Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels) Read online

  As he pulled into the gravel bed that served as Sunny Wong’s front yard, he suspected he was under surveillance. That’s why he’d rented an SUV, driven it through a couple of mud holes, and put on ragged Carhartt overalls and a dime-store adjustable baseball cap, the local uniform. Anyone studying the snapshots or videotape later would assume he’d come to buy a crocodile. The license-plate number would only trace back to the agency, which had recorded the transaction under the false name on the driver’s license, through one of a tangle of legitimate corporations that might lead back to Joe Vulpo after two years of research. For good measure he walked stoop-shouldered, but denied himself the flamboyant indulgence of a limp. In his amateur theatrical days he’d been a bit of a ham, but his longest-running role to date was the one he’d been playing for years.

  A woolly mongrel banged to the end of its chain, barking and snarling, as he walked past. The dog—collie, shepherd, and something worse—kept up its protest until the door opened and Sunny yelled. It sank onto its haunches and reached back to worry a clump of hair off its hip. Great gray patches of skin showed where the dog had shed.

  Without a word, the proprietress held open the door for the visitor to enter. She shut it and hurled herself at Grinnell.

  He had to catch her to keep from being thrown against the door. Her tongue filled his mouth, a squirming thing like one of her snakes, but far warmer.

  When at last it was out of the way of his own, Grinnell said, “I wasn’t sure you’d remember.”

  “Remember who? I thought you came to read the meter. Nobody’s laid me in weeks.”

  Inches apart as their faces were, he saw the first lines of age in her bisquelike features. She was thirty-five, but made up and dressed for town, she had to show ID to buy cigarettes. He could tell, holding her, she wasn’t wearing a bra under her sleeveless boy’s undershirt. She smelled of sweat and turtle food.

  “A lot’s happened since we saw each other,” he said.

  She looked from one eye to the other, frowned. Then she uncoiled her legs from around his waist and hopped to the floor. Apart from the undershirt she had on camouflage cargo pants and black rubber galoshes. Her nipples poked through thin white cotton. “You went and got yourself hitched. Who is she? I’ll send her a rhinoceros viper as a wedding present.”

  “No one gets hitched anymore. You told me that. Anyway, you’re not jealous. What happened to that fat sheriff’s deputy?”

  “He shot a little kid and took early retirement. I didn’t want him sitting around the house scaring away customers. Where you been, John? I heard you were running a casino in Windsor.”

  “That was a silent partnership. I sold out. We couldn’t compete with the Indians across the river. They can break all the gaming laws and answer to no one but the tribal council, and guess who runs the casinos? Also, it’s not John anymore. It’s Ben Grinnell. I made some changes when I became a citizen.”

  “U.S.? What the hell for?”

  “I couldn’t afford the General Service Tax.”

  “Bullshit. Since when do you pay taxes?”

  “Since I moved here. I’ve got nobody in Canada. I think my brother’s in Afghanistan. Last I heard he was a major in the Canadian Army.”

  “Next you’ll tell me you’ve gone square.”

  “Too risky. I’m here on business, as a matter of fact.”

  She stepped in close, groped him from neck to waist, cupped his genitals.

  “I’m not wired,” he said.

  She stepped back. “I didn’t see you so long. A lot can happen.”

  “I said that.”

  She smiled. She had beautiful teeth. She’d told him that when she was a stripper she’d cleared more tips than any of the other girls because she was the only one who didn’t scowl all the way through her act. “Or look bored,” she’d added. “That’s worse. Men are the same all over. They want to think it’s your first time. It’s worth a hundred extra bucks a night if you can fake a blush.”

  What she said now was, “I can always count on you, John. Almost everyone I know’s in some kind of federal program, wearing a wire or walking around Gopher Shit, Nebraska, telling people their name’s Joe Doakes. Ratting out their whole world, just to stay out of the can.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Spoken like someone who’s never been inside.”

  “Have you?”

  “Five hours, when they raided the club for violating the liquor laws. Only dumb fucks do stone time.”

  “I’ll remind you of that when you’re in Marion. They’re watching you from the house across the street. Curtains drawn in only one window, with a two-inch gap for the lens to see through.”

  “That’s just State. They want to keep box turtles out of the hands of children. Same old shit, John. They’re trying some poor schmuck in Michigan for killing a rattlesnake. They’re protected in Lansing. Meanwhile a guy can beat his ex-girlfriend half to death in Detroit, do his five hours, and come back to finish the job.”

  “It’s still Ben, not John. Try to remember that.”

  “What’s the matter, scared of your past?”

  “Paralyzed. I’m not even supposed to know you exist. When they ask me where the stuff came from, I’m going to have to say I asked around.”

  “What stuff’s that? I club frogs.” She was still grinning.

  “How’s business?”

  “They keep me hopping. What you need?”

  “Shotgun and two sidearms. Sig Sauer nine-millimeters, if you have them.”

  She patted back a yawn. “I got Sigs up the ass. You can get a Sig on the street; ask any of those boys in Cinci, leaning on their Chevies smoking Marlboros. Ask me something hard. I just got in a shipment of fifty-mag S-and-W’s. The army can’t get ’em, but they don’t have my contacts.”

  “The people I’m buying for aren’t hunting elephants. I need virgin stock, not those been-around pieces you get from the boys in Cincinnati. Men are the same all over. They want to think it’s the first time.”

  She laughed. She had a tinkly giggle, the only thing about her that was remotely Asian, apart from her looks. “Let’s go back into inventory.”

  He followed her through a small living room furnished in vintage redneck—crushed velour and duck-decoy lamps—to a door that looked like an ordinary hollow-core, but that he remembered contained a slab of case-hardened steel, impossible to kick down or ram through, and waited while she unlocked it from a ring of keys she took from one of the many pockets in her cargo pants. When she opened it, the stench of manure and weapons-grade disinfectant struck him in the face like a frying pan. An alarm sounded, high-pitched and impatient. He waited again while she punched out an eleven-digit code on a keypad in the door frame. The noise stopped.

  Fluorescent tubes in troughs mounted on the ceiling shed pale light on rows of cages and glass tanks. They sheltered a hundred or more varieties of reptile, insect, and arachnid, at least twice as many as the last time Grinnell had visited. The price of the stock connected with her second front would be far more than the house and property were worth. There was a handsome living there, but she seemed to prefer the heightened risk involved with her real enterprise. He suspected their attraction for each other lay in the mutual lives of deception they led. Certainly Sunny Wong was the only person he’d known who had seen through the bland mask he wore for the world.

  She worked a hidden catch and slid open a shallow drawer in the bottom of a mesh cage. A Goliath beetle the size of a kitten watched her from its bamboo perch on the other side of the mesh. The drawer had been designed to collect droppings for easy disposal, but she’d lined it with tarnish-resistant gray plush. Four nickel-plated semiautomatic pistols lay there side by side, identical and shining with oil. Sunny selected one, produced a chamois cloth from another pocket, and wiped it off expertly.

  “I slather it on,” she said, twisting one corner and working it between the trigger and the back of the trigger guard. “It’s easier to r
emove than cosmoline and the compartment’s airtight. Doesn’t collect dust.” She offered him the butt.

  He took the weapon, sprang loose the magazine, saw it was empty, worked the slide to inspect the empty chamber, and snapped everything back together. He did all this in less time than it took to describe; but then an IRA assassin had taught him how to disassemble and reassemble a Swedish assault rifle blindfolded. It was a cheap parlor trick, with almost no practical application outside a training camp, but Grinnell’s dexterity had impressed the handful of people who had witnessed it. All except Sunny Wong, who busied herself stroking the side of the cage with an index finger to make sure the beetle hadn’t expired on its perch. The insect responded by twitching its enormous mandibles.

  Grinnell returned the pistol. “Sack it up and wipe off another. What about the shotgun? Autoloader, twelve-gauge.”

  “Imported or domestic?” She lay the Sig Sauer on top of the cage and picked up its neighbor, still holding the chamois in her other hand.

  “The man favors Franchis.”

  “Who doesn’t? That’s a back order. Take a week.”

  “I never knew you to run short on anything.”

  “Ever since The Godfather came out on DVD I can’t keep ’em in stock. Everyone wants to be Fabrizio: ‘Hey, Joe, take me to America!’” She had the worst Italian accent west of Hong Kong.

  “Beretta, then. He won’t wait a week.”

  “I can let you have a trap model for a thousand. Recoil pad, Monte Carlo stock. Pletty rittle piece.” Her pidgin English was a microscopic improvement.

  “No stock. Pistol grip.”

  “I got one. Have to move the cottonmouths to get to it. I hate those ‘mouths. They remind me of my venerated grandfather.”

  “Tong?”

  She shook her head. “Headwaiter at the Peking Duck in Chillicothe. That’s p-e-e-king; the logo on the menu’s a duck looking at you between its fingers.”

  “Ducks have fingers?”

  “Eight-fifty for the Beretta,” she said. “Sixteen hundred for the two Sigs. You won’t find a better deal.”

  “I’m not looking for one. It’s not my money.”

  “What do you spend your money on? No arrests or lawyers, you must have a pile.”

  “Now that you mention it,” he said.

  She blinked. He never gave confidences.

  “I need a personal arm.”

  She laid the Sig Sauer next to the other, looked up at him, and smiled. “John, John,” she said. “You backslider.”

  TWELVE

  Even the boys in Toledo don’t know everything that’s here. Had to spread mustard pretty high up the fence to get it. We’ll settle later.

  The note clipped to the contents of the thick nine-by-twelve envelope was written in Loyal Dorfman’s backward-leaning hand, in blue ballpoint on plain copy paper, without greeting or signature. A quick glance inside while the desk clerk in the hotel in Toledo had been printing out Macklin’s bill showed photographs, a facsimile of an arrest report, and page after page of close type. The clerk had handed him the envelope while Laurie brought the car under the canopy for loading. He’d stuffed the envelope into an overnight case to read later. There’d been no sense telling her about it until he knew what it contained.

  Now, sitting on the bed in their room at the Best Western in Myrtle, he waited until he heard water running in the tub, then dumped the faxed and photocopied material out onto the spread. From instinct he went to the pictures first. There were front-and-profile mugs of a younger, somewhat leaner Grinnell with longer hair, and more recent candid shots taken with a long lens of him crossing a broad street on foot, getting into a cab, talking on a sidewalk with someone whom Macklin didn’t recognize, but whose stocky build, Hawaiian shirt worn tail out, black-black sunglasses, and mullet haircut screamed mid-level mob. There were a lot of pictures involving the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and only three or four of Grinnell alone, indicating he was not the focus of the surveillance. Whoever had taken the photos had followed him to his cab after the meeting, recording visual details for further investigation.

  The typewritten material had been obtained from reports by the Justice Department, Immigration, the Department of State, and sealed documents provided by confidential informants whose names had been blacked out; some of the pages had been nearly obliterated by some civil servant whose job consisted of drawing laundry markers through any passages of a personal nature. Reading between the inked-out sections, Macklin learned that his mother-in-law’s—what, paramour?—was a native Canadian named John Grinnell Benjamin, a distant relative on his mother’s side of George Bird Grinnell, the nineteenth-century anthropologist whose two-volume study of the Cheyenne Indians was still in print. He was the second son of a history professor at the University of Toronto. His father had died when John was three. The older son, Theodore, was a career officer in the Canadian Army. Whoever had compiled that part of the report presumed that their elderly mother was supported by money sent by both sons; the upscale assisted-living community where she lived in North York would not be satisfied with a university widow’s pension, and anything a simple military officer could contribute would scarcely have been adequate.

  The younger Benjamin had abandoned his Christian name and transposed his middle and surnames four years earlier, when he’d applied for U.S. citizenship. Because his only brush with the law on either side of the border was a prior arrest for trafficking in contraband cigarettes—a charge dropped later for lack of evidence—his application had been accepted. Such papers were reviewed daily by the ton; examiners couldn’t be expected to run every piece of information to ground, and in any case much of the data in Macklin’s hands was based on speculation and hearsay. Benjamin Grinnell had stood in a crowd at the federal courthouse in Detroit, raised his right hand, and sworn allegiance to the United States of America. John Grinnell Benjamin was a suspected associate of Toronto’s oldest crime family—an organization that had predated the American Revolution, grown fat hiring out to the Crown to break the French blockade and supply British troops in the field—and a liaison between the English-speaking syndicate and the Frontenac brothers in Quebec, whom the authorities in Montreal had been trying to convict for extortion and murder since the 1960s. Jacques and Louis Frontenac had made a fortune providing false identification and transportation for Americans fleeing the draft during Vietnam, and lately had established a monopoloy on the trade in cheap prescription medicines across the international border. Much blood had been shed in this pursuit, and some investigators in Ottawa were convinced that Benjamin had been directly involved. Wiretaps in the Frotenac offices in Mont-Royal had recorded more than a hundred references to someone named “Long John” during a particularly bloody three-week period when most of the brothers’ competitors retired from the field.

  None of it was evidence, and the information on the American side was even sketchier. Dorfman’s Ohio sources reported casual acquaintanceship with Ben Grinnell in connection with several interests shared with the Vulpo family in Toledo. So far even the local authorities were unaware he existed, and were they privy to the material spread out on the bed Macklin shared with Laurie, they wouldn’t have enough to obtain a warrant for his arrest. But Macklin didn’t need a warrant to identify a predator by the pack it traveled with.

  Why Grinnell should have taken up with Pamela Ziegenthaler, a divorced bookstore manager in a place like Myrtle, was the real question. It became a little less impenetrable when he figured in the fact that Pamela’s daughter was married to a former predator named Macklin. Coincidence was something he couldn’t rule out right away; but he only believed in it so far as he accepted the existence of an unseen God. Before accepting the whim of Providence he had first to eliminate all the things of this world.

  Confirming his suspicions neither elated nor satisfied him. It just made him tired. He’d spent two years traveling in a straight line in search of a normal life and it had led him clear around the world and back
to where he’d started.

  The realtor’s name was Linda, a large woman with a pretty face who wore a corsage the size of a dinner plate on one shoulder to play down her linebacker’s build in the orange company blazer. She greeted Peter and Laurie in the common room that in Laurie’s youth had been the front of Theisiger’s Confectionery and held open the door of her office for them to enter. It was a windowless room paneled in weathered barnwood, with a desk, chairs, computer, a credenza piled with brochures, and an acrylic portrait of Linda, her husband, and three children painted from a photograph and framed on the wall behind the desk. All wore cheesy smiles overlaid with appliance white, and Laurie had the sudden giddy thought that under a black light all those straightened and bonded teeth would glow like the Cheshire cat’s. Peter had noticed the portrait as well, but as usual she couldn’t guess what he was thinking. If he decided to surprise her by having something like that done from their wedding picture, she sensed a fight.

  When they were all seated, Linda asked them how they were enjoying their stay in Myrtle.

  “We’re just back,” Laurie said. “We were in Toledo overnight.”

  “Did you take in the botanical garden? I make it a point to go there twice a year. It changes that often. I’m an amateur horticulturist.” She turned her head slightly and sniffed at her corsage. It looked as if it would squirt water when she squeezed a bulb.

  “My mother took me there when I was eight. I sneezed the whole time. I think it was the insecticide.”

  “I believe in organic gardening myself. For every pest, nature provides a bigger one with a greater appetite. So you’ve reached a decision?” Her left eye twitched when she lifted her brows.

  Peter spoke up. “You said three-sixty, I think.”