He drove on provincial roads and surface streets, always at the speed limit or just under, making only fueling stops and using restrooms where he didn’t have to ask for a key. He was hungry, having skipped breakfast, but he didn’t stop to eat. There’d be time enough for that when the job was behind him. When he worked, he preferred to keep the flow of blood to his brain instead of his digestive system. It was mid-afternoon of a gray December day when he entered Toronto and made his way to the residential section.
There was no reason to notice the car parked in front of the Cabot Inn, except that it was unnoticeable, much like his own: a forty-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass, blue and battered, with decades of grime turning the vinyl top, white originally, the color of spoiled custard. He cruised past without turning his head, but the corner of his eye snagged an impression of a well-built man past middle age climbing out of the driver’s seat, wearing a suit and topcoat as unforgettable as the vehicle. The overcast hung low enough to show that the car’s dome light didn’t come on when the door opened.
Which might have meant anything from neglect to a short-circuit; but Macklin’s own first act after obtaining the Impala was to take its dome light out of service.
He found a spot around the corner and came back on foot, giving the man time to enter the bed-and-breakfast. He wore the Airweight in a belt clip under his fleece-lined leather coat. The Cutlass’ tires were in good shape, the exhaust pipe showing no rust under a skin of dust. The driver’s door was locked; likely so was the passenger’s. Not an insurmountable problem, but getting around it might draw the attention of neighbors. He strolled on past and around the next corner, noting the plate number on the way.
The man was a non-civilian, if not precisely law. Macklin’s senses told him that. Cut and run? No. Just do the job and get out. Forget the frills; they were never strictly part of the deal. Keep your weight on the balls of your feet in case the alert sounded.
He turned a corner yet again, putting himself behind the inn. The antique iron trellis he expected was in place, and from its appearance almost as good as an exterior staircase. The roses that had scaled it in spring and summer were now brown-stemmed and brittle. He gripped it with both hands and tugged. It was secured to the building, the lath struts sound.
He’d seen floor plans and photographs of the building inside and out, thanks to the website maintained by the local tourist facilities: It was a nationally registered historic structure built by a nineteenth-century lumber magnate who’d destroyed all his competition and driven away his wife and daughters, then turned philanthropic as he’d neared his Maker. Most useful were the pictures taken recently, enabling Macklin to locate all the guest rooms. His scout was a deliveryman with a legitimate service, bringing a package addressed to a tenant who’d moved out a few days before. While the old woman who managed the house was looking for a forwarding address, he’d found the most recent entry in the guestbook on a podium, reading “Mr. and Mrs. George Linden,” the name Guy Lennert and his female companion were using in Canada. They were in room 203. Only one of the four windows on the second floor was lit, and it was the right one. With only Lennert’s Chrysler in the parking lot, apart from a Toyota with Ontario plates belonging to the old lady, the likelihood of anyone else staying there that time of year was slim.
You could wait to be absolutely certain; but that time never came. You had to supply your own certainty, and be prepared to correct the situation in a split second if you failed.
The thorns were the only immediate danger—a snag could slow you down or leave evidence behind in the form of torn cloth or broken skin, both loaded with DNA—but with the blooms shriveled, he could see and avoid them, memorizing where they were because he’d be moving faster when he came down. Climbing didn’t come as easily to him as in years past, but he kept in shape and got to the second floor without breathing heavily.
Someone had opened the window three inches, possibly to let steam out. He could hear a shower gushing, but the door that muffled the noise wasn’t airtight; the glass was slightly clouded. He listened, heard no sounds of movement. He peered through the gap above the sill, braced to clamber down if he were spotted; a peeping Tom rap he could beat, even a weapons charge, if he couldn’t get rid of the revolver or run fast enough.
There’d be no running yet. Lennert, looking like all his photographs in spite of his casual dress, was alone in the bedroom in his stocking feet, combing his hair in front of a mirror attached to a dresser. If Macklin had the conscience of a normal man, he’d have been comforted by the thought that the man’s last thought was making himself look good for his lady friend when she came out of the bathroom. There was a superstition even in his profession that a victim slain in terror would be waiting for revenge on the other side.
He wasn’t superstitious, and for that matter the thought didn’t occur to him. To his point of view, Lennert was dead already.
Something—possibly a faint creak caused by his weight on the trellis or a premonition—distracted Lennert from his reflection. He was turning toward the window, holding his comb like a gun, when Macklin rested the barrel of the Airweight on the sill at a slight angle and shot him in the forehead.
There was no need for a second shot for safety. The wound was square in the center and the way he fell said it all: turning a little on one foot the way a tree twists away from the last blow of the axe and tipping plank-stiff off his heels. Macklin was halfway down the trellis, moving quickly but remembering where the thorns were, before the body struck the floor.
He leapt the last three feet, bending his knees to absorb the impact, but instead of running took off at an easy lope, like a man not wanting to miss a crossing light. The revolver was still in his hand, but in the slash pocket of his jacket, out of sight yet handy if needed to clear a path. He paid attention to his peripherals for potential eyewitnesses. You couldn’t expect to eliminate a bevy of them in an open situation, but Leo Dorfman built a better defense when he knew how many to expect during Discovery; a legal process Macklin had yet to face in a long career.
He’d cased the neighborhood long-distance, identifying it as working-class, with most of the residents employed during the day; barring the odd sick-out, the risk was minimal, and it looked as if he’d caught a break. At least he saw no movement in windows.
He slowed down as he approached an old man guiding his Yorkie toward the base of a bench belonging to a bus stop, but the man’s back was toward him, and the padding of feet in the grass alongside the sidewalk didn’t turn him.
Whether the man heard the remote scream that followed, Macklin never knew. By then he was around the corner and climbing into the Impala. He started the motor and pulled gently away from the curb into a street empty of traffic. At the next corner he turned left and glanced up at the rearview mirror. The abused-looking Cutlass was parked in the same place, still minus its driver.
He dismantled the Airweight and stopped at several scenic lookouts—deserted when he visited—along Highway 401 to dump the components into Lake Ontario. After that he delivered the Impala to the scrapyard in London, then walked eight blocks and hailed the first of a succession of cabs, never riding far enough to attract the drivers’ curiosity. The last, in Sarnia, took him across the Blue Water Bridge into Port Huron, Michigan, during evening rush hour. The U.S. Customs officer compared the driver’s and passenger’s faces with their license photos and waved them through.
SEVEN
Macklin was living in Warren pending the outcome of the divorce, sub-letting a condominium from a retired General Motors engineer currently wintering in Key Biscayne. The décor and furnishings wouldn’t have been to his taste even if he cared about those things: heavy on distressed dark wood, brushed brass, and windows with slats intended to make them look mullioned, but which kept falling out, startling him into defense mode. He’d considered removing them, but that would mean a visit from a representative of the condo board, which upheld uniformity of window treatments. In his case, avoi
ding attention was work-related, not paranoia. He missed owning his home.
Ornamental details meant little. The issue was shelter, not style. The location was close enough to the sprawling GM Tech Center to hear the experimental models roaring around the test track; an annoyance to many, but to him a convenience when conducting a telephone conversation he didn’t want his neighbors to overhear.
Like this one:
“You owe a commander in Lansing a C-note,” Leo Dorfman said.
“Is it worth it?” Macklin asked.
“I’d call it a bargain at his rank.”
“I could get the same information from a sergeant.”
“Lieutenants and worse have to sign in when they run a plate, and report the source of the request. Seriously, you’re dickering?”
“Why start now? Give me what you got.”
“It’s a small world. I hired Cutlass guy once.”
“What’s a lawyer doing driving a car twice the age of my son?”
“Not a lawyer, a private cop, and a good one. Amos Walker. Spelled the way it sounds.”
“About six feet, one-eighty, brown hair going gray?”
“Not so gray when I used him, but now, probably. He’s a neighbor, lives and works in Detroit. His thing’s missing persons.”
“What was he doing in Toronto?”
“Ask him.”
“Why should I expose myself?”
“Because I said he’s good; and good’s what you need considering your situation.”
Macklin listened to a driver changing gears at ninety. “You’re the one with the in. Sound him out. Use that checkerboard of yours.”
* * *
Ironically—or perhaps not so, based on his observation of human nature—the less legitimate and socially acceptable of Macklin’s two occupations was the one still in demand.
He’d spent years building up a retail camera business, run by others in his employ who knew nothing of his outside interests, whose profits had allowed him to declare a reasonable amount of income on his taxes. In the years of his apprenticeship with organized crime, he’d seen too many bright lights extinguished for overlooking Washington’s curiosity regarding lavish expenditures on little or no reported income. They languished in prison, condemned not for felonies innumerable, but for stealing from the government.
Macklin had learned from their example. He’d never concealed a dime of profit from sales, deducted no more (and no less) than what was allowed for expenses, and in twenty years his returns had gone unquestioned, enabling him to stash the money he made outside the system and to live off it comfortably but not extravagantly, without calling attention to himself.
When photography went digital, he’d made the conversion (deducting the cost from taxes), and lost customers of his developing service, which was the largest part of the profits. He’d stayed in the black mostly through sales to professional photographers, who wanted the best equipment and were prepared to lay out for it. Then along came cell-phone cameras. Never mind that they couldn’t compete in quality with the lowest-end Canon or Nikon: Your average customer will choose convenience over performance a hundred times out of a hundred. Polaroid had proven that. He’d sold out at the first blip in the market, losing a bundle but not as much as competitors who’d held out longer hoping against hope, and put his broker to work finding medium-risk investments for what he’d managed to make away with. He wasn’t as concerned with financial security as with the loss of his placid front. Too much federal interest in how he supported himself after his legitimate business went under must inevitably lead to local interest in the details. A five-year jolt for tax evasion was one thing, life for Murder One something else.
Professional killing was a horse of another color, in terms of the commercial market; another species, in fact. The faster the march of technology gobbled up trade that had existed for centuries, the more John and Jane Doe found reasons to eliminate each other the analog, non-digital way.
He was paid in cash: Small bills naturally, worn, the serial numbers non-sequential. Any marks not detectable by the naked eye would be rendered worthless by way of his laundering system into the Third World, where black lights were still science fiction. Half up front—fifty percent of the client’s net worth—and the rest on proof of completion. He deposited getaway stakes in several banks under different names, each with corresponding identification, and each deposit well under the ten thousand dollars that financial institutions were required to report to Washington. If one cover was blown, he had the others, and if all were blown, he had cash stashed in several secure venues, with the rest wired by computer to numbered accounts in Andorra, the Cayman Islands, and Switzerland.
The total was substantial, although hardly in Fortune 500 territory—if there were such a popular index for clandestine income.
Which was comforting, especially in view of the message that had come his way by blind email, along with photos he’d never seen before of Laurie, his estranged wife, sniffing a tomato at the Eastern Market (a hangout for them both in better times), swishing down a mall corridor in a sundress and oversize sunglasses, hair bleached nearly white in the summer sun; strolling a familiar street looking flushed, healthy, and heartbreakingly young in a jacket and billed cap designed for fall weather; sipping a steaming drink in an oversize mug gripped in both hands, looking out a frosted window in a heavy winter sweater. The images were arranged sequentially by season, the last doubtlessly captured since the first heavy snow the first week of this month. They were unposed, and likely she hadn’t known they were being taken.
He read again the terse message that accompanied it.
Dorfman had summed it up when he’d said “your situation.”
Macklin closed the file, then typed in Amos Walker’s name.
Even the internet struggled to find him. The man appeared to have no website, no Facebook page—no presence, in fact, in twenty-first-century terms. The only proof he existed were his licenses allowing him to drive and conduct investigations, his name in newspaper files, and an old record of petty arrests, mostly for withholding information in open police cases—one instance serious enough to have led to a temporary revocation of his professional license—but no convictions.
A face that had been lived in, but not to the point of serious wear, solemn but with something in the eyes (hazel, said the official description) that looked like trouble, much of it for the wearer. Broad streaks of gray, but he’d kept his hair, and from what Macklin had seen of him in front of the Cabot Inn he hadn’t fudged when filling in the height and weight blanks: No indication of flabby living, he was prepared to accept that much based on his brief observation of the man in person; although he thought he’d seen the signs of an old injury when he’d climbed out of his car.
Macklin brought his email back up alongside Walker’s picture and read again the message his anonymous correspondent had sent with the photos of Laurie:
$100,000 CASH.
JUST BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T WANT TO LIVE WITH YOU DOESN’T MEAN YOU DON’T WANT HER TO LIVE. MORE SOON.
It was a sum he could manage without paupering himself; whoever was behind the message would be aware of that, and that few in Macklin’s position would risk exposure by balking.
Whoever was behind it was wrong.
Walker was still looking at him, as if he’d read the words and was waiting for Macklin’s decision and whether it would involve him. The answer to both questions was easy.
EIGHT
Macklin’s own unreported income could fit inside one of the zeroes in Leo Dorfman’s, but if anything the lawyer lived even more modestly than his client, in a one-thousand-square-foot house in Redford Township, built during the 1970s and never renovated: the orange shag carpeting and avocado kitchen appliances had survived obsolescence and were probably on their way back into style. An artificial pink-tinted Christmas tree preened in the dining room bay window, sparkling with tinsel and aglow with fat red-and-green electric bulbs on the old-f
ashioned kind of string that went dark whenever one burned out.
“Lyla’s idea,” Dorfman said, inclining his white head toward his wife of fifty-three years, hanging exterior lights on the firs planted outside the window, her nose as red as Rudolph’s. Her coat trimmed with faux fur and black knitted watchcap belonged in the pages of The Bag Lady’s Home Companion. “I’d remind her we’re Jewish, but I just don’t have the heart.”
It would be news to many that he had one of any kind. There wasn’t a cop in metropolitan Detroit who didn’t call him a “criminal attorney” without an involuntary twist of the mouth.
The counselor’s only personal concession to the season had been to add a gay sweater vest to one of his funereal suits. Of the two, Apple Annie with her credit account at Neiman Marcus and the undertaker with cardinals embroidered on his chest, the visitor couldn’t determine which was the more incongruous.
But then undertaker was too conservative a description for Leo Zephaniah Dorfman. His FBI file associated him with more burials than the Ebola virus. The reports were worded carefully, alleged prominent in every paragraph. He’d never been convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, or even placed under arrest for suspicion. Unlike Macklin’s, his personal transactions were all legitimate and spelled out on his Form 1040, investments based on payments for his legal services. A score of intensive investigations had failed to turn up even one client who’d arranged a professional killing through him. The clients, of course, weren’t talking, and the billing hours, expenses, and consultation fees reported in the lawyer’s books could all be traced to legitimate advice. The fact that he hadn’t set foot in a courtroom or filed a brief in more than a decade did not constitute evidence.
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