Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  Gordy was helping him out of the car when a detective sergeant named Stills stepped out from behind a hedge and showed Maggiore a warrant for his arrest. The charge was conspiracy to commit arson in collusion with one Howard Arnold Filzer, in custody.

  “Police declined to say where Maggiore is being held,” announced Channel 4’s silver-haired anchorman. “He is recovering from wounds received in a suspected gangland attempt on his life and is believed to still be in danger.”

  Picante turned off the set in the living room of Michael Boniface’s suite. “Cheap son of a bitch got what he paid for,” he said.

  “They better be giving Filzer the same protection. Get the ball, Al.” Boniface tossed the green plastic sphere he had had Picante bring him from the gift shop in the lobby. The golden retriever, seated on the floor next to its master’s chair, watched it bounce and roll to a stop in a corner, its bell jangling. Al made no move to follow.

  “Stupid mutt,” said Picante.

  “He thinks it’s silly. Don’t you, boy?” He scratched under Al’s chin. The dog closed its eyes and leaned against his knee. “Animals got a stronger sense of dignity than humans.”

  “I guess that’s why they spend so much time licking their pricks.”

  “That fucking Maggiore,” Boniface said, and Picante smiled at the juxtaposition. “He’s smarter than any of us figured and dumber than any of us expected. He snatches the nigger and then cuts him loose so he can spread that dumb story and come off looking like a horse’s ass. Got half the town thinking he went out shopping for headlines and the other half ready to swear he spent the time shacked up with a parishioner’s wife. Then the fucking hunchback tries to torch the church just in case Sunsmith puts him to it and decides to roll over on him. Dumb.”

  “Still think the snatch was Maggiore’s?”

  “Hell, yes. He’s the only one strapped enough to try it and the only one lucky enough to pull it off. I hate to see anyone shit on his luck like that, even him.”

  “Who’s going to put the hit on him now we lost Macklin?”

  “Macklin, I never thought he’d be the one to turn.” He pushed the dog’s head away. It got up, went over to the corner where the ball had come to rest, sniffed at it, and curled up on the carpet. “Forget Maggiore. He’s past hitting now. If that gambling referendum ever had a chance of passing it’s now. They’ll vote it in just to dump all over Sunsmith. They’re madder at him than they are at Maggiore, with or without the torching.”

  “Put the hit on Sunsmith.”

  “No. You don’t hit cops or clergymen.”

  “Hit this one.” Picante pulled a chair in front of Boniface’s and sat down on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward. “He gets dead good and loud everyone will forget the kidnapping, figure the pro-gamblers took him out to shut him up. The referendum’s Tuesday. We can still spike it, but we got to move fast. Sunsmith’s holding a rally in Hart Plaza Monday. We’ll hit him there.”

  “Shooter gets within twenty feet his bodyguards’ll cut him to pieces.”

  “So we use two shooters.”

  Boniface said nothing. The lines in his face were pulled deep. He didn’t look bloated now, just old.

  Picante said, “The town’s crawling with hungry buttons will throw themselves to the dogs if we put it to them right. While the guards are busy plugging the goat, our number two comes in from left field and hands the good Reverend his pie in the sky.”

  “You didn’t just think of that.”

  “Mike, it’s the only way. And it’ll work.”

  “Maybe you already set it up.” Boniface’s tone was dead. “Maybe Maggiore’s not the only one fixed to heel over. I’m next, maybe.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Mike. I wanted your spot I’d of took it while you were inside.”

  “You wouldn’t of been able to. You needed me out so you could use my name, make contacts.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  After a moment the lines softened. “Naw. Hell, no. Things are just different out here. You get scared, you ain’t sure who’s your friend. Figlio mio.” He reached out and patted Picante’s accordioned cheek.

  “Mi padre.” Picante grasped the old man’s knee and squeezed. “What about Sunsmith?”

  “Forget Sunsmith. I want you to call that Polack state senator we spent so much money on, whatsizname, Subasic, see can he stall this thing past November. It’s too late to do anything about the vote Tuesday.”

  Picante’s long face sobered. He withdrew his hand. “Sure, Mike. I’ll call him today, start things moving.”

  “Take Al for a walk first.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m bushed. Shake me up when you get in.”

  The day clerk in the Pontchartrain lobby was a bald man with a modest gray handlebar whose upturned points gave him a false look of good humor. He disapproved of the man in the ugly suit who was coming off the elevator and he disapproved of the dog he had on a leash. The hotel was strictly off limits to pets. But the man’s employer had made a special financial arrangement with the manager that didn’t include the day clerk.

  “I’ll be out for an hour,” the man told him. “Mr. Boniface is resting. Don’t disturb him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Outside, the wind was lifting skirts and blowing newspapers against pedestrians’ legs. Al put his muzzle into the wind, eyes closed, nostrils quivering. Picante jerked the leash and the dog fell into step beside him.

  The blue Mercury was parked on Washington. Picante opened the rear door and Al hopped inside. He lowered the window two inches and closed the door on the dog, who whimpered and snuffled at the opening. Picante then opened the passenger’s door in front, sat on the edge of the seat, and exchanged the Colt Diamondback under his left arm for a less expensive model in the glove compartment with its serial number gouged out. Ignoring Al’s whining, he closed up and left the car and the dog.

  He re-entered the hotel on the Jefferson side. Checkout time was noon and the lobby was jammed with guests and luggage and bellhops pushing wheeled carts. Picante climbed the fire stairs and waited inside the door on the seventh floor while a cleaning cart rattled past pulled by a maid. After a minute he opened the door a crack. The cart was parked outside the open door of one of the rooms. He took the long way around to 716, met no one on the way, and let himself inside with his key.

  Boniface wasn’t in the living room. Picante checked the bath, then went into the old man’s bedroom. Boniface lay on his side on the bed in his shirtsleeves and stockinged feet, snoring gently.

  Picante had carried a towel in with him from the bathroom. He unclipped the revolver from under his arm, wrapped the thick towel completely around it and his hand, and placed the bundle against Boniface’s right temple. The sleeping man stirred.

  Muffled by the towel, the report was no louder than the thud of a heavy book striking a carpeted floor. The old man jerked. Bits of fiber swirled around angrily, then floated down through air clouded with smoke and tainted with the stench of charred cloth. Boniface’s bowels voided.

  Picante wiped off the gun with the towel and placed both on the bed. Then he went out to finish walking the dog.

  CHAPTER 30

  Roger Macklin succumbed to temptation finally and called the suite.

  He had heard from Picante twice in two days, the first time just after the news of the Reverend Sunsmith’s kidnapping had broken, the second following his release. Both times Picante had told Roger to stand by for instructions. Then nothing. Now it was Friday afternoon, three days away from Sunsmith’s rally, and the tension was getting to be like the old urgency when he had gone too long between fixes. That scared him and he dialed the number. After three rings a strange voice came on the line.

  “Hello?”

  Roger hung up. Picante always answered, “Yeah?” He wondered if Boniface had answered, and he supposed he’d catch hell for calling there. He hoped he hadn’t blown his big opportunity.

  Then t
hat evening he had the radio on and learned that Boniface was dead, murdered in his suite, and that an associate of his was being questioned at Detroit Police Headquarters. That would be Picante. He knew then that the voice on the telephone had belonged to a police officer. He started daydreaming then, wondering how the job had gone down and how he’d have handled it. It was a few moments before he pieced things together and knew as well as if Picante had told him that Picante had killed his boss. And that made him worry, because if the police arrested him for the murder then there was no one to stand the contract on Sunsmith. He was thinking along these lines when his telephone rang.

  “Roger? Me.”

  “Hey, they let you go?”

  “Sure, what’d you expect?”

  “Listen, I want to ask—”

  “Save it. You all set?”

  “Set?”

  “You got all the stuff down, you want to go over it again, what?”

  “You mean it’s on?”

  “You ever think it wouldn’t be?”

  “Well, after they arrested you.”

  “Nobody arrested anybody. You want to go over it again? ’Cause if you don’t I got other things that need doing.”

  “No. No, I’m fine.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll call you after.” The line clicked and buzzed.

  Pegging the receiver, Roger glimpsed his reflection in the window. “Treat us like mushrooms,” he told it. “Keep us in the dark and throw shit on us.”

  “He did it okay. I guess I know a wrong one when I see him.”

  Sergeant Lovelady leaned his forehead against the grilled window in Pontier’s office, looking down at Beaubien as if he expected to see Picante and the young lawyer who used to represent Michael Boniface coming out there. But the pair had been gone for an hour.

  “All we get in here is wrong ones,” Pontier said, seating himself on the edge of his cluttered desk with his hands in his pockets. “We know Maggiore had paper out on Boniface. Picante sure didn’t set up that shotgunning in Belleville and then put himself in front of it next to his boss.”

  “It was damn considerate of the dog to have to take a leak just when the shooter was fixing to come in.”

  “Maybe the dog was in on it.”

  “Yeah, laugh. We know Boniface didn’t hire Macklin to grab Sunsmith. Maybe Picante hired Macklin to off Boniface.”

  “And brought Boniface along to the zoo to witness the transaction?”

  “Well, then that was something else and Picante did the burn himself. He was a heavyweight before he started picking up after the old man.”

  “Why blow down Boniface now? What’s Picante got to gain from killing a racketeer without a racket? Arson’s got Maggiore. Let’s don’t be greedy.”

  “Picante’s running some game, I know it.”

  “Right now there’s only one game in town.” Pontier stopped.

  Lovelady turned from the window. “We keep coming back to Sunsmith.”

  “We do.” Pontier reached over and lifted the receiver off his telephone. “Tactical Mobile Unit still handling crowd control?”

  “Last I heard.”

  He dialed a number, waited. “This is Pontier in Homicide. Who can I talk to about security at Hart Plaza next Monday?”

  Macklin despised inertia, for the simple reason that he was so susceptible to it.

  Activity was his aphrodisiac, and although he had the kind of features that always looked tired, he seldom was. Long periods of inaction, however, were fatal, enforcing a cataleptic lethargy that in recent years had become steadily more difficult to throw off. By the end of his week in hiding at Carmen Thalberg’s house he was sleeping fifteen hours a day. But his sleep was light, and when the late edition of the News hit the front door he heard the thump. He rose and dressed and was tying his shoelaces when Carmen came in carrying the newspaper.

  “Did you know him?” She unfolded it and held it out.

  Macklin’s eyes landed first on the photograph of a bagged corpse being slid into an ambulance parked on Washington. Then he read the caption. He snatched the newspaper from her.

  She said, “I thought you might. Does it have anything to do with you?”

  He read all of the article that appeared on page one and put it down without turning to the inside page where it was continued. He looked around. Carmen went over to the bedstand and took his magnum and belt holster out of the drawer. He accepted them, slid the gun out, and checked the load. Then he sheathed it and snapped the holster onto his belt under his jacket.

  “You’re going out? What about the police?”

  “I have to find my son.”

  “Your son?”

  “I think the man who killed Boniface is going to kill him. Or get him killed. It’s the same thing.”

  She looked at him. He grasped her shoulder. She was wearing a cream silk blouse and his fingers crushed the material. “You asked me once if I ever did anything for someone’s life. I’m going to try.”

  “Is his worth it?”

  “Maybe not. And maybe I don’t have a choice either way.” He let go of her.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No. If I know Pontier he’s got officers watching this place. You’ll have to draw them off. They’ll follow you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He grinned. There was no humor in it. “Lady, if I knew that I wouldn’t be in such a hurry.”

  She kissed him hard. He was surprised into responding. After a long moment she pushed them apart.

  “I don’t love you,” she said. “I just don’t have a choice either way.”

  “We both have a problem,” he said, and kissed her. Then she left.

  CHAPTER 31

  Donna, Macklin’s ex-wife, was living with an oral surgeon named Riordan in Sterling Heights. After Carmen had driven away towing her police escort, Macklin took his car out of her garage and drove to a public telephone, where he got the number from Directory Assistance. Donna didn’t want to come to the telephone at first and he had to communicate with her through Riordan until she came on and told him she hadn’t heard from Roger in months. The last time she had tried to call him at his old apartment she had been informed that he had moved out without leaving a forwarding address. Macklin hung up on her questions and tried an acquaintance in the Detroit Police Department, Armed Robbery detail. The officer, wounded once in the line of duty and twice decorated for heroism by the commissioner, moonlighted as a contract killer for the Rubello family in Grosse Pointe. He told Macklin he’d get back to him. Macklin replied that he’d call back and stopped talking to him after receiving a warning that the pick-up order on him was still in force.

  He called old Hermann’s house and reached the housekeeper, who explained in broken English that her employer was in Las Vegas. By then he had run out of change for the telephone. He got back into the car and took Telegraph south into Detroit, where he attracted the attention of a city blue-and-white, which followed him for two blocks until he caught a light on the yellow and lost him. He was pretty sure the officer hadn’t gotten close enough to read his license plate or he’d have turned on his siren and run the light. Macklin left Telegraph then and wound his way down through side streets.

  He garaged the Camaro on Clairmount and walked to a cave of a bar run by a former Red Wing goalie named Veauxhill, who had been thrown out of the league for gambling and had invested his winnings in the bar and a loan-sharking operation in back. A black bartender with a glass eye went into the back when Macklin asked for Veauxhill and returned a minute later, jerking his head toward the doorway he had just come through. Macklin went around the bar and through the opening.

  Veauxhill was sitting at the folding card table he used for a desk, counting hundred-dollar bills into stacks on the red vinyl surface. A square man running to hard fat, he had a head the size of a pumpkin growing straight up out of a green silk bowling shirt and glistening black hair that showed the marks of the comb. His mouth was small and
lipless and V-shaped, like the flap of an envelope, and his nose was a blister with nostrils, the bridge smashed flat by a hockey stick years before. His broken-knuckled hands were astonishingly swift and graceful as he counted the bills from one to the other faster than the eye could follow.

  “You like indy work?” he asked without looking up.

  Macklin said, “It’s the same work. I just get to pick and choose who I do it for now.”

  “I ain’t hiring. I do my own collecting.”

  “I’m not looking for a job.”

  “Street talk says you’re smoking. I know half a dozen snitches would turn you in for what the cops are offering. You know what it takes to make a grifter roll over on a mechanic.”

  “I’m not looking for a safe house either.”

  Veauxhill finished counting, snapped a thick rubber band around the last stack, and began transferring the stacks into a Dewar’s carton on the floor next to his chair. “You pay the same vig as everybody else. I don’t play favorites even with shooters.”

  “I don’t need a loan. I’m looking for my son.”

  “He ain’t been in.”

  “Would you know him if you saw him?”

  “Until you brought him up I didn’t know you had a son. I thought you heavyweights did all your fucking with your guns.”

  “You know him. Or of him. His name’s Roger. He’s been working for Maggiore.”

  The loan shark closed the flaps on the carton. “I hear some kid’s been jerking chains for the hunchback. Maybe I hear he’s your boy. My memory ain’t what it was. You bounce enough pucks off your skull maybe yours wouldn’t be either.” He turned flat colorless eyes on Macklin for the first time.

  Macklin had eighty thousand dollars sewn into the lining of his corduroy jacket and in his wallet. He separated ten hundred-dollar bills from the wallet and laid them out individually across the card table.

  “He was shacking up with some dark meat in Dearborn Heights until she tried croaking herself a couple-three weeks ago.” Veauxhill started stacking the bills. “Apartment complex on Dudley. She was a singer in Sunsmith’s choir.”