Any Man's Death Read online

  “I will ask the sisters to pray for him each time it rains.”

  “He’ll be relieved to hear it.” He went over to buzz the receptionist.

  CHAPTER 4

  The messenger was a young black man in a blue nylon Eisenhower jacket and red necktie with his hair blown out into a modest Afro. When Macklin opened the door, his visitor handed him the flat package wrapped in brown paper without a word.

  “Cops are watching the place,” Macklin said.

  “‘S’okay. The service is legit.”

  The killer closed the door and carried the package upstairs to the study. Boniface had legitimate investments everywhere and even more businesses whose owners owed him favors. He doubted that the old man had had to pay for anything in years, not counting killers and lawyers. It was like him to arrange illegal deliveries by legal means in broad daylight. A paranoid like Maggiore would have set up an exchange in the monkey house at the Detroit Zoo or on a dock down by the river. Except Macklin would never have agreed to an exchange set up by Maggiore.

  Inside the study he locked the door and drew the curtains over the window, then snapped on the desk lamp and tore the paper off the package. He noted with approval the unbroken seal on the two-toned pasteboard box, broke it, and used a pencil to pry the revolver loose from the Styrofoam molded around it inside. It was a Colt .38 Special, called the Shooting Master, mounted on a .45 New Service target frame. It was handsomely blued and the butt was equipped with checked walnut grips. For no particular reason he preferred the Smith & Wesson Police Special, but he went with whatever was available so long as it wasn’t fully automatic and the caliber was neither too light nor too heavy. He admired the killers who made do with neat little .22s; admired them with no desire to emulate them. His marksmanship was good, not outstanding, and an inch this way or that with those small calibers could make the difference between a successful kill and life in the Southern Michigan Penitentiary at Jackson. Forty-fives and up were for water buffalo.

  From the paper sack on the broad oak library table he drew a new roll of black friction tape, the kind with the rough surface that didn’t hold fingerprints, and spent ten minutes taping the butt and hammer and trigger assembly. He always ditched the weapon at the scene, and gloves attracted too much attention in the balmy spring weather and were clumsy besides.

  He laid aside the weapon and got up to unlock the file cabinet. The second drawer contained his income tax records for the past five years. Pulling out a thick manila folder labeled MEDICAL EXPENSES, he slid shut the drawer and relocked it and spread the folder’s contents across the table. The display included several eight-by-ten color and black-and-white prints of a tanned blond man in his fifties with an athletic build spoiled a little by a hump on his left shoulder, a deformity he sought to cover through exquisite tailoring, with some success. Macklin, a polyester man, thought he would have done better to choose colors and patterns more conservative. But Charles Maggiore was not a conservative crimelord.

  The blond Sicilian was a throwback to Capone days, not as loud or flashy, but closer to that type than he was to the gray Costellos and Genoveses and Gambinos of the middle years. His taste ran toward Jacuzzis and expensive health clubs and framed pictures of himself with an arm around Hollywood motion picture stars. He had started out as a street soldier for Boniface, survived several attempts on his life during the 1972 gang war, and worked his way up to stand in for Boniface while the latter was serving time for drug trafficking. The deal was that he would step aside when his predecessor returned. But the deal died the moment Maggiore’s rump met Boniface’s chair.

  Among the other items on the table were a rundown of Maggiore’s habits and associates, a complete medical history extorted out of a hospital resident with expensive weaknesses, and a floor plan of Maggiore’s house in Grosse Pointe. Macklin had spent patient months compiling the information, slowly to avoid attracting his subject’s notice, and although he knew most of it by heart he went through it one more time, making notes in a pad on the table to ram home the essential details. When that was done he read over his notes, then shuffled the neatly lettered sheets and photographs together with the pad, blank pages and all, and slid them into the wastebasket under the table. The weight of the items activated the electric shredder and in seconds the whole was reduced to tangled excelsior in the bottom of the basket. The device was one of the conveniences he had missed while his ex-wife was in possession of the house. The room’s efficient soundproofing had been another.

  He had spared two photographs. One was a telescopic shot printed in wallet size of a huge man with scarred brows and a broad square body sheathed in a black wool suit, holding open Maggiore’s front door for its owner to pass through. This was Gordy, Maggiore’s manservant and bodyguard. Macklin tucked the picture into the inside breast pocket of his sportcoat. The other was a newspaper photo of a smiling Maggiore in evening dress accepting the Rotarians’ Man of the Year award. In it his face was barely larger than Macklin’s thumbnail.

  Macklin hoisted a large container of potting soil from the floor to the table and tipped it over onto its side so that the tightly packed contents faced out from the wall. Then he propped up the picture inside the lip of the pot, loaded the Colt from a box of cartridges included in the package, measured ten paces the length of the study, turned, and fired in one smooth motion.

  The first shot obliterated Maggiore’s face and filled the room with noise but not much smoke. “Smokeless powder” was an optimistic term, but he had fired some antique black-powder arms in the days of his apprenticeship and the difference between the thick, rotten-egg-stinking residue of those coarse grains and the cigarettelike haze caused by a modern self-contained cartridge was marked. The second shot took out Maggiore’s right shoulder and most of the arm supporting the attractive plaque. The third left the Rotarian who shared the picture alone with a large hole.

  Macklin stopped there. Earphones and earplugs during tests left a man unprepared for the gun’s noise during the genuine event, and so he scorned them. His ears rang with the echo of the report contained by the room’s six-inch cork lining.

  The gun’s heavy frame absorbed the recoil nicely, aiding accuracy. The potting soil stopped the bullets. Later he would dig them out and hammer them flat to destroy the striations and toss them into the garbage. Examining the photograph before consigning it to the shredder, he determined that the Colt fired a hair off to the left, but that was no problem. He intended to make the shot from as little distance as possible.

  When, after twenty hours of labor, the same family physician who had delivered Gordy’s mother freed a thirteen-pound boy from her womb, the doctor looked through the fogged lenses of his spectacles and instructed his nurse to tell the boy’s father not to worry. “He’s got a schlong on him like a black Angus.”

  Six years later the same doctor, almost bald then and growing deaf, put his hand on the boy’s shoulder after his examination—reaching up to do it—and informed his parents that the problem was glandular, but that it could be controlled with drugs. By then he was the biggest child in school and taller than most of his teachers.

  At age ten he was ducking through doorways, swiveling to clear his shoulders. Strangers addressed him as if he were an adult and came away thinking he was retarded. He wearied of always playing the Frankenstein monster with his schoolmates, but that problem solved itself when their parents forbade them to play with him.

  By the time he dropped out of high school he had stopped growing, six feet eight and three hundred and twelve pounds of arrested physical development, a joke with a square brow and a prognathous jaw, a candidate for the Rondo Hatton lookalike contest, something the parents in his neighborhood used to frighten their children into going to bed on time. A promoter who had helped train Sonny Liston talked him into leaving school and going on the road, where he boxed small-town toughs and former heavyweight contenders on their way down. He took fearsome beatings and was disqualified several times when dur
ing clinches he cracked vertebrae and pulverized ribs. His opponents bounced their gloves off his kidneys and bared their teeth and wriggled and went limp as firehoses in his arms. One passed into a coma and was still on a life support system four years later. Gordy called the private hospital once a month to check on the man’s condition. Part of his paycheck went regularly into the family’s medical account.

  The event sickened him on boxing. He tried professional wrestling, billing himself as Godzilla, but it was just as brutal for all the show business. He had already determined to quit when Charles Maggiore sent a man to Joe Louis Arena where he was touring with the Superstars of Wrestling to invite him to Maggiore’s house in Grosse Pointe. Himself a dark man of Albanian extraction, Gordy stood in awe of the blond Sicilian in his sporty clothes and of the house with its bulletproof picture window looking out on the blue-glass surface of Lake St. Clair, but he felt a bond with this man whose congenital hump made him a fellow physical unfortunate. Maggiore said he had seen Gordy wrestle on television and imagined that he made a lot of money. His eyebrows twitched when Gordy told him how little. “I’ll double it if you come to work for me.”

  Gordy hesitated. He had never heard of his host, but he couldn’t miss the significance of the limousine in which he had ridden there with its thick tinted Plexiglas windows and of the men patrolling the grounds wearing jackets in eighty-degree weather. He had no intention of exchanging one heartless profession for another that involved breaking the bones of people who owed other people money. Maggiore sensed his reservations and quickly explained that his job would be to protect his employer from harm, nothing more. He would give Gordy twenty-four hours to consider the offer.

  He spent that night on a walking tour of Detroit. The city reminded him a little of his native Philadelphia with its combination of gritty old Art Deco buildings and space-age plastic, and the lights of Windsor across the river enchanted him. Once, wandering over the ugly concrete covering the Wayne County Community College campus, he was accosted by a young black man in a Nike T-shirt who flashed a knife that was quicky put away when the moon came out from behind a cloud, grafting Gordy’s huge silhouette to the surrounding architecture. “Evening,” greeted the young man, fixing a grin on his narrow features. Gordy nodded and waited until he retreated into the shadows before continuing his own journey back to the hotel. He had decided to accept the job.

  That was three years ago. Maggiore’s confidence in his big bodyguard had grown to the point where he had dismissed most of his security and placed Gordy in charge of what remained, promoting him to majordomo in the process, with a raise in salary. He had gotten the giant a permit to carry a concealed weapon, but Gordy never used the gun; one glimpse of him in his neatly tailored black suit was enough to persuade the occasional hostile visitor to leave whatever weapon he had brought with him where it was.

  Now he stood blocking the entrance of the Grosse Pointe house as efficiently as the door he had just opened, looking down from under the shiny white scar tissue on his brows at the slim bald black man on the front porch. It was evident from the way the man looked back that he wasn’t accustomed to raising his eyes to meet anyone’s gaze. He was six-two in a gray suit specially constructed for him, with a barbered moustache and gray eyes light in his very dark face.

  “Inspector Pontier,” he said, showing the badge in the leather folder. “I called earlier.”

  After a beat, Gordy moved aside to let him enter. The way the man had looked at him, he thought he had been about to ask him about the weather up there, the same dumb old shit. But it wasn’t fear of consequences that had made him decide against it as it had been with some others, he was sure of that. Trying to scare a policeman was pointless; but it wasn’t that either. The big man closed the door and escorted Pontier to the room his employer called the library and shut him inside.

  Moving back up the hallway, Gordy decided it was Pontier himself who didn’t scare. You met them sometimes.

  Pontier made a show of looking around. “I don’t see any books.”

  “Books? Oh. The library.” Lowering himself behind the big bare desk in front of the bulletproof window, Maggiore spread the vent in his sunset-orange silk jacket to keep the material from creasing. A man made cautious by a number of contracts on his life, he had overcome his aversion to shaking hands long enough to clasp the inspector’s. Now that Pontier was ensconced in the leather chair on his side of the desk he relaxed a little. “I hardly ever study anything in here, so it’s not that, and the den sounds like the place where Mr. Cleaver had his little heart-to-heart talks with Wally and the Beaver. The office sounds too much like work. I’m thinking of putting in some books, but where?” He spread his hands, indicating walls covered with framed pictures, Maggiore with everyone but Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt.

  “Why not call it the studio?”

  “Studio. I like it.” He folded his hands across his flat belly, swiveling to right and left. But for the hump he could have been a movie star who made all his money in the sixties and then retired. He sometimes told people he had appeared in beach pictures with Frankie and Annette, just to see their reactions. One woman said yes, she recognized him from a crowd scene. “Look, Inspector, I’ll save us both some time. I didn’t have anything to do with that try on Mike Boniface. Why should I? He’s out of the running.”

  “Is he?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it, but prison’s a worse stigma in our business than in most others. Lawyer goes up, a doctor, he gets a chance later to take back his license. Even politicians get themselves re-elected while they’re in the holding tank. We’re like first-generation legit and sensitive about it. He’d be lucky to land a slot machine franchise in Dearborn. If we were still running slot machines.”

  “I thought your business was corporate consulting.”

  “Yeah, and yours is security services. And public toilets are rest areas and TV weathermen are meteorologists but they still can’t tell you what’s going on outside their own windows. My mailman calls himself an information dispersal engineer, for chrissake. Boniface is stale news.”

  “Who said I was here about Boniface?”

  Maggiore hooked his right arm over the back of his chair. The hump was less noticeable in that position. There were cops he liked and cops he didn’t, and whether they were in his corporate budget had little to do with it: he liked some of the honest ones, too. But he didn’t care for Pontier or this new breed of black, turned on a lathe and rubbed down smooth to slide into the white mainstream. In a few generations even the black would start flaking off. Aloud he said, “Who then, Sunsmith?”

  “Let’s talk about Sunsmith. Where were you at eleven o’clock Sunday morning?”

  “Where I usually am at that time, reading Charlie Brown at the breakfast table. Ask Gordy.”

  “Gordy’s the skyscraper that met me at the door?”

  “I’ve got enemies same as you. You could afford one, wouldn’t you hire a bodyguard?”

  “I made forty thousand last year before taxes.”

  “That’s just about what I paid in taxes.”

  “You want your part of it back?”

  “Hey, I wasn’t flexing any muscles.” He took the arm down. “Inspector, I confess. I blacked my face and dressed up in drag and shot at Sunsmith myself. I didn’t agree with his interpretation of the Old Testament.”

  “Caroline Vetters had a history of addiction to heroin and prescription drugs. She had five connections that we know of. Two of them are with the Boniface family. Now the Maggiore family.”

  “I’m not into narcotics. The heat isn’t worth it.”

  “That’s not what the DEA says. They’re cooperating with ATF to see you go down on that charge of smuggling guns to South America.”

  “That trial hasn’t started yet. You know where my cash is tied up.”

  “In the very thing Sunsmith is crusading against.”

  “Clergymen are off limits, especially famous ones. Same as cops and reporte
rs and people in office.”

  “Nobody’s off limits if Charles Maggiore wants him out bad enough.”

  “Shit. Look at it from my side. I take out Sunsmith, close his mouth, I open up the mouth of everybody in his congregation, swing everybody sitting on the fence over to his side and some that are on mine. A dead saint is a hell of a lot tougher to fight than a live clown in a pink robe. If I thought he’d accept them I’d fucking send some of my people over to see he doesn’t slip while walking across the water in his bathtub and hit his head, because as sure as God’s a Sicilian they’ll say I slugged him with a roulette wheel.”

  Pontier was playing with his moustache. “You make a hell of a case. I’ll say that.”

  “I’m telling it true and you know it.”

  “Of course, you could be working the double backspin. Kill the Reverend and count on everybody thinking you innocent because killing him would be worse for you than not killing him.”

  “Jesus Christ.” The slick nigger even thought like a white cop. “He gets dead he gets dead, everybody knows why regardless of who ordered it. Either way I’m behind the eight ball.”

  “It’s just the lady or the tiger with you mob guys, isn’t it?”

  “More like the tiger or the tiger.”

  “Well, don’t leave town.” Pontier placed his hands on the arms of his chair.

  “You mean Grosse Pointe?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Sergeant Lovelady sat slumped in rolls of fat behind the wheel of the unmarked car parked across the street from Maggiore’s house. His favorite yellow blazer was bunched around his chest under his arms, the button fastened. Pontier thought he looked like the Michelin man. He got in on the passenger’s side. “See anything?”

  “That freak in the black suit came out once to chase biplanes off the roof. Where do they find guys like that, the circus?”