Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places Read online

  Desperate Detroit

  And Stories of Other Dire Places

  Loren D. Estleman

  Copyright © 2016 by Loren D. Estleman.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-4405-9620-4

  Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9620-9

  Paperback ISBN 10: 1-4405-9623-9

  Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9623-0

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-9621-2

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9621-6

  “The Black Spot” previously published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March/April 2015. “The Tree on Execution Hill” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1977. “Sincerely, Mr. Hyde” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2014. “You Owe Me” previously published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2015. “A Web of Books” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, February 1983. “State of Grace” previously published in An Eye for Justice edited by Robert Randisi, copyright © 1988 by Mysterious Press, ISBN 10: 0892962585, ISBN 13: 9780892962587. “The Used” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1982. “Bad Blood” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1986. “Cabana” previously published in The Armchair Detective, Spring 1990. “Lock, Stock, and Casket” previously published in Pulpsmith, Summer 1982. “Diminished Capacity” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1982. “Saturday Night at the Mikado Massage” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1996. “How’s My Driving?” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January/February 2008. “The Pioneer Strain” previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1977. “Flash” previously published in Murder on the Ropes edited by Otto Penzler, copyright © 2001 by New Millennium Entertainment, ISBN 10: 1893224333, ISBN 13: 9781893224339. “Evil Grows” previously published in Mystery: The Best of 2001 edited by Jon L. Breen, copyright © 2002 by I Books, ISBN 10: 0743445015, ISBN 13: 9780743445016. “The Bog” previously published in Wild Crimes: Stories of Mystery in the Wild edited by Dana Stabenow, copyright © 2004 by Signet, ISBN 10: 045121286X, ISBN 13: 9780451212863. “Now We Are Seven” previously published in Ghost Towns edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, copyright © 2010 by Pinnacle, ISBN 10: 0786019565, ISBN 13: 9780786019564.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

  Cover design by Frank Rivera.

  Cover image © Andrey Bayda/123RF.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Preface: The Desperate Business of Crime

  The Black Spot

  The Tree on Execution Hill

  Sincerely, Mr. Hyde

  You Owe Me

  A Web of Books

  State of Grace

  The Used

  Bad Blood

  Cabana

  Lock, Stock, and Casket

  Diminished Capacity

  Saturday Night at the Mikado Massage

  How’s My Driving?

  The Pioneer Strain

  Flash

  Evil Grows

  The Bog

  Now We Are Seven

  About the Author

  Preface

  The Desperate Business of Crime

  It’s struck me, in the course of writing about it, that crime is the most durable small business we have.

  The rule of supply and demand applies to illegitimate enterprise just as it does to legal commerce, albeit without interference from government regulations and lip service about Giving Back; the characters in these stories never gave back anything, because they put their lives on the line acquiring it. No one can adequately explain algebra, the butterfly effect, or why Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons sounded so much like a loose fan belt, but everyone can grasp the significance of a suitcase full of cash. Nowhere else is desperation more obvious to the eye and touch.

  Alfred Hitchcock once explained the difference between mystery and suspense in the context of a stage play: When the cast is aware that a bomb is about to go off and the audience isn’t, it’s a mystery. When the audience is aware that a bomb is about to go off and the cast isn’t, it’s suspense.

  For going on four decades I’ve written stories about desperate men and women trying to find their way back to the lives they’d sought to escape from in the beginning; Dorothies groping their way along the Yellow Brick Road back to the bleak Kansas they’d hoped to leave behind. That formula doesn’t apply to all the protagonists in the stories that follow, but at the core, all are underdogs: cold-blooded killers who are somehow better than their victims, juvenile delinquents denied a second chance when it counted, clerks caught in the middle, psychotic killers who knew no alternative, survivors in a foreign world, losers who long to be winners, ordinary people with dark secrets, fanatics drawn into darkness by their fixations, someone putting his life on the line for something of greater value to himself than the world knows; people you read about every day in the papers, see on TV, glimpse on the Net (and sometimes in the mirror). Every one of them is a star in his own movie, if the world would just see it.

  It would be difficult to select a place to which the term “desperate” applies more appropriately than Detroit.

  I was fourteen years old when I tuned in to a local TV station and saw military tanks trundling four abreast up Woodward Avenue, the city’s main street. This was at the height (or depth) of the war in Vietnam, and footage of that tragically unnecessary conflict aired daily; I thought this was what I was witnessing, until I recognized the Fisher Building towering in the distance.

  Suddenly, guerrilla warfare had come to my own backyard.

  This is what happened: In July 1967, a routine police raid on a “blind pig” (regional parlance for an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling establishment) went very wrong very fast as a mob of residents fell upon the team of officers with rocks and bricks. Decades of unrest fostered by a predominately black population policed and governed by a predominately white establishment burst into rage. By the time the National Guard and then the U.S. military managed to quell the disturbance, 3,800 people had been arrested, 1,700 stores had been looted, 1,383 buildings burned, 347 people were injured, and 43 people had been killed. This led to a sharp hike in the crime statistics, peaking in 1974 with 801 murders. In that year, Coleman A. Young took office as the city’s first black mayor, but after twenty years of his administration Detroit’s image had not improved. It was referred to by the press as Dodge City, and when it was pointed out that the West’s wildest cowtown paled in comparison to the Motor City’s plight, “Murder City” took its place.

  Today, th
e situation has improved considerably, with various civic improvements ongoing and major businesses moving in and brightening the employment picture, but unscrupulous opportunists like former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, currently serving a decades-long sentence in federal prison for corruption and racketeering, periodically underscore Detroit’s lingering reputation as a desperate place.

  All this is useful to a crime writer, offering no end of inspiration, but as someone whose global outlook has always come filtered through the metropolis to the east, I continue to root for its renaissance. I like the place. Whine though its leaders and media personalities will about the cheap shots taken by outsiders, the residents of the neighborhoods are too busy paying bills and trying to improve their lot to behave like petulant children. They make the best of what they have, in the conviction, however faint, that things can only get better; and they take steps to see that they do.

  It’s unlikely that Detroit will ever be what it was in the 1920s and late 1940s, when it was expected to take its place as the fourth most populous city in the nation. There are too many variables, and its status as a great manufacturing center is ill-equipped to challenge the rapid-fire progress of technology. But I hold faith in its basic strength of character. From its founding to the present, its history has been a history of violence, but it has also been a history of hope.

  The culprits in the stories that follow, whether they ply their dark trade in Detroit or other places similarly suited to their methods, believe that in desperate times the very structure of civilization has collapsed and nothing is forbidden. As J.R. Ewing put it on Dallas, “Once you set aside integrity, the rest is easy.” Similarly, once you choose the forbidden path, assault and homicide are no longer off the table.

  Crime is free enterprise in the purest definition of the term. It’s pass/fail, with reward to the first and punishment to the second. And any place is desperate where desperate people congregate.

  —Loren D. Estleman, November 2015

  The Black Spot

  Just when it seems I’ve gotten all I can out of Peter Macklin before he devolves into one of those tiresome series characters who exist only to run up a body count, he surprises me with an exhilarating domestic situation. “The Black Spot” brings him full circle back to where he began: doing what he does best despite the distractions of home. Even cold-blooded killers worry about paying their bills.

  • • •

  They said Leo Dorfman had forgotten more about the law than most lawyers ever knew.

  A couple of his clients, currently serving as guests of the federal government, agreed.

  He’d been eighty for as long as Peter Macklin could remember, a stopped clock now in semiretirement, working out of his Redford Township dining room in one of the three-piece suits he continued to wear every day. Mrs. Dorfman, brown and wrinkled in a woven sun hat, sleeveless blouse, and yellow shorts, knelt in her flower garden outside. Macklin glanced at her from his seat opposite the lawyer’s at the round table.

  “Don’t worry about Lyla,” Dorfman said. “She can’t hear herself fart.”

  But Macklin kept his voice low. “Laurie’s divorcing me.”

  “I’m sorry. Being a criminal attorney, I can’t help you. But I can recommend some good divorce men.”

  “I’m going to settle. I can’t afford to have experts performing archaeology on the source of my finances.”

  “That’s wise. Do you have a figure in mind?”

  “Half a million should do it. Another hundred for incidentals.”

  “Have that much?”

  “No. That’s why I’m here. I need to work.”

  “What about your legitimate business?”

  “I should have sold out ten years ago. No one goes to camera stores any more. Any prospects?”

  “I may have something, but you won’t like it.”

  “A name?”

  “Sal Malavaggio.”

  Macklin didn’t like it.

  “I didn’t know he was out,” he said.

  “He’s in a halfway house in the Irish Hills. Next week he’ll be back in Detroit. One of his people called. I said I didn’t have those contacts any more. I thought you were out of it.”

  Macklin said nothing. He never wasted time on regrets.

  The lawyer said, “Your timing couldn’t be better—if you want the job. He wants six guys dead, and he wants it fast. I know you like groundwork, but you’ll have to scramble on this one. I think we can get him up to a hundred a pop.”

  “I need a hundred up front.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll agree to that.”

  “He will. This isn’t a job for Costco.”

  Since he’d moved out of the house in Toledo, Peter Macklin was renting a house in Pontiac, thirty miles northwest of Detroit. When he got back from Redford, he switched on the TV for company. Somebody had blown up something in the Middle East. It seemed to be a big deal.

  He wasn’t thrilled about working for Salvatore Malavaggio. The man was as Sicilian as they came—his family tree didn’t branch—and had done fifteen years on a RICO rap he might have beaten if he’d gone into Witness Protection; but he was an old-school Omerta man, buried so deep in the foundations of the Mafia he flossed his teeth with a garrote.

  Macklin had thought to leave that all behind many years ago. After his first divorce he’d gone independent, demanding that prospective clients come up with income tax forms and bank statements detailing everything they owned, which was what he charged for committing murder. This policy weeded out the frivolous. It was amazing how many people were willing to take a vow of poverty just to tip someone the black spot.

  Then he’d met Laurie, a beautiful, intelligent woman half his age, and retired on his legitimate investments; but eventually the truth of his past had come out, and that was the end of that.

  Now here he was, in his forties, separated, forced to fall back on the only skill he had to survive.

  When the FedEx package arrived he took out a small rounded rectangle of plastic.

  “Expect it,” Dorfman had said. “It’s a burn phone, anonymous and untraceable. Throw it in the river when you’re through with it. The money will be electronically deposited in the following banks, first the advance, then an additional payment each time you score; nine thousand in each account, so it won’t be reported to the IRS. My ten percent comes off the top.”

  A series of names and account numbers followed, all prearranged for just such a situation. Macklin had written them all down. “We don’t meet face to face after today. Wait for instructions by text.”

  No room for bargaining on the fee. Leo Dorfman was the only lawyer in the country who’d go near the case. It had made him a millionaire many times over, but the other side of the coin was he’d installed a remote starter in his car in case of detonation.

  The first text came in ten minutes after Macklin finished charging the phone. Something buzzed, he pressed a key, and looked at the screen. It provided a name, address, vital statistics, and a photo. A second text informed him that ninety thousand dollars had been deposited in his name, spread out among ten separate accounts. It was really amazing what technology had done for crime.

  Nikolai Kobolov lived in Bloomfield Village, where a house smaller than 5,000 square feet was considered a starter. When the Berlin Wall fell and the KGB temporarily lost interest in the Russian Mafia, he’d emigrated to the U.S. and invested his Swiss bank accounts in the insurance business, selling protection to expatriate Communists from their enemies, and occasionally from his own people, who respected such things as Molotov cocktails.

  He hung his bullet-shaped body in good tailoring and in the wintertime wore a long belted overcoat and a fur hat, like Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago. He was part Ukrainian, descended from Cossacks.

  When he left his house, riding in the back of a stretch Lincoln driven by a chauffeur in livery, two cars followed, one containing four men licensed to carry firearms in defense of his life. Two FBI agents rode
in the other. It was almost four o’clock, the time appointed for his daily shaving. He liked a clean head.

  The shop downtown, which called itself a salon, was all glistening glass, chrome, and tile. He took a seat in his customary chair while his bodyguards read newspapers in the waiting area and the two FBI men sat in their car outside. A man Kobolov didn’t recognize covered him in crisp white linen. He wore a white jacket fastened at one shoulder with buttons.

  “Where’s Fred?” the customer asked.

  “Sick today.”

  He shook a thick finger at the man. “No nicks. I’m going out with a young lady tonight.”

  “Yes, sir.” The barber removed a towel from the warmer and wrapped it turbanlike around Kobolov’s head. The Russian sighed, lulled into a doze, as always, by the heat. He barely shuddered when the ice pick entered the top of his spinal column. The bodyguards were still reading when the barber went out through the back room.

  Sanders Quotient was a third-round draft choice for the Detroit Lions, but he’d been drummed out of the league for unsportsmanlike conduct. He’d sued on the basis of discrimination; however, the NAACP had refused him use of its counsel. He’d invested the proceeds from his first year’s contract in one of the biggest drug operations in the Midwest, dealing in cocaine and heroin. Some of it was too strong for the clientele, who’d died of OD.

  He lived in an original Frank Lloyd Wright house in St. Clair Shores. The open plan, and the unobstructed view through big windows, appealed to him.

  He had no bodyguards. At thirty-five, in excellent condition, he could take care of himself. If that was overoptimistic, he had two DEA agents watching his house in eight-hour shifts, hoping to catch him in an illegal transaction.

  He got up around 2:00 A.M., leaving a fine young woman in his round bed, to crack open a bottle of imported beer. In the kitchen, he heard a thump coming from his deck.

  On the way through the rec room he selected a Glock nine from the rack and went to the sliding glass door to investigate. Gripping the weapon tightly and hugging the wall, he reached for the lock. It was open. He always made sure everything was sealed tight before bed.