Black and White Ball

by Loren D. Estleman

  NINETEEN

  This one was a challenge.

  Any naturalist prepared himself for it, the creature in captivity behaving entirely differently from its life in the wild. It knows it’s being watched, and so behaves as expected and by constriction, rather than by natural instinct.

  It shouldn’t have meant anything to me. I was there to keep the creature alive, not study and record its habits; but one needs his diversions.

  Laurie Macklin took phone calls from friends and professional contacts—she was a travel agent, it turned out; a calling as obsolete as my own in the world of instant information. But it provided her with the means to work at home by computer. Her special talent, from what drifted my way from this end of the conversations, was comparing rates among airlines, cruise companies, and hotels and playing them off against each other, playing every card from AARP to military service and hardship cases, and in the last ditch dialing up the feminine charm. Add-on charges collapsed when her tone got throaty, amenities increased, and at least one desk clerk asked to take her to dinner—the early-bird seating, which when translated meant a wife at home.

  When the voice came out, a combination of early Kathleen Turner and late Jean Harlow, it meant she’d grown accustomed to the situation, if she hadn’t actually forgotten about it. The breakthrough came halfway through my third day in the bell tower. I wasn’t sure I’d heard it at first, so I cranked down the thermostat to increase concentration. When the blower fan mounted inside the heating duct switched off, the register worked like a baby monitor. I could get used to listening to that voice.

  By then we’d been outside a few times, once to stretch our legs around the little park, another to buy fresh produce from the little chain supermarket four blocks away, again to eat lunch in a restaurant that served a dozen tables in a Wilson-era farmhouse with a wraparound porch for open-air dining in warm weather.

  We ate at separate tables; but we found each other at liberty outside, where I offered to escort her home.

  “We’re not fooling anyone,” she said, as we set out.

  “I’d be disappointed in Roger, if we were,” I said. “I’m going into Detroit tomorrow. It’d be more convenient all around if you’d accompany me.”

  “That would depend on the destination.”

  “It’s romantic as all hell, if you’re drawn to the library on Woodward. I’m interested in what the papers had to say about how Charles Major met his end. Indulge me,” I said. “You can treat yourself to lunch in Greektown. We’ll charge the bill to your soon-to-be-ex-husband. If he killed Major, I need to know. Investigating the client’s as important as the investigation he hired you to do.”

  She turned to face me. The weird warm spell was still in force; she wore a fall jacket I’d seen before, in a photograph, and a stretchy ear-muffler, which she’d loosened to let fall around her neck because the air wasn’t cold enough to pink her lobes. “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “By golly, so it is. We can stop by a church if that’s what you want.”

  “I’m as bookish as the next girl, if the next girl isn’t Evelyn Wood; but I don’t intend to spend any part of my weekend in a dusty old library.”

  “It’s not so dusty. You can eat off the floor in the microfilm reading room. You can ask any of the tramps who sleep there.”

  “Nobody eats off the floor in my apartment. But I’ve got a gizmo in it that can track down anything you could find on microfilm, without the ninety-minute drive round-trip.”

  “Maybe I’m homesick.”

  “I’m your responsibility, Mr. Walker, not your prisoner. It’s my place or nothing.”

  “Laurie, that’s just about the sexiest ultimatum I’ve ever had.”

  “If that’s what you think it is, you need to go back to calling me Mrs. Macklin.”

  * * *

  She’d set up her office in a corner of her bedroom, a pale blue room with strong light streaming in through the west windows. A printed spread covered the bed, and for once in the history of women living alone it wasn’t heaped with pillows and cushions. There was an antique curve-front bureau painted soft white, with a mirror, a slipper chair upholstered in yellow silk or rayon, and a laptop sitting closed on a vanity table painted to match the bureau but no vanity items visible. It was one of those heartbreaking winter days with no snow clouds in sight; the sky was bright enamel and it hurt to look at it. She drew the curtains, but there was still no need to turn on a light.

  I drew the slipper chair up alongside her swivel, perched on the edge, and watched her flip up the screen and power up.

  “You really don’t use one of these?” she said, stroking the built-in mouse.

  “I know who to go to when I need it. Apart from that the work’s the same as at the start, gasoline and shoe leather and sometimes brains. Try the News first.”

  “Major was killed in California.”

  “He made his bones in Detroit. The locals keep tabs on all the hometown boys and when it comes to crime reporting they can’t be beat. They’ve had more practice than most.”

  “It wasn’t long after—after Leroy.” Her fingers hopscotched across the keyboard. When the website came up, a hodgepodge of twenty-first-century graphics and the paper’s Ye Olde masthead, she found a legend, scrolled, chose a file, scrolled and scrolled; the principle was the same as cranking the mechanical microfilm readers at the library, only the images flashed by faster, like subliminal messages aimed at a focus group.

  I watched, but I gave no directions. I had a vague idea of what Carlo Maggiore/Charles Major would look like; mob bosses tend to run to patterns established by Hollywood. For the old-timers it was James Cagney and George Raft, for their successors Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, Al Pacino in both Godfathers, Al Pacino in Scarface, Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way. Slick hair, good tailors, and the kind of practiced swagger that shows even when they’re standing still. What they did before the studios came along to show them how to walk and talk and blow their nose I couldn’t guess.

  When she came to a stop on a front page picture, I realized my list was incomplete.

  It was a walking shot, taken with a long lens on some anonymous street, then blown up and cropped to serve as a trunk photo: A middle-aged character in three-quarter profile with the collar of a sports shirt rolled out over his lapels, a tiny gold hoop in his ear, and the obligatory dark glasses straddling a thick nose curdled like porridge. His fair hair was rumpled, needed trimming, and he listed toward a deformed left shoulder which some expert padding in the right couldn’t quite balance out. The man was a hunchback. The two-column headline ran:

  ALLEGED LOCAL CRIME CHIEF MURDERED IN CALIFORNIA

  In the old days, the byline would have been Barry Stackpole’s, my go-to source whenever organized crime reared its pug-ugly head; he’d had a lock on the paper’s investigative beat for years. But he’d long since drifted on to a local TV show, then a column on the internet, and currently a streaming program posting mugs of underworld figures, regular updates on their activities, and the names of certain everyday products and services whose profits financed traffic in drugs, weapons, human organs, and slave labor.

  His successor, a woman whose name I didn’t recognize, seemed professional enough, avoiding speculation and attributing official reports. Major, a second-generation American who by all accounts had performed his last legal act when he’d changed his name, had been alone in his Beverly Hills home watching TV when someone crept up behind him and cut his throat. He’d died within minutes.

  There followed a roster of his active interests in labor racketeering, narcotics smuggling, loan-sharking, gambling, fencing stolen property, and questioning by authorities in Michigan and California in connection with several homicides, but attempts to indict him for violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) had failed for lack of evidence, although several witnesses had come forward, and moved backward in short order, including two who’d backed off the edge of the earth. The L.A.P.
D. spokesman was of the opinion that Major had been targeted by rivals for his position in the rackets.

  “That’s always the fallback,” I said. “I wonder if both those no-shows were Macklin’s work too.”

  “We don’t even know if Major was. But Leroy said he was working for him, and even I know the best way to prevent anyone from taking Leroy’s place is to remove the man who paid his way. Peter isn’t a man to overlook things. Should we keep searching?”

  “They’d just be rehashing, trying to keep the story alive until the punchline. Which in these cases almost never comes about, and didn’t this time, if we’re right and it was Macklin. I think we’re right.” I sat back. “Thanks. I like to know everything I can about who’s paying my way.”

  “Would that change anything?”

  “Not if he’s on the up-and-up.”

  She turned her head. The look on her face made me laugh.

  “Up-and-up as to the job,” I said. “If I come through as arranged and he doesn’t terminate my services the way he did his employment with Major.” I looked again at the dead man. “Deb Stonesmith said Macklin’s as good with an edged weapon as he is with a gun. At the time I thought she was exaggerating for effect.”

  She shut the lid of the laptop and we went back into the living room.

  “Now that we’ve lined our stomachs with food, shall we move on to the drinking part of the day?” She started toward the kitchen.

  “Just one for me.”

  “Of course. Keep your wits—”

  She was crossing in front of the living room window, with me following. Just then I got one of those chills you get. I threw my arms around her and flung myself sideways, taking her with me. We hit the floor hard, but I hardly felt the impact. The window coming apart distracted me.

  HER

  TWENTY

  “Get the fucking sweater! Jesus Christ! Button it up to your ears. You get hot, you can take off your goddamn panties.”

  Wanting her sweater had been just an excuse. The wind blowing across the Pacific Coast Highway was damp with the ocean, but she wasn’t really cold, and hadn’t been when she’d thrown it in the backseat. She’d just done that to cover what was lying across it.

  It was a rented Buick, and just then it seemed the only safe place in the world; certainly not out here in the open, with no one to see the lanky lantern-jawed drugstore cowboy with his oversize folding knife. He practically shoved her toward the car, and she used the momentum to tear open the door against the powerful gust from the ocean walloping the shore, drowning out whatever obscenities he was still screaming at her. He’d said he was taking her back to his place in West Hollywood until Peter came looking for her; but she’d spent enough time in the man’s company—was it really less than a week?—it seemed like months since she’d been on her—

  honeymoon. She threw herself headlong across the seat, her hands on the sweater and the hard angular thing underneath. From some instinct, Leroy snatched hold of the door for leverage and lunged, the broad blade he’d been sharpening and oiling since he’d bought it in the sporting goods department at Kmart catching the light of the dying sun, sparking a memory; she was brought up on a farm and had seen hogs stuck in the neck at slaughtering time, the neon-bright arc their blood made gushing from the artery, that same impossibly hot shade of orange.

  She managed to twist herself around just as his weight was pressing her onto her face. There was no time to release the shotgun from its pink shroud. It was an old-fashioned one with side-by-side barrels like Elmer Fudd carried “hunting wabbits.” She swung the barrels until something dense stopped them and jerked both triggers. The roar boxed her ears. Bits of pink fluff swirled like glitter in a shaken snow globe, her nostrils shrank from the stench of scorched wool, burnt powder, and cooked flesh, the last like roast pork …

  And when she recovered enough from the shock of all those senses going off at once, only sight and smell remained, because she was deaf now to the pounding of the surf (and would have a ringing in her ears long after hearing returned), and even the pain of trying to fill paralyzed lungs hadn’t yet registered itself. In the presence of a man who’d been torn in half by a double load of ten-gauge buckshot in the belly, pain had no meaning. In time she’d be grateful for it, because that was a privilege Leroy wouldn’t know again.

  All of this played in her head as she said simply, “I had an antique shotgun. I didn’t even know if it would work.

  “It did.…”

  Laurie studied the detective’s face for his reaction, but it revealed no more than Peter’s had when she’d confronted him with what he did for a living. Were the men who followed such work born that way, she wondered, did they develop it, or did it come along on its own, like learning to tell if an ear of corn is ripe before you tear open the husk, exposing it to ruin? This face was different physically, older but far from worn, had been handsome and was still striking, set solidly on square shoulders with obvious strength in the muscles of the neck. Other things differed more significantly. The eyes were a greenish shade of brown and almost gentle looking, but sad, with a haze of pain that struck her as chronic. As he’d listened, the deep lines bracketing his mouth tightened until they were almost invisible.

  “I don’t drink to killers,” he said, when she raised a glass to Leroy.

  She’d called herself a killer, and Walker had said something to the effect that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, hinting that he was no stranger to slaughter himself.

  She agreed to let him look after her, if he could find accommodations. “I’ve lived with someone all my life,” she said. “I moved in with Peter straight from my parents’ house in Ohio. I’m still getting used to keeping my own company. I don’t intend to start over from scratch again. It would be like going backward.”

  “That suits me. I like to leave the seat up.”

  She promised not to go out until he came back, although she was probably safe enough until either Roger had an answer to his demand or Macklin paid him—which wasn’t going to happen, they agreed. An hour and a half later he knocked on her door again to say he’d moved in directly over her head.

  “I was watching through the window,” she said. “I didn’t see anyone drive up.”

  “I had a cab drop me off three blocks over and walked in across lots. I heard from a friend on the way here. His name’s Chuck. He’s taking the grand tour of the northwestern suburbs at the wheel of my car with a police escort close behind. It probably won’t surprise you your husband’s popular with the authorities. Me, too, by association.”

  She nodded. “I’ve met Lieutenant Stonesmith. I liked her, but I’m not expecting a Christmas card.”

  “Don’t count on that. Cops live in a Bizarro world. Upright citizens who crack too easy make them nervous. Care to see the new digs? I’m not Martha Stewart, but I know chintz don’t go with paisley.”

  * * *

  She was just starting to get comfortable with him, preceding him toward the kitchen bar, when her arms were pinned to her sides and she slammed on her side on the floor. It was as sudden as slipping on an unexpected patch of ice; one instant vertical, the next horizontal, gasping to fill her lungs with enough air to cry out. She was back in her rent-a-car outside Montecito, struggling to free herself from Leroy’s wiry grasp. It hadn’t been just the pounding of the waves she’d heard, she knew now, but her pulse hammering between her temples. She’d fallen for it a second time: a friendly stranger sent by Peter to keep her company, but who’d been sent by someone else whose motives were more sinister. She’d learned nothing from experience, and there would be no more opportunities to get wise. Cause of death? Trust in the common decency of man.

  Then the room filled with a noise louder than her heartbeat, as loud as the shotgun report, and pieces of something showered her, pattering against her sweater like hail. One of them stung her behind the ear, something trickled down her neck, and it was no hail, it was glass. She stopped struggling, but the weight continu
ed to hold her down, the arms encircling her as taut as thick hawser. She felt his warm breath in her ear, just ahead of where she was bleeding. It smelled of coffee. He must have stopped for a cup on his way to Detroit, to cut the effect of the gin he’d drunk on his last visit.

  Leroy wouldn’t have done that. His type wasn’t that kind of cautious. Peter wouldn’t have drunk at all—or eaten, for that matter, until the crisis was in remission. This man Walker was a similar species of creature to them both, yet not the same; a puzzle.

  “Are you hit?”

  Of course he’d seen the blood. He lifted himself far enough for her to free a hand. It came back from behind her ear with a smear, no more.

  She resisted the urge to pat herself all over, like a slapstick comic. “It was the glass, I think. Is it bad?” The throbbing had begun.

  He took her chin in one hand, turned her head. “I’ve done worse shaving.” Clothing rustled. Something crisp and smelling of starch pressed itself to the nick. What man carries a handkerchief these days?

  He shifted his weight more, giving her complete movement. Shards of glass shifted, slid, and landed on the floor with an almost merry tinkle, like icicles falling from a roof. She took over the operation, sitting up on one hip with the fold of cloth pressed to her neck. He was bleeding too, she saw then, a scarlet rivulet meandering from just beneath his right eye all the way down his neck and staining the collar of his white shirt. The shower of glass had caught him before he could turn his own face away.

  “You need this more than I do.” She folded her own blood inside the handkerchief and pressed it to his cheek. He let her dab at it, then took charge. Looked at the cloth. “Nothing for the diary here. It’s just my second scratch since Thanksgiving.”

  “You’ve done worse shaving, I know.”

  “Worse yet. I’ve got a tab at Detroit Receiving. Two more visits and the next one’s free. A little iodine wouldn’t hurt either of us. Well, just a sting.”

  “Who has iodine? You can joke about this?” Her voice shook. The shock was setting in.