Roses Are Dead (11 page)

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 turtle-neck 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 had 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.

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

“No.” Self-consciously 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.