Logic was an attorney’s weapon. A fissure showed in the blank wall before him and he pulled at it with all his training. “I’m a professional, like you. How do you think I’ve lasted this long with my reputation downtown?”
The other held his grip on Klegg’s lapels. His face was unreadable. The lawyer built on his silence.
“Get out of here before the police show up. Call me later.” He told Macklin his home telephone number. “Can you remember that? After six.”
The air was a riot of sirens, the keening of the fire trucks joined by the deeper bellowing yelp of police cars. Macklin opened his hands. The lawyer’s bunched jacket bore the imprint of his fists. “It only takes a second to kill you.”
“Use the back stairs.”
Macklin used the elevator. A lawyer of Klegg’s standing who kept his practice in that neighborhood would be too cheap to hire three killers. He slid into the crowd gathering in front of the building and away.
When the first man in a helmet and raincoat bounded into the foyer, he found threads of black smoke twisting out of the seam around the fire door on that level, carrying with them a sweet smell of roast meat.
Chapter Three
“Mr. Klegg?”
“Yes.”
“My name is George Pontier. I’m an inspector with Detroit Homicide.” He snapped his badge folder open and shut with a little turning movement of his wrist.
“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.”
Chapter Four
He didn’t go home. Familiar places were off limits to the hunted, and Macklin, who had spent at least as much time underground as he had on the surface, held little regard for material possessions he would just have to leave behind the next time things heated up. Thirty-nine years old, a husband—for a while longer, anyway—and a father, and he was no more attached to objects than a kid with his head full of Khalil Gibran.
The nickel-colored Cougar was a target too, but he hung on to it, choosing wheels over feet. He could hot-wire any car made in under three minutes, but an arrest for Grand Theft Auto and a night in the Wayne County Jail would be like strapping himself to the busy end of a shooting range.
Telephone booths too, those few overlooked by Ma Bell in her mania to strip her customers of their last thread of privacy, were forbidden. He cruised downtown Detroit, double-parking and leaving his car in loading zones while he checked out drugstores and diners for open telephone stands in good positions. Finally he found one, at the end of a bar in a cocktail place that commanded a good view of the room and the front door and provided easy exit through the grill. He went back out, parked in a legitimate lot, and used the telephone to call Klegg’s home number. Dusk was gathering in clumps outside, and the only illumination in the room came from the rose-colored lights behind the bar.
He was about to hang up when the lawyer answered on the eleventh ring. He sounded breathless.
“You alone?” Macklin asked.
“Yes. Sorry, I was longer than expected getting rid of the police. I just got in.”
“They identify the Human Torch?”
“Not yet. They won’t for a while. Where are you?”
“Who rigged the kill?”
“I’m not in a position to run it down. I’m seeing Boniface again tomorrow. He’ll put it in circulation. Not that he owes you anything now, but he’s sentimental.”
“I guess we know different Bonifaces.”
“Prison has gentled him.” Klegg paused. “You still think I set you up?”
“Right now I’m not thinking you didn’t. Someone had to know I was there and give the signal when I left.”
“I have someone come in and run the place for bugs and wire taps several times a month. The place is clean.”
“That doesn’t help your case any.”
“This morning’s electronic miracles are obsolete this afternoon,” the lawyer said. “Someone could have been eavesdropping on us through a gun mike from Toledo for all I know. I’ve been standing up for Boniface and his friends for thirty years, always as an attorney. I don’t push buttons on people.”
A tall blond waitress in a white blouse and black skirt that caught her just below the pelvis set a tray down on Macklin’s end of the bar, gave a drink order to the bartender, and waited while he filled it. Macklin remained silent while her heavily inked eyes slid over him casually.
“Macklin?”
The waitress left with the drinks. “I’m here.”
“Are you going to call Moira King?”
He had forgotten all about her. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“Look, if I were hanging you out to dry I’d find a better way to do it. I’ve been in touch with your wife’s attorney. My part of the bargain is started. Call her.”
Already the killer was experiencing the frustrations of working for himself. He had left most of his cash in his apartment and needed more. He would have to talk to the woman, even if the job turned out bust.
“I need one thing from you before I set anything up,” he told Klegg.
Klegg asked him what, and he answered. They spoke for a few minutes more, then Macklin pegged the receiver and went out through the grill, just in case.
The name Bakersfield said it all.
Accustomed to the damp cool of San Francisco in late summer, Fred Chao stood inside the steel Quonset on the outskirts of the minimal town with the appropriate name and mopped sweat from his neck and wrists with a lawn handkerchief already soaked transparent. His eyes stung with salt and he felt greasy in a suit built for the Bay Area climate. The desert was no place for a middle-aged Chinese-American businessman. He wondered for the hundredth time what he was doing sweltering in the only patch of shade in ten miles of flat, yellow, sun-scorched landscape when he could be drinking gimlets and enjoying his air-conditioned view of the Golden Gate Bridge. He had half decided to get into his rented car and drive back to L.A. International Airport when the man he had come to see appeared from behind the red-and-white Aeronca two-seater parked inside the hangar, wiping his hands off on a grease-mottled rag.
“Mr. Chow?” The man extended a palm that was not demonstrably cleaner than it had been before he’d wiped it.
His visitor touched it and withdrew his own quickly. “Chao.”
He could see that the subtle difference in the way he pronounced the name was lost on his host, who shrugged a narrow shoulder in a manner peculiarly rural Midwestern. In contrast to the short girth of the Chinese, the other was an inch over six feet and very lean, his coveralls a long narrow sweep of gray cotton smeared black. He had on a cap with OSHKOSH stenciled across the front and a long bill that shadowed most of his face, allowing only his long rectangular jaw to slide out the bottom. It was unshaven and lumped with acne. “My partner says you want Mexico.”
“Yes. I want to go to Mazatlán.”
“I don’t carry dope or nothing like that.”
“I just want you to carry me.”
“You ain�
�t wanted or nothing like that? That’s FBI. Wetbacks is Border Patrol and maybe I pay a fine, lose my license. Leavenworth, that’s something else again.”
“I’m not wanted. It’s perfectly legal. I have a passport.”
“You don’t need me, then. You could fly Pan Am or drive down. It’s a lot cheaper.”
“I’d rather not have my name on an official manifest.”
The man scratched the lump on his chin, leaving a fresh black smudge.
Chao reached inside his jacket and produced a thick envelope containing ten wilted hundred-dollar bills. “Perhaps this will clear things up.”
The man accepted the envelope and thumbed through the contents, wetting the greasy ball twice and moving his lips as he counted. He unzipped a coverall pocket and slid the package inside.
“One suitcase,” he said. “Eleven o’clock.”
Chao glanced automatically at his wristwatch. It was just three-thirty. “Why so late?”
“I got to finish greasing her, change the oil, clean the plugs. I ain’t ate since breakfast. You didn’t figure to leave right away.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“There’s motels in town.”
He had seen town. “I’ll take my chances in Los Angeles. How do I know you’ll be here when I get back?”
“Hell, mister, I own this place. I got more than a thousand bucks in just the building. I’m going to leave it all for one hot night in Tijuana?”
Chao hadn’t seen anything he would pay a thousand dollars for since leaving Los Angeles. But he held his tongue and got back into the car. It was too hot to argue.
He decided not to stay in any of the hotels near the airport. If they traced him down here, those would be the first places they’d look. Instead he booked an eighteen-dollar room in a Hollywood motel with an air conditioner that made a lot of noise without shedding much cool air and a TV set that didn’t work. He supposed he’d have done as well in Bakersfield, but he felt better in civilization. He double-locked the door and made sure the window was securely fastened, then took off his jacket and tie and shirt and shoes and stretched out on the bed.
But he didn’t sleep right away. He thought again of the murder, of the old Chinese man in the underground garage with blood on his silk suit, falling. Of the two younger tailored Orientals turning, the long blade glistening in the one’s hand. Of himself running, running and running with his heart slamming his breastbone and running out into the daylight and dodging the honking screeching traffic on the street and running and running, his side cramping, and running and being among people and then slowing down. He thought of the newspaper articles about Tong killings and the grand jury investigation and of going to work and working and going home and sitting and thinking and saying nothing to anyone about what he had seen, and of how safe he had begun to feel again until the police came around asking questions. Then the next morning he opened his front door and saw the Chinese character painted on it in red paint that was still wet. He was second-generation and didn’t even know what the sign stood for, but he knew what it meant well enough, and when they killed his dog and left its head on his kitchen table, just let themselves in like there was no lock and left it there for him to find, he called a number on a business card he’d had for a while and here he was in a noisy, airless motel room in Hollywood waiting to catch a plane from Bakersfield to a coastal village in Mexico. Life was funny.
Roses Are Dead Page 2
