A police shadow isn’t as easy to shake as you see in movies. Cops are the creative consultants, after all, and they don’t sell their secrets that cheap.
Most of the time I humor them; otherwise they get unreasonable, and I like to see my tax dollars at work. Not this time. Deb Stonesmith had been too eager to find out where Laurie Macklin had landed, and if it wasn’t my secret to share in her office it still wasn’t on the road.
I took I-75 north of the city, my fall-back place when I want to be alone. I timed it just far enough ahead of rush hour to slide into a pocket but not so far ahead I couldn’t shut the door behind me with a few hundred tons of Detroit steel. When I bailed out at the exit to the zoo, I left the unmarked Chevy stuck between a pair of Wide Load house movers and a flatbed steelhauler, with concrete walls twelve feet high on either side designed as part of a drainage ditch in times of flood. I doubled back to 1-96 West.
Stonesmith hadn’t actually said that Laurie Macklin had “vanished” from Southfield—magic is lost on cops—but if she had, she wouldn’t have been exaggerating by much. If you want to vanish from any place within a twenty-minute drive of Detroit, you can’t do much better than Milford, the Town Time Forgot.
They don’t write it up often. No one famous was born there, and nothing of particular historical interest has ever happened within its limits; but that doesn’t stop similarly unremarkable places from being gushed over in print. There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep this one a secret from the despoiling multitudes.
It’s a village of around five thousand, roughly fifteen miles west of Detroit’s fastest-growing suburb, and a solid eighty years back in time. The main four corners is just that, a once-upon-a-time place anchored by four stories of former furniture store and settled by wheelwrights and boilermakers in scale-model miniatures of robber barons’ palaces in Old New York. The people who live there now commute between Detroit and the university town of Ann Arbor thirty minutes west, and when they exit the Walter P. Chrysler freeway they pass through a time warp. I felt the shock-wave myself, and I was just visiting.
The big snows were yet to come. What remained of the first made half-moons in depressions in the lawns, frozen hard as plaster and edged with yellow where little boys—and some probably not so little—had tried to melt them before their bladders ran dry. It was one of those places where that was still a game and not a misdemeanor.
The house wasn’t as large as the Cabot Inn or as ornate, but the modest millionaire who’d built it about the same time had employed contractors who remembered how much fun it was to play hide-and-seek. Amid its dormers and bump-outs a child with an ordinary imagination could find niches in sufficient number and variety to wait out any adult’s store of patience. At one time, it would have been a paint-seller’s dream of pinks, teals, aquas, vermilions, peaches, and daffodils, but a later occupant had slapped gray on top of it all, adding white trim in a fit of artistic daring. That would have been around the time the house was parsed out into single-dweller suites.
It had three stories plus an attic. Laurie Macklin lived on the third. I recognized the window she’d looked out through whilst warming her hands around a steamy mug, unaware her picture was being taken. I shook out a cigarette, turned my back to the wind, and cupped a match in my hands. While I pretended to concentrate on that, I drew a sight line between the window and the little community park across the street. A gazebo of pressure-treated pine stood square in its dead center, with latticework around the base to keep out small animals. It was just the thing to hide behind while poking a lens through one of the diamond-shaped openings where the slats crossed.
He wouldn’t still be there. Why should he? Even blackmailers took time off. But I didn’t tarry. I flipped the cigarette into the gutter after one puff and mounted the steps to the front porch, where a row of bleeding hearts had bled out their lives in pots on the railing. Their shriveled blooms dangled over the sides like shrunken heads.
The door wasn’t locked; that would have been redundant. It led into a foyer that no longer bore any resemblance to the ground floor of a private house. A partition had been built a few steps in, studded with labeled brass mailboxes and a circular mesh grid assigned to each. Another door, this one with a Judas window, separated me from the rest of the house.
I’d rehearsed and discarded several cover stories during the drive there. If she was as cagy as Stonesmith let on, none would get me past the door. If she heard me out and turned me down flat, I could opt out. Provided this client let me.
A card next to 310 read L. ZIEGLER. Macklin had told me to look for his wife under that name. I pushed the button.
“Who is it, please?”
A voice just above middle register, not more than the usual challenge in it.
“Amos Walker, Ms. Ziegler. I’m a private investigator.”
A brief pause.
“Is it about my husband?”
So much for the incognito. I wondered why she bothered.
“I’m here on his behalf.”
“Did Leo Dorfman hire you?”
“No, I’m working directly for Macklin.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
She might have asked if I had a package to be signed for.
I grinned at the intercom. “Why would a plumber pay someone else to fix the drain?”
More dead air. “Hang on.”
Something buzzed and the door went clunk. I swung it open and climbed a steep staircase between lime-green walls.
There was a window at each end of the hall on her floor with the kind of view they sell in the Home Décor section at Target: barber poles, bike racks, front porches, and bandstands. All the ice cream trucks were in mothballs until April. I pushed the button next to 310 and looked at a .32 pistol.
It was a Davis with a light wood handle and a brushed-steel finish and nested nicely in her right hand. It was a slim hand, the nails unpainted but neatly rounded. They belonged to a smallish ash-blonde with her hair cut at an angle with her jaw, cloudy blue eyes, and good skin. She looked younger than her picture; too young for me, and for that matter her husband. Her quilted robe matched her eyes. A pair of slightly darker open-toed slippers poked out from under the hem. Those nails too were tended and not painted. She had long slender feet with high arches, a feature often neglected by good-looking women.
That she had tensile strength was something sensed rather than seen, and probably inherited, a kind of confidence in her bearing. It had nothing to do with the gun; most women, in fact, and as many men, are as nervous behind one as they are in front of it.
“Unbutton your jacket,” she said.
I did.
“Turn around and lift the tail.”
I did that. When I was facing her again she said, “Where’s your gun?”
“Downstairs in the car. I’ve been to Milford before. I’ve never had to shoot my way out.”
“I suppose you have an ID of some kind.”
I unshipped the folder, taking my time. The little pistol stayed level and she’d given herself plenty of room to move. Her eyes stayed on my face for another beat, then flicked to the license and the sheriff’s star for a nanosecond.
“Is that real?”
“The license is. The badge cost me six box tops.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Wrong crowd. Too young. The badge means nothing. The county hands them out like party favors when you serve papers to people who don’t want them.”
“Are you always this funny?”
“Funnier, usually. Do you want to shoot me here or wait till you get home?”
“I am home.”
“Lady, you’re killing me. Whoops. Poor choice of words.”
Something tugged at the corners of her lips. It didn’t stay long. She’d picked up that trick from her husband. Picked up more than that, probably. I’d never seen anyone more comfortable with death in her hand.
She moved for the first time since she’d opened the door: Thumbed the safety catch on, slipped the pistol into a blue quilted pocket, stepped back to let me pass. As I did I caught a tinge of scented soap and warm skin. I seemed to be spending a lot of time lately interrupting women in the shower.
It was a pleasant living room, lit from behind a soffit and by a winter sun as murky as dishwater. Red and yellow lozenges decorated a rug that fell two feet shy of the walls, leaving the floor exposed, eight-inch maple planks fitted as tight as when they were laid. There were books and magazines on an apostrophe-shaped coffee table with three legs. The walls were painted in semi-gloss eggshell, bouncing light evenly around the room.
She sat in a space-age wing chair upholstered in red leather, crossing her legs. I perched on the edge of a sofa covered in something smooth and porous decorated with rectangles.
“What’s on Peter’s mind?” she said. “I expected to hear directly from Dorfman before this.”
“This doesn’t have to do with the divorce. I’m supposed to keep you alive until Macklin can defuse a threat against your life.” I told her the rest. Her expression didn’t change until I mentioned Macklin’s son.
“Roger? We’ve never met. All I know about him is what Peter told me. He was pretty sure he’d gotten the boy free from mob influence.”
“Maybe he was. Maybe he’s right. But Peter got himself free too—without changing his occupation.”
“Roger’s a grown man now. I think he’s a year older than I am. Do you think he resents me?”
“No more than a hundred grand’s worth, if it isn’t just a dodge. Your husband thinks he wants to squeeze him for abandoning his mother, then torture him by killing you.”
“Some abandonment. My lawyer’s using the settlement Peter made on her as a basis for negotiation.”
“You’re a cool customer, Mrs. Macklin. Most women would at least blink when told they’re a target. Most men, too. Some in Macklin’s own line of work.”
“I’ve had practice.” She dandled a foot, her first sign of agitation. If that’s what it was. You can read anything into body language. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll arrange my own protection.”
“Leroy.”
“What?” But she’d heard me. Her face paled around the edges.
“Something Macklin said to tell you, if you turned me down.”
“Did he tell you what it means?”
“No.”
“Then it means nothing.” Her color had come back.
“Okay.” I stood.
Her gaze followed me up. “You don’t put up much of a fight.”
“I don’t want the job. He didn’t give me the choice of refusing.”
“How much was he offering?”
“He mentioned an amount. I used it as a basis for negotiation.”
She rose. “Thank you, Mr. Walker. I’m not a fool. I know when I’ve been warned.”
“I can recommend some people who specialize in this kind of work.”
“That’s kind of you, but I have a network of my own. It might surprise you the contacts one makes when she’s married to a man like Peter.”
“I’ll leave this just in case.” I got out a card and laid it on the tripod table.
“Incidentally, I’m Lauren Ziegler here. My maiden name is Ziegenthaler. I don’t enjoy entertaining the police.”
“I thought it was something like that.”
I saw something as I crossed in front of the window looking out on the street, or thought I did; a movement near the gazebo in the park. I didn’t turn my head to confirm it. It may be the work, but when I feel someone’s watching me I’m right more often than I’m wrong.
And I knew then this wasn’t going to be a job I could get fired from so easily.