Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  The next morning he found a thick envelope addressed to him in his post office box.

  Chapter Eight

  “Couldn’t you have worn a suit?” Howard Klegg scowled at Macklin’s brown-and-tan checked sport coat. The lawyer himself was wearing a gray three-piece with a silver stripe.

  “It’s in my apartment,” said Macklin. “I’ve been living out of motels for two days. I just bought this. It’s the only thing I could find that hides a gun.”

  “You’re armed? Here?” Klegg swept a long arm around the lobby of the Old County Building. A circuit court judge Macklin recognized from television interviews was showing the sailing-ship mosaic on the floor to a visitor.

  “Someone tried me again yesterday. Stairwells aren’t good enough anymore. It’s public streets now, in broad daylight. Why not a government building?”

  “Well, let’s just hope you don’t bump into a bailiff on the way.”

  They mounted a broad balustraded staircase. “You talked to Boniface?” Macklin asked.

  “Twice since you and I last talked. He drew a blank with his people on why you’re marked and who marked you. So far as the street talent in Detroit is concerned, there is no Macklin contract.”

  “Tell that to the charbroiled stiff and the Chink in the morgue.”

  “The police identified the man in the stairwell, an unemployed construction worker and ex-Marine named Keith DeLong. No known criminal record.”

  “Ask higher,” Macklin said.

  “You ask higher. I’ve enough to do with this divorce and repairing the damage to my building. My insurance doesn’t cover flamethrower explosions.”

  “Sell the Persian rug.”

  They had entered pedestrian traffic on the second floor. Klegg held his retort and rearranged his face into the expression he reserved for judges’ chambers.

  The judge’s name was Flutter, and Macklin thought he had never met a man whose name fit him less well. He was a pyramid of pale flesh poured into expensive tweeds and propped between the arms of a chair on a heavy steel frame behind a big desk. His hair was carrot-colored and his cheeks had a white consistency that looked as if they would hold the indentation of a finger minutes after it was withdrawn. Macklin’s wife Donna occupied another chair, next to a young man with short black hair permed into glossy waves like corrugated steel and spaniel eyes in a face that came to a point at his chin. He got up to shake Klegg’s hand and introduced himself as Gerald Goldstick, and there were more introductions while Macklin kept his hands to himself. In 1924, Dion O’Bannion, crime lord of Chicago’s North Side, had offered his hand to a visitor in his flower shop and had it held while another man pumped six bullets into him.

  It was a brief meeting, the sides feeling each other out under the somnolent eye of the fat judge seated behind his desk with his fingers lined up like frankfurters on the near edge. Even when the two lawyers were conversing, Macklin felt Goldstick’s eyes on him. The young lawyer had a big ruby knot snugged up under his pointed chin and he was forever pulling at it and shooting his cuffs and fingering the spray of handkerchief in his display pocket like a small boy playing dress-up. Macklin supposed Donna had been telling him stories. He wondered if they’d slept together yet.

  She looked better than he’d seen her in some time, but then he’d forgotten what she looked like out of the ratty old robe she wore around the house with cigarette burns on the front and drink stains on both sleeves. She had on a neat russet slack suit and cordovan boots and she’d been streaking her hair to disarm the gray, but she hadn’t lost any weight and her lipstick was on crooked. He glanced again at Goldstick and decided he’d been wrong about the two of them. The lawyer could do better.

  Sparks flew just once, when Klegg submitted Macklin’s estimate of his current worth. Donna remained silent while it was being read, then said, “What about the hundred thousand?”

  Macklin met her glare. “What hundred thousand?”

  “The hundred thousand you got for killing those people on the Boblo boat. I hear things. Even your friends in the Sicilian Sewing League couldn’t keep the lid down on that one.”

  Judge Flutter appeared to waken. The viscous eyes in the yeasty face blinked slowly at her, then at Macklin. “What’s this about killing?”

  “Figure of speech, your honor.” Klegg was looking at Goldstick. “By surrendering this financial statement at this time, my client has more than fulfilled his obligations so early in the action. His investments and savings accounts are all listed here. You’re welcome to go looking for secret caches.”

  “Fuck investments and savings accounts.”

  “Mrs. Macklin.” The judge tapped a thick finger like a gavel.

  “You don’t invest blood money. IRS would want to know where it came from. Under the laws of the State of Michigan I’m entitled to half of that hundred thousand.”

  “Comment, counselor?” asked Goldstick.

  Klegg was busy rearranging papers in his brown leather briefcase. “Mind you, I’m not saying there is any such sum. But if there were, my client’s Fifth Amendment rights would shield him from having to declare it.”

  Goldstick said, “Funny, Al Capone’s attorney didn’t try that.”

  “Your precedents are rusty, counselor. Under a 1966 Supreme Court decision involving a number of bookmakers tried for evasion of taxes, immunity from self-incrimination applies to declaring illegal income. This is not to say, of course, that any such income exists in this case.”

  “Kid games,” said Donna, setting fire to a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Shit.”

  The judge drummed his finger.

  “Gentlemen, I have seldom seen a divorce action or its answer so ill prepared before court. I suggest you meet on your own and discuss this matter of the hundred thousand dollars and then come back here with smiling faces all in a row. We adjourn for now.”

  A rabbit warren of offices in a short corridor led to the main hallway. On their way down it Klegg leaned close to his client and whispered: “By the way, what did you do with the money?”

  “I buried it.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Macklin looked at him flatly. The lawyer smoothed his tie.

  “I forgot. You don’t have a sense of humor.” They started downstairs. “Call me later. We’ve got to work out this thing.”

  “What about the Fifth Amendment?”

  “No one listens to the Supreme Court anymore. Call me.”

  They parted in front of the building. Walking away, Macklin heard quick footsteps clicking on the sidewalk behind him. He whirled, closing his hand on the butt of the revolver under his coat.

  “Go ahead. It’ll save you fifty grand.”

  It was Donna. He let go of the gun. “Where’s young Daniel Webster?”

  “I sent him back to his office. Where can we talk?”

  “I can’t get to the money, and even if I could, you’d still have to prove there is any.”

  “It can be proved. But it isn’t what I want to talk about.”

  They stood watching each other with the sidewalk traffic trickling around them. Under the sun her jowls were more evident and he could see the little cracks around her eyes under the thick mascara. But the eyes themselves were still pretty.

  “My car,” he said.

  “Can’t we go someplace for a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t and you can’t.”

  “Since when do you care whether I drink or not?” she demanded.

  “I never stopped.”

  “Don’t try to tell me you still love me, you son of a bitch. If you do I’ll take you for everything. I won’t stop at half.”

  “I don’t know that I ever did love you. But so many habits are fatal in my work you tend to hang on to the ones that aren’t. I’ll give you a lift home if that’s where you’re going.”

  “The long way.”

  She watched him check the Cougar over and le
t him open the door on the passenger side for her. He hadn’t done that in ten years and she hadn’t expected it in eight. They seemed to have fallen back into their premarital pattern in every respect but one. When they were moving up Woodward, she said, “I always liked this car. I want it.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Forget it. I’ll take my part of the hundred.”

  “I want a less conspicuous car. I’ll tell Klegg and he can work it out with your guy.”

  “Klegg doesn’t look like a divorce lawyer.”

  “Goldstick looks like a lounge singer.”

  They passed through two traffic signals in silence. Lone dry leaves jiggled on the naked branches of trees planted in boxes on the sidewalks. The gutters were full of those already fallen.

  “Mac, it’s Roger.”

  “They bust him for drugs finally?” He had given up on their son months ago.

  “No, he’s off them. Working on it, anyway. He took your advice and went to that clinic you told him about. They locked him in. It was bad and they told me I saw the best of it.”

  “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

  “He’s only just stopped talking about killing himself.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Now he wants to kill other people. For a living.”

  He was picking his way around a refrigerator truck double-parked on the right with its lights flashing. When they were back in their lane he glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead through the windshield.

  “I wonder where he got the idea,” she said.

  “He tell you that?”

  “I caught him playing with a gun in his room. He’s been living at home since you moved out. He said he bought it off a man in a bar. When I told him he couldn’t stay under my roof and keep a gun too he said that was fine with him, he’d soon have enough to buy a place of his own just as nice. Nicer. He said you did all right.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  “He’s almost seventeen. How old were you?”

  “Maybe he was just having fun.”

  “Not him. He’s like you that way.”

  “He hates my guts.”

  “Obviously not, or he wouldn’t be thinking of making your work the family profession. Maybe you can talk to him where I can’t. You’re his father.”

  “That doesn’t cut anything with him. You give them a roof and three squares a day and put clothes on them and go into hock seeing them through school and it’s not good enough anymore. Now you have to play baseball with them, go to father-and-son picnics. Be a pal. My dad never was, but I respected him.”

  “Yeah, and you turned out just swell.” She dug a loose cigarette out of her purse and punched the dash lighter.

  “He at home now?”

  “He’s staying at Lonnie Kimball’s apartment on Lahser. They went to school together before Roger dropped out. You going to talk to him?”

  “I’ve got too many other things to do right now. Maybe later.”

  “Later might be too late.”

  He said nothing. The lighter popped out and she lit up.

  “Crack the window, okay? I like to see.”

  She lowered the glass on her side two inches. “If you talk to him today I’ll tell Goldstick to forget the hundred grand.”

  “Roger isn’t worth it.”

  “You’re not his mother.”

  He swung left onto McNichols. “I’ll see him tonight. I’ve got a full schedule all day.”

  “Things to do, people to kill.”

  Neither of them spoke the rest of the way to Southfield. Macklin dropped her off in front of their old home and took off with a squirt of rubber as soon as she slammed the passenger door. Minutes later he felt silly, but by then he was halfway back to Detroit.

  Chapter Nine

  NAME: Roy Blossom

  AGE: 27 (approx.)

  HEIGHT: 5′ 10″ (approx.)

  WEIGHT: 125–130

  HAIR: Blond

  EYES: Blue

  SCARS: 1½″ bet. index and median fingers right hand, appendectomy, right side abdomen

  CHARACTERISTICS: Head leans left, toes point out walking

  FAMILY AND BIRTHPLACE: Tamaqua, Pennsylvania; father coal miner, mother’s occupation unknown

  OCCUPATION: Handyman, actor pornographic films, male model, mined coal while attending school

  HOBBIES:

  Seated at the tiny glass-topped secretary in his Harper Woods motel room, Macklin stared at the blank space on the neatly printed sheet before him, then wrote in: “Killing.”

  He flung down the pencil and read the information. Again he felt the sore lack of an efficient organization behind him. True, toward the end of his association with Boniface the background team had begun to get sloppy and the information nearly as sketchy as this, but at least they were professionals and the data they collected could be depended upon. He hated having to rely on the poor memory of a frightened woman who didn’t even know where her tormentor—and Macklin’s prey—was living.

  Their second meeting had taken place on Belle Isle, where Macklin and Moira King had walked past the fountain and along the tourist paths while she twisted her hands on the strap of her purse and massaged her brain for useful details about Roy Blossom. She had explained that upon returning home from their first meeting she was seized with the certainty that someone had been inside her apartment in her absence. Nothing had been taken, but some small items were out of place and there was a smell about the rooms that told her they had been invaded. She had no doubt as to who it was and had immediately signed and mailed the two documents Macklin had given her. His subsequent call had been forwarded to a friend’s house where she was staying. She was afraid to remain in her apartment.

  “Has anyone been following you besides Blossom?” he had begun, without greeting.

  “No, I—who else would be?”

  “Did you tell anyone where we were going to meet yesterday?”

  “No. Is something the matter?”

  “Just that I haven’t breathed safe air since I first heard your name. I hope you’re telling me the truth. Being a woman doesn’t buy you anything. It didn’t with four others.”

  “Oh, Christ,” she said. “I went to Uncle Howard to get Roy off my back and all I got was another Roy. Leave me alone, Mr. Macklin. Just leave me, period.” She hung up.

  He had called her back and soothed her and made the second appointment. Pegging the receiver, he had wondered if he would have bothered if the bulk of his hundred thousand dollars wasn’t still hidden in his apartment where he couldn’t get to it.

  Now, fresh from the second meeting, he laid down the sheet containing the bare material on Blossom and picked up the photograph she had given him. It was two years old, scuffed and creased from many months spent rattling around forgotten in a drawer, but the details were sharp. It was an arrogant face, good-looking in a fussed-over way, with the lowered lids and the curled lip Macklin knew so well, having worn a similar expression in the early days of his career. He marveled that he had lived long enough to grow out of it. He committed the important features to memory, tore the picture and the hand-printed sheet into long strips, and set fire to them in the big glass ashtray the motel provided. The flame towered briefly, then abated, the strips darkening and curling. He broke up the ashes with the end of the pencil and dumped them into the midget wastebasket by his knee.

  He counted six hundred dollars out of the thousand in his wallet and stashed three hundred in each breast pocket in case he lost the wallet, which he returned to his pants. The money was operating expenses provided by Moira King against the power of attorney. Then he put the room key in the ashtray for the maid to find.

  From the drawer in the bedstand he scooped the Smith & Wesson in its holster and clipped it to his belt under his coat. Wearing it made him feel oddly vulnerable. He had never before carried a gun he had used once, had always been careful to ditch it, knowing he could lay hands on another wit
hout a history for the next assignment. Lugging around a weapon traceable to a dead Chinese in Westland was a one-way ticket to life in Jackson. But going unarmed was even more dangerous in his present situation, and he couldn’t afford to go back to Treat for a replacement. Just going there the first time had been a risk. He had lost count of all the ironclad rules he had broken since visiting Klegg’s office two days before.

  Chapter Ten

  Brown nudged his companion, who lurched forward to help the man with his suitcase. The man was one of the first out of the tunnel that led from the jet airliner into the concourse, thin and gray-faced in a tight black overcoat that reached below his knees and tinted glasses in the shadow of a gray felt hat with a broad brim. He looked as much like a killer as a killer could look. But before Brown’s assistant could reach him, a fat woman with red-dyed hair wearing a fur coat swept past and threw her arms around the man’s neck. He took off his hat to kiss her and they walked away toward the escalators, hugging each other’s hips. Brown shrugged at his companion’s dismay, uncorking a broad Slavic smile.

  It was a big plane and they waited a long time while it emptied, stirring themselves for two more false alarms before the pilot came out followed by the copilot and three stewardesses. When an obvious plainclothes detective emerged handcuffed to a black woman, the two waiting men turned away.

  “He must have missed his connection,” Brown said.

  “Inspires confidence.” His assistant was a narrow American with deep sideburns and a weakness for orange neckties.

  “After two failures I assume nothing.”

  “Mr. Brown?”

  The pair turned. A man approaching sixty stood at their end of the tunnel, uncovering an impressive set of false teeth in an anxious grin. He had a big strapped leather suitcase on either side of him and his baggy overcoat gaped to expose a paunch gobleted in a green sweater. He wore black-rimmed glasses with round lenses and a maroon fur Tyrolean hat square on his head with a yellow feather in the band. His round face glistened pinkly.