Roses Are Dead

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’ll do nothing with the information,” he said. “In return for my promise that the business stops today, win or lose, without loss to the Bureau or innocent parties.”

  “Jesus,” said Green, “you’re not asking him for his word?”

  Burlingame ignored him. “No more bodies?”

  “One more.”

  “Macklin’s?”

  Brown shrugged.

  “I need answers,” Burlingame said. “The local police are in it and I don’t much like being the guy who takes the heat for committing an entire detail of field agents to dog another U.S. operative for eleven months. I’d like retirement to be my idea. So let’s roll.”

  “That is the other thing, the police. I have no wish to deal with them.”

  “Everyone thinks I have influence with the police but the police. There’s an inspector working this one who reminds me of me. But I’ll do what I can.”

  “I trust you. I think we’re much alike.”

  “Bite your tongue, you overdressed Communist.”

  “I am not overdressed.” Brown laughed again. “Citizen Kane. It plays in the U.S.S.R. as a chronicle of American decadence.” He sobered. “The CIA is a stalking horse. Behind it is another organization, smaller and quieter, but referred to by a name so long I sometimes forget it myself. I’ve worked for and with it on and off for sixteen years.”

  “I know the one. Clerks and auditors.”

  “The material collected and codified by those clerks and auditors would reveal Watergate as one small part of a master plan. But that’s too complex to go into and frankly it bores me. Anyway, after my assignment here, I was placed in charge of the international border in this region. Oh, not the check posts, which are well patrolled by the Customs officials of both countries. My jurisdiction covers the little holes no one thinks about. Wyandotte, where it’s a ten-minute swim to Windsor. Boblo Island, in the middle of the river, between Detroit and Amherstburg. I watched with interest your negotiations with those tour-boat hijackers last August, but when they sailed into Lake Erie and out of my charge I stayed clear. That was when I first heard of this man Macklin, and why I decided not to waltz with him now. The international salt mines beneath the river.”

  “Blossom. He works in the mines.”

  “I transferred him there after his release from Ypsilanti. He had the aptitude as a former coal miner in Pennsylvania. Before that my predecessor had him working deep cover in the local pornography industry. Those film cans carry a lot of cocaine and heroin and one of his duties was to monitor the traffic. He is a close observer and his memory for details is phenomenal. His kind is rare.”

  “Glad to hear it. He’s a psycho.”

  “That embarrassment is secondary. His insanity defense was laid by a specialist attorney hired through a government cover. So long as they remain useful we stand behind our own.”

  “What’s he doing in the mines?”

  “That’s one question you don’t get to ask. It’s enough to know those mines are a weak spot in the nation’s security.”

  “How’s a former Politburo hopeful get to stand on the U.S. border?”

  “Ah”—showing his teeth now—“the double double reverse. A one-man Temple Guard is a temptation to assassins if they can but identify him. Who’d suspect a suspected double agent under the surveillance of the CIA and the FBI?”

  “That’s Washington,” Burlingame said after a moment. “Never go directly from A to B with X so close. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “Probably. But I go where they tell me. I’m too old to look for another job. And I like this one.”

  “Blossom’s no sentinel. Psychopathic killers stashed in the exits are to keep people in, not out. Is that the new line in national security, scorched earth?”

  Brown laid a thick finger beside his nose.

  “Fixed nuclear warheads placed at strategic sites across the country are among the worst-kept secrets in Washington. They aren’t there to blow up the enemy.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Exactly. The model for the plan.”

  “Self-crucifixion wasn’t His way.”

  “Nor is it ours. This is just a layman’s hypothesis constructed on known evidence. We don’t know why those warheads are there.”

  “But you know why Blossom’s in the mines.”

  “Yes, but that isn’t part of our bargain.”

  Burlingame paused. The huge room felt cool with just the three standing in the center, Green off from the others a little, studying his reflection smeared across the varnished floor. A criminal waste of space in an overcrowded world. “It ends today.”

  “I’ve promised that.” Brown extended a large hand.

  The FBI man didn’t move. “My job says I have to make deals with people who hire killers to protect other killers. What I do with my hands is personal.”

  Brown lowered his. “I’m sorry we can’t be friends.”

  “Like hell you are.”

  Outside, Burlingame breathed cold air and sweet-sour auto exhaust. That night was Devil’s Night, to be followed by Halloween and then November and then the long bitter slide into winter, his last with the Bureau. He didn’t know until he looked down at his hands that he was holding his pipe. He snapped it in two and hurled the pieces to the sidewalk before moving on.

  All the killers weren’t on the streets.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Dry cold. A man left dead in that narrow white tunnel would never decay, his flesh preserved like the eighty-year-old mining equipment by salt and the unchanging forty-two-degree temperature. The two men walked single-file down the passage for three hundred yards and met no one. The pneumatic drill rapped on like firecrackers in a bottle. Then it stopped.

  Macklin called for Blossom to hold up. In the sudden silence on the end of the noise the monosyllabic command rang and rang in the tunnel. The miner obeyed, keeping his hands away from his body as ordered. Oxygen hummed out of the ventilators.

  Macklin waited. In his desire to get as far away from the other miners as possible he had taken too long, and now he would have to wait until the drilling resumed. In a public place he would have fired and counted on the noise of the report to frighten off the heroes. But down here, in this masculine mélange, among the Brotherhood of the Subterranean, the rules were different. A shot would bring the others running. They would overpower and disarm him and if they didn’t tear him apart right there they would hold him for the police. He waited.

  “Hey, guy?” Blossom’s head was turned slightly. Macklin could see the bone structure of his forehead and left cheek under the peak of his helmet.

  “Shut up.”

  “I didn’t do Moira. It was one of them dopers. It’s a wrong neighborhood.”

  Macklin said nothing.

  “Hey, I liked her too. Maybe you and me can work together, get the fuckers that did her, what do you say?”

  “Shut up.”

  Blossom was silent for a little. Then: “Hey, guy? I know what you’re waiting for. It ain’t going to work. This here tunnel’s a shortcut to the outside. Somebody’ll come along using it any minute. You got another hour to wait before that drill starts up again. What you going to do, shoot whoever comes along?”

  Macklin told him a third time to shut up. He saw only waste in conversing with the dead.

  “Let’s have the knife,” he said after a minute.

  Pause. “I ain’t—”

  He took two steps and laid the 10-millimeter’s barrel across Blossom’s exposed temple. The miner’s hard hat tumbled off and he sagged against the rough wall. Macklin ran a hand into the stricken man’s right slash pocket and came out holding a heavy clasp knife.

  “Don’t cut me,” Blossom whimpered. He was supporting himself against the wall.

  “That what Moira said?” Macklin brought the gun down butt first on the other’s collarbone. The miner howled and slid the rest of the way into a sitting position on the floor of the shaft. He was b
lubbering now.

  “I didn’t do her.”

  “You piece of shit.” The killer planted the sole of a shoe high on Blossom’s back and shoved him sprawling onto his face.

  “So much emotion.”

  He fought the urge to spin around at the sound of the new voice behind him. Instead he turned slowly, pocketing the miner’s knife in the same movement.

  “Gun.”

  It was the way he said it. Macklin let go of the pistol instantly. It clattered to the salt floor. He looked at a pudgy man in his late fifties or early sixties wearing a topcoat over a green sweater and a hard hat too large for him that rested on top of his round bifocals. His arm was extended level with his shoulder and ended in a lean semiautomatic pistol with a bore no bigger around than a man’s little finger.

  As Macklin remained standing with his hands away from his sides, the pistol came down to rest on the newcomer’s hipbone. It was a Walther.

  “I guess that makes you Mantis,” Macklin said.

  The little round man wrinkled his nose. “Signs and countersigns, code names and passwords. It is all like small boys playing at pirates. Novo is good enough; in fact, preferred.”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  He cocked his head toward a laminated card dangling from a clothespin on his lapel. “Inspector. The same man who got Mr. Blossom his job found employment for me also.” He pushed back his hard hat with his free hand and let it fall. From the bulging pocket of his coat he pulled a squashed hat and slapped it against his thigh and hooked it on over the back of his balding head. Macklin recognized the feather in the band.

  “Those exploding bullets are more trouble than they’re worth,” he said.

  “These are quite effective, and since the pieces left are too small to preserve striations, I can use the same weapon several times without detection. This time, however, I had to replace it. You were dead, I threw it away. But you were not as dead as I like.”

  “You had me at my place in the country. The fuse was a second too long. In Taylor you didn’t even come close. By then I had your pattern. Not this time, though. This time I was stupid.”

  Novo said, “It is the main paradox of our work. Habits are fatal and so we avoid them. But for every killer there is one perfect method and so we make it a habit, thereby inviting disaster while seeking success. Mr. Blossom was yours. Where he is, there are you.”

  “Don’t pop him too quick.”

  Novo’s eyes flicked behind Macklin. Macklin could hear the scraping sounds of Blossom getting to his feet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the miner’s slender hands lifting the 10-millimeter from the floor. He started to turn that way. Novo’s gun twitched and he stopped.

  “I’m going to bang you up good,” Blossom said behind Macklin. “Then I’m going to carve on you, just like Moira. There’s lots better things to cut off on you.”

  The Walther’s muzzle flashed. Macklin heard the nasty, popping report and flinched, his stomach muscles tightening for the impact.

  Behind him Blossom whimpered.

  Into the long silence on the end of the echo, laundry fell. Something heavy nudged the back of Macklin’s legs. He heard the breath leaving Blossom’s body in a long sigh.

  He screwed up his brow at the Bulgarian.

  “An embarrassment,” said Novo. “Mr. Blossom had his uses to a point. After that he became …” He groped for the word.

  Macklin said, “A liability.”

  “An expense. My employer chose to cut his losses. You stopped being the target last night, when some indiscreet person murdered a minor in Mr. Blossom’s apartment and involved yet another branch of the police.” His cherubic face exaggerated innocence. “Things are so complicated here. Where I come from there is only one authority to be concerned about.”

  “The contract is canceled.”

  “Contract? Oh, yes, your former employers’ colorful word for it. Yes, it has been withdrawn.”

  “You knew Moira King was going to hire me to kill Blossom before I ever heard of any of them. How?”

  “My employers ran surveillance on all of her acquaintances. Your first call to Howard Klegg on another matter was recorded off a tap on his wire. Following a background check on you, the rather crude gentleman with the flamethrower was placed on alert. Your conversation in Klegg’s office, overheard through means which are beyond my poor peasant’s understanding, confirmed their worst fears and he was ordered into position.”

  “Simple.”

  “Yet complex.”

  “We’re done then, you and I?” Macklin rested his hands in his pockets.

  “I think we are not.” The round glasses had slipped a little, reflecting light in two blank circles. “My dead mother had a theory about weeds in the garden,” he said. “It was not enough that they be uprooted, for she believed that the roots would re-anchor themselves and the weeds would grow back. They must be burned, the ashes buried far from the garden. Otherwise they will have to be uprooted again and maybe not in time to save the tomatoes.”

  “You’re not a weed?”

  “I have no such illusion. A weed does not say to itself, wait, look here, perhaps this is a brother weed I am choking. He strangles all obstacles in the path of his growth. We can learn much from our cousins the weeds. A killer left alive can only turn up somewhere else. Where two exist there can be no truce.”

  “The shot,” Macklin said.

  “By now the others have blamed it on a falling rock. I will not be here when they come to investigate the second. This tunnel is an exit. Give me your interesting weapon, Mr. Macklin. It is behind your left foot.”

  It had slid out of Blossom’s hand when he fell. Macklin rescued it from the blood and viscera of the miner’s exploded face and stepped forward to hand it to Novo.

  “With one of these bullets in your body and the proper guns left in the proper dead hands the police will leap to the most convenient conclusion,” said the other, accepting it. “My mother had a most successful garden, by the way. Everyone said so.”

  The drill started up again at the other end of the shaft, racketing like a machine gun. Blossom had lied about that too. Following through on his forward movement, Macklin tore his hand out of the pocket of his coveralls and arched it up under the swell of Novo’s paunch.

  He felt the old man gasp, blood running hot over the blade of the open clasp knife, and wrenched it sideways, sensing weight on his arm, things spilling out. At the same time he plucked the Walther out of Novo’s weakening grasp and stepped back quickly. The Bulgarian knelt with his hands clasped under his belly like a pregnant woman praying.

  He had not yet fallen when Macklin finished smearing his fingerprints on the gun and knife and flipped them in the general direction of their respective owners. Last he picked up the 10-millimeter from where it had dropped for the third time. By then Novo had flopped over onto his side, drawing his knees up into a fetal curl.

  The drilling was very loud and Macklin had to shout to be heard by the dying man.

  “You talk too much.”

  He went out the short way, secreting the gun and his bloodstained hand in a pocket.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  His apartment complex in Southfield looked smaller, like a childhood home revisited. He paid his driver and went in through the front door. It felt good to use his own key.

  The foyer felt warm. The air outside was metal cold, and the weatherman was predicting snow for Halloween. He was in his shirtsleeves, having discarded the coveralls in a city dumpster; the hard hat had been checked at the mine and the 10-millimeter pistol was well on its way to Lake Erie by way of the Detroit sewer system.

  He had made his way past the guard and miners lounging on a break outside the mine exit without being stopped. The occupants of a second unmarked car parked across the street from that gate had appeared to show some interest in him as he emerged, but then a DSR bus had whooshed to a stop in front of him and he boarded. The car hadn’t followe
d. Everyone knew professional killers didn’t use public transportation.

  A twinge of precognition tingled under his skin on the staircase to his floor. He ignored it as left over from the stairwell of Howard Klegg’s building and continued to his corner apartment.

  Inside, among familiar things, he felt strange. He’d grown used to the impersonal surrounding of rented rooms. His own slightly worn furniture, the odd items of clothing draped over the chairs and sofa and hanging from the top of the open bedroom door embarrassed him somehow, as if he’d been shown a nude picture of himself. Anonymity was the killer’s watchword and he felt most vulnerable among his own possessions. He wondered if there was a clinical term for the fear of the known.

  He was still tingling. Something, what was it? He sniffed the air. It was too fresh. Not stale at all after having been closed in for more than a week. And in the realization he turned back toward the door.

  But it opened as he was reaching for the knob, and Sergeant Lovelady’s wrinkled yellow sport coat filled the doorway. He was holding a Police Special, above which his pale dented face gave up no more expression than a whitewashed fence.

  “Just so it’s legal.” Inspector Pontier, tall and black and slender and bald, came in from the bedroom holding out a long fold of white paper with an official-looking border. “Your landlord let us in.”

  Macklin didn’t accept the paper. “I guess it’s legal if you’ve got it.”

  “Position,” said Lovelady.

  Macklin leaned on his palms on the wall next to the door and let the fat sergeant kick his feet apart and grope him from neck to ankles.

  Lovelady stepped back. “Clean, Inspector.”

  “Why aren’t I surprised.”

  Macklin pushed away from the wall and turned around, lowering his hands. The door was closed now and the sergeant’s gun was out of sight. Pontier said, “I hope you don’t mind. I’ve been using your telephone to monitor things in Melvindale. They wanted me there on the spot but when I found out neither of those bodies was yours we made ourselves comfortable here. You’re never around by the time the corpses turn up.”