by Otto Penzler
“The Black Spot” was first published in the March/April 2015 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places (Blue Ash, Ohio, Tyrus Books, 2016).
THE BLACK SPOT
Loren D. Estleman
THEY SAID LEO DORFMAN had forgotten more about the law than most lawyers ever knew.
A couple of his clients, currently serving as guests of the federal government, agreed.
He’d been eighty for as long as Peter Macklin could remember, a stopped clock now in semiretirement, working out of his Redford Township dining room in one of the three-piece suits he continued to wear every day. Mrs. Dorfman, brown and wrinkled in a woven sun hat, sleeveless blouse, and yellow shorts, knelt in her flower garden outside. Macklin glanced at her from his seat opposite the lawyer’s at the round table.
“Don’t worry about Lyla,” Dorfman said. “She can’t hear herself fart.”
But Macklin kept his voice low. “Laurie’s divorcing me.”
“I’m sorry. Being a criminal attorney, I can’t help you. But I can recommend some good divorce men.”
“I’m going to settle. I can’t afford to have experts performing archaeology on the source of my finances.”
“That’s wise. Do you have a figure in mind?”
“Half a million should do it. Another hundred for incidentals.”
“Have that much?”
“No. That’s why I’m here. I need to work.”
“What about your legitimate business?”
“I should have sold out ten years ago. No one goes to camera stores any more. Any prospects?”
“I may have something, but you won’t like it.”
“A name?”
“Sal Malavaggio.”
Macklin didn’t like it.
“I didn’t know he was out,” he said.
“He’s in a halfway house in the Irish Hills. Next week he’ll be back in Detroit. One of his people called. I said I didn’t have those contacts any more. I thought you were out of it.”
Macklin said nothing. He never wasted time on regrets.
The lawyer said, “Your timing couldn’t be better—if you want the job. He wants six guys dead, and he wants it fast. I know you like groundwork, but you’ll have to scramble on this one. I think we can get him up to a hundred a pop.”
“I need a hundred up front.”
“I don’t know if he’ll agree to that.”
“He will. This isn’t a job for Costco.”
—
Since he’d moved out of the house in Toledo, Peter Macklin was renting a house in Pontiac, thirty miles northwest of Detroit. When he got back from Redford, he switched on the TV for company. Somebody had blown up something in the Middle East. It seemed to be a big deal.
He wasn’t thrilled about working for Salvatore Malavaggio. The man was as Sicilian as they came—his family tree didn’t branch—and had done fifteen years on a RICO rap he might have beaten if he’d gone into Witness Protection; but he was an old-school Omerta man, buried so deep in the foundations of the Mafia he flossed his teeth with a garrote.
Macklin had thought to leave that all behind many years ago. After his first divorce he’d gone independent, demanding that prospective clients come up with income tax forms and bank statements detailing everything they owned, which was what he charged for committing murder. This policy weeded out the frivolous. It was amazing how many people were willing to take a vow of poverty just to tip someone the black spot.
Then he’d met Laurie, a beautiful, intelligent woman half his age, and retired on his legitimate investments; but eventually the truth of his past had come out, and that was the end of that.
Now here he was, in his forties, separated, forced to fall back on the only skill he had to survive.
When the FedEx package arrived he took out a small rounded rectangle of plastic.
“Expect it,” Dorfman had said. “It’s a burn phone, anonymous and untraceable. Throw it in the river when you’re through with it. The money will be electronically deposited in the following banks, first the advance, then an additional payment each time you score; nine thousand in each account, so it won’t be reported to the IRS. My ten percent comes off the top.”
A series of names and account numbers followed, all prearranged for just such a situation. Macklin had written them all down. “We don’t meet face-to-face after today. Wait for instructions by text.”
No room for bargaining on the fee. Leo Dorfman was the only lawyer in the country who’d go near the case. It had made him a millionaire many times over, but the other side of the coin was he’d installed a remote starter in his car in case of detonation.
—
The first text came in ten minutes after Macklin finished charging the phone. Something buzzed, he pressed a key, and looked at the screen. It provided a name, address, vital statistics, and a photo. A second text informed him that ninety thousand dollars had been deposited in his name, spread out among ten separate accounts. It was really amazing what technology had done for crime.
—
Nikolai Kobolov lived in Bloomfield Village, where a house smaller than 5,000 square feet was considered a starter. When the Berlin Wall fell and the KGB temporarily lost interest in the Russian Mafia, he’d emigrated to the U.S. and invested his Swiss bank accounts in the insurance business, selling protection to expatriate Communists from their enemies, and occasionally from his own people, who respected such things as Molotov cocktails.
He hung his bullet-shaped body in good tailoring and in the wintertime wore a long belted overcoat and a fur hat, like Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago. He was part Ukrainian, descended from Cossacks.
When he left his house, riding in the back of a stretch Lincoln driven by a chauffeur in livery, two cars followed, one containing four men licensed to carry firearms in defense of his life. Two FBI agents rode in the other. It was almost four o’clock, the time appointed for his daily shaving. He liked a clean head.
The shop downtown, which called itself a salon, was all glistening glass, chrome, and tile. He took a seat in his customary chair while his bodyguards read newspapers in the waiting area and the two FBI men sat in their car outside. A man Kobolov didn’t recognize covered him in crisp white linen. He wore a white jacket fastened at one shoulder with buttons.
“Where’s Fred?” the customer asked.
“Sick today.”
He shook a thick finger at the man. “No nicks. I’m going out with a young lady tonight.”
“Yes, sir.” The barber removed a towel from the warmer and wrapped it turbanlike around Kobolov’s head. The Russian sighed, lulled into a doze, as always, by the heat. He barely shuddered when the ice pick entered the top of his spinal column. The bodyguards were still reading when the barber went out through the back room.
—
Sanders Quotient was a third-round draft choice for the Detroit Lions, but he’d been drummed out of the league for unsportsmanlike conduct. He’d sued on the basis of discrimination; however, the NAACP had refused him use of its counsel. He’d invested the proceeds from his first year’s contract in one of the biggest drug operations in the Midwest, dealing in cocaine and heroin. Some of it was too strong for the clientele, who’d died of OD.
He lived in an original Frank Lloyd Wright house in St. Clair Shores. The open plan, and the unobstructed view through big windows, appealed to him.
He had no bodyguards. At thirty-five, in excellent condition, he could take care of himself. If that was overoptimistic, he had two DEA agents watching his house in eight-hour shifts, hoping to catch him in an illegal transaction.
He got up around 2:00 A.M., leaving a fine young woman in his round bed, to crack open a bottle of imported beer. In the kitchen, he heard a thump coming from his deck.
On the way through the rec room he selected a Glock nine from the rack and went to the sliding glass door to investigate. Gripping the weapon tightly and huggin
g the wall, he reached for the lock. It was open. He always made sure everything was sealed tight before bed.
He was turning from the door, pistol in hand, when his head exploded.
The coroner assigned cause of death to a blow that caved in his skull, pieces of which clung by blood and gray matter to a blackjack, discarded without fingerprints.
—
Zev Issachar controlled most of the illegal gambling between Chicago and the East Coast. At seventy-two, he was retired, but there wasn’t an underground casino or unsanctioned high-stakes poker game that didn’t pay him tribute. He’d changed his name legally from Howard Needleman before applying for residency in Israel to avoid arrest. Tel Aviv had turned him down.
He was awaiting trial for violation of the laws of interstate commerce. It was a rap he could beat, but he considered the electronic ankle tether humiliating, and it aggravated his arthritis.
On Saturday, he boarded a van belonging to the Justice Department, bound from his modest home in Highland Park to synagogue, in the company of two U.S. deputy marshals. Inside the temple, as his manacles were being removed, a man dressed as a Hassidim shot him three times in the chest before vanishing into the crowd waiting for the inner doors to open. Zev died instantly. The marshals gave chase, but found only a coat, hat, wig, and false whiskers in a pile by the fire exit.
—
“I thought we’d moved beyond all this after nine-eleven.”
Inspector Deborah Stonesmith commanded the Detroit Major Crimes Unit, which was helping to coordinate the efforts of the three major homicide divisions involved. She was a tall, handsome black woman with reddish hair, dressed conservatively in tweeds. The only touch of femininity in her office at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, was a spray of peonies in a vase on her desk.
“That’s just it.” Wes Crider, a homicide lieutenant, lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “These mobsters think we’re too busy looking for Islamic Fascists to bother with them.”
“They never heard of multitasking? If this is the Russian Mafia taking on the black Mafia, or the Jewish Mafia taking on either of the others, it’s a turf war. Targeting all three makes it something else.”
“A synagogue, yet; a place of worship. Is nothing sacred?”
“As opposed to plain murder? Who else we got?”
Crider took out a notebook with scraps of ragged paper sticking out of the edges at every angle, like Grandma’s cookbook. “Kim Park? Got all the massage parlors nailed down; prostitution, with a little shiatsu on the side. Korean Cosa Nostra.”
“He’s a maybe. What about Sal Malavaggio? He’s a sitting duck in that halfway house. Security there’s to keep them in, not others out.”
“He’s strictly a Mustache Pete. Those Sicilians went out with Pet Rocks.”
“Let’s put a car out front, just in case. Who else?”
Flip, flip. “Vittorio Bandolero, runs the best restaurant in Mexicantown. Smuggles illegals into the country. Last time his people thought they were being tailed, they machine-gunned the carload.”
“Next.”
“Jebediah Colt: Jeb the Reb, on the street. Dixie Mafia, Stolen Goods Division. Fences everything from bellybutton rings to catalytic converters.”
Stonesmith smiled. “I’ve seen his file. Sweetbreads in his freezer is what he’s got for brains. What else?”
“That’s the kit. All the Mafias: Russian, black, Jewish, Asian, Mexican, Dixie, and the Sicilian original. You know, if they’d just trademarked the name—”
“They’d be Microsoft.”
—
“Sí, I understand. I, too, would exit the driver’s seat of a truck when a helicopter flew overhead; however, I might have waited until a searchlight came on, just to make sure it wasn’t a traffic vehicle from a radio station.”
Vittorio Bandolero hung up and scowled at the man seated across the desk. They were in the back room of the Mexicantown restaurant whose income he reported to the federal government for taxation purposes. “I am losing patience with Immigration. Not all of my people have the slightest interest in overthrowing the government. I merely want muchachos who can fry a tortilla and cut the occasional throat. Is that too much to ask?”
Bandolero’s segundo, a small man with scars on both cheeks and black hair swept back from his temples—longer than those on top, like the fenders of a 1949 Mercury—moved his shoulders, paring his nails with a switchblade. “There are people to grease, jefe. We should meet with them.”
“Dónde?”
“The Alamo; ten o’clock, so I am told.”
The Alamo Motel stood on East Jefferson facing the river, a dump that rented rooms by the hour. Bandolero knocked at the door he’d been directed to. It opened at the pressure of his fist. He stepped inside.
Something swooped, tightened around his throat. He couldn’t get his hands under it. He thrashed, crooked his elbows, made no contact. His tongue slid out of his mouth just before he lost consciousness.
The first officer on the scene reported a deceased male, apparently strangled to death with nylon fishline.
—
Deborah Stonesmith stood over the body of Vittorio Bandolero, dragged into a sitting position against the wall of the motel room. The fishline was embedded two inches into his neck.
“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” she said. “Someone’s moving in.”
Lieutenant Crider said, “We need to open a tip line. An army of hit men can’t go unnoticed for long.”
“So it’s an army.”
“We got us an ice pick, a bludgeon, a gun, and a garrote. Heavy-lifters specialize. Nobody uses this much variety.”
“One does,” she said, smoothing her tweed skirt. “I thought he was dead, or moved—or hoped so; but wishful thinking never got nobody nothing but thinking wishful.”
—
Kim Park had come to the U.S. with a dollar eighty-seven in his pocket; also three hundred thousand dollars in Krugerrands in the false bottom of his suitcase, belonging to a Detroit politician who died before taking delivery. Park had invested this windfall in a string of massage parlors. He found America truly to be the Land of Opportunity.
The girls were skilled. What did it matter if their trained hands were joined by their bodies, so long as they split the tips with the management? But then an undercover cop had found a girl willing to testify that she’d been sold into slavery by her parents. She’d managed to stumble into a number of Dumpsters between Detroit and Flint: her torso here, a leg there, and her head and hands who knew where. A man couldn’t be held responsible for the bad choices of all his employees.
In any case, Kim Park never went anywhere without a train of vice officers making note of where he stopped and whom he spoke to. It pleased him to think of them stuck in their cars while he took a steam in one of his own places in Detroit.
He’d just poured a dipper of water over the heated rocks when the door opened, stirring the thick vapor. He grinned, expecting a half-naked Korean girl ready to escort him to the table. His head was still wearing the grin when it rolled out of the steam room, cut off with a hunting knife found in a towel hamper, its handle wiped clean.
—
Sal Malavaggio selected a cigar from the humidor on his desk, rustled it next to his ear, dropped it back into the box, and shut the lid. “Remind me to order fresh cigars. I kept better than these did.”
“Way ahead of you,” Miriam Brewster said. “A colleague in Key West has a standing order of Montecristos. Two boxes on the way.”
Malavaggio, short and stout, with a glossy head of dyed-black hair, had chosen Brewster out of vanity; she was an inch shorter than he was, and fatter yet in a tailored suit. But she had turned out to be a double blessing as one of the country’s foremost Constitutional scholars.
“Tell me again about overturning RICO.” He settled himself in the upholstered leather chair, taking in the comforts of home for the first time in fifteen years.
She sat facing the desk and crossed
her chubby legs. “It will take years, and maybe a change or two on the Supreme Court, but anyone can tell you it’s a jump-wire around the Bill of Rights. The government couldn’t get your people legally, so it crooked the system. In a way it was a victory for you.”
“Yeah. That brought me comfort in stir, while them animals took over the works. Russian Mafia, black Mafia, Jewish Mafia, Asian Mafia. They couldn’t even come up with a name of their own. But I’m changing that.”
He looked at his Rolex, lifted a remote off the desk, and snapped it at the new flatscreen TV mounted on the wall opposite. A local reporter stood in front of one of Kim Park’s rub-a-dub parlors, chattering breathlessly as morgue attendants carried a body bag on a stretcher out the door. “Trouble with whacking a chink,” Malavaggio said, “an hour later you want to whack another one.”
“I didn’t hear that.” Brewster’s lips were tight. “Be patient, Sal, I beg you. What good’s winning our point when you’re doing life for murder?”
“What murder’s that, Counselor? I was checking out of the halfway house when some feccia made that improvement in Jackie Chan’s looks. Same place I was when the Russky bought it, and the porch monkey and the Hebe. Sounds like the start of a joke, don’t it? They go into a bar?”
“Sure, Sal. You’re clean.”
“Cleaning house,” he said. “When I’m through, everybody’ll know there’s only one Mafia.”
—
Colt’s Ponies sold campers, travel trailers, and motor homes from four locations in the Detroit metropolitan area. The business provided an income Jebediah Colt could declare on his taxes and a neat bit of camouflage: Who’d look for a trailer containing hot transmissions on a trailer lot?
He’d declared his independence at fourteen, when he cold-cocked his father with a meat hammer, stole a car, and drove north to assemble Mustangs at Ford River Rouge. He was fired for stealing tools and parts, but by then he’d put enough away to open his own full-time business at twenty. He dealt in jewelry, rare coins, copper plumbing, and genuine factory auto parts, all stolen.
