“I had to sign for it, so don’t leave it at the laundromat,” he said, half-reclining on a sofa that matched the chair. “The agent who swung it for me figured I have less to lose, being on retirement leave. But I got a pension to consider.”
“I haven’t lost a piece of evidence or rolled over on a source yet.” Pontier removed the rubber band and flipped through the contents. “Thanks for the boost.”
“Forget it. Anything that’ll sink the hook deeper into Charles Maggiore just tickles me plumb to death.”
“I hope your replacement has the same attitude.”
“That’s up to you. If they ring in some quiz kid from D.C. like I expect, you’ll have the chance to bring him along, give him the benefit of your long experience in the interest of harmony in law enforcement. But if it’s an old fart waiting out his thirty it’ll be like pulling nails with your toes just to get him to run fingerprints for you.”
The file information was all gibberish to Pontier at this point. He put the rubber band back on and drummed his fingers on the folder. “How do you like it so far? Retirement.”
Burlingame shifted positions to pull the stained rag out of his hip pocket and waved it like a flag of truce. “That’s my last gray suit. Day I left I had Grace turn them all into wipers. All except one for burying friends and to be buried in myself.” He flung the scrap of cloth onto the coffee table. “My old man worked his ass off his whole life so his kid wouldn’t have to wear old clothes. I worked mine off my whole life so I could. Life’s a joke.”
Neither said anything for a moment. Pontier put his hands on the arms of the chair. “Well, thanks again.”
“What do you figure to find that the IRS didn’t?”
He subsided. “If I’m right, Maggiore’s been declaring donations to the Reverend Sunsmith’s church through one of his legitimate holding companies.”
“That charlatan? What’s the wop doing, buying indulgences?”
“I think it’s a scam, and I think it goes both ways. If so, it makes a better motive for taking out the Reverend than his stand on gambling.”
“Seems like a lot of homework wasted if Maggiore kicks off.”
“I called the hospital this morning. His condition is stable. They’re planning on operating to remove those slugs tomorrow. Then again it might not be Maggiore’s signature on the contract. There are others involved.”
“You do a sweep?”
“Doing it now.”
“Anybody I know?”
“Well, Peter Macklin.”
Burlingame grinned, not pleasantly. “The only work Macklin would do for Maggiore is drag his dead carcass out of the way of the door.”
“We reeled him in on the hit on the choir singer. We’re holding him on the try on Maggiore. If we get those slugs before Macklin gets sprung we might start building a case.”
“I don’t know what kind. Knowing Macklin, the gun’s a mile downriver by now.”
“All the bases get touched, anyway.” Pontier stroked the edge of the folder with his thumb absently. “In an ideal world, Maggiore and Macklin would be pulling life for murder and the fags in Milan would be buggering Sunsmith’s fat ass for the next ten years on income tax fraud.”
The FBI man plucked a two-inch cigar stub out of the ashtray on the coffee table and appeared to be considering lighting it. “Yeah, but in an ideal world we’d both be in some other line of work.”
“I could work on the line at Ford’s.”
“Like hell.” He dropped the stub back into the tray and picked up his beer. “And neither could I.”
A young man in a blue pinstripe suit with a bandage on his forehead who introduced himself as an attorney with Howard Klegg habeased Macklin out of Interrogation Monday evening. The killer signed for his valuables and accepted the lawyer’s invitation of a ride home. He felt sticky under his clothes and he needed a shave. They were getting into the car parked in the blue zone in front of police headquarters when a gray Maserati pulled abreast and a dark-skinned woman with tawny hair rolled down the window on the passenger’s side. “Lift, Mr. Macklin?”
She removed her yellow Polaroids, and Macklin recognized her from the squad room the previous day. She wasn’t a cop, not driving a car like that. He glanced at the lawyer. “Thanks.”
The young man measured out an inch of smile across the roof of his own car. “Good choice.” He got in behind the wheel.
When Macklin was sitting beside her, the woman looked at him. “Aren’t you going to buckle up?”
“I just got out of jail.”
“Against the law.”
He met her gaze until it faltered. “Right,” she said, and shifted into low. They took off with a squeak of rubber.
Driving along Beaubien, she asked: “Where to, your place in Southfield?”
“I knew it,” he said.
“Knew what?”
“Good-looking woman picks me up in front of thirteen hundred, it isn’t because she was driving by and liked my posture.”
“I looked you up. I was surprised you’re listed.”
“Where’d you go first, the Yellow Pages under Killers?”
“You do too have a sense of humor,” she said. “I was told you didn’t.”
“I don’t have much use for one in my work.”
“You’re pretty open about it.”
“I just came off twenty-four hours in lockup. If there’s anyone who doesn’t know what I do, I haven’t seen them since yesterday. Who are you?”
“Carmen Contrale Thalberg. I called the jail and they said you were in Holding at Police Headquarters. The officer I spoke to there told me you were being processed out. I just caught you.”
They took the John Lodge north. She drove the Maserati like she was mad at it, making racing changes between lanes and seldom touching the brake. She had on a powder-blue blouse and a beige skirt, and when they passed under a light, Macklin saw that she was in her stockinged feet. A pair of silver high-heeled sandals rested on the console.
“I saw you when you were brought in yesterday,” she said. “A detective told me who you were.”
He wondered if she was one of these bored rich wives who fantasized about making it with criminals. He had been pursued by a couple, and if they’d looked anything like this one he might not have run so hard. But she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Her only jewelry was a tiny gold crucifix that winked in the cleft between her breasts when she worked the shift. He was starting to feel not so tired.
As if she’d been following his thoughts, she said: “The car was a gift from my late husband. I like its looks, but it has too much engine for me, also it’s hard to shift in the city. Would you like to drive?”
“Anything beyond three speeds is beyond me.”
“I thought all American men liked to show off behind the wheel.”
“Shit,” he said.
The fuzzbuster on the dash bleeped. She slowed down. “What is?”
“Your dumb spic act. I think if you didn’t want the accent it wouldn’t be there. Let’s get to why you picked me up.”
“Hokay, Joe. There’s a cassette tape in the glove compartment.”
He found the compartment finally and opened it. It contained a pair of deerskin driving gloves—it was the first time he had ever found gloves in a glove compartment—and three cassette tapes in plastic boxes. “Which one?”
“The one without a label. Put it in the slot.”
He was still figuring out the dashboard when she took the tape from him and rammed it through a hinged flap under the radio with the heel of her hand.
“‘And Ahab spake unto Naboth,’” boomed a voice out of hidden speakers, “‘saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house; and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.’”
The speaker paused. Then: “What do you say, brothers and sisters? Did Naboth leap at this
offer of ready cash? Did he hold out for a better offer? No, brothers and sisters. Nabob said, ‘The Lord forbid it me!’”
The woman raised her voice above the rolling tones. “Do you know who that is?”
Macklin said he did. He had started feeling tired again.
She drove for another mile before asking the question.
“Can anybody hire you?”
CHAPTER 14
The shooter was a thirty-three-year-old Arkansan named Caudhill who had served with Special Forces in Cambodia and of late had been operating a stolen credit card racket for the Truzzi family in Toledo. The Ohio State Police had questioned him in connection with the turnpike slayings of two part-owners of a Cleveland adult theater chain and he was due in court next Thursday to answer charges of extortion and assault with intent to commit great bodily harm in an unrelated case. The clerk behind the desk in the Pontchartrain lobby barely looked at him when he asked for the number of Michael Boniface’s suite. He was of middle height but stocky, with ginger hair that he blew into a shelf over his forehead and a drooping moustache, and the blue Windbreaker he had on over a black turtleneck and faded Levi’s concealed a weight-lifter’s build and an Ithaca pump shotgun in a special harness with no stock and the barrel cut back to the side.
Armed with the number, he walked past the elevator entrance, where a security man in uniform waited to ask passengers to show their keys before going up, to a bank of in-house telephones. The telephone in Boniface’s suite rang twice before a man’s voice came on the line.
“This is the hotel cashier,” Caudhill said. “I’m just confirming your call to Auckland, New Zealand, before I enter it on your bill.”
“New Zealand?” said the voice. “You got the wrong room, pal.”
“Suite Seven-sixteen, Michael Boniface?”
“Shit. You sure it wasn’t Oakland, Michigan, something like that?”
“The charge is eighty-seven-fifty.”
“Well, no one here called New Zealand.”
“I see. Could Mr. Boniface come down and discuss it?”
“What’s to discuss? The call never happened.”
“Well, if there’s a problem with the telephone company we’ll need a denial in writing.”
“Shit. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
“Are you Mr. Boniface?”
“He’s sleeping. This is his associate, Mr. Picante.”
“I’m sorry, but we need Mr. Boniface’s signature. The suite is registered in his name.”
“Can’t it wait till morning?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m making out the books and we’re expecting the auditor from the parent company in the morning. It will just take a few minutes. Otherwise I’ll have to enter the charge.”
“Shit.”
“Pardon?”
“Give us twenty minutes.” Click.
Caudhill hung up and took a seat in the lounging area with a view of the elevators. The shotgun nudged his ribs.
The name of the desk clerk from whom he had obtained the suite number was Leon. A former bell captain taking night classes at the University of Detroit, he was having an affair with a maid on the fourth floor who thought he looked a little like James Brown. His duties included delivering the cash receipts to the bank at the end of the day, and although few guests were paying in cash these days there were still several hundred dollars to dispose of by late afternoon. He had applied for a limited permit to carry a concealed weapon for his protection during trips to and from the bank, but he had been turned down, and so he had bought a nickel-plated Browning .25 semiautomatic pistol that he carried all the time in his hip pocket under his Pontchartrain blazer. He kept it loaded, but so far no one had attempted to rob him.
Caudhill was sharing the lounging area with a plainclothes sergeant named Richard Weinacre, called Dick D’Bruiser by his fellow officers with the Detroit Police Department General Service Division for his resemblance to the big broken-nosed professional wrestler with a voice like a chainsaw. Ostensibly engrossed in a battered paperback copy of The Winds of War on the settee, he was actually present to witness a meeting between the director of a local car-theft ring and a man who had flown in from Los Angeles to buy him out. It was his day off, but the promotion list was coming out next week and he had been a sergeant for eight years. He could taste the arrest every time he moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He favored a Colt Cobra .38 Special that he wore in an alligator holster next to his right kidney.
The head of hotel security was out sick that week. In his place, a local firm had sent a former FBI field agent, one David W. Thornton, who had left the Bureau at age thirty-seven to marry the daughter of a Libyan oil millionaire who had then disinherited her. Forty now, with two children and one coming, he moonlighted days as a private detective. He was a good investigator with a sound federal man’s idea of how to dress. His confidence was highest in well-tailored brown suits that complemented his wavy hair with the silver showing in it slightly and the beard he had begun growing the month before and that was just starting to come in right; suits with a little space left for his Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in its stiff holster under his left arm. Unfortunately, he was wearing his gray pinstripe tonight.
He was standing at the door to his office, where he kept returning to watch the big man with the broken nose reading a book in the lounging area across the lobby. He was sure the man was there to take a gambling debt or a loan payment out of a guest’s hide. He had seen the type often enough when he was undercover.
None of the four armed men in the lobby knew why any of the others was there.
Caudhill could see the hotel dick even if the hotel dick couldn’t see him for the ferns in the lounging area, and assumed he was the one being watched. He had considered wearing a suit to blend in with his surroundings, but he never felt comfortable when so dressed—also he had never found one with a jacket that could conceal a sawed-off, his favorite weapon, without looking as if he had a pregnant rhinoceros hidden under there as well. Freedom of movement was everything in his work.
When he had been sitting for fifteen minutes he rose, stretched, and strolled over to the elevators. The uniformed man there became alert at his approach.
“There a cigarette counter in this place?” Caudhill asked.
“It’s closed this time of night. Sorry, sir.”
He could hear a car rumbling down the shaft. “That’s okay, thanks.”
He was turning away when the bell sounded indicating that the car had come to a halt at that floor. He timed his whirl with the trundling noise of the doors sliding open, unzipping his Windbreaker with one hand while swinging out the eighteen-inch shotgun with the other.
Glancing up at the sound of the bell, Sergeant Weinacre saw the stocky man zipping open his jacket as he turned and recognized the movement. He lunged to his feet, dropping his book and clawing out the Cobra.
David W. Thornton couldn’t see what was going on in front of the elevators, but he saw the big broken-nosed man leap up and bring a revolver into play. He drew the Smith & Wesson from under his arm with the ease of long practice on the federal range.
Slowest to react was Leon, who saw everything from his station behind the desk: flame disgorging from the end of the shotgun in the hands of the man in the blue Windbreaker, blowing in half the security man at the elevators; the big broken-nosed man in the lounging area shouting something that was drowned out by the roar and then firing twice at Windbreaker’s back; Thornton putting one into the big broken-nosed man’s chest from a two-handed stance, the wind on his bullet stirring the fronds of a big fern. Leon fumbled for the Browning in his pocket, but it had slid down and turned sideways. He popped a stitch in the seam of his blazer and nearly dislocated his arm, and then he tore his pocket freeing the little .25 and almost dropped it, the nickel plating slippery in his hand.
Silence thundered down on top of the reports, which had sounded so close together they might have been one
long explosion. In it, the elevator security man writhed and twitched on a carpet thick with gore, his killer on his knees over him with the shotgun held across his thighs and two bullets in his back. Weinacre lay sprawled across the settee he had recently vacated, his heels out and the revolver lying on the carpet at his feet. Thornton maintained his shooter’s stance with smoke twisting out the end of the nine-millimeter’s barrel. Inside the open elevator car crouched a woman in her fifties, barefoot and attired in a nightgown, who had locked herself out of her room and come down to ask for a second key. Her eyes were wide and round.
A cracking report split the silence. Thornton spun on his right foot, swinging the Smith & Wesson around in a quarterturn. Leon stood behind the desk looking sheepish with the Browning glittering in his hand. He had fired it accidentally when the barrel collided with the edge of the desk coming up. The bullet had gone into the floor.
Picante and Michael Boniface came down a few minutes later. Picante put one foot outside the elevator door, looked, pushed his employer to the rear of the car, and pressed the button for their floor.
“Killing Sunsmith won’t get your money back,” Macklin said. “Anyway, you’ve got millions.”
“It isn’t the money, it’s the principle.”
They were in the living room of Macklin’s house in Southfield. Carmen Thalberg sipped whiskey with a splash from a glass tumbler in the plaid chair Macklin had bought to replace the one his ex-wife had burned all over with cigarettes the many times she has passed out while sitting in it. This one could put it away, too; but she was on her third tumbler and hadn’t dropped so much as a syllable so far, although her accent was more pronounced.
“When people say that, it’s usually the money.” He was sitting on the sofa nursing a whiskey-and-Pepsi highball. The clock on the mantel of the fireplace he never used read 10:57. He had been home from jail an hour.
“Women in my bracket spend as much on a weekend shopping spree in New York as he’s stolen,” she said. “Not me. But you’ll never know what it’s like to be taken for a ride like any dumb spic puta that came in last week on a boatload of bananas. You know what I want? I want the son of a bitch to stop and say, ‘I picked the wrong broad.’ That’s what I want.”
Any Man's Death Page 9
