Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  He cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, making it obvious he was waiting. He thought of saying something to the guy, maybe even reaching out and breaking the connection himself, and a week earlier he would’ve, but his nerves were better now. Finally at 6:07 by the bank clock across the street the guy pegged the receiver and picked up his briefcase and folded the trench coat over his arm and smiled tight-lipped at Roger and walked off. Roger jumped on the instrument and dialed the number he had memorized.

  The telephone rang seven times. He was starting to lean against the box, resigned now, waiting for ten so he could hang up and go somewhere for a drink, when the line clicked and a voice Roger had never heard before said hello.

  The address Burlingame had given Macklin belonged to the back half of a duplex on Dix Road in the downriver community of Melvindale, an old frame building with split and curling shingles on the roof and the white paint rubbed down to leaden gray in spots. The lawn was shaggy and sprouting weeds in the dirty moonlight.

  It was an eight-block walk from the bus stop. Although there had been seats available aboard the DSR, Macklin had stood throughout the ride because the shotgun under his coat would not let him sit. The only other passenger not seated was an old black man in a cloth cap, whose pained expression whenever the bus clattered over broken pavement or took a corner too fast advertised a bad case of piles. From time to time he and Macklin exchanged sympathetic glances.

  Had Macklin more of a sense of humor, he might have reflected with amusement upon the irony of busing killers out of the city into the suburbs.

  “Hey.”

  Stretched out on the musty-smelling mattress in the guest room on the second story of the house across the street, Detective First Grade Arthur Connely came out of a light doze and rolled over to look at his partner seated on a rickety wooden chair at the window. Officer Richard Petersen, Uniform Division, on temporary assignment with C.I.D. Homicide, was little more than a dark bulk against the slightly lighter outline of the glass. “What you got?” whispered Connely.

  “Male cauc, five-ten and a hundred and eighty.” A twisting sound in the darkness, Petersen adjusting the infrared binoculars. “Around forty.”

  “Going in?”

  “Heading that way.”

  “That’s our guy.”

  The uniform, in plainclothes tonight, pressed the speaker button on his headset. “Baker two, look alive.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” crackled a voice over the earphones. “I want orders from a guy in a blue bag I’ll join the park patrol.”

  “What’s he doing now?” Connely asked.

  “Walking. Looking around a little. He’s at the driveway.… Shit.”

  “What?”

  “He’s walking past.”

  “Keep tracking him. Pontier says this guy’s a pro.”

  Dix Road declined steeply toward Outer Drive, where traffic was swishing by heavily between shifts at the Ford Rouge plant. After passing the duplex Macklin walked all the way down to the corner, then crossed the street and started back up the shadowed side. Darkness was no obstacle to the infrared equipment he knew was trained on the house, but the trees and parked cars on that side would help break up the continuity of any attempts to track his movement.

  A big blue 1969 Mercury was parked just below the crest of the hill. The front door on the passenger side was unlocked. He opened it and reached in and flipped the automatic transmission out of gear, then stepped back out of the way. For a long moment the car didn’t move, and he was thinking of giving it a push when the pavement creaked under a tire and the vehicle began rolling backward down the slope. It picked up speed as it rolled, and he turned his back to it and resumed walking.

  “What?” Connely was sitting on the edge of the mattress now, wide-awake.

  “I’m not sure.” Petersen adjusted the glasses. “I saw something moving. There! Guy walking.”

  “Him?”

  “Can’t tell. Damn the trees.”

  The detective got up. “Let’s have a look.”

  Petersen was pulling the strap off over his head when a horn blared not far away. Brakes screeched and a tremendous walloping wham splintered the air.

  “Jesus Christ!” Connely fumbled for his sheep-lined jacket.

  “Baker two, Baker two.”

  “Fuck that. Let’s go!”

  The uniform tore off the headset and hurried off after his partner.

  Standing in the doorway of a house two lots down from the duplex, Macklin watched the two men running down the street in the direction of Outer Drive, where other horns were blasting now, the traffic knotted around the collision site. He had already seen two others break cover from the bushes next door and hurry that way. He waited two beats, then stepped out and continued his path up the street.

  The house described an L, with Blossom’s number etched in rusting wrought-iron script over the door in the short rear section at the end of the driveway. The only window visible in that section was lighted. Macklin tried the door, then used the edge of his driver’s license to slip the antique latch and mounted a steep rubber-paved staircase lit by a dim bulb in an amber globe over the landing. At the top he paused, listening for footsteps on the other side of the flat wooden door in front of him. There were none, but he heard voices inside. He couldn’t make out the words.

  He thought about that, then decided that anyone talking with Blossom in his home was an enemy. This door he didn’t try. Swinging out the shotgun, he braced himself, threw a heel at the lock with all his weight behind it, and let his momentum carry him forward as the door flew open and slammed against the wall inside. He glimpsed movement in front of him, a flash of light-colored shirt in a dark coat, and released a charge. A full-length mirror mounted on the wall opposite the door collapsed, showering tiny reflections of himself all over the floor.

  Without pausing to assimilate, he swung right in the direction of the continuing voices, but this time he curbed his impulse to fire. On the bluish TV screen in front of him two scantily dressed women were beating up a gangling young dark-haired man under the rustling racket of a mechanical laugh track.

  Macklin was alone in the apartment with a rerun of Three’s Company.

  From the sidewalk across from the duplex, the explosion inside was a massive hollow crump, simultaneous with a throb of brighter light at the window, and Roy Blossom’s first surprised thought was that the television set had blown up. But then logic came rushing in to fill the vacuum and he recognized it as the report of a shotgun contained in a small room.

  He had gone to a restaurant on Oakwood for supper and had been on his way back home when a loud crash from the direction of Outer Drive told him another damn fool had tried to nose his way into the rush-hour traffic at the loss of his fenders. As he came within sight of the duplex two men had come running out the front door of the house across the street and gone down that way. Gawkers, although they both looked too young to be visiting the elderly couple who lived in the house. Blossom wondered if they were relatives. Then he had spotted a third man turning into his driveway, and as the man passed beneath his own lighted window, he recognized him as the one he had seen going into and coming out of Moira’s apartment house a couple of nights before. The man’s posture as he walked was unnaturally stiff, as if his back hurt. Well, that was what came of balling girls half his age. Blossom had waited on the street, absently opening and closing the clasp knife he had taken from his pocket.

  Now, as lights in private houses on both sides of the street sprang on in the echo of the blast, he turned around and hurried back the way he had come. By the time he reached the restaurant where he had just eaten he was out of breath and had to wait, gasping, his pulse hammering in his ears, before he was steady enough to lift the receiver off the pay telephone on the wall in front of the cash register and fumble two dimes into the slot. He listened to the purring, saying, “Come on, come on,” and then a voice greeted him with the number he had just dial
ed.

  “This is Blossom,” he barked, breaking in before the voice had finished. “Let me talk to Mr. Brown.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  He didn’t invest any more time watching great comedy on the black-and-white set. It was an episode he had seen anyway. Instead he allowed the shotgun to subside back under his sport coat and let himself out the door.

  The fire exit at the rear of the lobby was chained and padlocked. Macklin considered blasting through it, then decided not to risk a faceload of ricocheting pellets from the steel door and went back out the way he had come in, swinging out the Remington as he opened the door. He looked into a red Irish face as big and close as a curious gorilla’s at the zoo.

  “Freeze, motherfucker!” A nickel-plated magnum came up in two outstretched hands.

  Macklin’s finger was tightening on the shotgun’s trigger when hurrying footsteps rattled to his left. The Irish cop, still gasping from a hard run, twitched his face in that direction. Realization of the mistake came in an instant, and he was correcting himself when Macklin swung the Remington’s butt. It collided hard with the other’s hands and the magnum flew glittering off the front stoop into the dewy grass. The cop grimaced, opening his mouth to curse, and the barrel came back the other way and gonged along the side of his jaw. As he reeled backward Macklin fired over the head of the young man running up on him with something dark and gleaming in his hand. The muzzle flare washed them all in light for a pulsing microsecond, catching the young man in middive for the ground, his partner falling off the stoop, Macklin throwing himself the other way. His momentum carried him down to one knee and jarred loose the belt sling. He lurched upright and forward without pausing while the shotgun slid down his leg and fell to the ground. Running, he left it there. From that point on it was excess weight anyway.

  “Stop! Police!”

  A swallowed blam rent the air left intact by the shotgun blast. Macklin thought he heard the bullet shrilling over his head, but he put it down to imagination. You seldom heard them coming from a magnum. In any case he didn’t stop. The night welcomed him as one of its own.

  “Radio call, Inspector!”

  Lovelady had thrown open the door to Pontier’s office without knocking. The fat sergeant was out of breath, although he couldn’t have run more than twenty feet from the monitor in the squad room. Pontier, on the telephone, knew the answer to his question before he asked it.

  “Who?”

  “Connely and Petersen.”

  He slammed down the receiver without saying goodbye—forgetting even in the act to whom he’d been talking—and hastened out of the office behind the sergeant. He heard the telephone begin ringing as he left. He kept going.

  Burlingame, working late, counted sixteen rings before giving up. Less than a minute had passed since his last attempt to get through to Pontier, which had ended, as had all the previous ones, in a busy signal. The man spent as much time on the horn as every other police inspector the FBI man had ever known.

  In between tries he had called other sources in an effort to lift the APB on Macklin, but all had declined, maintaining that only the officer in charge of the investigation had that authority. Which was pure bullshit, but go identify yourself as federal and try to tell a city man what to do. Now the officer in charge was either out or not answering his telephone. Burlingame, himself a Bell fetishist, knew that men of their persuasion would sooner pull out before sexual climax than sit by placidly and let a telephone go on jangling.

  Cradling the receiver, he told the formal portrait of the President of the United States hanging on the wall opposite his desk that something was happening.

  “Honey? More coffee.” Blossom held up his empty cup.

  The waitress, a lumpy blond girl in her late teens with dark circles around her eyes, filled it from the carafe, glancing at him curiously. He ignored the look and she walked off. She didn’t have much up top, but he admired the way her buttocks moved under the white uniform, like—what’s that line?—like two cats fighting under a blanket. Any other night he might have been working on her. But he was waiting for Brown to call him back and he didn’t want anything to distract him from the telephone. Christ, if someone tried to answer it before he did, he’d use the knife on the bastard.

  He was hyper, really wired. He should’ve made his call from farther away, some other place where the help wouldn’t wonder what he was doing back after eating there just half an hour before. Where he didn’t have to keep looking at the door and seeing the old guy coming in with the shotgun, Jesus, seeing him just like he was there, that face with its down-drawn lines and a splattergun short enough to hide under his cheap sport coat, cut back beyond the choke so that the pattern spread a yard for every foot, clear the whole restaurant like a firehose. Blossom could see it happening.

  His imagination had always been extra vivid. Once when he was in junior high he had had the same nightmare three nights running, about putting his hand through a hole in a wall and having dozens of rats come squirming up his arm, squealing and slashing at him with their sharp little fangs, and after that he had stayed awake for a week before exhaustion took him. Then he had it again. He had slept in some dumps with holes in the walls since then and every time he looked at one of the holes he still saw the rats clear as anything. He didn’t even have to think about them and there they were, all slick gray like seals, fangs showing outside their lips. The last time he had seen them, four male attendants were required to strap him to his bed in Ypsilanti. The time before that had been just before he cut up the colored guy in the parking lot.

  Now he was afraid to look around him too closely. The restaurant was in an old building and there might be a hole in one of the walls.

  The telephone rang and he slopped coffee on himself putting down the cup. His waitress was just passing the instrument. He beat her there by half a step.

  “Mr. Blossom?”

  He recognized the familiar burring voice and said, “Where the hell you been? Didn’t Green tell you my ass is out?”

  “Obviously not too far, or you wouldn’t have been sitting there poisoning your system with caffeine for the past ten minutes.”

  How in hell did he know that? “It’s my ass, I guess I know when it’s out. Who’s the guy with the sawed-off, he one of yours? ’Cause if this is a cross I’ll carve on you so good, your friends’ll give up looking for the pieces.”

  “Very colorful. But we gain nothing by threatening each other. The man you described to Mr. Green is named Peter Macklin. He’s a professional working for the woman you eliminated. That wasn’t very intelligent of you, Mr. Blossom. These petty personal vendettas are messy and in the long run extremely costly. Frankly, I’m not sure you’re useful enough to justify the expense.”

  “You hang me out to dry I’ll open my mouth wide, fucker.”

  “A response like that is hardly calculated to win my cooperation, Mr. Blossom,” said the other, after a pause.

  “Yeah, well, hang on to a quarter for tomorrow’s Free Press.”

  “The Macklin situation is being attended to. We have a good man on it. I suggest you proceed as if nothing has happened. Go home, watch television, go to bed. Get up in the morning and go to work.”

  “Sure, wake up with my brains plastered to the headboard. Jerk off, Brown.”

  “I’ve said the situation is in hand. We know far more about this man Macklin than you and he is too cautious to risk coming back tonight. But just in case he does, we have that end covered. It’s important that you behave normally. The police are watching you.”

  The information startled him. “How come?”

  “Don’t be alarmed. It’s Macklin they’re after. But we can’t afford your attracting their attention.”

  “They ask me what happened I tell them what, my interior decorator uses double-o buck?”

  “Tell them nothing. You were out to dinner, and when you returned you found your apartment a shambles and the police on the premises. They won’t
believe you, but they won’t press the matter. Macklin’s the one they want.”

  Blossom remained silent while a pair of businessmen who had just entered the restaurant removed their overcoats and hung them on the tree next to the telephone. After they moved away: “You better hope what you’re telling me sticks, Brown. I’m down in the books as whacked out. Even if I go away for Moira, I’m out of the hatch in two years tops. Then I come looking.”

  Hanging up, he heard a faint squealing, the gnashing of tiny teeth.

  Floyd Arthur had the old man down as a teaching fellow, one of these Old World types who had grown tired of waiting for their accreditation to catch up with them and resigned themselves to assistant professorships in departments too broad for their specialties. He had that slightly seedy look, a topcoat too light for the November-like weather and a silly hat and those round-lensed bifocals you couldn’t get here, reflecting the light flatly as he looked around on his way up to the counter—that studied, unfashionable academic conceit fading into bored complacency. He used to see them often in his little chemist’s shop off the University of Detroit campus before the new breed of post-Watergate liberals came in wearing their blown hair and windowpane jackets over turtlenecks and shoved them aside. He missed them.

  “Yes, sir,” Arthur said brightly, leaning on his palms on the countertop.

  “I did not expect you still to be open when I called,” returned the old man. His voice was heavily accented, with a slightly British inflection. He had learned his English overseas.

  “I get most of my business after classes are out. I open in the morning for two hours at seven and then close until noon. You asked about mercury.”

  “Yes, I need it for a classroom demonstration.”

  “I don’t get much call for it anymore, after all the bad publicity. I’ll have to see your faculty card. Some proof you’re authorized to handle it.”