Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels) Read online

  “It ought to. He should trim those marijuana plants when they start sticking up above the stalks.”

  The realtor reddened furiously. Peter laughed, loudly and unguardedly, surprising Laurie for the second time that day. She knew then they were okay. They were a newlywed couple like every other, still feeling their way about and marking the sore spots to avoid. Later she’d surprise him in turn by suggesting he put his firing range in the barn. She’d decided to buy the farm where she’d spent all her summers as a girl.

  Edgar Prine, the captain in charge of the longest surviving task force in the history of the Ohio State Police, took armed robbery as a personal affront to his theory of an orderly universe. Insofar as he was a religious man, he believed God had hung the planets where he had according to a prearrangement that Man could never hope to understand, and that any attempt to alter their orbits was either doomed to fail or programmed to succeed by a system that had been in place billions of years before the first man-made rocket pierced the gravity belt. Haring about commercial districts with ski masks and guns was not part of the plan and it was his responsibility to discourage it even unto death. He’d gone about muttering this phrase—even unto death—for so long that men above and below him had taken to calling him “the Reverend Ed Prine,” and not always behind his back. When this happened to his face, he glared, but he didn’t protest. The task force’s record of arrests that stuck was defense sufficient.

  He was taller than he looked and bigger than he seemed. The width of his torso (he wore a size 54 jacket) impressed others more horizontally than vertically, and he was built in proportion so that his size didn’t assert itself until those who met him for the first time were standing in the chill of his shadow. He was fifty years old but looked older, with a crease on each side of his face from eye pouch to jawline and white eyebrows that stood out like feelers. When he wore his uniform, at departmental funerals and other dress occasions, he looked like an admiral of the fleet, but in plainclothes suit and tie he could be mistaken for the president of a middling prosperous small-town bank. He had killed four men in the line of duty before he made sergeant and had survived one governor’s attempt to dismiss him for misuse of deadly force.

  A female television reporter in a tailored suit spotted him on his way across the parking lot, snatched her microphone out of the face of the man she was interviewing, and came his way, trailing her cameraman and a bearded hippie with a bank of lights on wheels. Prine didn’t break stride. The woman fell off her heels, straight into the light man, whose lights tipped over, forcing him to lunge to save them from shattering against the asphalt. The cameraman avoided the domino effect with a Michael Jackson moonwalk and swung the lens to follow the police captain as he entered the video store. For the next two days, every time Prine turned on a TV set, he saw the same footage of his right shoulder and the back of his head going through the door. He placed the media on a level with satellites whizzing aimlessly among the fixed planets.

  He summoned a city uniform from the crowd inside the store. The sergeant identified himself as the first officer on the scene and escorted him to the aisle where a little fat man lay spread-eagled on the floor with a nickel-plated Ruger lying just beyond the fingers of his right hand and all of the middle of him stamped flat as if by a giant shoe. Blood and bits of entrail radiated out from the body on both sides, making a visceral snowflake on the carpet.

  “Cyrus Oliver, the manager.” The city cop read from a spiral notebook. “Came running out of the triple-X-rated section holding the 9mm. No one knows if he had a permit. Ran into a load of double-O buck. One of the cashiers said the man with the shotgun had long blonde hair. Saw it sticking out from under the back of his mask.” He pointed to a thin young woman talking to some other people near the counter. She was a college type with a punk cut and four-alarm acne.

  “That fits with the description we got from two of the other holdups,” Prine said. “What about the vehicle?”

  “Minivan, blue or silver. We got that from the kid with the tattoos.”

  The captain followed the sergeant’s pencil. The kid looked like a druggie. Okay if it was coke or some other upper, every eyewitness ought to indulge. “Model?”

  “Says they all look alike. Which they do. This a state case, Captain?”

  “I can’t answer that question till your chief asks it. He coming?”

  “Probably. We don’t get many killings in Hilliard.”

  “What about the guard?”

  The sergeant pointed him out, talking to another uniform. He hadn’t really needed to. The man’s sidearm made his Hawaiian shirt stick out in back. He might as well have been picking his nose with it.

  “He at least draw his piece?”

  “He says. Never got off a shot. The manager almost fell over him. They moved fast after that, scooped up what the cashier put in the bag and cleared out. The only experience most of these securities have is frisking shoplifters.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to get off a shot.”

  The sergeant nodded, as if he’d thought of that, and maybe he had. “Could be an inside job. An outfit like this usually has some kind of advance man, though, and nobody saw him talking to anyone.”

  “You know a lot about this kind of operation for someone who doesn’t get much of it.”

  “Heists we get: convenience stores, and maybe twice a year a bank. We haven’t had anybody killed in a couple of years.”

  “What’s the cashier’s name?” Prine asked.

  The sergeant turned a page. “Emily Grass. She’s a sophomore at State. This is a summer job.”

  That was useless information, but he stopped short of criticizing an officer he didn’t command. The man was eager for a boost. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Want me to take notes?”

  “No. Some people clam up when you start writing it down.”

  The cashier looked drawn. She might have been just tired. It was almost three o’clock, and in his time Prine had seen citizens’ reactions to violence change. He supposed she and the others screened From Dusk Till Dawn after the customers left. Hollywood was getting it all these days. All but the smell, and in another couple of years the multiplexes would probably start pumping blood and excrement into the ventilator system during the action scenes.

  “Ms. Grass?”

  She nodded. She was breathing shallowly, shuddering on the exhale. Maybe she preferred Merchant-Ivory films. He asked if any strangers had been in that evening. She was a good observer, and after they put behind them the usual sass about most of the customers being strange, he had a pretty good description of the advance man. And he knew before laying eyes on the local chief of police that it was a state case.

  Wild Bill answered the door holding a folded USA Today, one of the complimentary issues from the motel office. Grinnell knew what was inside it and that it would be one of the Sig Sauers from Toledo. The man was in his undershirt. The green polo shirt he’d worn earlier was flung across the room’s only armchair and Grinnell knew it was covering the bag from the video store. Wild Bill got out of the way of the door and when it was closed he threw aside the newspaper and took the automatic off cock.

  “What happened?” Grinnell asked.

  “Character came out of the dirty-movie section waving a piece. Did you even go back there?”

  “I looked inside. I thought he was a customer.”

  “Kind of careless.”

  Grinnell let it go. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t been thinking. “Where are the others?”

  “We don’t shack up together.”

  “What about the rest of the weapons?”

  “In the closet.” Wild Bill did a border roll and handed him the Sig Sauer. “Carlos didn’t want to give this up.”

  “He going to be a problem?”

  “Not as long as Mark Twain’s around.” He threw the polo shirt onto the bed. The cash was in a pile with the credit-card slips stacked neatly next to it.

  Grinnell s
plit the stack in two and put a sheaf in each pocket of his nylon windbreaker. Then he went to the built-in closet and hoisted the duffel he found there off the floor. The shotgun was the heaviest thing inside. “Anyone else open fire?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll get the same pistols back, then. Shotguns usually can’t be identified by Ballistics, but things are changing by the day.”

  “Pretty soon we got to start reading Police Times just to keep up.”

  Grinnell zipped open the duffel and put the Sig Sauer inside. “Take a month off.”

  “Not till I get my stake.”

  Grinnell didn’t ask. It was bad enough he’d had to add collecting the guns and booty to his case work. He didn’t want to know about anything else. “Don’t hit any video stores for a while. Next time it’ll be a cop instead of store security and an asshole with his pet gun.”

  “I already had something else in mind before tonight.”

  “What?” The question was out before he realized he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Wild Bill grinned, lifting the corners of his gunfighter moustache. “Bookstores.”

  THREE

  Macklin said, “Laurie tells me you own a bookstore.”

  “No, I just manage it. It’s part of a chain.”

  Pamela Ziegenthaler looked annoyed; but since the expression seemed to be a more or less permanent fixture on her face, her son-in-law didn’t think he’d offended her with his comment. Her smile, when she chose to uncase it, was worse, a pained thing with barbs that stung both ways.

  She could have passed for forty, but arithmetic made her nine or ten years older, despite professional highlights in her short hair and an expert application of makeup. She looked fit in a sleeveless summer top, no jiggles under the arms and good definition in the biceps, and the resemblance between mother and daughter was such that Macklin knew his wife would keep her good looks well into middle age.

  “Whatever made you choose that job?” Laurie asked. “I’ve never known you to get through even a magazine.”

  “That’s an advantage, dear. You don’t sell books by sitting around reading and dreaming.”

  Laurie, a reader, simmered in silence. Macklin felt grateful not to be the only victim of her mother’s lash.

  He’d gotten off on the wrong foot straight away by addressing her by her married name. She’d explained sharply that she’d resumed her maiden name after her divorce from Laurie’s father, but he was sure she’d been prepared to disapprove of him before they’d met. They belonged to the same generation, for one thing, and chronologically speaking, he might have fathered Laurie himself. Also, his wife had made it clear that Pamela regarded all men with suspicion—including, presumably, the one she’d been spending time with these past several months.

  “I think he’s younger,” Laurie had briefed him during the drive from the farmhouse. “We haven’t met, but some of the things she’s said gave me that impression. Don’t count on it working in your favor. Mother has many good qualities, but logic isn’t one of them.”

  So however he looked at it, Macklin was screwed. Which had removed the tension of having to work hard to give a good account of himself. She could not think less of him so long as he managed to avoid actually killing someone in her presence.

  They were seated on the screened porch of Pamela’s house in Myrtle, a town of about 15,000 situated just far enough away from Toledo to escape being tagged a suburb, in an upscale tract that itself comprised a kind of suburb of Myrtle. The town was an old farming village that had fallen into neglect with the decline of agriculture locally, then experienced rebirth as a place for day-trippers from Detroit and Toledo to browse the candle shops, antiques malls, and knickknack emporia that had moved in when the pharmacies and hardware stores closed. The chamber of commerce had replaced the parking meters with miniature clock towers, and a Victorian tea room served scones in the old Red Tractor Diner. Riding through town, marking the changes, Laurie had sounded like a septuagenarian revisiting the scenes of her youth.

  Pamela picked up her Long Island iced tea and jingled the cubes. “I understand you’re retired. Were you a dot-commer, Mr. Macklin?”

  “I was in the retail camera business, strictly bricks and mortar. I sold the stores and made some good investments.”

  “You can’t be doing too well in this economy.”

  Laurie smiled. “We didn’t come here to borrow money, Mother. We’re comfortable.”

  “Maybe I should borrow from you.”

  “I didn’t know you were clipping coupons.” Laurie was still smiling, but there was an edge in her voice her husband hadn’t heard often. He’d given up trying to comprehend the relationship between mothers and their grown daughters.

  “I might consider it, to pass the time. I get lonely here evenings. Every time Benjamin’s company lays a man off, they expand his territory. I often don’t see him for a week.”

  Benjamin was the new man in her life. Macklin asked if he was a salesman.

  “He’s a facilitator with a home- and building-supply firm based in Toledo. What they used to call an efficiency expert. He makes the rounds among the outlets, reviews their books and inventory, and makes suggestions on how they can improve sales without increasing costs. Or decrease costs without affecting sales. I don’t pretend to understand it totally, but apparently he’s quite good at what he does. When the stock market collapsed, they downsized a lot of employees who had more seniority.” She sounded proud, and a little bored.

  “How’d you meet, in the bookstore?” Laurie sipped her iced tea—the Midwestern variety, without alcohol. She and Macklin had agreed beforehand to stay sober.

  “No, he picked me up in a bar.”

  Macklin got directions and went into the kitchen for napkins to clean up Laurie’s spill. He came back during the explanation.

  “—to see your face. It was worth it. I was sitting with friends in the lounge at Banbury Cross; that’s the golf course that went in after Otto Pederson sold his hundred and sixty acres and moved to California. Henry Field, your father’s old business partner, introduced us. Benjamin made up a fourth after someone dropped out. It turned out we had a lot in common. His wife left him, and he used to collect Oriental rugs. He had to sell them to pay the settlement.”

  “You don’t collect Oriental rugs.” Laurie mopped at the front of her blouse.

  “I’ve collected salt and pepper shakers for years. It’s the same thing. Anyway, we struck up a conversation, and he took me out to dinner the next night. That’s been going on for six months.”

  “Conversation and dinner.”

  Pamela showed her bridgework. “Sex, too, darling. Lots of wonderful, uninhibited sex. I didn’t join a convent when your father left.”

  Macklin asked, “Does Benjamin live in Myrtle?”

  “He has a condominium in Toledo, with a view of the lake. It’s beautiful. He still has one rug, in the living room. He bought it back after the settlement. It was the best in his collection, he said.”

  “When do we get to meet this treasure?” Laurie asked.

  “Any minute now. We’re his guests for dinner. Can I pour you another tea? You seem to have applied most of yours externally.”

  Laurie said no thanks and excused herself to use the bathroom. Alone with his mother-in-law, Macklin refilled his glass from the pitcher on the wicker table. Pamela opened a small cedar box on the table and slid a cigarette between her lips. He fished a book of matches out of a pocket and lit it.

  “Thank you.” She blew smoke at the screen. “I have to sneak them when Laurie’s around. Sometimes I’m sorry I put her through nursing school. Do you smoke? I should have offered you one.”

  He shook his head, putting away the matches. “You never know when you may have to set fire to something. I carry a pocket knife, too, but I don’t whittle.”

  “Were you a Boy Scout?”

  “I was a mechanic’s son. It’s the same thing.”

  “Like
collecting Oriental rugs and salt and pepper shakers.” She smiled. “Who are you, Mr. Macklin?”

  “Peter. I’m the man who loves your daughter.”

  “No, when we’re alone I’ll call you Mr. Macklin. And you’ll call me Mrs. Ziegenthaler. I earned that Mrs. and I’m keeping it. I don’t believe you sold cameras for a living. You’re not the salesman type. I was married to one for sixteen years.”

  “Would you like to see the transfer papers from when I sold the stores?”

  “I’m sure they exist. I’m sure you owned stores where cameras were stocked, and may have even sold one or two. Don’t try to change the subject.”

  He sat back and sipped his tea. Somewhere in the neighborhood a gang of kids was playing a noisy and profane game of soccer.

  “I know what attracted Laurie,” Pamela said. “Anyone can see you’re secure financially, and you’re not bad-looking, if a bit ordinary. You’re a calming influence. Something’s happened to her in the time you’ve been together, that’s obvious. She’s less naïve. It isn’t because she’s been deflowered since I saw her last. I don’t kid myself that that didn’t happen long before she met you. Maybe it isn’t my business, but suppose it is.”

  He said nothing. Waiting for her to ask a question.

  He didn’t wait long. “We’ve established what Laurie saw in you. What did you see in her that brought you to my back porch?”

  “Have you looked at her since her braces came off?”

  “Oh, beauty. These days you can buy that over the counter, and there are women more beautiful than my daughter, with breeding and connections that would get you into any group in this country. You could do better.”

  “I don’t agree. I’m not comfortable in groups.”

  She blew more smoke and flicked ash onto the terra-cotta tiles at her feet. “That’s the first straight thing you’ve said to me. I think you’re a lone old panther, and that’s the way you like it. Why you should decide to take a mate so late in the game is what’s got me curious. And why it should be Laurie.”