Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’m not following any of this, of course. I haven’t been to Melvindale in months.”

  The inspector’s gray eyes were fixed planets in his face. “You’re good. I never said you weren’t. Burlingame filled me in on this guy Mantis, and you can’t ever predict what a giggler like Blossom is going to do next.”

  Macklin made no response. He felt Lovelady watching him from his corner.

  “You were seen entering and leaving the mine,” Pontier said. “I don’t have any reports on that yet but I will. Any one of those officers will pick you out of a lineup.”

  “Say they do. What’s the penalty for impersonating a miner?”

  “Who said you impersonated a miner?”

  “Not me,” said Macklin.

  The inspector’s amiable expression shut down hard. “I don’t like cute, Macklin. I don’t even have to fuck around with charges. I can have Sergeant Lovelady blow off your face and plant a throwaway piece on you and claim self-defense. You ought to know how that works. You doctored the evidence at the mine pretty good.”

  “Lovelady never killed anyone.”

  “I knew it,” the sergeant said.

  “Shut up.” To Macklin: “He does what I tell him. Don’t think I’m all that straight, fucker. Even a straight cop gets tired of watching killers squirt through his fingers. I could blast you and sleep like a nun.”

  The killer uncoiled a little. He’d been afraid Pontier had something. “I’m tired, Inspector. I was up early. Do I sleep here or downtown?”

  “Cuff him.”

  The sergeant hurled him back up against the wall hard, hooked a handcuff on his right wrist, yanked it down behind his back, did the same with the left, and levered on its mate. He ratcheted them tight.

  “You’re busted,” Pontier said. “For the murder of Moira King.”

  Macklin faced him. The bracelets were cutting off his circulation. “What’s your evidence?”

  “Your prints are all over her apartment. We’ve got a witness who will testify to your relationship.”

  “This witness wouldn’t be Howard Klegg.”

  “Should it be?”

  He said nothing. The inspector looked too eager. Klegg wouldn’t testify. He’d have to admit on the witness stand that he’d recommended the killer to her. Which would result in a charge against the lawyer of conspiracy to commit murder.

  “What’s my motive?”

  “Lovers’ quarrel, maybe. From what we found out about her she was vulnerable enough for you to be plowing her.”

  “I was out of town when she was killed.” Getting shot at by the Bulgarian.

  “Your car was. Got any witnesses to prove you were with it?”

  “You know it wasn’t me.”

  “We can hold you on it for now, and when that runs out we’ll ring in resisting arrest and assaulting an officer from last night in Melvindale. We’re dusting that shotgun you left behind for prints, but Connely and Petersen will ID you anyway. Then the Taylor Police will want to talk to you about a triple murder and arson there yesterday. You got a prime civics lesson coming.”

  “I’ve had it before. There isn’t anything you can do to me that hasn’t been done.”

  “How about this?” He slammed a balled fist into the pit of Macklin’s stomach.

  “Jesus,” said Lovelady.

  The killer jackknifed, bile climbing his throat. His vision clouded and his breathing came in short, shallow sips that burned his lungs. The wave of nausea and pain curled and broke and receded. His senses came swimming back with the tide.

  “You and Blossom and this Mantis character have been playing Dungeons and Dragons with my city for a week.” Pontier spoke through his teeth. “I don’t give a shit what kind of deal you’ve got cooking with the feds, they’re just visitors here. It’s my city, mine. Next time you lay out the pieces, you forget who owns the board, I throw you back in the box you came in and nail down the lid. That clear enough or you want me to repeat it?” He cocked his fist.

  “It’s clear.” Macklin’s breath still creaked.

  “You better hope it is. You better hope.”

  Lovelady started to read him his rights.

  “Forget that,” Pontier said. “Spring him.”

  The sergeant hesitated. “He ain’t busted?”

  “I’ve got a seventy-percent record for arrests that stick. I’m not fucking it up with any heavyweight scum this month.”

  “What about Connely and Petersen?”

  “Let them swear out their own complaint. Somehow I don’t think they will. It means admitting they left their post to goon a fender-bender down the block. Come on, the air stinks in here.”

  “The deputy chief won’t like it.” The sergeant produced his key and unlocked the cuffs.

  “The deputy chief’s a prick.”

  Macklin rubbed his wrists, watching Pontier do up his necktie. “I’m clear?”

  “You’ll never be that. Not in my city. You want advice? Move. Because no part of the wheel stays out of the shit all the time and when you go under I’m going to be right there standing on the brake.”

  “I haven’t known what’s been going on since this one started. If it means anything.”

  “Not to me. Let’s go, Sergeant.”

  “Aren’t you going to read me that speech about not leaving town?”

  “Why?” The inspector was at the door, held open by Lovelady. “Blossom stabbed Mantis, and Mantis shot Blossom. That’s what the officers on the scene say it looks like and I don’t guess the coroner will find anything that says different. Anyway, it’s the feds’ red wagon, as Burlingame would put it. They’ll type it up with a new ribbon for one of their gray cardboard folders and when it goes in the drawer it’ll be deader than Sacco and Vanzetti. The feds are a lot like you, Macklin. They clean up after themselves. We finished dusting that shotgun, by the way. There weren’t any liftable prints on it. But I guess you knew that.”

  “I hear you, Inspector. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Pontier shocked him by making a shrill, screeching noise off the roof of his mouth.

  “That’s me setting the brake.”

  He went out. Lovelady followed, closing the door behind them.

  Macklin turned the lock. Routinely he walked through the apartment, checking the bedroom and bath for leftover officers, then drew the curtains over the living room windows. After turning on a light he broke his cash out of its hiding place and counted the bills. They were all there. He put them back and went into the kitchen to fix himself a drink.

  Taken on an empty stomach, the raw bourbon made his head sing. He wasn’t hungry. He could still feel Pontier’s fist in his belly.

  The telephone rang while he was taking off his shoes in the bedroom. He let it ring and stretched out fully clothed atop the covers. He didn’t feel tired but he wanted to sleep. If he stayed awake with no more policemen to talk to or drinks to make, he would start thinking, asking himself questions he couldn’t answer. Which in his business was a mistake.

  The telephone rang and rang. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. He got up and padded back into the living room and lifted the receiver.

  “Macklin?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Macklin, how the hell are you? It’s Charles Maggiore.”

  He didn’t reply. It was Maggiore’s voice.

  “I hear you’ve been busy. I tried to reach you earlier but I guess you were out. I wanted to say that’s quite a kid you got. Regular peel off the old potato.”

  “Say it.”

  “Well, not over the phone. I just wanted to tell you your kid did real good last night. You can be proud.”

  The line clicked and buzzed. Macklin stood with the receiver to his ear until the recording came on telling him to hang up and dial again. Then he cradled it and checked his watch, turning his wrist to read it in the dim light. Ten to twelve. He went into the kitchen and switched on the radio and poured another drink and waited.

 
The news came on at noon. The story he was waiting for was tucked between a taped excerpt from the mayor’s address to council and a traffic report. At three that morning the body of the owner of a chain of area furniture stores had been found in a dumpster behind one of his buildings with a .22 slug in the back of his head. He had been dead several hours. There were no suspects as yet, but according to the police, the dead man had a record of business dealings with organized crime figures locally. Macklin spun the dial but could catch no other news programs. He turned off the radio.

  And he had to find another divorce lawyer.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Peter Macklin Thrillers

  CHAPTER 1

  Sister Lucinda was a quarter beat behind.

  She was the only contralto in the group and its newest member, but the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith flattered himself that he could have identified the responsible party in a chorus of sopranos. Before he got the Call he had played backup guitar with the Geeks out of Royal Oak, and he still had his ear, even in a crowd the size of the one he always drew for the late Sunday morning service when the Tigers were in town. He made a mental note to talk to the sister about it after everyone else had left.

  When the singing was through and the parishioners had regained their seats, he opened the big Bible on the pulpit to the page he had marked with a guitar pick and began to read in the rich bass he had developed in those former days of darkness. In the Spartan interior of the church he was a startling figure wearing robes of rose-colored satin, a big brown man with a shaved head the size of a basketball against the sisters behind him in pale yellow with their hair in buns and the less noticeable four wide men in blue suits seated to his right. As he spoke he looked out on the congregation with eyes moist and black and strangely inanimate, like drippings from a black candle.

  “‘Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus,’” he thundered, “‘took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.

  “‘They said therefore among themselves, let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be; that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, they parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did.’”

  He slammed shut the book with a boom that reverberated in the rafters and made the audience jump. The basketball head swiveled slowly, leaving no seat untouched by the waxen black eyes as he came around from behind the pulpit with its lining of bulletproof plastic.

  “I hate it when he does that,” commented one of the wide men in blue to his neighbor.

  “And so, dear friends,” Sunsmith rumbled, “it remains to this day, that to gamble is a sin under the Bible and an abomination in the eyes of God; for he who wagers his chattel on the gaming table of greed is casting lots for the coat of our Lord on the cross, and will be damned for it.”

  Without taking his eyes off the audience, he reached behind the pulpit with one of the long arms he had used to lunge for C above high C and held up a sheet of paper.

  “Brother Clark confiscated this from a man in Cadillac Square Tuesday morning. It is signed by an organization that calls itself Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit and claims to be a petition calling for a vote to legalize games of chance within the Detroit city limits. But this is not what it is, dear friends; no, indeed.”

  His voice rose. “It is a pact, not a petition, and it is not with your neighbors, but with Satan, and the CCGD does not stand for Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit, but for Cry Craps and Go to the Devil!”

  This sparked cheering and appreciative laughter from the congregation. But Sunsmith was not smiling. He lowered the paper.

  “Mind,” he went on, more quietly, “that I do not speak against games of chance because they steal bread from the mouths of children, or because they reduce men and women to pigs snuffling in the trough; no, dear friends, these are not my reasons, although they should be enough for any decent man or woman. A government that smiles upon the casting of lots for Jesus’ coat would as soon outlaw the Word of the Lord and cast us all into darkness. And so, dear friends, when the petitioner comes to your door and says that he represents Citizens for Casino Gambling in Detroit and asks for your signature on his pact, tell him that you will not cast lots for the coat of our Lord, but that instead you are casting your lot with our Lord, and if he still refuses to see the light, then show him the door! Three, four.”

  The sisters came in with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the sweet mix sliding over the cheering and applause in the congregation. But the effect was spoiled when Sister Lucinda entered the sixteenth bar a full beat behind the others. The Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith turned to glare at her, and in the act saved his own life. He saw the flash and felt something clip his collar and then he saw metal gleam and then all four wide men in blue were on their feet with their big nine-millimeters in their hands going off in ragged succession like four engines firing on a cold day. Big round spots like red quarters appeared on Sister Lucinda’s yellow gown and her mouth opened and she dropped the gun and because her legs were covered she seemed to wither and shrink as the four guns followed her down.

  The throb of gunfire in the big room took the place of the singing, and for an instant there was no reaction. Then a woman in the audience who had not seen Sister Lucinda falling saw the four wide men standing holding their empty guns with the actions run all the way back and the rest was screaming.

  “Mr. Boniface.”

  The heavy man with the hooking features, sixty but black-haired and not a hair of it dyed because that wasn’t allowed inside, barely glanced at the young sandy-haired man in the blue suit with orange pinstripes. Picante was with him in the corridor and the heavy man said, “Where’s Klegg?”

  “Tied up,” Picante said. “This is one of the junior partners. Michael Boniface, Jason—”

  “What the fuck I pay him for, he don’t come down to see I get out when I’m supposed to? What if there was something wrong with the paperwork?”

  The young lawyer said, “All the arrangements were made beforehand, Mr. Boniface.”

  “Bo-ni-fa-ce,” corrected the heavy man.

  The young man whitened. “Didn’t I say it right? I—”

  “Any way a punk like you says it, it comes out Boniface. Don’t say it no more.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They were walking down the corridor, which had an institutional smell of lemon wax and stationary air. The heavy man’s suit, expensively tailored, was strained in front and his neck rolled over his tight collar. His face had a slightly bloated look.

  Picante said, “You look good, Mike.”

  “Bullshit. That government food would blow up Gandhi.”

  They passed through the metal detector at the end of the corridor and crossed a narrow strip of grass to the paved driveway leading to the gate. There the young lawyer showed papers to the guard in the booth and the guard buzzed open the gate. A deep blue Mercury was parked against the curb outside. Picante opened the rear door and held it.

  “Let the punk ride nigger,” the heavy man said. “I got my fill of that shit between here and federal court.”

  The lawyer got into the back seat and the heavy man climbed in next to Picante in front. Picante was lean and dark in a textured brown polyester suit. He had long upper teeth and thinning brown hair that he combed sideways across his scalp and when he smiled, not often, his face broke into vertical creases like an accordion. The heavy man watched him transfer a nickel-plated Colt Diamondback .38 revolver from the glove compartment to his underarm holster.

  “When you going to see my tailor?”

  “When this suit wears out.” Picante started the engine.

  “You look like a fucking bag man. I’m embarrassed to be seen with you.”

  “So fire me.” When they were moving Picante said, “You hear about that try on Sunsmith yesterday?”


  “That asshole Maggiore.” The heavy man pulled loose his necktie and undid the top button of his shirt. “When a sky pilot hands you grief you buy him. You don’t ice him.”

  “It might not be Maggiore.”

  “He pulled everything out of narcotics and stuck it in numbers and then the Lotto came in and he got killed. Now he’s sunk a million and a half in a shithouse load of tables and roulette wheels in Toledo and if they don’t legalize gambling in Detroit and he brings the stuff in anyway he’ll have raids up the wazoo. It’s Maggiore okay. Cops got anything on the shooter yet?”

  “Our guy there says no. Looks like someone hung a ringer in the choir.”

  “Gambling, shit. It ain’t steady. Drugs, that’s the growth industry.”

  “Draws fire, though.”

  “Three years I can do on my head. Did.”

  “Three years ain’t what the judge gave you.”

  The heavy man said nothing to that. “Where’s Macklin?”

  “Around. Only he’s freelancing now.”

  “Talk to him.”

  They spoke no more. It was a long drive from Milan to Detroit and Picante stayed off the expressways to show his employer some scenery he hadn’t seen through his cell window. In Belleville a tan Buick Skyhawk slid up beside them at a stop light and the window on the passenger’s side came down, leaking Tina Turner out into the open air.

  Picante jammed his heel down on the accelerator just as the back seat window on the left side of the Mercury exploded. Wheeling one-handed around a panel truck crossing the intersection, he used his other to snatch the heavy man’s lapel and pull him down across his lap. There was a second roar, but the Mercury was through the intersection now and buckshot struck the rear window and rattled down like a handful of dried peas. He negotiated three turns, clipping curbs twice and narrowly missing an old man walking his dog, and spun halfway up a grassy bank in a residential neighborhood before coming to a halt with gasoline walloping around inside the tank. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed the young lawyer levering himself upright in the back seat.