Any Man's Death Page 7

  After leaving the rectory, Roger drove his old Duster around a series of corners until he was sure nobody was following him, then popped for full service in a station on McNichols while he placed a call from the public telephone next to the men’s room. It rang a couple of times before someone answered.

  “It’s me,” said Roger. “I’m having trouble delivering the package.”

  The man on the other end paused. “Okay. We’ll talk where we met last time. Two o’clock.”

  Roger said okay and hung up.

  “What happens at two o’clock?”

  Michael Boniface, looking his age behind a cobweb-gray overnight stubble with his belly hanging over the tie of his robe, shuffled in from his bedroom in a stiff new pair of leather slippers. His feet had grown accustomed to the disposable green sponge-rubber items issued to the inmates at Milan. The golden retriever got up from the carpet and trotted over to have its ears scratched.

  “Nothing.” Picante replaced the receiver. He was fully dressed in his shabby suit and skinny out-of-date necktie. “I was just ordering breakfast.”

  “Didn’t I hear the phone ring?”

  “No.”

  “Shit. I thought it might be Macklin.”

  Picante looked at him quickly, hesitated. “Oh. No, it wasn’t him.”

  “They don’t serve breakfast before two o’clock?” Boniface pushed the dog away. “Hell, the service was better at Milan.”

  “Two o’clock’s when they stop serving it.”

  “Good. I’m hungry enough to eat the mutt.”

  Picante uncased his long teeth in a grin.

  CHAPTER 10

  Gordy thought it would be like in the movies.

  In the movies, the emergency room was right outside surgery so the people who were waiting to find out what happened inside could come rushing up when the doctor pushed through the swinging doors in his greens with the mask dangling and gave them the news. It was always that way and you saw it so many times you never questioned it and couldn’t picture it any other way.

  At Detroit Receiving Hospital, the nurse behind the desk that looked like a cigarette counter in a hotel hung up the telephone and summoned Gordy over and told him Dr. Stepp would see him in his office. She might have been a receptionist informing him the personnel manager was ready to interview him.

  The office was half a mile down a quiet corridor and one floor up via an elevator that made no noise at all. The place reminded him of the set of a futuristic movie from the fifties. He wondered if other people thought so much in terms of Hollywood when they visited a hospital.

  There he found himself in the presence of a red-headed eighteen-year-old kid in a camel’s-hair sportcoat and red silk tie, who placed in his care a hand so pink and well scrubbed it might have belonged to a mannequin and asked him to sit down. He declined. The kid didn’t sit either and put his hands in his pockets.

  “Your friend is in Intensive Care,” he said. “I don’t want to operate just yet. He was about a quart low on blood when we got him.” It sounded accusatory.

  “He was laying in the basement when I found him. I don’t know for how long. I was only gone fifteen minutes or so. I took him straight here, didn’t want to wait around for an ambulance.”

  “You were wise not to. Nine-eleven is a joke in this town. We pumped two units back into him and we’re waiting for his condition to stabilize before we go in after those bullets. Did the nurse tell you what saved him?”

  “The nurse told me shit.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” said Dr. Stepp, placing a hand on the back of his neck; and from his language Gordy felt that some kind of barrier had been broken through. The bodyguard figured he was older than eighteen after all. “Do you know anything about your friend’s medical history? His birth?”

  “I just work for him.”

  “Well, it’s just a theory. Birth defects are sort of a hobby with me. I was thinking of specializing in that area when thoracics caught my fancy. The X-rays showed some things in the epidermal hump on his left shoulder that shouldn’t be, a partially developed ribcage and a bit of lumbar vertebrae. Yet he has a full set of his own. It’s my thought he’s wearing part of his unborn twin.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s not really all that uncommon. Some years ago, doctors in South Africa operating on what they thought was an abdominal ulcer found a withered fetus in a thirty-year-old man’s large intestine. He’d carried around his sister all that time without suspecting.”

  “So how’d that save Mr. Maggiore?”

  “Well, in the case of mirror-image twins, only one has the standard equipment in the standard places. The other will have his heart, liver, appendix, and pancreas on the opposite side.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The nurse who prepped him couldn’t figure out why he was still breathing when she saw those holes on the left side of his chest. The X-rays provided the answer.” Stepp smiled. “I don’t know what kind of terms you’re on with your boss, but if we get lucky and pull him through this you might tell him he made it this far because his heart isn’t in the right place.”

  Gordy couldn’t picture himself saying that to Mr. Maggiore. “Can I see him?”

  “I’d rather no one but the staff saw him until after the operation.”

  “I’ll stand out of traffic. Nobody’ll know I’m there.”

  Stepp’s eyes flicked up and down Gordy’s massive length, but he made no response to the statement. “Your boss is safe. The police have men stationed outside ICU. Incidentally, one of them wants to talk to you, an Inspector Pontier. He’s in the other waiting room.”

  “Take good care of Mr. Maggiore, Doc.”

  “I mean to. There’s a paper in this.”

  The big man went through the door indicated. The bald black detective who had come to see his employer a few days earlier was seated on a sherbet-green sofa with his legs crossed, turning the pages in a copy of the National Geographic.

  “Reading about this guy who found the Spanish galleon off Key West,” he said, without glancing up. “Four hundred million in gold and silver. He lost a son and a daughter-in-law looking for it but he says it was worth it. What do you think of that?”

  “Depends on the son and daughter-in-law.” Gordy stood over the detective with his hands folded in front of him.

  “Maggiore’s in good hands. Any doctor who keeps the National Geographic in his waiting room is all right. Stay away from the ones with People and Reader’s Digest.” He laid the magazine on an orange coffee table and looked up. “Do your legs bend?”

  “I sat in the car coming over.”

  “Give my neck a break and do it again.”

  After a second the bodyguard stepped in front of a chair upholstered in salmon-colored vinyl and let himself down on it, sitting stiffly on the edge of the cushion with his hands resting on his knees. The room’s walls were pastel blue and a watercolor done after Toulouse-Lautrec hung opposite the window. The place looked like the inside of a freezer at Baskin-Robbins.

  “Who did Maggiore?” Pontier asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  “I found him laying in his blood in the gym in the basement.”

  “That’s for the report. I want to know who you figure did it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pontier uncrossed his legs, recrossed them in the other direction. “I pulled your file. You don’t have one. You’re not one of these Fifth Amendment lugs. You’re not even Italian. That omerta crap fits you like a tent. We don’t pick up this shooter, a gang war gets started, your job as bodyguard gets harder.”

  “I don’t know means I don’t know.”

  “Let’s review this past week.” The inspector tapped his knee. “Last Sunday. One of the sisters in the Reverend Sunsmith’s choir tries to whack him and gets whacked by Sunsmith’s defensive line. Monday. Michael Boniface gets sprung from Milan and almost gets whacked in Belleville. Saturday nigh
t. The body of the sister who was supposed to be singing in place of the sister who tried to whack Sunsmith boogies ashore at Belle Isle. That same night someone tries to whack Maggiore, who as everyone knows is against Sunsmith on the casino gambling question and needs gambling legalized so he can hold the place that used to belong to Boniface. Aside from the fact that with all this attempted whacking going on the only person who gets whacked was the least important person in the whole mess, what have we learned?”

  “We learned that you like the word whack.”

  Surprised, Pontier grinned behind his moustache. “That’s pretty good. I never met one of you trained sides of beef with a sense of humor before. No, what we learned is something is getting set to blow. Being a peace officer, I’m naturally concerned in seeing that it doesn’t, whatever it is, and that’s where you can help.”

  “Wish I could.”

  “That’s your answer?”

  Before Gordy could reply, a door opened in from the corridor and a fat man stuffed into a yellow sportcoat entered and bent over Pontier, murmuring in a tone too low for the bodyguard to pick out words. The inspector listened without taking his eyes off Gordy.

  “Who’s spelling him?” he asked.

  “Sergeant Twill,” murmured the fat man.

  “Ledyard’s here?”

  “On the phone at the nurses’ desk.”

  “‘Kay.” Pontier stood. He was several inches taller than the fat man, but probably weighed far less. “Book this son of a bitch. Take his gun.”

  The fat man looked at Gordy with eyes no deeper than the dimples in his pocked face. “Material witness?”

  “Suspicion of attempted murder.” To Gordy: “Stupid smart men are the worst. The Wayne County Jail’s full of them.” He left while the fat man was standing the bodyguard up for the frisk.

  “Did not Satan inveigle God Himself into wagering the fate of Job, His good and loyal servant? And was not this an evil act?”

  Pontier turned down the portable radio on his desk. Even with the volume almost off, the Reverend’s baritone set the transistors buzzing. He watched Lovelady coming in. It was a warm Sunday for spring and the sergeant had peeled off his sportcoat and sweated through his shirt.

  “Sunsmith’s on a roll this morning,” Pontier said. “You run King Kong down to County?”

  “I put him in holding. Thought you’d want to talk to him some more.”

  “I’d rather try cracking glass with a hard look. We’ll hang on to him tonight and spring him in the morning. He got my goat is all. How much did Ledyard tell you over the phone?”

  “Just what I told you. Something about Sunsmith.”

  “Ledyard’s been cooling leather in interesting places since he started babysitting the Reverend. Philip Constable’s office. Carmen Thalberg’s place in Bloomfield Hills.”

  “Constable.” Lovelady’s slab of a face creased in thought.

  “President of Disiran Chemicals?”

  “Yeah. Mob front.”

  “Not really, but Charles Maggiore’s a heavy investor. Constable was a Boniface consig before Maggiore took over and handed him Disiran. Some other names and companies to check out, and Carmen Thalberg. How’s that for a couple, the evangelist and the stinking-rich widow?”

  “Maybe they got a thing. It’s a hell of a strange world.”

  “Maybe not that strange. I want to talk to her, Constable too. And run this list through the computer and see what it kicks out.” He slid a handwritten sheet across the desk. “How’s chances of nailing down Disiran’s investments over the past year?”

  “Like I said, I retire in two months.”

  The inspector turned the radio all the way off. The sisters were singing “Bless’d Be the Lessons of the Lamb.” “Maggiore’s under hack with the IRS, right?”

  “When a mob guy’s up on one charge it’s practically automatic.”

  “We got any fed friends?”

  “Randall Burlingame, if you want to call him a friend. But he’s on retirement leave.”

  “Ring him up, see can he deal us a copy of Maggiore’s tax records. How’s the sweep coming?”

  “Still sweeping. Couple of dopers in holding ought to start splitting open any time now. But the hit on Sister Vernal had too much class for them.”

  “Brief me when you get someone worth leaning on. And let me know what you shake down on this other stuff. You going to be able to remember all this shit?”

  Lovelady folded the handwritten list and poked it into his shirt pocket. “Remembering shit is my life.”

  The bleeding had stopped finally.

  Macklin had been moving as soon as the door sprang open in Maggiore’s basement, and as he returned fire had barked his left elbow hard on the steel shaft of a Nautilus resistance machine in the center of the room, knocking off a piece of flesh and numbing the bone all the way down to the wrist. His victim was still falling when Macklin heard tires swishing on the asphalt driveway. He had stumbled up the stairs, cradling his elbow with the hand still holding the gun, ducked as a headlight shaft raked the windows on the ground floor, and let himself out the french doors at poolside just as the motor was dying. Before climbing back over the wall he had pitched the gun into the pool. Police technicians could treat it until doomsday and never trace it back further than the body in the basement.

  By the time he had abandoned the stolen Nissan he had bled through his shirt and sportcoat and stained the front seat. He had wiped off everything he had touched and then tied the handkerchief around his arm at the elbow for the eleven-block walk back to his house. There he had stripped, cleaned the three-cornered tear with alcohol, bandaged the arm, and slept the rest of the night, half-waking from time to time with the throbbing. When he awoke in morning light the wound had stopped bleeding, but it hurt him to bend the arm.

  He showered, shaved, exchanged the crusty bandage for a smaller one, dressed in a sportshirt and slacks, and went out to the curb carrying the bundle of ruined clothing, which he mixed in with the other trash awaiting collection. By that time he was ravenous. He had eaten nothing since breakfast the morning before.

  The radio in the kitchen played low while he measured coffee into an urn left behind by his ex-wife and draped four strips of bacon sizzling into the frying pan on the stove. When the news came on he turned up the volume.

  “The President prepares for the Pope’s visit to Washington,” intoned the announcer. “FDA orders cans of contaminated mushrooms removed from supermarket shelves in three states. Two men missing and believed dead when their single-engine plane disappears over Lake Michigan. And locally, an alleged mob kingpin is in critical condition following an attempt on his life last night. Those are the headlines; details following these messages.”

  “Christ.” Macklin burned his finger on the pan and slid it off the gas flame to keep the sizzling from drowning out the radio. Sucking the finger, he waited for details. Even in the dim receding light of the muzzle flashes he had seen the stains spreading on Maggiore’s light-colored blazer high up on the left side. He wondered if the announcer was speaking from new information or if he was still going on an early report from the hospital.

  The announcer was still talking about contaminated mushrooms when the doorbell rang. Cursing again, Macklin left the kitchen, crossed through the living room, and put his eye to the peephole in the front door. Two big black men in moustaches and long sideburns stood on his small front porch, wearing the brown-trimmed dark blue uniforms issued by the Detroit Police Department.

  CHAPTER 11

  Picante ate with one forearm resting on the table across his chest and used his fingers to push carrots and peas onto his fork. When his mouth was full he washed down the contents with a slug of Dago red. He called it that, explaining that he was four generations removed from the old country and that all the Italian he knew you could get off the outside of a box of Mueller’s spaghetti. Roger, no fashion plate himself, looked at Picante’s suit and wondered if it was the only one he
had ever owned. There was a fresh gravy stain on his skinny tie.

  “Anyway,” Picante said, scooping a big forkful of whipped potatoes into his mouth, further jeopardizing the tie, “I left the guy’s head in this big basket of fruit on the doorstep for his missus to find when she got home from work. Wish I could of stuck around and seen the look on her face.”

  Roger pushed aside his chef’s salad half finished and lit a cigarette. His appetite came and went by turns, and his companion’s stories weren’t helping. “What if somebody else found it first?”

  “Hell, I never thought of that.” He chewed with his mouth open, considering it. “Well, hell, the effect is the same, right? I mean, a head in a fruit basket, who’d think of it? I had style, not like your old man. He’s about the best around, don’t get me wrong. He just ain’t got no imagination.”

  “I wasn’t going to stick up for him. We don’t get on.”

  “That’s too bad. You could learn from him. I had to make all my own mistakes. I made my bones with this little .25 Browning I bought off a junkman in Sandusky. Chased the guy for four blocks with two in his belly before I got him in this blind alley—”

  The waiter, a reedy young blond man, came around asking with a lilt in his voice if everything was all right. “Fine,” Picante said abruptly. “Just great.” When the waiter left, he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I jammed the piece in his mouth and fired, and would you believe he spit the bullet out at me? Didn’t even penetrate the roof of his mouth. So I put one in each eye and that did it finally. I didn’t know then that a .22 has more power than a .25, can you believe anybody ever being that dumb?”

  “What’d you do with the head?”

  “Well, by then there wasn’t time—” He broke off and sat back, picking up his wine glass. “Think you’re better than me, don’t you? Just like your old man. Okay, I liked the work. We’re still the same, you and me and Mighty Macklin. Cleaning up where the rich folks shit.”