Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  He started to sit in the matching armchair, but that placed the sculpture on the plain pine coffee table directly between them, impeding his view. It was an arrangement of gleaming stainless steel eighteen inches high, twisted into a sickle shape at the top, titled Anasazi Moon. He’d bought it at the opening of an exhibition at an art gallery in Austin, where he’d met the sculptor, a native-born Comanche, so it said in the brochure. He looked more like the Chicago South Side to Davis, despite the turquoise and braids, but the piece said Texas to him, bright and pitiless. He got up, moved the chair over six inches, and sat back down, without apology or explanation. The man gave no indication the action meant anything to him.

  “I’m no mobster,” Davis said. “Guess you know that. Rivera lets me operate here because I make him money, and don’t chisel any more than I think is decent. I mean, a guy that isn’t skimming a little off the top is probably skimming a lot off the bottom. Anyway it isn’t enough to hang a tag on me and risk the wrong kind of attention.”

  He paused there, as if to see if he was on track. But he wasn’t getting anything. Maybe the guy was a straight arrow, in which case Davis was being judged. It didn’t matter. Instinct told him anything but the truth would kill him for sure. He went on. Never break or change your spiel—second rule. (First rule: Don’t fall for your own con.)

  “Killings are bad business. The press plays ’em up, the church and the PTA throw rallies, the police have to go out and look busy, which means busting up slots and tipping over horse parlors and sports books like mine and rounding up whores and johns, just when the conventions are in town, and that pisses off the chamber of commerce. You know Goliad?” No answer. It struck him Goliad was where the gun came from. “I’ll assume you do; everyone knows Goliad. It’s Rivera’s cash cow, and not just because of the prostitution and the gun trade and the payoffs in the club rooms upstairs. The weekend legit receipts alone give the Alamo gift shop a run for its money when the tourists are in town. If the cops shut that down, the local economy goes blooey. Biggest hit since Santa Anna.”

  “Everything’s the Alamo in this town. I’ve been there. I wasn’t that impressed.”

  Well, fuck you, Davis thought. Aloud he said, “You got to understand it’s all we have. If the Mexicans had torched the place when they pulled out—which believe me, they wish they had—San Antonio today would be a couple of taco stands and a place to take a shit on your way to Tampico. Think Detroit without cars.”

  A twitch, Davis thought; not quite that, but something, a flicker of light on the cornea maybe. He’d spent a lifetime learning to recognize tells. What had he said, Detroit? Detroit hitter, possibly. Schevchenko had been Detroit, but one botched attempt wouldn’t sour them on the whole city. He continued before the man tumbled to the fact he’d let something slip. He wished he hadn’t said Detroit.

  “The point is—I’ve thought about this a lot; not much else to do when you’re under the axe—this doesn’t come from Rivera. Whoever set it up wants to kick a hole in the hive, devalue the local currency. Then when the old man’s down, indicted up the ass, whatever, he’ll roll in and take charge like—Grant took Richmond.” He didn’t want to say Santa Anna again, piss the guy off.

  The guy didn’t put anything into the silence. Davis couldn’t tell if he was thinking or what. Except for that one little flicker before, he could play poker with the devil. He’d have excited Davis’s professional interest if not for that death thing.

  “You’ve been polite to listen,” Davis said. “Here’s where it gets interesting for you.”

  Now he had to be really sincere, not the fake kind. He wasn’t selling phony software shares. Hell of it was, this time it wasn’t a con.

  “These are old-time tactics,” he said, “I’m talking tommy gun-in-the-fiddle case. The organization’s scared shitless of RICO; the last thing they need is to give the Justice Department a reason to come in like Waco and burn down the rest of the dons. So no way is this a sanctioned deal. Whoever’s the hyena, if they find him out they’ll slash open his scrotum and pull him inside-out through the hole. They’ll suspect him, sure, when he makes his move to claim this territory, but they won’t risk more heat without proof. If someone fingers him, they’ll have to make an example. Otherwise they’ll just finish what RICO started. Who else can finger him if not the shooter?”

  Davis sat back. He was feeling light-headed, but his senses were sharp. He could tell the man was thinking now. The revolver lay on the table, inanimate, forgotten. Time to close the deal.

  “Understand, I don’t have any proof this is what’s going on,” Davis said. “I’ve made a good living playing the percentages. I won’t accept evidence on sight, but I believe in the odds. Maybe you don’t. Maybe this picture I’m painting doesn’t look anything like the guy who recruited you. In which case you may get the chance to sit around some nursing home pissing your pants and waiting for the grandchildren to visit. Just in case I’m right, though, the clock starts ticking the second I’m dead. If I live, you live. Long enough, anyway, to take some steps.”

  Davis was exhausted then. His mouth felt furrowed and dry and he was hoarse, as if he’d been shouting to make himself heard over a noisy crowd. But he was only tired physically. It was the way he felt when he’d sweated out a game that had run closer than expected, then picked up a conversion in the last quarter, after which the elements of his inside information dropped into place, plink-plunk-plink. Fattening his wallet, sure, but confirming the lessons of his instincts and training, which was better. He couldn’t tell what was going on in his visitor’s mind, but for the first time he knew that something was. He’d stopped the progress of the machine. Bet the most important game of his life and covered the spread.

  As the man leaned forward, Davis became attentive, ready to answer any lingering questions. He was tired and proud of himself and his brain told his reflexes nothing when the man stood and scooped up Anasazi Moon and swept around the end of the coffee table and brought the curved pointed apex of the steel sculpture up in an underhand motion that punctured Davis’s spleen and hooked up under his breastbone and snagged his heart and tore it open like silk parting along a seam.

  Macklin held on to the sculpture, leaning into it, as he watched the life drain from the bookmaker’s eyes, his expression going from surprise to wonder to acceptance and a kind of pitying wisdom. In the days when he’d allowed his imagination to bleed into his work, he thought he’d pinpointed the moment when the Great Mystery revealed itself, and felt envious. Now he saw it as nothing more than the instant when the optic nerve stopped sending electrical impulses to the brain. The body was a mechanical device, without a soul or a divine spirit, no more valuable than the sum of its parts. He watched only to make sure the device was stopped. People were hard to kill. They had a way of coming back and lashing out long after you thought they’d ticked their last tick. Dead people had killed a thought-provoking number of men in his work.

  The body shuddered finally, the sphincter let go, and as the muscles lost tension the entire sack deflated until the skeleton was all that prevented it from sliding to the floor.

  He didn’t withdraw the crescent-shaped end from the body. To do so would release a gout of blood that he wouldn’t be able to explain if he were stopped later. He rested the circular wooden base against the fold of fat around Davis’s middle and shook out the square of unstarched, absorbent cloth—not a handkerchief—he’d brought to remove latent fingerprints from the sculpture and everything else he’d touched since he’d entered the house. There wasn’t much, thanks to old habit. He disliked gloves. Even the thin surgical kind deadened his sense of touch. He used it now to feel the carotid artery. It was still.

  He picked up the .38 and slid it under the waistband of his slacks. Usually—always, before this—he left guns behind rather than risk being apprehended with it in his possession. Had he used it on Davis, he’d have abandoned this one as well, but now the worst that could happen would be a charge of carryi
ng a concealed weapon and possession of an unregistered handgun, which were raps he could beat. In any case the risk was less than that of making a second trip to the Goliad Rod and Gun Club for a replacement. He still had use for the gun.

  He let himself out the back with the cloth wound around his hand, waited on the porch until the scratching of the crickets told him no one was stirring in the backyard, then went out, not wasting much time with the screen door. Such sounds carried at night and no one listening could tell where they were coming from unless he was in the house. He used the sliver of moon and his own natural sense of direction to find his way around the surrounding blocks, coming up on his car after twenty minutes from the opposite side of the street. The men in the panel truck would be too busy watching Davis’s house to pay much attention to someone approaching from the other direction. If they looked at all when he got in and drove away, they probably thought it was one of the neighbors going out for a case of beer. He cruised past the parked Corvette without turning to look at the ruined windshield.

  The drive to Meadowwood Acres seemed to take half as long as it had the first time. At that hour, many of the houses were dark, but there was a light blazing in the double-wide trailer where young Edison assembled the information he gathered in his work as a spotter, put it into presentable form for whoever came to claim it, and burned or flushed his notes if he was half as smart as Macklin thought he was. Macklin didn’t know the man’s habits—a spotter who spotted spotters would have to be very good, and in any case he hadn’t time to set it up or spot this job himself. That’s how it was with cleanup. You just had to allow for the necessity and be prepared to count on a combination of speed and luck. Emphasis on speed, which at least had the virtue of being under one’s own control. Many a well-planned and successful operation had ended in a capital conviction based on a botched follow-up.

  He was grateful he’d adopted his old device of not eating within twenty-four hours of the job. Apart from stimulating the circulation to his brain, his hunger kept him from becoming too comfortable. He never played the radio during these vigils, to avoid distraction as well as the possibility of someone overhearing it. The gnawing in his stomach—sharper than he remembered, but then he was out of practice—prevented him from dozing off, and increased his focus. His night vision was better. He could tell the difference between the jerky gait of a squirrel making its way across the yard and the shadow of a mesquite bush stirring in the breeze.

  Shortly after one o’clock, the lights went out in the trailer, but instinct told him Edison wasn’t retiring. Spotters and killers kept different hours from everyone else.

  A two-year-old Ford Ranger pickup with extended cab was parked in the driveway, at an angle that suggested carelessness, but was actually the practice of a man for whom caution was a habit. The angle placed the vehicle between the front door and the street, allowing the owner to exit the house and enter the pickup without exposing himself to fire. It was too bad for him, and an irritating inconvenience for Macklin, that that caution had not prevented him from letting slip that he knew who Macklin was.

  The parking gambit was effective. When, two minutes after the trailer went dark, Edison unlocked the cab using his keyless remote and hopped up onto the seat, Macklin had no clear shot from the rented Camaro. That’s why he had left it and was crouched in the driveway on the other side of the truck. When the lock clunked open, he swung wide the passenger’s door and shot Edison in the face when he turned his head.

  TWENTY

  Carlo Maggiore liked everything about Los Angeles, even the traffic and the smog.

  Although everyone, even the doorman, knew him as Charles Major, which he’d gone to the trouble and expense of making legal, he never thought of himself by that name. He’d say, when he nicked himself shaving, “Nice move, Carlo,” and when he attended the Oscars in a $5,000 silk tuxedo with Sandra Bullock’s body double on his arm, sliding in under the paparazzi radar, who didn’t recognize either of them, he wondered what Salvatore Maggiore of Siracusa, Sicily, and later the South Bronx, would think of his little hunchback boy if he saw him now.

  If, that is, the drunken old pipefitter would even recognize him. After recovering from a nearly fatal shooting, already feeling institutionalized by hospital life, he’d gone ahead and scheduled surgery to correct his hump, which although only partially successful had enabled him, with good tailoring, to create some semblance of balance in the line of his shoulders. Now he might conceivably be taken for a man with a slight stoop caused by a bad back. This was a far enough cry from his childhood nickname, Charlie the Frog, that still showed up in his FBI file, to encourage him to complete the metamorphosis by moving as far from Detroit as was physically possible without abandoning the North American continent. When an opening occurred in the administration of the union to which all the catering personnel belonged who prepared and transported meals for all the major Hollywood studios, he had plugged it with one of his own people. That had given him unlimited access to the pension fund, which had emboldened him to liquefy his Detroit assets and relocate. Now he was leasing a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff in Bel-Air, with a stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator big enough to hold all the stiffs he’d helped bury back in his formative years and a redwood deck with a view of submentally developed movie stars ripping their motorcycles and RVs through the Hollywood Hills.

  He liked it all, especially the movie stars, a dozen of whom accounted for two-thirds of the income he’d made supplying one thousand junkies in southeastern Michigan with low-grade heroin and crack cocaine. A twenty-two-year-old high-school dropout with his own production company and a ten-million-dollar price per picture thought nothing of dropping a grand to load up his arm one time with quality Asian shit, then coming back to do it again the next day. Even better, when one of these young fucks ran his Porsche into a plastic palm tree on Sunset or popped off a .357 mag at a party in Laurel Canyon and was arraigned, the dumb shits in the media focused on him, ignoring his connection. Just for an extra buffer, Maggiore stocked his sales force with other stars, some of them as well known as their customers or better, so that if the investigation proceeded any further it would stop with them. And they were grateful for the extra income, since movie stars were the most insecure race on earth, whose futures depended on the first weekend of their next feature, and the longer they dodged that bullet the shakier they got. Maggiore had gotten some of the best blow jobs of his life from internationally-known beauties whose fortieth birthdays were bearing down on them like a fast freight. After that it was character parts and whatever they could pluck out on the side to maintain their fifteen bedrooms and monkey-gland injections.

  It was so easy to lose oneself in a town full of famous faces. Back home, where celebrities were rare and generally colorless—tenth-carbon Henry Fords, washed-up former sitcom stars playing road shows at the Fisher Theater, presidential hopefuls on their quadrennial voyage of rediscovery in the Heartland—Combination men with much less authority than Maggiore wound up with their pictures in the paper with a frequency all out of proportion to their actual importance. He himself had had his picture taken descending the steps of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice with his lawyers so often that if he’d had kids and those kids had kept a scrapbook on their old man, their kids would think he was a politician or worse. But in L.A., one conservatively dressed Midwestern mobster wasn’t worth the expenditure of film, particularly when some solidly wed megastar like Tom Hanks or Paul Newman might happen by on the arm of a surgically enhanced soap queen at any moment and catch the shutterbug in the middle of changing rolls. Maggiore made it a point not to be seen in public with anyone better-known than he was, which left him with a wide field of obscure beautiful women from which to choose while allowing him to blend into the landscape. Notoriety was a lightning rod: Ask Tony Jack Giacalone, a second-string spear carrier if ever there was one, with his three hundred custom-made suits and fourteen counts of racketeering, conspiracy, and extortion that followed him r
ight into the ground in suburban Southfield, where, let’s face it, a man can only wear one suit. But that was how things were in a connected town. In an open city like Los Angeles, there was plenty for everyone, made guys and tabloid hacks alike.

  He knew it couldn’t last, though. That’s why when he opened the buff-leather case he kept in the floor safe in his home office next to the bedroom, a bolo tie with a turquoise stone in a heavy hand-worked silver setting lay among the diamond pinky rings, gold Rolexes, and ruby studs in their compartments lined with blue felt. Worn with flared lapels and patch pockets, it would help him remain invisible in urban Texas the way his lightweight flannels and woven Italian leather loafers did here on the Coast. Talk at parties in Beverly Hills and Hollywood always centered around three things: the Industry, recreational drugs, and D.C., and lately there had been rumors about a congressional investigation locally, which as soon as it was established that it would not involve narcotics, surrendered its interest in favor of what Spielberg had in development. Maggiore knew that if it was not drugs, it could only be one thing. Certainly not the daily and widespread violations of contract law that went on in every studio, and had since the last of the original moguls finished coughing up his lungs in Cedars of Lebanon. The money skimmed there went into too many campaign war chests to risk rocking that particular leaky boat.

  No, with the mob already tottering on ankles fractured by the unconstitutional RICO laws, all the capi selling one another out to avoid dying in the prison wards of hospitals, it was the safest target for a junior congressman to take aim at and bag himself headlines in the glamor capital. He could grill expensively dressed Sicilians on TV about their investments in projects starring Matt Damon and Julia Roberts, invoking the magic names without implicating them or the generous contributors who paid their elephantine salaries, and cop golden airtime on CNN, MSNBC, and Entertainment Tonight. Who knows, he might even get a grand jury to indict one or two of the poor dago fuckers before their kidneys shut down.