Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Are you arresting me?”

  “What for? There’s no law against lying to a police officer, much as we need one. Anyway, I’m not in a mood to play King Herod today. The sergeant there has a pension to think about and I’ve still got eleven years to go on my thirty. No, I’m just letting you know it stinks and that I’m going to be coming around sniffing to see if it goes away or it gets worse. What’s that about the bird’s fall?”

  “The sparrow.” Sunsmith stroked his thumb over the letter opener’s smooth surface, clouding it. “He marks the sparrow’s fall.”

  “Yeah. Well, so long, sparrow.”

  Lovelady rose. The two detectives were at the door when Sunsmith’s telephone rang. They paused while the Reverend answered it. He held out the receiver. “You gave your people this number?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind.” Pontier came over and accepted it. “Pontier. Okay. He make him positive? Uh-huh, he still following Macklin? No, that’s what I wanted, I know where to find the big man. Okay.” He hung up. To Lovelady: “Leonard and Hurst called in from the zoo. Macklin just made contact with Mike Boniface.”

  The sergeant’s pockmarked features barely stirred. “Just once before I retire I’d like to be right.”

  “We ought to both order suits from that Korean just to thank him for IDing Macklin.”

  “Speak for yourself. There’s five years’ more wear in this coat.”

  The pair left. After the door closed, Sunsmith used the letter opener to cut the blotter to shreds.

  CHAPTER 27

  At forty, evidence of simple absentmindedness—misplacing things, overlooking details once routine—were like the first chill of one’s own mortality. When one killed for a living they were a double whammy.

  When Macklin glanced up at his rearview mirror on his way home and spotted the white Oldsmobile rounding the corner behind him, he couldn’t say that he had actually seen the car parked in the zoo or following him there, but he knew that it had been in both places. Younger and less complacent, he’d have spied the tail earlier and thrown it off before meeting Boniface. Now he knew the empty-bucket feeling inside of a boy caught masturbating.

  Belatedly, automatically, he let the speedometer slacken to twenty climbing a hill on Ten Mile Road, noting with satisfaction that the driver of the Oldsmobile followed suit when the gap began to close. He waited until he had drifted over the crest, then flattened the accelerator pedal. The Camaro’s big engine hesitated, gulping, then shot forward with a squeal of smoking rubber. He took a curve on the outside where the road banked, narrowly missing a Jeep Wagoneer coming in his direction when he switched lanes, whisked through the red light at Southfield Road during the pause following the change, struck sparks off the pavement when he bottomed out at the base of the next hill, and swung north on Evergreen on the yellow. There he slowed down. He hadn’t seen the Oldsmobile since the first hill.

  After turning a few corners to make sure he had lost it, he took the John Lodge south to Carmen Thalberg’s bank. The safety deposit key was burning a hole in his pocket and a man in hiding from the police needed cash.

  “That fucking salt-and-pepper team lost Macklin,” Lovelady reported.

  Pontier’s shoulders slumped. He was standing at his office bulletin board, which he had stripped in order to pin up photographs of the Reverend Sunsmith and Michael Boniface’s mug shot and the FBI wire photo of Peter Macklin that the Korean tailor had identified as a picture of the man who had come in asking about Sunsmith. Lovelady recognized the procedure as a sign that his superior had determined not to leave the room until he had solved the puzzle. He would mix and match the pictures, change their order, discard some, and maybe add others until a pattern began to show. When the fever was on him it reminded the sergeant of Red Skelton’s Freddie the Freeloader constructing a tuxedo and top hat out of rags, soot, chalk, and tar paper. What he wound up with might not always be the real thing, but it was almost always close enough to pass.

  The pause was short. Then the inspector selected a shot of Charles Maggiore inside the lobby of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice and made room for it between Macklin and Boniface. He stood looking at the tableau for a second, then shook his head and took down Maggiore. “‘Kay, flag an APB on Macklin and a BOL on his car. General Service should have his license number on file.”

  “Armed and dangerous?”

  Pontier glanced back over his shoulder. “You want to fuck with him?”

  “A and D,” Lovelady agreed. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, pick up Boniface and anyone who’s with him.”

  “Warrant?”

  “Questioning.”

  When the sergeant had left, Pontier unpinned Boniface’s picture and tried it next to Macklin’s, then put Maggiore’s on the other side of the killer’s. He stepped back to look at it. After a moment he turned to his desk and shuffled through the contents of the thick file on the Sunsmith case spread out there. He skimmed through the reports, parts of which he knew by heart. His eye caught on the one filed by Officer Paul Ledyard. He read it through twice, then examined the material clipped to it. This included a photocopy from the department’s own microfilmed newspaper files of a long Sunday supplement piece on a tall, tawny-haired woman pictured crossing a street in Miami. She had on khaki shorts that left her long legs bare and a flowered print shirt with the tails tied under her breasts and she was turning her head toward the camera, a finger pushing down her sunglasses so she could see who was taking her picture. She had dark eyes.

  Not all of the article was included in the photocopy. He had ordered it just for the picture, to help identify her for the officer he had sent to pick her up for questioning. He read what was there, then detached it from the report and unpinned Maggiore and pinned the article and picture in its place next to Macklin. His heart was starting to thud. Without pausing he moved an old publicity mug of the Reverend Sunsmith taken during his show business days into the space on the other side of the woman. He didn’t know until he saw the blood that he’d stuck one of his fingers with the pin.

  Sucking the digit, he swept the debris off the telephone on his desk and punched a button. The line buzzed several times.

  “Records.” A woman’s voice, sleepy.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “The shift is changing. I just came on.”

  “What, is the clutch stuck?”

  “Huh?”

  “This is Inspector Pontier. Send me up everything in the newspaper file on Carmen Contrale Thalberg. That’s Carmen common Charlie Only Nebraska Tennessee Rudolph …” He lost his place. “Screw it, I’ll come down and get it myself.” He threw the receiver at the cradle, hurrying.

  CHAPTER 28

  She wasn’t escorted into an office this time. It was a small room painted beige with no windows and a table and chairs and a bare overhead bulb closed off in a cage. She asked the officer, a young black man in uniform, if she should be calling her lawyer. He said that was up to her and that if she wanted to he’d tell the inspector. She said, “Not yet.” He went out and closed the door on her.

  No one brought coffee. Ten minutes passed. She was starting to feel claustrophobic for the first time in her life when Inspector Pontier entered. He was wearing a camel’s-hair jacket and a brown knitted tie on a champagne-colored shirt. His gray eyes were light in his dark face. He sat down opposite her and said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  She laughed. “You sound like Judge Hardy.”

  “Where’d you meet Macklin?”

  She let the merriment fade slowly from her face. “Who’s Macklin?”

  “My guess would be right here at thirteen hundred. He came in on a sweep the same day I asked you about your business with Sunsmith. Someone will remember.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  He sat back, looking at her. She had on a gray silk blazer over a red top. Gray shirt, red shoes. The purse on the table was red leather. “A girl grows u
p on the streets of Central America fleecing tourists with her brother within earshot of Marxist guerrilla gunfire. She becomes an entertainer, which down there means she hooks a little on the side when she isn’t performing with spider monkeys onstage. She hangs around with smugglers, one of whom is her first husband, who gets himself fed to the fish for fucking with the Colombians, excuse my French. Long before she falls into money she’s learned to play up to the wrong element to survive. Hell, maybe she even knew the scroats who popped her second husband and made a rich widow out of her. Maybe she set it up.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it!” She reached for her purse. His hand shot out and closed around her wrist.

  “That part maybe.” His voice remained even. “The rest is all there in the white spaces between the lines of everything that’s ever been written about you. Change the setting to Detroit and every third hooker on Michigan Avenue will tell the same story. You show a long history of poor judgment in your choice of friends, señorita.”

  His grip was cutting off her circulation. She glared, not showing it. “Am I under arrest?”

  “No. If we tried booking you now you’d be out so fast your shoes would be smoking.” He let go. “It’s no fun being smarter than the entire criminal justice system. I know you hired Macklin and some others to take Sunsmith and throw the fear of God into him, so to speak. No one who started out shucking and jiving the anglos takes to getting shucked and jived herself, particularly when it’s up in the numbers you famous rich folk like to roll in. But the court’s from Missouri; it says show me. Maybe you even got some of those numbers back, although that wouldn’t be as important as letting the good Reverend know he can’t shit a shitter.”

  “I assume I can go.” She put both hands on her purse.

  “I didn’t want to give up on Boniface. When I figured out that he or his people were behind the attempt on Sunsmith, and especially after Sunsmith was kidnapped and released and then Macklin was seen meeting with Boniface at the zoo, I was stone sold on him. But he wouldn’t snatch Sunsmith just to let him go, and Sunsmith wouldn’t buy off Macklin. That’s why Macklin’s reached the age he has in his business. He always goes home with the one who brought him to the dance. I thought about Sunsmith’s disgruntled investors, and for a minute or so Charles Maggiore looked good. Then he didn’t, for the same reason I ruled him out in the try in the church two weeks ago. He stands a lot more to lose from a dead or a kidnapped Sunsmith than he does from a live one at the pulpit. All of the other investors were businessmen, and about as respectable as you can expect businessmen to be these days. Except one.”

  “I really am leaving.”

  “Not all of the minority stereotypes are wrong,” he said. “My Uncle Jonas was a pretty good tap dancer on the Chataqua Circuit, and every month or so I get a real craving for barbecued ribs, just have to have ’em. And you’ve got the Latin temper. When someone screws you, you screw them back twice as hard. You shouldn’t have shot that bodyguard. He didn’t have anything to do with Sunsmith’s scam.”

  “I didn’t—” She closed her mouth. Then she rose, clutching her purse. “I’ll catch a cab home. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  Pontier made as if to get up, then swept out an arm and snatched the purse from her grip. She lunged for it, but he clapped it to his stomach and tilted his chair back out of her reach. “Rich people hardly ever carry cash. I’ve been wondering what it is about this purse that you won’t take your hands off it.” He opened the clasp.

  “That’s illegal search and seizure!” A flush stained her tawny features.

  He rummaged through the contents of the purse and came up with a folded rectangle of paper, which he snapped open one-handed. His expression didn’t change as he looked at it. He returned it to the interior and snapped shut the clasp. “The Shadow was wrong,” he said, holding out the purse. “It pays.”

  She hesitated before accepting the purse. “My business dealings with the Reverend don’t concern the police.”

  “Give me some credit, Mrs. Thalberg.” He sounded tired. “Without someone to sign a complaint there’s no kidnapping. I can’t arrest you for carrying around a check for an obscene amount of money. But don’t let’s pretend I just fell off the potato wagon. Spare me that much.”

  “May I go?”

  “I wish to hell you would.”

  She tipped the cab driver five dollars and walked up the flagged path without looking back as he turned around in the driveway. On the porch she opened her purse, then remembered she had left her keys inside. She rang the bell.

  Elizabeth was a long time coming to the door. The black maid unlocked and opened it enough to see Carmen, then undid the chain and swung it wide. Her face was taut.

  Carmen said, “I hope you haven’t started dinner. I’m not hungry.”

  “I’ll eat it.”

  She jumped and turned toward the dining room arch. Macklin came through it, holding the magnum without pointing it. Light reflected flatly off its mirror surface. He said, “I need a place to stay. The cops will be waiting for me at my house.”

  “There are motels.” Her voice was toneless.

  “They’ll be all over them. I was parked across the street when they came for you. I figure they won’t be back here for a while.”

  “Pontier saw the check. I was on my way out to cash it when they came. If they find out you’re here they’ll arrest both of us.”

  “We’ll have to make sure they don’t find out.” He glanced at the maid.

  “Don’t worry about Elizabeth,” Carmen said. “Her green card depends on this job.”

  “I never worry about anything.” He belted the revolver. “What’s for dinner?”

  “I must be crazy.”

  Moonlight tented the furniture in the master bedroom and lay pale on the sheet against Carmen’s dark skin. She lay close to Macklin, not cuddling. He said, “You’re not crazy.”

  “You call it, then. I’m too old to still be attracted to bad men.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with age.”

  “How does a man get to be a killer?”

  “You mean what’s a nice boy like me doing in a business like this?”

  “You’re not a nice boy.”

  “Some of us marry sixteen million dollars. The rest of us do what we’re good at to get along.”

  She propped herself up on one elbow to look at him. The sheet fell, exposing one breast. “Maybe marrying sixteen million dollars is what some of us are good at. You’re kind of moralistic for an assassin.”

  He said nothing.

  “I never asked you if you were married,” she said. “Are you?”

  His grin was wolfish in the pale light. “You’re worried about adultery?”

  “I just like to know a little something about the men I sleep with. Are you married?”

  “Not now.”

  “Children?”

  “One boy.” The grin had vanished.

  “How old?”

  “Let’s go to sleep.”

  He turned his back to her. She snaked an arm around his shoulder, stroking the hair on his chest with fingers that moved downward then and became more intimate. A bare leg slid over his hip. He rolled into her.

  CHAPTER 29

  The next week passed relatively unnoticed by the Detroit Police Department. There were no drug shootings, no blue babies found in trash cans, two rapes, three armed robberies, and only one arson attempt. The homicide rate rested. Blissfully the two city newspapers made no mention of the slack time, being careful not to seem to imply that the criminals weren’t trying hard enough. The three local television stations noted the downturn, one of them expressing hope in an editorial by the general manager that the city had reached the turning point in its quest for respectability. That night someone was stabbed during basketball practice at Wayne State University, a junior high school teacher in Warren was arrested for having sex with three of his male students, and the owners of a mom-and-pop party store in Red
ford Township were shotgunned to death for $143.75 in the cash register and four cartons of Marlboros. Channel 7 sent a minicam crew to photograph the bloodstains. Inspector George Pontier of Detroit Homicide declined an interview.

  The attempted arson had to do with a homemade bomb discovered between pews at the Reverend Sunsmith’s church by a custodian. A timer wired to a small gelatin charge attached to a plastic five-gallon can of gasoline had failed to trigger an explosion. The Detroit Bomb Squad was summoned, headed by a lieutenant named Zangara, who grinned, patted the mechanism, and said, “Filzer, where you been keeping yourself?” He then defused the bomb with one snip of a pair of insulated wire cutters.

  Michael Boniface and his companion, Carmine Picante, were questioned and released early in the week in connection with the kidnapping of the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith. By that time the local media had begun to treat both the incident and the failed arson as publicity ploys by the flamboyant guitar player turned minister, and Boniface’s role in the investigation received only passing mention. The Free Press referred to him as “a one-time prominent figure in the Detroit underworld.” The News buried the item in the third section with a photograph taken when Boniface was imprisoned on the narcotics charge. The female newscaster who drew the story on Channel 2 mispronounced his name.

  Toward the end of the week, the Reverend Sunsmith hosted a press conference to field rumors surrounding his disappearance, but it dissolved into a tent revival when one reporter’s question sidetracked him onto the gambling measure. A cartoon in the News depicted the minister attempting to part the Detroit River using an umbrella riddled with holes for a staff. A more serious item analyzed the Detroit Police Department’s refusal to stem the growing curiosity regarding the finances of the Reverend’s church.

  On Saturday, Charles Maggiore was released from Detroit Receiving Hospital. A statement was issued to the press some minutes after his wheelchair was escorted under plainclothes guard through a rear exit, where Gordy helped him into the big Lincoln and drove him home.