Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “We think our suspect is the same man who was involved in that flamethrower killing downtown early this week.”

  “The one in Howard Klegg’s building?”

  “There’s been more than one?”

  “Who’s your man?”

  Pontier grinned appreciatively. Burlingame grunted, put down the pipe, and lifted the receiver off the telephone-intercom. “Louise, have that Robert Lai file sent up? Thanks.”

  He hung up and looked at his guest, who said: “Peter Macklin.”

  “Uh-huh.” The federal man picked up his pipe. “Our information is Macklin’s left Michael Boniface’s employ. He doesn’t have anything to do with Klegg.”

  “Hey, I never heard of him before we shoveled that pile of ashes out of the stairwell. Your people gave us Macklin. All we did was feed them the eyewitness descriptions of the man seen entering and leaving the building around the time of the explosion.”

  “He’s just a street soldier. Who would hire out-of-town talent to sweep him up?”

  “The same people who crapped out with local talent the first time. If I had the answers I wouldn’t be here wondering when you’re going to get around to filling and lighting that thing.”

  Burlingame scowled at the pipe and laid it down a second time. “I’m working on quitting. Macklin in custody?”

  “No evidence. I’d have tanked him for CCW except he’d have used the gun and anyway I want something that won’t slide off. I had a man on him for about five minutes after we talked but he shook him. He moved out on his wife, no known permanent address. Everything about him says contract.”

  “How’d you nail him down to begin with?”

  “Klegg set it up. See, that’s how I know they’re together. The old shyster is handling his divorce.”

  “You might have told me that going in.”

  “I might have.”

  The federal man used the pause to ask his secretary again about the file on Robert Lai. “On its way,” he said, pegging the receiver. “You were smart not to try and take Macklin armed. He never carries a weapon just for show.”

  “The sergeant I had with me gets his papers next year. A younger man might have fired the instant Macklin drew, but then all we’d have is another corpse to work with. As for the rest, we aren’t in this business to get killed.”

  “Bet you don’t talk like that when Internal Affairs is around.”

  “Those guys are too far from the street. Only cops who have been there and lived to make inspector know what I’m talking about. And maybe federal agents who have lived to make bureau director,” he added.

  Burlingame changed the subject. “Charles Maggiore wouldn’t mind sending flowers to Macklin’s funeral, but he’s bracing up for a tax beef and awaiting trial on six counts of smuggling guns to South America. He hasn’t had time.”

  “How much time does it take to make a phone call? But I’ve a feeling you’ve ruled him out anyway.”

  Someone tapped on the door. At Burlingame’s invitation the handsome secretary entered, handed him a plain gray cardboard folder, and left, her high heels whispering on the thick tough government carpet. The door snicked shut behind her.

  Pontier said, “That’s it?”

  “What did you expect, a big red seal stamped TOP SECRET?”

  “Well, yes, now you mention it.”

  “Everything in this building is top secret. It doesn’t have to be marked.”

  “Including Mrs. Gabel?”

  “Her especially. You want to look at this stuff or hunt pussy?”

  He had the folder open and its contents spread on the desk. Pontier got out of his chair and came around to Burlingame’s side. The pages were of the same heavy stock that had come pasted to the back of Macklin’s picture, typewritten in very black ink with wide margins. Seeing them reminded the inspector of something.

  “Say, is that true about Hoover and the margins?”

  “Yeah. He liked them nice and wide. One time he wrote ‘Watch the borders’ on a report that crowded them. An aide misunderstood and dispatched special task forces to both the Mexican and Canadian borders.”

  “Jesus, he must have been fun to work for.”

  “He was a son of a bitch. But he took a boondoggle left over from the Coolidge Administration and built it into one of the finest law enforcement organizations in the world. People forget that sometimes. Stop me when you see something you like.” He was shuffling through a stack of eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white prints.

  Several of them showed a young Oriental dressed in an open-necked shirt and dark slacks getting off an airplane ramp carrying a gym bag. It was Robert Lai, a/k/a Chih Ming Shang. Another set recorded a greeting in the airport between Lai and a thin white man with long sideburns and what looked like a garishly bright tie erupting out of his Oxford collar. Pontier stopped Burlingame. “Who’s he?”

  “We’re still running him down.” He resumed shuffling.

  The pictures appeared to be in sequence: Lai and the thin man getting into a taxi in front of the terminal, getting out of the cab before a building Pontier recognized, the two going inside. Lai held on to his bag. The last group didn’t include him at all, but the thin man and a much larger, broader senior built along Burlingame’s lines but even bulkier through the chest and shoulders. These had been zoom-shot through the building’s open front door.

  “You know the wrestler?” Pontier asked.

  “If you go by his passports you can call him whatever you want and chances are he’s used the name. The one he keeps coming back to is Vasily Andreivich Kurof. He’s a Russian national with visitor’s status in this country. He was a major in the Red Army with ambitions to the Politburo until the present faction ousted him along with thirty-six others. The other thirty-five went to Labianka Prison. He defected here, probably with CIA help, and his request for asylum is still pending with the State Department. We’ve had him under surveillance since he got here.”

  “What is he, some kind of double agent?”

  “We don’t know. There’s a good chance his ouster was just window dressing to burrow him in here. He’s shrewd as hell. This is as much activity as we’ve picked up on him in the year and a half he’s been in the area.”

  “I know that building,” Pontier said.

  “It’s a former health club on Larned with the second floor converted to private apartments. He lives there. We suspect he owns it through intermediaries, which is illegal for an alien with nonresident status, but that’s one for Immigration. He’s up to something. These were taken yesterday morning.” The federal man unwound the string from an interoffice brown envelope he had taken from a drawer and tipped another sheaf of photographs out onto the desk.

  At first they appeared to be duplicates of the airport shots Pontier had already seen, but then he noticed that the man with the sideburns and bright necktie was accompanied by the Russian Kurof and that Robert Lai was not present. In his place stood a much older man in a cheap topcoat and one of those hats Swiss yodelers wore in cartoons, with a feather in the band. Round-lensed spectacles made blank cutouts of his eyes in the light of the concourse.

  “He’s another new player we don’t have any stats for,” Burlingame said. “According to the airplane manifest he’s traveling under the name I. Wanze and changed planes for Detroit in New York after an overseas flight from London. Customs is all bollixed up as usual but we’re waiting on a call to them and a Telex to the CIA in Maryland. Those James Bond types take their own sweet time getting back to us on everything. There’s another appropriations battle going on in Congress and they take everything personally.”

  Pontier said, “He doesn’t look German.”

  “He looks like a Ukrainian potato-digger on vacation. For all we know he could be the next premier of the U.S.S.R.”

  “What’s this got to do with Macklin?”

  “Until you walked in here I didn’t know it had anything to do with him.” Burlingame was again probing absentmindedly i
nside his pipe. “But if it does, you better tell your friends in the morgue to move over.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The inspector resumed his seat while Burlingame sorted the photographs and information into their proper containers. The printed matter on Lai was just a copy of the information the police in Los Angeles had sent Sergeant Lovelady. “What makes Macklin so special?” Pontier asked.

  “You’re Homicide. Which killers are the easiest to catch?”

  “The family kind. Husbands and sisters and brothers-in-law that get into an argument about which TV show to watch and wind up putting a hole through their loved ones. They’re sitting there with the gun when the uniforms show. After that there’s the fancy kind of kill that somebody gussied up to look like something else. The job looks too easy. The hardest would be the ones that walk up to a complete stranger on a street corner and clobber him and walk away.”

  “There’s one harder,” said Burlingame. “The pro who stalks his man and pops him without music. He leaves the body where it fell and loses the weapon and goes home to drink Stroh’s and watch the Lions.”

  “They’re just instruments, though. No faces. Then you look for the guy that paid them. Our information says Macklin’s solo now.”

  “Yeah, but he put in his time as an instrument and he took his savvy with him when he left. You read a lot of shit about these guys being psychopaths with nightmares who keep prostitutes on retainer to whip them for their sins. There are some like that, I guess, but they burn out fast. These lifers punch in and out five days a week and take two weeks off for vacation in January. It’s just a job and a damn dull one, to them anyway. Fuck conscience. You ever visit a sewage disposal plant?”

  Pontier hesitated. “About thirty years ago, on a field trip with my high school conservation class. What’s—”

  “You talk to any of the workers?”

  “I guess. Yeah, one.”

  “You remember what he said when you asked him how he stood the smell?”

  After a moment the inspector smiled. “He said, ‘What smell?’”

  Burlingame sat back and charged the pipe finally from a tattered pouch. He struck a wooden kitchen match on the sole of his shoe and held it up, waiting for the sulfur to burn off. “I guess you know about Macklin and us last August,” he said, watching it. “Among federal and local cops it’s got to be the worst-kept secret since Hiroshima.”

  “I was going to ask you about that.”

  “Our statistics people predicted a two-point-five percent casualty rate among innocent passengers aboard that boat. We allowed for five percent. That’s twenty to forty bystanders dead or wounded. That’s if he was successful, and I won’t quote you the odds they gave us on that. Otherwise it was a hundred-percent dead loss. We got four nervous breakdowns and a plumbing contractor with a shattered kneecap. Armed with just a .38 revolver and a skindiver’s knife, Macklin took on seven terrorists holding assault rifles and semiautomatic pistols and brought the boat in safely.” He finished lighting the tobacco and shook out the match. “That’s what makes him so special.”

  Pontier watched the smoke uncoiling from the ashtray. “You talk about him like some hero-struck kid. He’s a paid murderer.”

  “‘Murderer’ is a hell of an emotional word for a Homicide inspector to be using,” Burlingame said. “It sounds too white-collar for a guy like Macklin anyway. He’s just a plain old killer, like Fred’s a carpenter and Bill’s an auto mechanic. He’s no Captain Indestructo. If he had any ambition, he wouldn’t still be doing what he does. He’d be running video games in Harper Woods or selling stolen furs in Grosse Pointe. He’s mostly nerves and reflexes. He’s got the brains of a turtle. You ever try to kill a turtle?”

  “I’m not out to kill anyone. I’m just trying to hold the line and not having a hell of a lot of success. What started out as a simple killing downtown is getting to look like a shooting script for Roger Moore. I don’t even know who has jurisdiction.”

  “Join the club. With Kurof and this potato-digger involved it could be CIA’s scooter, only they have no authority inside the United States. The book says. Immigration and the Secretary of State each get a slice and every day there’s a new alphabet soup agency to deal with out of Washington. Just for now let’s say Macklin is yours and we’ll worry about the foreign talent. I’d like to have a liaison man in your office to see we don’t stumble over each other.”

  “Uh-uh. No spies. I’ll keep an open line into this office. We’ll both use it.”

  Burlingame’s lips made popping noises on the stem of his pipe. The inspector thought he looked not at all like a fattish Sherlock Holmes. Finally the federal man rose and thrust out a hand.

  “You ever get tired of working for the city,” he said.

  Pontier grasped the hand. “No thanks. I like having just one boss. I couldn’t handle the whole Constitution.”

  “Thanks for coming down, Inspector.”

  “Chewing gum,” said Pontier.

  “What?”

  He indicated the pipe. “It’ll help keep your mind off that. It’s how my brother quit.”

  “I’d try it, only it’s hard to hold a field agent’s attention while you’re snapping your spearmint.”

  “Just a suggestion.”

  The detective left. Burlingame waited a full minute, then got on the intercom and asked Louise Gabel to put through a call to another office in the building. When a man’s voice came on the line he said, “Phil, who’s our man in Detroit Homicide?”

  “Second.” Keys rattled on Phil’s end. “Lester Flood, detective first grade. Lieutenant’s name is Gritch.”

  “Get him a transfer onto Inspector George Pontier’s detail.” The bureau chief spelled the name. “Oh, and Phil? Send someone out for a pack of chewing gum, will you?”

  “Sugarless or what?”

  “Surprise me.” He hung up and knocked his pipe out on the edge of the ashtray.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The car was a three-year-old Plymouth with a peeling vinyl top and Bondo’d patches showing flat and sullen around its fenders and at the corners of doors because they didn’t reflect light like the rest of the car’s blue finish. It stood alone in a row of empty diagonal spaces at the end of the lot farthest from the doors of the covered shopping mall.

  Macklin, standing on the other side of the small square painted plywood building where keys were made in the center of the lot, had been watching the car since its arrival ten minutes before. Its driver was still seated behind the wheel and from where he was standing the other seats appeared empty.

  “There you go, sir. That’ll be five-twenty.” The bearded young man behind the open window in the building handed Macklin back his keys and five colorful copies stamped out of sheet metal.

  Macklin thanked him, paid for the keys, and pocketed them. He hadn’t needed copies. Two of the originals he had handed the young man belonged to the ignition and trunk of his Cougar, a third opened the front door of the house he had shared with Donna for most of their married life, and of the others, one fit his apartment and the last was a mystery. It had been on his ring so long he had forgotten its purpose. The transaction was just a stall to give him time to study the car and its occupant without drawing notice. With his sport coat over his right arm he crossed directly to the car and opened the door on the passenger side and got in.

  Treat, who had been watching his approach, ignored the gun concealed under the checked coat and watched his guest’s face. Outside of his home, the gun dealer’s shoe-shaped face looked old and drawn and there were burst vessels in his divided nose. The inside of the car smelled sharply of gun lubricant.

  “This stinks,” he said.

  “Open the window.”

  “I mean getting up and getting out. We could of done this back at my place in Taylor.”

  “You know I don’t go to a place twice if I can help it,” Macklin said. “Never when I’m on the stick.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s going
to cost you. I had to cancel a piano lesson. The kid’s father’s my dentist and I got a molar needs yanking.”

  “What’d you bring me?”

  “You said you didn’t want a .38.”

  “It’s getting to be like my thumbprint.”

  “In the trunk.”

  “Okay, let’s have a look.”

  “Put up that thing first,” Treat said. “I know how little trigger pull it takes and I don’t want to wear any lead just because you slipped getting out.”

  Macklin holstered the Smith & Wesson and they climbed out and went around to the trunk. He tucked in the tail of his shirt, which he had been wearing outside his pants to cover the holster, and put on the coat while his companion unlocked and flung up the lid. Treat peeled back the foam rubber pad that concealed the cavity where the spare tire belonged. It glittered with pistols and revolvers and knocked-down rifles wrapped in glassine and pink naval jelly.

  “What if you get a flat?”

  “I call Triple-A like any good member.” The dealer unwrapped a shiny square pistol, shielding it with his body from the populated end of the parking lot. It was the 10-millimeter semiautomatic he had showed Macklin earlier. The killer swore.

  “Cops’ll just follow the ejected shells back to me.”

  “How? The model’s experimental. They’ll be a week just arguing over is it a 9-millimeter or a .38. By then it should be rusting in the river with all the other hardware. This one’s a prototype. Doesn’t even have a serial number.”

  “I don’t like automatics.”

  “You said. But revolvers only come in a few realistic calibers. Thirty-twos don’t have the stopping power and .44s are more iron than you like to lug around. You don’t like mags.”

  “Using a magnum on just a man is like putting five stamps on a letter that only needs one,” Macklin said. “I hate wasting firepower.”

  Treat opened his dark palm in the direction of the 10-millimeter.

  “How much?” Macklin asked.