Later he broke an Ace bandage out of the medicine cabinet and wound it around his abdomen, securing it with a safety pin. The ribs still throbbed but now he could think of other things.
Roger was beyond help. Macklin wasn’t one of those fathers who neglected their children for years and then woke up and suddenly decided to turn them around. He had seen this coming from a long way off, back when things were hotter and he was working all the time and sometimes had to stay away from home for months rather than attract trouble to his family. Donna’s drinking was a problem even then and her attitude hadn’t welcomed the dual role of mother and father. Macklin’s own father had worked in a junkyard; his calluses had made iron paddles of his hands and when the boy stepped out of line he wore their mark on his face for days. But a man to whom killing came easily feared to touch his son in anger, and Donna had little enough discipline of her own to spare any for the boy. When Roger wanted help, real help, he would have to seek it out himself or it would do no good. Macklin believed he wanted help the same way he believed that thousand dollars would end up in the hands of the drug therapist Macklin had recommended.
He dressed skin out in fresh underwear and a dark blue sport shirt and jeans and black sneakers—real sneakers with a suction-cup tread that gripped and held, not those slippery track shoes that were crowding them off the shelves in most stores—and put on a reversible windbreaker with the dark side in. Finally he transferred the revolver in its holster from his leather suit belt to the canvas web he was wearing with the jeans, tugged the elastic of the jacket down over the butt, and put Herb Pinelli’s knife and sheath inside one of the slash pockets. It had come in handy for more than getting in a door. He tipped a handful of .38 cartridges out of the box into the other pocket and left after tidying up.
Where was Donna?
“You won’t get a bushel of miles to the gallon, but the ones you get will be pure gold.”
Smiling chipmunk fashion as if amused by his own words, the fat little used car dealer squeaked his swivel chair contentedly and gazed out the picture window at the square blue Oldsmobile parked next to the door. The car was four years old, a discontinued model, and starting to scab up around the rear wheel wells, but Freddo liked its 550-cubic-inch Cadillac engine and speedometer that topped off at 140, and he knew that it would probably do better. He said, “Stop selling it. You got the money.”
Indeed he had, thought the dealer, eight hundred dollars in hundreds and fifties straight out of the young man’s wallet. It was a shame to have to let a good car go for so little, but that oversize fuel tank scared off a lot of customers and anyway, cash was cash. He watched the new owner signing the title transfer. Nice suit, a little wrinkled as if he hadn’t had it off recently, thin blond hair, slight swelling and discoloration on the forehead. The dealer had been about to ask about that when the wallet came out. So much cash in hands so young with Detroit so close tended to discourage questions.
When the papers were pushed away the dealer craned his short neck to read the signature and stood, offering his hand. “Come back and see us any time, Mr. Metzger. We’re a full-service dealership.”
Freddo folded the bill of sale and title slip into his inside breast pocket and went out without shaking the hand. The Oldsmobile rumbled into life and squirted forward the instant he put it in drive. That meant the idle was high. He pulled out of the lot, detoured around the area where a wrecker summoned by the police was hitching up to what remained of the Cordoba, found a commercial garage on a side street and parked in front of the doors.
A pimple-faced teenager in blue coveralls with a smudge of grease on the end of his nose greeted Freddo in a cluttered office paved with concrete. Freddo spiked a hundred-dollar bill on a spindle layered high with canceled statements.
“I got an Olds out front needs idling down,” he said.
The garage attendant’s eyes were fixed on the skewered bill. “That’s just a sixteen-dollar order, mister. I can’t change no hundreds. You’ll have to wait till my boss gets back.”
“It’s a twelve-dollar order. The hundred’s yours if while you’re adjusting the idle you accidentally knock loose all the anti-pollution equipment.”
“That ain’t legal.”
“Excuse me. I didn’t know I was doing business with Dick Tracy.” Freddo reached for his money. The attendant’s hand was quicker, covering it. Freddo straightened. “Ledger stays closed on this one, right?”
“What ledger?” The boy displayed brown teeth and got up to open the doors. The hundred was gone.
Out of boredom, Freddo stood by watching as the boy worked under the hood and then drove the car onto the hydraulic lift to free the catalytic converter. Judging by the look on the used car dealer’s face as Freddo had counted out the eight hundred under his nose, he’d have been glad to yank the environmental baggage that curtailed speed and performance free of charge, but Freddo had used the Lyle Metzger identity to make the purchase and since the request was suspicious he didn’t want to waste an alias he might need later. He had had driver’s licenses and Social Security cards under three names besides his own, acquired on birth certificates issued to children who had died in infancy, but he had been forced to tear up one set of identification after abandoning the wrecked Cordoba. Police would trace the registration to an Italian youth killed in an apartment fire in Philadelphia in 1960.
He was angry, too, about the .44 magnum he had been forced to leave in the car. It was a good gun and still unblooded. But he didn’t worry about having left fingerprints on it and all over the car. His prints weren’t on file anywhere. And he had held on to the .22, now nestled in its holster under his right arm. It was accurate and effective within thirty feet, his usual working distance.
It saddened him a little to have lost Link Washington. Loyal fetches were rare. The redhead must have been dead to the world to let Macklin get behind him like that. Well, he was sure enough dead to the world now.
Freddo thought about calling Maggiore again, then rejected the idea. The cocoa-butter bastard would just sneer at him like before. So the old man had a little more tread on his tires than Freddo had given him credit for. So he had outsmarted Link. An orangutan with arrested development could outsmart Link. The whole episode so far was an ugly wrinkle in Freddo’s smooth record of nine quiet kills.
He wanted Macklin badly.
The silver Cougar’s right signal flashed.
“He’s turning right,” said the man riding on the passenger’s side of the gray Plymouth a block behind.
“Oh, is that what that blinking light means,” said the man at the wheel dryly.
“Well, close it up. This is where we lost him yesterday.”
The driver used the center turning lane to pass a foreign hatchback poking along in front of them and turned right a fraction of a second behind Macklin. “He’s going to know we’re tailing him,” he said.
“He knows now, shithead.”
The two cars crossed the street where they had been separated the day before, the Plymouth just barely squeezing through on the yellow. They might have been chained together. They undulated over a series of hills and hollows. The Cougar slowed down and sped up and slowed down again. The driver of the Plymouth tapped his brakes to avoid ramming the car ahead.
“Don’t give him any slack,” barked his passenger. “If we blow it again our ass is grass.”
The driver touched the accelerator. The cars were as one angling down the first of a brace of steep hills. A small city of brick splitlevels showed behind a skin of trees on either side of the paved road. At the bottom of the hill the Cougar’s brake lights flashed on.
The driver of the Plymouth stood on his brakes. They locked with a hideous wail of rubber on concrete. A car following a short distance behind braked and slewed sideways, nearly clipping the rear of the Plymouth. Then the Cougar’s lights went off and a puff of black smoke escaped its exhaust pipe and it tore up the next incline. The roar drowned out the idling of the Plymou
th’s engine.
“He’s rabbiting! Step on it!”
The Plymouth hesitated, then snarled and shot forward and up. The speedometer needle climbed to sixty.
“Oh, shit!” the passenger exclaimed. “Back up! Back up!”
The Cougar was rolling backward down the hill, its sleek rear filling the Plymouth’s windshield. The driver of the Plymouth stamped on the brake pedal and slammed the automatic transmission into reverse while it was still moving forward. Something shrieked and the car shuddered and shot backward and struck the car behind broadside as it was maneuvering back into the right lane. A tire blew with the force of a grenade and the Plymouth sat groaning on its left haunch.
Meanwhile the Cougar swung on two wheels into a backward U-turn, paused, and took off the way it had come. The horn tooted twice as it passed the scene of the collision.
The driver of the Plymouth sat with both hands still on the wheel, watching the driver of the car he had hit wrestling an angry six-foot-three out onto the pavement. He looked at his passenger.
“You tell Burlingame, okay?”
CHAPTER 20
Clothes made a difference. The plainclothes security guard at the Detroit Public Library who hardly glanced at Macklin when he wore a suit looked at him hard when he entered in his windbreaker and jeans. Macklin walked with a hand in his rear pocket to cover any bulges the gun might make and took the stairs to References, where the telephone directories were kept. Once he strapped on a weapon, he kept it on until the job was finished. It was like a new pair of shoes you had to walk around in for a while before you got used to each other. Everything about a man changed when he was wearing a gun: his stride, his posture, the way he sat and got up again, even the timbre of his voice. The process of assimilation was just as long no matter how many times he had carried one in the past.
There were four Blakemans listed in the metropolitan directory. One was named Frances, another David, and the other two had only initials for their first names. They were probably women. He copied all the names and numbers into his pocket notebook anyway and pulled down the reverse directory, with the numbers listed in numerical order followed by the names. There were two listings for the David Blakeman number. Bold print identified the second entry as the Born Again Redemption Center on Gratiot.
It sounded religious. Macklin put the reverse book back on its shelf, drew down the Yellow Pages, and looked it up under Churches. It wasn’t listed. He frowned at the racks of books for a moment. On impulse he turned to Pawn Shops and found a small display advertisement for the Born Again Redemption Center. “D. Blakeman, Prop.”
He used a pay telephone on the ground floor to call the pawn shop, canting his back against the wall next to the box to conceal the revolver and meet the guard’s gaze imperiously until the guard looked away. When no one answered after six rings he hung up and left.
He missed the place on his first pass down the right block on Gratiot. He’d been looking at the signs and addresses at street level, where he expected to find signs and addresses. The second time through he spotted it, three circles and BORN AGAIN lettered in flaking silver on a second-floor window. He parked in a city lot one street over and walked back.
Steep stairs as old as Prohibition led up from a street door between dark walls smelling of old paint and cigars and rubber from the stairway runner. Senile boards winced under his weight. At the top he followed a hallway floored with hardwood made dull by too many coats of varnish to a door at the end with BORN AGAIN REDEMPTIONS painted in black on the frosted glass under the inevitable three circles. No light showed through the glass. Macklin tried the knob. Locked. He stood there for another moment, then turned. As he did so a door down the hall closed with a click.
He approached the door. Solid and paneled, it had been abused with varnish like the floor. Several coats had been applied since the last time the tarnished brass numerals 203 had been removed, so that the thick dark liquid had dried to form an uneven collar around them. Macklin thumped the door three times with a knuckle.
It was opened almost immediately, flung wide by a short broad woman with hennaed hair and large feet in a man’s brown loafers spread wide so that her skirt of no particular color stretched between her knees without a wrinkle. Over a green-and-orange floral print blouse she wore a thick blue sweater mangled at the wrists and missing all but its top button, which she had fastened. Her jowls were loose, she had circles the size of bar rings under her eyes and a gray moustache that went like hell with her orange hair. She looked like a bulldog that had been kicked in the face once and had never forgotten it.
“If you’re asking me where he went I don’t know,” she told Macklin. “If you’re asking me when he’ll be back I don’t know that neither. A den of thieves, that place. I bet you’re a thief too.”
“What makes you think so?” He stood back a little from the doorway. He was almost two feet taller than she and didn’t want to frighten her into putting the door in his face.
She squinted up at him again, and Macklin guessed she was nearsighted. Her forehead was corrugated from years of squinting up at people. She was probably afraid glasses would spoil her looks.
“No, you ain’t no thief,” she said then. “You’re too old.”
“There are old thieves.”
“Not around here. Not the ones come to Blakeman’s selling other folks’ stereos and toasters and TV sets. Most of them are black.” She leaned forward on the last part and mouthed the word black soundlessly.
“No kidding.”
He had tried to keep the mockery out of his tone, but the old lady had good ears. Her mouth came shut with a snap and she drew her face in so that the fat of her neck folded up around it like a turtle’s. “You’re a policeman, ain’cha?”
Macklin held his answer, turning over the question for thorns.
“Don’t tell me you ain’t,” she said, “because I can spot a policeman quick as I can spot a thief. Not that there’s a difference. I seen my share of them going into Blakeman’s. They find a place busted into and then go in and help themselves before they report it. Then they come up here with the stuff in bags and come out empty-handed and whistling.”
“They come up here in uniform?”
Her features caved in as if she’d just smelled something bad. “I said they was crooked. I didn’t say they was stupid. I told you, I can spot them. I spotted you.”
“You sure did. How come you know so much about them?”
“Because that’s how they used to do it in my old neighborhood when I was a girl.”
“Maybe things have changed since then.”
“Mister, it would take a lot more years than I got to change that, and then it wouldn’t change. How old you figure I am?”
He guessed late sixties. “About fifty.”
She hoisted her jowls in what she imagined was a sweet smile. “Sixty-two, sonny. A lot older than you’ll get, you keep messing around with puke-pots like Blakeman.”
“I hope to do a lot of messing around with him soon.” He lowered his voice a full octave. “Internal Affairs wants to shake all the rotten apples out of the barrel. We were counting on Blakeman as an informant, but since he’s not here we’d be grateful for input from an observant citizen such as yourself.”
She drew in her face again and brought the door forward eight inches. “I ain’t getting mixed up in no investigations. That ain’t how I got to be sixty-six.”
“I thought it was sixty-two.”
Her jowls blew out. The door swung. Macklin blocked it with the flat of his hand. “You didn’t give me a chance to explain the department’s new compensation policy.”
The pressure against his palm slackened a notch. “Talk English, mister. You saying you’ll pay?”
Macklin lowered his hand. The door didn’t budge. He separated a twenty from his roll and held it up. A pudgy red hand snatched it away and the door sprang open wide. Conquering the urge to count his fingers, he stepped across the threshold.
“Sit down, mister. I ain’t had a man in here except the guy to fix the TV since my husband passed away in ’sixty-seven. Right during the riots it was, though it didn’t have nothing to do with them, it was cancer got him.”
“Thank you, Mrs.—?”
“Fardle. But you can call me Audrey.”
He got away from Audrey Fardle after an hour, bloated with cheap doughnuts and expensive information, and drove to the haberdashery on Greenfield, where once again he had to settle Gyp Ibsen’s fears about his presence there before the natty little tailor told him Herb Pinelli was having lunch down the street. Macklin walked the block and a half and found the old killer curling fetuccini around a fork at the back of the restaurant. He rose and greeted Macklin warmly, but again without shaking hands, and waved him into a chair. A swarthy young waiter suddenly appeared next to the table.
“Do not order anything Italian,” Pinelli counseled, reseating himself. “The chef is Finnish.”
“You’re eating Italian.”
“I have to. Once you are in business you will find that if you are fortunate enough to have established an image you must live with it. The clam chowder is exquisite.”
“Thanks. I’m not eating.”
“Ah, you are working. Wine, then. What you Americans used to call the Dago red before you became so sensitive.”
“Coffee’s fine.”
“Dio mio, I forgot that rule.” Pinelli looked up at the waiter and began to order in Italian. When the waiter said he only understood English, he rolled his expressive eyes and asked for coffee with cinnamon. “The cinnamon takes away the bitter taste,” he told Macklin.
“I like the bitter taste. If I didn’t I wouldn’t drink coffee.”
“You are an exasperating man, Pietro. Very well, a cup of battery acid.”
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