Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  The old man produced a decaying wallet from his hip pocket and selected a blue-and-yellow card from a thick bundle of them in the photograph section. It was smudged and dog-eared, the lettering barely legible. Arthur accepted it. “Oh, you’re with the U of M. I thought you were local.”

  “No. I filed a requisition with the university, but the shipment hasn’t come in and I need the mercury tomorrow. None of the shops in Ann Arbor carries it.”

  The chemist returned the card, unlocked a cabinet behind the counter, and took down a half-pint plastic bottle from the top shelf. It was much heavier than its size indicated.

  “It’s fascinating stuff,” he said, squinting at the price code on the label. “When I was in eighth grade science, we used to sneak into the room during lunch hour and play with it, chase the little drops around a desktop with our fingers. We didn’t know it was poisonous then. I guess that’s why none of us got sick. That’s twenty-six dollars with the tax.”

  “Yes, it is deadly.” The old man counted two tens, a five, and a single out of his wallet.

  Arthur rang it up on the register, slipped the bottle and the receipt into a paper bag, and held it out. “Thanks for coming in, Dr. Wanze,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Morning glowered sullenly through a thin sheeting of dirty white cloud, graying out the skyline to the east and flattening perspectives so that the entire city looked like a dusty board game turned on end. Entering suburban Melvindale, Macklin told his cabdriver to slow down as they passed the entrance to the subterranean salt mines. From the street he could see only the outbuildings and part of the well-marked opening of the shaft and men in yellow hard hats and caked coveralls moving around in front. The cab passed within inches of a plain gray Chevrolet parked across from the entrance with two men in the front seat. Raising his hand on that side as if to scratch his temple, Macklin directed the driver to keep going.

  After leaving Roy Blossom’s duplex the killer had caught a late supper in a diner, then returned to his motel room to sleep the rest of the night. He had been jumpy after the debacle, angry with himself for his lack of caution, but he had ceased thinking about it the minute he hit the sheets. A lifetime of conditioning and the legacy of a father who had worked years of double shifts as a junkman and truck dispatcher (and weekends cracking skulls for pin money) had given him the ability to sleep anywhere without fanfare. He had risen with the sun, cleaned and oiled his pistol, brushed his clothes and dressed with all the elaborate attention to detail of a matador preparing for the bullring. After that he had gone straight to a cab stand without stopping for breakfast.

  Three blocks beyond the mine entrance he told the driver to pull over and paid him and got out. He kept walking in the direction they had been going while the cab was in sight, then reversed himself as it turned the corner and made his way back. The cold air chapped his hands and made an ice mask of his face, but the synthetic material of the sport coat trapped his body heat. Adrenaline crackled through his veins.

  A bar with a red Budweiser sign in the window stood in the middle of the last block before the mine. Macklin pushed through the glass door, blinked in the dim interior lighting, and took a stool at the bar, behind which mirrors plated the wall in back of the bottles. At that hour he shared the bar with only two other customers, large men approaching middle age and seated together at a back booth. They wore rough gray coveralls salted white in the creases.

  While Macklin was watching them in the mirrors, a stout waitress in her fifties with a beehive of hair dyed bright copper trundled up to their table and set a pair of foaming glasses in front of them. “Salt in your beer, Ed?” she asked.

  “That’s funny, Arlene. I ain’t heard that one all week.” The older of the two, a graying giant with an old forked scar on one leathery cheek, excavated a crushed bill from the breast pocket of his coveralls and paid for the beers.

  “What’s yours?”

  Macklin looked up at a freckled bartender in a green T-shirt and dog tags standing behind the bar. “Coke.”

  After paying for it he sipped it slowly, pretending to listen to the call-in program droning out of the radio over the beer taps. A woman with a Little Rock drawl was asking the guest, a writer, where he got his ideas. The writer said, “Cheboygan.”

  Ed’s companion finished his beer first and got up to leave. Ed rose too, and they shook hands. With a little wave to the waitress the other man left, after which his friend sat down and drank the rest of his beer. He stood again finally, laid two quarters on the table for a tip, and went back toward the rest rooms. Macklin drained his glass unhurriedly and followed.

  Ed was standing at the gang urinal, a long tub with black iron starting to show through the white enamel. He glanced up at the mirror in front of him as Macklin entered, nodded a greeting, then shook off and zipped up his fly. Passing behind him, Macklin jerked his right arm up stiffly, driving the heel of his hand into the back of the man’s head. Ed’s forehead struck the mirror hard, shooting spidery cracks out from the point of impact. He grunted, his forehead bleeding, but before he could move Macklin bounced the edge of the same hand off the big muscle on the side of Ed’s neck and his knees buckled. The killer caught him as he fell, lowering him to the floor gently.

  Working swiftly, Macklin got the big man’s coveralls off and stepped into them. They were big enough to fit into without taking off his sport coat, but he did so anyway, to keep the sleeves from binding, and turned back the cuffs on the coveralls sleeves and pants legs. He looked at his bee-eyed reflection in the broken mirror. It was a loose fit but not enough to attract attention. He took a moment to turn out the sport coat’s pockets for forgotten evidence, then dropped it to the floor beside Ed’s unconscious form. He was a lousy tipper anyway.

  The room’s only ventilation came through an amber pebbled-glass window tilting inward at a forty-five-degree angle to its frame. He yanked it horizontal, braced his hands on the sill, and wriggled his head and shoulders through the space underneath. Cold air touched him. He knew an instant of fear when the loosely bunched material around his hips caught, but he pushed hard and came free and got one leg outside and braced himself and freed his other leg and hopped four feet to the pavement. He was in an alley between the bar and the blank wall of an appliance warehouse next door.

  The street behind the bar dead-ended at the cyclone fence surrounding the entrance to the mine, with another alley leading to the street that ran in front. Macklin came out there and walked through the open gate without turning to look at the men in the car parked across the way. A bored security guard in a padded jacket with a pile collar barely glanced at him as he passed in his coveralls. He kept walking.

  “Hey!”

  Ignoring the shout behind him, he stepped up his pace. His hand went into his right slash pocket, where he had placed the 10-millimeter for easy access.

  “You! Wait up!”

  The calls were drawing attention from the workers milling around him. He turned, his hand closing around the pistol. A bearded party with FOREMAN stenciled across the front of his safety helmet strode up on him.

  “Put on a hard hat, you stupid son of a bitch,” he said. “You want the company’s insurance yanked?”

  Macklin took his hand out of the pocket empty. “I forgot.”

  “Well?”

  The killer left him to select one of the yellow helmets from the bench the foreman had indicated. It was cold to the touch and felt clammy on his head. When he turned, the foreman was still there watching him. “What’s your name?”

  He hesitated a beat. “Martin.”

  “Martin.”

  Macklin watched him scratching his beard.

  “You look a little light-skinned for the Martin I know,” the foreman said. “You got a first name?”

  “Ed.”

  He scratched some more. “You from nightside?”

  “I just changed shifts.”

  “Okay. Watch t
hat safety equipment, Martin. We had two warnings this month already.”

  Macklin said he would.

  The entrance was a cavern shored with creosoted timber and strung with electric bulbs in steel cages. Hills of salt so white it hurt to look at them surrounded the clearing outside, where the rumble of heavy trucks backing up to load made the ground tingle beneath Macklin’s feet. He stepped inside, avoiding the narrow-gauge tracks used by the loading cars. The air inside was ten degrees cooler and so dry it seemed to suck the moisture right out of his skin.

  Thirty yards in, the main tunnel branched into three separate shafts, fanning out from the center like the spokes of a broken wheel. There would be other levels, more shafts. Finding Blossom in the maze could be one for Jason.

  He was turning it over when a black man in hard hat and coveralls came out of the shaft to his left, peeling off a pair of yellow chamois gloves crusted over white.

  “Foreman wants to talk to Roy Blossom,” he told the newcomer. “You seen him?”

  The black man looked at him. “What’s the matter with the radio?”

  Shit, he hadn’t even known they had radios. The APB had caused him to force things at the sacrifice of his homework. “No one’s answering.”

  “Fucking things never do work in here. Try C. He rotated out of my corridor last week.”

  When Macklin didn’t move, the black man made a snicking sound with his lips against his teeth and pointed down the shaft across the way. “How long you been here?”

  “This is my first day.”

  “You better leave a trail of bread crumbs. You get turned around down there somebody sprinkles your bones in his soup a hundred years from tomorrow.”

  He started down the shaft indicated. It was narrower than the main corridor, and once he had to flatten out against the rock wall while a line of cars clattered past loaded with chunks of salt and towed by an electric engine with a hard hat at the controls. The ground declined at a gentle but steady angle. Although his sense of distance and direction had stayed behind on the surface, he knew with an icy clutch of claustrophobia when he had passed beneath the Detroit River. He was in a dead womb with millions of gallons of water pressing down from above.

  He walked for what seemed miles without meeting anyone. Then he rounded a bend and found himself in a broad section filled with men standing in three feet of snow.

  Under the vapor of spent breath twisting toward the humming ventilator ducts overhead, snow hardly seemed out of place. But he was looking at boulder-size chunks of crystallized salt that had been jarred loose from the white walls. In that ghost-lit cavern colonnaded with saline pillars as thick as tree trunks, the men loading the pieces by hand into a train of ore cars looked like trolls at work in a fairy castle of ice.

  He broke out of his trance finally and joined them, bending to help scoop pieces into the cars. They were sandpapery to the touch and much lighter than their size indicated. After a few minutes his palms began to feel incredibly dry, almost brittle. He paused to pat his pockets, found a pair of chamois gloves on his left hip, and wriggled his fingers into them, studying the faces of the men around him as he adjusted the gauntlets over his cuffs. But in the harsh electric light the peaks of their hard hats threw their faces into shadow, and he looked in vain for the arrogant features he had memorized. He resumed working.

  A chunk hurled with too much enthusiasm skipped off the mound in the last car, brushing the shoulder of a man working on the other side. “Hey!”

  The man who had thrown it shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “You do it again you will be.”

  Macklin watched the man who had been brushed swagger over to lift the errant piece and flip it into the car. He recognized the gait, the angle of the head. Slowly he worked his way toward him.

  They loaded side by side for some minutes, Blossom never turning his head to look at the man nearest him. Finally one of the hard hats told the others to stand away and took his place at the controls of the electric engine. The little train started with a splatter of sparks and rolled away up the tunnel, picking up speed as it went.

  “Clear!”

  Blossom and the others backed toward the right wall. Macklin followed their lead. The worker who had shouted gripped the sling handle of a pneumatic drill built along the lines of a machine gun on a tripod and elevated the bit. Macklin managed to get his fingers in his ears just as the man pressed the trigger. The rattle-bang was deafening in the enclosed space. Cracks spidered out along the jagged white wall and pieces dropped loose as from a jigsaw puzzle, raining down silently under the din and raising a cloud of grainy white dust that powdered hard hats and coveralls and parched Macklin’s nostrils as he breathed in spite of himself.

  Some of the others had their fingers in their ears, but most did not. He suspected they were wearing earplugs and he searched the pockets of Ed’s coveralls for a pair but found none. Well, if all the explosions he’d been in lately hadn’t thickened his eardrums, nothing would.

  A narrower shaft opened to his right, not as brightly lit as this one. Macklin glanced around, saw that the others were busy watching the drilling, and shoved his pistol into Roy Blossom’s ribs. He gave him time to react and to recognize him, then nodded toward the opening. After a moment the other turned that way. Macklin followed with the gun at kidney level. Behind them the drill clattered.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The door opened the width of the man standing inside, which was not wide enough to allow Burlingame a look at the room behind him. A faint odor of floor wax and vintage sweat skirled out, gymnasium smells.

  “Mr. Anderson?” said Burlingame.

  “My name’s Green. Who are you?” But the look on the narrow man’s face, bracketed by sideburns that reached to the angles of his jaw, told the FBI man he had been recognized. The man had on an orange necktie bright enough to stop a train.

  “Green’s good. Your CIA jacket says you’re not much for exotic aliases. Kurof in?”

  “There’s no Kurof here.” The door started to close. Burlingame blocked it with a shoulder and waved his ID.

  “Official business, friend. I can get a warrant, but we’re brothers in red, white, and blue. We shouldn’t have to do that sort of thing.”

  “Open the door, Mr. Green.”

  “Green” started a little at the deep tones behind him, then backed away, bringing the door in with him.

  Burlingame entered. With the light streaming in through the pebbled glass high in the far wall, the man standing in the center of the glossy blond-oak floor was a shadowy bulk with gray in his thick hair, built like a refrigerator.

  The FBI man said, “I wondered for a long time why a gymnasium. Then I went back to your file. Rome, 1956. Wrestling and hammer-throwing. You took a bronze medal.”

  “Nostalgia, Mr. Burlingame,” said the man in shadow. “It grows as our balls wither.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  The other opened his mouth and laughed, a peasant’s roar. “I’m glad we met,” he said when it was over. “So many Americans in your work are too serious. They don’t understand the beauty of the game, only its end.”

  “They like clear sides. The crowned checkers that move both ways just confuse them. Not me. When you’ve been playing it this long you get to welcome the double reverse. Keeps you awake. Anderson was a nice surprise.”

  “Mr. Green is here to see I don’t take pictures of secret installations before my asylum comes through.”

  “Bullshit. He’s got eight years in liaison. He doesn’t babysit suspected spies.”

  “How do you know that?” barked the narrow man.

  “Office secret. Like Kurof’s relationship with the CIA.”

  “Brown, please,” said the man in shadow. “I’ve grown used to it. I’m thinking of making it legal when I become a citizen. What cards are you holding, Mr. Burlingame?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not wired. Anderson can check me. Or does he prefer Green?”

 
Brown moved a massive shoulder. Green directed the FBI man to raise his hands, then spread his coat and patted him down. He removed Burlingame’s revolver and stuck it in his waistband.

  Lowering his arms, Burlingame said: “I considered the possibility of Green’s being a rogue agent, but there were too many people watching you for that. Then we got a court order to pull Roy Blossom’s file at the Ypsilanti mental hospital. He had only one visitor his whole stay. The description fit you.”

  “My build and coloring are not unique,” said Brown.

  “I know you’re working for the Company. Green here is your go-between. I know you’ve got something going with Blossom and that it’s heavy enough to hire three different killers to try to take out Peter Macklin when he accepted a contract to kill him. It’s details I’m after.”

  “To what purpose? Even if you’re right about me, the FBI and the CIA work for the same employer.”

  “Our paychecks come in the same kind of envelope. After that it’s a big scramble for appropriations from Congress and the loser gets to go home sucking his wounds. I figure between the two of us we’re spending a couple of billion a year listening at each other’s keyholes. I’m not out to kick over any pots, though. I’m just trying to keep peace in my jurisdiction. If I can leave here with some assurance that this thing isn’t going to stretch into my next pay period I’ll be happy as a pig with its own tit. And some answers.”

  “That’s what you want. What are you bargaining?”

  “The Bureau backs off from this one, hands in the air.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s more than my late great boss would have promised, and you won’t hear it again from my office. Provided I like what I hear.”

  “Close the door, please, Mr. Green.”

  After a moment Green complied. Brown turned and Burlingame followed him deeper into the echoing room. With the change of angle he got a better look at his host, his cod-colored eyes, the blue shadow covering the lower half of his face. He had seen him before only in photographs. Brown stopped under a slanting shaft of light.