Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  “What you maybe don’t know is that you weren’t the only one to stumble over this particular gold mine. There are at least six others involved. It doesn’t take Einstein to figure Sunsmith doesn’t bring enough in on his collection plate to make all those investors happy. So he’s robbing St. Peter to pay St. Paul.”

  “Sort of like a chain letter,” suggested Lovelady, near the door.

  “Call it Sunsmith’s Epistle to the Pigeons.” Pontier studied the man in the bed. “Yeah, you knew it. That’s why you hired the hit on the Reverend.”

  “I told you why I didn’t.”

  “It sounded good at the time, too. But this new development is my ball and I’m running with it. I lied before; I want you for that dead cop. But if I can’t get you for that I’ll settle for conspiracy to commit on Sunsmith.”

  The door opened and Dr. Stepp entered. His youthful face was dark. “Gentlemen, this isn’t a press conference.”

  Pontier was still looking at Maggiore. “Next time I’ll bring flowers. With a warrant wrapped around them.”

  Gordy hung back.

  “You too,” said the surgeon. “Your boss is a mile from out of the woods.”

  “Go home,” said Maggiore.

  The big bodyguard hovered. “You sure?”

  “I got babysitters up the ass. Right, Doc?”

  “Next they’ll be strip-searching the nurses.” Stepp’s tone was not bantering.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Gordy said.

  “Get Constable,” the Sicilian reminded him.

  When Gordy returned the next morning, shaved and dressed in a fresh black suit and crisp white shirt and accompanied by the neat pale man in yellow, Maggiore was sitting up in bed. The tube in his nose has been removed but he still had the other in his arm. Near the foot of the bed, completely filling an easy chair with a steel frame and orange vinyl upholstery, sat the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith. He had on a charcoal-gray suit and vest with a maroon knitted tie on an eggshell shirt.

  “I never thought I’d be dressed louder than the Reverend,” commented Constable after a moment.

  Maggiore said, “He’s incognito. Six-three and three hundred pounds of it.”

  He stood to wrap a great brown hand around Constable’s small neat white one. “The officers didn’t want to let me pass at first,” he rumbled. “Mr. Maggiore persuaded them. I had to send the elders home.”

  Gordy stationed himself in front of the door and said nothing. He had five inches and twelve pounds on the Reverend, but the latter’s reflectionless black eyes were disturbing.

  “It’s fortunate that we’re here at the same time,” Sunsmith told Constable.

  “Wait’ll you hear it,” Maggiore said.

  Said Sunsmith, “I’ve arranged a rally in Hart Plaza the day before the referendum to place casino gambling on the November ballot. It will be covered by all three local television stations and my own cable network. I plan to announce then.”

  “Announce?” Constable was looking up at him.

  “My candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives from this district. There will be a vacancy in November and I plan to fill it.”

  Constable tried to make a joke out of it. “Well, you’re big enough.”

  The black eyes were immobile in the smooth round face. They looked as if they would retain thumbprints. “A campaign donation of fifty thousand dollars would start me off in a competitive condition.”

  “That’s the part I wanted to hear,” Maggiore said.

  “The arrangement has been monetary so far,” continued the Reverend. “We’re opposed on the sin of gambling, but apart from that we are of much the same mind on legislation affecting business and the church. I would personally represent our interests in Washington.”

  “Well.” Constable didn’t know what else to say.

  “How do we know you won’t introduce some asshole legislation to outlaw gambling coast-to-coast?” Maggiore wanted to know. “We got interests in Vegas and Atlantic City.”

  “I will always be opposed to the practice. But I’ll be busy enough halting its spread without trying to reverse what’s been done. A soul lost to Satan is irredeemable. Meanwhile I won’t forget the believers who helped put me in office. I see no reason why our arrangement should change simply because I’ll be trading the pulpit for the lectern.”

  “That was money. Now you’re talking influence. Money you can count. I got a judge and half-interest in a senator now. Where do I gain?”

  “A vote in the other house.”

  Maggiore scratched his hump, something he wouldn’t have done outside the hospital. “Try me again after the referendum. I can only think about one ballot at a time.”

  “I hope you’ll be in a mood to hear what I have to say.”

  “Well, that depends on how the vote comes out, doesn’t it?”

  The Reverend shrugged, displacing as much air with the movement as a foreign car rolling over. “Campaign funds have started coming in. I can’t say how long the offer will stand.”

  “I live to take chances.”

  Sunsmith took his dignity from the room. The room seemed much bigger without him. When the door closed, Maggiore looked at the blank television screen suspended from the ceiling. “I wouldn’t vote for that fat nigger if he ran against Mussolini.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him that?” asked Constable.

  “You heard him; fucker’s got a pulpit. With his hard-on against gambling I wouldn’t lay it past him to tip our whole deal just for spite. IRS’s got a lien on my personal holdings now. They slap one on the company’s too I won’t be able to hire a first-year law student for the other stuff. Where’d you get that piece of shit that shot up the Pontchartrain?”

  “Toledo swore by him.”

  “You swore by that pair that fucked up in Belleville last week. What good are you, Phil? I’d turn you out and plug in Gordy there if he didn’t put so much store in other people’s breathing.”

  Constable unbuttoned his jacket. “I can run the straight business for you or I can interview killers. Doing both isn’t easy.”

  “Turn the business over to that expensive cunt you got sitting in the outer office.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Find me some talent. The real thing, not some sticks cowboy with no more brains than you can fire out of a sawed-off. I don’t care if you got to go clear back to Sicily, just don’t get me no more fuck-ups.”

  “The police will be watching Boniface now. It’ll cost.”

  “Fuck Boniface. He can wait. You got two weeks and four days to find a button worth pushing. That’s the day of the gambling referendum. No matter which way that vote goes, I want Sunsmith hit. I want him cut up in so many pieces God will have to send back for instructions to put him back together.”

  CHAPTER 17

  By Monday it had gotten really hard to avoid calling the suite.

  During his lunch with Picante, Roger Macklin had seen no problem in agreeing to wait for Boniface’s lieutenant to call him. But after a week he had started wondering if he had been passed over in favor of someone the Reverend wouldn’t recognize. He didn’t have cable, but on Sunday he had listened to Sunsmith’s sermon on the radio, half expecting to hear gunshots. That the services had concluded without mishap was small comfort. Roger had spent the hundred dollars Picante had advanced him upon parting company and if the telephone didn’t ring soon he would have to start stuffing bags at Kroger’s. Had he known there was so much waiting involved he might have chosen some other business. It rang while he was wondering if he should chance going out for cigarettes.

  “Roger? Me. The fountain.” The line clicked.

  He replaced the receiver, tingling.

  Despite the recent addition of an artistic monstrosity of a waterworks in Hart Plaza, to longtime Detroiters there was only one fountain. It stood on one end of an elongated strip of real estate named Belle Isle in the middle of the Detroit River, where in the gathering du
sk Roger could see its spray glittering in red and blue light the moment his tires hit the narrow bridge leading to the island from Jefferson Avenue. He found a space in the public lot and walked in that direction, enjoying the cool air and the mist on his face. He hadn’t been shut in so long since rehab.

  He was sorry to learn he had beaten Picante there. Belle Isle was a favorite drop spot for local pushers and his veins throbbed with the knowledge of business transactions going on in the bushes. He wondered if he would ever be free of the longing. The only time he didn’t think about it was when he was actually pulling the trigger on someone. The adrenalin rush alone compared to that feeling of supreme contentment that accompanied the needle’s withdrawal.

  When he made his appearance, Picante wasn’t hard to spot. He was the only person near the fountain wearing a brown polyester suit and skinny necktie. The colored lights reflecting off his features filled in the hollows, making him look a little less like an ambulatory corpse.

  “Hell of a sight, huh,” he said in greeting. “By daylight it’s plastered with pigeon shit and there’s crap floating around in the water. I figure God invented nighttime after He got through with us and took a good look. You carrying?”

  “On Belle Isle after dark? You bet your ass.” The water was starting to run off Roger’s face.

  Picante motioned him away from the fountain and turned his back to the men and women in short sleeves and halters loitering nearby, shielding Roger with the movement. “Let’s see.”

  “Right here?”

  “What’s the matter, it strapped to your dick?”

  Roger pulled his T-shirt out of his jeans to expose the butt of the Colt Woodsman.

  “Christ. You hunting doves or what?”

  “It’s a pro piece.”

  “Sure, you’re sitting in the back seat, the mark’s behind the wheel, you tell him pull over, you put one in the back of his head. How you fixing to get Sunsmith in a car with you in back? Let’s take a walk.”

  Roger covered the butt and accompanied the older man back to the parking lot, where they waited for two men seated in the front of a Buick Riviera to finish their business and take off walking in separate directions before Picante led the way to a brown car parked in the shade of a lilac bush. He unlocked the door on the passenger’s side, reached under the dash, and freed a newspaper-wrapped package from the tangled wiring with a tearing sound of tape. From the package he unrolled a square, steel-colored semiautomatic pistol and held it out butt first for Roger to take. It was heavy.

  “Forty-five?” He turned it over in his hands. It had a cherrywood grip and no serial number or place where a serial number had been.

  “Forty-five mag.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Dirty Harry’s out of date,” Picante said. “This is the most powerful handgun in the world. Man like Sunsmith, you probably won’t get a chance for more than one shot. With this it’s all you’ll need.”

  “My dad always said stay away from automatics.”

  “That’s just because they leave shell casings behind. With this it won’t matter, because you’ll be leaving the gun behind with them. It’s a prototype, no serial number or manufacturer’s identification plate. Cops’ll go crazy trying to trace it past where you dropped it.”

  “So where do I drop it?”

  “Hart Plaza, high noon, two weeks from today.”

  Roger grinned to show he got the joke. Picante’s face was a black oval in the darkness. He couldn’t tell if he was grinning back.

  “Bring your guts,” Picante added.

  CHAPTER 18

  Carmen Thalberg said Sunsmith had his suits and robes tailored in a little shop over a tattoo parlor on Montcalm. She remembered that he had worn a particularly arresting cucumber-colored three-piece during one of his visits and had taken literally her shocked inquiry into its source.

  The shop’s entrance was on an alley, from which Macklin climbed a steep flight of squeaking, rubber-runnered stairs and followed a wainscoted hallway through an open door into a big room smelling of fabric and sizing. A high wooden counter separated him from rows of racks supporting suits and tuxedoes in all colors and patterns and bolts of material stacked like fireplace logs under the back windows. He rang the customer bell on the counter. After a minute a gray-haired Korean in shirtsleeves and a vest emerged from the jungle of wool and silk.

  “I’m an elder with the Reverend Sunsmith’s church,” Macklin said. “He asked me to stop by and find out when’s his next fitting.”

  The Korean drew a black-bound notebook from his shirt pocket and leafed through it, licking his thumb in between pages. “No fitting. New red robe ready Tuesday.” He closed the book.

  “Okay, I’ll pick it up then.”

  The Korean looked at him unblinkingly. “You new?”

  “Why?”

  “Reverend he pick up his own clothes. Good smell here, he says.”

  “Oh.”

  “New color too,” the Korean said, squinting. “White elders, what next?”

  Macklin left the shop. Sometimes it was easier than other times. Those were the times he trusted least.

  He had lunch in Greektown and drove from there to a trailer park in Romulus, where a black weapons dealer he knew only as Sooty offered him three MAC-10 semiautomatic pistols converted to full auto for two thousand the package, fifty-round magazines included. Macklin asked him what he had in revolvers.

  “Revolvers, shit, I can do him two-fifties, grenade launchers in case lots, man wants high-top shoes.” Sooty scratched his great melon belly, brown and hairless where his white T-shirt ended and suspended over khaki trousers worn through at the knees. “I’m showing what’s on the block this week. You want to special-order, I don’t guarantee the pieces you get didn’t blow down some clerk in a convenience store job Friday night. I’m talking virgin timber here, spray twenty rounds a fucking second.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Man, you’re leaning on them.”

  Sooty occupied the only seat not supporting a box or a wooden case. Macklin was standing with one arm resting on a fiberboard carton stenciled GOLD COAST ORANGES, on top of a kitchen table littered with machine screws and recoil springs. Macklin said, “I don’t know why you haven’t been busted before this.”

  “I got a wait list with more gold badges on it than seven A.M. roll call at thirteen hundred. You got anything against magnums?”

  “Not if it’s all you’ve got.”

  “I can let you have a .357 for five hundred, two-fifty if you put up the two large for the MAC-10s.”

  “Christ, I hate full autos twice as much as semi-autos. One two-second burst and you’re out of business.”

  “So reconvert them, pull the sear blocks and replace the pins. I can do that for you.”

  “You’re in a big hurry to get out from under them. It looks like.”

  The black man belched. “I’m running a clearance. Got me a boat in the De-troit River, the John Brown, thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser. Come November, man, I’m out the St. Lawrence and down the Coast peddling Uzis to the monkey-jumpers in Nicaragua. No more of these fucking Michigan winters for me.”

  “You won’t be able to cut the same deal with the Coast Guard. They’ve got sources on both shores.”

  “I got two direct-feed Rolls Royces and a turbo backup. They can try and run me down.”

  “Two grand for the lot. I’ll do the reconverting myself.”

  “Man, I didn’t get this fat dishing soup out the back door.”

  “MAC-10s were going three-sixty a pop last time I looked,” Macklin said. “The mag ran you a buck and a half. You stand to clear close to a thousand my way. Not too shabby.”

  “Hunnert-fifty for a mag, you’ll never see that day again.” Sooty grinned, showing his tongue in the gap where his top teeth were missing. “I got to get it. It ain’t here.”

  Macklin figured he had his entire stock on the premises. But he was used to the stall. Sooty would use
the time to check his references. “Tomorrow night okay?”

  “Yeah, I like night.”

  Dusk found Macklin on the top floor of a new pinecone-shaped high-rise in Windsor, watching the river slowly turn from pink to green to black as the Detroit skyline swallowed the sun. The room was nearly as large as the floor plan of his house, with a burnt-orange shag carpet and black-and-chromium furniture and abstract watercolors on the walls. A spider-shaped contraption of a fixture clung to the ceiling, shedding soft yellow light from copper funnels.

  Behind the bar, a man whose Miami tan contrasted sharply with his thinning white hair stood measuring bourbon from a shot glass into a tumbler of milk. He had fine, clean-shaven features and a powder-blue silk shirt stuffed loosely into the tops of black wool trousers and might have been taken for a born aristocrat but for his hands. They were large and red-knuckled with old dirt in the creases.

  “Doctor’s orders,” he explained, when he caught Macklin watching him. “He said milk was the thing for my herniated esophagus, but I put myself through business school working for a dairy farmer and I can’t stand the smell. This is the only way I can bring myself to drink it.”

  His Yiddish accent was almost inaudible. Most who noticed it mistook it for German. Macklin remembered when it was much heavier, when his father worked in the junkyard owned by the man and the man’s two brothers. It wasn’t a junkyard now but a hotel downtown, and none of those who stayed there knew they were living on top of half a dozen victims of what the Prohibition press had called the Little Jewish Mafia. The man’s name was Hermann.

  He offered to serve Macklin, whose first inclination was to decline. But dimly in his memory glimmered an old-world rule about accepting a man’s hospitality in his house, a rule that for Hermann would still be fresh. “Hold the milk,” Macklin said.

  The old man brought over a tumbler like his own, with water and ice substituted for milk. The hand with which he proffered the drink was as steady as the building. He watched his guest take a sip before seating himself in the chair opposite. He drank, whisked away the moustache with a crooked finger, and set the glass into a depression built into the arm of the chair at his right elbow.