Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  1. No force unless absolutely necessary;

  2. No targets inside the Toledo city limits;

  3. Weapons to be obtained through the organization and nowhere else;

  4. A seventy-thirty split in favor of Wild Bill’s crew on cash (renegotiated from sixty-forty), with 80 percent of the profits from credit-card slips going to the organization, which would assume responsibility for turning them into cash;

  5. In the case of arrest, legal representation to be provided by the organization, so long as none of the other rules had been compromised, and the nature of the partnership kept off the record by all defendants.

  Wild Bill had balked when Vulpo’s man insisted upon recruiting his crew from the available local talent, but had relented upon assurance that no one would be forced on him without his approval, and an agreement pending approval from Vulpo that Mark Twain would be included. Wild Bill had met Mark in the tank in Idaho, where Mark was being held for extradition to Michigan for violating parole. It was his advice that the Midwest was a better place to ply his trade that had eventually decided Wild Bill to come home and take on the responsibilities of clearing the title to the house in Kentucky. Mark in his turn had brought in Donny, a driver who had proven himself under pressure.

  Ironically, the only men who had given Wild Bill cause for doubt were the belligerent Carlos and Grinnell, the case man whose slipup in Hilliard had put the whole operation in jeopardy.

  In the main, however, he was sanguine. Neither he nor his crew had been identified as yet by the authorities, and the people he answered to in Toledo seemed prepared to absorb the heat. He’d been confident enough about the future to litter the glass-topped table at his elbow with brochures promoting Ohio bookstores and some newspaper sections with ads announcing forthcoming appearances of name authors. Such an event brought in nearly as much as the Friday-night opening of a major Hollywood film at a multiplex.

  One or two scores like that and Wild Bill could settle all the liens against the property, sell it for ten times what his father had paid for it in 1960, put the money down on a dude ranch or a resort hotel in either Colorado or New Mexico, and live out his days as a land baron of the old school, craggy and respectable.

  Unless, of course, the Uncle Jakey in his blood called.

  Wild Bill Berman twirled his outlaw Colt, watching the shadows crawl across Daniel Boone and daydreaming about easy banks, slow trains, and willing women.

  TEN

  “COLOR GUARD” QUESTIONS PLAGUE ARTF

  —Columbus Dispatch

  HOMELAND SECURITY PROBES “COLOR GUARD,”

  TERRORISM LINK

  —Toledo Blade

  PRINE: “COLOR GUARD” BREAK EXPECTED SOON

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  HUE CREW SCREWS BLUES

  —Bowling Green Blast

  Edgar Prine, who for thirty years had taxed the vocabulary of the Ohio press for phrases to describe his demeanor other than the shopworn “poker-faced,” “solemn,” and “humorless,” chuckled as he shuffled through the colorful printouts of recent front pages on the big worktable in the office he used for genuine police business. He held up the last. “What or who is the Bowling Green Blast?”

  “Underground student newspaper,” Lieutenant McCormick said. “You can’t find it except on the Net and maybe scattered all over the floor of the student union. University’s been trying to shut it down for a year.”

  “Find out who wrote this piece and get him credentials. He’s the only cherry in a box of stale acorns.”

  “Give him Wagner’s?” Lewis Wagner’s byline appeared under the Dispatch headline hounding the Armed Robbery Task Force for results.

  “No, he’s the governor’s pup. He’ll bark the other way after the election.” Prine looked again at the Blade. “You been probed by Homeland Security lately?”

  “Not a poke. God knows where they got that.”

  “Whose name we don’t take in vain,” the captain reminded him. “At least Cleveland knows how to report a press conference. Why do they always use that picture? Makes me look like Mighty Joe Young.”

  “You swept out the photo editor’s cousin when you investigated the CPD for selling evidence from the property room. You’re lucky he doesn’t slug your name under Hannibal Lecter. Ken Abelard at WTOL was the first to use that ‘Color Guard’ tag. You’d think the print boys would steal from one of their own.”

  “Well, you can’t wrap your garbage in a TV set. We should’ve held back the matching-shirts angle. Give ’em a hook and they’ll chew each other to pieces to grab at it.”

  “They didn’t get it from us. The guys that put words in Abelard’s mouth interviewed witnesses in all four robberies.” McCormick brushed at a lapel; Prine didn’t need to run a DNA test to determine he’d come there straight from one of his wife’s haircuts. “The Dispatch jumped a human-interest piece to the inside, about Cy Oliver: Married nineteen years, son killed in a car crash on prom night a couple years back. One of his neighbors said he used to bring her kid Disney videos they’d pulled from the rack; you know, the ones they sell as previously viewed. Nice guy.”

  Oliver was the manager killed in Hilliard. “He should’ve stuck with that instead of bringing a gun to work. Civilian heroes screw up the natural order worse than heisters.”

  “I still think we should pull in Tommy Vulpo. It’d give the fish something fresh to fight over.”

  “He’d stonewall us, just like at his house. Only this time it’d be all over the media.”

  In fact, Crazy Joe’s crazy son had talked the whole time Prine and McCormick were with him. They’d learned all about his pocket-comb collection, the hazards of bidding against other pocket-comb collectors on eBay, and the general decline in quality in pocket combs manufactured since the 1950s. He’d finished by unlocking a bleached cabinet in his pale study and showing them a sample of his collection, rows and rows of plastic pocket combs, each one identical to all the others. The face he’d shown them whenever they asked about the recent string of video-store robberies was as bland as anything in his fucking bland collection. (McCormick’s words, on their way back to Columbus; Prine’s own language was as tidy and presentable as the fake office where he addressed Ohio.) They’d heard Joe Vulpo clumping around upstairs the whole time they were interviewing Tommy, but they’d heard enough nutcake babble for one visit and didn’t ask to see him.

  “Think Tommy really collects pocket combs?” McCormick asked.

  “Bras and panties, more like, in his size. He probably boosted the combs off a truck sometime by mistake. He may have hit on the best strategy during questioning: Bore’em into committing suicide. He’s just as looney as he wants to be. If we ever bust him for anything it’ll be for dressing up like the world’s ugliest woman and scaring old perverts to death at Franklin Park Mall.” Prine drummed together the newspaper material and jammed it into a wastebasket already stuffed with faxes and printouts. “What we got on that composite sketch?”

  “Department mainframe matched it to a half-dozen mugs on file. I told the geek to forward it to your box.”

  Prine went to his desk and logged on. “Only six? It looked like anybody’s brother-in-law.”

  “They narrowed it down to noncombatants: front men, forgers, embezzlers. The mob doesn’t normally employ heavy-lifters for case work.”

  The captain scrolled through three rows of front-and-profile photographs, went back, and stopped. “That one’s familiar.” He pointed.

  McCormick leaned over his shoulder. “Sure does. And I know from where.”

  “Tommy Vulpo’s driveway.”

  The pictures were of one John Grinnell Benjamin, a Canadian citizen arrested in Detroit in 1995 for conspiring to smuggle unlicensed tobacco products across a state line. Prine clicked onto his file. The manager of a supermarket in Sandusky had identified him as the man who’d arranged to sell him sixty cartons of cigarettes without tax stamps. The manager had been under arrest for the same charge and
was offered the opportunity to plead to a lesser offense in return for his cooperation. A bench warrant was issued for Benjamin’s arrest based on a partial license-plate number, and he was detained while attempting to cross the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, where he was a resident. Returned to Ohio to face his accusers, he was booked and printed, held overnight, and released when the supermarket manager failed to pick him out of a lineup. Representing Benjamin on that occasion was an attorney with a firm retained by Joe Vulpo.

  “No previous record,” Prine said. “Did you get a license number?”

  “I sure didn’t. Foreign bucket. Toyota? Lexus. Frost green Lexus, this year’s or last year’s model.”

  “Put out a BOLO here and in Michigan, and tell the Canadian authorities to check out his address. It’s seven years old, but you never know. Creature of habit, still doing business with the same people.”

  “Hold him on what, driving in Tommy Vulpo’s driveway?”

  “We can pull him in for questioning.”

  “Then in comes Tommy’s lawyer to jerk him back out on the street. Meanwhile we show our hand.”

  “It’s the only hand we’ve got. We can lose him in the system for a few days. If he’s working for Toledo full-time, maybe he’s living in this country. Maybe he forgot to renew his visa, or to apply for one in the first place. Or he never got around to registering as an alien.”

  “I’m not sure Canadians have to do any of that.”

  “Check. His record’s clean both sides of the cigarette deal. Good case man’s got nothing if not anonymity. We can threaten to release his name and mug to the press. These quiet ones are a lot easier to crack than the ones that’ve had the tour.”

  McCormick rubbed his nose; trying to erase the marks of the reading glasses he wore in private, Prine guessed. “If he doesn’t, we’ll be up to our balls in a false-arrest suit.”

  “Well, we’ve had those before. We’re past due. It beats sitting around scratching ourselves.”

  “Not if he turns out not to be our guy. All we know is what we knew seven years ago, that he’s Vulpo’s man. And we don’t even know that. We could both be wrong about who we saw driving that car.”

  “We’ve been wrong before, too,” Prine said, logging off. “But never both at the same time.”

  ELEVEN

  Among the few who knew how Sunny Wong made most of her cash (of whom Grinnell was one), she was known as “the beast with two fronts.”

  Outside that circle, the phrase was a mystery. There was nothing remotely beastlike about her five-foot-one, one hundred-pound frame or her fine Asian features, and even those who recognized the tong symbols tattooed from her shoulders to her elbows could not deny they’d been done by almost a dainty hand. But anyone who chanced to see her clubbing frogs in the rural marshes beyond the Cincinnati sprawl was halfway to the answer.

  Every weekend during summer, Sunny drove her stove-in Ford Ranger pickup west of suburban Finneytown, put on waders, twisted her waist-length hair up under a Reds cap, and slogged in among the leeches and mosquito wigglers, swinging a sawed-off Tennessee Thumper baseball bat right and left and throwing the stunned amphibians into a five-gallon plastic bucket slung from one shoulder. When the bucket was full, she went back to the truck for another, and when she had a truckload she returned to her house and two acres, dunked the frogs in a mixture of ammonia and formaldehyde, packed them snugly in USPS-approved containers, and shipped them to research laboratories and high-school biology departments throughout the United States.

  She charged ninety cents a frog, and averaged fifteen hundred frogs per outing. But this was only the first of her two fronts, the legitimate one.

  Her house was a one-story clapboard construction that looked bigger than it was because the broad side faced the street. In fact it was only eighteen feet deep, shallower than a double-wide trailer, and in order to walk from one end to the other, you passed through all the rooms, which were laid out in succession with partitions between and the doors lined up straight; what the low-income residents of an earlier generation, for whom the thought of owning any sort of house had seemed an impossible childhood fantasy, called “shotgun style.” Here she lived, and met customers at the door to begin the transactions connected with her second front.

  An addition had been built onto the back, the length of the house and nearly as deep. Sunny had filled it with cages and terrariums, which contained some 163 varieties of snakes, turtles, sundry other reptiles, and tarantulas, which she sold to university students, indulgent parents of inquisitive children, certain underworld figures, punk rockers, and professional strippers. The students and children kept the snakes, turtles, and tarantulas as pets, while the punks and strippers used the big snakes almost exclusively onstage. The underworld types favored monitor lizards, rattlesnakes, and gilas for the purpose of intimidating enemies and disloyal friends.

  The strippers were Sunny’s most consistent customers. She had been one herself, and so she knew which types of python and defanged diamondback were most suitable for exhibition. The exotic dancers respected her opinion and came from as far away as Las Vegas and Miami to make purchases with fistfuls of sweaty singles and five-dollar bills. One had traveled all the way from Newfoundland and paid fifteen thousand dollars cash for an iguana, which she planned to lead around by a leash attached to a jeweled collar; she would then smear her naked body with honey and lie down on the runway while the lizard licked her clean with its long forked tongue. (Sunny had recommended nettle honey. Iguanas have acrid tastes.)

  None of these customers, it should be pointed out, possessed a permit to keep an exotic pet, and in many cases the animals were protected and private ownership was prohibited. This was of no concern to Sunny, who had neither a permit to sell exotic animals nor a zoning variance to conduct any sort of business in a residential neighborhood. She had been cited for the latter many times, had paid fines, and suspended operation for six months during the term of a reform mayor, setting up again after the next election turned him out of office as they always did. More serious were the threats of an investigation from the Department of Natural Resources in Columbus, the likelihood of a raid, and possible prison time for innumerable violations of the state conservation law.

  However, Sunny Wong was content to go on as she had for years, paying certain officials to deflect official attention. Should that procedure fail, she could cash out her legitimate investments and hire a sharp legal firm to delay her case for months or years or however long it took for the tide to turn in the capital. Or for the present administration to lose interest in a case that never came to court or promised a single vote. She could afford to be content. As lucrative as it was, the illegal trade in fauna exotica was merely a front for her traffic in undocumented firearms.

  The cages and glass tanks in her back room stood atop a shallow underground vault built of concrete and lined with zinc, containing five million dollars (retail) in automatic rifles, semiautomatic pistols, revolvers, and cases of unissued grenade launchers from Desert Storm, packed in cosmoline and moisture-resistant Styrofoam peanuts. Under a six-foot pile of manure certain to discourage the most fanatic searcher, accessed by a rotating panel that moved the pile aside in a body, were crates and boxes of brass and stainless-steel cartridges, including explosive rounds outlawed in every country except North Korea, where they had been obtained by American mercenaries who knew where all the markets were in the U.S. Somewhere—Sunny had told someone she thought they were stored in an airtight Mylar case in a gila burrow with a false bottom—a six-pack of antipersonnel bombs resembling Osage oranges waited to turn human beings inside out; she really needed to take inventory, she said, she’d had them at least five years and they were probably unstable. She may have been teasing, but with the beast with two fronts you were never sure.

  She sold these items only to people she’d done business with before or who could provide verifiable references. A stranger who wandered in asking to see the “real inventory” g
ot the dumb-Chinee look and an offer to see the komodo dragon, which if it weren’t stuffed would be the most valuable item in the menagerie, two hundred thousand on the current black market. Or if she had the cramps she would simply show him the baseball bat she used on frogs. No one in authority, not ATF or the Bureau or the Cincinnati police, knew she was the largest dealer in illicit guns in the Midwest. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources would consider that justice had been served once she was arrested and convicted for the import and sale of unlicensed lizards and related misdemeanors. Only a genius or an idiot would suspect her illegal operation of being a front for one even more illegal.

  It would have puzzled—and alarmed—Tommy Vulpo to learn that Ben Grinnell was in on Finneytown’s best-kept secret. This was no accident. When he first came to work for the Toledo crime family, Grinnell had decided it was in his best interest not to disclose all his qualifications.

  Tommy, and before him Joe, the Iron Boss, had mistaken him for the retiring, nonviolent type. It wasn’t uncommon for a man with street-soldier experience to possess good manners and an education, but he was in every other way unremarkable to the point of boredom. He was the kind of guest you introduced someone to at a cocktail party in order to excuse yourself from the ordeal of holding a conversation with him. The aridness of his personality was so well established that it was almost no longer an act. It had quite certainly kept him out of harm’s way, which was a position he knew firsthand and loathed, not because of physical danger, but because when the heat turned up it was those who occupied it who were thrown into the flames. He was regarded on the same level with a bookkeeper or a file clerk—someone whose skills were useful, but whose criminal knowledge was as limited as his personal magnetism. Had Tommy suspected the truth, he might have put his case man in charge of something worse than procuring weapons, such as dismemberment and burial of disloyal employees. Grinnell was no stranger to that detail, nor to most others. He was, in fact, an anomaly in the highly specialized world of organized crime, post–Murder, Incorporated: a jack-of-all-trades.