“That’s where most shooters slip up. They want the mark to know what’s happening instead of just going ahead and switching him off. You want him dead, or you want him to squirm? I don’t do both.”
“I don’t want him dead.”
“Uh-huh.” He swirled his drink around. The ice cubes didn’t rattle anymore.
She said, “I like the man, that’s the thing. I believe in what he’s doing, I mean about gambling and all. If he’d come straight to me and told me he wanted the cash to finance his crusade—”
“You’d have given it to him.”
“Uh-uh. I came by my money honestly, married it. I don’t believe the rich owe anyone anything, it’s the American way. I’m against gambling in Detroit, but not to the tune of the money I’ve been investing with him in a perfectly ethical illegal business proposition. This morning he came to me and told me he’s running for Congress on a platform to ban gambling everywhere in the United States. I guess the old con isn’t making enough fast enough. He needs a lesson.”
She outlined the lesson she had in mind while he freshened her drink and went in to the kitchen to tip some fresh ice cubes into his. By the time he returned to the living room her voice was slurring audibly. She kicked off her shoes, which she had put on for the walk from her car into his house, and he noticed that another button on her blouse had become unfastened. He could see the clasp of her champagne-colored bra.
“It’s harebrained.” He sat down.
“The details, maybe. What do you think of the plan?”
“He’s got four bodyguards and police protection. He’s a walking crowd.”
“He told me today he’s refusing police protection from here on in. Said he’ll have enough when he declares his candidacy.”
“Which according to you he’ll never do.”
“I think he knows the police suspect him. He’s flushing out spli–spies.” She scowled down at the glass in her hand.
“Thanks,” he said. “The town’s full of cowboys. Try one of them.”
“I can afford the best. What’s the most you were ever paid?”
“A hundred thousand.”
She twitched her eyebrows. “You are the best.”
“Just the highest.”
She set down her glass on the end table next to the chair and straightened her legs to get a hand into the pocket of her skirt. He’d noticed she didn’t carry a purse. He also noticed that the slit of her skirt had fallen open to expose one stockinged leg clear to the hip. From the pocket she drew a fold of paper currency. She removed the silver clip and thumbed through the bills, then handed him one.
He looked at it from both sides, then at her. “A hundred thousand and one?”
“Call it a deposit.”
He poked the bill into his shirt pocket. She smiled in approval, then looked around dreamily.
“I’m too drunk to drive home,” she said.
CHAPTER 15
Another funeral to attend, and Pontier wasn’t sure if he could get his dress uniform to the dry cleaners and back in time.
That was his first thought when word came in Tuesday morning that Richard Weinacre had died following surgery to remove the nine-millimeter slug from his chest. He had known the sergeant slightly during his own days as a lieutenant with General Service and had pegged him then as a sluggard who coasted along drawing his time until he saw something he wanted, then scrambled to look busy—the police equivalent of an academic underachiever who crammed for exams to make up for time lost. Cops like that were dangerous, not so much because they crashed and burned sooner or later as because some worthier individual usually crashed and burned with them. In this case it was Thornton the hotel detective, whom if he were a cop and Pontier were on the shooting board, Pontier would have exonerated prima facie. As it was he would probably go down for involuntary manslaughter, and all because Weinacre failed to identify himself and state his business in the lobby going in. Almost as bad, the two men he had gone there to arrest were smoke now, along with eighteen months of investigative hard work. For this he would be buried in full state with a color guard and coverage on all three local TV stations.
The hotel clerk was at County awaiting arraignment on charges of carrying a concealed weapon and illegal discharge of a firearm inside city limits. He was the one who pieced together for officers the events leading to that bloody Shakespearean scene that had greeted the first uniforms on the premises, including the fact that the unidentified man now in a coma at Detroit Receiving with two of Weinacre’s slugs in his back had asked for the number of Michael Boniface’s suite. The elevator security man was dead at the scene, pieces shoveled into a coroner’s black rubber bag after he had inadvertently stepped in front of the shotgun. That weapon still had its serial number, but Pontier knew even as it was being checked that it would trace straight back to the factory with no stops in between. The woman in the elevator whom the shooter had mistaken for Boniface was at Receiving too, being treated for shock. It was a black day for Blue Cross.
Pontier was wondering if he should call home and ask his wife to run his dress uniform to the cleaners when Sergeant Lovelady joined him at the coffee machine. The fat detective was in his shirtsleeves and smelled of aftershave lotion and sweat.
“Give up?” Pontier handed him the cup he had just filled for himself and reached for another.
Lovelady blew on the coffee. “Getting air. He ain’t talking till his lawyer gets here.”
“I thought Troy Donahue in there was his lawyer.”
“Stand-in for Howard Klegg.”
“Christ, we’re just questioning him. He isn’t under arrest.”
“Tell him.”
The inspector found Boniface seated at the table in the interrogation room. The young lawyer was standing by the air vent smoking a cigarette. Pontier noticed the bandage over his left eyebrow and remembered the Belleville shooting. His client looked old and heavy under the harsh light, his black hair shining like shoe polish on a worn old boot. Pontier sat down.
“Mike, what’s this about Klegg? You’re not busted.”
“That’s Mr. Boniface to you,” said the lawyer.
“I told you not to say my name,” Boniface cut in harshly. “George, I bet these young pricks mangle yours even worse.”
He had a ghastly grin that Pontier struggled to match. They hadn’t met before that morning. “I guess we weren’t much different when we were that age.”
“Speak for yourself. When you were that age I was your age.”
“Lovelady show you the pictures we took of the guy in the hospital?”
Boniface nodded. “I didn’t know him from Sam’s dick.”
“Are you talking now?”
“I didn’t like that fat-ass sergeant. He’s got a face like puke.”
Listen to the pot, Pontier thought. He said, “The guy in the hospital isn’t on file, which doesn’t surprise me. Maggiore wouldn’t hire anybody local to take you out in the Pontchartrain lobby.”
“Maggiore, shit. He can have this town. I’m retired.”
“I thought nobody quit the organization.”
The grin again. His teeth were gray, like his complexion. “That Sunday-supplement crap. We aren’t like the Supreme Court. We aren’t even like us any more. Colombians, Cubans, shit, the Arabs coming in with that blow from the Middle East, they’d pop their mothers to get the cops to vacuum their rugs for free. I’m damn glad I’m shut of it.”
“Picante thinks Maggiore bought the hit.”
“Picante didn’t say shit. Come on, George. Maggiore’s laying there at Receiving, all those tubes stuck in him watching the blood go out with his piss, he’s going to worry about my health? I thought you cops might’ve got smarter by the time I left Milan.”
“No, we’re just as dumb as when we sent you up.”
“I’ve bought better cops than you, nigger,” Boniface flared.
The young lawyer stepped away from the vent. “You said my client isn’t under
arrest, Inspector. That means we can leave any time we want.”
“Hell, I’m comfortable.” Boniface undid his collar, allowing a roll of reddened flesh to settle over the knot of his necktie. “Excuse the language, George. You’d think three years inside would make a man more patient.”
“I think you’re impatient to have your old job back. That’s why Maggiore signed a contract on you, and it’s why you hired Macklin to knock him down Saturday night.”
“You got Macklin in custody?”
“You’ve got enough lines into this department to know we released him last night.”
“I haven’t even seen Mac since—”
“Watch it, Mike. He came to visit you in your suite the day after you were sprung.”
“I was about to say since then. It was just a friendly call. He’s on his own now. I told him that was smart. Mac always did have too much upstairs to waste it cleaning up after everyone else.”
“He’s still doing it. Only now he’s picking who he cleans up after.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, of course.”
“Mike, Mike.” Pontier shook his head. “I don’t give a shit how many of you mob guys jerk each other’s chains. Somebody’s got to stand up for the innocents whose lights get put out just because they’re standing too close, the hotel security men and the old ladies who lock themselves out of their rooms.”
“Wish I could help.”
“The last person who said that in here was Maggiore’s bodyguard. We tanked him for twenty-four hours.”
“Go ahead. I just did three years.”
The door opened and Lovelady leaned in. Pontier got up and went over.
“Klegg’s here,” murmured the sergeant.
“He got a writ?”
“What do you think?”
Pontier gave him a flat look. “Your mouth must have heard your brain’s retiring soon.”
“Sorry, Inspector. It ain’t you, it’s these wise-asses and their lawyers.”
“‘Kay.” Raising his voice: “You’re out of here, Boniface.”
Boniface rose, buttoning his collar. “What happened to Mike?”
“Just take your ass out of my interrogation room.”
“Inspector, your attitude—” the lawyer began.
“And take that piece of legal shit you’re trailing with you.”
Boniface paused on his way out. He looked like an old Italian fruit peddler on his way to a funeral.
“I’ve been gone better than two hours. If my dog messed up the carpet I guess the department will take care of the hotel cleaning bill.”
“With you up there, who’ll notice?” Pontier held the door for him.
The sunlight woke Macklin finally.
He usually came to consciousness with the same thought he had taken to bed the night before, but forty-eight hours in Holding and Interrogation had come down hard on him in the night and for a few minutes he lay there trying to figure out who was the naked woman lying with her legs intertwined with his. She smelled faintly of him and, not so faintly, of half-digested whiskey. With that discovery his memory kicked in. Carefully he disentangled himself and slid out from under the sheet. Carmen turned over on her back and began snoring. Her hair looked lighter in the morning light, her skin dark against the rumpled sheets.
The electric alarm on the bedstand read ten o’clock. He hadn’t slept that late in months. He dressed as quietly as possible, leaning against the wall to pull on his trousers. Something rustled while he was buttoning his shirt and he took a folded dollar bill out of the pocket.
Standing there holding up his pants with one hand and the bill in the other, he thought: A dollar and a fuck. Next it’ll be chocolate bars.
CHAPTER 16
Dr. Stepp took three minutes removing each of the two bullets from Charles Maggiore’s upper thorax and two hours repairing the damage they had made going in and the damage he had made going in after them. From the operating room the patient was returned to Intensive Care, where an infection developed Tuesday night and Stepp was called in early Wednesday morning to open him up again and drain off the pus. The fever broke that afternoon, and Wednesday night a nurse awakened Gordy in the waiting room outside Surgery to report that his employer’s prognosis for recovery was excellent. Gordy thanked her and asked when he could see him.
“He’s under sedation. Why don’t you go home and get some rest and come back tomorrow?”
“I ain’t paid to rest.”
He slept in the waiting room that night, as he had been doing since his release from the Wayne County Jail. Another nurse who had failed to make him heed visiting hours had threatened to call Security, but when he rose to meet a doctor who had stepped in to monitor the situation the doctor had smiled weakly and said that he didn’t think visiting hours applied to the waiting room. Gordy hadn’t been home since the night he had discovered his employer in a bloody and unconscious condition on the floor of his gym.
On Thursday morning, a different nurse roused him from a copy of Psychology Today and told him Maggiore was asking for him.
The Sicilian had been moved from Intensive Care to a private room two floors up. Gordy didn’t recognize either of the two uniformed police officers stationed outside the door, who studied his identification and handed it back up to him without comment. On his way inside he heard one of them say, “What would you have done if he wasn’t who he said he was?”
Maggiore was lying on his back with a clear plastic tube up his nose and another tube taped to his left arm feeding him liquid from a bottle suspended upside-down over the bed. He was gray under his tan and his hump looked bigger than usual under the white hospital gown. He looked at Gordy and said, “Jesus, you look worse than me.”
Although he had been washing in a public rest room down the hall from the waiting area, Gordy hadn’t changed his clothes or shaved since jail. His suit was wrinkled, one lapel stained with sauce from the spaghetti he had eaten two days earlier in the hospital commissary. He made no reply to the comment.
“Door closed?”
Gordy went over and closed it.
“How dead is Boniface?”
“Not very.”
“What the fuck happened?”
Gordy told him about the shoot-out in the Pontchartrain lobby.
“That son of a bitch Constable. Get him here.”
“How you feeling?”
“Like I been shot twice, how the fuck you think I feel? I guess the cops must be heating up the town.”
“I don’t know. I been here.”
“All the time? Jesus.”
“Well, I did jail for a night. That Inspector Pontier.”
“That black bastard.”
“My ears are burning. You fellows talking about me?”
Pontier had made no noise opening the door. He was wearing a brown pinstriped suit that emphasized his long leanness. Sergeant Lovelady, broad and dumpy in his yellow sportcoat, closed the door behind him and stood in front of it. Maggiore said, “That’s the trouble with hospitals. You can’t pick who visits you.”
“I heard you were conscious. I thought you might be in a mood to answer a couple of questions. You know, to find out if there’s brain damage.”
“I’m starting to feel weak. Gordy, get the nurse.”
When the bodyguard turned, Pontier placed spread fingers against his wrinkled shirt. “You must be getting your shooters on sale at K-Mart,” he told Maggiore. “That lobby shoot has to be the sloppiest since St. Valentine’s Day in Chicago.”
“I heard about it. One of those drug things.”
“Listen, no one’s mad at you. Boniface tried you, it’s just natural you’d try him back. But a cop and a citizen got killed and somebody’s got to pay the cashier.”
“Gordy says you busted the hotel dick.”
“He was a bystander too.”
“I don’t like it when a cop gets killed any more than you. It’s bad business and it rubs off on everybody. But
you’re shouting down the wrong hole here.”
“Anyway, it’s not why I came. The line to take you down forms behind the Justice Department, there’s plenty of time for that. Let’s talk about the Reverend Sunsmith.”
“Jesus, we covered that.”
“Yeah, but that was before I knew you were one of his angels.”
“No jokes, please, Inspector. I got more stitches in me than a boccie ball.”
“I’ll save you the time and energy it takes to deny it. We’ve got it in writing, complete with your signature on the bottom. You’ve been donating regularly for the past year. You’re a generous gangster, Maggiore. You ought to hire a press agent to tell the world how generous you are.”
“Just because I got excommunicated doesn’t mean I don’t still believe in God.”
“Thing is, if you’d told me you were a contributor the last time I asked you about Sunsmith, I might not have wasted so much time suspecting you of buying the contract on him. I wonder why you didn’t.”
“I’m a private man. My religious beliefs are my business.”
“Bullshit. Your business beliefs are your religion.”
Maggiore said nothing.
“Detroit is famous for its churches,” Pontier went on. “After cars and murders and crooked politicians they have to be the first thing people think of when they hear the name. A cop has to wonder why you’d pick Sunsmith’s to finance, him being so hot against gambling and you with so much of your capital tied up in casino equipment. You had to stand to gain enough to make up for all that gall you had to be swallowing.”
Maggiore kept silent. He looked genuinely weak now.
Pontier said, “All the gold’s been dug up and you can’t speculate in oil anymore. The last way left to make quick free cash is to cheat Uncle Sam. The dummy company you’ve been contributing through has been pulling in dividends from the Reverend’s operation without declaring them.
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