Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  Finding none, he sat back on his heels, hung his head, and filled and emptied his lungs ten times. He was shaking—from muscular spasm, not fear—and his wind came out in shudders. He drew a sleeve across his streaming forehead. Garroting was a young man’s game.

  Something rattled and banged. Someone was trying the locked front door. He stood, staggered a little, and found his balance. His side ached. He had a kink in his back and his left arm tingled below the spot where the falling mallet had struck a nerve.

  The drawer the wrestler had drawn the .44 from contained a box of cartridges for the Dan Wesson .38 Special and a Ziploc bag with the three interchangeable barrels inside. He might have bent the one he had subduing the damn ape. He unscrewed it, screwed the two-and-a-half-inch into its place, and put the bag in a pocket, along with the barrel he’d removed. He loaded the revolver and stuck the box in another pocket.

  Whoever had tried the door had either given up or gone for help.

  Macklin looked around. He hadn’t touched anything that would preserve prints, and the curious party outside had smeared any he might have left on the door handle when he’d entered the shop. He pulled his shirt cuff down over his palm, found the bolt to the back door, and let himself out into the alley behind the building. It was empty in the light of a street lamp at the end except for a Dumpster and what remained of a dead raccoon after it had been run over by a succession of sanitation trucks. He threaded the revolver under his belt and dropped his shirttail over the butt.

  Blank walls faced him on both sides, but he slumped his shoulders as he walked away, taking several inches off his height to discourage accurate description. You never knew who might be watching in a college town.

  SIXTEEN

  The interview room smelled of pencils, that resonant mix of cedar and graphite that always reminded him of grammar school. The table was steel with a laminate top and bolted to the floor. The wires attached to the switch on the interviewer’s side would go down inside the legs and connect to the intercom outside the one-way mirror that hadn’t fooled anyone since The Defenders. Light came in through a panel in the ceiling made of fluted shatterproof glass. There were dents in the beige-painted drywall just large enough to have been left by the heads of reluctant interviewees, if not by a mallet in the hands of a watch commander with an undergraduate degree in psychology. Not an unpleasant room, for all that, and certainly no more depressing than a hospital emergency waiting room with its professionally tended plants and collection of uninteresting magazines.

  Grinnell was a connoisseur of both places. At age three he’d waited with his mother and brother at Queensway General for the news about his father, and he’d spent a total of three days in these identical surroundings at the time of his arrest for conspiracy to violate the laws of interstate commerce. His mother had been in and out of treatment for various complaints real and imagined; he had played the dutiful son until he was old enough to operate a motor vehicle and drive away.

  He’d been in this one almost four hours. There was no clock, but he had his watch and he was a good judge of time without having to look at it every few minutes. An officer in uniform—not one of the pair who had come to his condominium—had escorted him to the men’s room down the hall an hour and a half earlier, but apart from that his stay had been uninterrupted by human contact. The officer had gone in with him and waited while he used the urinal. There had been no window in the rest room, no other exit except the door they’d entered through, but the man had taken no chances. That told him—if he hadn’t already guessed—that he was being detained for something or someone important. He knew for what and probably for whom, but whenever his thoughts drifted that direction he changed their course. Policemen were no more telepathic than anyone else, but a man could trap himself by assuming.

  Grinnell had been home an hour when the knock had come to his door. He’d had time meanwhile to change out of his redneck camouflage and stash the Browning BDA he’d bought from Sunny Wong.

  His condo occupied two floors of a historic row house overlooking Toledo and Maumee Bay. Shortly after moving in, he’d found a shaft hidden behind a panel near the kitchen ceiling, a remnant of the Victorian mania for ventilation, and that discovery had erased the last trace of unease about his long financial commitment. He’d suspected he’d find use for it one day.

  That day had been long in coming, but upon returning from greater Cincinnati and before changing his clothes he’d climbed a stepladder, crawled inside the shaft, pried loose another panel, and deposited the pistol behind a joist belonging to the row house on the other side of the common wall.

  That was the best part. The cache wouldn’t withstand a really thorough police search, but those were rare, and even then the evidence wouldn’t be allowed in court without a search warrant issued to his neighbor’s address. In the unlikely event of a friendly ruling, the forbidden item was evidence of only a misdemeanor. There was nothing to connect it with Hilliard or Sunny or the Vulpo crime family. He’d driven it from his mind immediately after replacing the panels.

  He was getting hungry, but the greasy corn chips and Twinkies he’d seen in the machine outside the room held no appeal. He was eating healthy these days, partly under Pamela’s influence, partly because of his awareness of middle age. Fish, skinless chicken, vegetables lightly steamed. He was getting to be as ordinary as he pretended.

  He wasn’t under arrest, and so technically was not entitled to ask to use the telephone. Technically he was free to go, but he knew he’d be arrested if he tried to leave. That would force him to call an attorney and bring the Vulpos into it. He preferred to wait things out, just as the police preferred to let him. Four hours was more than time enough for whomever they were expecting to arrive from any place he might be expected to start from; the rest was to make Grinnell doubt himself. In most cases it probably worked.

  He occupied his time with a childhood game, silently reciting the titles of Shakespeare’s plays in the order of authorship.

  The Comedy of Errors. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Henry VI, parts I, II, and III …

  In his early life, he’d been considered something of a prodigy. He’d learned to read at two and a half, and at five entertained houseguests by performing the first act of Lady Windermere’s Fan from memory, much to the amazement and alarm of his mother, who’d believed that precocious genius led to a nervous breakdown in one’s teens, followed by a lifetime of drooling idiocy and familial dependence. In any case the experience of his father had soured her on intellectual achievement, and to save him from his heritage she’d enrolled him in those pursuits she thought more suited to normal adolescence: soccer (which she insisted upon calling “football”), friendship with the dullard offspring of neighbors who attended American movies and thought dinner theater the apex of culture, and a social calendar chockablock with cheerleaders and girls who read magazines with teen idols on the covers. Close observation of their behavior had taught him how to cloak himself in bland disguise.

  Romeo and Juliet. Richard II. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. King John …

  His flight from home, therefore, had been a rebellion against both parents. He’d dredged canals, made change behind counters, shoplifted electronic equipment for quick cash. But steering a course opposite both high- and middlebrow required constant vigilance, and in time he’d succumbed to the tastes of his paternity. He would not finish his formal education, because that would have pleased the old rake whose name he’d shared, but the knowledge that if he had done so he’d be eminently qualified to join the faculty of a respectable university, and had chosen instead to squander his gifts in the underworld, satisfied him down to the heels. He’d whiled away many an hour watching the entrances of credit unions whose safes his companions were cracking, chronicling the works of the Bard from memory.

  Julius Caesar. As You Like It. Twelfth Night. Hamlet …

  At times, he recognized, his ability to detach himself from his thoughts had caused problems. He hadn’
t been concentrating in Hilliard. The risk factor in video stores was so low, and case work so routine, that he’d merely gone through the motions: seeing and noting, but not looking beyond the superficial. Assuming. It had cost a man his life, Wild Bill’s crew its low profile, and Grinnell his reputation for reliability. Before Hilliard, Tommy Vulpo had taken him for granted, not altogether a bad thing. What had happened there had attracted Toledo’s notice. Grinnell’s plan to coast under the radar into comfortable early retirement was jeopardized, his hostel in Myrtle in danger of exposure; and he caught himself thinking, and returned to his recitation.

  All’s Well That Ends Well. Othello. King Lear. Measure for Measure …

  The door opened and in came Edgar Prine, commander of the Ohio State Police Armed Robbery Task Force.

  Macbeth.

  He was more formidable in person than on television; what media analysts called a “hot personality,” impressive when encountered on the stage of a church hall or a tent meeting, pounded flat by harsh lights and the two dimensions of the camera. His physical presence filled a room that had been small to begin with, and his expanse of black suit threatened to suck Grinnell into it like a black hole. Grinnell resisted without great effort. His own studied effect was like eiderdown, which danced and floated and lacked the mass to surrender to the pull of gravity.

  Prine wore a professional smile, teeth clamped together like pliers. He was carrying a green leather folder with the Ohio State seal embossed on it in gold. It was the next best thing to swaddling himself in the state flag; but it wasn’t wise to belittle the man, even to oneself. He hadn’t risen to his current position and held it so long against the hurricane force of politics by being the pompous ass he appeared. It might even have been an artfully constructed facade, like Grinnell’s own.

  In fact he was sure of it. The hazard in living a role was to presume that everyone else was genuine.

  Close on Prine’s heels came a smaller man who could have lost himself in his own shadow, let alone his companion’s. He was fifty and could have passed for older, round-shouldered in a suit that was not quite a suit, the coat a shade darker than the trousers, but equally past hope of pressing. His grizzled hair was amateurishly cut and he carried his chin at an upward tilt that in anyone else might have been mistaken for arrogance. Grinnell suspected he was severely shortsighted and had either left his reading glasses behind or was in denial about needing them. All this was perhaps less the result of artifice, but on the whole here was another example of a creature who was greater than the sum of its parts. These were deep waters.

  He recognized the man in a muzzy sort of way from public appearances with Prine, and more specifically from behind the wheel of an official automobile powering up Tommy Vulpo’s driveway as Grinnell was driving down. He understood then the process that had led all three men from there to here. Chance was a treacherous mistress, filthy and unpredictable.

  This too he banished from memory. His best chance of leaving the building unescorted was not only to present a clean slate, but to be one as well.

  Captain Edgar Prine sat down at the interview table, laid his folder on its top, and stretched his arm across to envelop the hand of the man seated across from him. He introduced himself and Farrell McCormick, who remained standing and made no move to shake hands. Then Prine built some business out of spreading open the folder and looking at the top sheet, as if he’d forgotten what it contained.

  “You’re John Grinnell Benjamin?”

  The man shook his head. “I’m Benjamin Grinnell. I changed it when I applied for citizenship. That’s the form you have in front of you.”

  “Why’d you change it?”

  “I never liked it much. I’ve never considered myself the John type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “A regular sort of fellow who throws Super Bowl parties.”

  “That’s right, you’re Canadian by birth. I guess hockey’s your game.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “So much for sports. You don’t look like a Ben, either, if you don’t mind my saying so. Why’d you keep Grinnell?”

  “It was a family name on my mother’s side. She was a cousin of George Bird Grinnell.”

  Prine smiled ignorance.

  “He wrote a history of the Cheyenne Indians, among other things. It’s still taught in anthropology courses, nearly eighty years after it was published.”

  “I guess you’re proud of that. Well, why not? Eighty years. That’s quite a thing.”

  Grinnell said nothing.

  “Do you know why you were asked to come here today?”

  “The officers said they wanted to ask some questions.”

  “That isn’t really an answer.”

  Grinnell said nothing.

  Prine peeled aside the photostat copy of Grinnell’s citizenship application. It had been stamped APPROVED. The next sheet was a report of his arrest for smuggling cigarettes. No stamp there. “You smoke?”

  Grinnell shook his head.

  “Says here you were apprehended in Michigan on an outstanding warrant for trying to sell sixty cartons of Marlboros to a supermarket in Sandusky. I guess you’re like those old-time bootleggers who never took a nip themselves. Professional pride.”

  Grinnell was silent.

  McCormick spoke up. “You know that money’s used to support terrorists. You a terrorist, Benjamin?”

  “Grinnell.”

  Prine smiled his grit-toothed smile. “I’m sure the lieutenant was just calling you by your first name. We’re pretty informal around here, Ben. You can call me Ed, and the lieutenant prefers Mac. No one’s called him Farrell since his mother passed over. That’s right, isn’t it, Mac?”

  “My wife still calls me it sometimes, when she’s mad.”

  “Try living with Edgar. What’s yours call you, Ben? You married?”

  “No.”

  “Divorced?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s as far as I can follow that line. Don’t ask, don’t tell, you know?”

  No response; not even irritation at the implication he was gay. He might have been at that. There was a blurred delicacy about the man’s features that reminded him of an old movie actor. Not a matinee idol, but the best friend of the hero in a B feature. There was nothing insolent about Grinnell’s silence, no hint of defiance, just a polite expression of waiting for a question he could answer and help out the interviewer. That was an acquired skill, and for the first time the captain was less than confident of a positive end to the conversation.

  “What do you do, Ben?” he asked.

  “I’m a facilitator with American Dreams Home Supplies. I help maintain consistency of service throughout the chain.”

  “That’s a Toledo company, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, the headquarters is downtown.”

  “You know it’s mobbed up?”

  “Mobbed up?”

  “It’s one of a dozen companies Joe Vulpo has big investments in. You know Joe?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “Tommy’s his son. You know Tommy?”

  “I’ve heard of him as well.”

  “You went to see him three days ago.”

  Grinnell watched him with curiosity on his face.

  “I know you saw us,” Prine said. “Details are important in your work.”

  “They are.”

  “Maybe you just needed a place to turn around, and there was Tommy’s driveway. But you can see the coincidence. Then there’s your record.”

  Nothing. Prine turned over the old arrest report and looked at a note scribbled on a memo sheet.

  “Travel a lot?” he asked.

  “Quite a bit.”

  “Pretty hard on a car, even a Lexus. Miamitown officer spotted your car parked in front of a dry cleaner’s there. I put some men on it, but you never showed. I asked Toledo P.D. to send someone to your place here. You want to tell us why you left your car clear down by Cincinnati?”<
br />
  Grinnell scratched his cheek and refolded his hands on the table.

  “Maybe it broke down. All that wear and tear. You’re not the hitchhiking type, so I’m guessing you rented a car and drove it back here. The Lexus was still there a little while ago. I checked. Guess the place you called hasn’t gotten around to it yet.”

  Nothing. Prine sat back. McCormick looked down at Grinnell with the sad bored face of an experienced mortician.

  “I don’t know why we’re wasting this kind of time on you,” he said. “You’re a U.S. citizen because a mob lawyer dealt you out of a felony conviction, but you’re basically a penny player. Seven years later and you’re still out hustling. You’re no prize, Benjamin.”

  “We all make allowances for the lieutenant,” Prine said. “He’s borderline Tourette’s. He hasn’t reached the stage where you curse in public and make rude noises. He’s just blunt.”

  McCormick wore away. “Tommy has to be thinking the same thing. You were an okay front man, so he gave you a little more to do, put you to work casing video stores, but it was too much. You tripped over your own elbow, got a man killed, and now you’re on the burner. I’m thinking that’s why you slunk out of his place carrying your balls in a paper bag. What do you figure he’ll do when he sees your face on TV?”

  “May I have a glass of water?”

  McCormick looked sadder. “Another day or so and you can have all of Maumee Bay.”

  Prine said, “Don’t overdo it, Mac. You feel faint, Ben? Dehydration sneaks up on you.”

  “No, just a little thirsty.”

  “Okay if it’s from the tap? I don’t know if they have bottled here.”

  “From the tap is fine.”

  The captain closed the green folder and stood. “It’s hot in here with three people. Departmental cutbacks; they seal off these rooms from the central air to save energy. Bad for the blood pressure. We’ll leave you alone for a few minutes. I’ll send in water.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  Outside the room, the two detectives switched roles. McCormick’s face lifted, and Prine’s was grim.