Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  A floorboard squeaked inside the house. Pamela Ziegenthaler dropped her cigarette and crushed it into a crack between tiles.

  “I’ll find out who you are, Mr. Macklin. It’s not hard these days. These days, everyone’s a private detective. Hello, dear. Peter and I have been getting to know each other. He’s a mechanic’s son, just like your grandfather.”

  Laurie had entered the porch. She sniffed the air and sat down. Her features were slightly pinched. “Papa Z’s father was a diesel engineer in Stuttgart. What’s this about a private detective?”

  “Family skeletons. He’s entitled. I told him I didn’t have to hire one to find out your father was cheating on me. Laurie always was closer to my father than I was,” she told Macklin. “She spent her summers on the farm, milking chickens and becoming a proper corn-fed country girl. I never took to the rural life myself. Are you seriously considering buying the old homestead? Does either of you know anything about modern farming methods?”

  Laurie said, “We plan to live there, Mother, not herd cattle. There are plenty of people around who know modern farming methods who will want to lease acreage. Peter and I aren’t the condo and tract-home type.”

  “She always was stubborn. She gets that from her father.”

  “Have you heard from Father?” Laurie asked.

  “First of each month, regular as the calendar. The check always clears. One thing we never fought about was money. Practically the only thing. Peter knows what I’m talking about; he’s divorced. There was a son, wasn’t there?” She lifted her eyebrows above her glass.

  “There still is,” he said. “Roger. He graduated from Wayne State last year. He’s backpacking through Europe.”

  “Such a cliché. Of course the young think they invented everything.”

  Laurie said, “I haven’t met him yet. Peter says we’ll like each other.”

  “Let’s hope so. I imagine being a stepmother to a boy your own age has its complications.”

  “I’m three years older, and he won’t be living with us. He has a job waiting for him when he gets back. He majored in administration and marketing.”

  “A salesman. Just like his father. You must be proud. Children so seldom follow in their parents’ footsteps anymore.”

  Laurie sensed there was something behind the remark; Macklin could feel it. He was searching for a safer subject when Pamela rose, announcing that her drink needed freshening. When they were alone, Laurie asked Macklin what he and her mother had found to talk about while she was in the bathroom.

  “The fact that she doesn’t trust me.”

  “She doesn’t trust anything in pants. That’s why Benjamin came as such a surprise.” She put down her glass. “Is she threatening to have you investigated?”

  “It wasn’t a threat.”

  “What could she find out?”

  “Enough. Police records are public property.”

  “Can she hurt you?”

  “No more than the police. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t marry your mother.”

  “I don’t know how she ever talked my father into it.” She put a hand on his knee. He thought she was going to kiss him, but she whispered in his ear. “I snooped in the medicine cabinet. There are some man things, a razor and a can of Barbasol. Mother uses Nair.”

  “Did that shock you?”

  “Not after what you said. But I didn’t really believe he existed until I saw the evidence. You’ve seen what she’s like to spend an afternoon with. Who in his right mind would practically move in with her?”

  “It could be he sees something in her you don’t.”

  She sat back. “Well, I’d just like to know more about this person.”

  “I take back what I said,” he said. “I did marry your mother.”

  A door closed on the other side of the house, followed by voices. A moment later Pamela came out on the porch with a full glass in one hand and her other arm linked inside a stranger’s. Macklin rose. The man was a half inch taller than he, slender in a terry sport coat with natural shoulders and olive cotton slacks, soft loafers on his narrow feet. He was close to Macklin’s age, with splinters of silver in his black hair, cut in a brush that made him look older, possibly out of deference to Pamela. His features were even and unremarkable. He had a shy smile and wore no jewelry except a plain wristwatch on a leather band.

  “Look what I found on the doorstep,” Pamela said. “Laurie and Peter, this is Benjamin Grinnell, our host.”

  Macklin and Grinnell shook hands. They exerted equal pressure.

  FOUR

  When it was created, to handle the interstate fallout from the breakdown of order in Detroit after the 1967 race riot, the Ohio State Police Task Force on Armed Robbery was promised four floors of office space, a clerical staff of fifty, and two hundred on-duty officers. Several governors later, it continued to work out of a single story above a bank in downtown Columbus, with four full-time secretaries, a file clerk approaching the age of compulsory retirement, and a dozen temporary office workers. Thirty officers were assigned to the detail when there was no pressing need for them elsewhere. Four were in plainclothes, and one of these was Captain Edgar Prine, the task force’s commander.

  Somewhat surprisingly, for he never hesitated to call a press conference to complain about sloth, incompetence, or political cronyism among the top brass, Prine was never heard to complain about the force’s cramped quarters and coolie status. The eleven blocks that separated him from the capitol building might as well have been eleven hundred miles, allowing him to conduct business with minimal supervision and to relax the uniform dress code, a practice he believed created esprit de corps unique to the officers who had actively sought the assignment. Under his tolerant eye, green neckties and pink shirts often clashed with regulation navy serge, and until Prine himself had cracked down on more blatant examples of abuse, bush hats pinned up on one side Aussie fashion and batons with notches cut in the handles had not been uncommon. The captain always wore somber tailored broadcloth and solid-color knitted ties on white or pale blue shirts, but the reporters who loitered in the bank lobby hoping to snag an interview when he came off the elevator still referred to the task force privately as Baron von Prine’s Flying Circus. Unlike those bold individuals in the department who addressed him as Reverend, they never showed disrespect in his presence; Prine was always good for a colorful column when news was slow, and quick to cancel police credentials whenever he detected offense.

  To the Ohioan who had not managed to miss his frequent appearances on television, Prine’s corner office was as much an icon as the man himself: the rich blue curtains, stately (and budget-bending) walnut paneling, the American and Ohio state flags on gold staffs flanking the carved mahogany desk, elevated on a dais so that when the captain rose from behind it, he overwhelmed his audience with his already intimidating height.

  Few knew the room was a dummy. Prine had further incommoded his space-starved staff in order to dress a set to awe the media and important visitors such as the governor, whose own office at the capitol was larger, but not so statesmanlike as to support the presence of the larger-than-life-size bust of Lincoln on a pedestal in one corner. When the visitors had left, Prine returned to his working office next door, with its contemporary glass-topped desk and homely worktables where papers and large-scale maps could spread, while three junior men bumped knees in their shared space and damned the room that stood empty five days out of every seven. The captain had borrowed the concept from J. Edgar Hoover, a man whom to his life’s regret he had never met. He was content to let others dismiss the eccentricity as another sign of megalomania, but he knew that without the show of opulence and waste, his appropriations would dry up. State legislators, like their models in Washington, distrusted austerity as some kind of pose. A hair shirt almost always concealed a private preference for silk, and thievery on the grand scale.

  Prine was sitting at his real desk, up to his elbows in old arrest reports, when a fax came in wi
th an IdentiShop likeness of the man the captain believed was the case man in the latest video-store robbery. He studied the crudely blocked-out, computer-generated features briefly, then used his intercom to summon Farrell McCormick, his assistant.

  “Mac, this face trip any wires?”

  McCormick, a detective lieutenant with twenty-seven years’ experience in law enforcement, the first seven with the Pickaway County Sheriff’s Department, held the illustration out at arm’s length. A vainer man than his superior, he never wore glasses in company. When he addressed the media, he had his prepared statements printed out in eighteen-point type so he would not be seen to squint. Despite that egocentricity, he was a drab and rather dusty party in suit coats that didn’t quite match his trousers, whose hair was cut at home by his wife, a woman with no talent in that area, and who had failed to qualify on the state police shooting range his last three times out. Prine falsified the results in order to keep his best detail man on duty. McCormick never forgot a face or an MO, could match the one to the other almost instantly from his photographic memory of thousands of files going back many years.

  He returned the fax. “No, but God doesn’t build ’em from a kit. I look at these composites and all I see is Nose B-slash-this, Chin F-slash-that. Ears from Column A. We never should’ve done away with police artists.”

  “I could dig one up, but by this time that cashier wouldn’t recognize the guy if we printed his face directly from her head. We’ll make copies anyway, send them out to all the posts. Not to the media. Let’s hold the crackpot calls to double digits. Do you see this guy in a ski mask?”

  “Maybe. Probably not, though. We sure these are the same guys that hit the other three stores? This is the first time it’s come to shooting.”

  “Three inside, all in green shirts. The colors change, but they always dress alike. Say a fourth behind the wheel, judging by how fast they spun out. Shotgun and two handguns. Plus they always hit the same chain. That’s where the money is. What do you think?”

  “They’re pros. When the shooting starts, they won’t shoot each other, on account of the uniform. We ought to have a line on them by now.” McCormick sounded petulant. That was his area.

  Prine said, “Not if they never ran together before the first job. Which means they were recruited. They take the credit-card slips. Who do we know with the resources you need to put them in circulation?”

  “Oh. Those guys.”

  “The case man’s running liaison.”

  “Cleveland?”

  “Or Toledo.”

  McCormick nodded. “Joe Vulpo.”

  “Joe’s been nutty for years. So’s his boy Tommy, but he isn’t at the pajama stage yet. The old man won’t step down, and the other old-timers don’t trust Tommy enough to make it official, but someone has to call the shots. He’s got a little regency going up there.”

  “I’d prefer Cleveland,” McCormick said.

  “Me, too. You never know which way a lunatic’s going to jump.”

  “It’s Toledo.”

  “Why should our luck change now?”

  “Pull in Tommy?”

  Prine drummed together the police reports on all four robberies, putting the IdentiShop sketch on top. “We’ll make a social call. I’d rather talk to a nut than his lawyer.”

  FIVE

  Peter and Laurie had booked a room in Toledo, in a resort hotel on the lake that required a nonrefundable deposit for the first night in advance. It had given them an excuse to decline Pamela Ziegenthaler’s halfhearted offer to put them up. They had turned down after-dinner drinks in order to get on the road early.

  The restaurant Benjamin Grinnell had taken them to, an elegant place with candles on the tables in a large ugly block building that had once been an icehouse, had served lobsters and rack of lamb on china platters carried by waiters in livery. The service was better than the food, but in Myrtle the tradition of fine dining was no older than the CLOSED notice on the last farm-equipment store.

  Laurie had asked their host about his work.

  “It’s dull to the outsider,” he said, cracking an underdone claw. “Somewhat terrifying from inside. You’re always going someplace you’ve never been, telling strangers what they’re doing wrong, and suggesting a better way than the one they’ve followed for years. That’s one thing when you’re talking to a bookkeeper, and quite another when it’s the floor supervisor with a box cutter in his hand. These days there’s a lot of rage in the workplace.”

  “Were you ever attacked?”

  Her mother spoke. “Benjamin likes to dramatize. So far Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t come calling, asking for the rights to his life story.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Pamela. I’m just a CPA on wheels. Would anyone care for more wine?”

  Laurie had wanted to stab her mother with a fork. But Benjamin had appeared relieved. Either he was uncomfortable being the center of attention or Pamela had spared him the embarrassment of being caught in a self-aggrandizing lie. In any case, the rest of the evening had been dismal. Conversation was strained, as by tacit agreement all had refrained from commenting on the food.

  Peter had been driving for some minutes in silence when Laurie broke the peace.

  “Was your father really a mechanic?”

  “He owned a garage.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “He was a loan shark. He did some heavyweight work on the side. They called them mechanics back then. It was a long time ago.”

  “Heavyweight work. As in killing?”

  “Only if it couldn’t be avoided. Killing never was good for business, no matter what you’ve seen on The Sopranos. Some roughing around, maybe a broken bone or two. He died when I was little.”

  “Died.”

  “‘Died suddenly,’ the obituary said. The front page said something else. He was forty-one.”

  She didn’t say anything for a quarter mile. Headlights were scarce in the westbound lanes. Except for late Saturday night and the four P.M. rush hour, there was always more traffic going toward Toledo than coming from it. That much hadn’t changed since she was a girl.

  “You never had a chance, did you?” she said.

  “We all have the same chances. I could’ve taken auto shop.”

  “Are you always this hard on yourself?”

  “Only lately.”

  She thought about that and finally fished a compliment to her out of it.

  “What did you think of Benjamin?” she asked.

  “Your mother seems happy with him.”

  “Does she? I can’t tell. She’s incapable of expressing an emotion. There always has to be irony.”

  “A psychiatrist would call that a defense mechanism.”

  “I call it a pain in the butt. You didn’t answer my question. What did you think of him?”

  He said nothing.

  She looked at him. His profile was immobile in the lights spaced out along the interstate. “You didn’t like him?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know. You didn’t say anything. That’s always a sure sign.”

  He was quiet so long she thought he’d decided not to answer.

  “I think he’s a player.”

  “A player.”

  “I could be wrong.”

  “I don’t know what a player is,” she said. “I’m still learning the language.”

  “Don’t learn it too well. A player is what I am. Or what they call me when they don’t use words like heavyweight and mechanic.”

  She laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I could be wrong.”

  “He could barely crack the shell on his lobster. He’s polite and boring, except for that story about a floor supervisor with a box cutter. I think Mother likes him because she can dominate him. He’s the most nonthreatening man I think I’ve ever met.”

  “After me.” Peter sounded amused.

  “A man can be quiet without harboring guilty secrets. You do
n’t know my mother. She’d never let a man near her if she thought he wasn’t on the up-and-up. I’m surprised she ever let any man into her life after Father. But Benjamin’s as far from my father as you could expect to find. He was a backslapper, a man’s man, and when he drank too much he got loud. She would never have gone with him to a restaurant like the one we went to tonight. He’d have embarrassed her by hitting on a waitress.”

  “They didn’t have waitresses.”

  “A female customer, then. She put up with it until she found out he was taking them back to his hotel when he was on the road. After that there were scenes.”

  “I guess that’s why you picked me.”

  They slowed down when they entered a construction zone. A bank of blinding lights illuminated a crew pouring asphalt onto a closed lane.

  “I see what you’re getting at,” she said, once the lane opened. “Just for the sake of argument, what would a player be doing romancing Pamela Ziegenthaler? She likes to put people on the spot, but she’s hardly the gun-moll type.”

  “I never heard anyone call anyone a gun moll outside a movie theater. I don’t think anyone else has, either. Not since Dillinger was running around.”

  “Well, whatever you call them now. I just found out what a player is.”

  “I romanced you,” he said.

  “You were looking for someone to reform you. Mother doesn’t have that kind of patience.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Traffic thickened as they entered the outskirts of the city, and Peter concentrated on looking for their exit. A sign came up announcing it in two miles.

  “Something’s on your mind besides Benjamin,” Laurie said then.

  “I have to go into Detroit tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be back before dark. Dorfman wants a meeting.”

  Laurie’s heartbeat quickened. Loyal Dorfman was a retired criminal attorney, the former head of a large firm that had represented athletes and other celebrities charged with felonies. It had serviced mob defendants until the RICO laws proved impossible to beat. “Has something gone wrong with the case?”