Black and White Ball

by Loren D. Estleman

  There was no percentage in revenge, and in every convict’s heart lurked the hope of parole. The slightest shadow on their record of good behavior would destroy that. The rest were at large and had been for a long time after he’d given them reason to wish him extinct. Too long. If they were ever going to strike they’d have done it by now.

  Even that was time squandered. The only person, apart from Leo Dorfman and Laurie, who knew Macklin didn’t “want to live with her” was Roger. He should have seen that right away. It made him furious—but only with himself. He hadn’t the luxury of directing it anywhere else.

  He turned again to the medical report. Dorfman, he knew, could use his own contacts to obtain more recent information, but there were things of interest in the old file that might be of advantage. At ten, following a season of fatigue, night sweats, and joint pain during which the boy’s grades had fallen, Donna had taken him to a pediatrician, who’d ordered tests and X-rays and diagnosed rheumatic fever. Bed rest and an aggressive treatment involving antibiotics, cortisone, and related steroids over the summer break had restored him to normal, so that with some remedial education he’d been able to rejoin his class without missing a grade. Regular checkups had failed to note any significant damage to the heart valves.

  Now, Macklin’s search online revealed that without daily doses of penicillin, sulfomides, and other antibiotics, recurrent attacks were a possible danger. These could lead to endocarditis, a bacterial infection threatening the health of the aortic valve, the tricuspid valve, and the aorta itself, which if not treated early made the victim susceptible to a coronary attack or, transmitted by blood, to kidney failure, renal shutdown, and probably death.

  In the normal course of events, Donna would have done whatever was necessary to prevent the worst; but sometime during Roger’s adolescence, her social drinking had escalated to alcoholism. Macklin didn’t know just when she’d begun to suspect that her husband’s retail camera business was a blind, or when she learned the rest; but not long after their son turned seventeen, she’d entered into divorce proceedings. Macklin couldn’t be sure, because his work—his real work—had taken him away from home for weeks at a time, leaving such things as medical appointments to her, but it was possible that in the whiskey fog she’d lived in, they fell into neglect. Roger might not have received the treatment he needed to recover completely.

  At the very least, chronic serious illness put Roger at a disadvantage in any violent confrontation. On the other end of the spectrum, it could be the instrument of his removal.

  Macklin put aside the report, removed his reading glasses, and tapped the side bows against his chin. He’d shot many, cut the throats of as many more, garroted some, bludgeoned others, and shed blood in just about all the ways one creature could shed another’s; but in the one-third of his life he’d spent ending other men’s (and some women’s) lives, helping someone toward natural death was something new.

  It bore consideration; but not until Dorfman came through with more recent updates on his son’s physical condition.

  In the meanwhile, the man himself needed to be located.

  The pictures he’d posted of Laurie, carefully laid out in chronological order according to season, suggested that Roger had established himself in a place convenient to her access. Like his father, he’d learned not to leave a paper trail; which in view of the world security condition had made the practice of traveling under false names nearly impossible. He certainly wouldn’t fly commercial airlines with the frequency required if he were living more than a few hundred miles away, the rails were government property and as such their surveillance was an unacceptable hazard, and even the bus companies trained their drivers to take note of regular passengers. For all the lip service their representatives gave public transportation, U.S. residents still traveled mainly by private automobile.

  But even that posed a problem to those who sought invisibility. Cars needed service and refueling, and garages and filling stations were under the same camera scrutiny as banks and prisons, trained to take in license plates as well as vehicles and drivers. One could never be sure that some overzealous federal agent wasn’t putting in hundreds of hours of overtime comparing footage and tracking how many times a particular motorist showed his face or his registration number along the same route. No, despite the fact that Macklin had neither encouraged nor trained his son to follow the lethal trade, he’d inherited enough common sense to limit the distance of his commute.

  Any tracker knows the best way to pick up a trail is to go to the last place where the game was known to have been. Macklin, who had gone to Laurie’s new house out of curiosity after she’d given his divorce attorney to send papers, had recognized the window where she’d been standing nursing a mug of coffee when Roger took the most recent picture he’d sent. He’d hardly have left anything behind, but the gazebo in the little village park would be the best place to center the spiral of his search.

  He drove the TrailBlazer to Milford, parked three blocks away and around the corner from Laurie’s apartment, and was walking along a street on the other side of the park when he spotted the beat-up blue Cutlass parked directly opposite the gazebo. He stopped, looked at the erect figure of the man standing under its roof staring at the apartment window. He reversed directions toward the cover of the SUV.

  Driving away, he considered what he’d seen. He’d instructed Walker to seek out Laurie, not Roger. But what else could he be doing, standing on the identical spot where his son had drawn his photographic bead on Macklin’s wife?

  And whose idea was it, really, for him to hire the detective, his or Walker’s? And on whose behalf?

  In a convenience store–service station near the on-ramp to I-96, he found that rarity, a public telephone, and spent some money. When Leo Dorfman came on, he said, “How soon can you get hold of Amos Walker’s medical file?”

  THEM

  FOURTEEN

  The woman never had visitors.

  It might have been different back in Southfield, where she was established, with a husband and a supermarket she liked well enough to shop there twice a week, in the kind of neighborhood whose residents talked to one another when they met on the street; not here in this jerkwater Gomerville, where she was unknown. Despite what you saw on Nick at Nite, all those sappy-sweet small-town sitcoms, the locals closed ranks against strangers. It was the same as being the new kid in school. In the months he’d been watching her and taking her picture, no one else had entered her apartment, not even a cleaning lady. She took care of things herself, dragging a vacuum back and forth in front of the window facing the park, Lemon-Pledging, the whole Mrs. Brady bit, only without Alice the housekeeper. Cooked for herself.

  Which infuriated him. The kind of money Macklin brought in, an amount that likely would increase once there was a judgment—if not alimony, then surely a fat settlement based on the not inconsiderable income he declared on his taxes—she could afford a full-time staff, and better living arrangements in a city with life in it, none of this shit-kicking Saturday night Bingo in the VFW hall. What was the opposite of pretentious? And was it any less hypocritical than flaunting one’s advantages?

  He shook his head. They’re just target practice; who’d told him that? Not his father, that phony who’d brought up his son to respect the legitimate world that he himself only visited occasionally, to keep up the lousy front. Carlo Maggiore? Possibly; although if so he’d probably just been repeating a line he’d heard from someone who had imagination. That was the failing that had led to Maggiore’s death, no imagination or ability to envision the possibility that he’d die anywhere other than in his bed, ninety and rich. But, no, he wouldn’t be quit on, not the Don. And so he himself had wound up just target practice, and it was Roger’s father who’d done it, only with a blade across the throat instead of the bullet Roger had in mind for his beloved stepmother, instant and humane.

  Target practice. No malice in the act. Gloat later.

  Mercy wasn
’t in it, and hatred was disastrous. When the time came, whether Peter Macklin bore the ignominy of buying Laurie’s life or refused, Roger would dispatch the man who’d sired him with no emotion at all. That was the old man’s method. Let him experience it from the receiving end. Roger didn’t care about the money; he had plenty of his own, earned the same way. He just wanted to see the old man bleed twice.

  Again he shook himself, to clear his brain of reflection and projection. Laurie Macklin had a visitor. Roger had arrived at his old post in the park too late to see him arrive, but had caught a glimpse of him passing the window on his way out of the apartment, moving too swiftly to leave anything more than an impression of size and gender.

  He’d thought of withdrawing before the man emerged from the building lest he be seen, but that would leave the thing in mystery. His patience paid off minutes later. A tall, broad-shouldered figure in a winter-weight blue suit came out; a man older than his father, favoring one leg as he climbed into a car that needed body work. It was one of those old models with a long low profile and most likely a herd of wild horses under the hood. The man never once glanced toward the park, and when the motor started with a deep-throated rumble and rolled away with a blat of glass-pack pipes, Roger raised his phone and tried for a shot of the license plate, but it was gone before he could focus.

  That would slow things down, but not by much. How many of those cars were on the road? Too many, considering the proximity of the Motor City, where rusty hulks were revered on the same level as dead world champions, emaciated Motown musicians, and any huckster who promised to turn a crack house into a sports stadium—with taxpayers’ assistance. But there in the rust belt, most of the muscle cars of antiquity hibernated through the winter under canvas, in heated garages, like premature babies in incubators. Those who exposed them to snow, sleet, slush, hail, and salt did so only because they had no other means of transportation. That narrowed the field; and although Roger Macklin had yet to build the network of inside information that Peter Macklin had developed over twenty years, he had some resources.

  He may not yet be in his father’s tax bracket—if there was such a thing for their way of making a living—but he had tens of thousands of dollars at his disposal; and the civil servants who hadn’t as much as a thousand at theirs were always open to reason.

  One thing experience had taught him was not to linger in one place long enough to invite attention. As soon as the car was out of sight he left the gazebo, exiting the park by a different route from the one he’d taken on the way in. The sun, its existence taken on faith alone for days, opened a rift in the overcast; any traces he’d left on the frosted grass would be gone soon.

  Not that anyone in Milford would connect a casual stroller with the feral things that prowled the streets of big bad Detroit.

  His car was a blue Corvette, bought used. He could afford brand new, but cash transactions that size raised red flags. Many of the old-timers, his father included, shied from the flash of a sports car; but what good was money if all you did was bale it up and bury it? The cockpit-like interior, all brown leather with wood trim on the dash, served as his office, with a PC he’d had custom installed and a hands-free phone. He could take over a company or a small nation at eighty miles per hour.

  He tugged on his driving gloves, straddled his shades on his nose, and turned the key. The big 400 started with the same full-throated growl as Mr. X’s Cutlass; there might be more there than met the eye, and probably more surprises under the cheap suit and behind the bum leg.

  He spoke a number aloud, heard the dial tone, and pulled away from the curb; spending too much time so close to a target ran against his principles. His party picked up as he was pulling into the parking lot of a family restaurant.

  The conversation was brief, and conducted without names. He provided a description of the man and the car.

  “Michigan plate, that’s all you got?”

  “Hey, if I had the number, I wouldn’t be calling you. Start with the insurance companies, get the names of year-around customers who drive those jalopies. Most of the bozos only cover them from March to November, then put ’em up on blocks. If they took care of pussy the way they take care of their wheels they wouldn’t have so much to prove.” He cut the connection.

  It might be a wild-goose chase. The sturdily built stranger who’d made his way into Laurie Macklin’s tight circle might be no more than one of those opportunists who live on grass widows and a gift of gab; in which case he was no threat. But if he’d learned anything from his father’s example, this Macklin knew that when a ball came from left field you dove for it.

  PATIENT PLAN

  Walker, Amos (no middle)

  Reason(s) for Visit

  Follow-up GSW

  Condition:

  Extensive damage of the superficial fascia describing oblique canal bisecting superficial nerves and vessels, bypassing femoral artery approx. 2 cms. to right

  Assessment:

  Scarring in canal impeding muscle movement, p. chronic

  Impression:

  Vicodin and all opioids n.r. because of previous abuse; aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen r. as needed, not to exceed twelve in twelve hours

  That was the latest, and the one of most interest to Macklin. A much older report referred to an earlier gunshot wound to the lower thorax, requiring surgery to repair a compound fracture of two anterior ribs. In all likelihood, arthritis would slow him down in damp weather, but not so much as the permanent injury to his leg. He’d taken a 30.06 slug—a deer round—through the upper thigh, plowing a canal all the way through to a clean exit, missing the femoral artery by a whisker; otherwise he’d have bled out before the fastest ambulance could arrive on the scene. During and after recovery he’d overmedicated with Vicodin, which together with a taste for alcohol (other medical reports were as informative as they were objective) had placed him temporarily in a rehabilitation center, without his consent; a case of legal committal.

  Instinct based on personal contact told Macklin the last would be of no use to him. A man who was still a slave to drugs didn’t handle straight Scotch so well. The leg wound was important; if it came to physical combat, a blow to the thigh would paralyze him with pain long enough to deliver a coup de grace.

  Other older reports were revealing and, for someone not as schooled in the variables of the human condition, puzzling. The patient had suffered multiple concussions—which, if one took into account those that might have gone unreported—should have incapacitated him years ago: dementia, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, cerebral hemorrhage for starters. But like certain automobiles, some individuals were built to take more abuse than others that had come off the same line; a screw tightened an extra quarter-turn in the factory, an additional thirty-second of an inch thickness occurring in the occipital bone in the womb, or just plain luck in the angle and severity of impact. Based on their brief meeting, here was one model with all the important parts in working order.

  A challenge, if it came to a confrontation.

  Macklin tipped the printouts Dorfman had provided back into the folder, carried it into his kitchen, and after opening a window and disabling the smoke detector dumped it into the same steel wastebasket he’d consigned Roger’s file to, saturated it with charcoal starter and touched it off with a match. He used a long-handled steel spoon to stir the black and curling pages and switched on the fan in the hood above the range to draw the smoke out through the vent pipe. When the file was reduced to ashes, he carried the basket into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet in relays to avoid clogging. If only bodies were as easily disposed of as the sum total of their occupants on paper.

  * * *

  “Jesus. Talk about your Viagra on wheels.”

  Roger’s contact in the Detroit post of the Michigan State Police had sent data to his onboard computer from the auto theft division, which allowed him to scroll through engineer’s drawings and advertising illustrations of some eight hundred models of Amer
ican-made muscle cars manufactured between 1960 and 1973.

  Mustangs, GTOs, GTXs, Firebirds, Cobras, Cyclones, Galaxies, Road Runners, Dusters, Darts, Chargers, Challengers, Cougars; the names alone were composed to raise hard-ons. Blocks, hemis, spoilers, scoops; you needed a gearhead’s glossary to follow the language.

  He kept his hand on the clicker built into the dash and watched a dizzying parade of low-slung, attenuated silhouettes and exploded views of engines and drive trains flash across his screen. He’d had no idea how many different examples had been made available to a segment of the population that had grown weary of “your father’s Oldsmobile,” as one of the slogans ran in the ads his informant had included. It was a sub-culture he’d barely known existed, like book collecting and wine connoisseurship; and just as irrelevant.

  It made him soporific, all those gaunt slanted images flashing like a sped-up chase scene in a cartoon, so that when the one he was looking for came up he almost missed it, and had to scroll back to find it.

  There it was: the 1970 Olds Cutlass, a two-door with an optional vinyl top and a 455-cubic-inch engine with standard two-barrel carburetor, four-barrel available on request. The fanciful painted glossy illustration exaggerated its earth-hugging proportions, making it longer than it appeared in photographs, and its finish looked as hard as porcelain and as deeply reflective as Crater Lake, bearing little resemblance to the faded chalky blue of the car he’d seen in Milford, the virginal white roof nothing like its dingy peeling example, but the sound its motor had made starting up was as clean and virile as the spotless chromed dynamo in the cutaway photo.

  The restaurant lot was emptying, the dinner rush over. He got into line and called his man to report the identifying information.