American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel by Loren D. Estleman Page A

stapler, gave the paper another fold lengthwise, and laid it in the narrow channel inside. I figured it would escape discovery unless someone decided to staple something.
    I returned it to the drawer and put the swivel to work, with a glass in my hand and two inches of charcoal starter in the bottom. Soon it was in my stomach and the coals were warming up.
    Deirdre Fuller was a sad surprise. If anyone had an early expiration date stamped on his forehead it was Hilary Bairn, who swiped expensive watches and tried to pawn them through his girlfriend to support his champagne tastes, which probably included gambling debts. Deirdre had survived celebrity parentage and a broken home, had two million dollars coming, and yet had still been studying for a profession. She’d smelled of sweet almonds, a scent I approved of in a world drenched in honeysuckle and lilac. I couldn’t forget the expression on her face in Bairn’s apartment, that look of weary acceptance that said she had the answers I needed.
    One of them was what had happened to the watch. I hadn’t seen it in either the kitchen or living room and Detective Burrough hadn’t mentioned finding it in her handbag, a man’s wristwatch in a woman’s purse. If she’d gone there to confront Bairn over turning her into a fence for stolen merchandise, starting a fight that got her killed, it stood to reason she’d have had the evidence with her, to throw in his face. She wouldn’t have tried to pawn it after the first time;love is blind, not stupid, and she hadn’t the makings of a crook, not with an inheritance coming and her still committed to the law program at Michigan.
    I could ask Bairn, if the cops didn’t arrest him first. I’d start with where he went after he left the office early. Or I could ask Darius Fuller where
he
went after he fought with Deirdre at his house in Grosse Pointe. No wristwatch might mean she’d already said her piece to Bairn and he’d apologized and they were friends again and that was why she was waiting for him in his apartment. That would take the heat off the boyfriend. The father had sounded convincing on the telephone, but if her death was an accident he wouldn’t have had to fake grief. It would also explain why no one else was home when the police investigated the disturbance. Most domestic killings are tied up on the spot, with the perpetrator waiting next to the corpse to be taken into custody. Intruders panic and leave.
    I hoped it explained nothing. If it wasn’t Bairn I hoped the case was a complicated one involving a mysterious hooded stranger and smuggled rubies, with parrots and a map and hot-air balloons and a Soviet sleeper agent who hadn’t gotten the memo; cryptograms and bookcases that pivoted out to reveal secret passageways, or anyone or anything else but Darius Fuller. I’d gotten used to seeing sports heroes at their arraignments more often than on the field of play, but I liked it when parents didn’t kill their children, even by accident. There wasn’t liquor enough in the city for me to take on that kind of case.
    The cigarette carton in the deep drawer of the desk was as empty as the pack in my pocket, and I’d only bothered to pick that up in case the forensics team found it in Bairn’s apartment and thought it was a clue. They’d have plentyenough to go on once they lifted my fingerprints from places Bairn himself hadn’t touched. That was going to cost me if I didn’t have something to put on Inspector Alderdyce’s desk before he went home at midnight. I tipped the carton into the wastebasket and got up to go out for more, and maybe a lead or something. I had all of six hours.
    A telephone rang. Out of habit I lifted the receiver off the one on the desk and spoke my name into a dial tone. I put it down and broke loose the one on my belt.
    “Is that Mr. Walker?” Female, with a musical sort of accent: Asian. When I said that was what it was, she said, “Please hold for Madame Sing.”
    I’d