, no
s
, fifty and natty as Easter Sunday in a spotless white Panama and tan Palm Beach suit, gusseted to accommodate the harness. I think he’d transferred from the mayor’s security detail after a dustup of some kind with a reporter from Channel 7. I’d seen Burrough around headquarters once or twice and he’d seemed jolly, but then I’d had a pass to the fourth floor and no manacles on my wrists. I didn’t have them on now, but I got the impression there were orders pending on that.
    He sat me down at the table in Bairn’s kitchen and went through my personal items: a wallet containing a ten and two singles, an empty Winstons pack, fourteen scattered cents, a set of keys, a cell phone in its spring clip, and my ID folder with the toy badge. I’d left the registered Chief’s Special in the safe in my office and extralegal Luger in the car. I hadn’t come in prepared to shoot off any locks. Altogether it didn’t take up much space and looked kind of sad for a man on the thready outer edge of middle age.
    Oh, and fifty thousand in cash in a Number Ten envelope. I kept forgetting about that.
    He counted the bills, using the eraser end of a mechanical pencil to fan them out and then nudge them back inside the envelope. The FBI was watching the