Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Let’s forget about the hills,” she said. “I want to drive up the coast.”

  “What about The Ten Commandments?”

  “Let’s break them. I want to see the ocean. The closest I’ve ever seen to one is Lake Huron.”

  “We’ll have to rent a car. I’m pretty sure the tour bus doesn’t go up the coast.”

  “I’ll call the concierge while you take off that blue bag and change into a polo shirt.” She lifted the telephone receiver.

  “When did I lose control over my life?”

  “I believe it was when you said, ‘With this ring.’ Concierge, please,” she said into the mouthpiece.

  While she was waiting, Peter said, “We can have lunch in Santa Barbara. Five years ago there was a great little seafood place built on a pier. Maybe it’s still operating.”

  “What were you doing here five years ago?”

  “Sales trip. California goes through camera equipment like Detroit goes through tires.”

  “I always thought the head of a company had salesmen to do that.”

  “I didn’t say I ran Microsoft. I was the salesman.” He drew a blue knitted polo out of the top drawer of the bureau and pulled it on. Over his undershirt. Baby steps, Laurie told herself.

  “Where’s that concierge?” she asked. “I have to pee.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll man the fort.” He held out his hand for the receiver.

  “My hero. Get a convertible.” She went into the bathroom as he sat on the bed and reached for the second section of the Times.

  While freshening up, she got an idea. She stripped down to her black bra and panties, squirted perfume under her chin, and tried a couple of poses before the full-length mirror on the door. She was a healthy girl, smoothly muscular, and looked after her tan. At age eighteen she’d been runner-up for Miss Toledo. If she’d won she’d have gone on to the state competition in Columbus, and if she’d won there, she’d have represented Ohio at the big show in Atlantic City. Drop-dead gorgeous, she’d been called, more times than she could count. Only not quite dead enough to take the crown.

  On impulse she unhooked the bra and let it drop to the floor. Nice and perky and surreptitiously brown. Five years anyway before gravity took over.

  She walked out of the bathroom on the balls of her feet to accentuate the line of her legs, swaying her hips like Marilyn Monroe. “Of course, if there’s something you’d rather do with the top down …” She stopped with one hip cocked and rested a hand on it like Mae West.

  Peter was still on the telephone, the newspaper crumpled on the carpet by the bed. He made a noise with his tongue against his teeth and banged down the receiver. The report made her jump.

  “I’ve been on hold five minutes,” he said. “I’ll go down and talk to the concierge face-to-face. If he hasn’t skipped to Mexico.”

  He got up and went out. He’d never once looked at her.

  Alone and half-naked in the room, she realized she was still on tiptoe and lowered her heels to the floor. She felt as if she were deflating.

  She worried a cuticle. Had she come on too strong? No, Peter was no prude, nor was he one of those neanderthals who always had to be in control. He hadn’t minded her taking the initiative before. Maybe she’d worn him out. If so, it was the first time the age difference had asserted itself. He’d looked energetic enough striding out.

  More likely he was preoccupied. He was that way sometimes: here with her one moment, sweet, attentive, and then a hundred miles away the next. Lost in his head. Maybe he was still thinking about Roger. Sometime, something had happened between father and son, something he didn’t yet trust Laurie enough to tell her about.

  So many things to learn.

  She picked up the wrecked newspaper and laid it on the breakfast cart. DETROIT leapt out at her from a headline on the front page of the second section. She wondered if he’d read the article and that was what had distracted him. Detroit was his home, headquarters to the chain of camera stores he’d owned. Coming on it unexpectedly in a hotel room in Los Angeles, he might have been reminded of old concerns. The headline itself—L.A. POLICE QUESTION DETROIT CRIME BOSS—was so remote as to mean nothing.

  THREE

  “Who got it?”

  “Childs.”

  “Christ. Just this morning I prayed to the Holy Virgin he’d forget to wear his vest next time a cooker gets hit.”

  “He left Narco. Anyway, you’re not supposed to do that.”

  “Who the fuck cares? I’m not a Catholic.”

  Detective Lieutenant Christie Childs overheard this exchange on his way to the cooler. The doors in the morgue were soundproofed, but they were always being left open a crack, and voices traveled along the subterranean corridor as clearly as across water.

  He decided not to mention it as he entered the room where the two attendants were standing next to the gurney. Since the beginning of the year he’d resolved to let such remarks slide off him. Slight and black, one half-inch inside the regulation height for male officers in the San Antonio Police Department, he wore his suits snug and corrected his vision with gold-rimmed glasses that made him look like Herbie Hancock. He was thirty-three but could pass for seventeen, a dubious advantage that had stuck him on the Liquor License Bureau for five years, scamming bars whose personnel sold alcohol to minors without asking to see ID. Fellow officers called him the Child Detective, not always behind his back. At such times he gave thanks for his surname. Given his race, “Boy Detective” might have resulted in a number of violent episodes.

  The look on the attendants’ faces, when he strode in so abruptly on the end of their conversation, gave him grim satisfaction. Letting them wonder how much he’d heard and what he might do about it was better than chewing them out. The high road was worth the trip when it got improved results.

  “’Morning, Lieutenant,” said Anderson, the taller of the pair and the one who had prayed to the Virgin Mary. He was flushed and balding and his face was dimpled all over with acne scars, an overripe orange.

  “Yeah. This the Johnny Doe from Crockett?”

  Anderson nodded. “You never saw a neck snapped so clean. His head broke the front seat when he hit it.”

  The corpse stretched naked on the gurney belonged to a man in his late twenties or early thirties, thin black hair plastered to his scalp, with a hole in his left earlobe from which a tiny gold hoop had been removed when the body was stripped. Ribs showed clearly beneath the blue-gray skin. The man appeared to have only one testicle.

  “Just like Hitler,” Anderson said, following Childs’s gaze. “Maybe it’s why he became a button. Some kid teased him in gym class and he brained him with his locker.” His chuckle was hollow in the room full of sheet-covered corpses. He was still waiting for the lieutenant to lower the boom.

  “What makes him a button?” Childs asked.

  “Well, the garrote.” This was the other attendant, a man smaller than Childs, with an elaborate handlebar moustache and a lump of snuff pushing out his lower lip. “You don’t just walk around with one of them in your pocket if you don’t know how to use it.”

  “If he knew how to use it, maybe he wouldn’t be here. We’d be looking at the other guy.” Childs took hold of the wrist near him and turned it. The skin felt rubbery. “What do you think he used on his fingers?” There were raised welts on the tips, white as grubs.

  “Acid, according to the M.E.,” said Anderson. “Sulfuric or hydrochloric. That had to hurt.”

  “Stupid. Prints grow back.”

  “They were starting to already,” said the man with the handlebars.

  The lieutenant stroked one of the mutilated tips with his thumb, feeling the scar tissue. He let go and rubbed the ink residue off his thumb onto the sheet. Forensics had finished with the body. “Thoughtful of him to give us a head start. The FBI keeps a separate file on doctored prints in its database.”

  Anderson chuckled again, with more confidence this time. “It’ll only help if he was printed
since the acid.”

  “No tan. That makes him an out-of-stater or a vampire. We’ll rule out New Mexico and Arizona, skip California for now. Non-Southwesterner with a record, a pierced ear, and a touching nostalgia for a murder weapon that went out with Luca Brasi. I’m betting we find a match.” Childs looked up. “Or does your Holy Virgin frown on gambling?”

  The attendant’s face turned a paler shade of red. “Sorry, Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” echoed the other.

  Childs said, “Mm-hm,” and went out. In the corridor he smiled thinly. Sometimes the low road had its points.

  He thought of his office in Homicide as a sanctuary from rednecks.

  Home was no oasis. His wife, who unlike him was a native of Texas and a do-it-yourselfer, had textured the living room walls to resemble adobe, hung shadow-catchers and George Catlin prints, and scattered Comanche rugs throughout the house until it looked like all the others in the neighborhood, decorated with the same merchandise from the same shops in the Rivercenter Mall. Even the plates Childs ate from had cloven hoof-prints imbedded in them, reminding him unappetizingly of a cow pie. He never felt more like a Milwaukeean than when he was communicating with his fellow officers, tall, windblown Marlboro men all, who drove rust-ravaged pickups and wore Wranglers on weekends with Skoal cans making identical miniature crop-circles in the hip pockets, and he scarcely felt less like an outsider while trying to unwind with a glass of tawny port in the cowhide-covered chair in his den.

  Only at work, when his door was closed and he settled behind his glass-topped desk to read reports and place calls, did he experience some relief from the tensions that (if the truth be told) held him together, like the ocean’s stresses preserving the outlines of a sunken galleon centuries after parasites had eaten away the tenons. He was not a galleon. He could resist becoming a cowboy only so long without support. He’d had the buff-colored walls repainted a soothing forest-green, put up his academy class picture and black-and-white art photos of Lake Michigan in brushed-steel frames, and dressed the desk in a chrome-cornered pad and matching pen-and-pencil set from the Sharper Image catalogue. The picture frame on the desk, bound in tan imitation buckskin with visible stitching, was an exception, but the wedding shot mounted in it was the only one he had in which his wife wasn’t wearing a bandanna blouse, or barbecuing ribs. She’d given it to him to celebrate his promotion to an office.

  He called the medical examiner, who’d been absent when he’d visited the morgue. Cause of death—compound fracture of the second cervical vertebra—was no surprise, and the M.E. agreed with Childs that the deceased had been new to the Sun Belt, although his reasons were more scientific and based on bloodwork and the condition of the liver. He learned that the man had dined on steak and eggs, a local staple, two to four hours before death, and that he had cocaine in his system and had been abusing it for some time, from the perforations in his septum.

  “Modern-day berserker,” the M.E. said, his El Paso drawl making the distinctly non-Texas reference sound more absurd than it was. (Why were these people so ashamed of any knowledge not connected to the Lone Star State?) “Some of these hitters prefer to pump themselves up before the job.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Great Lakes. That’s a guess, but I’d ring in with it on Jeopardy.”

  Childs waited. He knew if he kept quiet at such times he would be spared asking unnecessary questions. He also knew it was exactly this refusal to play the regional game that made him unpopular.

  The M.E. was no exception. He cleared his throat and went on in a less folksy tone. “He had enough mercury in his liver to rise with the temperature. They eat a lot of freshwater fish back there. The contamination level’s high from all the industrial waste.”

  Home sprang to mind. “Milwaukee?”

  “Or Chicago, or Detroit, or Toledo, or Cleveland. Green Bay and Buffalo, if you want to bracket it, and go inland a couple of hundred miles. Put Michigan in the center and draw a circle about as wide as the distance from Houston to Amarillo.”

  “I know it’s a big state, Doctor. I drove a U-Haul here from Wisconsin. Thanks,” he added, belatedly and to no avail, he was sure. He was getting to have fewer friends in town than Santa Anna.

  He broke the connection, dialed the extension for Sergeant Murillo, and told him what the M.E. had said. Murillo knew what buttons to push at the Houston office of the FBI.

  The information was encouraging enough to make him leave the office and brave enemy territory. He found Officers Benteen and Gonzales leaning against the wall on either side of the one-way glass outside Interview Room A, where Davis, the owner of the Jaguar in which the John Doe was killed, was finishing his formal statement in the presence of a suitcase tape recorder and Detective Sill. The uniformed officers, who had been first on the crash scene, straightened at Childs’s approach. Benteen, fucking cowboy, wore his department piece low on his hip with pearl grips on the handle and was always chewing a toothpick. His partner was chunky, with black hair growing back from a straight line just above his eyes. It was Gonzales who had spotted the garrote after Davis threw it out the car window, and picked it up before anyone in the crowd could make away with it. The man belonged on the plainclothes squad but would probably never get there as long as he was stuck with Benteen.

  “Anything?” Childs asked.

  “Not a damn thing, L.T.” Benteen sucked his toothpick. “He don’t know nothing, he don’t see nothing. Just like that Kraut sergeant on that old TV show. Just another Chicago hood.”

  He started to say more, but Childs shushed him. Sill was holding up the loop of fishline. The lieutenant leaned into the scratchy speaker.

  “You said you cut your neck in the accident,” the detective said. “The only thing in the car that could make that sort of wound was this. You’re saying it was never around your neck?”

  “Why would it be? I’m telling you, I smacked up the car when I saw the guy in the rearview mirror. He was probably getting set to jump the wires when I came back and surprised him. Jags top the list for car thieves. They boost one, then they go to Disney World.”

  “See that stain? A DNA test will tell us if it’s your blood.”

  “I might’ve bled on it after I was cut. Maybe the guy’s a fisherman, it fell out of his pocket. Why would anyone want to strangle me? I’m a retired investment counselor.”

  “Yeah? What’s the IPO on Dallas Monday night?”

  Childs smiled at that. Sill was a big man with a well-trimmed moustache and had been told one too many times he looked and sounded like Ben Johnson, but he had a deadpan like a wall, against which a thousand alibis had dashed themselves to pieces.

  Johns Davis fingered the white bandage at his throat. It resembled a clerical collar. “I’m the victim here. If you want me to say on tape I ever placed a bet for a third party, you’d better let me call my lawyer.”

  “Come on, Davis. We don’t do Vice any favors. You lucked out yesterday. Odds are you’ll run out of Jags long before whoever it is you pissed off runs out of buttons.”

  “He wanted the car.”

  “Six-to-five Sill hangs a material-witness tag on him,” Benteen said.

  Gonzales grunted. “Better not place it with Davis. You’re into him for a yard already.”

  “Shut up, asshole. He’s kidding, Lieutenant.”

  Childs turned away, losing interest, and almost bumped into Sergeant Murillo. Murillo and Officer Gonzales might have been twins, except the plainclothesman was more fat than chunky, with a double chin and less intelligent eyes. What he lacked in personal initiative he made up for in unquestioning obedience. People liked him: other cops, citizens, even some of his collars. Childs liked him, God alone knew why. The man wasn’t a conversationalist.

  Without greeting, the sergeant held up a computer printout with an FBI heading, identifying the John Doe. It ran several pages.

  Buy Something Borrowed, Something Black Now!

  A Biography o
f Loren D. Estleman

  Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

  Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

  Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.

  Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

  In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

  Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

  Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.