I let that one slide off my poker face. I’d only stopped by the office to look at the mail and check for messages; I clean forgot Stonesmith’s centurions would have gone back there as a default line after I dumped them. I needed to set up shop in Milford, but if I brought a train with me they’d put things together and book her as a material witness for her own safety. That would be chicken soup for Roger’s soul. Suspicious suicide was no stranger to the Wayne County Jail.
Kopernick got tired of waiting for me to respond. “Roger’s still a kid. He gives up his contacts, his old man included, he’s out in ten with some lead still in his pencil. I didn’t make plainclothes throwing myself up against the thickest part of the wall.”
Just then something hummed. He shifted positions, pulled a phone the size of motel soap out of his coat and muttered into it. He listened, said, “Okie-doke,” and put it away. He stood. “Mama spank. She radioed Reed. We’re not supposed to make contact.”
“One of those orders I guess you don’t take from women,” I said.
His baggy grin had come with the shield. “We all got to get used to shit. I’ve killed six men and one woman, defending myself and on the run. That was back in the day. If you were dumb enough to say you didn’t shoot to kill, you got suspended. Now, not so much. You don’t adjust to the situation, they throw you a party and give you the boot. So that’s my advice: Adjust to the situation. We don’t shake so easy the second time.”
I waited until the hall door banged shut, got up and checked the waiting room and the landing just to be sure, and called the number that had popped up on my caller ID. When Dr. Chuck came on his cell, I asked him if a quick twenty would help him explore the city. I got the answer I expected and told him where he could find the hideout key to the car.
Ten minutes later I stood at the window, watching around the edge of the blind at the street below. The Cutlass slid out the open bay of the deserted building and turned southeast toward downtown. Kopernick and his partner hadn’t seen me come out of the building, so there was a little hesitation before the Chevy swung behind, its tires chirping on the U-turn. When I was sure they’d swallowed the bait I called a cab and went home to pack.
SEVENTEEN
“How do you know how much you’ll need?”
He was sitting in my best chair when I came out of the bedroom carrying a suitcase. I noticed then he didn’t cross his legs, seated on the edge of the cushion with his feet flat on the floor and his hands spread palms down on the arms. I couldn’t tell if he was armed; his leather windbreaker was built for a heftier man. He would buy most of his jackets that way, to accommodate the extra load.
I flung the case onto the swayback sofa, going for my belt in the same movement. He held his position. The revolver in my hand might as well have been a toothbrush.
“I didn’t get around to fixing that garage window,” I said.
“It wouldn’t matter if you had. You know what they say about locks.”
I returned the .38 to its clip. “I always pack for a week. Most of the work I get doesn’t take any longer than that. If it does, there are Laundromats. I can’t remember the last time a case took me to the Gobi.”
Peter Macklin tilted a hand toward a manila folder on my coffee table. “You move fast for someone who’s collected so many aches and pains. I’m not just talking about GSW. I’ve got a couple of those myself.”
“Okay if I take a look? I’m past due for a checkup.”
He said nothing. I scooped up the folder and paged through my medical file. “You left out the patient privacy information.”
“That’s to keep honest people out. Like locks. What I can’t figure out is why you don’t stutter.”
“I’m guessing you went through my medicine cabinet.”
“I was pretty sure I wouldn’t find anything stronger than over-the-counter. I can usually spot it when someone’s still using.”
“If you’re talking about concussions, I’ve had a lot of experience in picking myself up off strange floors. But I can still dress myself and work crossword puzzles, if the words aren’t too big. I took an aptitude test when I got out of the service. It called for a thick skull. That didn’t leave much room for brains; but what are those in detective work?” I flung myself next to the suitcase and shook loose a cigarette. “You’re wasting your time on me when you should be reading about Roger.”
“There wasn’t as much to read; but you’re wasting time I need. Roger’s my lookout, not yours. I hired you to protect my wife.”
I lit up. “I thought I felt someone watching me. I thought it was the usual small-town snoop, or cops, which I handle on a case-by-case basis; but I’m the careful type, so I checked it out. Roger take a size ten shoe?”
“Nine and a half. There’s always some distortion in snow and frost. I could have told you where that last picture was taken from. Things are going to take twice as long if you’re going to cover the same ground I already did.”
“I could say the same thing about you.”
“Casing’s like carpentry: Measure twice, cut once.”
“So is sleuthing. It’s part of the work, checking up on the story you get from the client. For all I knew, you took those pictures yourself. It wouldn’t be the first time someone hired me to draw attention away from him.”
“I take an eight. He got his feet from his mother’s side.” He drew a breath, purely in the interest of feeding his lungs. “I still feel about Laurie the way I always did. Roger knows that. He spelled it out in his email.” He lifted the same hand. “Keep the file. I can always get more.”
“Meaning you can always get me.”
“I’m like you. I work the job.”
I was beginning to enjoy the conversation, if not the company. I had no idea why.
“What are you going to do when Dorfman’s gone?” I said. “These days it’s a lot harder digging up confidential information from scratch.”
“Dorfman’s not going anywhere. Lawyers are tough to kill, and crooked ones never die. They just keep playing the angles until they run out of them; and they never run out of angles. What did Laurie say when you brought up Leroy?”
“How do you know I had to?” I blew smoke at the ceiling. “Forget it. She told me she killed him and you helped her dump the body in the ocean. Was that on the level, or did you do it and let her think it was her?”
“Why would I do that?”
“To bind her tight. To make her think she’s as bad as you.”
“Is bad important to you?”
“If you have to ask that question, you just answered mine.”
“Your world’s that simple, good and evil?”
“That simple, if you look at the situation long enough.”
“No gray areas?”
“People talk about them. When they do I know what side they’re on.”
“I can’t figure out whether you’re naïve or a cockeyed idealist.”
“I’m okay with both. Did you kill Leroy and let Laurie think it was her?”
“She told you the circumstances?”
“She said it was self-defense. He had a knife, she had a shotgun no one could be sure would work. I thought that was a nice touch. It leveled the playing field.”
“It didn’t. He was an experienced killer, a psychopath. It could easily have gone the other way. Civilians hesitate. He underestimated her. That’s all she had.”
“That and the shotgun.”
“This is hearsay. I’m telling you what she told me.”
“I asked her if your bringing up Leroy was some kind of blackmail, to get her to agree to our arrangement. She said it was to remind her you’re not the only killer in the marriage.”
“I doubt she meant that. You’re a stranger. She’s learned to be suspicious of people she doesn’t know. It was my way of telling her you’re acting for me. She and I were the only ones who knew about Leroy. Even the man who sent him thought I was the one who made him disappear. Either I hired you for
the reason I gave or to set her up, in which case I wouldn’t have sent her that message. You can’t have it both ways.”
The cigarette had gone bitter. I ditched it in a tray. “You called Leroy a psychopath. What makes you different?”
“He killed because he liked it.”
“You don’t?”
“Do you like detective work?”
“I did at the start. So it’s just a job to you.”
“I turn down work I don’t like. We have that in common.”
I said, “I’d retire tomorrow if I had the money. If Roger thinks he can tap you for a hundred grand, it means you’ve got more, probably a lot more. Why are you still working?”
“Who said I am?”
“Don’t try to sell me Roger doesn’t count because no one’s paying you to kill him. He’s giving you an out. You can pay him off and walk away clean. Whatever’s between you, you’re still blood.”
He was standing now, looking down at me with his hands hanging at his sides. We’d met only twice, but I’d figured out they were always empty in company except when he was holding a weapon.
“You’re smarter than that. You forget I checked up on you. It’s not money he wants, or Laurie’s life. Neither one is enough. He wants me to give in, and then he’s going to kill her with me watching, then kill me—if he can—or hang her murder on me just for garnish. That doesn’t come from my side of the family, or his mother’s. He’s a self-made man.”
He reached behind him; I jumped for the .38. He saw the movement. As far as he was concerned I was checking my watch for the time. From a hip pocket he drew a fold of currency and tossed it on the coffee table.
I said, “You paid me, remember?”
“There’s two thousand there. Fifteen hundred won’t get you far. If Roger was watching the apartment while you were inside it, he knows by now who you are, and can guess why. Leaving you as a witness would upset all his plans.”
“I’m not a witness till he follows through. I’d’ve thought you had more faith in yourself than that.”
“I might miss,” he said. “It’s happened before.”
EIGHTEEN
“Cozy. Reminds me of the night I spent in an airport waiting room when all the runways were socked in.”
I stood next to Laurie Macklin in the doorway, reviewing my pied-à-terre for an indefinite period. I’d spread my sleeping bag on squares of peel-and-stick linoleum and under it chipboard, stacked some books next to it and tins of deviled ham, canned tuna, and baby potatoes on the exposed two-by-fours that kept the sloped roof from collapsing like a fort made of sofa cushions; four plastic jugs of drinking water on the floor. A faux Tiffany lamp that had been rescued from above someone’s pool table hung from a stiff cord above the sleeping bag. Someone had installed a two-burner electric range, a microwave oven big enough to heat up one bagel at a time, and a toilet and triangular sink enclosed in a hinged screen that belonged to the Ikea dynasty. Some kind of light, from the moon or a streetlamp, filtered in through a window wedged in the triangle of the north wall.
It wasn’t a hovel, unless that was what you wanted. Add chairs, a sofa, tables, a proper bed, bookshelves, bright wallpaper, curtains, some wall art, and Architectural Digest wouldn’t exactly sniff at it. But if you wanted a place to be temporary, I’d taken all the right steps. This wasn’t home. It was a hunting camp, to be exited as soon as I’d taken my trophy.
Which was Laurie Macklin, in the condition in which I’d found her. The room was directly above hers. A brace-and-bit might have come in handy, to drill a hole in the floor; but as it was I could hear most of what went on below. She’d been watching the Food Network, and the soufflé recipe had come through clear enough to try it for myself, if I knew how to crack an egg.
“I had a better billet in Cambodia,” I said, “in a bamboo hut, including an eight-hundred-dollar Japanese stereo system I bought for sixty bucks from a tunnel rat. But of course there was a war going on.”
“How’d you know how much to pack?”
“Your husband asked me the same question; but he was just making conversation.”
She turned toward me. She had on the sweater and slacks she’d changed into from her robe a couple of hours earlier. The varicolored light from the glass-shaded lamp found tiny fissures in the corners of her eyes. It was one of those flaws I look for in women. When I couldn’t find them, I wondered how much money had gone into getting rid of them and where it had come from.
“You saw him since we met?” she said.
“He invited himself into my house. He has a habit of doing that, whether I’m there or not. I can keep mice out but not him.”
“I don’t suppose he mentioned me.”
“Mrs. Macklin, you’re the only person he talks about except his son.”
She hugged herself. The room was a little chilly at that, heated by only a square register in an aluminum duct running up the wall opposite the door. “Fathers and sons. What is it about them, and why can’t they get along?”
“The Greeks had a theory. Then too there’s the you-broke-my-mother thing.”
“I never met Roger. I wanted to go to Donna’s funeral, but Peter said no. He was right, I guess. It would be like inviting her to our wedding.”
“Just as well you didn’t hook up. No one should know more than one killer, even socially.”
“By that I take it to mean you’ve known more than your share.”
“I’m not sure they hand out shares. If they do, I guess I’d have the corner. Most killers turn out to be a disappointment; like when you meet a celebrity you’ve heard about all your life. The conversation’s limited. Anyone can be famous, and killing’s a snap. Ask any goldfish.”
“Why do you do what you do?”
“Why did you marry Macklin?”
“I probably wouldn’t have, if I’d known what he was.”
“If I’d known what the work’s like, I’d have become a telephone lineman. I’d be just as obsolete now, but I’d probably have all my teeth.”
“If you didn’t slip.”
“Still better than killers.”
“So what’s the procedure? Do I bang on my ceiling with a broom handle when I’m in distress? Maybe in some kind of code, so if it’s just one of my neighbors complaining about a loud TV you can roll over and go back to sleep?”
“A scream should do it. I’ll probably hear anything unusual. The house is solid, but they saved a bunch of bucks when they finished the attic.” I stamped a heel on the ply. “I could pretty much map your movements when I was up here unpacking. You flushed the toilet twice—ran water in the sink both times, I’m happy to say—opened the refrigerator once, poured something fizzy into what was probably a tall glass, from the time it took, clunked in two ice cubes, and surfed through about seventeen channels before you found one worth looking at; only you switched off just when the hostess turned on the oven.”
“I can’t say I’m happy about that—not the cooking lesson, just a stranger knowing I don’t cook and that I wash my hands after I pee.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m the place where secrets go to die.”
“I only heard a board or two creak up here.”
“That’s as much as you can expect to hear when Walker’s on the job. Stealthy is my middle name.”
“You don’t have a middle name. I looked up your investigator’s license on the Lansing site.”
“I can’t say I’m happy about that—not the no-middle-name thing. Nobody uses them except angry mothers. I don’t care for strangers knowing I don’t have one.”
“I can keep a secret same as you. So do I entertain you or what? I’m new to this bodyguard business.”
“You can make up your own rules. The protocol’s all on my side. If you’re still alive when I punch out, I came through on it. You don’t even have to know I’m in the same zip code. I should warn you: Bodyguards have a nasty habit of shooting last.”
“Encouraging.”
&n
bsp; “It gets worse. Some people think it was a Secret Service slug that killed JFK. He got caught in the crossfire.”
“Everybody killed JFK. Frankly, I felt safer when I was with Peter.”
“You were, but I can’t get that close.”
She turned my way, and the murky blue eyes took on a new layer of haze. “If that’s your idea of seduction, you’re rusty.”
“I had those kinds of ideas yanked out with my wisdom teeth, Mrs. Macklin. Call my cell when you’re planning to leave the house. I’ll try to stay out of your hip pockets even then.”
My supper was deviled ham, eaten straight from the can with a spoon, with a mineral water chaser; I’d been in too much of a hurry to get to the apartment after the Peter Macklin delay at home to stop for bread. The attic room hadn’t been advertised as nonsmoking, but there was a smoke detector screwed to a rafter. I dismantled it, letting its innards dangle, cracked the window in the north wall, and smoked until I got sleepy, stretched out in the sleeping bag unzipped all the way in case I had to break out of the chrysalis in a hurry, with the Chief’s Special in easy reach on the floor.
I put out the cigarette and drifted off to the soothing strains of The Golden Girls chirruping up through the floor from the apartment below; every minute of every day an episode is playing somewhere. I doubted Mrs. Macklin was a fan, but the prattle of mature women wrestling with post-menopausal sex is like white noise for the troubled; and one-half of a couple going through the clinical practice of separating for life was trouble enough, without the killing-threat thing.
That was just projection, maybe. For all I knew, the Ohio farm girl who’d married a Detroit killer-for-hire (I’d looked her up, too, through an acquaintance with twenty-first-century connections) was having the time of her life breaking all bonds to the underside of existence as we know it and exploring the world on top. She was on the left side of thirty, after all, with two-thirds of her life left to play out.
But you don’t get those cloudy eyes in the maternity ward. Those you had to earn.
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