Macklin was living in Warren pending the outcome of the divorce, sub-letting a condominium from a retired General Motors engineer currently wintering in Key Biscayne. The décor and furnishings wouldn’t have been to his taste even if he cared about those things: heavy on distressed dark wood, brushed brass, and windows with slats intended to make them look mullioned, but which kept falling out, startling him into defense mode. He’d considered removing them, but that would mean a visit from a representative of the condo board, which upheld uniformity of window treatments. In his case, avoiding attention was work-related, not paranoia. He missed owning his home.
Ornamental details meant little. The issue was shelter, not style. The location was close enough to the sprawling GM Tech Center to hear the experimental models roaring around the test track; an annoyance to many, but to him a convenience when conducting a telephone conversation he didn’t want his neighbors to overhear.
Like this one:
“You owe a commander in Lansing a C-note,” Leo Dorfman said.
“Is it worth it?” Macklin asked.
“I’d call it a bargain at his rank.”
“I could get the same information from a sergeant.”
“Lieutenants and worse have to sign in when they run a plate, and report the source of the request. Seriously, you’re dickering?”
“Why start now? Give me what you got.”
“It’s a small world. I hired Cutlass guy once.”
“What’s a lawyer doing driving a car twice the age of my son?”
“Not a lawyer, a private cop, and a good one. Amos Walker. Spelled the way it sounds.”
“About six feet, one-eighty, brown hair going gray?”
“Not so gray when I used him, but now, probably. He’s a neighbor, lives and works in Detroit. His thing’s missing persons.”
“What was he doing in Toronto?”
“Ask him.”
“Why should I expose myself?”
“Because I said he’s good; and good’s what you need considering your situation.”
Macklin listened to a driver changing gears at ninety. “You’re the one with the in. Sound him out. Use that checkerboard of yours.”
* * *
Ironically—or perhaps not so, based on his observation of human nature—the less legitimate and socially acceptable of Macklin’s two occupations was the one still in demand.
He’d spent years building up a retail camera business, run by others in his employ who knew nothing of his outside interests, whose profits had allowed him to declare a reasonable amount of income on his taxes. In the years of his apprenticeship with organized crime, he’d seen too many bright lights extinguished for overlooking Washington’s curiosity regarding lavish expenditures on little or no reported income. They languished in prison, condemned not for felonies innumerable, but for stealing from the government.
Macklin had learned from their example. He’d never concealed a dime of profit from sales, deducted no more (and no less) than what was allowed for expenses, and in twenty years his returns had gone unquestioned, enabling him to stash the money he made outside the system and to live off it comfortably but not extravagantly, without calling attention to himself.
When photography went digital, he’d made the conversion (deducting the cost from taxes), and lost customers of his developing service, which was the largest part of the profits. He’d stayed in the black mostly through sales to professional photographers, who wanted the best equipment and were prepared to lay out for it. Then along came cell-phone cameras. Never mind that they couldn’t compete in quality with the lowest-end Canon or Nikon: Your average customer will choose convenience over performance a hundred times out of a hundred. Polaroid had proven that. He’d sold out at the first blip in the market, losing a bundle but not as much as competitors who’d held out longer hoping against hope, and put his broker to work finding medium-risk investments for what he’d managed to make away with. He wasn’t as concerned with financial security as with the loss of his placid front. Too much federal interest in how he supported himself after his legitimate business went under must inevitably lead to local interest in the details. A five-year jolt for tax evasion was one thing, life for Murder One something else.
Professional killing was a horse of another color, in terms of the commercial market; another species, in fact. The faster the march of technology gobbled up trade that had existed for centuries, the more John and Jane Doe found reasons to eliminate each other the analog, non-digital way.
He was paid in cash: Small bills naturally, worn, the serial numbers non-sequential. Any marks not detectable by the naked eye would be rendered worthless by way of his laundering system into the Third World, where black lights were still science fiction. Half up front—fifty percent of the client’s net worth—and the rest on proof of completion. He deposited getaway stakes in several banks under different names, each with corresponding identification, and each deposit well under the ten thousand dollars that financial institutions were required to report to Washington. If one cover was blown, he had the others, and if all were blown, he had cash stashed in several secure venues, with the rest wired by computer to numbered accounts in Andorra, the Cayman Islands, and Switzerland.
The total was substantial, although hardly in Fortune 500 territory—if there were such a popular index for clandestine income.
Which was comforting, especially in view of the message that had come his way by blind email, along with photos he’d never seen before of Laurie, his estranged wife, sniffing a tomato at the Eastern Market (a hangout for them both in better times), swishing down a mall corridor in a sundress and oversize sunglasses, hair bleached nearly white in the summer sun; strolling a familiar street looking flushed, healthy, and heartbreakingly young in a jacket and billed cap designed for fall weather; sipping a steaming drink in an oversize mug gripped in both hands, looking out a frosted window in a heavy winter sweater. The images were arranged sequentially by season, the last doubtlessly captured since the first heavy snow the first week of this month. They were unposed, and likely she hadn’t known they were being taken.
He read again the terse message that accompanied it.
Dorfman had summed it up when he’d said “your situation.”
Macklin closed the file, then typed in Amos Walker’s name.
Even the internet struggled to find him. The man appeared to have no website, no Facebook page—no presence, in fact, in twenty-first-century terms. The only proof he existed were his licenses allowing him to drive and conduct investigations, his name in newspaper files, and an old record of petty arrests, mostly for withholding information in open police cases—one instance serious enough to have led to a temporary revocation of his professional license—but no convictions.
A face that had been lived in, but not to the point of serious wear, solemn but with something in the eyes (hazel, said the official description) that looked like trouble, much of it for the wearer. Broad streaks of gray, but he’d kept his hair, and from what Macklin had seen of him in front of the Cabot Inn he hadn’t fudged when filling in the height and weight blanks: No indication of flabby living, he was prepared to accept that much based on his brief observation of the man in person; although he thought he’d seen the signs of an old injury when he’d climbed out of his car.
Macklin brought his email back up alongside Walker’s picture and read again the message his anonymous correspondent had sent with the photos of Laurie:
$100,000 CASH.
JUST BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T WANT TO LIVE WITH YOU DOESN’T MEAN YOU DON’T WANT HER TO LIVE. MORE SOON.
It was a sum he could manage without paupering himself; whoever was behind the message would be aware of that, and that few in Macklin’s position would risk exposure by balking.
Whoever was behind it was wrong.
Walker was still looking at him, as if he’d read the words and was waiting for Macklin’s decision and whether it would involve him. The answer to both questions was easy.