Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “That’s M-A-N-T-I-S?”

  “Yes. Like the insect.”

  “Brown,” said a voice on the other end.

  “Collect call from a Mr. Mantis. Will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  The old man gave the operator time to get off the line, then said, “The package is delivered, Mr. Brown.”

  “There were no complications?”

  “None.”

  “Excellent. When can you come in to discuss details?”

  “As soon as I have wiped my shoes.”

  He hung up, started out, then went back and retrieved his quarter from the return slot.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  No one followed Moira home from work.

  Once she thought someone was doing it, but after three blocks the car turned off and she didn’t see it again. She saw no sign of the silver Cougar she had come to associate with Macklin. But then she had seen nothing of Roy since the incident in the employee lounge. Leaving him with Mr. Turner, she had felt a small thrill of concern and had wanted to warn her supervisor about Roy but could think of no way to do it without going into the details of her past. Fear and disgust with herself had made the second recording session worse than the first, and finally the exasperated technicians had asked her to go home and try again tomorrow. On her way to her locker for her purse, she had passed Mr. Turner in the hall. Her rush of relief as she explained her reasons for leaving early must have puzzled him, but he merely said: “I’m going to put in for more security on this floor. This fellow Bates barging in looks bad.”

  “Bates?”

  “The man who came to complain about his bill. He said his name was Norman Bates.”

  “Mr. Turner, Norman Bates was the name of the killer in Psycho.”

  “Oh. Maybe I heard him wrong.” He played with the dial on his hearing aid. “Anyway, I wish you’d contact me when you find unauthorized parties on this floor.”

  “I will.”

  “I rode down with him in the elevator,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Strange man.”

  He had walked off.

  Now she was feeling the familiar pressure behind her right eye and left the key in the apartment door while she went into the bathroom to wash down a Valium. The migraines had been troubling her for three years. Once early on, she used one as an excuse to get around a picketer outside a tripleX theater where she had been filming on the second floor. But the picketer, an awful, fat woman of forty, obviously pregnant, with a dirty-faced child hugging each hip and a sign over her shoulder reading DECENCY 1, PORNO 0, had moved to block her path. “That’s your guilty conscience, dearie. Virtue is the best aspirin.” Walking around her and her brood, Moira had said something back that made the fat woman turn and yell after her, “Fine language in front of two little kids, slut.”

  Leaning on her hands on the sink, waiting for the Valium to take effect, she studied her face objectively in the mirror. It was a thing she had trained herself to do after that first traumatic exposure to her image on film. No one would think her twenty-two, she decided, looking at the lines connecting her nose and mouth and the puffiness under her eyes that would turn into bags if she didn’t do something about them soon. In high school she had read The Picture of Dorian Gray and laughed at the notion that the sort of life a person led always showed on his face. But high school was something that had happened to someone else. She couldn’t summon up an image of the girl she was then. If her class held a five-year reunion next year, she would avoid it. What have you been doing with yourself, Moira? Oh, popping pills and getting laid for money, the usual stuff.

  The drug was working, or else the thought that she had taken it was blunting the pain. She washed off her makeup and patted her face dry with a towel. In the mirror she thought she looked better without the paint, but that was probably the drug. It tended to soften the world’s harsh edges like an out-of-focus camera, one of those things with Vaseline on the lens that were already going out of style when she got into movies.

  She wondered if Macklin would be coming in tonight, or if he was already there, waiting outside. Thought of him made her stomach quicken. She didn’t know why. Yes, she did. She was the queen, he the brute palace guard who came in to service her while the king was away crusading. She had made a film using that plot. What was it called? The Swordsman. Only she had been considered too young for the queen’s role and had played her lady-in-waiting instead and got two scenes in the hayloft with the royal groom, a graduate student at the University of Detroit who munched on a raw onion during lunch break. Today they would probably ask her to play the queen’s mother. Certainly she was too old for sex games, even harmless ones in her head.

  Everything she did reminded her of films, she thought disgustedly. She was in danger of becoming a sort of X-rated Norma Desmond. Worse, thinking of that past made her think of Roy and she remembered with exasperation her keys in the apartment door. She went out to get them. They were gone.

  The sky purpled, washing the overgrown field below in medium gray. Only a garish smear of bright ragged yellow near the house foundation spoiled the study in subdued hues, that and the rotating lights on top of the trucks and the patrol car parked inside the battered-open gate. Then a tank in the hands of a man wearing a black rubber raincoat and fiberglass helmet whooshed three times and the flames bucked and died, pouring black smoke out of the holes in the burned-out hulk. The man laid down a fourth layer of smothering gas for insurance and stepped forward to peer inside. After a walk around the car he approached an older, white-haired man in similar dress. “Nobody, Chief.”

  “‘Course not,” said the other, around a lump of Skoal wadded under his lower lip. “Deliberate torch job. It didn’t crash.”

  A big man in his thirties wearing the brown uniform and Stetson of the county sheriff’s department nodded. “Trundle it into the first lonely spot and torch it to destroy the evidence. As if we ever lifted a set of prints off a car worth going to a judge with. Kids. They see a lot of television.”

  The trio watched the other firemen hosing down the charred grass around the blackened auto shell.

  “Kind of a loud wham for just a match job,” suggested the man with the extinguisher.

  “Gas tank was about empty, probably. They go up bigger than a full one.” The chief spat.

  “Gate was locked.”

  The deputy said, “Picked it.”

  “Damn polite of them to close it and lock it again after.”

  “Kids, go figure ’em.”

  The voices droned, muffled under the gushing nose of the fire hoses and by the uneven stone wall separating them from the man lying on the earthen floor of the open cellar. Weeds grew thickly from the rich, untilled soil, concealing him, their stems and leaves gone brown and brittle after early frosts, and scratching his face where he lay, fully conscious now but unwilling to move lest he discover bones broken or something torn and bleeding inside.

  In his shaken condition after the shooting match, Macklin had forgotten to run his car for booby traps until he had the door open. In the instant of remembering he had turned and hurled himself headlong away from the car, paying no heed to the nearness of the deep hole in the ground. The hole had saved his life, for after the filament in the door broke, activating a five-second timer attached to a nitrogelatin charge, the explosion had sprayed flaming gasoline a hundred feet in every direction, missing only the depression where Macklin had landed, knocking himself senseless. He had awakened moments later to the wailing of sirens and drumming of booted feet hitting ground level on the run.

  It was dark in the cellar. For a long time he didn’t know where he was and wondered groggily if this was death, eternal motionless consciousness in the grave, awareness of his flesh falling away and of blind legless scavengers exploring his cavities. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. But as his head cleared and the voices above grew separate and more distinct, he remembered the sudden flash of s
elf-preservation and the dive through bottomless empty air and the shocking stop. Eight feet, not counting the six feet covered horizontally on his flight over the foundation wall. He was getting too old for these acrobatics.

  “Run the plate,” one of the voices was saying. “Check it against the hot sheet from Detroit PD first. That’s where they’re lifting most of these sports jobs now.”

  “Who owns this property?” asked another.

  “Some Jew from Hamtramck.”

  “No, he died or something. Someone else bought it a month or so back.” Yet a third voice.

  “Easy enough to find out who.”

  In the dark and weeds Macklin waited for the voices and noise to go.

  Meaninglessly she ran her hand over the doorknob where she had left the keys hanging. In the long, black moment of realization panic rose in a red arc, but she forced it down and turned with deliberate slowness and walked across the room to the telephone stand, aware of each separate step. She pulled out the drawer and looked at the emptiness inside.

  “Look in the cracks, Slick. It’s just a little piece. They get lost easy.”

  She straightened, turned again, more slowly this time. The door drifted shut, pushed by Roy as he came away from the wall behind it. He was wearing his navy coat over smooth bare torso as before. The .25 pistol was so small his long fingers seemed to curl around it twice. He wasn’t pointing it at anything, just holding it.

  “I was in here before,” he said. “I know where you keep everything, your ladies’ napkins and everything.”

  “You’re trespassing.”

  He showed her his Cagney sneer. “That’s cowboy movie talk. When’s the last time you heard someone getting arrested for trespassing? We’re all equal now. Everybody owns everything. We’re all like communists. Power to the people. Was a guy in Ypsi thought he was Karl Marx. He had a beard and everything, the works. I learned a lot.” He pocketed the gun. “I keep this. You could hurt yourself.”

  “Get out of here.”

  He walked around the apartment. “This place is a dump. Why’d you move out of the place on Bagley?”

  “I couldn’t afford the rent.”

  “That’s ’cause you left pictures. You should of stayed. You could be pulling down five bills a week now, way the business is growing. Hell, you could be a star, rich bitch out in Hollywood, get coke delivered to your door, do maybe one fuck scene per movie and fake that. Jackie Bisset, look at her.”

  “I’ll call the police.” Her hand was on the telephone.

  He said nothing. Stood there. If she moved.

  She said, “If you go now, I’ll just forget anything happened. Just leave my keys and the gun. You shouldn’t have one. If they find it on you—”

  “I get a fine for CCW, maybe ninety days. I ain’t on parole, Slick. I’m free as water. See, I was sick, but I’m all better now. Shrinks give me a clean bill of health. You want to see how healthy I am?”

  “Roy, I’m going to walk out past you. If you’re hungry or thirsty, you can help yourself to whatever’s in the refrigerator while I’m gone. But if I find you here when I get back I’ll call the police.”

  He had his knife out now and open, and he was whetting the blade on his woolen sleeve. It made a soft licking noise.

  “You call Gramps, tell him what I said? I don’t want no interruptions tonight.”

  She took a step, another. She felt awkward doing it with him watching. It was like the first time she had had to walk across a soundstage with the camera turning. Later the director had told her it was the hardest thing to do in acting. All of her appendages seemed to work independently. She walked and then she was past him and she walked faster and then she was grabbed and spun around and her back hit the door hard enough to buckle the frame. Roy leaned into her, pinning her. He had her right wrist in his left hand, pressed across her left shoulder against the door. He turned the knife this way and that in front of her face so that the blade caught the light.

  “Remember Alley Man, Slick? The rape in the motel room?”

  She struggled. He leaned in harder. Her right shoulder creaked in its socket. He repeated the question. He was breathing just a little harder than normal.

  “I wasn’t in that one.” She paused to catch her own breath.

  “You missed something.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Don’t worry, though,” he said. “We’ll make it up to you somehow. Hell, we’ll make it better. See, I kept in practice. There was this girl in Ypsi. Retard, you know? But, man, didn’t she learn fast.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  “That ain’t a word you get to use, Slick. Not till you done it.” He pushed aside the neck of her blouse with the point of the blade, tracing her collarbone with the blunt edge.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing ain’t been done to you before. No pay, though, this time. We’ll call it a rehearsal.”

  “Oh, that.”

  She was relieved, actually relieved.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “You like oysters?”

  Standing at the stove in his apartment, still in his vest and tie and pink shirtsleeves with the white apron on over everything, Gerald Goldstick reminded Donna Macklin of someone. She worked at it.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t like food that springs back.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll just scrape them off your steak before I serve it.”

  She remembered. It was that gourmet cook she used to watch on television in the afternoons, the one who cooked everything in wine and drank off the excess. She had liked him until he got into an accident or something and came out of the hospital Born Again. Everything’s got to be recycled these days, she thought, paper and clothing and Christians. Stale.

  “You cook steak with oysters?”

  “My mother’s recipe. They bring out the natural flavor that mushrooms just smother. Also they’re good for the libido.”

  “I thought that was a myth.”

  “I don’t get many complaints.”

  Conceited little rooster. As if she’d be going to bed with him if there were anything else available in a zipper. Him with his hairless chest and tight little butt in a blue cotton slingshot. Mac had worn white Jockeys as long as she’d known him, dull underwear, and she’d never had any complaints about that part of their relationship. Nor did his little sidepiece, she suspected. Donna had been out of circulation too long. She wondered just when the entire masculine population had gone over to these randy little rodents in colored underwear.

  “Open the wine, will you? I’ll be through here in a minute.”

  She said okay and went into the living room where the folding table was set up to do it. Opening the wine, another male job ceded to women. The bottle was cold to the touch. Chilled. Her father, a mid-level connoisseur, had always insisted that any wine that couldn’t be served at room temperature wasn’t worth serving. So that was another thing that had changed. She bet that when the steaks came they would be lean. Mr. Gerald Goldstick didn’t mess around with cholesterol, never mind that the meat tasted like boiled wood. She twisted in the corkscrew and braced the bottle against her stomach and forced down the little levers. The cork came out with a satisfying report. She laid it aside with the screw still attached, leaving a burgundy stain on the white tablecloth, and filled the two glasses. He came out then with the steaks on a tray. She looked at them.

  “Jesus, they must have made the cows jog.”

  “Got to watch the old bloodstream.” He used a long-handled fork to transfer the steaks to the china plates.

  “I’ve lost two pounds. You don’t have to put me on a diet.”

  “I’m talking about health. Two more dishes.” He spun back into the kitchen, balancing the empty tray on his upraised palm like a waiter.

  Actually she had lost just a little over a pound, but her cheap bathroom scales measured in twos, and when the indicator cleared a notch she rounded off the
results. She looked slimmest in blue, and she was wearing that color dress tonight, straight up and down without a belt or any other kind of tie or ornament to interrupt the clean line and call attention to her various bulges. With Gerald’s encouragement she was reawakening the fashion and practical dressing sense she had had before things got so bad with Mac and Roger that she had stopped caring.

  She sipped at her wine. It started out a sip, but as the familiar warmth spread through her system she went ahead and drank off half the glass. Hurriedly she replenished it so Gerald wouldn’t notice. She set the bottle back down an instant before he reentered with two dishes balanced on each forearm busboy fashion. He arranged the dishes on the table and took off his apron and held Donna’s chair while she sat down.

  “What’s this green stuff in the cottage cheese?”

  “Wintergreen.” He sat down opposite her and unfolded his napkin.

  “That another of your mother’s recipes?”

  “Not exactly. Hers called for green onions. But she was married to Dad and didn’t have to worry about her breath.”

  “The soup’s cold.”

  “It’s supposed to be. It’s gazpacho.”

  “Gesundheit.”

  “Funny. Try it.”

  She took a spoonful, caught herself blowing on it, and swallowed it. After a second she glared at him and grabbed for her wine. This time she emptied the glass.

  “Now I know why you chilled it,” she gasped.

  “Gazpacho takes some getting used to. Eat your steak before it gets cold.” He picked up the wine bottle and refilled her glass.

  The steak was delicious and she told him so. He executed a little bow sitting down, like a boy at a dancing class. She said, “You were very good in the judge’s chambers today.”

  “I had to be. Flutter seems slow, but he’s like a water moccasin if you try to slip something past him. I was impressed with Klegg. You’re normally better off hiring a supermarket bag boy to plead a divorce case than a lawyer whose specialty is something else. But he was like a Vegas veteran in there. Your husband isn’t so dumb.”