Black and White Ball

by Loren D. Estleman

I never found out what it didn’t. I pulled her door shut and sprinted downstairs.

  “What’s the matter, neighbor, roof blow in?”

  A man around my age, wearing the kind of pajamas you save for when everything else is in the wash, stood inside the open door of a ground-floor apartment, scratching a wild patch of gray hair with a pipestem. His toes looked indecent sticking out of flip-flops, as men’s do.

  I muttered something about getting my car off the street to make room for the plow. To leave him curious would be to cut Roger’s reaction time when he came to find out why he hadn’t seen us around.

  The nose of the Cutlass stuck out of a quay of snow that was already up to my shins. The motor didn’t want to start. I pumped the pedal, tried again, and it made a noise like a sick hippo. I serenaded it with lyrics from a filthy sea chantey and it fired a couple of times and caught. Then the wipers wouldn’t budge, so I got out, shoving my feet into the only mud puddle in southeastern Michigan that wasn’t completely frozen, and broke them free of the ice. Of course, I’d left them turned on, so I got slapped in the snoot for my trouble.

  Winter Wonderland, they used to call our state: Put it on the license plates.

  I went back up, and here was one woman who could put herself together in less time than it takes to watch an opera. She’d run a brush through her hair, applied paint and powder, and managed to make a bulky polar coat look like a Dior sheath. The turtleneck of what looked like the sweater she’d worn in her most recent candid photograph tickled the soft flesh under her jawbone. Quickly but with precision she scooped her hair into a red knitted beret, pulled the sides down over her ears, and picked up a small suitcase made of molded fiberglass by the handle.

  She caught me staring. “What?”

  “Just wondering why Macklin let you go.”

  She smiled then, wide as the world.

  TWENTY-THREE

  You can drive from Milford to Detroit in a little over thirty minutes. It took us two hours.

  The snow was drifting across all lanes, with nothing to stop it this side of Windsor, and already the overpasses looked like something stranded in an unbroken field of white. The sun was a watery lightness in the pewter-colored overcast; you could lose it in any of the fifty-foot lamps that stood on both sides of the Chrysler freeway. They were usually shut off by that time of day. But not today.

  I was in no hurry. A sixteen-ton semi was stuck in the acceleration lane like a plastic horse in a slotted track, and every quarter-mile or so an Oompa Loompa decorated the shoulder, waiting for a shovel to turn it back into an automobile. I’d timed my entry to let a big orange bronto of a county snowplow pass and we rode its polished wake all the way to Southfield, where it got off to help clear Telegraph Road. We’d clocked a steady seventeen miles per hour, but with the snow flying fast as ever—we were moving with the storm, after all—I slowed down with no one running interference.

  We made no conversation during that trip. My passenger’s face stuttered in and out of view as we passed the tower lights, looking like the terrified woman on an old-time paperback cover. When I saw myself in the rearview I looked like one, too.

  It was as bad as things get in a state that doesn’t have hurricanes or tidal waves, but it didn’t stop the occasional Autobahner from cruising past us at seventy, driving a four-wheeler that performed swell in heavy snow but not on glassy pavement. We usually found him up the road, a pair of trouble lights flashing SOS from the depths of a snowdrift on the shoulder.

  We slalomed a bit ourselves, once completing two thirds of a 180, luckily with no cars in our path. That was months ago, and I can still make out the impressions of Laurie’s fingers in the dash on the passenger side.

  As for traffic, it was less than on a usual Sunday, but nothing like the wasteland in states that don’t get big snows often enough to stock the salt and equipment necessary to deal with them. Some people work weekends, and in our city you didn’t let a little thing like the Blizzard of the Century keep you from punching in. If you did it once, what’s to stop you from making a habit of it, and of standing in line outside the employment office?

  The flakes were coming slower when we took the exit, avoiding the side streets where we could because they’re the last to see a city scraper.

  Laurie broke her vow of silence. “Where are we going, by the way? A hotel?”

  “It isn’t Miami. There aren’t so many Roger can’t cover them all, showing your picture to desk clerks wrapped in a C-note. I thought about my place, but these days it looks like I’m the only one who needs a key to get in. Your husband’s already been there twice without being invited. He broke into my office once; but right now I think that’s the one place no one will expect you to pitch a tent.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Because it’s uncomfortable enough just sitting in it eight hours a day.”

  Grand River Avenue, a fairly dirty stretch of urban landscape with all the architectural innovation of an aircraft hangar, had vanished. In its place someone had smuggled in a village from the English lake country. The snow had almost stopped, the flakes turning slowly as they fell, like paper cutouts in a mobile. The sun had shouldered its way into the open, making the cloaked sidewalks sparkle. The parking meters wore elves’ caps and snow hung lace curtains in the windows. The air was as clean and sharp as new steel.

  It was as beautiful as we get. We paid tribute to it by saying nothing, rolling silently through the black tracks other tires had made in the white and looking through all our windows. It was temporary, which was a big part of the charm. In no time at all more tires would churn it into brown slush, stray dogs and homeless men would contribute their own personal shade of yellow, and rivers of icy dung-colored melt would pour into the gutters, gurgling and snorting like an old man with post-nasal drip. But for now it was something to hang on the wall and look at on those days when you were shut in.

  My building had a jump on the others. It stuck its ugly mug three stories into a sky suddenly turned achingly blue, sharpening the contrast. Horned and scaly creatures from myth spat rusty water from the roof, staining the walls a deeper shade of umber and making a moat in the snow at their base. It made the House of Usher look like the Crystal Palace.

  There was no sign of my self-appointed parking valet in the deserted building across the street. I was surprised he’d hung around as long as he had; as intriguing venues go, a concrete shell filled with the ghosts of grease monkeys and dishwashers is a long way from the ruins of Troy.

  The lights were on in my building. I saw it as a good sign.

  We found the super plucking white plastic letters from the directory in the foyer. He looked like a Russian peasant in a political cartoon. A colony of hippies had moved out of the seat of his overalls and he was growing new cultures in the faded red handkerchief hanging like a tongue out of his hip pocket.

  “Laurie Macklin, this is Rosecranz,” I said. “When they built the Kremlin, he carried the hod.”

  “A lie. It is made of wood.” I think he actually pulled his forelock when he laid eyes on my guest.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Rosecranz.”

  “Please, just Rosecranz. I came to this country because it knows no class.”

  She laughed. “Classes.”

  “No, he got it right. Who’d we lose?” I pointed at the jumble of letters in his calloused palm with my chin.

  “The tailor. In the middle of the night he left, with all his samples and two weeks’ behind on the rent.”

  “The corporation will blame you for that.”

  “I am sure.”

  I cranked out my wallet and started counting out bills from Macklin’s deck. “This should cover it. With change to spare, since you charge me more than anyone else in the building.”

  For answer he inclined his forehead toward the ruptures in the tile walls. Laurie looked. “Are those bullet holes?”

  “Get yourself shot at once at work, years ago, and they never let you forge
t,” I said. To him: “You still got that rollaway cot in your office?”

  “A man must sleep.”

  I added a fifty to the sheaf of cash. “For this you can do it standing up, like a horse. Take it up to the tailor’s, with some fresh linen. You’ve got a new tenant.”

  He looked at her again. For him she’d lost her charm.

  “It is against the law.”

  “When did you start caring about zoning? You sleep here yourself and you founded a Russian province in the basement. How many relatives do you have, anyway?”

  “I should send them back to Kiev?”

  “I’m sure it’s stopped glowing by now.”

  “Give it up, Amos,” Laurie said. “The man doesn’t want me here.”

  “I did not say that.”

  He took the bills, stuffed them in his bib pocket, and shuffled toward his door around the corner from the stairwell, walking on the outside of his feet with one knee pointing west and the other pointing east. Waiting for the cot, I shook out a cigarette and tapped it against the back of my hand.

  Laurie said, “How often do you go through some version of that?”

  “It isn’t that bad. I don’t always see him.”

  “Where would you have put me if the tailor hadn’t moved out?”

  “Look at this dump. It’s off the main track in a city where anyone can afford to set up downtown. It’s got more empty space than a goalie’s smile, and every week they knock down another crack house and don’t put up anything in its place. The tailor was on my floor; that’s a break I hadn’t counted on. Between that and the blizzard, our luck may be changing.”

  “How long am I staying?”

  “As long as it takes and as short as I can make it. At the risk of bruising your feelings, the plan is to have you out long before the rent comes due. I’m not being cheap. We flung ourselves into the teeth of the storm for a reason. With you under wraps, I’m free to do some stalking of my own.”

  “That’s not what Peter hired you for.”

  “So he said, at gunpoint. I’m not the waiting type, I told you that. Consider me a one-man ad hoc committee.”

  “First I left a house, now an apartment. What’s next, a refrigerator box?”

  The old fraud came back, pushing a striped mattress in a metal frame. Three of its casters squeaked and the fourth spun horizontally, like every other supermarket cart on earth. Folded double, the mattress was as thick as a mouse pad. I helped him lug it up the stairs. By the time we reached the second landing I was wheezing like a leaky calliope. He was sweating a little. To hear him tell it he’d hiked all the way from Moscow to Odessa in diapers, with Cossacks galloping close behind. That would put him in his second century, but even if it was malarkey he had the constitution of a steppe bear.

  The tailor’s office, down the hall and across from mine, smelled of sizing and starch and there were enough bits of snipped thread on the floor to weave and clothe a wedding party. A beige telephone stood on the floor with the wire coiled around it. I opened the narrow door to the water closet. It had the same setup as mine, a toilet and sink and no counter, but I had a mirror above the sink. It was no bigger than the changing room in a cabana. The office itself was a good-size space, with no partition to divide a reception area from the workroom, unlike mine. The window was shaded and the light came harshly from an unfrosted bulb in a clear bowl attached to the ceiling.

  “Could be worse,” I said. “Ten years ago I bribed a client out of solitary in the Jackson pen. He didn’t have a phone.”

  Rosecranz said, “It is shut off.”

  Laurie looked around. She’d taken off her beret and shaken loose her hair, and stood slapping her hip with the hat.

  “It’s not so bad. My dorm room at OSU was smaller, and I had to share it with two other girls. I could use a mirror, and access to a shower when I’m tired of taking sink baths.”

  “I can smuggle you into mine,” I said.

  The Russian shook his shaggy head. “It is no place for a lady.”

  “Lucky I’m not one.”

  I dug out another fifty. “I’d feel better if someone sat in the hall at night. There’s more where this came from if it goes past three nights.”

  He thrust his fists in his pockets. “I am not a Bolshevik. I will sit outside her door for as long as necessary and you need not bribe me like a guard in prison.”

  Just when you think someone has no surprises left, he draws one like a pistol.

  Which reminded me. I excused myself, let myself into my office, unlocked the safe, and returned carrying the Luger.

  “I’ve got a gun, remember?”

  “Not enough gun. A pro like Roger eats .32 slugs like peanuts.”

  I showed her where the safety was, racked the shell out of the barrel, slipped out the magazine and replaced it, and pumped another into the pipe. I extended it butt-first. A slender hand wrapped itself around the checked grips. She knew enough to point it at an uninhabited corner while she examined it. Rosecranz looked on, his face dark and disapproving.

  “You asked about a secret knock before.” I rapped the nearest wall twice, then paused, then rapped again. She aped the gesture. “If it’s anything else,” I said, “answer it with bullets.”

  THEM

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He’d slept in the ’Vette.

  The storm didn’t hit until the wee hours, but from the reports on the radio, confirmed by the Weather Service website on his dash computer, he couldn’t be sure if he’d be able to drive back into town from the dump he was renting in Wixom. But the seat reclined, and when the cold woke him he’d started the engine and let the heater warm the interior. With a deli wrap and a bottle of Perrier—given his condition, he’d learned the importance of keeping his body tuned up as well as the car—he was content to spend the night in the parking lot of a medical building that closed at seven, getting out when necessary to relieve himself into a planter containing a young tree. He’d slept in worse places.

  It amused him, when he gave thought to his rheumatic heart, to reflect upon the fact that his contempt for his mother was even stronger than his father’s indifference to her. If she hadn’t spent Roger’s teenage years in an alcoholic haze, she’d have gotten him the treatment he needed to restore his health. When the bottle took precedence over the maternal instinct, who was the real criminal, the second-generation contract killer or the drink-sodden mother of a sick child?

  But if it hadn’t been for Peter Macklin, his choice of professions and the lie he lived at home—when he was home—there’d have been no bottle, and consequently no need for Roger to spend every waking moment under the shadow of death. Seeing the old man playing the hypocrite at Donna Macklin’s graveside had brought his blood to a boil. How ironic would it have been had Roger’s heart given out when he took a swing at the man he hated more than any other?

  To top it all, the two-faced son of a bitch had had the colossal nerve to try to keep his son from the work he himself was still conducting, then marry a woman barely older than Roger and begin living the lie all over again.

  Forcing him to pay for sparing her life, then killing her anyway and then hanging it on him; that would settle so many scores.

  If—longest of long shots—the thing could be done while Macklin watched helpless would be even sweeter. But—

  Killing Macklin next, in his own cell, once he’d suffered enough; now, that would be worth even a fatal heart attack.

  He had fallen asleep and was dreaming that very thing when the blizzard hit, snatching the car between its teeth and shaking it like a dog. The Corvette rocked on its springs, a gush of snow whited out the windows and windshield, icy air found its way in through every seam in the compartment, blowing hard, grainy snow that pricked his face and neck like needles and stung his ears.

  He twisted the key in the ignition, but he’d slept longer than he’d thought; the fan blew nothing but cold at his feet. He switched it off while the motor warmed up, then opened
all the vents, turned his collar up around his ears, and slid down onto his spine with his knees pressed against the dash and his arms folded with his hands in his armpits. The driving gloves he wore were uninsulated and helpless against frostbite. He turned on the radio for the distraction.

  “This storm is moving rapidly.…”

  “No shit, Stephen Hawking.” He scanned through more End-of-Days voices, squirming nests of rap, and a horde of talk shows, stopping at last on an R-and-B station. But every fresh gust brought static. He bailed out and listened to the wind climb and fall and ice crystals rattling against the finish.

  The snow swept past in clouds, smacking the side of the car in waves and rocking it on its springs. The motion and the monotony put him to sleep.

  When he woke, the storm had blown out of town. Winter advisories remained in force to the east, with countless reports of vehicles wrecked or stranded. Meanwhile, in the village, peace reigned. Snow swaddled it in eerie silence. Even the constant thrum of freeway traffic had ceased, apart from the rumble of heavy trucks pushing snow and spraying brine.

  He had to heave his weight against the door to break loose the ice, and when he got out with his brush and scraper he saw the fall had turned its clean lines into something resembling a plush toy. He dug out the exhaust pipe first to prevent an ice ball from sealing it, and as the blue-gray smoke appeared and the heat melted a dirty hole in the white drift, he used the brush to push the heavy snow off the roof, hood, and trunk, then the scraper to clear the windshield and windows of ice softened by the blower inside.

  All this helped him stay on point. If his resentment hadn’t gotten to the point where it interfered with his sleep, he’d still be in Miami Beach, where he owned a condo, or vacationing in Vegas, where a hotel manager who was paying down his debt to one of Roger’s associates kept a suite vacant (and off the registry) for important visitors. Just because a man was born and reared in Michigan—Siberia West—didn’t mean he had to put up with mukluks and mittens five months out of the year. The amount he spent running the Corvette through a car wash twice a week to keep the slush and road salt from eating holes in the undercarriage was better dumped on the craps table, which at least was entertaining.