Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Bitch.” Abilene clearly wasn’t listening. “Jake, I need a look at the FBI file on Peter Macklin.” He spelled the last name and added Peter’s date of birth, which Laurie hadn’t known. She took comfort from the fact he hadn’t lied about his age.

  “I don’t know. Brass changed the rules. An officer has to log on with his badge number.”

  “Who’s got the watch?”

  The young detective—the nameplate on his desk read SGT. J. THURTELL—made a face. “Captain Birxey.”

  Abilene grinned.

  Thurtell stared. “You’re shitting.”

  “I never shit a shitter.”

  “Hold on.” Thurtell sat down and rattled the keys on his board. After five minutes he grunted, sat back, and swung the monitor around on its lazy Susan for his visitors to view.

  The first thing Laurie saw were side-by-side photographs in front and profile of a man’s face. Immediately she felt relieved. The man was years younger than Peter, and the sullen expression he wore was not in her husband’s repertoire. There was a strong family resemblance. A mistake had been made, and she was so ashamed of herself for the doubts she had begun to feel that she instantly forgave Peter for keeping the secret of a black-sheep brother or first cousin. Then the raw data began to appear.

  “Do Jake’s superiors know you’re paying him for information?”

  It was the first thing she’d said since before they left city hall. She’d felt faint staring at the bright computer screen, reading the endlessly scrolling list of arrests, court appearances, and surveillance reports in which Peter’s name appeared, and the effort of forming words would have sapped the strength she needed to remain standing. She’d kept silent while Abilene thanked the sergeant and all the way out to where he’d parked the Jeep. Abilene was quiet too, for once, rolling down the window on his side to let out the heat and poking tobacco inside his bottom lip from a flat can and waiting for her to say something. Now he made an animal sound in his throat, spat out the window, and wiped the back of a hand across his mouth.

  “I don’t pay nobody for nothing,” he said. “It’s like the army.”

  “You mean he belongs to Maggiore.”

  “Major. He had it changed in court. Mr. Major don’t even know Jake’s name. But Jake knows his, and if he don’t, his watch captain does.”

  “Captain Birxey. Major owns him.”

  “Funny thing about captains. They come cheaper than lieutenants. It’s like that right up to detective commander.”

  “He owns the police.”

  “Nobody’s that rich.”

  “Does he own Peter?”

  “There was a difference of opinion about that. When Mr. Major left Detroit, Macklin came with him, and made a space for him. Then Macklin went back. He thought he had his pink slip, and maybe he did. But he shouldn’t have picked L.A. for his honeymoon, not if he wanted to stay retired. He was seen, and Mr. Major ain’t one to let a handy tool lay.”

  “Who is Peter supposed to kill?”

  “Nobody you ever heard of, so why ask? All you got to do is have fun in the sun for a few days till the ball and chain gets back.”

  “How do you know he’ll come back?”

  “He left, didn’t he?”

  She hated looking at his crooked jaw, the way he showed his lower teeth with the black stains between them. “Am I the reason he’s doing this?”

  “He didn’t want to do it at all. If you want to know, he was rude about it, called Mr. Major a hunchback son of a bitch, and Mr. Major don’t like folks talking about his hump. That was when he told me to come keep you company. Your husband got real reasonable after that.”

  “Are you supposed to do something to me if Peter doesn’t go through with it?”

  “That didn’t come up.”

  “Did it have to?”

  He looked at her. His tongue bulged out his bottom lip as he pushed the tobacco around. He shook his head. “I don’t see it. You’re a pretty little bit, but the studios turn away prettier every damn day, and Macklin’s supposed to be a hard old nail. Maybe that’s what retirement does to you. Or maybe he wasn’t so hard to begin with. You hear a lot of stuff from the field and most of it’s horseshit.”

  “If things don’t work out and Maggiore expects you to kill me, why didn’t he just have you kill this person instead of going to all this trouble to get Peter to do it?”

  He reached above the visor and groped underneath the folded newspaper. “I’m no killer, nursie. Not the professional kind. But if hubby fucks up, or runs, or forgets the play, I can fix you so he won’t want to come back.”

  He was even faster than before. His hand streaked down and around and the point of a narrow blade stung the flesh below her right eye. She didn’t move. If she blinked or flinched, the skin would break.

  “The name’s Mr. Major,” Abilene said. “Show some respect if you don’t want to have to read them hospital thermometers in Braille from now on.”

  She wet her lips. “Mr. Major.”

  He withdrew the knife, folding it against his thigh, and slipped it into one of the arrow pockets on his shirt. Then he switched on the ignition. The air conditioner cut in with a whoosh of hot, fishy-smelling air, then cooled down. “There’s a cigar bar in Culver City,” he said, rolling up his window. “California’s got a law against smoking in bars and just about everyplace else, but this one ain’t open to the public. If you know somebody you can get a look at Demi Moore sucking on a panatella any Friday night. I can get you in, but you got to promise not to ask for autographs.” He shifted into first and eased out into Civic Center traffic.

  ELEVEN

  For a little over two and one-half hours Monday night, Johns Davis actually forgot he was under a sentence of death.

  The event was football on ABC-TV. The Rams were 10-point favorites going in, and if Davis’s source could be trusted, their starting quarterback was playing hurt. Davis had laid off short in order to take cautious advantage of the information.

  The experience was nearly as harrowing as the fear of losing his life. Certainly it was less pleasant than it would have been had he not been let in on any secrets. On the one hand he stood to drop fifty thousand dollars if Tampa Bay failed to cover the spread. On the other, he feared he’d been too conservative and would not clean up as spectacularly in the event his source was right as he would have if he’d taken a leap of faith. He had just enough of the gambling bug (a rarer condition among professional bookmakers than is commonly supposed) to consider losing no more disastrous than not winning enough.

  During the first half, not winning enough didn’t appear to be the problem. Jackson completed two passes and ran thirty yards to a touchdown, and didn’t seem to be favoring his right arm during the victory dance that followed. But in the third quarter, whatever he’d injected to deaden the pain from the fractured ulna must have worn off. He threw an incomplete, was intercepted twice, and when a Buccaneers tackle took him off his feet two minutes into the fourth quarter, he rolled around on the ground cradling his forearm against his chest and had to be helped to his feet and off the field. A second-string quarterback was substituted, but a turnover in Tampa Bay’s favor in the last ten seconds put them three points ahead at the gun. That covered the spread, and Davis was two hundred thousand to the good, give or take an upset among the layoff bets he’d placed.

  He poured himself a glass of Glenlivet to celebrate, but the euphoria lasted only as long as the drink. He couldn’t help remembering the tip had come his way moments before some psychotic Ukrainian son of a bitch had slung a length of fishline around his throat. Again, as he had over and over for days, he tried to think what he’d done or said recently to set himself up for the cemetery. The haystack containing that needle wasn’t large—in San Antonio, Spanish Rivera was the one man a fellow in his line was well advised to keep happy—but he drew a blank just the same.

  Davis was no naïf. The word of even a mafioso of the old school carried no more weight than foil
, and despite Rivera’s protestations of faith, he had not achieved his age and rank by confessing to a man’s face that he was plotting against him. His own innocence of transgression meant nothing. A mistake had been made, or Rivera had reasons of his own for creating a vacancy where Davis stood. It might have been something as pedestrian as a relative or some other favorite the old man wanted to move into the bookmaker’s place, and he was too polite or embarrassed by the situation to ask Davis to step aside. More than a few gang murders had been arranged out of respect for the victim, whom the men behind the assassinations wished not to insult. The possibility that the insult might have been preferred by the parties involved seemed not to have entered consideration. Organized crime was a Bizarro World. Davis had stopped trying to work out its line of reasoning years ago, for fear he might end up thinking the same way.

  An even greater paradox lay in the fact that the same people who were capable of these convoluted thought processes expected everyone else to behave logically. It explained why so many top hoods landed in prison on some dumb charge like possession of a blackjack, because they expected the cops who patted them down to assume they were smart enough to hire someone else to carry their weapons for them. Applying this same theory to Johns Davis in the wake of the botched garroting, they would expect him to react one of two ways, while his own instinct was to confound them by doing the opposite. Flight, to begin with, was a forgone conclusion; he would stay put. He firmly believed no new move would be made against him until after the flurry caused by the first died down, and was determined not to cut short his grace period by forcing an action. Nor was he about to relocate to territory unfamiliar to him and well-known to whatever local talent might be recruited to finish the job. The obvious alternative was to hire protection; for reasons already stated, and for one other, he would go it alone. Apart from being almost exclusively reactive, bodyguards had a long history of being turned. A string of Roman emperors and an even greater number of modern heads of state, crime bosses, shylocks, D.A.s, and bent police chiefs could testify to that if they weren’t busy composting consecrated soil. The effect was to increase the firepower in the opposite camp, and at one’s own expense. It was like hiring one’s own hit.

  He got up from his chair. He felt lonely and restless with Eugenia gone. He’d sent his housekeeper to visit her family in Nogales, partly for her protection, but mostly so if he heard a footstep in the house he’d know it wasn’t friendly. He spread the slats in the blind covering his living-room window and looked out at the lighted street. A plain panel truck and two cars were parked against the curb. He couldn’t see inside them, but he recognized his neighbor’s Corvette. The truck was probably police surveillance, but it could also have been hired by whoever had found him inconvenient.

  There was a time when cops drove Chryslers, the FBI Chevies, and the mob Fords, preferably Lincolns, and one knew where one stood depending upon which make was spending the most time in his orbit. Then the Germans and Japs had moved in, and then fuel shortages and high gasoline prices led to aerodynamic design, until a Caddy looked like a VW. Prestige meant shit if no one recognized it. So every local bureau, substation, and mob family made its own selection according to its budget. A power window humming down on the driver’s side of a sleek gray Town Car could as easily expose a badge as a gun, and for that matter the twerp behind the wheel of a poky four-banger Cavalier could be an off-duty Stationary Traffic patrollie looking for a promotion to Al Ca-fucking-pone. It was a world of knockoffs and you couldn’t tell the thugs from the bulls without a program.

  The strange car might contain a killer, or more likely a spotter, who would turn over his notes on Davis’s movements to Schevchenko’s successor, or it might contain a cop. Same with the panel truck. There was a cop in one of them for certain, but it didn’t make Davis feel any less at risk. In 1936, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, a syndicate enforcer who’d agreed to turn state’s evidence against Lucky Luciano, sailed to his death out a skyscraper window while under twenty-four-hour police guard, and the evidence of more recent events had done nothing to restore Davis’s faith in the Thin Blue Line. The statistics involving police officers moonlighting as contract killers were not encouraging.

  He knew he was being watched, and that the only ones doing the watching who cared about his life were those who were determined to end it. At this point he’d lived with the knowledge long enough for the novelty to have begun to wear off. In fact the only part of the whole business that retained its bright blue edge was why.

  The spotter’s name was Edison. “Like the guy that invented the lightbulb,” he said, in an empty tone that told Macklin he wasn’t listening to himself. “No relation, my old man told me. If he was, I wouldn’t be living in this shithole.”

  Macklin looked around. They were standing in the living room of a house in the bucolic-sounding San Antonio suburb of Meadowwood Acres. It was a double-wide trailer that had shed its wheels a long time ago, long enough anyway for trees and shrubs to grow close in and cast a cooling shade. He said the place looked pretty good to him.

  “The house is okay, if you don’t mind no room service and the neighbor’s riding mower at seven ayem every Saturday it don’t rain, and it never rains. It’s Texas I’m talking about. I don’t even like westerns. I came out here because my wife missed her family. Two years later she files for divorce and I’m lucky to keep the house. Soon as I can afford to relocate, I’m heading east, stopping every five hundred miles or so and buying something in three stores till three clerks in a row don’t say, ‘Y’all come back.’ I’m stopping there and taking a room forty stories up.” He studied Macklin. He had frank brown eyes in a long thin face that wasn’t as young as it looked, although he wore his sandy hair in an extreme cut as if to pass for a man still in his twenties. He wore a short-sleeve madras shirt with the tail out over olive-drab cargo pants and scuffed black combat boots. “You’re the new wet guy, huh? What’s the capital of Texas?”

  “San Saba. Whoever came up with that one needs a crash course in geography.”

  “Well, that was the idea. The Russky couldn’t figure it out and I couldn’t explain it to him. I’m glad they sent an American this time. They say they gave up that commie shit, but who left except the commies? I did all the sharing I plan to do in the settlement.”

  Macklin said nothing. The man was less brash than he tried to appear. It may have been part of the youth act, but he suspected Edison preferred being underestimated. He wouldn’t be a spotter for long. That was okay, because people who dead-ended there became resentful and lazy and their reports couldn’t be trusted.

  Not that he trusted spotters in general. He did his own surveillance when he could, and when he’d worked fulltime he had insisted upon it. Being handed a fat manila envelope and acting upon the information it contained, when he was the one taking all the risks, was like breaking into a strange room in the dark and finding his way through it based upon someone else’s description of the placement of the furniture. It wouldn’t be the spotter who barked his shins against a coffee table or fell over an unreported sleeping dog. But it was a hurry-up job and there was no time to start over from scratch.

  That was why, when he’d called Edison’s number, he’d held out for meeting him in his house rather than some neutral place. A man’s living arrangements said a lot about who he was. What Macklin saw when he walked in—a large overstuffed sofa, worn but comfortable-looking, a fabric-covered armchair and a recliner upholstered in tough green Naugahyde, unremarkable pictures on the walls, a little dust, a little bachelor clutter—reassured him somewhat. A lot of sleek low European furniture, rustic cowboy decor, or a python in a glass cage, anything on that order would have told him he was working with a narcissist who was more caught up in his lifestyle than his livelihood. Liking or not didn’t figure into the equation. He wasn’t there to enjoy the company, just to collect information and decide whether the party who supplied it could be trusted not to leave anything out or embellish what
he had. Edison’s house was no showplace. Apart from the creature comforts of a portable CD player, a few books and magazines, and a nineteen-inch color TV, it was obviously intended for shelter only. He could decamp in fifteen minutes for the next city, the next job, leaving nothing behind that couldn’t be replaced elsewhere. He was either a pro or had hung around pros long enough to know how to look like one, which often amounted to the same thing.

  Macklin declined the offer of a drink, approving silently when his host poured himself a diet cola from a plastic two-liter bottle with a generic label in his refrigerator, and the pair sat down in the living room. Edison waited for Macklin to ask each question, then consulted a steno pad covered with an illegible scrawl or some personal code before answering. He added no information beyond what had been requested, proving that he was no showoff while testing his guest’s ability to quiz him on the necessary details. He was as cautious as Macklin, with good reason. When an arranged killing blew up, it was often the spotter who took the fall, having exposed himself to more witnesses over a longer period of time, while the shooter was in and out and on his way home or to the next assignment before the first squeal went out. A clumsy interview set the stage for a clumsy hit, and he was best forewarned so he could begin packing immediately. Edison showed no such inclination. No, he wouldn’t be spotting much longer. He was ready to move up to the next level, unless he was one of those who preferred not to shed blood while having no reservations about making it possible for someone else to do so. He was a man to talk shop with, share war stories, if Macklin were the type who did that. He wasn’t.

  He went through the photos Edison handed him, head and body shots taken from several angles with a long lens. He looked at each twice and handed them back. He’d know the face next time he saw it. That would be the last time.