Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  She said, “I’d better drive.”

  He nodded and got out to trade places.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “His name’s Macklin. He’s wanted for questioning in two murders in Texas and is a suspect in about a dozen others, starting when Reagan was a pup.”

  The Los Angeles Homicide sergeant, Martin Milner type with a youthful freckled face—approaching fifty, Childs guessed—nodded. “Must be in his dotage. You don’t go to Texas to squiff someone. You lure him over the state line with cheese and do it in Louisiana.”

  “I can’t get my fill of execution jokes. I got a couple about L.A. cops I bet you haven’t heard.” He watched some palm trees slide past, wondered like a couple of hundred thousand other tourists if they were real or made out of Legos. “Is this a new unit? Can’t go above forty for the first three thousand miles?”

  The sergeant accelerated without comment.

  When Macklin’s last known address came up on the FBI printout, Childs had called the P.D. in Southfield, Michigan; then while they were checking went ahead and touched base with Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Point of departure on his San Antonio ticket was LAX, which meant that was where he’d been staying, unless he had the world’s worst travel agent. Southfield called back first, said the house was locked up, and neighbors interviewed said he was on his honeymoon, they didn’t know where. They knew damn little else except they thought he was divorced from his first wife and had a kid and was some kind of retired business executive. Best kind of neighbor, Officer. Quiet, no loud arguments or parties, maintains the place. Keeps to himself. The Ted Bundy Fugue.

  Then a lot of information all at once. Marriage license, ink still wet, corn-fed Ohio girl, German surname long enough to strangle Erich von Stroheim with, about the age of Macklin’s first arrest on suspicion. Student nurse, handy to have around for patching bulletholes. Northwest flight 512 to L.A., nonstop. Fax of Macklin’s last mug sent to taxi companies in Los Angeles.

  Dead end there. The perp’s face is as memorable as pocket fuzz.

  Then Ohio State University weighs in with the better half’s senior picture, and unless she’s let herself go to pot in two years they’re going to remember her even in the city of a million rhinoplasties and boob jobs. Dispatcher with Champion Cabs shows it around, driver remembers picking her up at LAX, she’s with some guy. Records has the hotel where he dropped them. Desk clerk with a Kato Kaelin accent answers, checks, says yes, Mr. and Mrs. Macklin are registered. Childs takes the call in-flight, Southwest 2249 to Los Angeles. Detective Sill looks up from his copy of Cowboys & Indians, grins back.

  Now they were greasing up Sunset, Sill in the backseat of the unmarked, taking in the sights. If Sacramento drags its feet on extradition he’s sure to drop by the spot where the Cocoa-nut Grove burned down, pay his respects to Buck Jones’s ghost. That was all right with Childs. For the first time since he left Milwaukee he felt like he was living in the right century, and it wasn’t just the change of scenery. In San Antonio he was afraid if he stopped fighting he’d be chasing John Wesley Hardin for all eternity.

  The sergeant tried again. California cops were still Californians, couldn’t stand not being liked, unless it was Zsa Zsa or a black motorist. “So this guy Macklin’s a heavyweight?”

  “Cruiser class. Came up in the old Boniface outfit in Detroit. I think he did some covert work for the FBI. I can’t swear to it. There are blanks in his file where there ought to be some garden-variety mayhem. Thirty-eight revolver’s his weapon of choice, but he’s flexible: knife, garrote, bare hands in a pinch. That’s all field information. He did a bit for officer assault, most of it in the infirmary at Jackson, Michigan, recovering from GSW. No other convictions.”

  “And I thought all the good lawyers were out here.”

  “The best lawyer in the world’s only as good as his client. Macklin’s smart. Not smart enough to work a regular job, though. Hope you’re wearing a vest.”

  “Duh.”

  Holy shit. They really talked like that.

  Four other unmarked units awaited them at the hotel, two under the canopy and two double-parked on the street, plus a blue-and-white around the corner with the uniforms sitting in the front seat waiting for a call to back up. One of the plainclothesmen, tricked out in a navy suit and striped tie that screamed East Coast, greeted the sergeant at the door, where he was standing next to a luggage cart that anyone who didn’t know he’d been there for the last hour would assume contained his bags. Childs wondered if the department had a wardrobe room or if the man had had to go to a costume shop.

  “Anything?” asked the sergeant.

  The man shook his head. “If he was in there when I came on, he’s in there now.”

  “What about the other doors?”

  The man shook his head again and opened his coat to pat the Motorola on his belt.

  “You didn’t check at the desk?”

  “You told me not to.”

  “That’s why I’m asking now.”

  “I didn’t.” The man’s face went flat.

  The sergeant and Childs and Sill went inside. The lobby was decorated in ivory and white, with veined pillars and black-and-white blow-ups in frames of movie stars, either dead or still discussing keylights with C. B. DeMille at the Motion Picture Actors Home. The bellmen wore Philip Morris jackets and matching pants, Dorothy’s ruby slippers twinkled in a glass case with an alarm-company logo pasted in one corner. The place was as bad as San Antonio. It had just picked a different year to get stalled in.

  It was checkout time. All the clerks were busy with customers and a line had formed between the velvet ropes. The sergeant stopped at the end and put his hands in his pockets.

  Jesus Christ. Childs pushed his way to the front and showed a short dark woman in a green blazer his gold shield. She told him “one moment” in an accent and went on clattering her keyboard. A fat man in a Hawaiian shirt stood next to Childs smelling of Brut.

  “Excusa, señorita. Lo siento, pero esta función policía.” The sergeant appeared at Childs’s other elbow and opened a folder containing his ID and a shield with a sunburst engraved on it. Outside, the sun was cloaked in saffron smog.

  The woman looked up, showed three thousand dollars’ worth of crownwork in a square smile. The hotel was just a stop on the way for the next Jennifer Lopez. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “You’ve got a couple staying here, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Macklin?”

  The woman apologized to Hawaiian Shirt, cleared her screen.

  The sergeant smiled at Childs and lowered his voice. “It helps to be bilingual.”

  “She speaks English.”

  The sergeant returned his attention to the woman.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. and Mrs. Macklin checked out this morning.”

  “When?” Childs asked.

  “I’m showing ten o’clock.”

  He did the time-zone math. “You said at ten-thirty they were registered.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. You must have spoken to someone else.”

  “The fuck’s that got to do with what time they checked out?”

  The smile went out like a bulb. “Would you like to speak to the manager?”

  “What language should I use, esperanto?”

  She shifted her focus back to the man in the Hawaiian shirt.

  Childs showed his faxed photos to the doorman, an acre of black in a white uniform trimmed in gold.

  “The woman, yeah, I got her a cab. Very pretty. A little tired looking. She had two bags. She was alone, though.”

  “Hear where she was going?”

  “I think she said the airport.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The doorman returned the faxes, touched two fingers to his visor. “Have a nice day, sir.”

  Childs figured you had to belong to the uniform class to flip somebody the bird without actually doing it.

  Sill touched his arm. His biceps twitched. “Look at the room, Lieutenant?”


  A pillbox showed them up. An Asian housekeeper was stuffing items of clothing into a plastic bag. The sergeant spoke to her. Childs was surprised he didn’t use Japanese.

  “People always leaving things behind,” she said. “Jack Daniel’s once, whole case, almost. I sold my neighbor.”

  “Traveling light,” the sergeant told Childs. “Had to have something in the suitcases or answer too many questions. Box up the rest?”

  “Think you can get a good price?”

  Sill said, “Look at this.”

  Childs studied the painting the detective had picked up from the bureau. A hippie with a handkerchief tied around his head. Maybe a pirate. He turned it over. There was a rip in the brown paper where a sticker or something had been removed. He asked the housekeeper if she’d emptied the wastebaskets. She shook her head and pointed to a square plastic container on the floor. Childs removed the liner and turned it inside out. It was empty. So was the one in the bathroom. He stared at the water in the scrubbed toilet.

  The sergeant joined him. “Figure he flushed himself?”

  “Fuck you,” Childs said. “How do you say that in Spanish?”

  THIRTY

  What Maggiore liked about the chauffeurs in Los Angeles, they all had martial-arts training and knew the drill when it came to evasive driving. Some of them—the ones he used—had carry permits. Everyone in the picture business was under some kind of threat, or thought he was, or said he was in order to jump-start the first-weekend box office on his pathetic Christian Slater hand-me-down, and hired muscle. If they preferred polished characters in uniforms and blue serge cut to make room for the artillery, so much the better for Maggiore. The pool of mouth-breathers he’d had to choose from in Detroit had always made him self-conscious, particularly when he told reporters he was a misunderstood businessman, but out here in the multitasking capital of the U.S. of A., employing a wheelman who doubled as personal protection was like driving around with a two-thousand-dollar mountain bike strapped to the roof of your Beamer. Everyone was a gangster in L.A.

  Riding in the gray leather interior of the stretch Lincoln he’d drawn in that day’s limo lottery, he admired the tapered haircut on the back of his driver’s neck, seventy-five bucks at Lupo’s of Hollywood, and knew what it must feel like when a director or producer rode away from the Oscars with the little gold fucker on the seat beside him. He was on his way back from a men-only party aboard a yacht moored at Long Beach, thrown by an Arab emir to celebrate the whopping overseas gross on a picture he’d financed that had only performed modestly on the domestic market. There had been Havanas and Jeroboams and Venezuelan cocaine and grand-a-pop whores. Maggiore, sloshed and cokey, reeking of Moroccan perfume and his own semen, had wobbled into the saloon and paused before a seventy-inch TV screen hooked up to a dish. It was an HD job, and the reporters looked life-size and real as they swarmed around a spick who looked like an accountant but whom a legend on the screen identified as the chief of detectives of the San Antonio Police Department.

  The sound was off, but when a mug shot appeared of Johns Davis from an old Chicago arrest for bunco, Maggiore had found the remote and bumped up the volume. A local anchor, looking very grave for his fifteen seconds of network fame, announced that although police were not releasing details, the bookmaker’s homicide was being investigated as mob-related. When file footage came on of Spanish Rivera, surrounded by bodyguards and attorneys and striding past excited reporters in the lobby of some court building, Maggiore punched the mute button and went off to thank his host for a pleasant evening.

  He was elated, but a little sad. He would miss living in California fulltime. He preferred its climate and its tourists, who came and went in such a steady stream the year around that they were almost invisible, and there was no nightlife in Texas, unless you were a Chicano and liked to unwind by smashing beer bottles on the sidewalk. But absentee management was not an option. It encouraged even legitimate subordinates to steal, and when all you had to work with was crooks to begin with, you were on the scene most of the time or else you might as well sign everything over and go on the dole. He might manage three months in Bel-Air—say, January through April, when all the best parties took place—but the hard money was in San Antonio, after the cops finished mulching up Rivera. Maggiore could get in ten years there, at least, before the feds decided it was time to take notice. Then, who knew?—maybe L.A. would open up again. Reform fever was cyclical.

  Checking up earlier, he’d been concerned to learn no one using the identity his people had prepared for Macklin had boarded any plane for Texas during the past week. Maggiore had begun to wonder if he’d been blown off, maybe the son of a bitch had concluded his wife wasn’t such a catch after all, when just for the hell of it he called the airport again, this time asking for Macklin by name. The bell rang then. Tricky asshole was going in naked, which meant none of the other arrangements Maggiore’s people had made—hotel, car, line of credit—were in play either, so there was no way to check up on him.

  Nothing new there. He should have seen it coming. Button men were loose cannons by definition, wouldn’t be intimidated because, let’s face it, they were the reason men in Maggiore’s position managed to intimidate anyone at all. And Macklin had been the loosest of all. He was the one who had put two slugs where Maggiore’s heart would have been if he’d been born the same as everyone else. Macklin had taken a couple of magnum rounds himself soon after, and he hadn’t been expected to live, either. So they had that in common.

  But now that he’d come through on Davis it was time to put him down and no fucking-up this time. Maggiore had people to answer to just like everyone else. A bunch of creaky old dons had been convicted finally, and now the ones left standing shit their pants when they heard a cop say “Freeze!” on TV. Texas was going to be too hot to put a toe in for a long time; the feds and the Rangers and the San Antonio P.D. would see to that. That meant loss of revenue, and according to the dons that was the sin that burned and burned without consuming. But if Rivera took the fall and authority was satisfied, the dons would let it go, even if they knew within the last tenth of a percent who was responsible. They needed that last tenth of a percent, just like the courts, before they would risk cranking up the heat again with a punitive action. But once they had it, they would burn him down and shit on the ashes. They were Sicilians after all, no matter how many Swedes and micks their mommies and daddies had fucked to make them. They couldn’t afford to look soft in front of the pack. Macklin represented that last tenth of a percent. Every time his heart beat, Maggiore moved closer to the pit.

  That was why he’d made the choice he had after Schevchenko went down. The hitter had to be a throwaway, but he had to be good. Macklin was the best he knew, and the man he hated and feared above all the rest. After his own recovery, Maggiore had bowed to the dons, forgoing revenge in the interest of détente with the police and a healthy bottom line. Then had come that black cloud on the Hollywood horizon from D.C., followed by the idea to relocate to San Antonio, topped off by a chance sighting by one of his people of Macklin honeymooning in Maggiore’s own wheelhouse. When things worked out like that, you had to believe God or the devil was in your corner.

  Abilene was the X factor. He hoped the crackbrained cowboy had the stones to do Macklin. Losing Macklin’s wife was a confidence-shaker. The thing itself didn’t matter now, Macklin had believed they still had her and had gone ahead and carried out the assignment, but you had to wonder about a guy who couldn’t sit on a little hick girl from Kansas or wherever. Well, Abilene would be eager to please now. Enthusiasm counted for something.

  The car slowed to a stop. He looked up to see what was wrong and realized they were in his carport. He hadn’t noticed when they’d left the boulevard and glided up the composition driveway to his house on the hill. He was more wasted than he’d thought.

  “Need any help, Mr. Major?”

  He looked at the driver holding open his door, searched his tanned face for that
serving-class contempt he knew so goddamn well. They were always expecting him to slurp his soup or lose his temper and stab someone to death with the wrong fork. This time, though, all he saw was professional interest.

  “I’m fine,” he snapped, then blew it when he overcorrected getting out of the car and almost threw himself onto his face. Just for that he tipped the driver fifty. He usually went a C-note.

  The car swung around and started back down without laying rubber, which irritated him all the more, displays of restraint and good breeding being just one more of the many ways you can spit in someone’s face. He’d taken in too much blow and champagne for sure. He’d had a reputation as a mean lush before he’d learned to nurse his drinks. There had been a girl whose hospital bills he’d had to pay, and an emergency-room doctor whose student loans he’d settled in return for not filing a report with the police.

  The alarm squealed when he unlocked the front door. He blew the eleven-digit alarm code the first time, had to wait a second, then entered it again. The squealing stopped, but the damage had been done. He felt the first split in the seam of the pleasant foggy cloak between his nerves and tomorrow’s red-alert hangover. He had to do something to combat the blood in his alcohol system if he was going to get any sleep. Abilene would probably be calling in tomorrow.

  He went into the barn of a living room, shedding jacket, tie, and cummerbund on the way, stooping a little from exhaustion. Standing at the bar pouring himself a tall gin he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass balcony doors and straightened. For a second there old Charlie the Frog had returned. The hunchback was always lurking just under the surface, waiting to shuffle out and be laughed at.

  He carried his glass over to his thirty-six-hundred-dollar recliner and used the remote built into a hatch in the right arm to turn on the TV. The screen was ten inches smaller than the emir’s and it wasn’t high-definition, but then, shit, he didn’t have to stick up his ass and kiss the floor to Mecca every day. He laid his thumb on the up-arrow button and left it there while the images skidded past, like a drowning swimmer’s life. Five hundred fucking channels and they all seemed to be soccer and Independence Day. He was going to dream all night about Martians zapping Nicaraguans in baggy shorts.