Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Mr. Shang?”

  Naked before an open locker, stuffing his white outfit into a leather gym bag, the Oriental said nothing. He looked even younger without clothes. He was smooth all over, not muscular, and had no hair on his body. His penis was no larger than a boy’s. He zipped shut the bag and turned to the clothes in the locker, paying no attention to his visitor.

  “The showers here are excellent,” Brown tried. “The pressure could pin a man to the floor.”

  “I didn’t work up a sweat.”

  “Yes, I saw. Did you have to be so rough? Kung Fu sparrers are expensive and hard to come by in this part of the country, unlike California. We’ll have to pay him a bonus on top of his hospital bill to keep him from running to the authorities. If he survives.”

  “I don’t work for Occidentals.”

  He had a slight singsong accent, miles removed from the broad man’s lathed-down, carefully cultured American euphony. He buttoned a blue dress shirt and stepped into black wool slacks. He wore no underclothes.

  Brown said, “Then may I ask why you accepted our invitation to fly here?”

  “I’d never been to Detroit.”

  “Sure it wasn’t something else?”

  Shang slammed shut the locker and turned, holding patent leather loafers. “Your name is what?”

  “You can call me Mr. Brown.”

  “Not Smith?”

  “For now I like Brown. Chih Ming Shang.” He pronounced the name correctly. “I understand a little Mandarin. The name means ‘deadly wound,’ doesn’t it?”

  Shang slipped the loafers on over his naked feet and straightened, saying nothing.

  “You came because Michigan offers anonymity,” Brown suggested. “Your growing reputation has begun to hobble you on the West Coast. Once you’ve acquired a nickname, your effectiveness is cut in half. The Tongs call you the Shadow Dragon.”

  “The Tong is an Occidental invention.”

  “And the Mafia and the KGB are the creations of popular novels and the Sunday comics. But the organizations that bear those misnomers exist. By now you know we didn’t bring you here to see this building—which, by the way, I own through a string of dummy corporations that would take Antitrust the next two presidential administrations to sort out. We want you to remove a problem. If you do well we may retain you permanently.”

  “I’m a martial arts instructor.”

  Brown laughed softly, spreading his coat.

  “I’m not wired. The room isn’t bugged. If I were a police officer, I think you’d agree that flying you two-thirds of the way across the continent to trick a confession out of you would fall under gross entrapment.”

  “Now that I know what you aren’t.” He let it dangle.

  “I’m a government bureaucrat.”

  “Which government?”

  “Do I detect a streak of Chinese-American patriotism, Mr. Shang?”

  “I’m half Japanese. My parents spent World War Two behind barbed wire at Manzanar because their eyes slanted. What do you think, Mr. Brown?”

  “A good answer. Have you visited your bank lately?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. If you had, you’d know that at four o’clock yesterday afternoon, Pacific time, the sum of two thousand dollars was deposited in your account. An additional deposit will be made later. Say, five thousand total?”

  “I don’t do political assassination.”

  “Just a moment ago you didn’t work for Occidentals,” Brown mused. “No, this man is quite anonymous, or at least no better known to the general public than you.”

  “A professional?”

  “A user of weapons.”

  “Guns?”

  “Usually. He has a curious superstition, however. He never arms himself unless he’s working. At the moment he isn’t.”

  “I can handle a man with a gun. But I have to know he has one.”

  “He won’t if he follows his usual pattern. Can I take it you’re hiring on?”

  “Why me?” Shang asked. “There are more locals working here than in L.A. and San Francisco combined.”

  “We tried one. He didn’t work out. He was semipro at best. The man who made that mistake is on his way home. I’m his replacement.”

  “You have a workup?”

  “Workup?”

  “A report. Description. Habits. Perversions.”

  “It’s waiting for you at your hotel. It’s quite thorough. We bought it from one of our underworld contacts with your same realistic approach toward nationalism.”

  “There’s a difference. I’m not a traitor.”

  “You’re a martial arts instructor.”

  Shang didn’t smile. His masklike face looked like the illustrations of Oriental villains on the covers of the smuggled pulp magazines that Brown had read as a boy. The slitlike eyes of Wu Fang. “When can you start?”

  “After I’ve read the workup. And called my bank.”

  Brown showed him a way out of the locker room and the building that wouldn’t take him past the ambulance attendants on their way inside to tend to Shang’s vanquished opponent. He’d been hearing the sirens coming for minutes. Carrying his gym bag, the small man moved with fluid grace down the narrow alley and around the corner. Brown was glad to see the last of him for a while. Killers had no sense of humor and he never enjoyed working with them.

  Chapter Seven

  The bar was a green-painted concrete building with a gravel parking lot on a corner across the street and down the block from the General Motors assembly plant in Westland. The lot was deserted, and when the woman entered and her eyes adjusted to the medium light inside she saw no one but a white-haired bartender dozing while standing up in front of the beer taps. She glanced down at her watch, stood there a moment longer, and was about to turn and walk out when a man rose from the other side of the jukebox and beckoned her over.

  By the time she got there, he was seated again. The table was narrow, barely large enough to support two drinks, with a hard chair on either end. She said, “I’m Moira King. Are you the man who called?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we move to a booth? I’d feel more comfortable.”

  “Booths are too hard to get out of.”

  When he said nothing more she sat down opposite him, resting her purse on her lap. She was twenty-three but looked much older, her face anorexic-looking with the bones prominent and her eyes large and bright as from fever. She wore her auburn hair short and combed behind ears with amber buttons in the lobes. Her dress was a plain brown shift through which the straps of her white brassiere showed. She dug a cigarette out of her purse and let it droop from the center of her mouth with her thumb poised on the wheel of a disposable butane lighter.

  “You didn’t give me your name,” she said, and lit it.

  “You’re Louis Konigsberg’s daughter.”

  “Yes.” She blew smoke away from the table. “I had my name legally changed. I was going to be an actress for a while. Now I make recordings for the telephone company. When you call for the time? That’s me.” She closed her mouth before she could run on further. The man’s tired-looking eyes seemed to see through her skull. She wondered if he was a policeman.

  “Klegg said you had a problem. He didn’t tell me what it was.”

  She puffed at the cigarette, flipped ash into the tin tray on the table, puffed again. She never inhaled. “Can I get a drink? Whiskey sour.”

  He went on looking at her, then got up and walked over to the bar, rapping a knuckle on the top to wake the bartender. He returned carrying only one glass, which he set in front of her.

  “Aren’t you drinking?”

  “Not when I’m working.”

  He was a policeman. She sipped her whiskey and set it down. “I don’t see how you can help me. The other police said there was nothing they could do until Roy committed a crime.”

  “Who’s Roy?”

  “He was my boyfriend. He thinks he still is,
that’s the problem.” She looked around at the empty tables. “I don’t see how this place stays in business.”

  “The shift at the assembly plant doesn’t change for two more hours. Then the place is jammed. That’s why I picked this time. What’s Roy’s last name?”

  “Blossom. We—made some films together in Detroit two years ago, before I found out I wasn’t going to cost Faye Dunaway any sleep. We saw each other off the set. He was good-looking, about twenty-five, tall and blond and fantastic in bed. The joke around the studio was that when the lights went up so did he.” She got a sour smile on her face. It wasn’t returned. She sent some more ash at the tray. “Then he got arrested.”

  “Pornography?”

  “Murder. He got in an argument with a man in a parking lot over a scratched fender and cut him up with a pocketknife.”

  “What’d he get?”

  “The jury found him innocent by reason of insanity and he went to the forensic psychiatry center at Ypsilanti for sixteen months. They let him out five weeks ago. He called me the day he got out. He’s called almost every day since.

  “I told him I didn’t want anything more to do with him. I said I had a good job and I was happy with my life and I didn’t want to go back. I told him it had nothing to do with what he did. It did, of course, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.”

  “He didn’t take it well.”

  She looked at him quickly. His expression hadn’t changed. “He said I’d be sorry.”

  “He say how?”

  “He’s too smart for that. He calls me at all hours. I changed my number to an unlisted one, but he found it out somehow. I’m afraid to answer the phone. But the ringing and ringing is almost as bad as listening to him. He never says anything specific, just talks about what he’s been doing and how he thinks about me all the time. Hell, I can’t even get him for making obscene calls. If they were they wouldn’t be so bad. It’s what he doesn’t say. Then last Monday I saw him.”

  The bartender cruised past, stopping to wipe off a table nearby. She waited until he moved away.

  “It was on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. I was coming home from work and there he was. He was thinner than I remembered and his hair was shorter, but the time in the hospital didn’t seem to have hurt him physically. He had a knife with him.”

  “He threaten you with it?”

  “Yes. Well, not really. He didn’t wave it at me or even mention it. He just cleaned his fingernails with it. All the time he was talking he was cleaning his fingernails. It was one of those fancy ones with a lot of attachments. We used to call them Swiss Army knives.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing. He just said it was good to see me and that I looked good, said he was job-hunting; small talk. He pretended we met by accident. But he was waiting for me. He offered to see me to the door of my apartment. I said that wouldn’t be necessary and he didn’t push it. I don’t think we were talking for more than five minutes. But all the time he was cleaning his nails with that big knife.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think he’s been following me. I never see him doing it. I just feel him. He means to kill me, and you people won’t do anything to stop him. He was declared sane by psychiatrists, but he’s just as crazy as he was when he went to the hospital, and he’s going to cut me up just like that man in the parking lot and no one’s going to stop him.”

  She had raised her voice. The bartender was watching them from across the room. The man stared at him until he looked away. Quietly the man said, “I’m not with the police.”

  “You’re not? But, Uncle Howard said—”

  “He didn’t say I was a cop. How much do you know about the law practice he shared with your father?”

  She crushed out her cigarette and sat back. “I’m not naive. I’ve known what kind of clients they represented since I was seventeen.”

  “That would be about the time you got into moviemaking?”

  “About then, yes.”

  “I used to work for one of their clients,” he said. “Michael Boniface.”

  “Oh.” She played with her glass. “A leg-breaker. Well, you won’t scare Roy. They had some parts left over when they built him, and the ability to be scared was one of them. If you’re the best Uncle Howard could do—”

  “I don’t scare people. Not for a living. I come in when the leg-breakers give up.”

  His eyes were on hers. He watched the color subside from her face. She started to get up quickly, clutching her purse. He clamped a hand on her wrist and held it.

  “I’m seeing you as a favor to Klegg,” he said. “I don’t need the work.”

  “Fine. Because if you think I’m going to pay you to—”

  “Kill Blossom. Let’s stop waltzing around it. Sit down.” His fingers tightened.

  Glaring, she obeyed. He withdrew the hand. She rubbed the red spots on the underside of her wrist. “Violence never solves anything.”

  “It solves almost everything. It’s why we arm the police, and it’s why we still have wars. Have you ever thought how many lives would have been saved if some enterprising assassin had stabbed Hitler in that beer hall in Munich?”

  “That would have been sinking to his level.”

  “There’s only one level, Miss King. It belongs to the survivors.”

  “I’m not a killer.”

  “That’s why you need me.”

  She finished her drink and lit another cigarette, looking at him through the smoke.

  “I don’t even know you’re what you say you are. Maybe you’re just some grifter who’ll take my money and go and I’ll still have Roy to deal with.”

  “My name is Macklin.”

  A vertical line cracked her forehead.

  “I’m sorry you recognize the name,” he said. “It’s not good to be known outside the business.”

  She said, “The Boblo boat last summer. Those terrorists.”

  “My part in it hit the papers for one edition. One of them reported my name. Just once, though. Boniface cuts a wide swath in this area, the FBI too.”

  “Isn’t this out of your line? I mean, individual.”

  “I’m working for myself these days.”

  She was silent for a little. Then: “I don’t want you, Mr. Macklin. I’m no one to judge what anyone else does for a living. But it was tough getting out and I’m not going back.”

  “That what you told Roy?”

  “I’m sorry. This was a mistake.” She started to get up again.

  He drew a long fold of paper from inside his jacket, glanced at it to make sure it was the right one, and reached it across the table. She hesitated, then took it and unfolded it. “What’s this?”

  “In case you change your mind. It’s a power-of-attorney form giving me title to everything you own. It’s my standard fee.”

  “Isn’t it a bit stiff?”

  “It’s worth it. If he kills you, you won’t need it, and if he doesn’t, I’m not necessary. I had Howard Klegg draw it up. That’s his secretary’s signature in the witness blank. All you have to do is sign it. This too.” He handed her another document. “It’s a formal confession that you’ve hired me to commit murder. Spreads the risk a little more evenly.”

  “You don’t take any chances.”

  “I got out of the habit. There’s a post office box number on the confession if you decide to go with me. Sign and mail both papers and I’ll get back to you.”

  She started to give them back. He didn’t take them.

  “Hang on to them at least until you hear from Blossom again,” he said. “You can always burn them. Next time the phone rings maybe you’ll remember this moment.”

  “I won’t change my mind.” But she put the papers in her purse. She rose and looked down at him. “I’m curious.”

  “You get one question.”

  “When the census-taker knocks on your door and asks what you do for a living, what do you tell him?”

/>   “Human relations consultant,” he said. “I’ll look for your letter.”

  The white-haired bartender leaning on the beer taps didn’t stir as she went past.

  Shadows were stretching when Macklin left the bar twenty minutes behind the woman, as was his habit. He had parked his car around the corner on a meterless residential side street. It was the only vehicle in sight at that time of day. With the end of the recession in the automotive industry, the GM assembly plant was running at white heat and everyone seemed to be working.

  Before opening the door he routinely inspected the interior through the windows and ran the hood and doors for unfamiliar wires, finally checking the engine and getting down in push-up position to peer under the car. He was climbing to his feet when the man came at him.

  He had been crouching behind a hedge in the front yard of the house across the street, and but for the scrape of one sole on the pavement he made no noise coming across, touching ground only once in a whirling bounce, all arms and legs and flying black hair, a tubular body dressed all in black and a flash of ivory face screwed into a grimace of concentration. A pointed foot at the end of a gracefully arched leg streaked toward Macklin’s head and he squeaked the Smith & Wesson out of the holster in the small of his back and fired twice into the flying form.

  The foot grazed his shoulder and the man on the end of it piled yelling into the side of Macklin’s car and dropped in a tangle to the pavement. Macklin put the gun to the man’s temple.

  The man was still grimacing, his eyes glittering in their slits. “They said,” he whispered.

  “Who said?” Macklin pulled back the hammer.

  “They said you wouldn’t—” Blood came into his mouth, choking him. He coughed, and then he stopped coughing.

  Macklin lowered the hammer gently as the hate-face relaxed, freed from the burden of a soul. The body arched and settled.

  A dog started barking. Putting away the revolver, Macklin patted the body down swiftly. The clothes had no pockets. He got into the car, started the engine, and backed up to drive around the dead Oriental in the street.