Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Smooth character,” the lieutenant said. “He doesn’t scare, and he won’t use a story even when you make one up for him.”

  “A crook with company manners is still a crook.”

  “Kick him?”

  Prine drummed his fingers on the edge of the folder. “Yeah. If we blow him now, Tommy’ll stay away from him like AIDS. That puts us back in the dugout.” He thumped McCormick’s chest with a corner of the folder. “Closed tail. If he spots us he’ll just lead us to every American Dreams store in the Cuyahoga Valley.”

  “I didn’t know American Dreams was Vulpo.”

  “It isn’t. He wouldn’t be working there if it was. You can’t bluff a bluffer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try.”

  “If I was Tommy, I’d have sent him to the showers after Hilliard.”

  “If you were Tommy, Grinnell would’ve left Northwood in the cargo compartment of that Lexus.” He paused. “You were scary in there.”

  “You think? Going in, I thought I’d throw a chair or something, pound the table. I couldn’t find the motivation.”

  “Save it,” Prine said. “We’re going to wind this one up in Kevlar.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “Fucking gingerbread village,” Carlos said.”I lived here, I’d run down the fucking mayor to get out.”

  Mark said, “Not me. I’d open up a cockshop. All these horny old guys married to old bats selling potpourri, them rickety benches with the heart-shaped holes, they got to drive all the way into Toledo for pussy.” He’d never sounded so black.

  “Pipe down or roll the windows up,” Wild Bill said mildly. He was enjoying the scenery in an ironic way, two rows of 150-year-old brick buildings painted country blue with fake white columns plastered to the fronts. Six gift shops, a place that did fancy nails, and no place to buy a screwdriver. Strip malls were a crime against Main Street.

  Donny drove twenty-three miles an hour and said nothing. They were using his personal car, a battered Chevelle worn down to primer all around with a 380 Coup deVille engine grumbling under the sun-powdered hood. Wild Bill insisted they all attend trial runs, mainly to give Carlos a chance to bust their balls with “better” escape routes and get them out of his system. Donny wasn’t easily distracted, but Wild Bill was always keyed up after the real deal, and with a shotgun across his lap it would be just too tempting. He’d be one happy cowboy when the bookstore was behind them and the partnership dissolved.

  There would be no getaway through downtown. The council had reconfigured the street into a zigzag by planting trees and flower beds, discouraging speeders; he could see them racing through at seventy, sparks showering off the frame and pieces of suspension trailing the pavement. No reason to have to point that out to Donny.

  The residential neighborhoods were potluck: wedding-cake Victorians, 1960s ranch styles, modulars dating back no further than pet rocks. They passed two baby-boom schools with trailer-type temporary classrooms dropped in to handle the new housing tracts, three sparkling bank branches with non-geo-specific names, combo gas stations and convenience stores, a warehouse outlet that might as well have been called Some Assembly Required. Squat-and-gobble fast-food joints, Wal-Mart Supercenter, Discount Tire, Chevy and Honda dealerships, and not a stick in them older than the transmission Donny had rebuilt from junk-yard scrap. A brick shell was going up on a dirt lot with a hangar door–size sign out front announcing the site of a new Panera Bread. Farther out on the plain smoothed by the mighty Ohio River, Wild Bill could see the first of the subdivisions bordering on one another like European countries, to half-million-dollar houses with Palladian windows and four-car garages, still smelling of fresh sawdust and curing concrete; they stood among artificial hills built from landfill and carpeted with blue-green sod. He might have been in any town in North America, regardless of size or the source of its economy.

  They slowed down for a construction crew grading for two additional lanes and turned at last into a parking lot with a Hallmark, a pharmacy that sold package liquor, a health club, a video outlet—twinge of nostalgia there, but life went on—and a bookstore with a sheet of glass for a front wall and remainders stacked on long folding tables under the overhang. Customers loitered there and passed in and out through glass double doors.

  They’d deliberately chosen the hour past dinner Saturday for the reconnoiter, when the streets were paved with entertainment-hungry motorists and the average wait to get through a traffic light involved two changes. It would be quieter later in the evening, when next week’s thing went down, but to know a route when all the obstacles were in place was to know it thoroughly, like a woman without her first-date manners. There were no regular spaces available near the businesses. Donny pulled into a vacant one with a sign saying it was reserved for expectant mothers (Carlos wondered if there was a slot for customers with clap) and switched off the engine. They sat there for a while watching the customer flow.

  Wild Bill said, “You wonder who’s home watching Survivor.”

  “Skin magazines and the out-of-town papers,” Carlos said. “That’s the profit margin. These places’d go under if all they had was Isabel Allende.”

  Mark Twain grunted. Wild Bill suspected he was coming down from the parrot pills, when his mood was ugliest. “What you know about Isabel Allende? All the comic books out of circ in the Jackson library?”

  “Hey, I read. Not much else to do when Paulie D’Onofrio’s got his buttons out looking for you.”

  “I keep forgetting you rode along on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

  “Man, I know you’re shitting, but down in Little Mexico, that one wouldn’t even make the papers. That’s how come Tommy Vulpo does his recruiting in the Spanish neighborhoods.”

  Wild Bill wondered if Carlos even spoke the language. The wetbacks in El Paso would’ve broken him like a piñata. He said, “I’m going in, look around.”

  “What for?” Mark asked. “That’s Grinnell’s end.”

  “First he’s in, then he’s out, then he’s back in. Who knows where he’ll be in a week?”

  “Pussy.” Carlos spat his p’s, sprinkling the back of Wild Bill’s neck. “That last fuckup brought out the yellow.”

  Mark said, “It’s a bookstore. What’s to see?”

  “There’s always a back room, where they do the ordering and keep the extra stock. Maybe they don’t lock the back door. Is there a public toilet? How many doors we got to watch? Shit like that.”

  “Send in Donny. No one sees him anyway. He looks like a guy you see hanging around Science Fiction.” Mark was sullen.

  The driver turned his scruffy-bearded face on Wild Bill. Panic shone in his eyes. He never showed it when the road was all he had to face.

  “There’s a crowd. No one’ll notice me.” Wild Bill opened the door.

  Carlos said, “See if they got Latin Labia.”

  Wild Bill looked at the man in the backseat: tightly curled hair low on the forehead, bunched, angry features, thick Pancho Villa moustache. He looked like an old Frito ad.

  “Anything else? You want me to pull out my cock so they’ll remember me?”

  “I didn’t say get it. I said see if they got it. I might pick it up next Saturday.”

  “After next Saturday you can hire Ricky Martin’s asshole and bugger it all day Sunday.” He got out and thunked the door shut.

  An eleven-by-fourteen placard in the window advertised the Francis Spain signing. There was a color mock-up of the new book, Serpent in Eden, a blown-up quote, “Awesome!” from MTV, and a smug picture of the author leaning against a red barn wall with his arms crossed in a sweatshirt and khakis. He brushed his teeth but apparently not his hair and he had one of those tans you sprayed on. Copies of the book were stacked next to the sign, with one propped face out on top, and there was a cardboard display box on the other side holding up rows of last year’s Love Song in glistening paperback.

  Wild Bill held the door for a fat woman carrying two full plastic bags. She didn’
t say thanks or fuck you or kiss my ass. He missed the courtly manners of the far West.

  People were lined up at the checkout with their selections under their arms. Others prowled the aisles between the racks, browsed among the magazines and discounted art and travel books on the remainder table, blocking the paths of employees pushing carts with more books to shelve. There was no coffee shop, no public rest room for either sex. Two cashiers worked the counter. No in-your-face security, and nobody sticking out like Andy Sipowitz among the looky-loos.

  Wild Bill wandered toward the children’s section in back. A door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY stood propped open with a stack of books with torn jackets. He glimpsed more books piled on metal utility shelves, an open door to an employee rest room, a plywood counter holding up a computer monitor hemmed in by bales of paper, no employees in his line of sight.

  He took down a picture book with glazed cardboard covers and pictures of all kinds of big trucks: the young father looking for something for his toddler son. He had on a blue work shirt over a gray T-shirt and jeans. He might be working at any of the plants he’d seen on the other side of town. Not that it mattered. The customers dressed every way possible, not counting evening wear and barefoot in overalls. That stiff Grinnell put too much thought into trying to blend in. Wild Bill wondered why he’d changed his mind about backing out. Maybe that crack Wild Bill had made about Myrtle hadn’t been such a shot in the dark after all. There was something not quite right about the way Grinnell presented himself, went out of his way to be invisible even among his accomplices. Wild Bill knew the difference between a tame cougar and a domestic cat. He put back the truck book and looked at three shelves of Dr. Seuss. The man must have been an insomniac.

  He was flipping through Horton Hears a Who, his head swimming with rhymes, when a heavy door slammed shut in the back room and three people came out into the store, a short-haired middle-aged woman in a blazer pinning a name tag to one lapel followed by a man close to her in age, and a younger woman, a pretty blonde in a silk blouse and tailored slacks with a high rise that showed off her narrow waist. She was Playboy material: not quite busty enough for the centerfold, but worth a spread in The Girls of the Big Ten, lithe, well-scrubbed, and golden. She dressed a little too well for a college student, but no ticket clerk would demand to see her student ID. She was too young for the man, but he sensed they were together.

  “This won’t take a minute,” the older woman told the couple. “Look around all you want. If you see anything you like, you can use my discount.” She strode off from them toward the front counter.

  Wild Bill watched the couple over the brightly illustrated pages in front of him, curious about their relationship with a store worker—the manager, he guessed, by her age and don’t-fuck-with-me walk. There was nothing to the man. Medium height, medium weight, medium everything; thinning temples, tired face set in a patient mask. You saw the most faded men with the best-looking women, and this one had been left forgotten on somebody’s dashboard a long time. Wild Bill wouldn’t have looked at him twice in any place but a place he was getting ready to rob.

  These things Wild Bill thought, then realized how long he’d been thinking them, and how much of the time he’d spent watching the man and not the woman. He was in his middle forties, fit-enough looking for his age but no Bruce Willis. That kind could surprise you in the mountains, climbing all day shouldering heavy packs and rifles, outdistancing the young sprinters and lifters who’d loped out in front at dawn. And this one seemed to be paying more attention to his surroundings than the stock. Wandering a little away from the woman, who had stopped in Home Decorating, he read the spines in Photography, took one down, glanced inside, and put it back; but all the time he kept track of the traffic through the doors, the people coming his way up the aisle, the cashier behind the counter talking with the woman in the blazer.

  He might have been casing the place himself.

  Cop, Wild Bill thought. Advance security, checking things out for the Francis Spain tour. He reminded Wild Bill a little of Grinnell. Their side didn’t have the monopoly.

  The manager came striding back. The pretty blonde returned a book on country homes to the shelf and joined the pair in Photography. Wild Bill put back Dr. Seuss and drifted that way.

  “Nothing?” said the manager. Wild Bill couldn’t read her name tag and he didn’t want to be caught trying.

  The young woman said, “I can’t concentrate. I’m famished after all that cleaning.”

  Facing each other in profile, they bore a close resemblance. He guessed mother and daughter.

  “Well, let’s eat. Where are you taking us?”

  “You choose,” said the man. “I’m a stranger here, and Laurie keeps talking about places that aren’t there anymore.”

  “Careful, dear,” the mother said. “That’s how you date yourself. How about the Bread Basket? It’s not far, and they make the best carrot cake in town.”

  They drifted out the back. Wild Bill didn’t follow.

  He was relieved to know the man’s connection was personal, not professional, but he was glad he’d come in when he had. If the man was there next Saturday night, he’d be someone to watch. Wild Bill had learned his lesson about civilian heroes.

  He scooped a box off the Audio Books rack—the cover was a smaller version of the Serpent in Eden jacket, with a picture of Matt Damon, the reader, next to Spain’s on the back—waited his turn in line, and slapped it on the counter. The woman cashier he’d seen talking with the manager charged him thirty bucks and change.

  He slid two twenties across the counter. “Boss check up on you every night?”

  She looked at him briefly, then shook open a plastic bag. She was a redhead with freckles the size of poker chips. He could tell she approved of what she saw. Not every woman went for that rangy gunfighter look, but when they went, they went clean over the fence. Her tag said her name was Marjorie.

  “No, she’s just nervous about next week. She wants to make sure we ordered enough books.” She showed him a flyer announcing the Spain event and stuffed it into the bag with the audiobook. She gave him his change.

  “Guy on the tape? Looks like you got enough for everybody in town.”

  “They come in from all over. Last week in Buffalo, New York, he signed a thousand copies in three hours. Buffalo’s not much bigger than Myrtle.”

  “I don’t think I could write my name that many times in three hours. He that good?”

  “I loved his first. The new one just came in. You should get one for your wife and have him sign it. I don’t know if he signs books on tape.”

  “I had a wife, I might. That her family she had with her?”

  She was confused for a moment.

  “Oh, Pamela? I didn’t notice. If she has a family she never introduced them to any of us.”

  He underscored the name mentally.

  “Treat you like mushrooms, I guess. Keep you in the dark and throw shit on you.”

  He could tell she’d heard that one, but she laughed anyway. It was like shining deer, not much sport.

  “Maybe I’ll drop by, meet the man. You working that night?” His fingers brushed hers as he accepted the bag.

  Her freckles vanished into bright pink. “Whole staff’s scheduled.”

  “Maybe I won’t wait till Saturday.”

  He was almost out the door before he heard her say she could help the next person in line. Easy banks, slow trains, willing women. It was hard not to swagger.

  EIGHTEEN

  Prine, evidently determined to go on playing the good cop, had offered to return Grinnell to his apartment in an unmarked car. Grinnell, equally bent on playing the unadventurous acquiescent, had accepted. A plainclothesman who introduced himself as Detective Plenham chewed Trident and talked about the Indian motorcycle he was restoring throughout the first dozen blocks. Grinnell, normally attentive in tedious company—looking for tics to emulate—said nothing to encourage him. In time Plenham stopped droning
and turned up the volume on the two-way radio. There was absolutely nothing happening in the city of Toledo to occupy the police.

  In front of his building, Grinnell thanked the detective, got out, and walked up the front steps, careful not to look at any of the cars parked on the street. He knew he was being watched, knew also that Prine would have ordered them to be clever, and looking for them would only tip a cover the police already knew was just that, a cover. He’d been outed, but to abandon the masquerade now would be to admit defeat, and he had no practice at that.

  In any case, he’d been Ben Grinnell so long he wouldn’t know how to go back to being John Grinnell Benjamin. He barely remembered the fellow. A man had his choice of prisons, that was all. He could plead guilty and go to a six-by-eight cell or turn stool pigeon and go to North Dakota or put on his bars like a suit of clothes and wear them everywhere he went. A self-inflicted sentence was just as dismal as the other kind.

  He rode the coffin-size elevator with its Edwardian cage and modern mechanism to his floor, grilled a cheese sandwich, and ate it with milk to fill the hole in his stomach. He tried listening to music, then turned off the stereo, giving it up as an artificial mood-altering device. He poured himself a glass of white wine, then poured it out after a few sips for the same reason. Finally he picked up the telephone and called Pamela’s number in Myrtle. He didn’t care if the wires were tapped. The police would find out about her sooner or later. That had been the reason for her in the first place. After next Saturday she would be useless to him—worse than useless; the link they would need to tie him to Wild Bill’s crew and a felony murder charge for the video-store disaster. But until then he needed her more than ever.

  Her machine kicked in on the fourth ring. He hung up without leaving a message and tried the bookstore. He’d given her a cellular telephone for her birthday, but she was always leaving it behind or neglecting to recharge it, and he’d forgotten the number from disuse. Pamela wasn’t that careless except with things she didn’t like. She was a passive-aggressive nightmare, like his mother, and after the young woman who answered at the bookstore put him on hold, he was a little surprised when it occurred to him he’d miss her. A little masochism seemed a small price to pay to avoid loneliness.