He had gone down three steps when a door sighed shut below and the stairwell echoed with heavy footsteps climbing up. He hesitated, then started backing the way he had come. In this mechanized age he rarely met anyone else using the stairs.
When he was on the landing, a denim-clad black man with a walrus moustache rounded the turn below, clanking as he came. A square backpack affair wrapped in green canvas rode high on his shoulders on a web harness and he cradled a long black tube along his right forearm with a tiny yellow feather of flame wobbling on the end. Their eyes met just as Macklin cleared the entrance and swung the steel door into its frame.
The man on the stairs set his feet and depressed the tube’s trigger, trying to beat the closing of the door. A geyser of liquid orange and yellow gushed up the stairs and splattered against the door, blistering the paint and licking back along the fire-resistant walls. The temperature in the stairwell soared. Sweat prickled under the black man’s clothes and evaporated as soon as it hit the heated air. He felt as if the oxygen were being sucked from his body and he opened his lips to inhale, charring his lungs with a sudden crackling sear that stopped his heart instantly. His clothes and hair and moustache caught fire and he was still falling when the gasoline in the tank on his back blew, bulging the brick walls beneath the fireproof paneling and shattering every window in the old building.
Klegg’s office door sprang open just as Macklin got to it. Except for a quarter-inch horizontal red line on his right cheek that started bleeding while Macklin was looking at it, the lawyer’s face was as white as his hair. His eyes flicked behind Macklin to his secretary, getting up from the floor where she had flung herself after the blast, then back to Macklin. “What—”
The killer took Klegg’s silk lapels in both fists and rode him inside. The lawyer’s feet went out from under him but Macklin held him up by the force of their momentum and Klegg kept going backward until the backs of his legs touched his desk and he sat down hard on top, ringing the bell on the telephone. Macklin hung on to his lapels. The younger man’s face was liver-colored.
“I’m set up,” he said. “I wonder who.”
His tone was dead even. Far away, a fire siren started up, drawn thin and high through the broken window. Klegg said, “I don’t—”
“Someone who knows I always take the stairs and who knew when I left this office and called someone.”
“Think straight, Macklin. Why would I want you dead?” Klegg’s fingers were spread on the killer’s forearms, his thin wrists jutting like stemware from the loose whiteness of his cuffs.
“‘Quitting is not a word in the jargon of this organization.’” Macklin mimicked the lawyer’s querulous tones.
“In my own building? With a big noise?”
Logic was an attorney’s weapon. A fissure showed in the blank wall before him and he pulled at it with all his training. “I’m a professional, like you. How do you think I’ve lasted this long with my reputation downtown?”
The other held his grip on Klegg’s lapels. His face was unreadable. The lawyer built on his silence.
“Get out of here before the police show up. Call me later.” He told Macklin his home telephone number. “Can you remember that? After six.”
The air was a riot of sirens, the keening of the fire trucks joined by the deeper bellowing yelp of police cars. Macklin opened his hands. The lawyer’s bunched jacket bore the imprint of his fists. “It only takes a second to kill you.”
“Use the back stairs.”
Macklin used the elevator. A lawyer of Klegg’s standing who kept his practice in that neighborhood would be too cheap to hire three killers. He slid into the crowd gathering in front of the building and away.
When the first man in a helmet and raincoat bounded into the foyer, he found threads of black smoke twisting out of the seam around the fire door on that level, carrying with them a sweet smell of roast meat.
Chapter Three
“Mr. Klegg?”
“Yes.”
“My name is George Pontier. I’m an inspector with Detroit Homicide.” He snapped his badge folder open and shut with a little turning movement of his wrist.
“Odd, you don’t look French.”
The black detective grinned appreciatively. He was tall and trim, though not cadaverous like the lawyer, and his soft moustache and gray fringe were barbered to draw the eye down from his bald head to the rough sculpture of his face. His eyes were a startling gray against skin as dark as oiled wood.
“I don’t know why they’re so down on you at headquarters,” he said. “It takes a special kind of person to make that sort of joke knowing how many times I must have heard it.”
“Sorry, Inspector. I just got through telling your men for the fifth time what happened here, and it looks like I’m going to have to tell it again.”
“Actually, they’re not mine. They’re with the arson squad. The body makes it my case. But it shouldn’t take so long since I’m told you say you don’t know what happened.”
The corners of Klegg’s lips twitched. “You’ve studied law, Inspector. Don’t deny it.”
“Two semesters. We didn’t get along.” He moved his shoulders around under his gray wool suit coat. “Chilly.”
“I haven’t had time to call a glazier.”
Pontier gestured amiably and the lawyer buzzed his secretary and asked her to make the call. Meanwhile the inspector studied the office without moving his eyes. The desk Klegg was standing in front of had been knocked crooked, and some stray pieces of broken glass from the missing window glittered on the floor. The rest would have been driven outward, but one at least had flown inside with enough force to nick the lawyer’s cheek, which now wore a fresh pink Band-Aid. Pontier charged the other disarray to the officers who had been tramping in and out for the past two hours. Every place they entered was their place of work and they treated it accordingly.
“You didn’t know the dead man?” he asked when Klegg had finished with the intercom.
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t identify him.”
“I was escorted downstairs and shown a charred something in the stairwell. It could have been my brother, if I had one. It could have been barbecued beef or a Chevrolet seat cover. May I ask why I’m being singled out for all this questioning in a building full of witnesses?”
“Top floor’s a good place to start. Also you own the building.”
“Also?”
“Also you’ve represented more men with Italian names before grand juries than Campbell has soups and it isn’t every day a man pressure-cooks himself to death with a flamethrower in a fireproof stairwell in this city.”
“I conduct a legitimate practice according to the ethics of my profession.”
“There are easier ways to commit suicide. Someone else was supposed to be standing in front of that nozzle, and if it wasn’t you, it was one of your clients.”
“That’s a broad assumption, Inspector. No wonder you gave up law.”
“Your secretary says you came back from lunch about two o’clock. The blast was reported at two forty-two. What were you doing in the time between?”
“I was in conference.”
“That’s what she said. She wouldn’t say with who.”
“She’d be fired if she did. Privilege extends to the entire legal staff.”
“Excuse me while I brush all these split hairs off my shoes,” Pontier said.
Klegg let his shoulders slump. “I’m an officer of the court, same as you. We both have confidences to keep. We live in a world where anyone who hears voices in his head can arm himself and spray lead into fast-food franchises packed with innocent people. We can’t abandon our precepts every time a troubled person cracks.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not going to help me on this?”
“If there are no further questions, I have some more calls to make. You can appreciate what all this has done to my schedule.” Klegg circled behind his desk. W
hen he sat down, the detective was leaning on his hands on the other side.
“You’re wrong about why I got out of law,” he said. “I’m looking at the reason.”
Pontier rode the elevator down to the foyer. There the air was thick with wet char and the bitter-metal smell of carbon tetrachloride from spent fire extinguishers. The door to the stairs was propped open, the burned corpse having been removed by men from the medical examiner’s office. The inspector spotted a fattish man in a crumpled yellow sport coat standing in a group of officers in uniform. “Lovelady!”
The man wobbled over. He wore his red hair in bangs and his face was a flat white slab with features among the pockmarks. Pontier said, “Trot Howard Klegg through the computer downtown. I want his associates.”
“All of ’em?” Sergeant Lovelady’s voice had been cracking for as long as he had been in the inspector’s detail. Pontier had given up waiting for it to finish changing.
“Also I want you to put men on everyone in the building, find out who was seen coming or going between one and three o’clock this afternoon. Get descriptions.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.” The pair left together.
The big man opened the door, looked at the smaller man standing on the flagstones, and rested his thumb outside the lapel of his black suit coat. The smaller man said, “Don’t.”
Gordy, enormous in black with balloonlike scars over his eyes that eradicated his brows, hesitated. His broken face was incapable of expression. “You carrying?”
Macklin said, “No.”
“What you want?”
“See your boss.”
“You know what he looks like.”
Afternoon sunlight bronzed the surface of Lake St. Clair, visible behind the big Tudor house standing on its square grass island isolated from the rest of suburban Grosse Pointe by an eight-foot wrought-iron fence. Out front a rotating lawn sprinkler swished and pattered on the flagstone walk.
Macklin said, “I can go over you, big as you are.”
“I know it.”
The lawn sprinkler whispered and pattered. At length a wolfish grin crept over the lower half of Macklin’s face, leaving the upper half untouched.
“Whatever he’s paying you, Gordy, hit him up for a raise.”
“Anything else you want?”
“I still want the first thing.”
The big man said nothing.
“Somebody tried to kill me today,” Macklin said.
“Surprise.”
“In Howard Klegg’s building, with a flamethrower.”
“It wasn’t Mr. Maggiore.”
“He confide in you?”
“No, but catering a hit takes time and that’s one thing he ain’t got much of. He’s inside with his accountants. He’s been inside with his accountants every day for a month. Trying to stay out of jail. Last thing he’s got time for is to have somebody blowed down.”
“You forgot. I’m the reason he’s inside with his accountants. If Boniface weren’t getting out of the box, he’d still be swinging Boniface’s clout and IRS wouldn’t be smelling blood.”
“Yeah, but like I said he ain’t had time.”
“You’re big,” Macklin said. “I guess you’re as hard as you were when you fought.”
“Harder.”
“If it gets down to you and me, you’ll come off second. You’ll hang back when the time comes and I won’t. That’s the difference.”
“I know it.”
The tension went out of Macklin’s body in a rush. “Hit him up for that raise,” he said. “Don’t wait.”
“He’s got other things on his mind.”
Gordy was the only man Macklin knew who would put a door in his face. The killer stood there looking at it for a moment. It was one of those times when he was sorry he’d quit smoking. A man with a burning cigarette in his mouth never looked confused. Finally he turned and went back to his car, avoiding the arc of the sprinkler as it came around.
In the sun-filled room Charles Maggiore called the library, the owner of the house looked up from a pile of ledgers and adding-machine tapes on his desk as Gordy entered. Two men wearing blue suits and glasses occupied the chairs on the other side of the desk, one gray-haired, the other barely thirty. They went on checking columns of figures against calculators on the desk as the big man approached.
“Who was it?” Maggiore demanded.
“Peter Macklin.”
In the silence following the announcement the gray-haired accountant looked at Maggiore. All the color had slid from under the blond Sicilian’s careful tan.
“What did he want?” he asked.
Gordy told him. The other accountant glanced up, then back to his figures.
“Did you tell him it wasn’t me?”
“Yeah.”
“He believe you?”
“He ain’t here, is he?”
“One of your jobs is to make sure he isn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Maggiore returned his attention to the paperwork in front of him.
Gordy left. The gray-haired accountant entered a few more digits into his calculator and said, “You seem relieved.”
“I thought it was something else.”
Buy Roses are Dead Now!
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estlema
n with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in February 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Loren D. Estleman
Cover design by Rebecca Lown
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3481-4
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY, 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
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