Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  His exhausted-looking eyes prowled the room. “Find anything missing yet?”

  “No.” Selfconsciously she adjusted her sweater and skirt and straightened her hair. “I don’t have many valuables and they’re all here.”

  “I meant, like clothes. Underwear.”

  “Good God, no. Roy was always normal about that kind of thing. He’s a maniac, not a pervert.”

  “You never know how a man will think after the shrinks get through rooting inside his skull. You want to tell me the rest of it?”

  “What rest?”

  He looked around some more. “You sleep here?”

  “Yes. The sofa unfolds into a bed. What rest of it?”

  He jerked his chin at the sofa. She stared at him. He pulled his lips out with a disgusted smack. “Sit.”

  She sat. She was conscious of her stockinged feet and put her shoes back on. He remained standing.

  “There’s a paper out on me,” he said. “I’ve had them out on me before but that’s when I was connected and it usually wasn’t hard to figure out who issued them. Since I first heard your name there have been two tries, and nobody I’ve talked to knows who set them up. That isn’t normal. I don’t know what you’ve read or heard about omertà, but that oath of silence always was a crock. Six hours after a hit order comes down every little rat on the street knows most of the particulars. But this one’s been a blank wall from the word go. Secrets get kept only two ways. The one I’m fondest of is only one person knows it, in this case the guy who’s hiring the shooters. Or the woman who’s doing it.”

  “Are you accusing me?”

  “Hell, lady, you just tried.”

  “I thought you were Roy! Why would I want to kill you?”

  “Why isn’t important. People die all the time without knowing why.”

  “What’s the other way secrets get kept?”

  “By letting the man you’re keeping them from ask all his questions of the wrong people. I don’t like that at all. Too complicated.”

  “You don’t think it’s me,” she said.

  “What makes it I don’t?”

  “Because you’re letting me sit on this sofa next to the gun I tried to use on you just now.”

  He made a little movement and she was looking at a heavy revolver in his right hand. He put it away.

  She broke apart then. Bitter sobs climbed her throat, choking her.

  “I should’ve just left town,” she croaked. “I shouldn’t have gone to Uncle Howard.”

  He said, “I’m rustproof. Waterworks fall short with me.”

  “Get out.”

  He didn’t move.

  She was on her feet then, coming at him with her nails out. “Get out! Get out of my apartment! Now!”

  He caught her wrists and held on, his jaw muscles standing out from the strain of keeping her nails from his eyes. She collapsed against him then, sobbing uncontrollably. His arms went around her.

  “My apartment,” he reminded her. “You signed it over to me along with everything else, remember?”

  Her sobs broke into a short feeble hiccup of a laugh. He held on, her wet face buried in his chest.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The old man loaded the pistol, returned it to its box, and rewrapped the package loosely, looping the string around it. Then he unpacked his clothes from one of the suitcases into the bureau drawers and put the package in the suitcase. He spun the combination lock, secured the straps, and hoisted the case onto the top shelf in the closet.

  He napped, setting his folding travel alarm for an hour. He hadn’t trusted hotel wake-up services since a dilatory clerk had almost made him late for his first murder. He took off his shoes and glasses and fell asleep quickly atop the bedspread and awoke at the alarm’s preliminary click. By then it was dark out. He washed his face in the bathroom, came out, sat down at the secretary, and read the typewritten information once again from start to finish. Then he peeled the pictures off the bureau mirror and placed them in the manila folder with the report. He tore it in half, then quarters, then eighths, and continued tearing the pieces until the desk was littered with confetti. Finally he swept them into the ice bucket provided by the hotel and took it into the bathroom and flushed the pieces down the toilet a handful at a time.

  When the last of the scraps had disappeared, he rinsed out the bucket, swallowed another red-and-black capsule, put on his hat and coat, and went out. In the elevator he removed his hat for a middle-aged woman in a green pantsuit, who glanced at him once, then returned her attention to the numbers flashing over the doors.

  “L.A. Police, Inspector.”

  Pontier glanced up at Sergeant Lovelady, found nothing in the ravaged slab of a face, and accepted the big envelope, pushing aside the duty roster to make room on his desk for the contents. He looked at the front-and-profile mug of the man he knew as Detroit John Doe No. 106, read: “Robert Lai, a/k/a Robert Lye, Bob Lee, Lee Shang, Shang Lee, Chih Ming Shang, Shadow Dragon.” The physical description was a clear match with the corpse in the morgue. Pontier turned to the rap sheet and goggled at the dense block of Teletyped information. Lovelady capsulized.

  “Fourteen arrests assault, ADW, assault with intent, attempted homicide, suspicion of homicide, extortion. One conviction ADW, he pulled half a year in Q. The deadly weapon was his hands. He was a registered black belt or whatever they call it in kung fu.”

  “Mobbed up?”

  “The Chinese gangs in L.A. and Frisco. This is as far east as he’s worked, if the dope is straight.”

  “What the hell was he doing here?”

  “All the label on his skivvies told the Westland cops is he shopped in Los Angeles.”

  “How do they feel about us mixing in?”

  “Stiff’s a nonlocal, there’s no heat to clean it up. It’s all ours with the original wrapping. I’m waiting on a call from the Feds.”

  “What’s the holdup?”

  Lovelady made an expression that for him was a grin. “Computer’s down. They said.”

  “Fucking machines. Think they’ve got a hold on this Dragon character’s file?”

  “All I know is I spent most of my call on hold. They play music now. I bet I heard ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ sixteen times before they came back on to tell me about the computer.”

  “Jesus. I’m putting you in for a commendation.”

  “More like disability.”

  Pontier reached for the telephone. “What’s the regional director’s name?”

  “Burlingame. Randall Burlingame.”

  Light from the street lamp outside the window fell short of the ceiling, leaving a black hollow above the filmy gray oval. On other nights Moira would lay there imagining she was at the bottom of a deep shaft and that the light was leaking in through an escape tunnel at the side. It was a comforting fantasy while it lasted, but then the sun would rise and the ceiling would show, and she would have to face the fact that there were no escape tunnels.

  But tonight she lay with her head in the hollow of a man’s naked shoulder and one leg crooked over a hard hairy stomach with a stubborn pad of fat around the base, and the space around her under the covers was very warm, almost hot. She could hear the dull measured thud of his heart and feel his breath stir her hair. His breathing was slightly uneven and she could tell he was awake. She bent her leg further, pressed closer. She felt him gasp.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “I bruised some ribs on that side a couple of months ago.” His voice was a deep rumble.

  “I’m sorry. It didn’t show earlier.”

  He disengaged himself and peeled back the covers. She clutched his arm. “Do you have to leave?”

  “I’m not much for talking after. Sorry.” He reached for his clothes on the chair next to the bed.

  “I wasn’t thinking of talking.”

  “I’m not much for more than once a night, either. I need sleep more than most people.”

  “Why not sleep here?”

/>   “I’m not doing any good here. In bed with you I’m an unloaded gun. I’ve got to be able to move around.”

  “Do you think Roy’s close?”

  “You do. That’s why you hired me.” He tucked in his shirt and clipped the Smith & Wesson to his belt, snugging the butt into the small of his back. Then he put on his sport coat.

  “It’s cold out tonight,” she said. “Don’t you have an overcoat?”

  “If I get too comfortable I’ll fall asleep. I’ll be in the car. I don’t think he can get inside the building without me seeing, but if anything happens, throw something through that window.”

  He started for the door. She got out of bed naked and threw her arms around his chest. The revolver prodded her belly. “Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t that great.” He stood unmoving.

  “It was on time.”

  “Don’t make anything more of it than it is,” he said. “I don’t want to find any cards with cute animals on them in my post office box.”

  She said, “You’re trying too hard to be cold.”

  “Not hard enough or I’d be in the car by now.”

  She let go.

  “Lock the door behind me.” He went through it.

  She twisted the lock and slid the chain into its socket. She heard his footsteps going away then. The air was cold on her bare skin. She padded back to bed and drew the covers over herself, snuggling into the warm hollow he had left in the sheet. She lay at the bottom of a deep shaft with light coming in through the side tunnel.

  A small housing tract faced Moira King’s apartment house across the street. The lawns were freshly sodded and the buildings smelled of sawdust and fresh concrete. Only half of them were occupied, the rest still posted. In the doorway of one of the unsold units the young man stood shifting his weight from one foot to the other and warming his hands in the side pockets of his navy peacoat. His cruel good looks were hidden by shadow and by his raised collar and the blue knit cap he had drawn over his ears and down to his eyebrows. He liked the outfit, which he had appropriated from wardrobe on one of his films. He had been told he looked like a Scandinavian sailor in it.

  When the man in the checked sport coat came out of the lighted lobby across the street he pressed farther back into shadow, but after a quick glance around the man crossed at an angle away from where he was standing and got into a long low car parked at the curb. The young man waited. When after five minutes the car showed no sign of starting up and driving away, he eased out of the doorway. In the light of the corner street lamp he saw the man’s head resting on the back of the driver’s seat.

  He looked up to where the light reflected dully off the window of Moira’s apartment. He thought he saw the curtain move and remained still in the darkness on the unfinished lawn. For ten minutes he stayed unmoving. But the curtain didn’t stir again and with a final glance in the direction of the parked car he turned and headed down the block and around the corner to where his own car was standing. In his right coat pocket the handle of the closed knife felt cool to the touch.

  The old man half lay in the backseat of his rented Oldsmobile, following the young man with only his eyes as he passed, trailing vapor in the crisp air. When the pedestrian was out of sight he returned his gaze to the Cougar parked a full block up the street. He had already confirmed the license number through the infrared glasses on the seat beside him.

  He had found the Cougar empty when he took up his vigil and had been there when the young man had appeared and taken his position in the doorway of the empty house. Again using the binoculars, he had matched the newcomer’s gait and features to the description Mr. Brown had provided. When Macklin had emerged from the apartment building, however, he had not needed the glasses to identify the man’s forward-leaning walk or the worn, jagged features glimpsed in the light from the lobby as the door drifted shut behind him. His memory had not trained as well as Macklin’s, but concentration was an acquired skill, and his study of the photos and written description had been thorough.

  It was cold in the car. He had opened his window all the way to keep the windshield and his glasses from clouding, and his topcoat, purchased for twenty francs in a Paris thrift shop, was inadequate for autumn nights in Michigan. He buttoned the collar around his fleshy neck, removed a brown jersey glove to feed himself another capsule from the bottle he had carried from his hotel room, and hurriedly put the glove back on before sipping from the plastic water bottle. He drank only enough to help down the capsule. As it was, his bladder no longer accommodated itself to long waits in enclosed spaces.

  Screwing the cap back on the bottle, he set it on the floor and made himself comfortable out of the draft from the window. He was confident the noise of an engine starting or a car door slamming would awaken him out of his customarily light slumber.

  He always did his watching from the backseat on the passenger side, where curious eyes never wandered. Nosy neighbors and passersby always looked behind the wheel. People did the same things the same way every time. It was infuriating and exhilarating.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Have you an appointment?”

  From behind her sleek racing number of a desk, the woman in the starched blouse managed to appear to be looking down at the tall bald black man. Pontier showed her his badge folder. She repeated her question.

  “He knows I’m coming,” he said, putting it away. “I said I’d be in sometime this morning.”

  “That’s not very specific.”

  “Miss, I’ve got six homicides on my desk and an officer dying at Wayne County General of wounds received in a holdup at two this morning. I don’t have time to be specific.”

  “It’s Mrs.” She raised the receiver from the telephone-intercom and spoke into it quietly. Pontier judged her to be approaching middle age, but along an elegant route. She was a handsome woman rather than a beautiful one, with strawberry hair pulled behind her head and an almost Oriental slant to her hazel eyes. She wore a plain gold band on the third finger of her left hand.

  She cradled the receiver. “Go right in, Inspector.”

  He had to walk around the end of the desk to go through the door. It blocked the opening. Inside, a man as tall as Pontier, but very broad in the shoulders and heavy-waisted, was just rising from behind his desk in front of a bulletproof window overlooking the river. His hair was white with streaks of tired red in it and his square granite face held an indoor pallor. His grip when they shook hands was brutal.

  “Inspector,” greeted the federal man in a pleasant rumbling bass. “It’s a pleasure. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

  “The same here.” The detective wondered if the director of local FBI operations had been briefed by his people on Pontier the way Pontier had had Sergeant Lovelady brief him on Randall Burlingame. Ostensibly on the same team, law enforcement officials on opposite sides of the federal fence could operate for years within a few blocks of each other, each unaware of the other’s existence until necessity changed the rule. “Quite a bottleneck you’ve got out there,” the inspector commented.

  “If you mean Mrs. Gabel, I inherited her from three predecessors and so far I haven’t even been able to get their home addresses out of her. If you mean the barricade, I was here one week when a nut armed with a .357 mag tore through that door looking for the man who tanked his brother-in-law for mail robbery. I put him down on the sill. One shot from an old-fashioned Police Special.”

  Pontier looked back the length of the office. “What, eighteen feet?”

  “Nineteen and a little. The shape of the room helped. It’s like the range in Washington.”

  “Bullshit, Mr. Director. I stopped playing that game when they stenciled my name on the door.”

  Burlingame smiled, tugging out his lips slightly. “Where’d I slip up?”

  “Nowhere special. I’ve just got this built-in shit detector.”

  “Yeah. You and Hemingway. The guy had a Saturday nighter with a broken firing pin. Securit
y nabbed him without a shot. I was at lunch. I’m through flexing my muscles if you are.”

  “I guess we’re just a couple of unliberated males,” Pontier said.

  “Unregenerate. Unreconstructed.” The federal man flipped a hand at the chair on Pontier’s side of the desk.

  “I don’t talk to the federal liaison people much,” said the inspector when they were comfortable. “They’ve all got oral constipation and I hate to see them suffer. But the last time I did, they were all high on this new cooperation between government and local authorities.”

  “First memo I dictated, when this office was still full of packing cartons.”

  “So I understand. Imagine my surprise when a routine request from my office for federal wants and warrants on a dead Chinese named Robert Lai drew that whiskered old excuse from this office about the computer being down.”

  “Brides burn breakfasts, Inspector. And computers go on the blink.”

  “That noise you hear is my shit detector going off again.”

  Burlingame took a dilapidated pipe out of the brass ashtray on his desk and ran a finger around inside the bowl. “You said the Chinese is dead?”

  “Someone shot him in Westland a couple of nights ago. It was in the papers.”

  “Mrs. Gabel clips all the crime news from the local papers for me to read every day. I don’t remember it.”

  “The Westland Police held back that he was Chinese. That Vincent Chin thing has got everyone looking for a new yellow peril. He was John Doe’d at the morgue until yesterday. Cops on the Coast had him down as a professional mean mother. Washington must have something.”

  “You’ve been reading too many books about the FBI with forewords by J. Edgar Hoover. We don’t have every lifetaker in the country on file.”

  “Who said he was a lifetaker?”

  Burlingame blew through the pipe and measured out another inch of smile. “I don’t figure a Homicide inspector would pry himself loose from his desk for a knucklebuster. What makes a Westland killing Detroit’s red wagon?”