Ernest Krell’s aversion to windows was a legend in the investigation business. It was a trademark, like his tie clasp made from a piece of shrapnel the army surgeons had pried out of his hip in Seoul and his passion for black suits with discreet patterns to break up their severity. During his seventeen years with the Secret Service he had spent so many public hours warning presidential candidates’ wives away from windows that when it came time to open his own detective agency he dug into his wife’s inheritance to throw up a building that didn’t have any. Narrow vertical slits set eight feet apart let light into a black marble edifice that looked like a blank domino from anywhere along the Detroit River.
A receptionist with blue stones in her ears and that silver complexion that comes free with fluorescent lights took my hat and left me alone in Krell’s office, a bowling alley of a room carpeted in black and brown and containing oak-and-leather chairs and an antique desk in front of a huge Miró landscape, lots of blues and reds, to make up for the lack of a window. The walls were painted two shades of cinnamon, darker on the desk side of the office to keep the customers where they belonged. A lot of framed citations, Krell’s license, and a square black-on-white sign reading “RELIANCE — Courtesy, Efficiency, Confidentiality” took care of the bare spots.
There were no ashtrays, so I took a seat near a potted fern and lit a cigarette, tipping my ashes into the pot. After five puffs the man himself came in through a side door and scowled at the curling smoke and then at me and said, “There’s no smoking in this building.”
“I didn’t see any signs,” I said.
“You don’t see any ashtrays either.” He ran a hand under the edge of the desk. A second later, the silver-skinned receptionist came in carrying an ashtray used just for putting out smokes, and I did that. I couldn’t decide if it was the way he had pushed the button or if I just had the look of a guy that would light up in the boss’s office. When she left carrying my squashed butt, the man extended his hand and I rose to take it. His grip was cool and firm and as personal as a haberdasher’s smile.
“Good to meet you, Walker. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”
“This is the first time I’ve gotten any higher than the fourth floor,” I said.
Krell chuckled meaninglessly. He was six three and two hundred pounds, a large pale man with black hair that looked dyed and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun looking for riflemen on rooftops. It was orange today, orange stripes on his black suit and jaunty orange sunbursts on his silk tie to pick it up. It softened the overall effect of his person like a bright bow tied to a buffalo’s tail made you forget he was standing on your foot. The famous tie clasp was in place.
He waved me into one of the chairs but remained upright at parade rest with his hands folded behind him. “I spent last night reading the files on the cases you assisted us with,” he said. “Despite the fact that you’re anything but the Reliance type” — his gaze lit on my polyester suit — “you show a certain efficiency I admire. Also you spend more time and effort on each client than a Reliance operative could afford.”
“You can do that when they only come into your office one at a time,” I volunteered.
“Yes.” He let the word melt on his tongue, then pressed on. “The reason I asked you to come down today, we have a client who might best benefit from your rather unorthodox method. A delicate case and a highly emotional one. Frankly, I’d have referred her to another agency had she not come recommended by one of our most valued clients.”
“She?”
“You’ll meet her in a moment. It’s a missing persons situation, which I believe is your specialty. Her son’s been kidnapped.”
“That’s the FBI’s specialty.”
“Only in cases where ransom is demanded. On the statutes it’s abduction, which would make it a police matter except that her ex-husband is the suspected culprit. The authorities consider that a domestic problem and approach it accordingly.”
“Meaning it gets spiked along with the butcher’s wife who threw a side of pork at her husband,” I said. “How old is the boy?”
“Seven.” He quarter-turned toward the desk and drew a typewritten sheet from a folder lying open on top. “Blond and blue, about four feet tall leaning to pudgy, last seen April third wearing a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, red corduroy shorts, and dirty white sneakers. Answers to Tommy. One minute he was playing with a toy truck in the front yard of his mother’s home in Austin, Texas, and the next there was just the truck. Neighbor thought he saw him on the passenger’s side of a low red sports car going around the corner. The ex-husband owns a red Corvette.”
“That’s April third this year?” I asked. It was now early May.
“I know it’s a long time. She’s been to all the authorities here and in Texas.”
“Why here?”
“A relative of the mother is sure she saw the father at the Tel-Twelve Mall in Southfield three weeks ago. She flew in right after. Staying at the relative’s place.”
“What makes it too hot to touch?”
He stroked the edge of the sheet with a meaty thumb, making a noise like a cricket. “The ex-husband is an executive with a finance corporation I sometimes do business with. If it gets out I’m investigating one of its employees—”
“Last stop for the money train,” I finished. “What’s to investigate? She should’ve gone back to court to start, put the sheriffs on his neck.”
“His neck is gone and so is he. He took a leave of absence from his company, closed out his apartment in Austin and vanished, boy and all. He probably had all his bags packed in the Corvette’s trunk when he picked up Tommy and just kept driving. It’s all here.” He put the sheet back inside the folder and handed the works to me.
It ran just five pages, triple-spaced and written in Reliance’s terse, patented preliminary-report language, but on plain paper without the distinctive letterhead. Very little of it was for me. The ex-husband’s name was Frank Corcoran. He was a house investments counselor for Great Western Loans and Credit, with branch offices in seventeen cities west of the Mississippi. There were two numbers to call for information there. The name and number of the witness who had seen his car at the time of the boy’s disappearance were there too, along with the ‘Vette’s serial number and license plate. It was long gone by now or the cops in Austin or Detroit would have had it in on a BOL weeks ago. I folded the report into quarters anyway and put it in a pocket and gave back the empty folder. “Can I talk to the mother?”
“Of course. She’s in the other office.”
I followed him through the side door into a room separate from the one where the receptionist sat, a chamber half the size of Krell’s, decorated in muted warm colors and containing a row of chairs with circular backs, like the room in a funeral home where the family receives visitors. “Charlotte Corcoran, Amos Walker,” said Krell.
The woman seated on the end chair raised a sunken face to look at me. Her jaw was too long to be pretty, but it had been an attractive face before she started losing weight, the bones sculpted, not sharp like now, the forehead high and broad instead of jutting and hollow at the sides. The little bit of lipstick she wore might have been painted on the corpse in that same funeral home. Her hair was blond and tied back loosely with wisps of gray springing loose around her ears. Her dress was just a dress, and her bare angular legs ended in bony feet thrust into low-heeled shoes a size too large for her. She was smoking a cigarette with a white filter tip. I peered through the haze at Krell, who moved a shoulder and then flipped a wall switch that started a fan humming somewhere in the woodwork. The smoke stirred and began twisting toward a remote corner of the ceiling. I got out a Winston and sent some of my own after it.