Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’d give up my license to practice law to see that.”

  “Coming, Donna?” Goldstick asked.

  “I’ll catch up with you.” She was standing close to Macklin. They glanced at Klegg, who busied himself with things on his desk. Macklin touched her elbow and they moved to the far end of the office.

  “Roger told me you talked to him yesterday,” she said. “You’re right. He does hate your guts.”

  “Well, he hates guts. Think it worked?”

  “I don’t know. It’s so hard to tell with him. He really is like you. Thanks, Mac. For trying.”

  “The price was right.”

  Her eyes were still young in the fleshy face. She took them from his and opened her purse.

  “I found these yesterday when I was cleaning. I thought maybe you’d like to have them.” She handed him a small bundle of yellowed and curling envelopes bound with a rubber band. “There isn’t much. You were never one for getting and writing letters.”

  “You were cleaning?”

  She smiled then, a little stiffly. “I’m getting neat as all hell. You wouldn’t know the place. I’ve enrolled in a health club too. Going to see if I can take off a few pounds.” She paused. “I’m job hunting. First time in my life.”

  “How’s the hunting?”

  “Aside from the fact I’m too old and don’t have any skills, it’s just peachy. The interviewers are all very courteous and polite. You never lied to me with that kind of grace.”

  “I only lied to you about my work. Nothing else.”

  “What about Christine?”

  He looked at her. She met his gaze, then looked away.

  “I found a note from her you forgot to tear up. One of these things you leave on someone’s pillow. Pretty hot stuff, Mac. Is that what you liked? You never told me.”

  “What’s it matter, Donna?”

  “Nothing. Now. I just never thought I was that dense.”

  “You were that drunk.”

  “I took my first drink the day I found out what you did for a living.”

  “You did it to celebrate finding a reason. You’d been looking for one for years.”

  Silence crackled. He remembered the bundle of letters and slipped off the rubber band. One of the older envelopes contained a fold of green construction paper pasted over with pictures of flowers cut out of a seed catalogue. Inside was a legend scrawled in purple crayon.

  “‘Roses are red,’” he read.

  “Roger made it for you that time you were in the hospital,” she said. “He was four.”

  “I’d forgotten it.” He looked at it a moment longer, then returned it to its tattered envelope and shuffled through the rest of the stuff. He replaced the rubber band and handed back the bundle. “Keep it for me, will you? Throw it out if it gets in your way. I do a lot of moving around and it would just get lost.”

  She put it back in her purse.

  “I guess I should ask how you are,” she said. “But I don’t care.”

  “Thanks for thinking of me with the letters.”

  “Where can I reach you? I mean, if Roger …”

  “Call Klegg.”

  When she left, the lawyer stopped straightening his desk and looked down the length of the office at Macklin. “You talked to Pontier?”

  “I did. If you weren’t my lawyer I’d kill you.”

  “That’s been said to a lot of lawyers. It’s why you never pick up a paper and read about one being found in a car trunk at Metro Airport with a hole in his head. He got on to you somehow. I knew he didn’t have any proof, he was acting too cagey. I didn’t think it would do any harm if you talked.”

  “You could have told me. I came in here wearing a gun I could have gone down a long time just for having.”

  “Would you have come if I did?”

  “No.”

  Klegg spread his hands. “I’m in a vulnerable business. I have to put up a show of cooperation. As careful as I am there is always something a good investigator could get hold of if he digs. Up to now I haven’t given any of them a reason to want to. When I do it won’t be because some hoodlum I never heard of set himself on fire in my building.”

  “Pontier explained that.”

  “Question is did you believe it.”

  “Next time tell me,” Macklin said.

  The thin old man lowered himself into his chair. When he did that he seemed to grow broader and more substantial. “How’s Moira?”

  “I said I don’t talk shop.”

  “I heard you. I just want to know how she is.”

  “She’s in trouble deep.”

  “If I didn’t know that I wouldn’t have had her find out the two of you exist in the same world.”

  “I’m just for dusting off when you need me,” Macklin said. “Then it’s back up on the dark shelf.”

  Klegg wasn’t listening. He cut a thin smile at one of the chairs arranged before the desk. “She used to come in and sit there while her father was interviewing a client he didn’t want her to meet. Her feet barely reached the floor. I spent almost as much time with her in those days as Lou did. His wife hemorrhaged after birth and he raised her alone. If she’d had a mother she might not have had the problems she did. But she’s making her way back now.” He looked at Macklin. “I want this man Blossom out of her life.”

  “You mean, you want him out of his own.”

  “Remember I never said that.”

  “Lawyers,” said Macklin, on his way out.

  In his hotel room the old man double-locked the door and inspected the room and bath for unwanted visitors. There were none. He had already checked out the view from his window and satisfied himself that there were no fire escapes or nearby roofs from which an intruder might gain entrance. He shrugged off his overcoat and hung it with his hat on a hook in the closet, then opened one of his big suitcases on the bed. From it he took a small bottle of red-and-black capsules. In the bathroom he swallowed one and chased it down with water.

  Next he drew the curtains over the window, dumped the contents of the manila folder out onto the bed, and used Scotch tape to fix the dozen five-by-seven glossy photos to the mirror over the bureau in two neat horizontal rows. Most of them had been shot with a long lens, but there was one formal mug and a family portrait several years old, the latter cadged from the files of a studio photographer who owed someone a favor. The old man sat on the foot of the bed drinking the rest of his water and gazing at the pictures. Two showed the man getting into and out of his car, a silver Cougar. One included a clear view of the license plate.

  Someone rapped at the door. He got up and used the peephole, lowered his bifocals to focus through it. He recognized the bellboy who had brought up his suitcases and unlocked and opened the door.

  “Sir, you said to bring this up the minute it came.” The young man held out a package the size of a shirt box wrapped in brown paper and bound with string.

  “Thank you.” The old man accepted the package and closed the door on the bellboy, who was staring down at the seventy-five cents in his hand.

  The old man relocked the door and sat down at the secretary to tear off the wrapping. He opened the pasteboard box and separated the Styrofoam inside from a slim pistol built on a magnesium frame with a bare grip. It was a 7.65-millimeter Walther of a special design, weighing less than eight ounces. After inspecting the action he laid it aside and turned to the rest of the items in the package.

  He used a penknife to pry the top off the first of the jacketed cartridges. The brass nose was hollow, lined with lead. He opened the heavy little plastic bottle he had brought and used a glass eyedropper to insert a bright wobbly silver globule of mercury in the bullet cavity. Last he lit a squat candle he had bought downtown and dropped wax into the cavity to seal it. He reassembled the cartridge, tamping down the bullet with gentle taps of a small yellow nylon-headed mallet, put down the cartridge, and selected another from the box. He spent the next half hour filling a full pistol load with
mercury.

  It was simple physics. Upon impact inertia forced the mercury forward, splintering the lead and the brass jacket and opening a hole in unprotected flesh large enough to let daylight through. Thus a hit anywhere in the body guaranteed a fatality from massive blood loss, if indeed it did not kill instantly. It was safer to fire than the old dum-dum, which had been known to separate in the gun’s barrel and cause a backfire, and it required less charge than a magnum load, heightening accuracy.

  Finishing, Mantis wiped his glasses. He disliked the mercury load for aesthetic reasons and had no plans to use it. But only a cowboy declined to back himself up.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A door swung open, coming up against the wall with a crash that knocked a picture loose from the wall on the other side. In the same instant a young woman hurtled through the opening and sprawled across the bed just inside when her knees touched the edge. Behind her, almost as explosively, entered a young blond man dressed in a heavy turtleneck and jeans, who hauled her off the bed by one wrist and spun her into his body and touched the razor point of a knife with a long, slim blade to the underside of her chin.

  “Take off your clothes,” he commanded.

  The room was washed in alternating red and blue light from a neon sign outside the window. As the woman obeyed, fumbling with the buttons and zippers, the skin she bared added a golden underlay to the liquid hues. When she was naked, her nipples and pubic hair were very dark in the shifting light.

  The sex was slow but brutal and punctuated by gasps and grunts, the lovers’ wet bare flesh reflecting the neon colors. When it ended in a cataclysmic double orgasm, the screen went empty. A loose end of film fluttered in the projector.

  “Run it again,” Macklin said.

  The projectionist rewound the film. The killer sat alone in a dark theater that smelled of dust and old sweat, as if the odor had leaked off the thousands of miles of scenes of sexual intercourse that had panted and slobbered across the flyblown screen. Even his seat felt sticky.

  The film started again with a brief title and credits. Roy Blossom’s name didn’t appear, but from his first entrance there was no mistaking those sneering good looks. As before, Macklin ignored the other players and concentrated on Blossom’s movements. Very early in his career the killer had learned the relative unimportance of facial features in the stalking of a mark; since the hunter spent most of his time behind his game, it was a man’s distinctive carriage, the way he held his head and swung his arms, his gait and mannerisms that counted. Once you had them down and if you didn’t let your mind wander, losing your man in a crowd was next to impossible. He observed his quarry in silence and took no notes. Pieces of paper with things written on them were always getting lost and being found by the wrong people. He had spent many long hours developing a photographic memory, and it was so much a part of him now he no longer had to work at remembering a thing of importance.

  Blossom had good moves and an athletic build, a runner’s body, cylindrical and gently muscled. What it would lack in strength it would make up for in endurance. He was younger than Macklin, but Macklin was used to youthful opponents. Sheer longevity had dictated that as a necessity. He noted with some small jealous satisfaction that although Blossom was an energetic lover, his penis was small by comparison to his fellow male performers.

  When the motel room door onscreen crashed open a second time, he decided he’d seen enough. He stood, throwing a hard black shadow across the scene, and called his thanks to the projectionist in his alcove above the balcony.

  “Tell Jeff Payne we’re even,” he added.

  He blinked in the afternoon sunlight outside the theater, breathing in fresh air and auto exhaust from Woodward Avenue. He hadn’t asked Payne where he had found one of Blossom’s films from two years ago, had accepted his invitation to view it without question. He took results on face value.

  Now Macklin knew everything about his man he had to, except where to find him.

  The car was still there.

  Moira King had first spotted it in her rearview mirror on her way home from her cubicle at Michigan Bell and had noticed it again a couple of turns later, and now here it was, still parked across the street from her apartment building in Redford Township. She had no knowledge of makes or models but it was a distinctive vehicle in color and style and she knew she wasn’t mistaken. Someone was sitting behind the wheel, but the angle of the roof cut off her view of his head. She saw only a jacketed arm resting on the window ledge.

  Turning away from her apartment window, she clenched a fist and willed herself to calmness. She wished she had Macklin’s telephone number. All he had given her was a post office box. The way the mails were it could be the next day before a note reached it, and even then there was no telling how much time would pass before he read the note. She wished he’d call. She hadn’t heard from him since their meeting at the zoo and all her suspicions about his genuineness were rushing back.

  Maybe he and Howard Klegg were in it together. She had been stupid to think she could come to Uncle Howard for help after all those years with no contact. He had been kind to her when she was small, but people with no hearts at all were soft on puppies and children, and she had outgrown her innocence with a vengeance. She wondered if she were being made to pay for not attending her father’s funeral. His death had come at a time when she had grown to hate everything he represented, and by then she was so deep in the underground film business that there had seemed no coming back.

  She mixed whiskey and ginger ale in a tall glass in the kitchenette and carried it into the living room that made up the apartment with bath, pausing to look out the window once again. The car was still there, the arm too. She sat on the sofa and kicked off her shoes to tuck her feet up under her. It seemed important to behave as if it were just another early evening at home. She didn’t know why.

  For the first time in a long time she wanted a man. Completely, sexually. It surprised her. She had never had time for the rhetoric or martial emotions of the so-called women’s movement, but she had endorsed the notion that a woman could survive without male protection and companionship. After Roy and that endless parade of faceless men with organs that stood up on command in the studios around town, she had developed a contempt for the whole sex. She had known other actresses who shared that contempt and who had tried to convert her to lesbianism, but the sexual act itself had become repugnant to her, caught up with memories of hot airless rooms and filthy beds whose sheets were changed not nearly so often as the reels in the cameras, and of the physical pain of too much love made to loins too dry. Those women were just an extension of the men they despised. She had taken comfort from her newfound celibacy. That she could feel the desire again she considered a betrayal on the part of her hormones.

  So she no longer had the superiority of her contempt, and now that her home had proven less than impregnable she had lost even that small security. She hadn’t felt so vulnerable since her first audition, when she had taken off her clothes for an excitable Arab armed with a cheap Polaroid camera. She dreaded nightfall.

  Her glass was empty. She didn’t remember drinking its contents. On her way back to the kitchen for a refill she pulled aside the curtain again. The car was there. The arm was gone.

  She looked up and down the street. It was deserted but for more parked cars and a pair of half-grown boys walking along the far sidewalk in football uniforms, cleats dangling from around their necks. She peered again at the car. She could see down to the cushion on the driver’s seat and it was empty. The glass in her hand creaked from the tension of her grip.

  The door buzzer rasped.

  She dropped the glass. It bounced once on the padded carpet and rolled under the telephone stand. For a blind moment her eyes searched the apartment for other ways out and lighted on the window. But it was a two-story drop and she was weak from not eating, her appetite spoiled by constant fear. The fall would kill her.

  The buzzer sounded again. It ha
d the odd effect of rearranging her senses. She clawed at the stubborn drawer in the telephone stand, breaking a nail before it came out with a squawk. She took out the .25 semiautomatic pistol.

  She had purchased it in a Grand Avenue pawnshop after the apartment had been broken into. The black man behind the counter had barely glanced at the false signature on the State of Michigan paperwork, then showed her how to load and operate the small square gun.

  She jacked a cartridge into the chamber the way he had demonstrated and approached the door. She was conscious of her ankles shaking, but the hand holding the weapon was strangely steady.

  The buzzer was going off a third time when she released the lock and stepped back, calling for her visitor to enter. She almost shrieked the welcome. The door opened. She squeezed the trigger at waist level.

  Then the door was open wide and a body was charging through it and a hand closed on hers and wrenched the gun from her grasp, nearly taking her finger with it before the trigger guard pulled free. She screamed and kicked and a heavy backhand came swooping around in deceptive slow motion and a light exploded in the side of her head. Her knees lost their tension and she fell hard on her back on the floor.

  The details of the room and of her attacker turned viscous then. She blinked her eyes to clear them, and as the edges sharpened she lay looking up the incredible length of a man in a checked sport coat, at tired features near the ceiling and a sharp widow’s peak. He examined the small pistol disgustedly before flinging it onto the sofa.

  “Next time remember to take off the safety.”

  “Mr. Macklin.” She lay unmoving. “I thought—”

  “Yeah. No wonder he had no trouble following you. I could’ve done it on foot.”

  “That silver car is yours?”

  “I got tired of looking for him. If you’re right about him, he’ll come here sooner or later.”

  Still, she made no move to rise. He got the hint then, and with an expression of exasperation he bent over her and extended a hand. She took it and he pulled her up, supporting her back with the other. When she was on her feet, she fell against him and held on for a moment before they separated. He was harder than he looked, with little of the middle-aged softness she had expected.