Any Man's Death Read online

  “Save it for the congregation.” She settled the glasses back on her nose and closed her eyes, lifting her chin to the sun.

  For a moment he sat motionless. Then he leaned forward again and placed a huge palm on her oiled thigh. “I will ask the sisters to pray for you.”

  She opened her eyes to look down at the hand, then across at him. “He is risen.”

  Grinning, he withdrew the hand and got up to leave.

  More junipers screened the front of the four-acre Bloomfield Hills plot from the street, where two cars were parked with their finishes baking in the sun. Two of the Reverend Sunsmith’s personal bodyguards sat in the white-over-maroon Buick Electra in back while Paul Ledyard shared the cream Lincoln Continental stretch in front with the other two. The engine and air conditioning were off, and seated four feet behind them on the lavender-upholstered back seat he could smell the pair sweating under their aftershave. It was almost as bad as the locker room at headquarters.

  He knew who belonged to the low sprawling white brick house behind the junipers. Two years before, he had accompanied a lieutenant named Wurmser to that address to ask Mrs. Thalberg to come down and identify an Italian national awaiting extradition back to his country for subversive activities. Wurmser had handled liaison with the authorities in Rome following her husband’s kidnapping and had a bug up his ass about anything Italian if it could get him inside a trim pair of pants. Of course she couldn’t match the prisoner’s voice to the man with whom she had discussed ransom over the telephone, but Ledyard had thought the whole thing worthwhile for the opportunity to observe the handsome brown woman with the light hair and model’s erect posture. Rich widows were always attractive in the newspapers but hardly ever were, really. This one fit the image. He wondered if she and the Reverend had something going.

  But then the bushes shook a little on either side of the flagstone path leading back from the sidewalk and the great man inserted his shoulders between them, ducking a little, and the bodyguard behind the wheel of the Lincoln got out to open the rear door for him next to Ledyard. He had been in the house just under fifteen minutes; if they did have something going he was one fast man with a zipper. The whole seat dipped as he sat down.

  “Church,” he told the driver, when he was back behind the wheel.

  As they slid away from the big house, the Buick following, Sunsmith’s attention remained on the scenery gliding past the tinted windows. His right arm rested on the window ledge with the big diamond sparkling on his pinky. In the six days Ledyard had been babysitting him he hadn’t said three words to the officer. They had spent a good part of that time on the road, stopping at residences and businesses throughout Detroit and most of its many suburbs. After the second day Ledyard had begun keeping a record of the stops in his pocket pad, writing them down from memory after his shift was over. He wasn’t sure why. But he planned to discuss them with Sergeant Twill that evening when Twill came on to relieve him.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Arab was a perfect miniature of a grown man, less than five feet and eighty pounds and built to scale. He had plainly bought his silver-yoked cowboy shirt and brown corduroys in the children’s department and could have been mistaken from behind for a boy of nine or ten. But his face with its pompadour of curly black hair was long and narrow, beveling back from a perfect wedge of a nose, brown, and pockmarked like wormwood. His eyes were dead yellow. Later it would occur to Roger that he was the first Arab he had ever seen without a moustache.

  From behind the glass counter of the liquor store on Woodward, the man looked at his customer a long time before he turned and went through the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY at the back, moving his chin for Roger to follow. It was a storeroom stacked almost to the cobwebby ceiling with cartons labeled Seagram’s and Jack Daniel’s and Old Granddad and a lot of other brands the young man didn’t recognize, some of them identified by strange characters that looked like Hebrew although he was plenty sure it wasn’t. The air was a hundred proof. He went on following the Arab through a square arch and down a flight of wooden stairs worn hollow, ducking to avoid a bare lit electric bulb under which his guide had passed without taking any such precautions.

  In the basement were more cartons, empty, and a scabrous steel desk from a service station with bills and receipts arranged neatly on it in piles. The light came from another naked bulb that swung from its cord after the Arab pulled its chain. There was a rectangular window at ground level but it had been painted over.

  In the center of the room, effectively filling it, stood an old oilburner in gray sheet metal with square ducts radiating out from it like spokes in a wheel. Bending, the Arab slid a Four Roses carton from the space between the furnace and a water heater of similar vintage. From this he drew a number of glassine bundles clouded pink with Cosmoline and laid them side by side on a bare corner of the desk.

  Roger said, “Jesus, the furnace kicks in it’ll blow the roof off the building.”

  “It hasn’t worked as long as I own the place,” said the Arab. “Besides, I don’t keep ammunition down here. You have to deal that somewhere else.”

  Roger lifted a greasy rag off a control switch sealed with rust to the side of the furnace and unwrapped the bundles, using the rag to lift out their contents and inspect them. The light glistened off the Cosmoline-streaked surfaces of a Smith & Wesson short .44 magnum and a P-38 with a grip slim enough for a woman’s hand and a nickeled High Standard .22 he didn’t much like because it was a single-shot that you broke like a shotgun to replace the spent cartridge. He passed over a bulky bundle whose length suggested a Colt Python—too big—and slid out a Colt Woodsman .22 semiautomatic, the target model.

  “That’s an old one,” the Arab said. “You won’t find another one off the NRA range. It came in the box, unsold stock from a guy in Texas that died. I bought out his widow. Ink was still wet on his obituary.”

  “No history?” Extending his right arm, Roger sighted in on a fat brown spider crouched in its web in the corner of the painted-over window.

  “Was still in the box like I said. Three-fifty.”

  “Shit, downtown it wouldn’t run me a hundred.”

  “Sure, score it off some nigger on Michigan Avenue, it’s been used in a dozen stickups, killed a Stop ’n’ Rob owner in Sterling Heights. Like carrying around a lit stick of dynamite till the cops toss you. Or deal it over the counter in some hock place, do the paperwork, cops trace it from ballistics straight to your pocket. I never sold nobody a piece with a pedigree.”

  “Yeah, I’d say that too I wanted to score a fast three and a half.”

  “Man, I don’t have to do business with you. You came here.”

  “Give you three.”

  “Put the piece back. Nine years I been doing this, I got two arms and legs and I don’t talk in a high voice. What’s that tell you? I tell you what it tells you, it tells you I never sold out a customer. I don’t haggle neither. Three-fifty is what I said and three-fifty is what I said.”

  Roger laid down the weapon and skinned seven fifties off a thick fold he took from his jeans pocket. The Arab accepted them and poked them through a slit shaped like an arrow in his cowboy shirt. “Get you something to carry it in,” he said.

  Back in his Royal Oak apartment, Roger lifted a stack of shirts and undershorts out of a drawer in his dresser in the bedroom, pulled up the false bottom, and put away the gun and a box of .22 shells he had bought elsewhere. Before replacing the panel he took out an unlabeled videocassette, which he carried into the small living room and fed into the VCR he had rented from a place in Birmingham.

  “… It is a pact, not a petition, and it is not with your neighbors, but with Satan, and the CCGD does not stand for Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit, but for Cry Craps and Go to the Devil!”

  Perched on the edge of a hassock with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his chin—the position in which he used to watch Hawaii Five-O when he was eight—he watched the big black man wit
h a shaved head the size of a basketball strutting across the platform at a downriver dedication ceremony of some sort, his white satin robes shimmering in the sun. Roger had taped the open-air event off last night’s Six O’Clock News. He knew well enough what the Reverend looked like, but wanted to get some idea of his security following last Sunday’s attempt on his life.

  He saw the four bodyguards in blue suits balancing out the sisters in yellow on the other side of the platform and a slightly smaller black man in a tan poplin jacket seated with them who was obviously a plainclothes officer, and when the camera swept briefly over the crowd cheering and applauding Sunsmith’s sermon and swaying to “Jesus Loves Me,” he spotted four more men wearing jackets in the heat. At least two of them were carrying walkie-talkies.

  Cops were dumb, always preparing for the attack that had already taken place. They figured if someone had tried to kill someone else in public, that’s how it was going to be the next time.

  He was rewinding the tape when his telephone rang.

  “Roger? It’s Mercer.”

  He caught himself wondering for a bare instant how she could be calling him when he had just seen her singing on television with the rest of the choir. “Hi, babe,” he said, stopping the tape. Onscreen, the Reverend posed with his mouth open pink and one arm raised, the robe sleeve slipping to expose a ruby cufflink. A wavy line crawled across his broad middle.

  “I talked to him.”

  “Who?”

  “Who. Him! He’ll see you after the early service tomorrow morning.”

  Roger looked at the black eyes glaring back at him from the halted tape. “Alone?”

  “Well, as alone as he gets.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks, babe.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “Will I see you tonight?”

  “Tonight? Sure. It’ll have to be a short night, though.”

  “Right. You’re getting up early.”

  He said he’d stop by her apartment at six and they said good-bye. He started the tape again.

  “It is a pact, not a petition, and it is not with your neighbors, but with Satan …”

  Macklin felt tiny and exposed standing atop the pedestrian walkway over Grand River Avenue, outlined against a mauve sky with cars swishing below towed by the beams of their headlights. It was the kind of place a bodyguard would choose to meet someone—public, with both parties at an equal disadvantage. To the east rose the vertical scape of downtown, the turreted structures of the twenties and thirties pointed with the lights of the pyramided windows while the newer buildings showed square and flat, their glass sides lit in horizontal rows like characters on a computer screen. Westward stretched the tract homes and low-slung businesses of the suburbs, hugging the earth, illuminated headstones in the vast cemetery of the latter third of the twentieth century.

  He thought of everything in terms of death these days, a sure sign he had been in the business too long. For the first time in his life it was getting to be more than just a job. He couldn’t watch the President speaking on television without thinking how absurdly easy it would be to blow out his brains with a scoped rifle, bypassing the celebrated bulletproof vest entirely, and be blocks away before the Secret Service reacted. When science announced a fresh victory over death, he thought only of ways to reverse the defeat. He wondered if carpenters went around studying woodgrains during their off hours. He wondered if they would worry about it if they did.

  The walkway shifted slightly. Someone had mounted the steps, someone heavy. Macklin fingered the Shooting Master in its clip on his belt with his jacket hanging over it. He never carried a gun unless he was working or someone made an appointment to meet him in a place like a pedestrian walkway over a busy street.

  The newcomer rose into view thirty feet away at the top of the steps, a great bulk blotting out the lights behind him. The white V of his shirt cast a ghostly glow against the black of the rest of his attire. He came toward Macklin with an oddly graceful, gliding gait, like an Olympic skater. Or a professional wrestler.

  “You don’t need that, Gordy.” Macklin tipped a hand toward the gun enveloped in the big man’s right hand.

  Gordy stopped walking, but left the gun where it was. “What was the idea of that picture?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t think you’d come when I invited you otherwise.”

  “I almost didn’t then. You know Mr. Maggiore’s phones are all tapped.”

  “It’s why I let you call me back from an outside phone. Pick up any tails?”

  “One. I lost him in the bus block on Woodward. What’s it about?”

  “I drew the contract on your boss.”

  “I guessed that. Just because I’m big don’t mean I’m dumb.”

  “It’s just business. Your boss started it when he hung out paper on Boniface.”

  “You’re working for Boniface. I guessed that too.”

  “Well, you know enough about the way I work to know Maggiore’s as good as in the box.”

  “He ain’t so easy and you know it. He came up hard, not like those business school shits in New York. Maybe you’re figuring on that and it’s why we’re meeting. Knock me down, clear the way.”

  “Gordy, if I wanted to do that I could’ve picked you off when you came up those steps. But you did me some turns back when we were on the same team and I owe you walking-away time. Don’t go back tonight. Leave your stuff there and keep walking.”

  “Shit. You dragged me clear out here to tell me that? Shit.”

  “I’ll blow you both down if you stick.”

  The dying light made pale squares of Gordy’s scarred brow and cheeks and shadowed chin. His eyes were lost in hollows. “I’m a bodyguard. I guard the body. You blow one down you blow us both down. I guess we’re through talking.”

  “I guess we are.”

  “Question is, do I get down from here without carrying any scrap metal I didn’t bring up with me.”

  “Gordy, you know me better than that.”

  “I don’t know you at all.”

  Macklin let out some air and raised his hands, locking them behind his neck. Holding his gun close to his ribcage, the big man stretched out an arm as long as one of Macklin’s legs, patted him down, removed the Colt .38, clip and all, and hooked it on his own belt. Then he continued his search down to Macklin’s ankles. Finally he straightened.

  “I’ll leave yours at the bottom of the steps. You’d just go out and buy another one.”

  “Next time I come shooting. Sorry, Gordy.”

  The big man flexed his fingers around the gun he was holding. “Maybe I kill you now.”

  “You won’t.”

  “What makes it I won’t?”

  “A guy in a coma in a hospital back east that takes a call from Detroit once a month.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I do my homework.”

  Gordy said, “Shit,” turned around, and lumbered back down the steps. The walkway went on swaying until his weight left it.

  Macklin waited, watching the traffic sweeping under his feet, letting up a little now as rush hour drew to a close. He wasn’t so sure Gordy wouldn’t reconsider his humanitarian impulse and wait to pick him off as he descended. Macklin wondered if the big man really believed he had asked him out there to persuade him to stay out of the line of fire.

  By the time the killer felt it was safe to go down he decided he did believe it. Gordy was smart, but his brain moved in a direct line. Just as an example, the Shooting Master was waiting in its clip just where he said it would be.

  CHAPTER 8

  “You should’ve killed him when you had the chance.”

  Steam drifted in front of Charles Maggiore’s slightly lopsided form, blurring it. He sat naked on the bench in a former half-bathroom that he had converted into a sauna, a man well muscled for his age but showing a stubborn ring around his middle and a cruel hump on his left shoulder with skin stretched over it. He was tanned but for a pale st
ripe around his hips and a bent white scar four inches long riding the top of his pelvis on the right side where a bullet had sliced across it in a botched attempt a dozen years before. It might have been an appendectomy scar.

  “You pay other guys for that. We talked about this when I came to work for you.” Gordy stood sweating on the tile floor, his suit turning darker. He made no move to wipe away the perspiration or otherwise show that he was uncomfortable. “What I can’t figure is how come he told me at all. I don’t buy that about not wanting to go through me to get you.”

  “Can’t you?”

  Gordy waited, but the blond Sicilian didn’t supply the answer. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to finish my sauna and turn in. You’re going to get Phil Constable on the phone, tell him I want better guys. Those other two blew it big on Boniface.”

  “It’s Saturday night. He won’t be in the office.”

  “Fuck do I care? Get him at home or wherever he hangs out. Tell him I want that greaseball on a tray by morning or he’ll be on one by noon. I don’t have to tell you to use an outside phone.”

  “It won’t stop Macklin. He’d spliff you just to watch your eyes roll back in your head.”

  “We’ll both worry about Macklin. Me because he’s got the paper on me, you because I pay you to worry about things like that. Meanwhile I don’t close down the show just because I’m in season. I’ve been there more times than I’ve been out.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Lay out my green plaid and make sure the seven-millimeter is cleaned and loaded.”

  “It ain’t registered. Feds toss you and find it they’ll call in the locals. While you’re pulling a year for CCW they’ll be busy throwing up a stone case against you on all the other charges.”

  “I got lawyers to tell me that. They’re worth shit to my ashes if Macklin gets past you. Gordy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aren’t you hot as hell in here in that suit?”

  “The ring was hotter.”