Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  Moira’s was the corner apartment on the second floor. He rapped on the door, waited, rapped again. When no one answered the second time he tried the knob. It turned all the way around and the door opened in. Something spread its dark wings inside his chest.

  He brought out the 10-millimeter, stood to the right of the door near the knob, and gave it a push. The waiting gunman smart enough not to fire directly through the doorway would choose to pierce the wall on the side near the hinges.

  There were no shots in either location. He fixed his grip on the gun, filled his lungs, and hurtled through the opening, pivoting to flatten out against the wall inside the apartment. He was alone in the living room.

  It was messy but in good condition. The sofa was unfolded and the bedclothes were rumpled, tangled. A throw pillow lay on the carpet at its foot. A woman’s tailored blue jacket drooped over the arm. The coffee table supported a smeared glass and an ashtray heaped with butts among the dog-eared magazines. Nothing appeared damaged or violently dislodged.

  Still holding the gun, he walked over to the kitchenette and stretched to look beyond the four-foot counter that separated it from the living room. The floor was clean.

  He thought he smelled something familiar. Then he wasn’t sure. Rooms where women slept provided a combination of smells that were always foreign to him. He went into the bathroom. The smell was stronger there, a dank sharp musty odor that was like no other. He knew it now.

  Something that looked brown in the sunlight sifting through the silver lace curtains over the window spotted the ivory-colored tiles at his feet. He touched one of the spots with the toe of a shoe. It smeared glutinously.

  The curtains were drawn in front of the bathtub, opaque pink plastic with blue fish printed on them. Stepping back, he leveled the pistol along his hipbone and stretched out an arm to slide them apart with a rattling of plastic rings. The movement disturbed a double handful of fat flies, one of which lighted on his cheek next to his nose and had to be brushed away with the barrel of the gun.

  His killer’s stomach did a slow turn when he looked down and saw why the flies were there.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Feliz Suiza closed the door of the office safe on the morning receipts and went back out into the shop to draw the blinds and turn off all the lights but those in the display window. My shop, he always called it, never just “the shop.” It was the first thing he had ever owned. A small, very black Cuban with flat features cracked many years beyond his bare forty-two from cutting cane in the hot sun, he had come over on the Freedom Flotilla with his son Tranquillo, who was now a bullpen pitcher with the Detroit Tigers. Tranquillo had used his contract money to finance the shop with the National Bank of Detroit and give it to his father. Feliz had a photograph of his son in his baseball uniform taped to the cash register, and whenever someone came in to pawn a typewriter or redeem a saxophone he would point to it and urge the customer to remember the name Tranquillo Jesus Suiza come playoff time next year.

  He was open every day but Holy Sunday and made good money, more than he had ever seen from his laborer’s wages, but the habits of a lifetime broke with difficulty and he always took an hour’s nap precisely at three. He was on his way to his cot in back when someone banged on the front door. He ignored it and continued walking, but as the banging went on he muttered an oath in Spanish and went back and raised the blind over the door, calling, “We close. Come back later.”

  The man on the other side of the glass didn’t turn away. He was much older than Feliz, owlish-looking in funny round glasses and a little hat with a yellow feather in the band. A slight pot webbed in a green sweater swelled out through the opening in his topcoat.

  “I called you before,” the man shouted back, pudgy hands cupped around his mouth. His eyes went from side to side, comic-sinister. “About a gun.”

  “I said after four.”

  “It will just take a minute.” When Feliz hesitated, the man reached inside the sweater and came up with a handful of bills folded double. The shop proprietor unlocked the door and opened it.

  “You said you have a Walther,” the man said.

  “Come in. Don’t shout on the street.”

  Inside, the man took off his hat. He was bald to the crown. “The gun is new? No previous owner?”

  He had a thick, slow accent, not Spanish. He did not look or sound like a police officer, and he was many years older than the detectives who sometimes came to ask Feliz questions. When he did not answer the man’s question right away, the man began counting hundred-dollar bills from one hand to the other. The Cuban decided then that he was not a detective. It was too much money to risk on a simple arrest for illegal sale of firearms.

  “It is still in the box.” He relocked the door and redrew the blind. “Six hundred dollars.”

  The other pocketed all but six bills but held on to them. “I must see the gun.”

  Feliz told him to wait. Back in the office he opened the safe and took out the false bottom and removed the box with the gun from among the others. He brought it out and put it on the counter. The man put down an antique candelabra he had been examining, picked up the box, nodded approval at its unscuffed condition, and lifted off the top. He hefted the semiautomatic and checked the empty magazine. “You have ammunition?”

  “Yes, but cartridges are extra.”

  The man took the roll out of his pocket, peeled off four more bills, and laid a thousand dollars on the counter.

  “You have been recommended to me as a man to be trusted, a man of silence,” he said.

  “I see to my business and let others see to theirs.” Feliz was looking at the money.

  “I need two more men who observe the same philosophy,” said the man.

  Feliz touched the bills. The man didn’t stop him. He tidied them, squaring off the edges. Then he folded them once and tucked them into his shirt pocket, where they bulged like a woman’s breast.

  “I throw in the cartridges,” Feliz said.

  Pontier showed the uniformed officer in the hallway his badge and ID and went through the open door into the apartment. There he found Sergeant Lovelady in conversation with a man Pontier recognized from the coroner’s office. The sergeant wore a gray waterproof open over his yellow sport coat. Another uniform was standing around plainly wondering what to do with himself and a photographer stood at the window tripping his flashgun at the floor, testing it. They were always doing that. It could make you crazy.

  “Somebody’s good with a knife,” the coroner’s man was saying. “I’ve been a deer hunter twenty years and it’s as fine a job of quartering as I’ve seen. Must’ve taken him most of the night.”

  “Night?”

  He looked at Pontier for the first time. “Hello, Inspector. Twelve hours anyway, maybe eighteen. Body temperature goes down fast after all the blood’s drained away. I’m mostly going by how completely it’s congealed. I’ll make a more intelligent guess once I get into the stomach downtown.”

  “We got a name?” Pontier asked Lovelady.

  “Moira King’s the name on the lease. We got a preliminary ID from the manager. He’s the one called us. Came around to fix the faucet in the bathroom, found the door open, and came in. He said. He didn’t want to go snooping in no drawers, run his fingers through her undies, not him. He’s downstairs in his office if you want to talk to him. I put a uniform there.”

  “He our guy?”

  “Nah. He threw up in the sink. Guys like him don’t even cut up their own meat.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Jesus, there’s two inches of blood in the bottom of the tub. You’d think he’d of pulled the stopper at least.”

  “Trouble with these scroats,” Pontier said. “No consideration. Anybody see anything?”

  “Not yet. Most of the tenants are at work. We’ll pump them when they get home.”

  “What’d this Myra do?”

  “Moira. She was something with the telephone company, the manag
er said. Some pay stubs we found check out. Quiet, no parties, not many visitors. Kind of stuck up, he said. Meaning she didn’t fall down and spread her legs every time he said hi.”

  “Hit it off, didn’t you?”

  “Guy’s a fuck, like every other landlord I ever met. That faucet I told you about? I tried it. Works just fine.”

  “We got a weapon?”

  The sergeant reached into his raincoat pocket and brought out a small square semiautomatic pistol in a glassine bag. “Under the bed. It wasn’t there long. Lots of dust bunnies there but the place was clean. It hasn’t been fired. There’s a little dust in the barrel.”

  Pontier looked at the coroner’s man. “Gunshot wounds?”

  “She was stabbed repeatedly. We’ll have to wash her off but I don’t think she was shot. Guns and blades just don’t go together. If you do one you don’t generally do the other.”

  “Nobody we talked to heard shots,” Lovelady added.

  “Anything else?” The inspector was still looking at the other man, who pulled a face.

  “Downtown. Christ, these aren’t exactly the ideal conditions to take a smear.”

  Lovelady said, “There’s pecker tracks on the sheets. This ain’t your average everyday rape-murder, though. This guy’s way off the white line and in the Twilight Zone.”

  “Where do we stand with the Redford cops on this one?”

  “Smack dab in the middle of it. Someone offers to take your enema for you, you don’t stake any claims. Question is, do we want this one?”

  Pontier stroked his moustache.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’ve got a feeling about it. Handle it?”

  “I need help I’ll call you. You want to see the damage?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  On his way out the inspector made room for a pair of uniformed morgue attendants on their way in with a folding stretcher. Lovelady held up a palm, stopping them, and whistled at the photographer. “Hey, Flash Casey, you ready?”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Treat’s eye was the color of blue clay at the peephole in his front door. “What’s the matter, you use up the last one already?”

  “No, I just need heavier artillery,” Macklin said. “Open up.”

  The dealer let him in and set the locks behind him. “What you need? I got a kid in back.”

  Piano music floated in from another room. Macklin said, “I need a shotgun sawed off short enough to fold a coat over. Twelve-gauge pump. Ithaca, if you’ve got it.”

  “I’m all out of Ithacas. I got a Remington but it ain’t sawed off. I can do that upstairs.”

  “If that’s all you’ve got.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “What about the kid?” Macklin asked.

  “He can use the practice.”

  The music sounded pretty good to the killer, but he followed Treat into the back bedroom and up the tight staircase to the attic workshop. There the little dealer broke a new Remington shotgun with a square hickory slide out of the wall rack and used an oily rag to wipe off the cosmoline and removed the barrel. After wrapping a cloth around the barrel to protect the steel, he clamped it into the vise on the bench and looked at his visitor.

  “Be four hundred.”

  “It’s a lousy hundred-buck fowling piece,” Macklin protested. “Not even worth that, with that clumsy damn slide.”

  “Hey, I’m at considerable risk here. Guy with my record, I’m looking at a year’s tour of beautiful downtown Jackson State just for cutting down this barrel.”

  They agreed on three hundred finally. Macklin took the bills out of his emergency stash and Treat put them away in a drawer of the workbench. Then he scored the outside of the shotgun barrel with a pipe die, selected a hacksaw with a shiny titanium blade from a row of them over the bench, and began cutting. The rasping was like labored breathing in the closeness of the room.

  When the thirteen-inch section he had measured off came free, he laid it aside, used an emery cloth on the end of the remainder to smooth the harsh edge, and unwound the vise. The barrel was now no longer than a man’s forearm.

  “Stock too?”

  Macklin nodded, and Treat used a screwdriver to remove the three screws that held the hickory stock in place, then clamped it into the vise and cut off the shoulderpiece with a fine-toothed finishing saw, leaving only the pistol grip. It was the work of a few minutes to reassemble the shotgun. From grip to muzzle it measured less than two feet. “This short she’s just as hairy from both ends,” Treat warned, handing it over.

  “Not if you know how to handle it.” The killer reached into an open box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells on top of a stack and took one out to examine it. “Double-ought?”

  “Uh-huh. Steel, though. Not lead.”

  The killer made a face but fed the shell through the bottom loading gate and worked the slide, racking it into the chamber. Elevating the weapon, he watched with approval as the slide glided back down into place without help. “You’ve done some work on it.”

  “I wouldn’t of had to, it was an Ithaca,” Treat said. “Prewar, anyway, not that shit they crank out now. You going to carry it around with one up the pipe like that?”

  “What good’s a watchdog with his teeth in his pocket?”

  “Blow off your foot.”

  “My foot.” Macklin fisted out a handful of shells, filled the magazine, and put the rest in a pocket of his coat. Then he took off the coat.

  Treat said, “What you doing? I got to get back to the kid.”

  “I thought you said he needed the practice.”

  “Well, you know, I get paid to give him lessons, he tells his mother I wasn’t there most of the time, my business falls off. Maybe they wonder what I’m doing when I ain’t there.”

  “You trying to get rid of me?”

  “Well, in a nice way.” He tried a grin.

  Macklin finished folding the coat over his arm with the shotgun under it and jerked his head toward the stairs. Treat hesitated, looked at the gun, then got up and started that way. Sideways, keeping an eye on the man behind him.

  “What’s got you jumping?” Macklin demanded.

  “Nothing. I just hope you don’t trip on a step with me in front of you.”

  “I’d be sorry as all hell.”

  “Just don’t forget about that stuff I left with a friend,” Treat said. “I mean, accident, heart attack, a tree falls on me when I’m cutting the grass, it don’t make no difference, stuff goes to the cops.”

  “Don’t flex at me, Treat. I’ll cut you off at the roots.”

  They descended the steep staircase, Macklin holding the bundled weapon vertically. The piano was still playing.

  “Kid’s good,” Macklin said.

  “He’s got a good teacher.”

  It sounded too jaunty for the dour little gun runner. Macklin hung back a step while the other preceded him out of the bedroom. He saw movement then, a dark leather jacket glistening in the hallway, a flash of faded denim on the other side. He swung the shotgun level and pulled the trigger. The room swelled. Fire leapt, and Treat’s back and the two men in jackets dissolved in smoke.

  The silence after the roar rang. For an instant Macklin held his ground. Fibers from the blasted coat floated around in the air. Then he bounded forward, almost tripping over the gun dealer’s body in the doorway. Treat lay in a spreading puddle of red, his shirt in bloody tatters on his back and smoldering, on top of a black man in a Levi’s jacket with all of the middle of him gone. A .32 revolver lay on the floor nearby.

  The floor bounced and Macklin swung right, shotgun foremost, toward the end of the hall leading to the exit. The black leather jacket stopped running then and whirled, light glinting off shiny nickel in his hand.

  “Stop!” Macklin worked the slide with a loud double clack.

  Instantly the black leather jacket dropped his gun and threw up his hands. “Don’t, mister! I’m cool!”

  He was barely half
Macklin’s age, white, tall, and reedy, with shoulder-length blond hair that looked greasy in the light. His skin was the slick gray of chewed paper. He was shaking.

  The killer stepped over the bodies, lowering the weapon slightly. In another room the piano went on tinkling, and Macklin knew then that he was listening to a recording.

  “Forget your name,” he said. “Who bought you?”

  “Bought me?”

  “One.” Macklin shouldered the Remington.

  “Mister—”

  “Two.” He braced himself.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Three.”

  “No!” It was a shout. “I don’t know his name, mister. A little old guy with glasses and a funny hat. He split a hunnert between Rolly there and me down at the arcade and said they was another two hunnert in it for us when we offed a guy.”

  “I’m the guy?”

  “You look like what he said. It was just the money, mister. I got a yard-and-a-half-a-day itch, I can’t ask no questions. He said you’d be coming here soon.”

  “Treat in it?”

  “Treat—you mean the little guy? Not at first. The old guy, he talked to him, brought him around, kind of. Mister, you let me go, I’d just as soon not—”

  “Go.”

  “What?”

  Macklin lowered the gun and let the short barrel droop. “Get out.”

  The young man hesitated, then started backing down the hall, his hands still in the air. When he reached the living room arch, he turned around and ran stumbling to the front door and tore it open. It drifted shut behind him but not before Macklin heard the shots, two loud nasty shredded pops very close together. Then silence.

  Someone groaned.

  Macklin turned and looked down at Treat. The fingers of the dealer’s one visible hand plucked at the floor. He was lying on his face on top of the dead black man, Rollo, saying something that was muffled by the corpse’s denim jacket.

  “Fuckstlsht.”

  The killer bent down, grasped a handful of Treat’s brush-cut hair, and lifted his face free.