Kill Zone (16 page)

The Plymouth hesitated, then snarled and shot forward and up. The speedometer needle climbed to sixty.

“Oh, shit!” the passenger exclaimed. “Back up! Back
up!
”

The Cougar was rolling backward down the hill, its sleek rear filling the Plymouth's windshield. The driver of the Plymouth stamped on the brake pedal and slammed the automatic transmission into reverse while it was still moving forward. Something shrieked and the car shuddered and shot backward and struck the car behind broadside as it was maneuvering back into the right lane. A tire blew with the force of a grenade and the Plymouth sat groaning on its left haunch.

Meanwhile the Cougar swung on two wheels into a backward U-turn, paused, and took off the way it had come. The horn tooted twice as it passed the scene of the collision.

The driver of the Plymouth sat with both hands still on the wheel, watching the driver of the car he had hit wrestling an angry six-foot-three out onto the pavement. He looked at his passenger.

“You tell Burlingame, okay?”

CHAPTER 20

Clothes made a difference. The plainclothes security guard at the Detroit Public Library who hardly glanced at Macklin when he wore a suit looked at him hard when he entered in his windbreaker and jeans. Macklin walked with a hand in his rear pocket to cover any bulges the gun might make and took the stairs to References, where the telephone directories were kept. Once he strapped on a weapon, he kept it on until the job was finished. It was like a new pair of shoes you had to walk around in for a while before you got used to each other. Everything about a man changed when he was wearing a gun: his stride, his posture, the way he sat and got up again, even the timbre of his voice. The process of assimilation was just as long no matter how many times he had carried one in the past.

There were four Blakemans listed in the metropolitan directory. One was named Frances, another David, and the other two had only initials for their first names. They were probably women. He copied all the names and numbers into his pocket notebook anyway and pulled down the reverse directory, with the numbers listed in numerical order followed by the names. There were two listings for the David Blakeman number. Bold print identified the second entry as the Born Again Redemption Center on Gratiot.

It sounded religious. Macklin put the reverse book back on its shelf, drew down the
Yellow Pages
, and looked it up under Churches. It wasn't listed. He frowned at the racks of books for a moment. On impulse he turned to Pawn Shops and found a small display advertisement for the Born Again Redemption Center. “D. Blakeman, Prop.”

He used a pay telephone on the ground floor to call the pawn shop, canting his back against the wall next to the box to conceal the revolver and meet the guard's gaze imperiously until the guard looked away. When no one answered after six rings he hung up and left.

He missed the place on his first pass down the right block on Gratiot. He'd been looking at the signs and addresses at street level, where he expected to find signs and addresses. The second time through he spotted it, three circles and BORN AGAIN lettered in flaking silver on a second-floor window. He parked in a city lot one street over and walked back.

Steep stairs as old as Prohibition led up from a street door between dark walls smelling of old paint and cigars and rubber from the stairway runner. Senile boards winced under his weight. At the top he followed a hallway floored with hardwood made dull by too many coats of varnish to a door at the end with BORN AGAIN REDEMPTIONS painted in black on the frosted glass under the inevitable three circles. No light showed through the glass. Macklin tried the knob. Locked. He stood there for another moment, then turned. As he did so a door down the hall closed with a click.

He approached the door. Solid and paneled, it had been abused with varnish like the floor. Several coats had been applied since the last time the tarnished brass numerals 203 had been removed, so that the thick dark liquid had dried to form an uneven collar around them. Macklin thumped the door three times with a knuckle.

It was opened almost immediately, flung wide by a short broad woman with hennaed hair and large feet in a man's brown loafers spread wide so that her skirt of no particular color stretched between her knees without a wrinkle. Over a green-and-orange floral print blouse she wore a thick blue sweater mangled at the wrists and missing all but its top button, which she had fastened. Her jowls were loose, she had circles the size of bar rings under her eyes and a gray moustache that went like hell with her orange hair. She looked like a bulldog that had been kicked in the face once and had never forgotten it.

“If you're asking me where he went I don't know,” she told Macklin. “If you're asking me when he'll be back I don't know that neither. A den of thieves, that place. I bet you're a thief too.”

“What makes you think so?” He stood back a little from the doorway. He was almost two feet taller than she and didn't want to frighten her into putting the door in his face.

She squinted up at him again, and Macklin guessed she was nearsighted. Her forehead was corrugated from years of squinting up at people. She was probably afraid glasses would spoil her looks.

“No, you ain't no thief,” she said then. “You're too old.”

“There are old thieves.”

“Not around here. Not the ones come to Blakeman's selling other folks' stereos and toasters and TV sets. Most of them are
black
.” She leaned forward on the last part and mouthed the word
black
soundlessly.

“No kidding.”

He had tried to keep the mockery out of his tone, but the old lady had good ears. Her mouth came shut with a snap and she drew her face in so that the fat of her neck folded up around it like a turtle's. “You're a policeman, ain'cha?”

Macklin held his answer, turning over the question for thorns.

“Don't tell me you ain't,” she said, “because I can spot a policeman quick as I can spot a thief. Not that there's a difference. I seen my share of them going into Blakeman's. They find a place busted into and then go in and help themselves before they report it. Then they come up here with the stuff in bags and come out empty-handed and whistling.”

“They come up here in uniform?”

Her features caved in as if she'd just smelled something bad. “I said they was crooked. I didn't say they was stupid. I told you, I can spot them. I spotted you.”

“You sure did. How come you know so much about them?”

“Because that's how they used to do it in my old neighborhood when I was a girl.”

“Maybe things have changed since then.”

“Mister, it would take a lot more years than I got to change that, and then it wouldn't change. How old you figure I am?”

He guessed late sixties. “About fifty.”

She hoisted her jowls in what she imagined was a sweet smile. “Sixty-two, sonny. A lot older than you'll get, you keep messing around with puke-pots like Blakeman.”

“I hope to do a lot of messing around with him soon.” He lowered his voice a full octave. “Internal Affairs wants to shake all the rotten apples out of the barrel. We were counting on Blakeman as an informant, but since he's not here we'd be grateful for input from an observant citizen such as yourself.”

She drew in her face again and brought the door forward eight inches. “I ain't getting mixed up in no investigations. That ain't how I got to be sixty-six.”

“I thought it was sixty-two.”

Her jowls blew out. The door swung. Macklin blocked it with the flat of his hand. “You didn't give me a chance to explain the department's new compensation policy.”

The pressure against his palm slackened a notch. “Talk English, mister. You saying you'll pay?”

Macklin lowered his hand. The door didn't budge. He separated a twenty from his roll and held it up. A pudgy red hand snatched it away and the door sprang open wide. Conquering the urge to count his fingers, he stepped across the threshold.

“Sit down, mister. I ain't had a man in here except the guy to fix the TV since my husband passed away in 'sixty-seven. Right during the riots it was, though it didn't have nothing to do with them, it was cancer got him.”

“Thank you, Mrs.—?”

“Fardle. But you can call me Audrey.”

He got away from Audrey Fardle after an hour, bloated with cheap doughnuts and expensive information, and drove to the haberdashery on Greenfield, where once again he had to settle Gyp Ibsen's fears about his presence there before the natty little tailor told him Herb Pinelli was having lunch down the street. Macklin walked the block and a half and found the old killer curling fetuccini around a fork at the back of the restaurant. He rose and greeted Macklin warmly, but again without shaking hands, and waved him into a chair. A swarthy young waiter suddenly appeared next to the table.

“Do not order anything Italian,” Pinelli counseled, reseating himself. “The chef is Finnish.”

“You're eating Italian.”

“I have to. Once you are in business you will find that if you are fortunate enough to have established an image you must live with it. The clam chowder is exquisite.”

“Thanks. I'm not eating.”

“Ah, you are working. Wine, then. What you Americans used to call the Dago red before you became so sensitive.”

“Coffee's fine.”

“
Dio mio
, I forgot that rule.” Pinelli looked up at the waiter and began to order in Italian. When the waiter said he only understood English, he rolled his expressive eyes and asked for coffee with cinnamon. “The cinnamon takes away the bitter taste,” he told Macklin.

“I like the bitter taste. If I didn't I wouldn't drink coffee.”

“You are an exasperating man, Pietro. Very well, a cup of battery acid.”

When the waiter had withdrawn, Macklin looked around as if surveying the decor, then got the sheathed knife out of his pocket and passed it across the table. Pinelli secreted it under the tails of his blue camel's-hair suitcoat. Leaning back: “It was of use?”

“
Molto
. I thank you, my friend. I couldn't have gotten in another way.”

“There is one who found another. But here is your coffee.”

Macklin searched his friend's hawkish features as the waiter placed a steaming cup and saucer and a silver cream pitcher on the table in front of him. When they were alone again, Pinelli pushed away his plate and stretched an arm to refill his glass from the half-liter of red wine on the table. His well-tailored coatsleeve masked the play of his old muscles.

“An assassin made his way into the manager's apartment in River Rouge yesterday and hit him with a ball bat many times. The radio said he was pronounced dead at Detroit Receiving Hospital. That means he probably was dead when the police found him.”

“It wasn't me,” Macklin said after a moment.

“I did not think it was. Why would you use a bludgeon when you had an excellent knife? Also dead men are unreliable messengers.”

“I'm sorry about your friend, Umberto.”

“He was not a friend. Someone who owed him a favor asked me to hire him to clean up around the store. He knew what I did before I sold clothing and this frightened him at first. I calmed him. We talked. We were friendly. We were not friends.”

“Do the police suspect anyone?”

“The radio did not say.”

“That means they do.” Macklin sipped his coffee. It tasted bitter and for a moment he wished he'd let Pinelli order the cinnamon. Then he decided it wouldn't have helped. “I know who it was.”

“Not Ackler. Even he could not be on a boat in Lake Erie and in River Rouge at the same time.”

“Not Ackler. If I'm right, the same man tried to kill me twice last night. He's the reason I'm here. Have you ever heard of a pro calls himself Freddo?”

“Only four or five,” said the other, showing the grin that Macklin never saw anywhere else except in the mirror. In the early days he had imitated everything there was to copy about the old killer, and some of the mannerisms had stayed with him, most noticeably the grin. Not humorous, it was a lightning glimpse behind the civilized mask they presented to the world. “One of the first things I taught you,
figlio mio
, is that the successful killer is less than a shadow, blending with the landscape like the stain of breath passing from glass. He avoids ostentation in all its forms. We will not discuss the car you drive, which we both know distresses me. These sly names, these reverse euphemisms so beloved of the men who make movies and of the children who see them, they will tangle about your limbs and make you stumble. Freddo, fah! All the art has gone out of our profession.”

“This one is about twenty-five and blond, built like a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. He has a lazy eye. His voice is as high as a girl's. Wears sharp suits. Drives—drove a new Cordoba, brown. Carries a .44 magnum and a .22 target gun in shoulder rigs. He had a partner he called Link. He doesn't any more,” Macklin added.

“You killed the partner?”

“Yes.”

“He had red hair and freckles, looked like that puppet on the old children's television program? Happy something?”

“Howdy Doody. Yes. You know him?”

“He was what the police like to call a layoff. The man who stands at the door holding a gun on the squares while his partner goes in and snuffs the mark. You do not trust such a man alone on any but the least important contracts. That he lived so long is evidence of the decay in our work.”

Macklin smiled at his friend's elephantine attempt at TV crime parlance. “What about Freddo?”

“I think I would remember such a man as you describe. He is new or an outsider. The organization is getting to be like a college football team with all this recruiting out of state. The partner was called Lincoln Washington. A black man's name, although he was not black. A native who farmed out.”