Silent Thunder by Loren D. Estleman Page B

fifty years. Although he was not especially tall, his trim build and a way he had of carrying his back created an impression of considerable height. He appeared at first to be totally bald, but at closer range his hair was pale and cropped very short on a skull like a Roman emperor’s, the brow high and round. His nose was hooked, his eyes dark and set deep. His suit wasn’t important; it would be a color and fabric that was right for him and he would know where to go to have it cut and fitted. As he walked he dragged his right foot very slightly. I’d read somewhere that he had suffered a stroke a year or so back. He made it seem like a temporary annoyance.
    “Right on time, Mr. Thayer,” said Proust, shaking the old man’s hand.
    “I’m late. Two of your men are outside. I understood this would be a private meeting.” His voice was shallow. It often is with men who seldom have to raise it.
    “It will be. I asked Lieutenant Romero and Officer Pollard to escort Walker here. I can send them back anytime.”
    “Are you asking me if you may?”
    “I’ll send them back.” It sounded lame to him too. Quickly he introduced us.
    Thayer let me come to him; the less he walked the less he broadcast the limp. His grip was as frail as a dowager’s. Up close, his head shook as from palsy, although the muscles on the sides of his jaw stuck out from the effort to control it.
    “Is there someplace less open?” he asked Proust.
    “The den is this way.”
    A short sunlit corridor lined with framed photographs of thoroughbreds led to a walnut door, which Proust unlocked and opened, standing aside to let us enter. It was a small woodstained room with an olive-colored rug, a big square desk with a mirror finish and nothing on top, and brass-plated trophies on the bookshelves. No books. A single window looked out on the corrals. Proust stepped past us and drew the curtains.
    “I’d like this private,” Thayer said. “Just Mr. Walker and me.”
    Proust’s hesitation made his eyebrows rise.
    “He’s afraid I’ll hit you with the desk, leap out the window onto a horse, and gallop away,” I said.
    The old man’s face was without humor. “Were you brought here under force?”
    “It was polite enough.”
    Proust said, “You don’t know Walker like I do, Mr. Thayer. Sometimes—”
    “Please wait for us.”
    Proust took himself out. He almost bowed.
    Thayer wandered behind the desk, a natural migration for him. He was outlined against the curtained window now. His complexion was paler than his hair, almost translucent blue, but it wouldn’t be because of his blood. The son of an upholsterer, he had worked his way up from the machine room to the front office of a tool company that no longer made tools, then bought it to serve as the flagship for an industry whose main product was numbers on the New York Stock Exchange. Since then he had been acquiring local ball clubs, a fast food chain in California, and a Spanish castle, which he had ordered dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic to a Brooklyn dock where it sat in numbered crates awaiting removal to Mackinac Island and his twelve-acre estate. He had done all this almost with nobody’s notice, and it would probably still be that way had not his son’s violent death catapulted him into the public eye like a very rich cinder.
    In another year, possibly two, he would begin the long slide, sinking in on himself like a grand old building grown too heavy for its foundation, but that summer he stood astride the loose collection of feudal fiefdoms that is the Detroit area business community, and looked it.
    “I’ve employed the services of Reliance on a number of occasions,” he said. “I assume that’s why Krell went outside the agency in this case.”
    I said nothing. It was one reason I hadn’t thought of.
    “My son and I had nothing in common except our name,” he went on. “My fault. You can’t build a successful business and tend to family at the same time.