Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  Linda swiveled toward her computer and rattled some keys. “Yes. A very good price in today’s market. There are several developments planned in the neighborhood. If you decide to sell, you could double your investment in two years.”

  Laurie said, “We don’t intend to sell it. We’re going to raise our children there.”

  “You’re expecting? Congratulations! The schools—”

  “We’re expecting to expect.” She squeezed Peter’s hand beneath the top of the desk. “I grew up on that property and we plan to grow old on it.”

  “That’s very refreshing. So many people are afraid to set down roots. The owners are willing to enter into a five-year land contract, if you can put a hundred thousand down. What’s the name of your financial institution?”

  Peter drew his checkbook out of his inside breast pocket. “It’s on the check.”

  They’d planned to celebrate by having a picnic in the front yard of the farmhouse. All the way to the realtor’s, Laurie had been suggesting supplies: tablecloth, bottle of wine, bread and sliced turkey for sandwiches. She’d spotted a large convenience store that sold package liquor on the site of the old cider mill, and Macklin drove back that direction. But something else was on her mind now, he could tell, and he had to wait until he stopped for a traffic light before she spoke.

  “Just like that, you draw up a check for a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “There’s a little more to it. I’ll have to do a telephone transfer so it won’t bounce.”

  “We don’t have that much in savings.”

  He hesitated. “It’s a different account.”

  “There’s another account?”

  “There are three, not counting a safe deposit box in Detroit.”

  The light changed. When they were moving again she said, “More secrets?”

  “I opened several after I sold the camera stores. I told you about them when we were engaged. You were too starry-eyed to pay attention.”

  “I guess the honeymoon wiped them out of my mind. You never said how much was in them.”

  “Are you asking me how much money we have?”

  Another block slid past. Macklin saw inflatable wading pools, a soccer ball resting against a flower bed bordered with whitewashed stones, an elaborate gym set, no children. UV rays, the West Nile virus, and child abductions leading off every news report had emptied the front yards and sentenced a generation to life in front of computers and SpongeBob Squarepants.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you know about the hundred thousand, which we don’t have anymore as of twenty minutes ago. There’s a little over sixty thousand in Switzerland. It’s been months since I checked Andorra and the Caymans, but figuring interest—”

  “Are we millionaires?”

  “Technically; but what’s that? If your mother cashed everything out tomorrow, she’d be too. There’s a long way between a million and Bill Gates.”

  “How much of it is blood money?”

  “Not much. You know what I took from Maggiore. I earned that for all the times he tried to kill me. The rest came when I sold the stores.”

  “That was a front, you said.”

  “Some fronts have been known to pay better than what they’re fronting for. Toward the end I think I was spending more time running the stores than—”

  “Killing people.”

  He turned a corner. A laser-tag facility occupied an immaculate building standing on an entire city block, with a GRAND OPENING banner swagged across the front. That was where the kids went when they weren’t watching TV or interacting with Lara Croft, running down halls and shooting at one another. He was gladder than ever he’d left the life when he had. In ten years the competition was going to be fierce.

  He said, “It might interest you to know I sometimes went a year or two at a time without killing anyone. Gang wars are risky and expensive. They eat up a lot of good men and draw too much attention. And most of the local branches handle their own mop-up. There were people on the inside who thought I was just Mike Boniface’s errand boy. It’s not like the Old West. I wouldn’t have lasted half as long as I did if I had a reputation.”

  “What happened to all the money you made running errands?”

  “Most of it went into the house in Southfield. Then there was Roger’s tuition, and putting clothes on Donna’s back. The rest went to her in the settlement.”

  “She must be the richest divorcee in Southfield.”

  “I’m not the Man with the Golden Gun. The pay was good but I had three neighbors who were doing better than me shuffling papers and taking meetings. Mike didn’t believe in spoiling his employees.”

  “Then why didn’t you quit?” Her voice broke.

  “I did.”

  She said nothing until he slowed down to turn into the convenience store parking lot. “Keep going.”

  He flipped off the indicator. “What about our picnic?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Where to, then, your mother’s?”

  “She’s at the bookstore. I don’t feel like browsing either. Let’s just drive around for a while, okay? Look at the changes.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  He made a decision. She was upset, even if not directly at him. He might as well take her the rest of the way.

  “There’s an envelope in the backseat. I didn’t want to tell you about it until after the picnic.”

  She looked, reached back between the seats, and hoisted it onto her lap. “What’s in it?”

  “Benjamin Grinnell.”

  THIRTEEN

  Wild Bill, who at eighteen had spent a bad first week in Colorado adjusting to the elevation, had learned the principles of hydration. Keeping the tissues sluiced down prevented any manner of complaints, and at the risk of ridicule from some of his less enlightened companions he never went anywhere without his own supply of water. On a blistering afternoon like the one he was spending on Exit 39 in Forest Park, he could have bathed in the stuff and still had enough left over to turn a profit if he’d cared to sell it. He’d sure have done better business than selling flowers.

  He drank off all but a cupful of his fifth plastic bottle and sprinkled the rest over the inventory: the sorriest-looking bunch of cheap posies he’d seen all in one place, but he’d managed to sell three bouquets in an hour at five bucks a pop. Every motorist who’d forked over was male, with the same worried look. They’d each had a fight with the wife over the telephone from work and had steered toward his hand-lettered sign on their way down the ramp like a lost ship’s captain making for dry land. Wild Bill wondered if the women they’d married were dumb enough to accept a wilted bunch of stems smelling of exhaust fumes in lieu of a night on the town.

  Everything smelled of exhaust. Even the water had a distinct aftertaste of regular unleaded.

  He spotted Grinnell soon after he turned off the expressway, even though he was driving one of his rented brown paper bags on wheels. The man always drove with his seat pushed close to the dash and both hands on the wheel; Wild Bill had seen him often enough circling parking lots where he and the others were parked before a job, and he prided himself on his ability to observe and recognize driving styles, the way an old-time cowboy knew an acquaintance was approaching by his posture in the saddle.

  Grinnell cruised the beige SUV to a stop, waited for the dust to drift past, and powered down the window. “Is this what you do when you’re not sticking people up?”

  “I gave the guy a fifty to take the afternoon off. That’s more’n he makes in a weekend. What you dressed up for, a hillbilly wedding?” Grinnell was wearing ragged Carhartt overalls, in sharp contrast to his indoor personality.

  “Never mind that. Where do you want me to make delivery?”

  “Right here. I didn’t set this up to put FTD out of business.”

  The man behind the wheel looked around. A towering car transporter thundered down the ramp huffing its air brakes and swep
t around Wild Bill, lifting his long hair and snatching petals off the bunch of flowers he was holding. The trailer was loaded with new Hondas. “In broad daylight?”

  “I never knew what that meant,” Wild Bill said. “I never saw no narrow daylight.”

  “We might as well do this in front of the State House. There are underground garages.”

  “I don’t like tight spaces. They’ll just think you’re delivering more flowers.”

  Grinnell drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Then he put the SUV in park, got out, and unlocked the back hatch. A Ford Escort ticked past as he took out the bundle wrapped in a black garbage bag and laid it in Wild Bill’s arms. The driver glanced at them briefly, then went on to the stop sign at the end of the ramp.

  Wild Bill groped at the long object in the sack. “Franchi?”

  “Beretta.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s what I could get. I got you the Sigs and boxes of shells. Try not to use them on anyone this time.”

  “I should let myself get shot full of holes by some prick manager with his first piece.”

  “Well, I wasn’t there.”

  “Goddamn right you wasn’t. You wasn’t there when you was there.”

  Grinnell’s face was unreadable. Wild Bill felt the tension going out of his own. “They ream you out in Toledo?”

  “Get the package out of sight.” An official-looking vehicle left the expressway heading down the ramp.

  Wild Bill strode over to the hatchback he’d stolen in Lexington and laid the bundle in the cargo compartment. The official-looking vehicle was a white van belonging to the Ohio Parks Department. It paused at the stop sign and turned left.

  “How much I owe you?”

  Grinnell shook his head. “We’re still providing the weapons. We’ll take it out of the back end like always.”

  “That’s where I been taking it my whole life.” Wild Bill spat out his snuff.

  “When do you go again?”

  “Next Saturday.”

  “Where?”

  “Want some flowers?” Wild Bill picked up the bunch he’d set aside to accept the package.

  Grinnell took it. Wrapped around the stems, secured with a twist of wire, was a page from the Book section of the Toledo Blade. He worried it loose, tearing it. An asterisk was scratched in blue ink in the corner of a quarter-page advertisement. He skimmed through it without changing expression.

  “Too chancy,” he said. “There’s bound to be security, maybe even police.”

  “Small-town cops. They’re not much better than store security. What you do is you contain them early. That’s Mark’s department.”

  “Famous writers attract long lines. If there’s shooting, you’ll be wading through corpses. You got a pass in Hilliard, but if it happens again, you’re on your own. You know the terms of the arrangement.”

  “We’ll hit the place just before they lock the doors. They’ll have the crowd cleared out by then. I checked out a couple of big bookstores in Cinci after I saw the ad. They got his books set up in big displays in front, and stacked up behind ’em to your knees. They’re shooting a picture with Kevin Spacey or somebody out of this Love Song thing; I saw it on E.T. This’ll be like hitting three video stores all at once.”

  Grinnell stuffed the torn sheet back under the wire and smacked the bunch of flowers against Wild Bill’s stomach. “I won’t case it.”

  Wild Bill took the flowers. “You’re in and out before the shindig winds down. We go in after, just like always. You won’t get no blood on your shoes.”

  “Not any you can see. Why do you think I’m delivering guns now? One more blowup and I’ll be cleaning Tommy Vulpo’s swimming pool. Or under it.”

  “Scared?”

  “You should be too. I was the goat last time. If Myrtle goes down the same way, he’ll cut his losses and feed us all to the hogs. His people get quicker results than the state police.”

  “Well, we don’t need an outside case man. Mark or I could do what you do. You can sit it out and you won’t have to shit your pants.”

  “If I’m out, so’s Toledo. You can get guns anywhere, but if you go ahead without a green light, Myrtle will be the last thing you ever did.”

  “I’m thinking that anyway. After Saturday night I’ll have my stake.”

  “You’re counting plenty on there being a Saturday night.”

  Wild Bill grinned his gunfighter’s grin. “You going to run tell Daddy?”

  “Carlos is Vulpo’s property. Ask him what happens when you work outside the organization.”

  “All he ever done was bitch anyway. I’m thinking Mark and Donny and I can handle a bunch of bookworms.”

  “We’re through talking, then.”

  “I think you ain’t scared of Tommy,” Wild Bill said. “That ad don’t say Myrtle. It says the Breakfront Mall, forty minutes southwest of Toledo off of twenty-four. You can drive past a little shit place like Myrtle every day and never know its name. Unless it’s your hole in the wall.”

  Grinnell walked back to his SUV and got in. A piece of gravel clipped Wild Bill’s pants leg as he pulled off the shoulder. It was the first time Wild Bill had managed to put a gaffe in that cold fish.

  FOURTEEN

  Grinnell drove over the overpass and got back on 275 heading back to Miamitown, where he’d left his Lexus and rented the SUV. Stopped in a construction-zone bottleneck, he reached down and slid out the box he’d put under the front seat, just to remind himself not to leave it behind when he switched vehicles, then slid it back. It contained the Browning BDA he’d bought from Sunny Wong: a flat, compact piece that concealed easily and packed a 9mm wallop, just enough to stop a man without passing through him and hitting a citizen, a hard charge to duck even if he had the Vulpos behind him. Dead bystanders seldom went to their graves unaccompanied.

  His hand shook a little when he returned it to the steering wheel. Wild Bill didn’t frighten him and neither did Tommy Vulpo, when it came down to it, but he’d spent a long time setting up a safe haven in Myrtle and if it got around he’d be on the run. The fugitive life was repellent to him: an endless cycle of gasoline and rest stops and six-hour stays in anonymous motels and no progress being made.

  He and the damned cowboy had one thing in common, a desire to make their boodle and cash out. In Wild Bill’s case it was most likely the usual dreary plan, to retire to some bucolic and probably nonexistent village in Mexico or some other place with palm trees and unlimited opportunities for fornication, or to move on to bigger and better scores with less risk, set himself up as Tommy Vulpo Lite. Grinnell just wanted to be let alone. He’d had his fill of the bandit life, gotten his revenge on a remote father who’d expired at seventy in the bed of a female undergraduate when Grinnell was three, and burned off all his adolescent rage against the universe long ago. For a time he’d been contented to remain a semi-uninvolved specialist, identifying potential problems without having to offer a solution or put it in practice, but that situation had begun to sour long before Hilliard.

  Pamela Ziegenthaler was a vain, petty woman, who didn’t respect him any more than she appreciated her bright, beautiful daughter, but they were compatible in bed and she didn’t ask him questions about his work. She was also respectable, and as boring to be around as he tried to be himself. She was his tropical retreat, made up of equal parts security and monotony. Wild Bill would call her a hole in the wall. But Wild Bill and Tommy Vulpo couldn’t know about her.

  He missed the clear-cut days when a case man was a case man, a button a button, a trafficker in contraband that and nothing else. Now it was all a muddle. When an efficient criminal organization started counting pennies—blurring the lines like any struggling legitimate corporation—mistakes were made, and it was never the people up top who paid for them. If this was midlife crisis, then he shared it with the entire system. And there was only one way to go from middle life.

  As if that weren’t enough to concern him, he had grave dou
bts about Pamela’s new son-in-law. Peter Macklin struck him as someone who was putting on the same act he was. A quiet man by necessity, Grinnell distrusted other quiet men. When a man wasn’t talking he was thinking, and a thought unexpressed could be as dangerous as a concealed weapon. A braggart wore it on his hip for all to see.

  There was something else about Macklin too; an aura, if one wanted to be mystical about it. It was rare, but he’d seen it in others. It put him on his guard as it didn’t with characters like Tommy Vulpo and Wild Bill. He could trust them not to be trusted, and when dealing with them could figure his play several moves ahead. He was fairly certain that Macklin had done the same with him over dinner in the restaurant. Grinnell suspected he’d been overplaying his own part, embarrassing even Pamela with his tedious conversation; but Macklin’s eyes had never left his, as if he were enthralled with all the gray details of the life of a glorified traveling salesman. No one was as dull as all that. And even if he were, he would never hold the interest of someone like Laurie, a woman whose mature beauty belied her years, whose flashes of intelligence startled even her self-obsessed mother.

  The mother distrusted Macklin as well. In her case, it was for most of the same petty reasons that inspired mother-in-law jokes. Later that evening, she’d hinted that Grinnell, with his scattered business acquaintances, might ask around about a Peter Macklin who claimed to have retired from the retail camera business, as if everyone in sales and marketing knew everyone else in that line. Grinnell had been vague in his response. If the man was as dangerous as he seemed, he could find out fairly quickly, although not by asking the people Pamela expected him to. But he was afraid to ask. He wondered if Macklin had been sent to observe him or worse, and if the people behind him caught on that Grinnell was wise, it might force their hand.

  So Macklin could wait. The first order of business was to prevent Wild Bill and his crew from robbing Pamela’s store next Saturday. But even as he formed that conclusion, Grinnell rejected it. It would mean going to Tommy Vulpo, who would want to know why it was important to him. Tommy was as crazy as old Joe—maybe crazier, having gotten his start earlier in life—but he was no fool, and would see through any complaint that the plan was too dangerous. Grinnell’s opposition alone would be enough to attract attention to his hideaway.