This one was a challenge.
Any naturalist prepared himself for it, the creature in captivity behaving entirely differently from its life in the wild. It knows it’s being watched, and so behaves as expected and by constriction, rather than by natural instinct.
It shouldn’t have meant anything to me. I was there to keep the creature alive, not study and record its habits; but one needs his diversions.
Laurie Macklin took phone calls from friends and professional contacts—she was a travel agent, it turned out; a calling as obsolete as my own in the world of instant information. But it provided her with the means to work at home by computer. Her special talent, from what drifted my way from this end of the conversations, was comparing rates among airlines, cruise companies, and hotels and playing them off against each other, playing every card from AARP to military service and hardship cases, and in the last ditch dialing up the feminine charm. Add-on charges collapsed when her tone got throaty, amenities increased, and at least one desk clerk asked to take her to dinner—the early-bird seating, which when translated meant a wife at home.
When the voice came out, a combination of early Kathleen Turner and late Jean Harlow, it meant she’d grown accustomed to the situation, if she hadn’t actually forgotten about it. The breakthrough came halfway through my third day in the bell tower. I wasn’t sure I’d heard it at first, so I cranked down the thermostat to increase concentration. When the blower fan mounted inside the heating duct switched off, the register worked like a baby monitor. I could get used to listening to that voice.
By then we’d been outside a few times, once to stretch our legs around the little park, another to buy fresh produce from the little chain supermarket four blocks away, again to eat lunch in a restaurant that served a dozen tables in a Wilson-era farmhouse with a wraparound porch for open-air dining in warm weather.
We ate at separate tables; but we found each other at liberty outside, where I offered to escort her home.
“We’re not fooling anyone,” she said, as we set out.
“I’d be disappointed in Roger, if we were,” I said. “I’m going into Detroit tomorrow. It’d be more convenient all around if you’d accompany me.”
“That would depend on the destination.”
“It’s romantic as all hell, if you’re drawn to the library on Woodward. I’m interested in what the papers had to say about how Charles Major met his end. Indulge me,” I said. “You can treat yourself to lunch in Greektown. We’ll charge the bill to your soon-to-be-ex-husband. If he killed Major, I need to know. Investigating the client’s as important as the investigation he hired you to do.”
She turned to face me. The weird warm spell was still in force; she wore a fall jacket I’d seen before, in a photograph, and a stretchy ear-muffler, which she’d loosened to let fall around her neck because the air wasn’t cold enough to pink her lobes. “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“By golly, so it is. We can stop by a church if that’s what you want.”
“I’m as bookish as the next girl, if the next girl isn’t Evelyn Wood; but I don’t intend to spend any part of my weekend in a dusty old library.”
“It’s not so dusty. You can eat off the floor in the microfilm reading room. You can ask any of the tramps who sleep there.”
“Nobody eats off the floor in my apartment. But I’ve got a gizmo in it that can track down anything you could find on microfilm, without the ninety-minute drive round-trip.”
“Maybe I’m homesick.”
“I’m your responsibility, Mr. Walker, not your prisoner. It’s my place or nothing.”
“Laurie, that’s just about the sexiest ultimatum I’ve ever had.”
“If that’s what you think it is, you need to go back to calling me Mrs. Macklin.”
* * *
She’d set up her office in a corner of her bedroom, a pale blue room with strong light streaming in through the west windows. A printed spread covered the bed, and for once in the history of women living alone it wasn’t heaped with pillows and cushions. There was an antique curve-front bureau painted soft white, with a mirror, a slipper chair upholstered in yellow silk or rayon, and a laptop sitting closed on a vanity table painted to match the bureau but no vanity items visible. It was one of those heartbreaking winter days with no snow clouds in sight; the sky was bright enamel and it hurt to look at it. She drew the curtains, but there was still no need to turn on a light.
I drew the slipper chair up alongside her swivel, perched on the edge, and watched her flip up the screen and power up.
“You really don’t use one of these?” she said, stroking the built-in mouse.
“I know who to go to when I need it. Apart from that the work’s the same as at the start, gasoline and shoe leather and sometimes brains. Try the News first.”
“Major was killed in California.”
“He made his bones in Detroit. The locals keep tabs on all the hometown boys and when it comes to crime reporting they can’t be beat. They’ve had more practice than most.”
“It wasn’t long after—after Leroy.” Her fingers hopscotched across the keyboard. When the website came up, a hodgepodge of twenty-first-century graphics and the paper’s Ye Olde masthead, she found a legend, scrolled, chose a file, scrolled and scrolled; the principle was the same as cranking the mechanical microfilm readers at the library, only the images flashed by faster, like subliminal messages aimed at a focus group.
I watched, but I gave no directions. I had a vague idea of what Carlo Maggiore/Charles Major would look like; mob bosses tend to run to patterns established by Hollywood. For the old-timers it was James Cagney and George Raft, for their successors Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, Al Pacino in both Godfathers, Al Pacino in Scarface, Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way. Slick hair, good tailors, and the kind of practiced swagger that shows even when they’re standing still. What they did before the studios came along to show them how to walk and talk and blow their nose I couldn’t guess.
When she came to a stop on a front page picture, I realized my list was incomplete.
It was a walking shot, taken with a long lens on some anonymous street, then blown up and cropped to serve as a trunk photo: A middle-aged character in three-quarter profile with the collar of a sports shirt rolled out over his lapels, a tiny gold hoop in his ear, and the obligatory dark glasses straddling a thick nose curdled like porridge. His fair hair was rumpled, needed trimming, and he listed toward a deformed left shoulder which some expert padding in the right couldn’t quite balance out. The man was a hunchback. The two-column headline ran:
ALLEGED LOCAL CRIME CHIEF MURDERED IN CALIFORNIA
In the old days, the byline would have been Barry Stackpole’s, my go-to source whenever organized crime reared its pug-ugly head; he’d had a lock on the paper’s investigative beat for years. But he’d long since drifted on to a local TV show, then a column on the internet, and currently a streaming program posting mugs of underworld figures, regular updates on their activities, and the names of certain everyday products and services whose profits financed traffic in drugs, weapons, human organs, and slave labor.
His successor, a woman whose name I didn’t recognize, seemed professional enough, avoiding speculation and attributing official reports. Major, a second-generation American who by all accounts had performed his last legal act when he’d changed his name, had been alone in his Beverly Hills home watching TV when someone crept up behind him and cut his throat. He’d died within minutes.
There followed a roster of his active interests in labor racketeering, narcotics smuggling, loan-sharking, gambling, fencing stolen property, and questioning by authorities in Michigan and California in connection with several homicides, but attempts to indict him for violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) had failed for lack of evidence, although several witnesses had come forward, and moved backward in short order, including two who’d backed off the edge of the earth. The L.A.P.D. spokesman was of the opinion that Major had been targeted by rivals for his position in the rackets.
“That’s always the fallback,” I said. “I wonder if both those no-shows were Macklin’s work too.”
“We don’t even know if Major was. But Leroy said he was working for him, and even I know the best way to prevent anyone from taking Leroy’s place is to remove the man who paid his way. Peter isn’t a man to overlook things. Should we keep searching?”
“They’d just be rehashing, trying to keep the story alive until the punchline. Which in these cases almost never comes about, and didn’t this time, if we’re right and it was Macklin. I think we’re right.” I sat back. “Thanks. I like to know everything I can about who’s paying my way.”
“Would that change anything?”
“Not if he’s on the up-and-up.”
She turned her head. The look on her face made me laugh.
“Up-and-up as to the job,” I said. “If I come through as arranged and he doesn’t terminate my services the way he did his employment with Major.” I looked again at the dead man. “Deb Stonesmith said Macklin’s as good with an edged weapon as he is with a gun. At the time I thought she was exaggerating for effect.”
She shut the lid of the laptop and we went back into the living room.
“Now that we’ve lined our stomachs with food, shall we move on to the drinking part of the day?” She started toward the kitchen.
“Just one for me.”
“Of course. Keep your wits—”
She was crossing in front of the living room window, with me following. Just then I got one of those chills you get. I threw my arms around her and flung myself sideways, taking her with me. We hit the floor hard, but I hardly felt the impact. The window coming apart distracted me.