Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “He isn’t dumb at all. Some people think he is because he’s always so serious. It isn’t that he doesn’t get the jokes; it’s just that he doesn’t find them funny.”

  “He isn’t what I expected.”

  “What were you expecting, a bouncer’s build and a broken nose?”

  “Something like that. He really isn’t very intimidating. He’s like a salesman or a junior executive that got stalled.”

  “I’ve seen the blood run out of men’s faces when they recognized him.”

  “How many people has he killed?”

  “I never asked. I didn’t know for sure he’d killed any until recently. I suspected it for years, but I didn’t want to bring it up. You know, like when someone close to you is dying. You’re afraid if you talk about it, it’ll be true. You know it’s true, but there’s always that little doubt and you hang on to it.”

  He topped off their glasses. “Didn’t he ever talk about it?”

  “Never. It’s how he got to be thirty-nine, doing what he does. He was doing it when we met. I’m sure of that now, though I didn’t want to admit it when we were living together. What kind of wife stays married to a man almost seventeen years without knowing what he does to support them?”

  “What tipped you?”

  “He was always going off on business trips or working late at the office. Whenever I called the office, his secretary said he was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. For a long time I thought he was playing around on me. He was, but that wasn’t the reason.”

  She pushed her plate away and picked up her glass. “I don’t know, it just sort of seeped in on me. Sometimes he’d be gone for weeks. Touring his company’s branch offices, he said, helping them get organized. Once it was more than a month, and then I got a call saying he was in Detroit Receiving Hospital with a gunshot wound. They said it was an accident. He was hunting in the Irish Hills with a customer who mistook him for a pheasant. He had tubes sticking out all over. I didn’t even know he was in the area. He was supposed to be in Chicago. That was in 1972.”

  “The big gang war,” Gerald said.

  “I didn’t know anything about it. It was only after Mac got out of the hospital that I started paying attention to that kind of thing. Somewhere in there, I don’t remember where exactly, I knew. Not knew knew, as in having evidence. But as in knowing.” She lit a cigarette. She didn’t remember getting it out or putting it in her mouth.

  “Is that when you started drinking?”

  “That came later. I didn’t drink at all before then. I didn’t like the stuff. Hell, I still don’t. But hot fudge sundaes won’t get you through the long days and nights alone when your husband’s out there killing people.”

  “I think that’s an excuse.”

  “A damn good one.”

  “I mean, I think you’re dramatizing yourself. It hurt you more to find out your husband was keeping secrets from you. I think if he went on doing what he did and told you about it, you’d still be happily married. Give or take one mistress.”

  She drank some wine. “You’ve been hanging around court-appointed psychiatrists too much.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t think I was happily married anyway. We only got married because I was pregnant. I thought I loved him later, but that was just being used to having him around. Roger’s more like him than either of them will admit and that never made it any easier.”

  “You love your son, though, don’t you?”

  “Same thing, I got used to having him around. Not even that, now. I was a rotten mother. Mac wasn’t around when Roger needed him to be, and I spoiled him silly.”

  “Isn’t that what mothers do?”

  “You better not let the feminists catch you talking like that,” she said.

  “The feminists aren’t here. You are.”

  “He got mixed up in dope and I was too stupid to see it until it was too late. Or too drunk. He went sour long before that, though. Now he wants—well, forget what he wants. Say I messed up all the way around. I wouldn’t have had to if Mac had used the house for something more than just home base.”

  He was looking at her. “What’s Roger want?”

  “Forget it, I said. I talk too much. Mac always said I talk too much. I thought it was because he hardly ever talked at all. But since he moved out I haven’t been able to stop my mouth from working. How about another slug of wine?”

  “You’ve had enough. He wants to be like his father, right? A killer.”

  “Let it go, Gerald.”

  After a moment he sat back. “You know, those things aren’t doing your heart any good.”

  She glanced at the cigarette in her hand, took a puff. “We’re all killers. Some of us just like to practice on ourselves.”

  “No, they’re a special breed. You have to be born missing something to go into that kind of work.”

  “We’re all just meat and muscle and bone to someone like Mac.” She put out the cigarette, smiled, and laid her hand atop the lawyer’s on the table. “I didn’t come here to talk about him.”

  He smiled. “Dessert’s in the oven.”

  “Let it burn.”

  “What am I, just a sex object?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘just.’”

  God, she was listening to herself.

  He sat there a little longer, puffing up. Then he got up and held her chair.

  Later, in bed, Goldstick lay next to Donna, looking at the darkened ceiling. He couldn’t get over the fact that he was sleeping with a hit man’s wife. It was better than oysters.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was past dark when the driver of the last hook-and-ladder turned over its engine, letting it warm up for a minute before gears shifted and the big truck swung around in a wide arc, its headlamps slicing through darkness like a sickle of light. Gravel crunched and it pulled out into the road and changed gears again and throbbed away, no siren.

  For what seemed a long time afterward Macklin heard the last man walking around above, something making a chinking noise in rhythm with the footsteps. Handcuffs on a belt. Macklin was sure the man was alone. There was no conversation, and from the sound of things he wasn’t making any special effort to be quiet.

  The noise stopped. After a second a pebble rattled down the foundation wall, coming to rest on the ground within a foot of where Macklin lay. The man was standing right above him. He willed himself still. If a flashlight came on, a spotlight, he would play dead. If the man came down to investigate … He felt the weight of the 10-millimeter pistol lying against his right kidney.

  Silence stretched. Then he heard a short zipping noise and then the sound of water running. Something pattered the leaves nearby. An acrid smell came to his nostrils.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. I can only go uphill from here.

  When it was over the man walked away. For a while Macklin didn’t hear anything. Then a car door slammed. It sounded like a gunshot and he jerked involuntarily. A starter ground twice and an engine caught with a roar. Tires turned, zinging a little on flattened grass, then bit into earth. Macklin heard the car stop at the end of the overgrown driveway. The frame rattled a little as it bumped onto the road. He lay listening until the engine noise faded off into the distance. Then he stirred, flexing his muscles one by one, the legs first. He clenched his teeth before trying his stomach muscles, but his ribs held. He was just getting over banging them up the last time. His arms were okay too, a little sore, especially his left, which had folded under when he struck ground, pulling the bicep. He got his hands flat on the earth and pushed himself to his knees, stood. Some miscellaneous scrapes and bruises; he’d be sore later. He’d caught his right jacket sleeve on a thistle or something, leaving a three-cornered rip below the elbow.

  He groped around until he found the steps that led up and out of the cellar. They were wooden and going to sawdust and splinters, but he tested his weight on each step, skipping a few when they started to sink. At the top he stopp
ed to take in cool night air tainted with the stench of charred grass and scorched metal. There was no moon. A light hung here and there on the horizon like peaches on a dying tree. He could see his breath in the starlight.

  He didn’t bother to look at what was left of his car. It would stay there, a blackened shell sitting on wheels with shreds of melted rubber clinging to them, until a wrecking service with a county contract came to tow it away. Instead he walked down to the road, leaving open the gate, its wooden frame hacked to splinters by a fireman’s axe. He started on foot in the direction of the main highway.

  Something thudded the ground in front of him in the darkness, scattering stones. He unholstered the pistol in a single fluid movement that made him think of a movie cowboy even in the act, thumbed off the safety in the same motion, and fired. Something squealed and was silent. After a moment he stepped forward and lifted the thing by its tail.

  Casting the carcass into the brush at the side of the road, he thought: Getting pissed on and killing possums, what next?

  Ring, ring.

  Standing in the light of an exposed telephone box on a corner three blocks from the house where he was staying, Roger counted the rings. At eleven he pegged the receiver. His dimes clunked down into the pan and he scooped them out. It was just 6:08 by the watch his mother had given him for his sixteenth birthday, which he had just got out of hock. He said what the hell and tried the number again. When no one answered after six rings, he gave up and went home.

  The house was dark. The old lady had gone to bed. She always did, just about the time she would have to turn on a light. It pissed him off, because if he turned one on to get upstairs to his room in the attic she would see it under her bedroom door and give him a lecture about sharing the Detroit Edison bill that month. Jesus, it was just a few pennies. Groping his way up the stairs, he bet himself for about the thousandth time that she was one of these old bags who starved to death and then when the cops came to check out the place, they found a quarter of a million socked away in jars and cans all over the house. He’d thought of searching the place but she slept with one eye open for a goddamn light and never went out during the day. He did the shopping for her. She gave him money for it, fives and tens all wadded up in her apron pockets, and he never saw where it came from. Social Security, probably, only she never went out to cash a check. Well, she’d of cashed this month’s already. And food stamps, Christ, she should see the looks he got from cashiers and people standing in line, women with their checkbooks out to buy a carton of milk, when he put the stamps on the counter. Like he was picking their pocket. Money wasn’t everything, okay, but not having any was sure nothing.

  When he was inside his room he closed the door and stuffed a couple of old Tshirts under the crack so he could switch on the light, a string attached to a bare bulb that swung from the ceiling, casting lariats of shadow up the walls until it came to rest. His quarters consisted of a mattress on an iron bedstead and a warped clapboard wardrobe and painted child’s bureau with a mirror in need of resilvering. The ceiling came down at a forty-five-degree angle over the bed. He had bumped his head on it twice the first night but he was getting used to it now. The window at one end of the long room was old and discolored and he had to press his forehead against the glass anytime he wanted to see out. He didn’t want to, though, after the first time. He had a breathtaking view of the old lady’s wash hanging on the line in the backyard and the puddle where she threw out her dishwater because the pipes were always clogging up.

  There were two magazines on the bureau, an American Rifleman and a Guns & Ammo he had bought as soon as he found out there was no TV, but he didn’t feel like reading. He looked at himself in the mirror for a little, at his bad complexion, and then he slid the bureau away from the wall and knelt and reached a cloth-wrapped bundle out of an old squirrel-hole he had discovered the first day. He didn’t trust the old lady not to search his wardrobe and drawers and probably under the bed while he was out. He unwound the cloth from the .22 semiautomatic and after admiring its racy profile for a moment he stuck it barrel-down into his right hip pocket and faced the mirror with his feet spread and his hands hanging in front of his thighs. Then he scooped out the pistol and drew down on his reflection, snapping on the empty chamber.

  “Gotcha, fucker,” he said.

  No, too gung-ho. Something with more style.

  “Too bad, brother.”

  Yeah, better. He tried it a couple of times, dry-firing the .22 on “brother,” until something thumped the floor under his feet. It was the old lady rapping her bedroom ceiling with a broomstick, the one she carried around inside the house for protection in case someone broke in. Roger rewrapped the gun and put it back into its hole, moved the bureau back in front of it, and spent the rest of the evening reading a long article about the new lightweight .45 the army was developing. Then he switched off the light and lay on the bed, mouthing, “Too bad, brother,” and grinning at the feel of it in his mouth.

  Fucking computer really was down this time.

  Randall Burlingame replaced the receiver on the telephone-intercom, not gently, and switched on his desk lamp to glower at the Xerox copy of the West German passport on his desk, at the cherub’s face with its high bald forehead and Coke-bottle glasses, an overweight Lionel Atwill, only more amiable-looking. The name underneath was Ingram Wanze, no middle name or initial. Birthplace: Cologne, West Germany. He was as German as a Russian wolfhound.

  It was dark outside the window. The cityscape across the river had lost its shape, taking on skeletal configurations made by lighted windows stacked one on top of another, describing cruciforms and inverted pyramids and random letters against many coats of black. On this side, Burlingame’s window was the only one showing light on his floor. It was the latest he’d worked in weeks. The passport copy had come through finally from Customs just before quitting time and the computer had shut down just as he was requesting file information on Ingram Wanze. He was missing a double birthday celebration for his daughter and granddaughter, and he was a little afraid to call home again to say he’d be even later than expected. Although Elizabeth, his wife of thirty-three years, never shouted and seldom showed anger in any of the conventional ways, she had a way of saying “I understand” that made him feel as if he had just flashed an orphanage for girls. He was about to call downstairs again when the telephone rang.

  “Working, sir,” said a young male voice on the other end.

  “Okay, let me know as soon as something comes through.”

  “Er, we lost the input when it went down. Could you repeat the information?”

  He ground his teeth on the stem of his cold pipe. “Never mind, I’ll feed it through up here.”

  He went through Louise Gabel’s domain, deserted now, her typewriter covered, and down the hall to the office of his assistant. They hardly ever spoke. Ten years Burlingame’s senior and awaiting retirement, he had come as part of a package with ten new field agents the bureau director had requested from Washington to expand the local force and replace personnel lost to resignations and transfers. He would come in at noon, stretch out on his sofa, and go home at two if someone remembered to wake him. His secretary had mastered Rubik’s Cube and was taking a mail-order course in general accounting.

  Without turning on a light Burlingame sat down at the computer console behind his assistant’s desk and flipped the toggle, bathing himself in green illumination from the screen. Theoretically the instrument was his, but this was as close to his own office as he would allow one to be installed. Having apprenticed in Records during the Korean war, he had spent too much of his youth memorizing columns of information to surrender his autonomy to a microchip. He entered the code, tolerated the slangy printout greeting some smartass had programmed into the central unit, fed in his request from memory, and sat back to unscrew his pipe and run a straightened paper clip through it during processing. In less than thirty seconds the first line of data came tripping out across the screen, th
en the next and the next, left to right, faster than a human could type, little green-glowing letters machine-gunning across his vision. He sat there holding the halves of his pipe while the information rolled past, row upon row, stack upon stack, like a roll call of the dead.

  Which in truth it was.

  The guy that used to be on Star Trek, wearing a kinky wig these days and a blue uniform that fit him like the foil on a stick of chewing gum, was under hack for shooting a supposedly unarmed suspect, that old saw, but instead of suspending him or placing him on restricted duty his watch commander had assigned him to the same case. Unreal.

  The telephone rang in the dining room. He let his wife get it. Jesus, the Star Trek guy had already creamed three parked cars in this one chase. He wanted to watch long enough to see if the guy had any paperwork to fill out after. It would be, let’s see, one copy of the report for the file, one for I.A.D., one for each insurance company, that’s times three—no, four, there goes a civilian ‘Vette caught in the intersection—Christ, he’d qualify for a disability for writer’s cramp.

  “George, it’s that Sergeant Love-something.”

  He scowled at the screen—shot of the police cruiser’s undercarriage shooting up over a steep hill, six hundred dollars’ suspension replacement right there, one more copy for the department’s insurer—and got up out of the easy chair to accept the receiver from his wife.

  “Thought you went home.” He leaned against the dining room arch, watching the chase.

  “I’m working the double, Christmas coming up,” cracked Sergeant Lovelady’s voice. “Girl in Traffic just finished running a plate number on a total out in the country, torch job, probable stolen. Her husband’s attached to Homicide. She recognized the owner’s name and hustled it up here. I thought you’d want to hear it.”

  Nice close-up of a windshield shattering, cut to a commercial. Pontier turned his back to the screen. “Reel it out.”