Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  Not that he’d have to. As they were leaving, Carmen handed each of the three men a key to a safety deposit box belonging to a different bank. Macklin’s share would come to eighty thousand dollars.

  He wasn’t thinking about the money, however. He remembered how straight Carmen’s back was under the green jumpsuit as she walked through the open gate behind the empty building, separately from the others as agreed. She hadn’t looked back at Macklin, standing at the back door holding the box containing the abandoned weapons, who watched her go.

  It had been a short walk to the river, where he dumped the guns into the water, then tossed the empty box toward the middle to darken and grow soggy and eventually sink to the bottom among the Coke bottles, ring tabs, used prophylactics, and gnawed human bones submerged downstream. He caught a cab on Lafayette and took it to the west side parking garage where he had left the Camaro. Then home.

  Such actions after all these years were automatic, requiring little thought and scarcely remembered. This could be a danger, he knew, like becoming so familiar with a heavy machine that one lost respect for its ability to crush and tear and amputate living limbs. But Macklin was still seeing Carmen’s straight back when the telephone hooked to a separate line that went only into his study started ringing.

  The interior light in the Camaro sprang on in the cool morning shade, then off as the driver’s door was pulled shut and the engine growled into life. The two men sitting in the front seat of the white Oldsmobile parked across the street slid down when it turned out of the driveway into traffic. They started up and followed, executing a U-turn behind a Mayflower van.

  The passenger unhooked the microphone from the Oldsmobile’s dash. “Twelve in, over.”

  “Headquarters, twelve,” crackled a voice from the speaker. “What’s your twenty?”

  “Beech Road between Eleven and Twelve. Suspect is moving, should we take him?”

  “Negative, twelve. Instructions are to follow and report, over.”

  “We hear you. Twelve out.” The passenger, a reedy redhead on temporary plainclothes assignment from Traffic, peered through the windshield at the low green car sliding along the center line. “Nice wheels.”

  The driver snorted. He was black, with a gray moustache cradled in the curve of an underslung lower lip. Three years on Homicide, five on Vice, seven on Missing Persons, four in uniform busting heads down Gratiot. “Them sports jobs kill you for gas and insurance. Car’s just to get you there from here. It ain’t a house or a woman.”

  The redhead wasn’t listening. “These snuff guys sure take care of themselves.”

  CHAPTER 25

  “Look at that big grayback. Who’s he remind you of?”

  Picante joined his employer at the railing to look down at the polar bears in the pit. The smaller of the two biggest males, buttermilk-colored with a broad silver streak down its back, sat on one of the big rocks watching the cubs swimming, their eyes closed against the spray, whiskers drooping, paddling like dogs but much faster. The bear’s great paws rested on its swollen belly.

  “Bert Lahr.”

  “Naw. Closer to home. C’mon, who?” Boniface freed a peanut skin from between his teeth with the end of his little finger and reached into the bag for another peanut.

  Picante squinted, then drew his upper lip back from his long upper teeth. “Nicky Bazooka.”

  “Right. Same big gut. He was all the time rubbing it and patting it, like he was expecting any day.”

  “Jesus, I haven’t thought about him in years.”

  “What was it, dynamite?”

  “No. Hell, no. I just walked around his lock while he was out and replaced the light switch inside the door with a circuit breaker and blew out the pilot light on his stove. Place was full of gas when he got in and flipped the switch. They peeled his face off the far wall of the apartment next door.”

  “Poor old Nicky.”

  “Poor old Nicky,” Picante agreed. “I was engaged to his daughter once.”

  “There he is.”

  Macklin was coming down the footpath along the iron railing. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, and he and the two men waiting for him were the only people in sight in that part of the Detroit Zoo. He had on a corduroy sportcoat and khaki trousers. When he drew within speaking distance he said: “You’re early.”

  “I’m a suspicious old greaseball,” said Boniface. “I say nine o’clock, I know you’ll be here at eight, so I come at seven. If I had the brains to wipe my ass I’d set my watch ahead two hours and be done with it. How are you?”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Picante was holding a copy of the morning Free Press. He unrolled it and held it out in both hands. The headline read: SUNSMITH RELEASED UNHARMED.

  “I heard,” Macklin said. “Good news. Dead clergymen are hell on business.”

  “Look below the fold.” Boniface sounded impatient.

  A square piece in the lower right-hand corner of the front page detailed Charles Maggiore’s continued recovery from his bullet wounds. It was accompanied by a recent photograph of a healthy Maggiore taken at his arraignment in federal court on the gun-running charge.

  “Nice picture.”

  “Where’s the black border?” Picante refolded the paper.

  “I put two where his heart should be. How’d I know he didn’t have one?”

  Boniface said, “A miss is a miss. Happens. But it’s been almost two weeks and there he is taking up bedspace when there’s empty slabs at the morgue.”

  “There’s no percentage in planning a hit in a hospital. You’ve got the police to worry about on top of the security staff, and even if you get around them you never know who’s going to be coming down the hall when you drop the hammer, maybe an off-duty cop or just a Sunday hero. Too many variables.”

  “I took out a bookkeeper on the fourth floor of Detroit General eight years ago,” Picante said blandly.

  “Then the job’s yours.”

  “I told you that’s past. Maybe if everyone else was shooting at the same fish.”

  Boniface spat out a bad peanut. The polar bear that looked like Nicky Bazooka turned albino-pink eyes on him from its rock. “When you fixing to take him?”

  Macklin said, “I’m not.”

  “I mean after he gets out of the hospital.”

  “Not then either. I’m walking away from this one.”

  “Shit. He’s holding you up for more cash, Mike. Guy blows the hit the first time and now he wants a raise.”

  Boniface told Picante to shut up. He was looking at Macklin with eyes grown less clear and piercing in prison. “I named a figure and you said okay. That was always as much contract as we needed. Okay, the world’s changed. What’s the tariff?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  “Five hun-… Half a million dollars?”

  “A million.”

  Picante said shit.

  “Two million,” Macklin said. “Pick a figure, I won’t take it. Get yourself another button.”

  “This is Carlo Maggiore we’re talking about, the one hired a soldier to take you out two years ago. The guy that turned your own kid into a killer just because he knew it would tear your heart out. You don’t want to hit him?”

  “I don’t feel anything about him anymore. He’s meat for the feds now. They can have him.”

  “This ain’t Macklin talking. Macklin wouldn’t leave a job unfinished.”

  “You mean he wouldn’t walk out on twenty thousand,” Picante said. “Unless he got a better offer.”

  Macklin said, “Some advice, Mike. Drop this guy before he heels over and pulls you down on top of him. He thinks too much for a gofer.”

  Boniface looked sad. “Just because a man’s in the can don’t mean he can’t still see through walls. I know most of that hundred grand I gave you year before last went for the house the judge gave your wife in the settlement. You can’t live on what’s left and you’re too old to learn meat-cutting by ma
il. You turn loose of this job, you won’t get the contract on a sick goldfish.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “I can’t help it. Sometimes when I look at you I see that skinny punk hanging around Hermann’s junkyard waiting for his old man to show.”

  “I was a fat kid, Mike. And the closest you ever got to Hermann’s junkyard was the guy you sent to watch and make sure the right stiffs got ground up in the crusher. You’re the finger and I’m the trigger. Don’t try to make anything more out of it than that.”

  “I got to ask where your living’s coming from if not from me.” There was now no trace of softness in the older man’s heavy features.

  Picante said, “Watch your blood pressure, Mike. I’ll talk to him.”

  The pair started walking.

  “You got to be careful what you say to these old moustache petes,” said Picante. “That Roman blood goes straight up their ass. It’s like Caesar never died and the last couple of thousand years didn’t happen.”

  “Only since prison. He didn’t used to be like that.” Macklin’s eyes were on the ape house straight ahead.

  “A lot of things ain’t like they were when he went in. He wants to turn the clock back. It ain’t healthy. I don’t think old Mike’s going to be with us much longer.”

  Macklin said nothing.

  “Take Maggiore,” Picante went on. “In the old days we’d just pop him and all our problems would be over. It ain’t that simple now. Christ, he delegates so much his fucking office boy could run things if he swallowed the pill tomorrow. We could blow down his whole organization, but then the papers and TV would start screaming massacre and we’d all wind up getting run bare-assed out of town. No, these days you’ve got to be more indirect.

  “Mike wants to put down Maggiore and get his ass back into the driver’s seat, but he wants to do it before Maggiore puts down Sunsmith or he’s afraid there won’t be a driver’s seat to get his ass back into. That’s the old way of thinking. As I see it nowadays, kill a crook, kill a reverend, you get the same amount of heat either way, especially after the public finds out some of the things Sunsmith was into at the time he met his well-deserved fate. A story like that takes time to sink in, so allow for a week or so of heavy shit. Meanwhile the gambling referendum gets voted out because the good holy man died in the cause of God. In the long run the heat’s down and so’s gambling, and guess who’s in the driver’s seat then.”

  “Carmine Picante,” Macklin said.

  They had stopped outside the ape house. Shrugging exaggeratedly, Picante thrust his bony hands into his pants pockets. “Well, someone other than Maggiore. What can you do to hurt narcotics, make them legal? Not likely. Okay, you don’t want to do Maggiore. Maybe you’ll give the Reverend a thought. How’d you like the slot machine franchise in Iroquois Heights? Pays about half a mill, before and after taxes.”

  “Will you pay it to my estate after Sunsmith’s bodyguards finish cutting me down?”

  “Fuck the bodyguards. Four guys just did without even spilling any blood hardly. Hey, maybe you know them. The thing had style.”

  “I haven’t been following it.”

  “I bet it was them Criselli brothers out of Farmington Hills. Them cowboys would rape the mayor’s daughter if he had one and send him a bill for the stud fee. Or, hell, maybe it wasn’t a kidnapping at all. That story Sunsmith told about masked men and being held in a dark room and then dumped downtown from a van at midnight sounds like bullshit. Maybe it bought him a few hundred votes.”

  “Maybe.”

  Picante shrugged again. “You want to think about the offer, get back to me?”

  “I thought about it.”

  “Sure?”

  Macklin nodded.

  Picante nodded too. His long face lengthened. “I guess you’re just as much into the old way of doing things as Mike. It’s a good thing your son ain’t.”

  He returned to the polar bear pit, leaving Macklin standing there.

  The white Oldsmobile was parked on the other side of the children’s petting zoo with a view through the bars of the ape house and the man standing near it and the other returning to the third man leaning on the railing over the pit. The redheaded officer lowered his binoculars and handed them to his partner behind the wheel. “You make the guy in the cheap suit?”

  The black detective focused the binoculars, turning the wheel again as he slid them from the long-faced man in baggy polyester to the man in the corduroy coat and back to the heavy man eating peanuts. “Don’t have to.” He laid them on the seat. “Guy looking at the bears is Mike Boniface.”

  “Who he?”

  “Before your time, like damn near everything else. Keep your eyes on Macklin.” He radioed headquarters.

  CHAPTER 26

  FLIM-FLAM FAKER

  THE GEEKS

  METRONOME RECORDS

  OCTOBER 1972

  Reading the inscription in the brass plate screwed to the plaque in Sunsmith’s office, Inspector Pontier wasn’t sure if he remembered the tune or not. Every time he tried humming it to himself it came out The Flatfoot Floosie with the Floy-Floy. Floy-doy, floy-doy. He wondered what would come out if you took down the gold record and tried to play it. Didn’t matter. He was only looking at the thing because the twice-life-size portrait behind the desk of Sunsmith in Day-Glo made his eyes swim.

  Looking at the Reverend in the flesh was no comfort. He was seated at the altar-shaped desk in lavender shirtsleeves and maroon vest with a gold stripe and a gold silk necktie tucked into the V. Despite his drawn appearance and lack of luster in his black eyes, he made Sergeant Lovelady, sitting across from him in the visitor’s chair, seem quiet in his yellow sportcoat.

  Nobody was talking at the moment. Sunsmith’s letter opener, slim silver with a handle fashioned after St. Christopher, made sibilant sounds as he slit one envelope after another, laying each aside without removing its contents to reach for the next. The corners of paper currency poked out of several of those he had opened.

  “It stinks, Your Holiness.” Pontier turned away from the gold record. “Nobody snatches a prominent clergyman and his four bodyguards off a public street in broad daylight and holds them for thirty-two hours just to let them go.”

  “You’ve spoken to the elders.” Sunsmith went on slitting envelopes.

  “You over-rehearsed them. Same words, pauses all in the same places, even the one in the hospital had it down cold. They should put together a brother act, sing a cappella.”

  “How is Brother Julian?”

  “They’re holding him for observation at Receiving in case of infection. The inside of his coatsleeve was the only thing that kept the bullet from passing straight through his wrist, the doc said. Those steel-jacketed jobs are like grease through a goose. Only things smoother are the lies he told us.”

  “You overestimate my authority, Inspector.” Slit, slit. “Two of the elders handed in their resignations this morning. I expect Brother Julian to do the same when he’s released.”

  “I bet the severance pay is sweet.” This was Lovelady.

  Slit, slit.

  Pontier said, “Know what I think? I think Mike Boniface had you taken, figuring everyone would blame Charles Maggiore and come out against gambling in the referendum Tuesday a week. That’s what I think.”

  “If that’s true it was kind of him to let me go.” Slit, slit.

  “I’m still working on that part. Meanwhile Lovelady has another theory. Tell him, Sergeant.”

  “Maggiore wouldn’t chance killing you,” Lovelady said, folding his hands across his middle. “But if your story holds any water at all, it could be he took you and then let you go so you could tell it and nobody would believe you. Discredit you with the grass roots.”

  The letter opener paused. “Like Aimee Semple McPherson.”

  “The thing’s got stunt written all over it,” said Pontier. “Which is another theory.”

  “A man was shot.” Sunsmith slit the final t
hree envelopes and shuffled the lot into a neat stack in front of him. Then he laid his palms flat on the blotter. His gaze met the inspector’s.

  “In the wrist, missing everything vital. Some men might consider it worth a bonus.” He went on before the Reverend could interrupt. “I don’t think it was a stunt. If it was you’d have a better story, a daring escape under cover of darkness, one of your men was shot, you gave him your shoulder during the breathless dash to safety, that shit. Not a gimmick, then. Maybe a disgruntled investor.”

  “I like that one too,” said Lovelady.

  “We kicked it around. Just for now, though, we’re going by the book, and the first rule in investigative theory is to keep it simple. From the start Boniface’s stood the most to gain from your death. He pulled the string on that hophead who tried to ice you two weeks ago and when that didn’t work he decided to be more subtle and had you snatched. Maybe your body was supposed to show up in the trunk of a stolen car at Metro Airport, or maybe he was just fixing to keep you under wraps until after the referendum and let everyone think the worst. Either way the measure would go down along with Maggiore’s hopes and Boniface would come in and scoop up the leavings. I don’t know what went wrong. My guess is you bought off the thugs he had babysitting you. There’s no honor left among thieves if there ever was any to begin with.”