Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Mr. Brown?” he said again. He had a thick, furred accent.

  Loath to ask the obvious question, Brown said, “Yes?”

  The man gave a little pleased grunt and seized both suitcases and wobbled forward and set them down again, thrusting out a soft moist hand with bitten nails. “Dreadfully sorry to have kept you waiting, but I had my bags in the rear compartment and was forced to let everyone else pass down the aisle before I could go back for them.” He wiggled the hand, as if the other hadn’t noticed it. “I’m Mantis.”

  While the two shook hands a telephoto lens with a range 310 feet longer than any on the market blinked, freezing the pair amiably for the ages. The man behind it worked the shutter twice more, then melted back into the crowd around the metal detector and thumbed up a button on the lapel of his topcoat, murmuring into the grid pattern.

  “Intertrap three, this is Intertrap two. Call Intertrap one and tell him contact has been made repeat contact has been made. Am continuing surveillance. Out.”

  The two men he had photographed were moving up the concourse, the third man struggling along behind with the newcomer’s suitcases. The man with the camera waited until they passed, then hoisted the strap over one shoulder and fell into step several yards behind them, pulling a face at the silly kid things a grown man had to say and do in his business.

  Sergeant Lovelady entered the office without knocking and found Inspector Pontier on the telephone again. The sergeant was retiring in fourteen months and most of his memories of his superior would be of him in his office with the receiver screwed to his ear. Lovelady spoiled every detective show his wife watched by carping about all these upper-level TV dicks who ran around trading lead with bad guys and never did any paperwork. He tipped the contents of his manila folder out onto Pontier’s desk.

  The inspector went on talking and fanned out the three black-and-white blowup photographs. He finished the conversation and hung up. “What’s this?”

  “Three possibles on those eyewitness descriptions at Klegg’s building. Lyle Canaday, two arrests extortion, one conviction ADW. Philip Vernor, one suspended sentence aggravated assault. And Peter Macklin.”

  “Macklin, Macklin.” Pontier stared at the third photo, a grainy shot taken with a long lens.

  “FBI sent that one. Wait’ll you see what’s on the back.”

  The inspector turned it over and read the close typewriting on the heavy stock pasted to the back. After a minute he looked up.

  Lovelady said, “You like?”

  The big frame building on Lahser had been a farmhouse in the days, not so long ago, when everything north of Detroit was planted in corn and wheat. The farm had been subdivided and the big rooms partitioned off and converted into apartments. Macklin climbed a flight of open stairs wearily and knocked on 7.

  His exhaustion was more mental than physical. He’d fought traffic all the way to Ypsilanti and back only to be told by an assistant director at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry that the patients’ files were confidential and that even if Roy Blossom’s address was recorded there it could not be given out. The killer had considered testing the Hippocratic Oath against Smith & Wesson, but it was too early in the search to start attracting that kind of attention. His head throbbed and his neck was sore.

  He knocked again. A voice inside asked who was there.

  “Roger?”

  A pause, then floorboards shifted on the other side of the door. “Dad?”

  Macklin confirmed the guess. The door opened.

  “Roger?” he said again.

  He hadn’t been prepared for the change in his son’s appearance. As tall as his father, the boy had always been more slender, but now he was emaciated, with deep hollows in his cheeks and his ribs showing where his striped tank top bagged at the armholes. His long black hair was dead, without luster, and his complexion was pale and mealy. He might have been a hundred years old. When he grinned at Macklin’s confusion his face turned into a death mask.

  “I don’t feel half as good as I look.”

  Macklin, covering, said, “I heard you got off the stuff.”

  Roger stretched out his forearms for inspection. The wrists were peppered with healed-over scars but there were no fresh needle tracks.

  “Can I come in?”

  The boy walked away from the door. Macklin stepped inside and closed it behind him. The furniture in the single room was piled high with cast-off clothes and magazines. A portable Murphy bed stood in one corner and a stove and refrigerator crowded one end, both in need of scouring.

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Down the hall.”

  “That where your roommate is?”

  “He’s out.” Roger dropped onto the sprung sofa.

  “I’m surprised you’re in.”

  “I’m keeping quiet. My guts are still shaky.”

  Macklin watched his son light a cigarette, holding the match in two hands to avoid shaking out the flame. “I didn’t know you were smoking.”

  “Keeps my mind off shit.”

  “Your mother told me you were here.”

  “She threw me out.”

  “That’s not how she tells it.”

  “She send you?”

  Wandering the room, Macklin had stopped before the only poster on the wall that he recognized, a reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of Hell. “You paying your share of the rent on this place?”

  “Lonnie’s carrying me. I’ll pay him back later, when I get a place of my own.”

  “Proving yourself in this business takes time. You’ll be lucky to take in a hundred bucks on your first job. A good gun will run you three times that.”

  “I got a good one that only cost fifty.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Roger flicked ash at the floor, got up, and took a foil-wrapped package out of the refrigerator.

  “No good,” Macklin said. “Moisture gets to the action.”

  “Not the way I wrapped it.” Roger peeled back the foil and three layers of slick butcher paper. He hesitated before handing over the object inside.

  “I’ll give it back.”

  He laid the gun in his father’s palm. It was a long-barreled Colt Woodsman .22 target pistol. Macklin ran back the action and broke out the magazine. It wasn’t loaded. “Who sold you this piece of shit?”

  “Twenty-two’s a pro’s gun,” said Roger, snatching it back. He rammed home the empty clip.

  “For a pro who knows what he’s doing, and if he wants to be quiet about it,” Macklin agreed. “I like ’em loud.”

  “Bring the cops down on your ass.”

  “Cops are the last thing you have to worry about on a job. The noise keeps the heroes away. A semiautomatic, Christ, you might as well leave bread crumbs. Leave shell casings behind, maybe get one caught in your cuff and they turn it out during the frisk.”

  “I don’t wear cuffs.”

  “You even know the name of the guy you bought it from?”

  “A guy in a bar. I see him there before. I know what business he’s in.”

  “He sees this strung-out kid, figures he’s found a good place to unload a piece with a past. Cops pull you over—way you look, I’d be tempted myself—pat you down, come up with a gun’s been used in three robberies and a double homicide. Judge hangs life on you before you even taste blood.”

  Roger said nothing. He rewrapped the gun and put it back in the refrigerator.

  Macklin said, “What you going to do about lining up work, take out an ad under ‘Situations Wanted’ in the Free Press?”

  “I got a customer.”

  “Who? Somebody else you met in a bar?”

  “Charles Maggiore.”

  This time Macklin was silent.

  His son continued. “I went to his place. He was glad to see me, kept his accountants waiting while he talked to me out by the pool. Hey, I didn’t know he was a hunchback. Stuff I read about him never said. Anyway, he said he’d call me when he had work for
me.”

  “The son of a bitch.”

  “In a way I guess it was a compliment to you. Your genes, anyhow.”

  “He’s using you to get back at me for helping spring Boniface. He got used to putting his feet up on the old man’s desk.”

  Roger shrugged. “A start’s a start.”

  Macklin unholstered his .38 and pointed it at his son. The young man was busy lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. His eyes widened, then narrowed. He finished and crushed out the butt under a threadbare track shoe. “Do it,” he said. “It’s the one thing will relieve these fucking cramps.”

  “I would, if a bullet from this gun weren’t already in a dead man.” He put it away. “You up for traveling?”

  “Like where?”

  “Just a short trip. Downtown Detroit.”

  Roger unsheathed the death’s-head grin. “You taking me for a ride?”

  “I might if I thought you were worth the gas. You got a telephone?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Get cleaned up or whatever you do when you’re going out and meet me down there.”

  “I didn’t say I was going.”

  But Macklin was already on the stairs.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Where we going?” Roger reached to put his cigarette out in the dashboard ashtray.

  “Flick it outside.”

  He cranked down the window and released the glowing butt into the slipstream. They were passing a shopping center, red and blue neon washing the inside of the Cougar.

  “You never answered my questions even when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah, I warped you by curbing your natural curiosity. Don’t lay that Freudian crap on me.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like?”

  “You know.”

  “Killing,” Macklin said irritably. “If you’re going to do it you’ve got to be able to say it. Or are you fixing to be one of these that call themselves liquidators?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “After the first few times it’s just work. That’s why they pay you to do it. The ones that still get a jump out of it after five or six are ones to stay away from. Sooner or later they turn like Dobermans.”

  “I mean, is it like it is in movies?”

  “Nothing ever is. Those movie killers’ tongues are their best weapon.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “They run on and on about what they’re going to do to a guy instead of just going ahead and doing it. What’s the sense of telling someone what’s going to happen to him if he’s going to be dead in a minute? Real killers kill. They don’t talk about it.”

  “You’re talking about it.”

  “Could be I’ve been in it too long. When you get to thinking of yourself as something special, you’re done. It happens sometimes.”

  “Well, what’s it like the first time?”

  “Wait until we get where we’re going.”

  They circled the block of Lafayette and Brush twice before finding an empty meter and pulled in. Roger said, “There’s a parking garage right over there.”

  “First things you give up in this work are parking garages and elevators and telephone booths. Let’s go.”

  They mounted concrete steps and Macklin held the door for his son, who said, “I never been here before.”

  “Most people never have, breathing.”

  A young man wearing a white coat over a plaid shirt and necktie met them in the badly lit hallway. “Mr. Macklin? Lieutenant Cross said you called. I’m to give you the run of the place.”

  “Thanks.”

  The young man led the way around a corner and down an echoing flight of stairs. The air smelled of Lysol.

  “Lieutenant?” Roger whispered.

  “C.I.D.,” said his father.

  “How do you know a Detroit Police lieutenant?”

  “Did you think we were all florists?”

  At the bottom of the stairs their escort pointed the way and left them. As the pair walked, the odor of disinfectant gave ground slowly before a staleness that after a few steps had Roger shielding his nose with a hand. “Where are we?”

  “Wayne County Morgue.”

  They passed through a room with chairs and a closed-circuit television screen into a larger room, where the stench burned Roger’s newly revived olfactory nerves. Under bright fluorescent tubes five corpses lay naked on steel tables.

  “Busy night,” said Macklin.

  “I get it.” Roger looked around with a show of boldness. “I seen meat before.”

  The first table they stopped at supported a middle-aged black woman with pendulous breasts and a distended belly. Her face was oddly crumpled, like a collapsed balloon, the features almost concave.

  “Suicide,” Macklin said.

  “How can you tell?”

  His father took the dead woman’s chin between thumb and forefinger and lifted it. They looked inside the loose flap of skin where her throat belonged. “Put a shotgun under her chin. When you blow out your brains and skull, your face falls in.”

  Now Roger noticed the woman’s head had no top.

  They visited the corpse of a little boy—“Drowned,” announced the killer—hovered over a shapely young woman with multiple stab wounds in her breasts and abdomen, which Macklin pinched to show the edges of the cuts, and looked at a man in his late thirties with the back of his head caved in, the head lying flat as a paperweight on the table. Finally they stopped beside the body of a young Oriental whom at first Roger took to be a boy of eleven or twelve, but who, upon studying his face and the well-developed muscles under the smooth ivory skin, he realized was a man grown. He had two blue holes close together on his left breast and he was open from sternum to groin, exposing slabbed ribs and an empty cavity. A pile of red-and-purple entrails was heaped next to his hip. Macklin seized his son’s wrist and shoved his hand into the pile.

  Roger shouted and tried to pull loose. Macklin’s grip was iron. The mess was slippery and cold as ice.

  “Some you bring down with a deer rifle at six hundred yards,” his father said. “Others you get right in close and smell the fear just before the knife goes in. Either way they wind up like this and that’s what it’s like.”

  The stench of the stirred guts rolled up into the boy’s nostrils. Bile scaled his throat. Macklin’s grim face was inches from his.

  “They shit when you cut their throats, just dump right in their pants. You get used to the stink, though.”

  He held on for another moment before letting go. Roger jerked his hand out of the pile.

  “You can catch a bus home on the corner.” Macklin left.

  Roger used the sheet folded at the foot of the table to mop off the dead blood and half-digested stomach contents. He sniffed his hand and threw up into a scrap bucket.

  NAME: Peter Macklin

  AGE: 39

  HEIGHT: 5′ 11½″

  WEIGHT: 185

  HAIR: Black, receding

  EYES: Gray

  SCARS: Recent powder burn, ½″ above left eye; three bullet, ¾–1¾″ diameter, left side thorax, upper right arm, behind right shoulder (exit); 6″ knife, right side abdomen; 4″ knife, 1″ left of center and bisecting collarbone at 30° angle; bite, 2″ diameter, left bicep; recent bullet mark, 2½″, right hip.

  CHARACTERSTICS: Slight forward tilt minimal arm movement walking, smiles rarely, no tics or mannerisms, does not arm himself when not at work

  FAMILY AND BIRTHPLACE: River Rouge, Michigan; father Eugene Macklin, truck dispatcher, strong-arm man Boniface family Detroit, Michigan; mother Georgia Murdock Macklin, housewife; no brothers or sisters

  OCCUPATION: Killer

  HOBBIES: None

  ASSOCIATES: Donna Macklin, wife, 36, 10052 Beech Road, Southfield, Michigan; Roger Macklin, son, 16, address same; Christine Lucarno, mistress, 6513 Oakwood Road. Dearborn, Michigan, Apartment 12, file clerk, Ford Motor Company; Umberto (Herb) Pinel
li, friend, 4202 Greenfield Road, Southfield, Michigan, owner Clovis Haberdashers, 4200 Greenfield Road, Southfield, merchant, retired killer

  The old man returned the typewritten sheet to the manila folder.

  Brown, anxious, said, “Satisfactory?”

  “It is very spare. What, for instance, are these crossed-out items?”

  “Corrections and updates. He no longer associates with the Lucarno woman, and this man Pinelli is dead, murdered in his shop after a struggle. That bit about going unarmed cost our last man his life. Our fault, I’m afraid. We try to stay abreast but the human factor is vexing.”

  “It is infuriating and exhilarating. It is my specialty. Ah.” The maid came in and served their meal. Brown’s assistant wrinkled his nose at the steaming patty on his plate. The man called Mantis inhaled, cheeks reddening with delight. “Meat loaf. A dish only Americans know how to prepare. You are a good host, Mr. Green.”

  “Brown. Mr. Green is my associate.”

  “Yes. Well, does it matter? We are three men with not a genuine name among us.”

  “I was told you favored meat loaf. Anya disapproved, but she’s incapable of laying a poor meal. We can talk freely in front of her, incidentally. She has been with us since the Nine Hundred Days.”

  “Stalingrad, yes. I helped relieve it. There was not a dog or a cat or a rat to be found in the city after the siege was lifted.”

  Brown raised his fork, only to lower it as the old man folded his hands and sank his collection of chins onto his chest with his eyes closed, moving his lips silently. The overhead light made blank circles of his eyeglasses. Green started and glanced at his superior, who shook his head.

  Mantis stirred and became animated, unfolding his napkin and draping it over his swelling middle and eagerly cutting himself a morsel of meat loaf with the edge of his fork. “Superb! Just a bit heavy on seasoning, but it’s better than any I’ve had since my last visit.”

  “It is better than any you have had,” returned Anya in a heavy accent. The maid was tall and white-haired, with a nose that just missed being aristocratic and an old scar at the corner of her left eye. She finished serving and went back into the kitchen.

  “America, it corrupts,” the old man sighed.