Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

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  Any Man’s Death

  A Peter Macklin Thriller

  Loren D. Estleman

  For S.T.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sister Lucinda was a quarter beat behind.

  She was the only contralto in the group and its newest member, but the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith flattered himself that he could have identified the responsible party in a chorus of sopranos. Before he got the Call he had played backup guitar with the Geeks out of Royal Oak, and he still had his ear, even in a crowd the size of the one he always drew for the late Sunday morning service when the Tigers were in town. He made a mental note to talk to the sister about it after everyone else had left.

  When the singing was through and the parishioners had regained their seats, he opened the big Bible on the pulpit to the page he had marked with a guitar pick and began to read in the rich bass he had developed in those former days of darkness. In the Spartan interior of the church he was a startling figure wearing robes of rose-colored satin, a big brown man with a shaved head the size of a basketball against the sisters behind him in pale yellow with their hair in buns and the less noticeable four wide men in blue suits seated to his right. As he spoke he looked out on the congregation with eyes moist and black and strangely inanimate, like drippings from a black candle.

  “‘Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus,’” he thundered, “‘took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.

  “‘They said therefore among themselves, let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be; that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, they parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did.’”

  He slammed shut the book with a boom that reverberated in the rafters and made the audience jump. The basketball head swiveled slowly, leaving no seat untouched by the waxen black eyes as he came around from behind the pulpit with its lining of bulletproof plastic.

  “I hate it when he does that,” commented one of the wide men in blue to his neighbor.

  “And so, dear friends,” Sunsmith rumbled, “it remains to this day, that to gamble is a sin under the Bible and an abomination in the eyes of God; for he who wagers his chattel on the gaming table of greed is casting lots for the coat of our Lord on the cross, and will be damned for it.”

  Without taking his eyes off the audience, he reached behind the pulpit with one of the long arms he had used to lunge for C above high C and held up a sheet of paper.

  “Brother Clark confiscated this from a man in Cadillac Square Tuesday morning. It is signed by an organization that calls itself Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit and claims to be a petition calling for a vote to legalize games of chance within the Detroit city limits. But this is not what it is, dear friends; no, indeed.”

  His voice rose. “It is a pact, not a petition, and it is not with your neighbors, but with Satan, and the CCGD does not stand for Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit, but for Cry Craps and Go to the Devil!”

  This sparked cheering and appreciative laughter from the congregation. But Sunsmith was not smiling. He lowered the paper.

  “Mind,” he went on, more quietly, “that I do not speak against games of chance because they steal bread from the mouths of children, or because they reduce men and women to pigs snuffling in the trough; no, dear friends, these are not my reasons, although they should be enough for any decent man or woman. A government that smiles upon the casting of lots for Jesus’ coat would as soon outlaw the Word of the Lord and cast us all into darkness. And so, dear friends, when the petitioner comes to your door and says that he represents Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit and asks for your signature on his pact, tell him that you will not cast lots for the coat of our Lord, but that instead you are casting your lot with our Lord, and if he still refuses to see the light, then show him the door! Three, four.”

  The sisters came in with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the sweet mix sliding over the cheering and applause in the congregation. But the effect was spoiled when Sister Lucinda entered the sixteenth bar a full beat behind the others. The Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith turned to glare at her, and in the act saved his own life. He saw the flash and felt something clip his collar and then he saw metal gleam and then all four wide men in blue were on their feet with their big nine-millimeters in their hands going off in ragged succession like four engines firing on a cold day. Big round spots like red quarters appeared on Sister Lucinda’s yellow gown and her mouth opened and she dropped the gun and because her legs were covered she seemed to wither and shrink as the four guns followed her down.

  The throb of gunfire in the big room took the place of the singing, and for an instant there was no reaction. Then a woman in the audience who had not seen Sister Lucinda falling saw the four wide men standing holding their empty guns with the actions run all the way back and the rest was screaming.

  “Mr. Boniface.”

  The heavy man with the hooking features, sixty but black-haired and not a hair of it dyed because that wasn’t allowed inside, barely glanced at the young sandy-haired man in the blue suit with orange pinstripes. Picante was with him in the corridor and the heavy man said, “Where’s Klegg?”

  “Tied up,” Picante said. “This is one of the junior partners. Michael Boniface, Jason—”

  “What the fuck I pay him for, he don’t come down to see I get out when I’m supposed to? What if there was something wrong with the paperwork?”

  The young lawyer said, “All the arrangements were made beforehand, Mr. Boniface.”

  “Bo-ni-fa-ce,” corrected the heavy man.

  The young man whitened. “Didn’t I say it right? I—”

  “Any way a punk like you says it, it comes out Boniface. Don’t say it no more.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They were walking down the corridor, which had an institutional smell of lemon wax and stationary air. The heavy man’s suit, expensively tailored, was strained in front and his neck rolled over his tight collar. His face had a slightly bloated look.

  Picante said, “You look good, Mike.”

  “Bullshit. That government food would blow up Gandhi.”

  They passed through the metal detector at the end of the corridor and crossed a narrow strip of grass to the paved driveway leading to the gate. There the young lawyer showed papers to the guard in the booth and the guard buzzed open the gate. A deep blue Mercury was parked against the curb outside. Picante opened the rear door and held it.

  “Let the punk ride nigger,” the heavy man said. “I got my fill of that shit between here and federal court.”

  The lawyer got into the back seat and the heavy man climbed in next to Picante in front. Picante was lean and dark in a textured brown polyester suit. He had long upper teeth and thinning brown hair that he combed sideways across his scalp and when he smiled, not often, his face broke into vertical creases like an accordion. The heavy man watched him transfer a nickel-plated Colt Diamondback .38 revolver from the glove compartment to his underarm holster.

  “When you going to see my tailor?”

  “When this suit wears out.” Picante started the engine.

  “You look like a fucking bag man. I’m embarrassed to be seen with you.”

  “So fire me.” When they were moving Picante said, “You hear about that try on Sunsmith yesterday?”

  “That asshole Maggiore.” The heavy man pulled loose his necktie and undid the top button of his shirt. “When a sky pilot
hands you grief you buy him. You don’t ice him.”

  “It might not be Maggiore.”

  “He pulled everything out of narcotics and stuck it in numbers and then the Lotto came in and he got killed. Now he’s sunk a million and a half in a shithouse load of tables and roulette wheels in Toledo and if they don’t legalize gambling in Detroit and he brings the stuff in anyway he’ll have raids up the wazoo. It’s Maggiore okay. Cops got anything on the shooter yet?”

  “Our guy there says no. Looks like someone hung a ringer in the choir.”

  “Gambling, shit. It ain’t steady. Drugs, that’s the growth industry.”

  “Draws fire, though.”

  “Three years I can do on my head. Did.”

  “Three years ain’t what the judge gave you.”

  The heavy man said nothing to that. “Where’s Macklin?”

  “Around. Only he’s freelancing now.”

  “Talk to him.”

  They spoke no more. It was a long drive from Milan to Detroit and Picante stayed off the expressways to show his employer some scenery he hadn’t seen through his cell window. In Belleville a tan Buick Skyhawk slid up beside them at a stop light and the window on the passenger’s side came down, leaking Tina Turner out into the open air.

  Picante jammed his heel down on the accelerator just as the back seat window on the left side of the Mercury exploded. Wheeling one-handed around a panel truck crossing the intersection, he used his other to snatch the heavy man’s lapel and pull him down across his lap. There was a second roar, but the Mercury was through the intersection now and buckshot struck the rear window and rattled down like a handful of dried peas. He negotiated three turns, clipping curbs twice and narrowly missing an old man walking his dog, and spun halfway up a grassy bank in a residential neighborhood before coming to a halt with gasoline walloping around inside the tank. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed the young lawyer levering himself upright in the back seat.

  “You all right?” Picante asked the heavy man.

  The heavy man sat up, patting himself all over. “Yeah. Who the hell taught you to drive?” He ran a hand back through his disheveled black hair.

  “I’ve been shot!” exclaimed the lawyer.

  Picante twisted around in his seat. The lawyer had a hand to his forehead, where blood was trickling through his left eyebrow. Picante grasped the lawyer’s wrist and pulled the hand away. “You caught a pellet is all. Maybe a piece of glass. Lucky.”

  “Lucky? Getting shot is lucky? Oh, God, I’m going to be sick.”

  “Not in here.” Picante unclipped the Colt Diamondback from under his arm, checked the load. A siren wound up in the distance. “That asshole Maggiore. He payrolls hopheads ’cause they work cheap. Sorry, Mike. I should of seen it.”

  “Sorry, hell. Just talk to Macklin.” Grinning suddenly, the heavy man struck Picante’s shoulder hard with the heel of his hand. “Jesus, it’s good to be out.”

  He figured the two keys on the ring cost him thirty thousand dollars apiece.

  Looking at the house objectively—the only way he looked at anything—he couldn’t see where it was worth sixty thousand. Rust had perforated the gutters and the shingles were curling. There were more surprises inside, leaky pipes and a furnace that cut in only when some fairly determined individual fetched it a smart kick, but he had missed his second-floor study and any other house in the area would have run him as much or more. Even so, he figured having to buy it back from his ex-wife had cost him an extra ten in gall.

  He was forty years old and the house was everything he owned, that and last year’s green Camaro parked in the driveway. Other men his age were toting up the years between themselves and retirement. Most others in his line were dead or in jail. The rest, like him, went on working and trying not to think about diminishing returns. It was the only law they considered.

  Working on not considering it, he inserted one of the keys in the front door lock and turned it. The key met no resistance and he stopped. He had locked it that morning.

  He was forty and his reflexes were not what they had been. But they kicked in ahead of sluggish reason, and before the bare fact that the door was not locked had registered he was backing toward his car. He opened the door on the driver’s side without turning his back to the house and got in.

  “How are you, Mac?”

  Peter Macklin recognized the lean dark man in the baggy brown suit sitting on the other side and relaxed. The man had one hand wrapped around a Colt revolver resting in his lap.

  “Same old Picante,” Macklin said.

  “I slowed down some,” said the man. “You too.”

  “Who’s inside?”

  “Couple of temporaries from Cleveland. Mike’s casting his net wide these days. Maggiore’s got this area fished out.”

  “I heard they were throwing him loose.”

  “This morning. Klegg sprang him a day early to beat the reporters.”

  “That’s good.”

  “He’s grateful, Mac. That was a hell of a thing you did for him on that boat. The feds liked it too and that’s how come he’s out as agreed.”

  “I didn’t do it for him.”

  “He knows that. These days it’s pay-as-you-go, no blood oaths or rings to kiss. He wants to see you.”

  “Tell him his invitations stink.”

  Picante looked down at the Colt as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. He didn’t put it away. “Hell, Mac, it’s been a couple of years. You don’t keep track of your friends you lose them.”

  “I only carry when I’m working.”

  When Picante still didn’t move, Macklin opened his corduroy sportcoat slowly. The other looked and returned the gun to its holster. “Mike’s got work for you.”

  “I’m not connected now. He knows that.”

  “He knows a hell of a lot more than a lot of guys that didn’t spend the last three years pressing the warden’s pants. Like he knows you hire out.”

  “What’s wrong with Cleveland?”

  “You trust a Kelly girl to slam the back door, nothing else. There was a try on him this morning.”

  “I didn’t hear.”

  “Cops, they sit on things they don’t know what else to do with. He’s okay; just mad.”

  “I remember you were pretty good.”

  Picante uncovered his long teeth. “My guts don’t stretch that far these days. Besides, someone has to look out for Mike.”

  “Tell him thanks.”

  “He’s paying fifteen thousand.”

  “It isn’t that. I’m through popping people I don’t know because someone else doesn’t like them.”

  Picante touched his upper lip with the finger that had rested on the Colt’s trigger. “The person he wants popped is Carlo Maggiore.”

  Macklin scratched his ear.

  CHAPTER 2

  Caroline Vetters, aka Lynn Venters, Cheryl Lynn, Carol Vintner, Paula Gaye—where’d that come from?—Carolyn Vetter, and Carole Ayn Vetters, was black and frowzy-looking, with a flat nose and beestung lips and welts under both eyes and a shaggy natural that looked tinted red in the black-and-white photograph. Priors said she had been arrested four times for solicitation for purposes of prostitution, twice for carrying a concealed weapon (served nine months in the Detroit House of Corrections the second time), once for attempted murder, charges dropped before trial. From front and side she might have been any one of a hundred women Inspector George Pontier saw lugging wash to the laundromat on Watson every day on his way to Detroit Police Headquarters; even he had to admit that a lot of black women of her age and station looked alike. And maybe it had nothing to do with race. Take ten bottle caps in ten colors and hit them all the same number of times with the same hammer and try to tell them apart. This particular bottle cap was thirty-six years old and wouldn’t have to worry about being thirty-seven.

  He looked up at Sergeant Lovelady’s broad mealy face hovering over his desk. “What was the weapon and what did she use in the a
ttempted?”

  “Handgun, the CCWs,” Lovelady said. “First one was German make, a real suicide special. She was lucky she got caught before she ever tried firing the thing. Other was S&W, a .32 with a history, only she was pulling ten days for solicitation the time it was fired into the ceiling at a stop-and-rob over by Ypsilanti. She used a sticker in the attempted, on her boyfriend. Allegedly,” he added, deadpan.

  Pontier wondered which was alleged, the attempted murder or the boyfriend. He put down the photo circular from Records and picked up the weapon recovered from the woman’s body at the church. It was a Colt .357 magnum with nickel plating and an alligator grip. The serial number over the trigger guard had been cut out neatly in a rectangular piece with a jeweler’s torch or something equally precise. He stroked the gouge with his thumb. “She came up in the world some toward the end.”

  “It’s a pro piece for sure. A little loud.”

  “They like it that way sometimes. How they coming with the autopsy report?”

  “Typing it up now. Lab says she had enough amphetamines in her plumbing to light up the Penobscot Building.”

  “Pump her up and shove her in shooting. Throw her away with the piece, there’s plenty more where they came from. Christ.” He stroked his moustache with an unselfconscious movement. He looked tall and slim even seated behind the desk, bald, with his graying fringe blown out professionally and light gray eyes that glittered in the varnished mahogany of his face. The commissioner liked his looks, and lately it seemed that he had appeared on the TV news more often than the mayor. “Sunsmith show yet?”

  “Outside.”

  “‘Kay. You get an address on Caroline Vetters, run it in here. We find out where she went to the can this year and who with, I bet we turn up somebody connected.”

  “Dese guys?” Lovelady laid a finger alongside his pitted nose, bending it over.

  “Them to start. And probably to finish. Christ, we were just getting shut of them and then this casino gambling thing comes along. Be a hell of a thing we let all these street soldiers run around popping each other over dope when there’s another racket just laying around waiting for muscle. Anyway, taking Sunsmith out would shake up the organization against gambling. Who else if not dese guys? Shoo him in here.”