Kill Zone (9 page)

“Still looking?” he asked.

“No, I just like to mark the words I know.”

“Stop that sarcastic crap. You're getting to sound just like Donna.”

“Whoops, we're touchy today.” A skillet on the stove snarled when a sandwich steak hit the grease. While it was cooking she came out and folded the newspaper and moved it to the telephone stand and started setting the table.

“They going to call you back at the plant?”

“They'll have to call back the workers on the line first,” she said, “and they haven't done that yet. Clerical staff comes last.”

He dug a roll of bills out of his coat pocket and peeled off some twenties. “Hundred see you through the week? I haven't been to the bank.”

“I've still got some of what you gave me last time.”

“I don't see how.”

“Sandwich steaks,” she said brightly. Then she jumped a little and hurried back into the kitchenette to turn his steak over.

He snapped the rubber band in place and dropped the roll back into his pocket. “I don't know why you won't let me open an account for you. Just till you're working again.”

“I wouldn't like being kept.”

“Now you sound like a novel.”

Christine put the pattie on a roll and served it with a glass of milk. They sat down at the table. She watched him pick up the sandwich. “Aren't you eating?” he asked.

“I'm funny. I ate at lunchtime.”

There was no more conversation. He finished eating and she cleared the table and then they went to bed. The curtains were drawn and when she slid naked between the sheets to join him the dull light sifting through the fabric lay violet on her polished skin. They moved together, placing learned hands in familiar places, and when he finally entered her she took in her breath and dug in her heels high on his back. Afterward they lay with their legs intertwined and Macklin's arm around her, his hand fondling a firm breast.

“I can't marry you,” he said. “Donna would make a fight of the divorce and I can't afford open court.”

“I don't want to be married. I've been there and I didn't like the scenery.”

“Just living with someone isn't the same as being married.”

“It is in everything important. Someone dies, someone else lives, and she has to shop for the casket and give away his clothes.”

She had been living with a smalltime loan shark in Troy when they had met at a dinner party at Michael Boniface's house. It was there that Boniface, the traditionalist, had given the shark the kiss of death. Macklin had never seen the custom in practice before and had always thought it showy and a nuisance, as it put the intended victim on his guard, but when the old man did it, it seemed chivalric and exactly right. Macklin had refused the assignment on his principle never to kill someone he knew, but he agreed to lay the groundwork. Soon he was sleeping with Christine, against another of his principles. The cowboy they eventually sent so botched the job on the loan shark that the police picked up a clear lead and Macklin was called in to mop up. The cowboy was bones in the Detroit River now and Christine remained unaware of Macklin's role in her lover's death.

He kissed her forehead. She stirred and said, “That felt like good-bye.”

“I'm still working. How much can you expect for a sandwich and a glass of milk?”

“What, no tip?”

He grunted. It was as much of a laugh as he ever allowed himself.
Save your emotions for private moments
,
Pietro
. Herb Pinelli had counseled him long ago.
They only make you human, and humanity is not a commodity in our market
. But the old killer hadn't told him how to break them out of storage when those private moments came. He squeezed Christine's breast gently and got out of bed, sucking in his stomach while he drew on his pants. Soon he would have a belly like a house painter.

Christine watched his muscles twitch as he reached for his shirt. “Call me?”

“I'll try. I'm going to be busy for a while.”

It was as close as they ever came to discussing his work. Often he wondered how much she knew. She had never asked him what he did for a living, not since they had met. When his tie was done up he draped his coat over his arm and leaned down to kiss her. “I'll try to call,” he repeated, while their lips were still touching.

When he had gone she lay awake for a while. Then she napped.

Because there was no back way out of the warehouse, a two-by-four having been spiked across the great doors opening onto the loading dock, Freddo left through the front door. The silk lining of his suit jacket felt cold as iron touching the patches where he had sweated through his custom shirt and he welcomed the cool moisture of the river mist on his face after the close humidity inside. The stuff was still thick enough to make shadows of the industrial buildings on Zug Island across the Rouge, but he could smell the acetone pouring out of the tall stacks. At night the island glowed from the foundry fires and reddened the bellies of low clouds like St. Elmo's Fire, but today it was as gray as old pewter. Freddo scowled at the black cinders as large as dried peas that had collected on the Cordoba's hood and roof but made no attempt to brush them off for fear of scratching the finish. He got in and drove away in search of a car wash. And a telephone.

Anna Dietrichson had seen River Rouge grow up around her from a semirural village of Ford workers to an anonymous appendage to the Motor City, and she didn't approve or disapprove of any of it so long as her joints didn't ache. She had not got on with her neighbors when the population was predominantly European, and so felt no resentment when the blacks moved in, or when Arabs and other peoples whose muddy-sounding languages she couldn't begin to identify came in to join them. She had, in fact, been seriously inconvenienced only twice in her sixty-year residency: once when Isadore, her husband of forty-two years, died, forcing her to go on welfare, and again eighteen months ago, when the apartment building she had lived in since her honeymoon was condemned and she was evicted.

This would make the third time. Cockroaches were something people all over the world learned to live with. Electrical failures were so infrequent now, compared with the early days of alternating current, that she barely noticed them. But when the gray pain was in her bones and there was no hot water in which to soak them, a confrontation was at hand. When she tired of banging on the pipes in her second-floor room in the converted warehouse with the crescent wrench she kept as protection against burglars, she buttoned her ragged sweater and snatched her hard-rubber cane out of the antique umbrella stand near the door and commenced the long journey down to ground level and the manager's quarters.

She rested twice on the stairs, and at the base she leaned against the flimsy stairwell wall and listened to her heart pounding irregularly in her ears. After five minutes she opened the door into the hallway just as a man in a soft gray suit like no tenant in that building ever wore passed by and continued to the exit. She saw only his long thin back and blond hair to his collar with pink scalp peeping through at the crown, and then the fire door closed behind him, cutting off her view. Someone from the city, she thought. If they were getting ready to condemn this place too …

She clunked the manager's door with the crook of her cane. To her surprise it opened a few inches under the slight impact. It had always been locked before. She waited, and when no one answered she nudged the door open a little farther with the soft rubber tip. She could always claim it moved by itself. It stopped after three more inches and would move no farther. By that time she could see inside far enough to know what was blocking it.

“Mother of God.” She crossed herself for the first time in thirty-seven years.

CHAPTER 12

“Port Huron, what's he want in Port Huron?”

Charles Maggiore's voice, filtered through the telephone wires, sounded fat and contented. Freddo supposed he'd fallen asleep under the sun lamp and been awakened by the bell.

“Some soldier named Ackler,” Freddo said. “He's got a place up there, a cottage on the lake. That's as much as I got out of the jig on Rouge before I lost him.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay means okay.”

“Oh.”

“Who you got with you?” Maggiore asked.

“Nobody so far.”

“Make it somebody. I don't want any missed chances. If you don't nail him the first time you won't get another try. I got a number in Pontiac you can call if you don't have someone in mind.”

“I got someone.”

“Okay, use him. I don't want to hear from you again till you tell me just one word and that word is yes, you got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” The line clicked and buzzed.

“Thinks he's Scarface Al.” Freddo hung up on his end, then lifted the receiver again and dialed a number in Detroit. Leaning on his elbow on the shelf of the open-air booth, he watched a kid in white coveralls buffing the glistening Cordoba with a yellow chamois. When a voice came on the other end of the line he said, “Link?”

“Yeah. Freddo?”

“Get your shit. I'm picking you up in twenty.”

“Heavy shit?”

“Heavy as you got.” He pegged the receiver and tipped the kid with the chamois five dollars for remembering to buff under the windshield wipers.

None of the half-dozen diners in the Peacock's Roost was paying any attention to the organist. It was two hours to the dinner rush and the dark young man at the keyboard was using the down time to experiment with some chords the owner didn't allow when people were listening. Slim and swarthily good-looking from a little distance, he had tobacco color in the whites of his eyes on closer examination and his cheeks were a purple relief map of burst blood vessels. Although he was just thirty, there was a light sprinkling of dull gray in his curly dark hair, anchored by scimitar-shaped sideburns to his jaw. When he wasn't playing he was constantly flicking imaginary cobwebs from his face with his fingers, and sudden noises of whatever volume made him jump. At one time he had been organist for a rock band that hadn't missed a chart for the past six months, but drugs and alcohol had made him late for too many rehearsals and when the band went to Los Angeles to sign a recording contract he had been left behind. Now he played requests for couples celebrating their golden wedding anniversaries, and every other one was “Moonlight Serenade.”

“John Scavarda?”

He looked up from a variation on “Lullaby of Birdland” he had borrowed from Elton John to see an exhausted-looking man with ordinary features of a slightly wolfish cast standing on the other side of the organ. His necktie of no particular color was at half-mast and he had his hands in the pockets of a dark suit that needed pressing.

“Johnny,” corrected the organist. “You look like ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried.' Or maybe ‘Love Me Tender.'”

“I'm not making a request. I understand you were one of the last people to see Jack DeGrew before he turned up at the Wayne County Morgue.”

Scavarda stopped playing and leaned back on the bench, swirling the ice in a glass of tea laced heavily with bourbon. “Cop, huh? I been wondering when you cats would get around to me.”

“Everyone thinks I'm a cop. Howard Klegg gave me your name.”

“I don't know any Howard Kleggs today. Try me tomorrow.”

“He's a lawyer. He represents Michael Boniface. Whose main man while he's on a long holiday is Charles Maggiore. Who has a working relationship with a bookie named Ernest Starvo, also called Fort Street Ernie. Who just now is sitting on eighteen bills in markers signed by Johnny Scavarda. Care to talk?”

When the organist hesitated, the other man skinned two twenties off a roll he had produced from a coat pocket and poked them into the empty tip glass on top of the organ.

“Not here,” said Scavarda, rising and transferring the bills to the inside pocket of his dinner jacket. “I got a break coming. Step into my office.”

They left the dais where the organ stood and went out through a side door into an alley smelling of urine and rotting garbage and the dry musk of rats. None of the people eating inside had glanced up as they threaded their way between tables. Scavarda lit a cigarette with quick nervous fingers and inhaled. “Who are you?”

“My name's Macklin. When word hit the street that DeGrew was the charbroiled stiff the police scraped out of that car torched off Eight Mile Road, you told Starvo you saw him getting into a car that fit the description, with a man whose description fits Daniel Oliver Ackler.”

“I don't know any Ackler. And I didn't say the car fit the description of the one burned. I don't know a Chrysler from an Idaho potato.”

“Klegg says different.”

“Not knowing him I wouldn't call him a liar.”

“You've got a snug lip for a man with my forty dollars in his pocket.”

“Make me a request. I'll play any tune you want except ‘MacArthur Park.' I hate that fucking song.”

Macklin moved quickly. Scavarda was spun around, his cigarette flying and showering sparks, and a hand grabbed the collar of his dinner jacket and yanked it down from his shoulders to pin his arms behind him. One of the buttons plinked off brick and dropped on its edge and rolled to a stop amidst the litter from an overturned garbage can. Something pricked the flesh under his chin.

“Of course, I could learn to like it,” he managed to gasp. “‘Someone left the cake out in the rain …'”

“Don't be funny, Johnny. As a stand-up you're a great musician.” Macklin was talking through his teeth. Moisture trickled down Scavarda's neck into his shirt collar. “Where'd you see DeGrew get picked up?”

“In front of the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn. We were getting set up for a gig. I was subbing on piano for a guy that was getting married—”