Any Man's Death Read online

  “You know Maggiore. The little guinea hunchback thinks he’s Al Capone.”

  “You play up to it?”

  “I had him thinking he was Public Enemy Number One, right behind Dillinger and Genghis Khan. It’s worth it to watch him strut. Boniface was his, all right.”

  “That’s Belleville’s hot handle. What about Sunsmith?”

  “No, somebody else wants Sunsmith. Maggiore’s just the lightning rod.” Pontier unbuttoned his jacket and rolled down the window. “Let’s go back to thirteen hundred and make some phone calls.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Sister Mercer thought the young man looked just like David Carradine.

  She was a Carradine fan, going back to before Kung Fu, when he was still playing the wastrel sons of powerful ranchers on Gunsmoke; and tended to measure most men she encountered against that standard. (Not the Reverend, however.) This one had hair as long, except his was black, and he had the bone structure and sensuous lips and the lanky build under a fashionably faded blue velour sweatshirt with its sleeves pushed back past his forearms and jeans gone almost white from wearing and washing. But his eyes were more visible than Carradine’s, not just slits, and he was considerably younger despite the shrunken look of his skin, his cavedin cheeks. She guessed he was in his early twenties. In fact he was seventeen.

  She met him in the laundromat on the ground floor of her apartment complex in Dearborn Heights, where he said he was watching a friend’s apartment until the friend returned from a business trip. The conversation started when he warned her that the machine she was about to load wasn’t working and that she’d just be wasting quarters, try this one over here. They were alone in the room that smelled of soap and dank concrete. Normally she avoided contact with strangers under those circumstances, but this one was clean and polite and looked just like David Carradine. He asked her if she had plans for lunch. She said she had choir practice in half an hour. He offered to drive her and she declined. When her small load was dry he held the door for her and said he hoped he’d run into her again.

  She had even island features and cocoa skin and if her hair didn’t curl so tightly she might have been mistaken for Mexican. The corduroy slacks she was wearing that day emphasized her broad hips, and she was self-conscious about them. The only time she didn’t feel that way was when she had on the yellow satin robe that fell in straight folds from her breast to the floor. Men in the congregation admired her when she sang with the others and quickly forgot about her when they saw her in street clothes. She had tried dieting, only to lose all her weight above the waist, and she hadn’t the tenacity to follow an exercise program, although she had tried that too. She was thirty-four years old and had just about given up on male companionship.

  So she felt a little leap in her breast when the young man, who said his name was Roger Martin, met her at the church door as she was leaving practice. He drove her in his spotless old blue Plymouth Duster to a restaurant in Greektown. That night he took her to dinner on the Star of Detroit and stayed with her in her apartment until dawn. The affair was on.

  Three days later—five since Sister Lucinda had tried to kill the Reverend, but when no more attempts followed, Mercer had stopped counting them—she lay naked atop Roger in the dawn light gathering in her bedroom, nuzzling his hairless chest while he stroked smooth palms over her buttocks. He asked her what it was like to work for the church.

  “The Reverend works for the church,” she said. “I work for the Reverend.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s the most Christian man in the world.”

  “Well, it’s his job.”

  “No, it’s the way he is.” She lay listening to Roger’s heartbeat. “He doesn’t pay any of us, we’re volunteers. But he knows I’m on welfare and he gives me money sometimes. I never ask for it, and he won’t take it back. He does it for some of the others too. That’s the way he is. Most people don’t know it, but he owns the Eternal Mercy missions downtown and in Redford. Everyone thinks he’s rich, living off his collections; but he gives most of it away.”

  “He need any help?”

  She laughed and kissed him on the lips. But he was serious. “Well, like what sort of help?”

  “Man like that, people should be told about the good he does,” Roger said. “It could double his collections. He could do twice as much good with twice as much money. See, I’m a human relations consultant.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s sort of my dad’s invention. He’s one too. It’s like public relations, only softer. Not so much hype. A PR flack, if there’s nothing good to say about his client he makes something up. A human relations man makes sure the truth gets out. It’s more honest.”

  “I think I understand.” But she didn’t. She rubbed a palm across his right nipple, feeling it stiffen. In the gentle light he looked no older than seventeen. It had been a shock to learn she was twice his age. But it wasn’t a sin, and it was a warm feeling, the thought that she could attract a good-looking young man, with teenage girls so brazen these days. “I don’t think he’ll hire you.”

  “’Cause I’m just a kid?”

  “You’re not a kid.” She kissed him. “But he handles his own publicity. He’s good at it.”

  “Think he’ll talk to me?”

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “You might be surprised. I’m a charmer.” He ran his hands up to her shoulder blades and back down to her hips. She arched.

  “I’ll ask him,” she croaked, straddling his narrow body.

  Two hours later, after a shower and change, the young man whom Sister Mercer knew as Roger Martin left his apartment in Royal Oak to place a call from a public telephone outside a Michigan Bell office three blocks away. Waiting for his watch to read 8:35, he smoked his tenth cigarette that morning. He had taken up the habit when he’d kicked heroin. Now that his appetite was back and his nerves were settling into a steady thrum, he hoped to taper off tobacco before long. His father had narrowed his own weaknesses by giving up most of the vices, and since his father was still alive in a high-risk profession it seemed like a good idea. That he and his father hated each other was beside the point.

  When the watch hands moved into position he snapped away the cigarette, fed a quarter into the slot, and dialed a number from memory. The telephone rang eleven times, twelve. He stayed on. On thirteen the receiver was lifted on the other end.

  “This is Roger Macklin,” he said into the silence.

  There was a pause before a man’s voice came on. “Make the delivery.” The line went dead.

  After a beat, Roger hung up, grinning. He went back to his apartment to rest. All this groundwork was cutting in on his sleeping hours.

  The blue-black Cadillac salon model looked attenuated, a Warner Brothers cartoon vehicle that snaked around corners and followed dips in the road like a centipede. Its windows were opaque on the outside and when it slid into the curb in front of the racquet club on Gratiot it took up two full parking spaces. Macklin pulled his Camaro into a loading zone a block and a half back and watched through binoculars as Gordy unfolded himself in sections from the limousine’s front seat and held open the rear door for his employer, shielding Maggiore entirely from Macklin’s view with his body. All the killer saw of the Sicilian on his way across the sidewalk and up the front steps was a patch of blond hair and an elbow sheathed in bright expensive material. The two went inside, Gordy bending his knees and turning his hips to clear the doorframe.

  What made the big man so desirable as a bodyguard had little to do with his size, Macklin decided. He would have taken a bullet or a bomb meant for his employer without hesitation. The fact was as clear as if it were painted on his billboard-size back. It was a formidable weapon at a time when even high-level bosses of Maggiore’s influence were selling out their peers in return for government clemency.

  Normally, Macklin gave little thought to bodyguards. They were just window dressing after all,
a measure of a man’s status. He remembered the numbers man on Antietam who had surrounded himself with wild-haired Haitians armed with machetes, Christ, machetes that they carried bold as cane-cutters down the street at collection time. They had terrified the neighborhood. But then Macklin had paid two of them five hundred dollars apiece to hold the others off with blades drawn while Macklin popped the numbers man in a vacant lot on his way to the condemned hotel where he conducted business. You bought them when you couldn’t scare them off, and if you couldn’t buy them you took them out with their bosses. But Gordy had no price and there was no predicting how many bullets his enormous frame could handle before he reached out with one of those hands that could palm a bowling ball and crushed his assailant’s throat like a soda straw. Besides, Macklin liked him.

  The killer waited. Less than two minutes behind the Cadillac, a green panel truck with a cartoon bee in a derby painted on the side cruised past and made a right at the corner beyond the racquet club building. Thirty seconds later it came back along that same cross street in the opposite direction, turned left onto Gratiot, and drifted to a stop by a fire hydrant across from the limousine. A magnetic sign reading BUSY BEE DIAPER SERVICE decorated the door on the passenger’s side. Christ, a diaper service in the Pampers age. If anything the feds were dumber than they had been under Hoover. He could swear he saw the camera lens poking through one of the busy bee’s eyes.

  Waiting, he turned on the radio. Paul Harvey horse’s-assed his way through the light moment at the end of his broadcast and yielded to the local news. Lightning had struck two teenagers playing golf at Oakland Hills, killing one and critically injuring the other. The badly decomposed body of a four-year-old girl missing for three weeks from her parents’ home in Farmington had been found jammed into a culvert off Beech-Daly Road in Redford Township. The American Civil Liberties Union was working on a way to try a man a second time for a crime for which he had received a sentence the ACLU considered too light. The mayor was accusing a Republican of racism, or maybe it was a racist he was accusing of Republicanism; the announcer didn’t seem too sure. Lightning never struck where and whom you wanted it to.

  The station then played a taped excerpt from a speech delivered by the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith at the dedication of a new free clinic in Taylor. Somehow he had worked in a reference to the temptations of Jesus by way of introducing his favorite subject, the casino gambling measure in Detroit. Macklin liked listening to his voice. If there was a God, he hoped He sounded like the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith.

  The light at the corner changed twice while he was waiting. It was just turning amber when a semi truck with a double bottom trundled past farting its air brakes. It stopped with its front tires in the middle of the crosswalk. Macklin turned off the radio and climbed out of the Camaro.

  The huge truck was still waiting at the light, its diesel engine burbling, when Macklin reached the Cadillac. His view of the panel truck on the opposite side of the street was completely blocked. He slid a Slim Jim from his deep inside breast pocket, popped up the lock button on the door on the driver’s side of the limousine in less than a second, and opened the door. The light had changed, but the driver of the semi was signaling a turn and had to let a string of cars pass through the intersection before he could ease out. By the time he released his brakes with a long hissing sigh, Macklin had finished and relocked the door. He was inside his own car before the panel truck’s view of the limousine was restored. He started the engine, entered traffic, and swept past the Busy Bee without looking in that direction.

  When Gordy escorted his employer out of the building forty-five minutes later—Maggiore’s hair still damp from the shower following his workout—he spotted the panel truck and thought, dumb feds. He closed the Cadillac’s rear door on Maggiore and compacted himself into the driver’s seat. With the key halfway to the ignition he froze. A photograph of himself holding the front door of the house in Grosse Pointe for Maggiore was secured with a pin to the horn button in the center of the steering wheel.

  He unpinned it and turned it over. On the back, someone had blocked-printed two words in black Magic Marker:

  CHAPTER 6

  Elizabeth, Carmen Thalberg’s black maid from the Central American republic of Belize, greeted the Reverend with a broad smile and accompanied him to the backyard patio, where her mistress lay sunning herself in a white bikini on a flowered chaise near the pool. The four corners of the pool were anchored by Grecian female nudes done in limestone—none of which, the Reverend decided, had anything on the fine slim lady in her late thirties offering her slick legs and flat belly to the sun. She had loads of light brown hair that looked golden out in the bright open and slender feet ending in neatly rounded nails without polish and around her neck was a tiny silver chain with crucifix attached. She didn’t stir as Elizabeth left and the big black man moved a patio chair into the shade offered by the junipers that surrounded the yard and trusted his weight to it. His suit that day was teal trimmed with gold buttons and his tie and shirt were silver.

  When after a full minute she still hadn’t moved or spoken, he drew a thick envelope from inside his jacket and leaned forward to lay it on her stomach. She smiled then, teeth showing blue-white against the tan on top of her natural dark pigment, and sat up slightly to riffle long fingers through the bills inside. She had pale lashes behind the rose-tinted lenses of her big sunglasses. The Reverend wondered again about her ancestors.

  “Five thousand,” he said. “I could’ve sent someone, but I like your smile.”

  “Bullshit. You like my tits and ass. You know I’m always out by the pool this time of day. But thank you.” She put the envelope and its contents on a metal table supporting a tall glass with lumps of ice in the bottom.

  Her accent was faint, left over after years of voice coaching, and could have been mistaken for western or deep southern but for her Hispanic first name. The Reverend knew only that she had come out of Honduras or Guatemala or someplace like that, brought back by the son of a family that had made its fortune off an improved fuel pump design for General Motors. Shortly after their honeymoon the son had been kidnapped by Italian Marxists while touring a plant in Florence, and although the family paid the ransom his bloated body was found two days later floating down the Arno. He had left Carmen sixteen million dollars and two houses. The other was on Mackinac Island.

  “Where are the Pips?” she asked.

  “Outside. I’m safe enough here.”

  “Who’s trying to kill you, a disappointed investor?”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “I have five thousand dollars on my patio table.”

  “Maybe you want to turn some of it back,” he said. “Sweeten the pot.”

  “Ask me next week. I’m expecting a dividend check from the offshore fields in Nova Scotia Monday.”

  He shook his big shiny head. “Rich people, they never seem to have any money.”

  “Rich people don’t need it. Not the taxable kind, anyway.”

  “Not your rich. Music rich got to put up cash every time. I knew a man, he made more than you’re worth off just one album. Whenever he checked into a hotel he had to pay a damage deposit up front. Well, he ate live mice onstage.”

  “Hotel people are so unreasonable.”

  He sat back, the legs of his chair spreading under him. “Collections are up. I can offer you the old scale until Wednesday. After that …” He turned up his palms.

  “You’ll offer me the scale we agreed on whenever. IRS finds out you’re running in the black they’ll yank your nonprofit status and audit you back to the Carter administration.”

  “You too. Unless you’ve been declaring that.” He waggled a finger toward the five thousand.

  She took off the sunglasses. Her eyes were startlingly dark against the pale lashes. “How many investors does your church have?”

  “I prefer to call them donors.”

  “Answer the question.”

 
; “It’s a question you don’t get to ask. You hire a band you like, you don’t ask them did they study at Julliard or Joliet.”

  “Cut the music crap. You’ve been out of it too long. I find out you’ve been selling more than a hundred percent of your operation, paying me out of someone else’s investment, I’ll shut you down. The government can sting me on account of that’s what it does and I have to take it. I don’t have to take the old pyramid game off a broken-down guitar player with a pink Bible.”

  The accent was stronger when she was angry, not that she appeared angry otherwise. She didn’t raise her voice or spit words; if anything her tone was more level than usual. But she bit off her consonants.

  He said, “You lack faith.”

  “I was helping my brother sell maps to Blackbeard’s buried treasure to gullible turistas when you were still learning your chords. You can’t con a con.”

  “I thought maybe you married a suspicious man.”

  “Marty had modern ideas about involving wives in the business. He got my feet wet. When he died I got wet all over in a hurry.”

  So did Marty, he thought. “He needed God.”

  She touched the crucifix at her throat, an automatic gesture. “He had God. I have God. The place where I grew up, you still had God after you saw what the priests did in His name, you had Him for life.”

  “You feel that way I’m surprised you donate.”

  “Business can’t be anything but business. That’s another thing Marty taught me. His family didn’t make three hundred million dollars avoiding doing business with people they didn’t like.”

  “Sister Carmen,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking, you’d look good in yellow. Can you sing?”

  “Like a brake. Am I supposed to be flattered or what? You ask me to join your harem.”

  “The choir sings for God. Only for God.” It was his pulpit voice. “I serve the Lord, Who provides. Sins of the flesh committed under His roof are mortal.”