Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’re going to start the bleeding again you don’t cool off.”

  “Who’re you, Marcus Welby? Call Constable.”

  “Why don’t you call him?”

  “They took away my phone. Call him, tell him I got a message to send Sunsmith. What’s the name of that matcher we used at the Bannerman Projects?”

  “Filzer? He’s a firebug. He’d touch off his sister just to see how long she burned.”

  “Filzer, yeah. Tell him I want Filzer. I want everything in Sunsmith’s church burning but the holy water.”

  “What happened to not wanting to rile the voters?”

  “Fuck the voters. That Bible-thumper has to be told there’s a hell here too for them that slip up. I’m through screwing with him.”

  Penitentiary life had hooked Michael Boniface on television for the first time in his life. He had never owned one, preferring during his few free hours to listen to his valuable collection of Italian opera records or the radio station that broadcast by satellite from Rome. But the records in Milan were all rock and strings and the Rome broadcast was after lights out, and since he had never been much for reading he had drifted into the television room, where early-evening reruns of Daktari and The Patty Duke Show quickly became his favorites. Along with a broad vocabulary of English gutter terms, this preference was the only thing he had taken with him from prison.

  Marsh and Paula were trying to figure out who had let the sick leopard out of its cage when a male announcer with peroxided hair appeared on the screen announcing the abduction of the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith from an alley downtown. Boniface stopped scratching behind Al’s ears and the golden retriever raised its chin from its master’s knee to look up at him.

  “Picante!”

  Picante came out of the bathroom zipping his fly. He glanced from his employer’s tense hawklike profile to the screen, where a hand-held camera lingered on a row of bulletholes stitched across the trunk lid of a maroon-and-white Buick Electra before moving on to the empty limousine parked in front of it. The announcer’s oiled baritone rolled on.

  “That cocksucker Maggiore,” Boniface said. “You think someone’s just so stupid and then he goes and does something more stupid.”

  “Why didn’t he just kill him?”

  “Because he’s so stupid he thinks he can turn him into an expressway overpass on the QT and not get blamed.”

  “Sweet for us. I mean, if the voters tumble and turn out in Sunsmith’s favor on gambling.”

  “Sweet, hell. The feds and cops will shut us all down. They won’t ask is this drop-spot or that whorehouse Maggiore’s or Boniface’s, they’ll close up the town tighter than a nun’s twat.”

  “So wait it out.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not shelling out a hundred and a half a day for this suite. Your wife didn’t divorce you and take the house while you were in prison. I got a dog and debts. I need cash I’m going to get back where I was before the world turned to shit.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “It’s too late for Sunsmith. He’s pavement by now. Blacktop, ha! We got to throw the cops a piece of meat and keep them out of the kitchen. Any luck finding Macklin?”

  “I tried calling his place all day yesterday and again this morning. No answer.”

  “Keep trying. I hired him to deliver a package to the Wayne County Morgue that only got as far as Detroit Receiving. He’s got a job to finish.”

  Picante lifted the receiver off the telephone. “I’m dialing.”

  “W.R. Fontana, Inspector. Free Press.”

  “How are you, Bill?”

  “Is Sunsmith’s kidnapping connected with the attempt on his life a few weeks ago?”

  “That hasn’t been ruled out. So far, though, it’s an abduction, not a kidnapping. There’s been no ransom demand.”

  The rubber-faced reporter from the Free Press pulled his mouth into a tight grin. “We discussing semantics or is that a stall?”

  “Neither. When we know something, so will you. Yes.” Pontier pointed to the blonde woman in the red suit from USA Today.

  “Is it true the police are investigating Sunsmith’s finances, and if so, do you think he might have arranged his own disappearance in order to escape detection?”

  “I’m a homicide inspector. You’ll have to check with Fraud on that.”

  The fat man with a walrus moustache from Channel 4 identified himself. “What about terrorists, Inspector?”

  Pontier laughed and so did most of the journalists present. That footage would make the Eleven O’Clock News on Channel 2 but would be edited out on 4.

  “Are we to assume anything from the fact that a homicide inspector has been placed in charge of this investigation?” Fontana, the Free Press.

  “Only that the Reverend Sunsmith has been my responsibility since the assassination attempt.”

  “Could this be a stunt?” put in the black man from the News. “Rumor has it the Reverend is planning to run for public office.”

  “I can’t speculate on that.”

  “How will this affect the gambling referendum?” USA Today.

  “Who am I, Jimmy the Greek?”

  “Your answers are Greek.” Fontana.

  “Bill, you’re a horse’s ass.”

  The man from the News grinned. “Well, there goes TV.”

  “Inspector!”

  “Inspector!”

  The press conference continued for another minute, ending abruptly when a scruffy-bearded, bespectacled young writer representing Monthly Detroit asked Pontier if he would feel comfortable wearing stripes with plaid. The inspector went back upstairs to the Criminal Investigation Division while a pair of uniformed officers ushered the reporters out to the front steps of 1300. Lovelady followed him.

  “Where’d that bitch hear about Sunsmith’s finances?” Pontier demanded.

  “This place has more leaks than a lace firehose.”

  “See what you can do about stopping some of them up.”

  “You want I should tap the phones?”

  “I don’t care if you have to wire the bitch’s panties. I can’t work in a glass bowl.”

  The sergeant was wheezing from the climb. “I should of put in when I had my twenty.”

  “How’s Duck?”

  They had entered the squad room. Lovelady, out of breath, inclined his head toward the gray-haired Korean sitting at the sergeant’s desk with a stack of mug books at his elbow and another spread open in front of him.

  “That’s not the same book.”

  “It’s the same page.”

  “That mean anything?”

  “Maybe not. His record so far is fifteen minutes.” Lovelady mopped his face with a handkerchief.

  “What’s he doing, fitting them for suits?”

  “Want me to goose him?”

  “Not just yet.” The inspector went into his office trailing the sergeant and started opening and closing drawers in his desk, shuffling through the contents. Finally he lifted out a bundle of manila interdepartmental envelopes bound together with a wide rubber band and thrust it at Lovelady. “Have him go through these when he’s done with that book. They’re readers and some wire photos of some scroats we haven’t got our loop around yet.”

  “Constitutional question.”

  “No cop ever lost his job for making a bust that didn’t stick in court. Plenty of them have over things like dead famous black ministers who could’ve been saved by bending the Bill of Rights a little. If he sees the man who came around asking about Sunsmith’s robe in there, holler.”

  “I’ll have him look. Maybe we’ll be out of here by sunup.” The sergeant went out, carrying the bundle.

  When he came back in forty-five minutes later, his eyes were glittering.

  CHAPTER 24

  At age ten, Carmen Contrale had helped stock her family’s larder selling maps to buried pirate treasure and locks of Henry Morgan’s hair with her brother Francisco to fishermen and vac
ationers visiting from the States. She hadn’t seen Francisco since her wedding to Martin Thalberg and when last heard from he was a major in the Marxist revolutionary army in charge of procuring grubs from trees for the company mess.

  At seventeen she was taking off her clothes to music in the coastal nightspots outside Managua and taking them off to no music and better money in the rooms upstairs. By then she was married to a man named Paulo Minuto, the owner of a boat and a sign reading PAULO’S CHARTER SERVICE, but known as the Minuteman in the islands, where he made deliveries under cover of darkness twice weekly until his body washed ashore at Port-au-Prince during high shark season with its lower half missing. She worked the streets for a while after that, and then a photographer scouting beach locations for a Chicago-based travel agency brochure happened to snap her picture and two weeks later she found herself in a white bikini walking down a deserted stretch of beach in Costa Rica on the arm of a homosexual weightlifter named Crew. She was paid five hundred dollars for posing.

  The picture the agency selected found its way onto billboards and a full-page ad in a national magazine, after which she was offered a contract by a modeling agency headquartered in San Francisco. She never saw California or met the man who countersigned the contract, but for five years she posed against Central American sunsets in varying stages of undress and all oiled up in pink yarn bikinis trying not to slide off the waxed hoods of new automobiles parked on Guatemalan beaches and in the jungles of Belize. The contract was not renewed—she was coming on twenty-six, after all, and the crooked strip of land discovered by Balboa was acrawl with nubile post-pubescents who photographed well—but by that time she had a half-interest in an airline shuttle service consisting of a twin-engine Cessna and a pilot partner named Hector, who wore a pencil moustache and a silk scarf like Smilin’ Jack and made love like Harry Reems.

  They had been in business almost three years when the pilot was arrested by the United States Border Patrol in Nogales for transporting Mexican nationals into the U.S. without visas. He was given probation and released, but the plane was confiscated and the Honduran Government secured a restraining order preventing the company access to its funds. The partnership was dissolved.

  Carmen was employed as a hostess in a hotel restaurant in Port Barrios when she met and seated a big red-faced norteamericano named Thalberg, a wealthy young industrialist addicted to safari coats and the legend of Michael Rockefeller. He was attracted to the woman’s dark complexion and light hair and asked her to join him for dinner. When she demurred, explaining that she would lose her job, he asked to speak to the manager. Following a short, whispered conversation, the manager himself seated her. In the days that came after, Carmen found herself swept up into a world where the same gold card that got them through the doors of white houses in the hills where latinos in dinner jackets raked in stacks of chips with ivory scrapers was also good in dark, fish-smelling huts on the harbor where señoritas of indefinite breeding performed acts more basic. At the end of a week the couple were married in Trujillo.

  At thirty-three she had become a widow for the second time, having identified and buried the swollen thing tipped into the Arno by Florentine kidnappers, and the heiress to seven million dollars in cash and securities and an additional nine million tied up in offshore oil interests, the automobile industry, and genetic research. In twenty-six years she had come from the back-street tattoo emporiums and scent shops where a turista with funds and the proper references could secure women and white powder to a big house and four professionally kept acres in Bloomfield Hills. But she felt that she had grown up only within the past twenty-four hours.

  In that time, she had become an accessory to kidnapping and murder, dictated an extortion demand, and watched a man in whose fundamental piety she had held faith despite his ambition and greed sit motionless while three of his own followers went to their executions because he wouldn’t sign a check for two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars. She had written off the first elder, supposing that Sunsmith would suspect a bluff until he heard the report of the machine gun and saw Ski return to the dance studio alone. She had thought that the threat of killing a second bodyguard would crack him. But he had let Ski lead the man out and had still not moved or spoken when the third elder, he of the cut cheek and puffed lip, was dragged, struggling and cursing and wetting his pants, by Macklin and Ski together into the hallway.

  There are no holy men, she thought. Not one.

  The Reverend said, “Give me the book.”

  Carmen took a second to react, his voice was so low. By the time she called to Ski to hold his fire, her words were drowned out by the burst.

  The bald head came down.

  Macklin and Ski came back in as Carmen was unlocking Sunsmith’s handcuffs. For several moments after his arm came free he sat with his hands hanging inside his thighs, still looking at the floor. Carmen had been holding the checkbook and pen in front of him for a few seconds before he raised his eyes and then his hands to accept the items. Macklin stepped forward and gripped the hand holding the pen.

  “What about my son?”

  He had to say it again, staring down into the black candle-dripping eyes, before the Reverend showed understanding. A pale tongue moved over his lips with a sound like fine sandpaper moving over smooth wood. “He came to me last Sunday looking for a job. I knew who he was. I sent him away.”

  “Was he there to kill you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think of another reason.”

  “Maybe he found God.” Ski was grinning.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wanted to get straight.”

  Macklin waited. “That’s all?”

  “That’s what it came to. He left of his own will.”

  He let go of Sunsmith’s hand. Carmen said, “Just sign your name. We’ll fill in the rest.”

  “You stop payment we burn you,” Ski said. “Your security’s a fucking joke.”

  “He knows all that,” said Macklin. He waited while Sunsmith finished signing, then seized the book, tore out the check, handed it to Carmen, and tossed the book into the Reverend’s lap. “Spring the bodyguard.”

  Ski spun the dial of the lock securing the manacle to the last elder’s wrist. The big man in blue got up, stumbling when his knee threatened to give out. Ski, all wiry muscle encased in a slender frame, took Sunsmith’s hand and heaved him to his feet with a backward-leaning lunge. The checkbook slid to the floor. Changing hands on the automatic, Ski bent to pick it up.

  The elder lurched forward, clawing with both hands for the pistol in Ski’s off hand. Ski swung it around, pressing the trigger.

  “No!” Carmen grabbed at the killer’s arm. The first bullet out of the muzzle struck the elder’s wrist, making him gasp. The rest slapped the wall behind him, chewing paint and filling the room with the stench of spent powder and burnt cork. When it was over the elder stood holding his wrist with threads of blood hanging between his fingers.

  When Macklin was sure the shooting was over he handed his magnum to Carmen and stepped forward to pull the bodyguard’s hand away from the wound. He reached inside the elder’s coat, withdrew a handkerchief, twirled it into a braid, and knotted it tightly around the man’s forearm above the hole. “The bullet’s still in there. Get to an emergency clinic.”

  The prisoners shuffled swayingly toward the door, the elder cradling his tourniqueted arm. The Reverend appeared unaware of what had just happened. He moved like an old man who had lost his room in a nursing home. With a flourish, Ski grasped the knob and swung the door open, revealing Deac crouched on a high stool in the hallway with the other three elders lying face down on the floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs, their heads craning around to look at the newcomers. The floor was a litter of empty shell casings and plaster dust dislodged from the bullet-tattered ceiling.

  “Foooled you,” Ski sang, showing teeth.

  The air in Macklin’s Southfield home smelled like bad brea
th. After unlocking the front door he left it open for draft and went upstairs to lock the magnum away in the safe in his file cabinet. Having it away from his person and out of sight was a relief. The only time he didn’t feel uneasy carrying a weapon was when he was using it; the rest of the time it rode inside his belt waiting to get him arrested. It was his usual practice once an assignment was completed to get rid of the gun immediately, and although he had disposed of the slug that had killed Hank and this piece was to all intents and purposes virgin, he had planned to dump it as well. But that was before he had learned his son was mixed up with the Reverend Sunsmith.

  The revolver put away, he went back downstairs, closed the front door, and turned into the kitchen to fix himself a meal.

  He had known killers who drank after a job, and even a few who used drugs to come down from the dizzy adrenalin high that only killing another human being could create, although those who employed them eroded their judgment and either got themselves killed working or became the sort of liability that they were paid to eliminate. Macklin ate. He was neither a gourmet nor a glutton, and in truth didn’t think much about food one way or the other. But he abstained from food when working so that the blood and oxygen meant for his brain wouldn’t have to detour through his stomach, and at 11:45 P.M. on this particular working Thursday he had not ingested anything but water since Wednesday morning. He made four slices of toast, placed two slices of processed American cheese between each pair, and let them grill in the microwave oven he had gotten from his ex-wife in the settlement while he filled a glass with milk.

  Eating, he felt his blood slowing and the electricity level going down. His memory kicked in then. After they had turned loose the Reverend and his elders, Ski and Deac had raced through the dance studio with handkerchiefs, eradicating their fingerprints from everything they had conceivably touched, Ski muttering that if they had just gone ahead and killed the hostages they would have saved themselves the trouble. But Carmen reminded him that no bank would have honored Sunsmith’s check in the event of his death or mysterious disappearance. Deac had suggested they torch the place. Macklin said that making arson look like anything other than arson for the benefit of the insurance company was not one of his talents and that Hermann had too much tied up in the building to take a dead loss, did Deac want to wake up on the floor of the Detroit River with a fish staring at him? He didn’t say that there was no real point even in removing the evidence of their presence, since Sunsmith wasn’t about to invite a probe into his finances by swearing out a complaint against them for kidnapping and extortion. And he would make it worth the elders’ while, especially the wounded one’s, to forget the incident as well, depend on that. Macklin didn’t say these things, because he didn’t want Ski and Deac to get into the habit of ignoring caution, and he might want to work with them again.