Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  One refreshing thing—the only—about Tommy was his tendency not to engage in small talk. “What happened in Hilliard?”

  Hilliard was the Columbus suburb where the most recent video-store robbery had taken place. When Grinnell hesitated, Tommy told him the room had been swept that morning for electronic surveillance.

  “The manager came running out of the back room with a gun. The shotgun man had no choice but to open fire.”

  “Did you see the manager before the shooting?”

  “I saw him. I thought he was a customer. I was sure he wasn’t an undercover officer.” Grinnell was in the habit of never volunteering fault or denying it. Both attitudes left a man open to assault in the circles he’d moved in since age fourteen.

  “You’re an experienced case man. How’d that happen?”

  “It shouldn’t happen, but it does. It’s almost impossible to predict when a hometown hero will turn up.”

  “It’s rotten business. No one cares except the cops when a multimillion-dollar chain gets ripped off. Shooting citizens brings down heat. Even when the citizen’s an asshole.”

  “I advised the leader of the crew to back off for a while.”

  “Was he amenable?” Tommy was looking at the Web site.

  “He agreed to shift targets. Bookstores.”

  “Any money there?”

  “I didn’t think so, until I researched it. A chain store in a good location can take in as much as ten thousand on Friday night.”

  “Cash?”

  “And credit cards. That’s our end.”

  “I know what’s our fucking end! I spent two rotten summers as a teenager helping strike off duplicate cards from filthy carbons. Don’t tell me what’s our fucking end!”

  Grinnell managed not to jump when Tommy started screaming. He’d known there was seldom any buildup. He said nothing.

  Tommy wiped his mouth with the heel of a hand. Grinnell had never actually seen him frothing, but Tommy believed his own legend as well as anyone. When he spoke again his voice was level.

  “When an employee fucks up, it’s normal to relieve him of his responsibilities. I think they learn more by taking on additional ones. From now on, you’re in charge of buying and delivering weapons. It’s risky, and a pain in the ass, but not that much more than disposing of them, which you’ve been doing for a while. Maybe you’ll keep your eyes open next time.”

  Grinnell was afraid his punishment would take such a form. But as he’d been more afraid that it would take another, he made no complaint. “Where do I buy them?”

  “Do I look like I’d know that? Show some initiative, for chrissake.” Tommy clicked his mouse. The next page that came up looked like a Broadway tribute to fellatio. It was a dismissal.

  Outside the study, Grinnell nearly collided with the Iron Boss.

  Joe Vulpo was dressed respectably enough, although sloppily, in a wrinkled sport shirt that might have doubled as a pajama top, with half the tail hanging out over the trousers of an old gray pinstripe suit, baggy in the knees, and carpet slippers worn nearly through at the toes. There was white in his stubble and his thinning gray hair stuck up comically on one side. His face looked bloated and his eyes lacked focus.

  “My sheets are all wet,” he told Grinnell. “Change them right away.”

  Before Grinnell could explain he wasn’t the housemaid, Take materialized and took the old man’s arm gently, but in a grip that would snap bone if resisted. “What you doing down here, Don Vulpo? How you get out?”

  With a shy smile, Joe held out his free hand. On the palm lay a bent nail and what looked like the plastic refill from a ballpoint pen. Grinnell suspected that he’d spent part of his early life as a picklock. Take scooped the contraband out of the old man’s hand and conducted him toward the stairs.

  “What about my sheets?”

  “You don’t pee on them if you wear your diapers.”

  Grinnell got into his car and started down the driveway. Near the end he made room for a wide-bodied sedan on its way up. It was a plain car of indeterminate American make, rounded just enough at the corners to satisfy modern aerodynamics, yet still reminiscent of the slab-sided barges of the 1970s. It was demonstrably an official vehicle.

  The face behind the wheel was vaguely familiar. He thought he might have seen it on television or in the newspapers, always off from center. But the man seated beside the driver jolted his memory like an electrode. Wide-bodied like the car, his height crowding the headliner, he was as much a fixture of Ohio culture as Chief Wahoo. Most recently, Grinnell had seen him reading a statement on TV and answering questions from reporters in connection with the Hilliard robbery. It was no great leap from there to the reason State Police Captain Edgar Prine was coming to see Tommy Vulpo.

  SEVEN

  “A lot of changes since you were in town last,” Loyal Dorfman said. “Casinos. Mexicantown. They knocked down Hudson’s finally, and elected a new mayor. I say they. I haven’t voted since Truman. That mean little cocksucker put me off politics for good.”

  Macklin said nothing, waiting for the old lawyer to wind down. They were seated at the round oak table in the bay window of his dining room in Redford Township, fifteen minutes from downtown Detroit. The house had been built in 1944, and he had claimed it from the original owner when the owner couldn’t pay his fee for legal services. Most of Dorfman’s old law office—desk, files, barrister cases, seventy volumes of federal and state precedents—was in storage in the attic. Since his retirement from daily practice, he preferred to work in his dining room with the aid of a laptop. Most of his current clients were professional criminals who drew confidence from the lack of a visible system of records. He was a patrician-looking eighty, with a polar cap of white hair brushed immaculately and a long, blue-veined nose suitable for looking down at witnesses for whose testimony he held small regard. Even in his leisure he continued to wear three-piece woolen suits with matching necktie and display handkerchief sets. He’d been disbarred once, and won a headline-making suit to reinstate his license. The front page of the old Detroit Times announcing his victory hung in a frame next to his 1948 diploma from the University of Michigan School of Law and a dozen birthday cards signed by his great-grandchildren.

  From the kitchen at the other end of the house came the clatter of pots and pans and crockery, the homely clangor of Mrs. Dorfman’s daily assault on dirty dishes. She was as deaf as a fence rail and no threat to the sanctity of the attorney-client relationship. Macklin enjoyed the comfort of the informal setup; it was far more difficult for the FBI to bug a private home whose occupants seldom left, and never both at the same time.

  “What’s Texas up to?” he asked, when Dorfman finally ran out of small talk.

  “The usual bullshit. They say they’ve got an eyewitness who can place you at Davis’s home the night he was killed.”

  “Who?”

  The lawyer pecked with one finger at a series of keys on the laptop, frowned at the screen. “Neighbor named George Hogstroop. He picked you out of a mug file as the man he saw speeding away after someone shot out the rear window of his parked Corvette.”

  Macklin remembered the incident in detail. He’d used a slingshot to fire a steel ball bearing through the window. The owner had come charging out of his house with a shotgun, drawing a trio of officers out of a surveillance van and allowing Macklin to enter Davis’s house unnoticed. But Macklin hadn’t sped away after committing the act of vandalism. He’d let himself out of his parked rental car while the officers were arresting the Corvette owner and finished the job on foot.

  “He didn’t see anything,” Macklin said. “They bullied him into making the identification after they found out I was in town that day. They had a laundry list of disturbing-the-peace violations against him. If you check into it, you’ll find the charges were dropped.”

  “I did. They were. I thought it was something like that. I know some people in San Antonio. He’ll recant.”

  “What about E
dison?”

  Edison—Macklin knew him by no other name—had been the spotter on the Davis job. He’d made the mistake of letting Macklin know he knew his name. Macklin had mopped that one up on his way out of town.

  “Nothing there. San Antonio knew he had ties to Old Man Rivera, and he was shot in the face with a single slug from a thirty-eight revolver, so they thought of you. You ought to consider a new choice in weapons.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Me, too.” Dorfman bared his false teeth in a shark’s smile. It made him look less aristocratic. “I just wanted to make sure we covered everything the last time we spoke. Men in your walk of life have a habit of squirreling things away, even from those best in a position to help them.”

  “I told you everything.” Everything about San Antonio. Since Los Angeles had closed the investigation into the murder later in the week of Carlo Maggiore, he’d seen no reason to provide information the lawyer didn’t need to pursue his case against the People of the State of Texas. Also, there was the sticky point that Laurie had been indirectly involved in the L.A. matter.

  Dorfman’s predatory grin remained in place. “Okay, we’re done.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’ll be in touch if anything comes up. I think we can drag this out until Austin loses interest. Johns Davis and Richard Edison were known members of the underworld. No one’s likely to lose an election over either of them, and anyway the situation’s changed in this country. You can thank your lucky stars you’re not an Arab. I’ve been asked to defend some suspected terrorists.”

  “Just asked?”

  “And answered. I have standards.”

  Macklin looked at the clock on the sideboard. Seven hundred dollars gone in five minutes. He was determined to use up more of his hour.

  “Do you know any people in Toledo?” he asked.

  “My granddaughter lives there with her husband and two children.”

  Dorfman’s Rolodex—if he’d ever become insane and kept one—had more unlisted numbers belonging to the Fortune 500 list of notorious felons than any in Washington. Three subpoenas, including one served by the U.S. Attorney General in person, had failed to make him surrender them or even admit he knew their owners. He’d celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in federal custody for contempt of Congress, and been rewarded for his continued silence with an annual IRS audit. But his smile dissolved before the blank wall of Macklin’s face.

  “I know some people,” the lawyer said then. “This have anything to do with your case?”

  “It’s a personal favor. I’m looking for information on a man who calls himself Benjamin Grinnell. He says he works for a home- and building-supply business with headquarters in Toledo.”

  Dorfman mouthed the name silently, entering it into his personal memory bank. He kept his hands away from the computer.

  “I’m still an officer of the court. If I gave you information on this Grinnell and someone gaffed him out of the Maumee River a week later, you’d be in the market for another attorney.”

  “He’s dating my mother-in-law. The favor’s for my wife.”

  “And how is your child bride?”

  “She’s fine. How are your daughter and her two children in Toledo?”

  They regarded each other across the table.

  The lawyer pulled at his nose, as if it weren’t long enough for all the places he had to stick it into. “I’ve never heard of anyone named Grinnell.”

  “How long before you do?”

  “How long before you check out of your hotel?”

  Macklin drove eight miles out of his way to cruise past his old house in Southfield. He wasn’t sure why. It had been a wedding present from his first employer, Mike Boniface, and he’d moved in with his first wife right after their honeymoon. It had been the first home he’d called his own. Most of the firsts of his life had taken place there, yet he had few good memories of his time within its walls. He’d raised a son there, worried about his grades and his companions, had loved there and fallen out of love. He didn’t miss the coldness that had crept in like black mold and that had come away with him when he’d moved out. That had lifted only when he’d met Laurie.

  The postwar two-story frame had acquired new windows—the aluminum-framed kind that resisted drafts and fresh air in equal measure—and a coat of buttery yellow paint. The color was a distinct aesthetic improvement over the layers of conventional white stretching back to Eisenhower. A basketball hoop had sprouted above the garage door; he’d meant to get around to installing one for years and felt resentment toward the homeowner who had succeeded where he’d failed. He wondered what the current occupants thought of the soundproofed basement.

  There was a bicycle on the small front lawn, and in the driveway a Big Wheel tricycle (two children). A riot of blossoms burst out of boxes under the windows facing the street (a wife, probably; male flower fanciers tended toward more difficult and time-consuming projects like roses and dahlias). A Ford Expedition, that year’s model, stood in the driveway. He postulated a second car in the garage. Two breadwinners under one roof. He accelerated discreetly and didn’t look back.

  It didn’t occur to him until later that he’d evaluated everything as if he were collecting intelligence on a potential target. He wondered if he’d ever be Joe Average, with nothing on his mind but next month’s mortgage payment and the dead spot in the backyard.

  EIGHT

  Laurie had done a lot of growing up in a short amount of time; enough growing up to decide there were two things about her character she disliked intensely, but too short an amount of time to know what to do about them.

  Thing No. 1: She could feel sorry for herself at the drop of a hat. Thing No. 2: When she felt sorry for herself, she spent money.

  When she took a cab from the hotel to North Towne Square, she knew she was getting back at Peter for deserting her on almost no notice at all. That understanding gave her hope for her salvation, along with the irritating knowledge that she could do nothing about it other than see it through.

  Then, in a narrow deep shop crowded with clothing carousels and the aggressive personality of the owner, a gargoyle of a woman in a muumuu with overdrawn black eyebrows and huge, patently window-glass spectacles, she found that Holy Grail of female fashion, the Little Black Dress.

  It was her size, scooped front and back, and sleeveless. The price was high enough to give pause, but not so high that a less patient husband than Peter would turn her out on the street, either to return it or to find her own source of income to pay for it. When she tried it on, her reflection in the dressing-room mirror drove every negative thought out of her head. The neckline was daring but not scandalous; she knew just which earrings she would wear with it, to call attention to her neck—her best feature—and away from what her mother used to call her “naughty bits”; but not so far away that strangers might not have a reason to admire them. She liked the way the color showed off her tan and the toning of her upper arms, her reward for working out regularly. When a young woman married an older man, it was important not to let oneself go.

  She stepped out, walked around, and managed a clandestine twirl before the shop owner descended, chirping compliments. There was just enough rayon to make the dress move easily, with the flirty flip she sought, but enough weight so that it draped elegantly when she walked and stood still. Reluctantly she changed back into her street clothes.

  The lady gargoyle was ringing up the purchase when Laurie realized a fundamental flaw in the transaction.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Could you hold it for me until later?”

  The woman hoisted her black-black eyebrows above the ludicrous glasses. Her gaze flicked toward the wedding-set on Laurie’s hand. “You have nothing to worry about, honey. When he sees you in it, all doubts will vanish.”

  Laurie felt herself flush. Did the old bat think she was a bimbo? She made her voice cool. “I’m not worried about the expense. I don’t have anything to wear it to
.”

  “If you buy it, it will come. The cosmic forces are always at work.” The woman tapped a set of jeweled nails on the cash register drawer. “I close at five. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll have to put it back on the rack.”

  Laurie took a business card from the little Lucite rack on the counter and put it in her purse. The woman’s superior attitude was so much like her mother’s she decided to hold her tongue and keep the peace. Otherwise she’d have told her where else she could put the dress.

  She had a salad and a Diet Sprite in the courtyard of a restaurant on the square and took a cab back to the hotel. The light was blinking on the telephone. She hoped it was Peter, but the message was from her mother, leaving the number of the bookstore and asking her to call back.

  A call from Mother was always cause for anxiety, but this time it carried with it a twinge of fear. Laurie couldn’t get out of her head what Peter had said about Benjamin—I think he’s a player—and she knew at firsthand all that entailed. Was this the cry for rescue?

  She spoke to an airheaded clerk, established that the “Mrs. Ziegenthaler” she’d asked for was Pamela, the clerk’s boss, and caught her mother in a mood of breathless excitement, a rare event.

  “I got Francis Spain!” Pamela said without greeting.

  Laurie heard an insipid instrumental version of “My Heart Will Go On” playing over the store’s PA system. “Who’s she?”

  “She’s a he, my cave-dwelling child. I thought you liked to read. His first novel was only on The New York Times list for thirty-six weeks. Love Song?”

  “Oh, yes.” She remembered reading a review somewhere. Something about hating to kill another tree to warn readers away from a book that had leveled innocent forests. “Is that all you called about?” She was relieved; and mildly irritated. Pamela had a gift for raising Laurie’s apprehensions even when she wasn’t aware of them.