Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  No, he would have to accept the assignment to case the bookstore as if the job were no different from all the others. Unlike all the others, he would have to remain on the premises and prevent it from becoming another Hilliard. He was glad he’d trusted his instincts and bought the BDA.

  Traffic resumed moving. He drove on to Miamitown and the agency where he’d rented the cumbersome thing he was driving. He’d parked the Lexus in front of a dry cleaner’s in the adjoining strip mall. He found a slot next to the other returns and was about to get out when he took a second look at the parking lot next door.

  Near the end of the strip, the city had erected a bus stop, shielded by Plexiglas on three sides, with a bench for passengers to rest. A man in a baseball cap and a T-shirt with Chief Wahoo rampant on a field of red sat at one end, reading the Inquirer. At the other end sat a stout, elderly woman with a grocery sack on her lap. As Grinnell watched, a city bus slid in front of the stop and coughed its air brakes. It stood still for a full minute, then coughed again and bore away its passengers. The man in the baseball cap remained sitting on the bench. One leg of his blue jeans bulged above the ankle.

  Grinnell turned his attention to a public telephone mounted in front of a pet shop two doors down from the dry cleaner, where another man, thickset and balding, stood with one arm resting on the ledge beneath the telephone and the receiver to his ear. He wore his shirttail out over his slacks.

  That was enough for Grinnell, but just to make sure he started the SUV and drove around the block. A gray Ford Crown Victoria sedan with whip antennas and a Columbus plate stood unoccupied in a fifteen-minute loading zone on the street that ran parallel to the dry cleaner’s. He accelerated and went on to 75 North. He couldn’t allow himself to be apprehended with an unregistered pistol in his possession, but if the state police knew his car they also knew his address in Toledo. He might as well go home and wait for them.

  Picnic or no, Macklin and Laurie came to the sudden and simultaneous conclusion they were starving. They turned into a Cracker Barrel at high tide, got their names in, and browsed among the novelty clocks, T-shirts, cookie jars, and tins of overpriced toffee in the gift shop until a table opened up. He excused himself to use the men’s room. On his way back into the dining room he stopped at the pay telephone, dialed a number from memory, and spoke with the man who answered for two minutes.

  As he returned to the table, Laurie collapsed the antenna on her cell telephone.

  “Your mother?” He sat down. A weathered crosscut saw hung on the latticework wall beside them.

  “I got her answering machine. She must be on her way home from the store.”

  “Leave a message?”

  “I said I had something important to talk about. I left the number.”

  “When she calls back, tell her you forgot what time we’re expected at the autograph party.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Now isn’t the time to tell her about Grinnell. She’ll ask him if it’s true.”

  “He’ll deny it, of course. Lying isn’t anything to a criminal.”

  She dropped her voice to a whisper on the last part. A waitress had appeared at their table, eighteen and plump. Laurie and Macklin glanced at their menus. They ordered coffee, chicken-fried chicken, and roast beef. The waitress trundled off.

  Macklin said, “We just found out who he is. We don’t know who he represents or why he’s with your mother. If he finds out we’re on to him, we’ll never know.”

  “But if it scares him away—”

  “You saw what was in the envelope.”

  She nodded. “Okay, so he doesn’t scare. Do you think he’ll hurt my mother?”

  “He doesn’t have a history of violence.”

  “Every history has to start somewhere.”

  “It wasn’t your mother I was talking about. She runs a bookstore. The only enemies she’s likely to make are people who paid too much for Harry Potter.”

  “There are times when I’ve thought I could kill her myself.” She hesitated. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “She’s a difficult woman. I’ll stack up my enemies against hers any day.”

  “You think it’s you they’re after?”

  “I have to play the odds. So far as I know the Vulpos were never especially friendly with Carlo Maggiore, but they represent the same institution. And then you never know whose toes you’re stepping on when you fill a work order.”

  “Kill a man, you mean.”

  Their coffee came. When they were alone again he said, “If it’s me he’s after, getting caught out might force him to act, or force whoever he’s spotting for. He’s a case man as a rule. As long as he doesn’t know we know what he is, we’ve got an advantage.”

  “Are you going to kill him?”

  The restaurant was packed, with the usual assortment of lively conversants and unruly children. In the din of voices, flatware, and crockery, the couple could have been planning a terrorist act in a normal tone of voice without being overheard.

  “You’ve got killing on the brain,” he said. “It’s not the only way.”

  “It’s your way. Who did you call?”

  He smiled, without humor. “If you can hear through walls, how come you ask so many questions?”

  “We’ve been married a year. You never take more than four minutes to use the bathroom.”

  “I worked in Toledo and Cleveland. I’ll tell you who it was for, if you have to know. But then I’d have to kill them too.”

  “How would they find out you told me?”

  “The same way you found out I made a call. We’ve been married a year, but I was with the organization more than twenty. They’d know. And even if they didn’t, I couldn’t take that chance.”

  She stretched a hand across the table. He covered it with one of his. “I’m sorry about before,” she said. “Just when I start thinking we’re a normal married couple, something comes up to remind me.”

  “What’s normal?”

  The waitress brought their meals. They ate mostly in silence, breaking it with innocuous comments on the tin advertising signs and old bric-a-brac decorating the walls. Finally she pushed away her plate. “I’m stuffed.”

  “No dessert?”

  “Are you kidding? You never eat dessert.”

  “Another cup of coffee.”

  Her expression flattened. “You’re waiting for someone.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t see him.”

  They asked for a refill. When their cups were empty, Laurie went to the women’s room while Macklin paid the bill. When they left the building, they found a fold of blue paper tucked under one of their windshield wipers. Macklin read what was written on it, then tore it into tiny pieces and let them flutter.

  “A name?” Laurie asked.

  “An address.” He opened the door on the passenger’s side and held it for her.

  Wild Bill was napping in his chair on the back deck when his telephone rang. He went inside and picked up the receiver just before the machine kicked in. He listened, then said, “What changed your mind?”

  “My horoscope,” Grinnell’s voice said. “What time Saturday?”

  “They close at nine. Just before then.”

  The receiver clicked. Wild Bill worked the plunger, then pecked out a number.

  “’Sup?” asked Mark Twain, when he recognized the voice.

  Wild Bill said shit under his breath. Mark only talked like a Budweiser commercial when he was on parrot tranquilizers. “Can you talk?”

  “Sure. I just can’t walk.” He giggled.

  “Man, I need you lucid.”

  There was a rustle on the other end; Mark sitting up, running his fingers through his dreads. “Okay, what?”

  They made arrangements in a series of one-word sentences only they understood. When Wild Bill was sure Mark was sober enough not to forget them five minutes after they finished, he hung up, got the Beretta shotgun down from its perch atop one of the big ti
mbers that held up the roof over the living room, broke it down, and coated every surface with graphite. When he put it back together and worked the pump, it slid as smoothly as foreskin.

  FIFTEEN

  Pamela Ziegenthaler answered the door with her hair tied up in a bandanna. She wore a buffalo plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her forearms and the tail hanging out over stretch jeans. Her bare feet were stuck in woven sandals. Macklin thought of I Love Lucy.

  “I got your message,” she greeted. “I didn’t expect you to come by. I’m getting some cleaning done; no telling when I’ll get another chance until after the autograph party.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. We’ll come back later.”

  Macklin spoke up quickly. “I’ve got some business in Bowling Green. I thought Laurie’s time would be better spent with you.”

  They’d argued about the decision, but he’d convinced her there was more risk involved with two. That hadn’t made all her anger go away. She suspected there was more to it, and she was right.

  “Well, I’ll put you to work. I need someone to help me move the refrigerator so I can scrub behind it.”

  Laurie said, “I thought you had a woman come in.”

  “I let her go. She was a snoop. I didn’t see any point in paying someone to gossip about me to her other employers.”

  Macklin wondered what part Grinnell had played in that decision.

  “I don’t do windows,” Laurie said.

  “I didn’t ask you to, dear. I’ve seen how you clean. It’s your young muscles I’m after. Business, you said?” she asked Macklin. “You said you were retired.”

  “I have investments. Mostly they look after themselves, but every now and then.”

  “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  He said, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ll take you both out to dinner.”

  “I’ll accept that offer. Benjamin called. He’s stuck in Toledo for the next couple of days. You’d think he was the only man on the company payroll.”

  The address Macklin had found on his windshield belonged to a store that sold musical instruments near the Bowling Green University campus. Drum sets dressed the display windows and a candy-apple-red Stratocaster with a fifty-thousand-dollar price tag leaned aristocratically inside a glass case on a stand. A high ledge behind the counter supported glistening violins, gold snares, and amplifiers; trombones, trumpets, and saxophones hung from pegs on the wall below it. Keyboards and microphone stands competed for floor space with racks of picks, strings, reeds, and sheets of music. A poster tacked to the counter announced the appearance locally of a traditional Irish band.

  Macklin waited while a gangly customer of about twenty paid for his purchase, a set of earphones and a twelve-volt battery. The young man’s head was shaved and he had arrows tattooed on the back of his scalp, labeled YES and NO, like the rear of a semitruck trailer. He walked out, carrying his sack and dragging the cuffs of his baggy pants.

  “Sir?”

  The counterman looked like an ex-professional wrestler, thin bleached hair to his shoulders, brown Fu Manchu moustache drooling from the corners of his wide mouth. Biceps and belly strained the material of a T-shirt advertising the four-century European tour of the Black Plague.

  “Phil Lavery told me about your shop,” Macklin said.

  “Sorry, don’t know him.”

  “He said you might say that. He said it might help if I mentioned Wapakoneta.”

  The counterman nodded. His face was glum. He moved to the far end of the counter, swung up a hinged flap, and came out from behind it. He was severely bowlegged—years of deep knee-bends with barbells resting across his shoulders—and the shortened tendons in his arms prevented them from hanging straight. He twisted the latch on the front door and turned the sign around in the window so that the CLOSED side faced out. “In back.”

  Macklin followed him behind the counter and through a fire door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY into a combination workshop and storage area lit only by an overhead bulb and during the day a skylight with a heavy grid protecting the glass. Crates and boxes were stacked nearly to the rafters and tools hung on a pegboard above a workbench and littered its chipboard surface. Industrial-size padded clamps held a bass viol in place on the bench; the instrument was in the process of being restrung. A coil of string that looked like piano wire hung on a corner of the bench, waiting to be trimmed off.

  The wrestler selected a key from a ring attached by a retractable cord to a metal case on his belt, unlocked a drawer shaped like a bin under the bench, removed an assortment of tuning hammers and needle-nose pliers, dumped them on the bench, and pulled up a false bottom. Eight handguns lay on a chamois cloth in the exposed compartment, their butts and barrels reversed so that they fit together like chicken drumsticks in a supermarket package.

  “I don’t deal full auto,” the wrestler said. “That’s a year and a day in this state, no plea bargain. I don’t have room for long guns, shotguns and rifles. These days I make more off woodwinds. Every parent in Bowling Green thinks his kid’s a virtuoso.”

  Macklin was only half listening. He ignored the Glocks and Berettas and picked up a Dan Wesson .38 Special revolver with a four-inch barrel. The chambers were empty.

  “That comes with interchangeable barrels: eight, six, two and a half. I can let you have the works for six hundred.”

  “How much without the extra barrels?”

  “Still six. Can’t sell barrels without the revolver. I tried.”

  He aimed at a packing crate across the room, dry-fired the Wesson. “Trigger pull’s stiff.”

  “That’s on account of it’s new. It’ll loosen up with practice. I don’t sell used pieces. That one came in a batch that fell off the back of a truck.”

  “How long did you have to follow it before that happened?”

  “See, that’s the point. A man’s time is worth something, even in this economy.”

  “Is it on a hot list?”

  “The guys that owned the truck don’t report losses. It’s clean.”

  “What about cartridges?”

  The wrestler produced another key and unlocked a bin-drawer next to the one he’d opened. “You know about Wapakoneta?”

  “No.”

  “No, I don’t guess Phil’d tell you. This fellow Anderson came short ten or fifteen grand on a loan. The guy Toledo sent to his house got hot and squiffed him. The wife walked in on it, so he squiffed her too. Fixed it up to look like murder-suicide. Toledo came down and sprayed some cash around to make sure it stuck. I provided the ordnance. It’s the dirtiest deal I ever was in on. They like to use it whenever I talk about quitting. You know: ‘You’re in this far, and the cops in Wapakoneta never did trace the gun, but that don’t mean someone won’t make an anonymous phone call.’” He scooped a short-barreled .44 out of the drawer and pointed it at Macklin. “This one’s loaded.”

  Macklin didn’t move. The wrestler gestured with the barrel toward the ceiling. Macklin lifted his hands then. He was still holding the empty .38 in his right.

  “I’ve never been to Wapakoneta,” he said.

  “What’s the difference? I’m holding you for the cops. If you know Phil Lavery, they’ll want to know you. Maybe they’ll go easier on me for the other. I’m done walking around with it.” He reached behind his back and drew a cellular telephone out of his hip pocket. He glanced at it one instant to dial 911 with his thumb.

  Macklin swept his right hand down, cracking the .38’s barrel across the wrestler’s wrist. The wrestler yelped and the .44 thudded the floor. Macklin scooped up the coil of violin wire with his left hand, looped a length around the wrestler’s thick neck, spun him around, and drew back on the wire. The wrestler dropped his telephone and clawed at his neck, the veins on his biceps standing out like rope. He raised one foot and kicked, fighting for leverage. His foot went through the belly of the bass viol clamped to the bench. The instrument came away with the foot and flew apar
t when he stamped the floor. His fingers pried at the wire, but it was sunk almost out of sight. He heaved backward. Macklin, backpedaling with him, toppled a stack of crates, stumbled, and struck the wall hard, pinned between it and the wrestler’s bulk.

  The man was as strong as a bull, and Macklin was out of practice. He hitched the wire twice around the revolver’s barrel and twisted, drawing it tighter than he could through muscle power alone. The wrestler made cooking noises in his throat. He managed to plant one heel against the wall, shoved away, ducked his head, and tried to throw Macklin forward over his back; but his strength was waning. One of his knees buckled. Macklin spread his feet for leverage and leaned back. The wrestler snapped his leg straight through sheer will and threw his weight to the side. Macklin barked his ribs against the bench. Tools jangled on the pegboard, a rubber mallet fell off its hook and glanced off his shoulder. He gave the revolver another half twist. Bracing himself against the bench he jerked the wrestler upright and turned, swiveling him off his heels and increasing the torque. Something crunched underfoot; the wrestler’s cell phone.

  A stubby hand shot out toward the tools scattered on the bench and found a pair of needle-nose pliers that came to a wicked point, but Macklin pulled him away and the handle slid out of his grip. Air whistled through the wrestler’s nostrils in a high-pitched sob.

  His weight began to sag. Macklin resisted at first, sensing a trick, but a disk shifted in his back and he followed the man down, maintaining pressure. The wrestler fell to his knees, then toppled forward onto his face. Macklin knelt astride him and tried to twist the gun again, but it wouldn’t budge. The wrestler’s limbs began to twitch.

  Macklin didn’t let up for a full minute after the twitching stopped. Then he extricated the gun and groped at the man’s lacerated neck for a pulse.