Black and White Ball

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Okay, we’ve got a needle in a pile of needles instead of in a haystack,” said the other. “Stick around.”

  “You stick around. You’ve got my cell. Start with cops. Retirees first. This one’s a long way past his twenty.”

  “What makes him a cop?”

  “He didn’t get that limp sewing doilies.”

  “Man, I didn’t sign on to do a fellow officer.”

  “You signed on. Wait, don’t hang up.”

  He’d pulled back into Laurie Macklin’s street and slid into the curb a block down from her building. A familiar vehicle was parked in front of it.

  “He’s back,” he said.

  “Who’s back?”

  “Cutlass guy. Stand by for the plate number.”

  ME

  FIFTEEN

  She left the room without excusing herself. Since the pistol hadn’t made a reappearance I took it she didn’t expect to find me gone when she came back.

  I killed time looking at prints on the walls. Her taste ran toward German expressionism: bright colors and jagged figures with exaggerated proportions set at precarious angles so that they looked as if they might fall out of the frames any second. It seemed an odd choice for a woman whose furnishings were quiet to the point of transparency; but it said a lot about her taste in husbands. A woman who lived not quite on the edge, but close enough to appreciate the view.

  She came back wearing a pale yellow lambswool sweater with a boatneck that showed off her collarbone—a feature often overlooked by men who admire women—gray linen slacks with a crease, and gunmetal-colored slippers that left her ankles bare. Her hair was caught up by a dark blue figured bandanna tied at the nape of her neck, exposing a high forehead. The outfit came without pockets sufficient to conceal a firearm.

  She saw me notice. “You might extend me the same courtesy.”

  I reached under my coattail, unclipped the .38, holster and all, and laid it on the apostrophe-shaped coffee table.

  “I’m drinking,” she said. “Gin and tonic. I have vodka, if you prefer.”

  “I don’t. People who do don’t drink for pleasure. Can I help?” There were no setups in the living room.

  “I don’t intend to poison you.”

  “Don’t joke about that. Someone tried once.”

  Muscles pulled at the corners of her mouth. “I can’t decide whether you’ve led an interesting life or you’re a liar.”

  “A little of both. But I like to see how different people mix different drinks.”

  “For what it says about them?”

  I grinned. The muscles at the corners of my mouth were looser than hers. “Every little movement has a meaning all its own.”

  Whoever had renovated the apartment had torn down most of the interior walls, leaving a clear expanse from the living room to the kitchen, small but arranged for efficiency: Ceramic floors, a freestanding stove with granite counters flanking the burners, a side-by-side refrigerator, open cupboards above a bright copper sink. She kept the liquor in a narrow cabinet with pull-out racks. A collection of footed glasses hung upside down from racks, like bats in an attic. It was Bombay Sapphire, a premium label. She filled two glasses a third of the way on one of the counters, topped them off from a bottle of Schweppes, and stirred them with a long-handled spoon. I accepted a glass, stroking the etched gold veins on the side with a thumb.

  “Wedding present.” She lifted her glass. “To Leroy.”

  “To his health?”

  “In memoriam,” she said, and drank.

  “Sorry I missed him.”

  “You didn’t miss much.”

  “How did he meet his end?”

  “Someone blew him in half with a shotgun.”

  “Macklin?”

  “Me.”

  I drank without mentioning the toast.

  * * *

  “His name was Landis,” she said, “Roy, except most people called him Leroy, which was probably the real deal. He wanted me to call him Abilene. I called him Leroy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Meaning?” A vertical line bifurcated her high brow.

  “It’s from the Latin for ‘I’m listening, Mrs. Macklin. Or Ms. Ziegler; whatever.’”

  The room was the living room: I had the wingback, she the sofa, same as before. Creatures in the animal kingdom pick their sites of advantage, creatures in the human kingdom too. We’d gone back to the Bombay for reinforcements, me mixing this time, two-to-one now. I felt a comfortable buzz, but if the gin had any effect on her, she was as good at concealing it as I was. How she’d learned at her tender age what it had taken me most of my career to develop may have had something to do with her marital situation; or maybe it came natural, like cloudy blue eyes.

  “He came with a letter of introduction with Peter’s signature, on our honeymoon in L.A. Peter’d been called away to supervise the sale of his camera business—I still thought he was in the camera business then—and Leroy was there to keep me company; take me to see the sights and whatever, so I wouldn’t feel neglected. We took in the Chinese Theater and Tijuana. I had my picture taken standing next to one of those zebra-striped burros.”

  “Who wrote the letter?”

  “I never found out. Leroy, probably. He was a tall drink of water, as I suppose they put it in Arkansas, where he said he was from. Fancied himself a cowboy, and dressed like it: Stetson hat, snap-front shirt, shit-kickers, the works. Mind if I use words like ‘shit’?” She looked at me over her glass, holding it in both hands like the mug in her picture.

  “I’ve got cable.”

  Her brow creased the other way, but she let it slide. “I was his hostage, was what I was. Bait. To lure Peter out into the open so Leroy could kill him.”

  “Wild guess,” I said. “Leroy and Peter worked for the same firm till Peter gave notice. Only you don’t quit that firm. It quits you.”

  “They’d tried before. I guess when I entered the picture they thought their luck had changed. Chink in the armor.” She rolled a shoulder. “The boss’s name was Major, Charles Major. Detroit man. Carlo Maggiore before he changed it. I got that much from Peter. That’s when I found out he wasn’t in the retail camera business.”

  “Maggiore. I heard that name.”

  “Not lately, unless you saw a rehash on 48 Hours about mob history. He and Peter had butted heads before. Maggiore came off worse that time, so their differences were personal as well as professional. His luck didn’t hold the second time. Somebody cut his throat in his own house in Beverly Hills—California, not Michigan. I can’t say who, because I wasn’t there. But I can guess. It wasn’t long after Leroy—”

  She drank. It was the first time she’d drawn on the gin as medicine. Until then we’d been two people drinking a hole in the early evening, like almost everyone else in the working world of metropolitan Detroit.

  “It was in self-defense,” she said. “Peter’s, mine; makes no difference, he was going to kill one of us at least. It was in a car on the Pacific Coast Highway. Leroy had a knife, his weapon of choice. I had an antique shotgun, a joke meant to hang on a wall. I didn’t even know if it would work.

  “It did. Peter showed up—too late to do anything but help me with the burial at sea. Leroy.” She drained the glass.

  I toyed with mine. I don’t drink to killers, dead or otherwise. “So why’d he bring it up? Macklin, I mean. To blackmail you into cooperating with me?”

  “That’s not Peter’s—racket? Racket.” She drew a finger around the inside of her glass and licked it. “He’d be incriminating himself if he reported it. He told you to mention Leroy to remind me I’m no better than he is, that my life means more to me than someone else’s. More than Leroy’s, and more than Roger’s. Well, he’s right. I’d rather live. He just wanted to remind me of that, in case I got too proud to rely on help, considering the source.”

  “So am I hired?”

  She blinked. “You still want the job?”

  “Working for one killer
against another killer? It’s a new experience for sure.”

  “You left out one killer.”

  “You’re not a killer, Mrs. Macklin.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Do you think we killers can’t spot each other?”

  She rolled her glass between her palms. “I think you should call me Laurie.”

  SIXTEEN

  The apartment house was managed by a realtor on the second floor of the old furniture store downtown. The receptionist wore ten yards of wool sweater with a snowman embroidered on it and silver hair in waves that brought a whole new meaning to the word permanent. A plastic replica of Santa and his reindeer took up most of a glitter mat on her desk. BAKER FIDELITY read a decal on the side of the sleigh. When I told the woman my business she leaned back in her swivel and shouted, “Ralph! Someone about Parkview!” That was the name of Laurie Macklin’s apartment house.

  A gargly male voice shouted back. She directed me through an open door. This was a big room, but there was barely space for a gargantuan old partners desk, an artificial Christmas tree, and a quartet of painted wooden nutcrackers three feet high. The man who got up to shake my hand might have posed for the statues. His jowls hung loosely, making creases, so that his mouth looked as if it opened and shut on wooden hinges.

  “Sorry I can’t offer you a chair,” he said. “I had to put it in storage. I let Nora go hog-wild with the decorations during the holidays.” His gargle dropped to a whisper. “She lost her son in Desert Storm and she doesn’t have any grandchildren.”

  I said that was okay—the chair thing, not the other—and gave him a card that carried only my name; to land offices in communities like that a private investigator is as ominous as a telegram from the War Department. It usually means the kind of scandal that had decided people to move out of the big city in the first place. He asked for references and I gave him Rosecranz in my office building. He pecked out the number on the phone on his desk, waited. “No one’s answering.”

  The old Russian was probably out hunting cockroaches. I told Ralph to try Lauren Ziegler. “She’s—”

  He brightened at that and broke the connection. “I know Ms. Ziegler. The town’s not that big.” He dialed a number from memory and shot the breeze with the tenant while I admired his view of Milford. I was born in the same small town not too many miles from there, with the same stoplights that flashed yellow after ten o’clock and in December the same red-and-silver garlands on the streetlamps and lumps of frozen slush in the gutters. I’d spent the first ten years of my life clawing to get out and the rest of it clawing my way back.

  But things are the same no matter the size of the city limits, or for that matter whether it’s Kokomo or Katmandu: The kindly old gentleman who runs the hobby shop has images on his computer that could get him twenty years in stir, the devoted couple celebrate their golden anniversary with a butcher knife and a .44, the kid with the paper route throws in a Baggie filled with white powder for the house on the corner. Noxious weeds grow in all kinds of soil.

  He hung up on a jovial note. “You’re a friend, she says. That’s fine. She always pays her rent on time and there have been no complaints from the other tenants.” He drew a file from his deep drawer and opened it; frowned. “The attic room’s available, but there’s not much headroom.”

  I said I’d stoop.

  “It’s unfurnished.”

  “That’s okay too.” I kept a sleeping bag in the car for unexpected overnighters.

  “Five hundred a month. We usually ask for first and last month up front, but since you’re a friend of Miss Ziegler’s—”

  I got out my wallet and counted the bills onto the desk. He unlocked another drawer, put the money in a metal box, took out a ring of square brass keys with tags attached, separated one, and passed it across the desk. He wished me a merry Christmas and was humming the tune when I left.

  * * *

  Back in Detroit I broke open the purse again, but Chuck the urban explorer shook his head. It was almost dark in the empty building across from mine, but his dental work caught the light from the corner streetlamp. “You’re good for all day, mister. You won’t get that from the city.”

  “Much obliged. Find Tut’s tomb yet?”

  His grin broadened. “Nothing so spectacular, but a bro found a bottle of single-malt in an old piano last night in a warehouse.”

  “I wouldn’t drink from it.”

  He touched my arm as I was leaving the old gas station. His voice dropped to a murmur. “You don’t owe anybody money, do you?”

  I followed the inclination of his head. The familiar Chevy was parked in a fifteen-minute loading zone half a block down from my building. “Just the county, the state, and Washington,” I said. “These guys are with the city.”

  “Cops? They must want you bad. They’ve been there two hours. I was wondering why nobody came around to shoo ’em off.”

  Turning my back as a shield I smuggled a five-spot out of my wallet into a plaid flap pocket. “Got a phone?”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Let me know if anything changes. My cell’s on the back of my card.”

  “You in trouble?”

  “I’m used to it, but you don’t have to be. Keep the cash anyway.”

  “I didn’t mean that. You’re the first person hasn’t told me to get a real job.”

  “I’d choke on it. I haven’t had a real job since Saigon fell.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Theme park. Before your time.”

  The phone on the desk was ringing when I unlocked the private door. I scooped the mail off the floor inside the slot—it was all too brightly colored for checks or love letters—tipped it into the wastebasket in the kneehole, and picked up. The number on caller ID meant nothing; but most of my calls came from strangers. “A. Walker Investigations.”

  “Chuck, Mr. Walker. One of ’em’s on his way up. He got out of the car as soon as you went inside.”

  I thanked him, scribbling his number on the pad. I’d never heard of urban explorers before that day, but you never know when you need one. I just got settled behind the desk when a shadow came to the pebbled glass.

  “Come in, Officer,” I said. “Or is it Sergeant?”

  He had a heavy, handsome face with black brows, a prominent but not beaky nose, a wide mouth, and a raised white scar in a tiny ragged C on his blue chin just right of the cleft, likely left by a man’s ring.

  He was a big man; but they don’t come in any other size in the department, in a knee-length camel’s-hair coat over a navy suit and a trilby hat cocked at the right angle above his left eyebrow; gray necktie on a gray shirt. Threads of silver glittered at his temples.

  “Detective.” His voice was Tonto deep. “Stan Kopernick, First Grade. I told them that champagne color’s too easy to spot.”

  “Shows how much I know. I thought it was brushed gold.”

  “There’s the job to have. I guess if you said baby-shit yellow you wouldn’t have it long.” He stretched a hand the size of a La-Z-Boy across the desk.

  I took it, and here was one cop who didn’t think he had to grind my bones to make his bread. There was power there, but held in reserve for when it counted.

  “That was pretty slick there on seventy-five,” he said, planting himself in the customer’s chair. “Reed’s not easy to lose.”

  “Reed should know better than to try not to be lost.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “That would defeat the purpose, Detective.”

  He patted the camel’s-hair. “I never leave the office without grabbing a fistful of John Does. Obstructing justice, that’s a Swiss Army knife in my trade.”

  “You’d have to serve one to every driver that got between you and me on the interstate. There’s nothing on the statutes that says a man can’t go motoring in the afternoon. In this town it’s practically a requirement.”

  “I don’t want to get tough.”

/>   “I know. You just can’t help it. Does Lieutenant Stonesmith know you came up here to brace me, or was that your own brainstorm?”

  “She didn’t say one way or the other, but I’d probably do what I wanted to anyway. I don’t take orders so good from a woman.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. “I work out of the old Third, Walker. That mean anything to you?”

  “I thought I knew everyone in Homicide.”

  “I’m just back from the minors. They sent me down for retraining after the Gang Squad broke up.”

  “Everyone thought you boys went away after that. They just threw you back into the mixing bowl and poured you out in little cups, same as STRESS and the old Racket Squad. No sense wasting all that street savvy.”

  “MBA, we call it: Maul, Batter, and Assault, all in the interest of maintaining the peace.”

  “How long have you been trying to sprinkle salt on Peter Macklin’s tail?”

  His hat rode up his forehead. “Who said anything about him?”

  “No one had to. Nothing ever changes in the department except the look. A ladies’ room installed in Thirteen Hundred, no third-degree in the basement, nothing so obvious, not so many flashlights built like blackjacks, good fitness program in place to keep the bellies from hanging over the gun belts, cameras on lapels, everything modern in all the areas visible to the public, but it’s all the same at the core. The cops operate the way they did at the start: all the warlords marking their territories, like dogs.”

  “Not such a bad system. What good’s having separate details, you don’t honor them? When did Murder One stop being a major crime? Who invited Diana Ross anyway?”

  The question wasn’t racist or sexist on the face of it: An HR committee could dismantle it, inspect all the parts, and put it back together without reaching a conclusion. If sensitivity training had had any visible effect on haters, it was in the way the professionals chose their weapons.

  “I don’t know where Macklin is, Kopernick. If that’s why you tied a firecracker to my tail, you wasted a match.”

  “Peter Macklin? He’s one for the cold-case crowd. It’s fresh meat I’m after. It’s his boy Roger I want.”