Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  “That was Judith Krantz. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “Of course not. You’re not the one she called a monkey.”

  “Last week’s Time is lining birdcages, and Serpent in Eden is in every airport from Sydney to Savannah. No one in Hollywood’s in any hurry to option Balzac.”

  “Fuck Hollywood. Warner Brothers had me escorted off the Love Song set just because I caught them straying from the script. That script was damn faithful to the original.”

  “You told me they wrote out the lounge singer.”

  “I might’ve said something about that, too. I don’t remember. There’s a cow. Jesus.” He was staring out the window. “What happened to the Little Professor?”

  “You found out they were stacking Serpent back in the Romance section and wrote an e-mail to the publisher. I called the vice president of the chain, he gave me the runaround, and I pulled all your signings with them. There weren’t that many, and others have stepped up to plug the holes. That’s how we got Myrtle. I’d already confirmed the tickets, so here we are. The cow probably won’t show up.”

  “Funny. Do they have people as funny as you at William Morrow?”

  “Probably. They publish Patsy Cornwell.” She patted his hand. Hers wore an engagement ring. He had yet to meet a woman under thirty in publishing who wasn’t getting married, just married, or going through a divorce; the turnover was worse than in Hollywood. “You’ll have a good time, I promise. They don’t get to see many big-ticket authors out here, and here’s where the sales are. Winter lasts five months. They’ve got nothing to do but shovel snow and read.”

  He withdrew his hand and turned back toward the window. They were passing one of those high walls built to keep expressway noise from reaching residents, probably a trailer park. “I don’t like independents. They all smell like old magazines and they treat me like an idiot because I’m not starving.”

  “This one’s part of a small chain.” She lifted the flap on her briefcase and retrieved a computer printout from among the papers inside. “The manager’s serving champagne and canapes before the signing. She’s invited some local dignitaries. She wouldn’t go to that kind of trouble if she thought you were an idiot. I don’t know what she smells like.”

  “I can see it now: bunch of pig farmers in new overalls and a mayor with a red sash across his chest. What about security?” He’d begun getting anonymous letters comparing him to the serpent in Eden, offering to sing a love song at his funeral.

  She lowered the printout and pressed a button in her armrest. “Kevin? Mr. Spain asked about security.”

  The smoked-glass partition separating passengers from driver slid down noiselessly into a pocket. Without taking his eyes from the road, the eyebrowless wonder snapped something loose from under his blazer, held up a square semiautomatic pistol with a brushed-steel finish, and returned it to its place.

  “Kevin’s with Heartland Protection out of Chicago,” Becca said. “He used to be an air marshal.”

  “Bugged out after nine-one-one, that it?” But Spain couldn’t keep from sounding impressed.

  “I left three years ago. They asked me to come back, but I’m allergic to pretzels.” The driver slid the partition back up without waiting for a response.

  “Just a precaution,” Becca said. “Writers are the Ford Escort of hot lists. These days it’s more dangerous teaching high school.”

  “Tell that to Salman Whatsizname.”

  The publicist wasn’t listening. She was moving her lips over the printout, committing the information to memory. Finally she looked up and stuffed it back into her briefcase. “Here’s Myrtle. See? No overalls.”

  Dueling Texaco stations, an Arby’s, a KFC, and Kinko’s glided past on either side of a broad avenue without cracks or joins in the asphalt; square yellow flags stuck up where the lines had yet to be painted. Everything looked new enough to come with a freshness date. Spain felt the tension draining out through the soles of his feet. People who went to restaurants where they’d already memorized the menus were people who read books like Love Song and Serpent in Eden. He wondered why Becca hadn’t gone ahead and told him that and spared him the effort of complaining.

  The little black dress hung from the folding louvered door of the hotel-room closet, where Laurie could see it reflected in the bathroom mirror where she was applying the top coat on her makeup. When she turned her head one way and then back, glimpsing the dress in the corner of her eye, she thought at first it was a woman standing there. She’d been spooking that way for a week.

  “What’s going to happen today?” she asked.

  “Your mother’s going to sell a ton of books, if she doesn’t explode first.” Paper crackled. Peter had finished dressing, everything except his suit coat, and was sitting on the bed, reading USA Today with a pillow bunched behind his back and his legs stretched out on the bedspread to keep the seams of his trousers straight. She couldn’t see him, but that was what he always did in a hotel room when he got ready ahead of her, which was another thing he always did. Men had it easy.

  This time there’d been no nonsense about Mother persuading them to stay at her house. She was a fistful of nerves with Francis Spain already on the ground and two hours to showtime. Laurie had just gotten off the telephone with her.

  “I don’t mean what’s going to happen with Mother. I mean Benjamin.”

  “Probably nothing. He works for the Vulpos. You’re always safe around an organization man. Unless you work for the organization. It’s like having a policeman on the corner.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I believed him when he said he’s getting out. That’s what you wanted me to find out.”

  “What if they don’t want him out? The Vulpos, I mean. You said they’re crazy.”

  “That’s the rumor. Joe’s senile and they say Tommy likes to dress up like a woman. Personally I think he’s just getting in touch with his feminine side.”

  “You make me nervous when you joke. You don’t have that much of a sense of humor.” She started to put on mascara, but her hand was shaking. She put down the brush and picked up her lipstick. Better to get Bermuda Pink on her teeth than stick herself in the eye.

  “He was worried about me and I was worried about him. Turned out we both thought the other one was spying for the organization. He’s in the same place I was three years ago. That broke the ice. You and I have already had this conversation.”

  “So with Mother and Benjamin it’s like it is with me and you.”

  “That’s how I see it.”

  “Then why do you still have that gun?”

  They hadn’t talked about the gun since the night he’d gone to meet Grinnell at the brewpub in Toledo. He’d hardly hoped she’d forgotten it, but she might have assumed he’d gotten rid of it. She knew he didn’t keep them around unless he had something specific in mind. Hanging onto unregistered firearms had sent more hitters to prison than the reasons they’d hung onto them in the first place.

  “What makes you think I still have it?” he asked. That month’s hot Hollywood couple beamed out at him from the front page of the entertainment section.

  “It never takes you longer than three minutes to put the bags in the trunk when we leave someplace. It took you five when we left Mother’s. Where do you put it, with the spare tire?”

  He turned the page. “I didn’t know you were timing me.”

  “Peter.”

  “I couldn’t very well leave it at your mother’s. I’ll dump it in the stream behind the house next time we go there. The silt’s as deep as I am tall.”

  Something rattled and clanked; Laurie nearly knocking over one of her bottles or jars. They filled every square inch of counter space, and when she came out she looked the same as she had when she’d gone in. “We promised each other no more secrets.”

  “I know.”

  He said it as sincerely as possible. He’d meant it when he’d promised it, but in practice it wa
s a promise impossible to keep. If he kept it, told her everything all the time, she’d be in a constant state of nervous collapse. Laurie was one young woman in a million, tougher than some men whose toughness he’d admired when he was still young enough to admire that sort of thing, but she hadn’t spent a lifetime on the wall, learned to deaden her senses, like a fighter soaking his hands in brine to thicken the skin on his knuckles and kill the nerves beneath. You had to die a little to avoid death. That was something he could never explain to her without killing what they had.

  He hadn’t told her, for instance, that Grinnell had changed the subject both times Macklin had mentioned the bookstore signing, or that Grinnell’s conversation about his future never went beyond the coming week—the week just gone. The man had been full of questions about how Macklin had managed to leave the Detroit Combination, and because his curiosity had tipped his hand, had been candid about his own wishes to get out from under, but as to an innocuous promotional event that had nothing to do with how he’d made his living, he’d merely said that was Pamela’s department and his only contribution was to stay out of the way until it came time to show his support by showing his face.

  It was clear Grinnell’s only motive in arranging their meeting was to find out whom Macklin represented. Having established to his own satisfaction that he represented no one, his interest was in the details of Macklin’s escape from Detroit. Well, Macklin had been less than forthcoming about that, avoiding specifics; and so the conversation had been frustrating on both sides.

  Nor had Macklin mentioned to Laurie the surveillance car he’d spotted on his way out of the Alehouse. Everything about it, from the make and model to its location, in the shadow of a scaffolding on the far edge of a nearly deserted parking lot, assured him he wasn’t just being paranoid. Whether the car had been following him or Grinnell, whoever had been inside knew by now who Macklin was, and so did his superiors.

  He hadn’t told Laurie either of these things, because if she suspected something was going to happen at the signing, she’d have tried to get her mother to call it off, and she couldn’t do that without raising questions neither she nor Macklin could answer without blowing the top off the world they were trying to build. Or she would insist on notifying the police. The police would be there in any case, he was sure of that. And so would someone else. In life as in nature, natural enemies attracted one another.

  Laurie closed the door to use the bathroom. She was shy about that, despite her nurse’s training and being married a year. When the ventilator fan began whirring, Macklin put the paper aside, got up, and slid the Dan Wesson .38 from between the two fat telephone books in the bottom drawer of the dresser built into the wall. He checked the cylinder, nestled the butt into the small of his back, put on his suit coat, and inspected his profile in the full-length mirror for bulges. He’d never been to an autograph party and didn’t want to embarrass his escort.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It was Independence Day, but Wild Bill wasn’t just sure how to declare it.

  He’d had his fill of Toledo. When Jesse James, his man Jesse, took it in his head to tip over a bank or a train, he didn’t wire St. Louis for permission, and he sure wouldn’t put up with somebody like Carlos.

  “Hey, man, they got a snack machine here?” Carlos asked. “I need a Baby Ruth.”

  Mark Twain said, “Baby Ruth looks like a turd. You put turds in your mouth?”

  “Hey, I don’t do drugs. Take enough of them parrot pills, you jump out the window and try to fly.”

  “You don’t need no windows with the pills. You fly anyway.”

  “All’s I’m saying is I keep the body clean. A little sugar now and then when I need the buzz.” He was sitting in the stiffupholstered armchair with his feet on the bed in black high-top sneakers, drumming his fingers on the Sig Sauer in his lap. The greasy little fucker hadn’t let go of it since Wild Bill had handed out the weapons. Wild Bill liked guns as much as the next man, as much as any Westerner, but Carlos was psycho on the subject.

  “I don’t call eating turds keeping the body clean.”

  “There’s something down the hall,” Wild Bill said. “Leave the piece here. I don’t want you shooting up the machine when it swallows your dollar.”

  “Man, I never paid a dollar for a candy bar in my life.”

  He was cheap, too.

  Wild Bill looked at Donny, Donny leaning on his hands on the table that did double duty as a writing desk and breakfast surface, studying the Wood County road map he’d spread out on it. Donny was all business. Wild Bill had never even seen him eat before a job.

  Carlos got up finally, slapped the pistol down on the bed, and went out the hallway door. Mark Twain came up off the love seat and switched off the Weather Channel. “Let’s clear out before he comes back.”

  Wild Bill grinned in response and thumped a finger down on a secondary road. “Don’t forget they’re tearing up that stretch.”

  Donny said, “Tell me about it. The whole state of Ohio’s under construction.”

  “You’d think they’d check with us first.”

  They were all in a room on Motel Row in Harbor View, place with the biggest most ornate lobby Wild Bill had ever seen outside Denver, supported by a shuttle-service arrangement with the amusement park in Cedar Point. The woodwork alone had set somebody back twenty grand, but he’d made up for it by stocking the rooms with just basic cable and Handi Wipes for towels. There were no moisturizers or shoe mitts and you could crack ice on the so-called queen-size mattress. A lightbulb was burned out. Wild Bill figured Ramada was Spanish for cheapshit. Nobody ever sat at a table in McDonald’s more than twenty minutes and nobody ever stayed in one of those cardboard rooms more than one night at a time. Check ’em in, check ’em out, make room for the next poor dumb tired son of a bitch lugging his ballbuster wife and squealing brats ten hours round-trip from Kalamazoo.

  The ideal place for four desperados to put up their heels before taking someplace down.

  Mark Twain said, “You think this guy’ll write a book about it after?”

  “He don’t write that kind of book. Maybe when Lawrence Block signs.”

  “I’m in a book.” Mark closed his eyes. “Recidivism and Racism: A Study of Serial Criminal Behavior in North America Post-Brown v. the Board of Education. Midget professor from the University of Michigan interviewed me in Jackson. I got most of a page.”

  “Yeah?” Wild Bill said. “Who’s playing you in the movie?”

  “Go fuck yourself. You even know what a recidivist is?”

  “I think we’re doing it today.”

  Someone knocked at the door that led from the parking lot. There was a wad of paper stuffed in the broken peephole, but Wild Bill looked around the curtain in the big window next to the door and saw Ben Grinnell standing there in a suit. He leaned the shotgun against the radiator, twisted the latch, and opened the door.

  “What’s it today, in or out?” Wild Bill said.

  “I’m here, so I guess it’s in. Do you want this in the room or out in the parking lot?”

  “If you’re talking about the lay, I got it. Busy little store. I guess everybody’s not home loving Lucy.”

  “What do you know about security?”

  “There’s nada. Book people spook too easy. You ever try to browse through Penthouse with some semipro breathing peppermint over your shoulder?”

  “Spain’s bringing a bodyguard. His name’s Kevin Randle, with an 1-e. Former air marshal, three-year man with Heartland Protection. They pave the way for the Secret Service whenever the president comes through chasing votes.”

  Wild Bill stepped out of the way. “Enter, brother. You want a candy bar?”

  Grinnell was no longer driving either the rented SUV or his Lexus. He’d risen early that morning, put on the midnight-blue Brooks Brothers suit he’d picked out for the autograph party, took one last look around at his condominium, and driven downtown to his bank. There he opened his safe deposit box
and distributed fifteen thousand dollars in bricks of hundreds among his pockets. The box was still two-thirds full when he returned it.

  He’d driven from there down to Cincinnati to exchange the SUV for the car. On the way he stopped to fill the tank and call a number in Mason from the pay telephone in the station. He was told an hour would be needed to make the arrangements he’d requested.

  The Lexus was still parked in the free space where he’d left it. He hadn’t bothered with evasive tactics on the way there, knowing he’d just have to repeat them when he picked up the car and with it the police unit assigned to it. He drove it to Mason and an automatic car wash whose owner was still paying off the interest on a loan made by Joe Vulpo in 1993. Once inside, and between the soap and the rinse, Grinnell got out and climbed into another car on its way to the drying cycle. It was a four-year-old black Ford Taurus, the linear opposite of a new frost-green Lexus. On the front seat he found the nylon duffel he’d asked for and a fisherman’s canvas bucket hat, a nice touch. He clapped on the hat. When the man in coveralls at the exit finished hand-buffing the fenders and mirrors, Grinnell rolled down the window and handed him ten thousand dollars. The man was the owner of the car wash and a used-car dealership in Loveland.

  In his rearview mirror, Grinnell watched the owner step into the office and emerge after less than a minute without the coveralls and smoothing the creases out of a blue suit with his hands. He got into the Lexus. The ten thousand would be waiting for him inside after the state police were through grilling him. The Taurus certainly wasn’t worth that much. With any luck, the police wouldn’t become suspicious and pull the Lexus over for hours.

  Back in Toledo, Grinnell had parked the Taurus near his bank, taken off the hat, signed out his box for the second time that day, and placed the remaining sixty-five thousand dollars in the nylon duffel. Then he’d driven straight from there to the Ramada Inn in Harbor View.

  Wild Bill and the others were wearing identical red sport shirts. They looked like a bowling team.