Any Man's Death Read online

A drop of sweat quivered on each of Maggiore’s eyelashes. He looked at the big bodyguard through them as through a prism. “You’re sure you’re not Sicilian? Maybe way back on your mother’s side.”

  “Nope. French and Hungarian.”

  Maggiore told him to go make the call.

  Later, in his dressing room trying on the lime-colored windowpane blazer, Maggiore peered objectively at his reflection in the full-length mirror, searching for some sign that betrayed he was armed. There was none.

  Tailors who could design a jacket to cover a gun were becoming rare. Most executives of his stature preferred to pay others to carry weapons for them. Some of them would be dead in a year. They came straight out of business school and thought that because they wore rep ties and balled their pretty secretaries at lunch like any good Merrill Lynch broker they were in a legitimate line of work. But the business still depended on pimps and hookers and addicts at street level and a bullet was still the most effective means of getting the promotion list moving.

  Why anyone wanted to move up was beyond him. The feds called him a crimelord when they weren’t going partners with him and had hot pants to get him in bracelets on the Six O’clock News. Most of the street talent was like the turkeys who had dropped the Boniface hit. When you did find a professional, sooner or later he turned. The business was Constable people on one side and Macklins on the other, with the Maggiores sitting between them with flanks exposed. All this on top of the usual problems with organized labor and with stockholders, the stockholders in this case being those dinosaurs in New York and Vegas who were still sorting out their wins and losses after the hits on Dutch Schultz and Bugsy Siegel. When it came down to it the only things you could count on were slim seven-millimeters and good tailors, and both were getting hard to find.

  Macklin, parked across the street from Maggiore’s house, was grateful when Gordy left to make the telephone call. The only car he had been able to lift that night with his limited knowledge of locking transmissions had been a red Nissan, and the seats in most foreign cars had been designed for young men with durable backs.

  Gordy never left the house except to place calls for his boss that couldn’t be trusted to the tapped lines on the premises; the meeting with Macklin had been a special event. While compiling his file on Maggiore, the killer had followed Gordy on several of these errands and learned that he had a favorite public telephone in the lobby of a restaurant in downtown Grosse Pointe. It was a twenty-minute round trip. The call itself would not last more than five minutes, as Gordy was not a gab. It was more than enough time.

  He held no illusions that Maggiore would not see through his strategy in telling the bodyguard of his plans. The Sicilian’s brain was Byzantine, forever wondering if the pea that had been discovered under the right walnut shell was now under the left, or if the man in charge of the game had counted on his thinking that and placed it under the right yet again, or if, thinking that his mark would be thinking just that, had instead placed it under the right on the theory that the mark would think that too simple. If A wants to kill B by fooling B into sending his bodyguard out of the house, it was in B’s best interest to do just that and lay a trap for A. But not, Macklin decided, if A was expecting that. Sometimes a simple line of work could make Form 1040 read like a child’s primer.

  The feds were easier. Tonight they had exchanged the diaper service van for another with no advertising on it, a civilian vehicle parked two cars down with a sunset painted on its rear window. They had set up in front of the house because the light from the streetlamps aided their cameras and because they were assigned to keep track of who went in and came out as guests, not who sneaked in uninvited. Macklin started the Nissan, pulled out and around the van, and cruised down the less adequately lit side street north of Maggiore’s lot. There he parked and got out and let himself easily over the low wall surrounding the house and yard. The Colt’s butt gouged him a little during the climb, but that was okay. It took his mind off the incipient pain crawling across his lower back.

  Pontier found Sergeant Lovelady seated on the grass a little off from the gang of uniformed cops in short sleeves lining up barricades against no crowd at all. Belle Isle was no place to be late on a Saturday night, even in warm weather. When Lovelady spotted his superior approaching he got to his feet with that peculiar grace exhibited by fat men everywhere, brushing grass off his yellow sportcoat and straightening out the roll at the top of his trousers. Pontier was dressed more casually in a blue Windbreaker and jeans and running shoes.

  “Sorry, Inspector,” said the sergeant. “You said to get you when anything came up on this one.”

  “I meant it when I said it. Who found her?”

  “Kid dipping for carp. Thought it was some kind of float and waded out and pulled it in to shore. He didn’t cop the smell till then. Tossed his cookies over there on the beach.”

  “I’ll take in that sight some other time. He here?”

  “Sent him home. He was busting curfew as it was. I got his folks’ number and a statement to go on.” He patted his right hip pocket, bulging with a notepad and Sergeant Lovelady.

  “How long in the water?”

  “Maybe a week, from the smell. M.E.’s there now. My guess is she got tangled up in reeds or a rusty Model A with a stiff in it left over from Prohibition and just broke loose. Maybe got tipped into the water up around St. Clair Shores. Someone would of seen her before this if she drifted much further.”

  “Someone might’ve anyway. Let’s have a look.”

  “Be ready for it,” the sergeant warned.

  The body had been placed on a coroner’s black rubber bag that had been unzipped and spread flat on the ground sloping toward the water. Black, nude, and fat even before bloating, it lay spreadeagled like a monstrous parade balloon with belly and breasts distended, its features lost in puffs of dark dough. The remains of a modest Afro hennaed almost orange stuck out in clumps streaked green with algae. The corpse looked artificial in the harsh beam of the police strobes with the flat surface of Lake St. Clair stretching behind it and the lights of Detroit spangling the mainland beyond. The stench was a living creature writhing in the still air. Not a few of the uniformed officers present were smoking. The tobacco acted as a disinfectant.

  The medical examiner was a young woman with large-framed eyeglasses and sandy hair cropped close at the temples and nape and tumbling in a sort of carnation over her forehead. She had on sandals and corduroy slacks and a man’s gray workshirt with the tail hanging out over the slacks. She had put away her instruments in a black metal box and was standing with one foot propped up on it, smoking a cigarette. Lovelady introduced her as Dr. Langan.

  “There’s a hole at the base of the skull that might have been made by a small-caliber bullet,” she said without preamble. “If so it passed through the spot where the spinal cord meets the brain.”

  “The medulla oblongata,” Pontier said.

  She started a little. “Yes. Well, I may find any number of other causes when I get inside, but that hole was more than enough to induce brain death if it’s as deep as it looks. Whether her lungs were still working when she went in depends on how much water I find in them.”

  “Show him what else you found,” said Lovelady.

  From her shirt pocket she drew a tiny glittering something on the end of a gold chain and handed it to Pontier, who examined the crucifix. “I had to pry it out of a crease in her neck,” she said. “That must be how the killer missed it when he stripped the body.”

  Lovelady said, “It’s the same kind worn by the sisters in Sunsmith’s choir. It’s why I called you.”

  Weighing the ornament and chain in his palm, the inspector looked down at the body. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sister Vernal.”

  “Think Sister Lucinda did her?” asked Lovelady.

  “I don’t know. She used a .38 on Sunsmith.”

  Dr. Langan said, “I just guessed a bullet. Hole like that, could have been an awl or
an icepick.”

  “Thanks, Doc. Okay to call you Doc?”

  “Just don’t call me honey.”

  The detectives walked away from the stench.

  “Icepick, shit, where do they get them?” Lovelady said. “I ain’t seen one in a hardware store since I bet I was twelve.”

  Pontier thrust the crucifix at him for bagging. “Even less likely if it was Caroline Vetters. She wasn’t a stone killer, just someone they hopped up and pointed in the Reverend’s direction. We’ll do a sweep. Pull the file on every mechanic we got and ask them some questions.”

  “What, Detroit?”

  “Detroit, Birmingham, Southfield, downriver, the Pointes—hell, call Iroquois Heights, use our markers. If it walks and it kills for money I want to talk to it.”

  “Jesus. I retire in two months.”

  “Smartasses retire quicker than that, Sergeant.”

  “I hear you,” Lovelady said.

  The alarm system was nothing. They never were. Macklin shorted it out with a penny, jimmied open the french doors leading in from the pool, and stood inside the anteroom to the library letting his eyes adjust themselves to the darkness indoors. Not even a deadbolt lock. It was surprising how much faith even someone as cautious as Charles Maggiore placed in walls and an exclusive location.

  After two minutes he began moving, feeling his way with his feet for any new furniture that might have been added since he had last visited the house as a guest. For the rest, he had drawn his floor plan from a memory that he had spent years training. The Colt Shooting Master was in his right hand.

  The library door was open. Maggiore wasn’t in that room. Macklin determined that much after five minutes of excruciating advancement. He was aware of the time, although he had removed his wristwatch to avoid catching moonlight on its face; the clock in his head—a natural convenience, not an acquired one—was accurate to within a few seconds. He timed his movements, sensing a trap.

  Maggiore wasn’t in the living room or in the kitchen or in the dining alcove. From that room, bulletproof bow windows looked out on Lake St. Clair a brisk swim north of the spot where Wayne County Morgue attendants were busy moving a body found beached on Belle Isle. The bedroom and bathroom were deserted. Macklin found the door leading down to the basement gym. It was where Maggiore spent half his life.

  The room, illuminated grayly through two rectangular windows at ground level, was silent, smelling faintly of leather from the punching bag and exercise horse and of Sicilian sweat. The perspiration odor had an odd effect on Macklin. It represented his first personal contact in months with the man who had tried to have him killed while they were ostensibly working on the same team; the man who, failing that, had lured Macklin’s son into the business of killing. A modern Mediterranean, the man nevertheless understood the power to be gained through the slow murder of the soul.

  Macklin waited for the sensation to pass. He had always worked from an emotionless base; beyond professional pride it was of little moment to him who lived and who died or how. You did a thing enough times until you could do it without thinking, grooving in your muscles and reactions like a key worn to a certain lock. It was the way to success and the way away from guilt and madness. But the sensation did not pass, and time was growing short. Gordy would be finishing up his telephone conversation by now. He had ten minutes at most.

  He had taken a step toward the only door in the room other than the entrance when it sprang open and darkness dissolved in a flash of red and yellow. But before the report imploded his eardrums, he aimed the Colt at the crooked figure outlined by the flash and put two into the left side of its chest. His own muzzle flare receded and into its place rushed noise and darkness and pain.

  CHAPTER 9

  The church where the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith held forth twice Sundays and all day Christmas Day had started out Catholic, only to be placed on the market when the Vatican had decided to consolidate the archdiocese during the money crunch of the late seventies. There it had languished for five years, a steepled white elephant with no resale value except to another man of God, who bought it outright with his share of the proceeds from his group’s one hit record. He had added more pews, placed amplifiers where the votive candles had stood, and turned the rectory into dressing rooms for the sisters and a big office for himself with a white shag rug, an altar-shaped desk topped with black onyx, and a portrait of himself in mauve robes done in Day-Glo on black velvet in a silver frame as big as a barn door. The walls were paneled in yellow oak and a mounted copy of the group’s gold record occupied a spot level with a framed certificate of ordination.

  Roger studied the latter while waiting for Sunsmith’s entrance. He was wearing a brown corduroy sportcoat over a clean pair of jeans and his only necktie, blue polyester with a pink stripe, and he had combed his hair and shaved. His gun was at home. Good thing, because before being allowed into the rectory he had been frisked expertly by the black police officer he had spotted on television earlier, while the Reverend’s four huge bodyguards looked on. He hadn’t seen Mercer, who was busy changing along with the other sisters for the late service, but one of the giants had his name in a notebook and after the search he had been conducted into the office and told to wait. The bodyguards all moved like men wearing guns. Church had changed since Roger’s Sunday school days.

  His inspection of the office had yielded nothing of use to him. The desk was bare on top, the drawers empty but for sermon notes and stationery and hundreds of guitar picks. The guitar itself, red and silver and shaped like a scimitar, leaned on its amplifier in a corner. If there was a safe it wasn’t hidden in any of the standard places. There were no books, unless one counted six big Bibles on a shelf in assorted colors to match the Reverend’s robes. Four shelves running the length of the east wall contained dated videotapes that Roger guessed were of the Sunday services. They were broadcast locally on cable and syndicated across the country. Roger shifted his attention from the ordination certificate to the glow-in-the-dark painting of the big brown man in mauve and wondered if he wore a bulletproof vest under his robes.

  The man himself entered, bald head shining, square body sheathed in a royal-blue three-piece piped in gold like a band uniform, orange necktie held in place on a matching shirt by a big gold clasp in the shape of a musical clef. He showed Roger a grin as big as the room and crushed his hand and sat him in a chair upholstered in white leather and slid one hand onto the edge of the desk. He was even more physically overwhelming in person, with a face the size of a caricature’s and heat radiating out from his center as from an ambulatory furnace. “Sister Mercer speaks highly of you,” he rumbled. “I hope you two have been discreet.”

  “About this meeting? I didn’t—”

  “About your affair. Of course she thinks she’s in love with you. I don’t ask the sisters to be angels anywhere but in the choir, but I do require they display good judgment in how they conduct their personal lives. Well, you’ve come to talk about working in the service of the Lord.”

  “The service—”

  “I’ll start. Your name isn’t Martin and everything you know about public relations you could poke through a buttonhole. Your name is Roger Macklin. You have a history of arrests in this area for possession of narcotics. You spent two months in a drug rehabilitation center in Farmington Hills last year. Your father’s name is Peter Macklin, a hired killer for the Boniface family, or he was before he went independent. Young Mr. Macklin, I could have had the elders shoot you down when you showed up at the church and the case would never have gone to trial.”

  The elders were evidently what Sunsmith called his bodyguards. Consciously, Roger convinced himself he had accepted all this without moving a muscle in his face. Subconsciously he was aware that his mouth was open. He closed it, worked his tongue from side to side to gather lubrication, and said: “Who told you all that?”

  “Christians have friends all over. Did you think because Sister Mercer recommended you you could
just walk in here and pick your spot to shoot me?”

  “Shoot you? No kidding, shoot you? You thought that?” Roger felt himself recovering. Sunsmith hadn’t mentioned anything he couldn’t have gotten off a police blotter. “Hell, why’d I want to shoot you?”

  “One of the sisters tried to shoot me in this church one week ago. I hope you’ll excuse me if I suspect a complete stranger of entertaining the same designs.”

  “Was any of those arrests for murder or attempted murder?”

  “No, but then neither was any of Sister Lucinda’s.”

  “Hey, I don’t talk to my dad since I found out what he does. I don’t even go deer hunting. Look, I fucked up my life with the drugs, but I’m off them now and I’m looking to start again, that’s all.”

  Sunsmith showed all his teeth. “You found Christ in rehab, that it?”

  “I might say it if I thought you were dumb enough to buy it. Guy in my ward, he saw Joseph when he was on meth. Said he knew it was Joseph on account of he had that worried look like you’d have if your wife told you it was God’s baby she was having. Anyway, I hear the guy’s in El Salvador now reading the New Testament to the contras. Me, I was to see a burning bush I’d figure some kids set it on fire smoking shit. I ain’t been to church since I was little. I need a job is all. Something interesting enough to keep me from pumping my veins full of crap.”

  “That why you took up with Mercer?”

  “No, that just happened. The job idea came after.”

  The big man sat swinging one leg, his large fingers drumming the desk in four-beat time. He said: “I don’t ask everyone I hire to believe. One of the elders is a Muslim and I think Jesus turned the ancestor of my publicist out of the temple at Jerusalem. I ask merely that everyone does his work and does not slander this church.”

  “That mean I get a chance to show you what I can do?”

  “Don’t think I’m a fool because I dress like this.” He slid off the desk to tower over Roger. “Jesus knew that one of the apostles would betray Him but took no steps to protect Himself. I am constructed along different lines. Go from this place, Mr. Martin-Macklin. If you return, I can’t answer for the elders’ actions. There is lamentably little of Jesus in their natures as well.”