“I don’t work fast.”
“Thing is, he has to be taken out before he takes out this nigger preacher that’s so loud against casino gambling. You don’t hit public figures. Press gets on the mayor and the mayor gets on the cops and then we’ll have to start throwing good people to the wolves. You got to cut this kind of thing off at the source.”
“Also you don’t know anything about gambling and if Maggiore gets it legalized and nails down all the casinos you’re out in the cold.”
“Hey, I never said I was a communist.”
Macklin picked up the highball. “The White House could learn something from his security.”
“If it was easy I wouldn’t of called you.”
“It’s worth twenty.”
Picante said, “Fifteen’s the offer.”
“You got to understand Mac’s situation,” Boniface said. “Man just went through a divorce. Seventeen.”
“No, it’s twenty.”
“You’re not that good. I hate to say it.”
“Get someone who is, then.”
Boniface looked down at the dog. Al’s red-gold head was resting on his knee, eyes reduced to white slits, and in that moment dog and master looked alike. “You’re a bad boy, Mac. You’d do this one for nothing without being asked.” To Picante: “Give him ten now. The other ten when Maggiore turns up in the long term lot at Metro Airport.”
Macklin drained his glass and set it down. It would be his last drink for a while.
CHAPTER 3
The Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith’s four bodyguards made Paul Ledyard feel small for only the second time in his life.
The first time had been when he tried out for the Lions and the equipment manager had strapped him into eight sets of shoulder pads before he found a pair that wasn’t too large. At six-one and two hundred he had been the biggest man on his high school varsity squad and made all-state two years in a row, but when he took the field with the Detroit third string he had felt like an ant in a cricket hatchery. Weeks later, when he had recovered from his first and only skirmish with a right guard nicknamed Rhino, he had learned that his high school coach, a family friend, had called in a marker to arrange the tryout to demonstrate to Ledyard that pro ball was not for him. It had cost him two ribs and his classic profile. But he had gone on to college and now had in eleven years with the Detroit Police, the last two on the detective squad.
Sunsmith’s men were as big as the Reverend himself, deep and square in blue suits whose jackets would wrap twice around Ledyard with enough material left over to make a vest. Their aftershave was strong and the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson semiautomatics they wore under their arms showed only when they stretched with their jackets hanging open. They seldom spoke in his presence. He wondered if they were any more talkative when he wasn’t there.
It was his first babysitting job and it bored him worse than stakeout. Bodyguards saw a lot of waiting rooms; it occurred to him that people who had waiting rooms all had the same taste in magazines. He’d been all through the current Time and Newsweek, even the financial reports, for chrissake, had chuckled at all the pictures in Gentleman’s Quarterly, and knew all the floor plans in Architectural Digest by heart. One place had had Playboy, neatly bound in stiff clear plastic, but all the pictures had been taken by the same photographer, who seemed to be turned on by those goddamn legwarmers that just broke up the long clean line of a woman’s leg. USA Today was sexier. He had given up admiring the various receptionists behind their imitation wood-grain desks when they all started to look alike too in blonde hair pinned up and sprayed hard as horn and worsted wool suits and lacquered nails shaped like teardrops. They were always doing something back there, meaningless little movements, never looking up. He decided that being a receptionist was not much better than guarding bodies.
While he busied himself drawing these conclusions, twenty-two floors up in a new skyscraper in suburban Warren, Sunsmith was twelve feet away drinking lemonade laced with vodka on the sofa inside the main office. His suit today was green, with a thin purple stripe that picked up the deep bluish tinge of his skin. The glass vanished once it was inside his big fist so that when he brought it up to his lips and then replaced it in the little recessed area on the arm of the sofa with its contents half gone he appeared to have pulled off a magic act. The soft sheen in his moist black eyes brightened when the alcohol struck bottom.
“You mix a respectable drink, Mr. Constable. I don’t think I’ve had that combination before.”
“Thank you. It’s my own invention. I call it a Yellow Boy.”
Sunsmith nodded, his scalp catching the light. The man seated in the leather chair across from him was white—very—with blond hair so light it was difficult to tell where it stopped being blond and started being gray. He wore it short on top but brushed over his ears on the sides to conceal a slight tendency toward sails. His steel-rimmed glasses were tinted amber and he wore a beige sportcoat over a pale yellow shirt and canary tie. Yellow seemed to be his favorite color.
“I see you’ve made an addition to your company,” Constable said.
“He’s a policeman. It was either that or move my congregation to the chapel at the Wayne County Jail. The mayor wants to keep me alive.”
“That’s odd, considering you’re on opposite sides of the casino gambling question.”
“A martyr is hard to beat in an election.”
Constable measured out an inch of smile and sipped at his own Yellow Boy. His office looked like a living room, with good abstract oils on the walls and floor lamps with soft white bulbs. The desk was parked in a corner by the curtained window; he never entertained from behind it. “How much this time, Reverend?”
“That’s up to your conscience, Mr. Constable. Yours and your employer’s. Did I mention that all donations are legally deductible?”
“Every time. I can’t help wondering what you do with the money.”
“The church needs a new roof and the youth center needs more room.”
“I had your file pulled after you called for this appointment. We’ve made donations totaling sixty-three thousand dollars over the past fifteen months. That must be some contractor you’re using.”
“Faith is expensive.”
“I can’t help but suspect this firm is helping to finance your campaign against legalized gambling. Which I find counterproductive, seeing as how Charles Maggiore is our major stockholder.”
“Has he complained?”
“Rather loudly. But he hasn’t shut off your credit.”
“That would be counterproductive.”
“Not as much as you might think,” Constable said. “True, we benefit from the return on investments logged officially as tax-deductible charitable contributions, and your church takes in more in collections than many secular businesses in which we hold interest. But we stand to gain far more if the gambling measure is passed.”
“The police think Mr. Maggiore is trying to have me killed.”
“We both know they’re wrong. You don’t invest in dead men.”
“A record of his donations would be a handy thing to reveal when the police try to charge him with my murder,” Sunsmith suggested.
“It might be, were there such a record.”
“Well, someone is trying to free my soul.”
“Just who that is is as much our concern as it is yours.”
“I hardly think that. ‘Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.’”
“Solomon?”
“Longfellow.”
Constable ran a polished nail around the lip of his glass. “Is it at all unreasonable to ask you not to persecute the measure quite so energetically?”
“Gambling is a sin before God,” intoned Sunsmith, not smiling. “My soul is not on the block.”
“Mr. Maggiore understands that. It’s why he trusts you to honor his investments even if they’re off the books.” Constable rose. “Will ten thousand take care of the r
oof?”
“I will ask the sisters to pray for him each time it rains.”
“He’ll be relieved to hear it.” He went over to buzz the receptionist.
Buy Any Man’s Death Now!
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in February 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Loren D. Estleman
Cover design by Rebecca Lown
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3482-1
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY, 10038
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Roses Are Dead Page 23
