Black and White Ball

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I haven’t done bodyguard work in years, and then it was only because I was broke. It didn’t turn out so well for the client.”

  “I know. I know every case you ever had that made news. I’m just buying time.” From the same inside pocket he took a thick envelope, which made a substantial thump when it struck the desk. It was oversize, and packed tight enough to need a rubber band to keep it from splitting; but even so.

  I left it where it was. “That’s not a hundred grand.”

  “Fifty. The rest when it’s over to my satisfaction.”

  “It’s the satisfaction part that worries me.”

  He shook his head again. The movement this time was even narrower. “I only kill when I’m paid, or it’s in my best interest. You finish what you start—however it turns out—and you play it tight to the vest. I can concentrate knowing Laurie’s in capable hands.”

  “Concentrate on eliminating the threat. What makes it I wouldn’t be an accomplice to murder?”

  “Nobody’s said anything about murder. I’m hiring you to keep an innocent party safe. Where I go from here and what I do, no one can accuse you of knowing.”

  “Suppose I tell Stonesmith about this meeting.”

  “I wouldn’t. It would move you into the category of my best interest.”

  I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward to pick up my cigarette. I grabbed the heavy glass tray and scaled it at his head.

  He ducked it—I knew then why he conserved his movements so carefully—and beat me to the Luger by a length. Half a second more and the magazine was in place and a fresh cartridge jacked into the chamber.

  “You disappoint me,” he said.

  “I know the feeling.”

  “What did you hope to accomplish by that?”

  “Ounce of prevention. I got bit once by a spider. Now I kill them when I see them.”

  We returned to our seats. He laid the pistol in his lap. The cigarette was still in my mouth, to my surprise. I drew on it and squashed it out in the canal. I tapped the printout on the desk. “Why don’t you just do what you have to do before he makes good on his threat? You can track someone down as well as I can. You proved that in Toronto.”

  If it was my hole card, I wasted it. Nothing on his face indicated it meant anything. “I’m not a killing machine,” he said, “no matter what Stonesmith says. I don’t pay tribute, but in certain circumstances I’ll give the mark a choice.”

  “Circumstances such as?”

  “Such as the man who sent me that email is my son.”

  TEN

  It was an embarrassing admission by most standards; not his. He spoke as if a family pet had strayed off and killed someone’s sheep.

  “Roger’s mother was my first wife. She died about this time last year. Drank herself to death.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Drunkenness. That’s why a drunk drinks. No one can drive them to it. We were divorced for years, but I went to the burial service, for Roger’s sake. The cops were there, taking pictures.”

  “They would.”

  “We’ll get back to that. I didn’t realize until then that Roger blamed me for his mother’s situation. He threw a punch at me as we were leaving the cemetery.”

  “Did he connect?”

  For answer, Macklin glanced toward the glass ashtray lying where it had landed on the floor.

  “The people I used to work for never came to terms with my quitting. They recruited my son. I tried to keep him out. I was sentimental. I should have made it permanent. The fact he’s still alive is proof enough he’s his father’s son.”

  So far as I could tell there was no pride in the remark; no contempt either, or anything else approaching human emotion. He wasn’t a robot, just impossible to read.

  “Apart from Dorfman,” he said, “Roger was the only one who knew I was divorcing again. He also knows I don’t kill for personal reasons. The law doesn’t necessarily buy into that; a killer kills, as they see it. If Laurie were murdered, I’d be the immediate suspect. And he’d be sure to plant enough evidence to see I went down for it.”

  “Thin,” I said. “A man in your line makes a new enemy every time he comes through on a contract. And divorce isn’t exactly a secret action. Anyone could find out about it, and take advantage of it.”

  “He knew my email address, another thing he shared with Dorfman.”

  “What about Dorfman? It wouldn’t be the first time a lawyer gave up a shady client with a grand jury barking at his heels.”

  “Leo helps Leo; that’s nothing new in lawyers, but it fills every minute of his day. But he’s too smart to choose sides between the law and me. It’s not fear. As old as he is he wants to get to be as old as he can. Anything less would be admitting defeat.”

  He was getting to be quite the conversationalist.

  “Call it instinct on my part,” he said, “if you want to fill in the blanks. Anyway I have to run it out, but I need time, which is what I’m buying from you.”

  “So that’s what this is about, saving your skin from a homicide rap involving your estranged wife?”

  Something resembling emotion passed across the implacable face, like a dust cloud. It was probably just my imagination. It pleases me to maintain the illusion there’s some humanity left in even the worst of the race. In any case he didn’t follow up on it, and the impression faded along with my faith that I’d seen anything at all.

  “After I left my former employers,” he said, “I found out they’d recruited Roger. Some people have an inordinate faith in genes. I did what I could to turn him away. There was collateral damage, but I thought I’d made progress. As it turned out, he is his father’s son, with certain inside knowledge of the game.

  “That’s the other shoe I mentioned earlier. Those police photographers spent as much time on Roger as they did on me. When I saw that, I knew he was still active.” He frowned down at the pistol on his lap, then put it on the desk, just far enough outside my reach to react. “I think he’s capable of holding me to account for what he thinks I did to his mother.”

  “But not so much he wouldn’t take a hundred G to forgive the debt.”

  “That’s one of the questions I want to ask him, before I make my decision.”

  I rose from my chair, without asking permission; I paid the rent, after all. His only answer was to rest a hand on the Luger. I unlocked the safe, keeping far enough away from the opening so he could see what I was doing, reached past the .38 Chief’s Special lying there, and scooped out the bottle of Dewar’s I kept for company, mostly mine. Again I offered him a hit; this time he nodded, taking up no more space than when he shook his head.

  I took two pony glasses from the safe. “Water? No ice, sorry. A refrigerator would blow the building’s circuits.”

  Another head shake. I filled the glasses and held one out. He sat unmoving with his hands in his lap on either side of the Luger until I set the drink down inside his reach. When I was in my chair holding mine he picked his up and drank the top off it.

  “You’ve got better taste in the office than you do at home.”

  “I hope that lock gave you more trouble.”

  “If you’re thinking you don’t have a choice in this,” he said, “you don’t. I’ve told you as much as I had to, which is too much. If things fall that way and you hear about the untimely death of one Roger Macklin, I can’t afford to let you run around with that burden on your conscience.”

  “What makes it less costly if I take the job and that happens?”

  “Then a hungry prosecutor might charge you as an accessory. So you’ll bury your conscience along with your civic pride.”

  I made myself sip my Scotch. I didn’t care if he saw me take it down in a lump, but I wanted the time to figure out how to crawl inside the glass and roll it out the window. The chance of surviving the three-story fall beat all the options. When it was empty I slipped the rubber band off the envelope, separated fifteen bills from the sheaf of hundreds, a
nd slid it back his way.

  “My retainer,” I said. “I never charge more than that unless the job takes more than three days. I’m not Gandhi; if Roger slips and falls into the path of a bullet, ten years’ salary showing up in my possession is as good as a smoking gun. It’s a security job, that’s all.”

  If that face could show surprise, I was a witness. He frowned and put away the envelope.

  He spent ten minutes telling me everything he knew about his ex-bride-to-be. Most husbands don’t know that much, and he was no exception, so far as their married life was concerned, but he was as good as Google when it came to her background before they met. Of course he’d have checked her as far back as the womb before proposing. Where a man who makes his living by killing is concerned, the woman in his life has no mystery.

  “What’s my cover?” I said. “If I tell her I’m working for you, she’ll spook and holler cop.”

  “She doesn’t spook. But if she balks, say ‘Leroy.’”

  I repeated the name. I knew better than to ask who Leroy was. You get only so many breaths in this life and there was no use wasting one on a question he wouldn’t answer.

  Once again he drew the pistol’s fangs and rose. “I’ll leave this in the other room. Don’t be in any great hurry to go through the door.”

  I sat back cradling my drink. “How do I know when the job’s done?”

  “No one’s ever had to ask me that before.” He went out, shutting the door behind him.

  When I heard the hall door close, I put down the glass and swiveled toward the safe to unlock it. The Luger is a stopgap, better than no gun at all but no match for most: The Rube Goldberg action lacks the reliability of German engineering at its best. I took out the Chief’s Special revolver, holster and all, swung out the cylinder for a look-see, and clipped it to my belt. For the foreseeable future it would be my conjoined twin.

  I retrieved the Luger, reassembled it, and locked it in the safe. I didn’t run into Rosecranz on the way out; not that he’d have pumped me for information. He’d left his curiosity at the Brandenburg Gate.

  The address Macklin had given me for his wife was burning a hole in my pocket. When I entered the dank gray deserted building across the street, the man who’d appointed himself to look after the Cutlass scrambled up off his straw pallet and stood yawning and rubbing his stomach. He couldn’t be that tired and there wasn’t that much stomach to rub. I sighed and cracked open my wallet.

  “No, sir; I was just surprised you wanted the car again so fast.”

  The sir threw me. I took a closer look at him. He wasn’t dressed for a charity ball, but apart from being worn and several cycles past due washing, his clothes wouldn’t get him turned out by the elbow. He was younger than I’d thought at first—eighteen or twenty—and less septic, his shoulder-length hair glossy black and his face clean except for some bits of lint from the pallet caught in his chin-whiskers. His teeth decided the thing: too white for the street and too even to have come in that way outside the supervision of an orthodontist. I’d have realized he wasn’t the same man I’d been dealing with if I hadn’t been preoccupied earlier; try testing your own powers of concentration with an armed killer at your side.

  “You’re not a tramp.” I put away the wallet, but left my thumb hooked in my hip pocket, alongside the Chief’s Special. “Not the career kind. Runaway?”

  “No, sir! I’m an urban explorer.”

  “What the hell’s an urban explorer?”

  “People with an interest in the history of a place. We go into abandoned houses, closed garages, boarded-up businesses, collecting impressions of the people who came before us.”

  “And what else?”

  “Nothing. Just impressions.”

  “This place has been empty only a couple of months. The impression I get is of bad management and a rotten location.”

  “I got that after five minutes. I’m just crashing. My parents think I’m in Fort Lauderdale. They’d rather think I’m boozing on the beach than poking around old buildings, especially in Detroit. They’re in Grosse Pointe Woods.”

  Twenty minutes from downtown and an age away.

  “Anything juicy so far?”

  A lower lip got pushed out. “A body, last month. In a condemned parking structure. Turned out to be a hooker. Somebody cut her throat and also—” He flushed. I’d thought that had gone out with panty raids. I was in danger of liking him.

  “They can’t all be King Tut.” I almost snarled it. “How many of you are there?”

  He frowned, stroked his whiskers, picked fluff from them. “Hundreds, maybe. I don’t know them all. Sometimes I meet with the ones I do know and we go in together.” He dug a cell phone out from under his plaid shirt. “If any of the others are like me, they go in alone as much as not.”

  “What do you do with these impressions?”

  “I don’t know about the others, but I’m writing a thesis.” He spread his palms. “‘Digging up Detroit: Archaeological Studies of the Modern City.’”

  “You’re a college student?”

  “Wayne State. I’m on winter break.”

  “What’s your name, or should I call you Indiana?”

  He showed his excellent orthodontia. “Dr. Chuck.”

  “Doctor?”

  “I mean, when I get my Ph.D.”

  “What’s with the shakedown, Chuck?”

  “What’s a shakedown?”

  He made me tired. I’d have to fill him in every time just to have an argument.

  “The ten bucks you soaked me to garage this heap. It won’t pay back your student loan.”

  “That’s what I had to pay the man who usually looks after this building to let me fill in for him. You want it back?” He fumbled under his plaid tail.

  “I already charged it to expenses. If you’re here, where’s he?”

  “One of his other places, I guess. He says he’s got a string of ’em, vacant lots and like that, where people can find parking without having to walk a mile.”

  “A franchise on real estate nobody wants. Only in Detroit. Urban explorers, you said? Much obliged.” I got my wallet back out and gave him five.

  The whites of his eyes shone in the gloom. “What’s it for?”

  “Teaching me something new. That’s fee simple in my work.”

  “Thanks, Mr.—?”

  I gave him a card. “Next good impression you get, let me know. I’m a collector myself. Meanwhile, watch your back, Doc. A cop might take you for a scrap rat, or a scrap rat for another scrap rat, and then it’s ‘Digging up Chuck.’”

  I left him putting away the bill; to him, another treasure from the city’s hollowed-out past.

  My tail showed up on schedule, the only really reliable service in our city. I spotted it after three blocks; but then I was looking for it. I made out two heads in the front seat of a brushed-gold four-door and wondered when the Detroit Police Department had converted its unmarked rolling stock from Ford to Chevy.

  ELEVEN

  A police shadow isn’t as easy to shake as you see in movies. Cops are the creative consultants, after all, and they don’t sell their secrets that cheap.

  Most of the time I humor them; otherwise they get unreasonable, and I like to see my tax dollars at work. Not this time. Deb Stonesmith had been too eager to find out where Laurie Macklin had landed, and if it wasn’t my secret to share in her office it still wasn’t on the road.

  I took I-75 north of the city, my fall-back place when I want to be alone. I timed it just far enough ahead of rush hour to slide into a pocket but not so far ahead I couldn’t shut the door behind me with a few hundred tons of Detroit steel. When I bailed out at the exit to the zoo, I left the unmarked Chevy stuck between a pair of Wide Load house movers and a flatbed steelhauler, with concrete walls twelve feet high on either side designed as part of a drainage ditch in times of flood. I doubled back to 1-96 West.

  Stonesmith hadn’t actually said that Laurie Macklin had “vanished
” from Southfield—magic is lost on cops—but if she had, she wouldn’t have been exaggerating by much. If you want to vanish from any place within a twenty-minute drive of Detroit, you can’t do much better than Milford, the Town Time Forgot.

  They don’t write it up often. No one famous was born there, and nothing of particular historical interest has ever happened within its limits; but that doesn’t stop similarly unremarkable places from being gushed over in print. There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep this one a secret from the despoiling multitudes.

  It’s a village of around five thousand, roughly fifteen miles west of Detroit’s fastest-growing suburb, and a solid eighty years back in time. The main four corners is just that, a once-upon-a-time place anchored by four stories of former furniture store and settled by wheelwrights and boilermakers in scale-model miniatures of robber barons’ palaces in Old New York. The people who live there now commute between Detroit and the university town of Ann Arbor thirty minutes west, and when they exit the Walter P. Chrysler freeway they pass through a time warp. I felt the shock-wave myself, and I was just visiting.

  The big snows were yet to come. What remained of the first made half-moons in depressions in the lawns, frozen hard as plaster and edged with yellow where little boys—and some probably not so little—had tried to melt them before their bladders ran dry. It was one of those places where that was still a game and not a misdemeanor.

  The house wasn’t as large as the Cabot Inn or as ornate, but the modest millionaire who’d built it about the same time had employed contractors who remembered how much fun it was to play hide-and-seek. Amid its dormers and bump-outs a child with an ordinary imagination could find niches in sufficient number and variety to wait out any adult’s store of patience. At one time, it would have been a paint-seller’s dream of pinks, teals, aquas, vermilions, peaches, and daffodils, but a later occupant had slapped gray on top of it all, adding white trim in a fit of artistic daring. That would have been around the time the house was parsed out into single-dweller suites.

  It had three stories plus an attic. Laurie Macklin lived on the third. I recognized the window she’d looked out through whilst warming her hands around a steamy mug, unaware her picture was being taken. I shook out a cigarette, turned my back to the wind, and cupped a match in my hands. While I pretended to concentrate on that, I drew a sight line between the window and the little community park across the street. A gazebo of pressure-treated pine stood square in its dead center, with latticework around the base to keep out small animals. It was just the thing to hide behind while poking a lens through one of the diamond-shaped openings where the slats crossed.