Kill Zone (30 page)

“Odd, you don't look French.”

The black detective grinned appreciatively. He was tall and trim, though not cadaverous like the lawyer, and his soft moustache and gray fringe were barbered to draw the eye down from his bald head to the rough sculpture of his face. His eyes were a startling gray against skin as dark as oiled wood.

“I don't know why they're so down on you at headquarters,” he said. “It takes a special kind of person to make that sort of joke knowing how many times I must have heard it.”

“Sorry, Inspector. I just got through telling your men for the fifth time what happened here, and it looks like I'm going to have to tell it again.”

“Actually, they're not mine. They're with the arson squad. The body makes it my case. But it shouldn't take so long since I'm told you say you don't know what happened.”

The corners of Klegg's lips twitched. “You've studied law, Inspector. Don't deny it.”

“Two semesters. We didn't get along.” He moved his shoulders around under his gray wool suit coat. “Chilly.”

“I haven't had time to call a glazier.”

Pontier gestured amiably and the lawyer buzzed his secretary and asked her to make the call. Meanwhile the inspector studied the office without moving his eyes. The desk Klegg was standing in front of had been knocked crooked, and some stray pieces of broken glass from the missing window glittered on the floor. The rest would have been driven outward, but one at least had flown inside with enough force to nick the lawyer's cheek, which now wore a fresh pink Band-Aid. Pontier charged the other disarray to the officers who had been tramping in and out for the past two hours. Every place they entered was their place of work and they treated it accordingly.

“You didn't know the dead man?” he asked when Klegg had finished with the intercom.

“I never said that.”

“You didn't identify him.”

“I was escorted downstairs and shown a charred something in the stairwell. It could have been my brother, if I had one. It could have been barbecued beef or a Chevrolet seat cover. May I ask why I'm being singled out for all this questioning in a building full of witnesses?”

“Top floor's a good place to start. Also you own the building.”

“Also?”

“Also you've represented more men with Italian names before grand juries than Campbell has soups and it isn't every day a man pressure-cooks himself to death with a flamethrower in a fireproof stairwell in this city.”

“I conduct a legitimate practice according to the ethics of my profession.”

“There are easier ways to commit suicide. Someone else was supposed to be standing in front of that nozzle, and if it wasn't you, it was one of your clients.”

“That's a broad assumption, Inspector. No wonder you gave up law.”

“Your secretary says you came back from lunch about two o'clock. The blast was reported at two forty-two. What were you doing in the time between?”

“I was in conference.”

“That's what she said. She wouldn't say with who.”

“She'd be fired if she did. Privilege extends to the entire legal staff.”

“Excuse me while I brush all these split hairs off my shoes,” Pontier said.

Klegg let his shoulders slump. “I'm an officer of the court, same as you. We both have confidences to keep. We live in a world where anyone who hears voices in his head can arm himself and spray lead into fast-food franchises packed with innocent people. We can't abandon our precepts every time a troubled person cracks.”

“Why do I get the feeling you're not going to help me on this?”

“If there are no further questions, I have some more calls to make. You can appreciate what all this has done to my schedule.” Klegg circled behind his desk. When he sat down, the detective was leaning on his hands on the other side.

“You're wrong about why I got out of law,” he said. “I'm looking at the reason.”

Pontier rode the elevator down to the foyer. There the air was thick with wet char and the bitter-metal smell of carbon tetrachloride from spent fire extinguishers. The door to the stairs was propped open, the burned corpse having been removed by men from the medical examiner's office. The inspector spotted a fattish man in a crumpled yellow sport coat standing in a group of officers in uniform. “Lovelady!”

The man wobbled over. He wore his red hair in bangs and his face was a flat white slab with features among the pockmarks. Pontier said, “Trot Howard Klegg through the computer downtown. I want his associates.”

“
All
of 'em?” Sergeant Lovelady's voice had been cracking for as long as he had been in the inspector's detail. Pontier had given up waiting for it to finish changing.

“Also I want you to put men on everyone in the building, find out who was seen coming or going between one and three o'clock this afternoon. Get descriptions.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.” The pair left together.

The big man opened the door, looked at the smaller man standing on the flagstones, and rested his thumb outside the lapel of his black suit coat. The smaller man said, “Don't.”

Gordy, enormous in black with balloonlike scars over his eyes that eradicated his brows, hesitated. His broken face was incapable of expression. “You carrying?”

Macklin said, “No.”

“What you want?”

“See your boss.”

“You know what he looks like.”

Afternoon sunlight bronzed the surface of Lake St. Clair, visible behind the big Tudor house standing on its square grass island isolated from the rest of suburban Grosse Pointe by an eight-foot wrought-iron fence. Out front a rotating lawn sprinkler swished and pattered on the flagstone walk.

Macklin said, “I can go over you, big as you are.”

“I know it.”

The lawn sprinkler whispered and pattered. At length a wolfish grin crept over the lower half of Macklin's face, leaving the upper half untouched.

“Whatever he's paying you, Gordy, hit him up for a raise.”

“Anything else you want?”

“I still want the first thing.”

The big man said nothing.

“Somebody tried to kill me today,” Macklin said.

“Surprise.”

“In Howard Klegg's building, with a flamethrower.”

“It wasn't Mr. Maggiore.”

“He confide in you?”

“No, but catering a hit takes time and that's one thing he ain't got much of. He's inside with his accountants. He's been inside with his accountants every day for a month. Trying to stay out of jail. Last thing he's got time for is to have somebody blowed down.”

“You forgot. I'm the reason he's inside with his accountants. If Boniface weren't getting out of the box, he'd still be swinging Boniface's clout and IRS wouldn't be smelling blood.”

“Yeah, but like I said he ain't had time.”

“You're big,” Macklin said. “I guess you're as hard as you were when you fought.”

“Harder.”

“If it gets down to you and me, you'll come off second. You'll hang back when the time comes and I won't. That's the difference.”

“I know it.”

The tension went out of Macklin's body in a rush. “Hit him up for that raise,” he said. “Don't wait.”

“He's got other things on his mind.”

Gordy was the only man Macklin knew who would put a door in his face. The killer stood there looking at it for a moment. It was one of those times when he was sorry he'd quit smoking. A man with a burning cigarette in his mouth never looked confused. Finally he turned and went back to his car, avoiding the arc of the sprinkler as it came around.

In the sun-filled room Charles Maggiore called the library, the owner of the house looked up from a pile of ledgers and adding-machine tapes on his desk as Gordy entered. Two men wearing blue suits and glasses occupied the chairs on the other side of the desk, one gray-haired, the other barely thirty. They went on checking columns of figures against calculators on the desk as the big man approached.

“Who was it?” Maggiore demanded.

“Peter Macklin.”

In the silence following the announcement the gray-haired accountant looked at Maggiore. All the color had slid from under the blond Sicilian's careful tan.

“What did he want?” he asked.

Gordy told him. The other accountant glanced up, then back to his figures.

“Did you tell him it wasn't me?”

“Yeah.”

“He believe you?”

“He ain't here, is he?”

“One of your jobs is to make sure he isn't.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Maggiore returned his attention to the paperwork in front of him.

Gordy left. The gray-haired accountant entered a few more digits into his calculator and said, “You seem relieved.”

“I thought it was something else.”

Buy
Roses are Dead
Now!

A Biography of Loren D. Estleman

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman's most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980's
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman's most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010's
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.