Roses Are Dead (15 page)

“She's brand-new and a little stiff. They took away my good one when they busted me. Had that one so loose I could flip her open by the blade. Man, wasn't that nigger surprised in that parking lot, though.”

“Why do you have it? Nobody carries pocketknives anymore.”

“That's what happened to this country. Guys stopped carrying jackknives. Then Kennedy got shot and all hell broke loose. Who's your new boyfriend? Kind of old, ain't he?”

“Why are you watching my apartment?”

“Bet he don't get it up but once a week. Me, I'm hard all the time. This lady shrink was going to write a paper on me in Ypsi. Said I was a psycho-physical phenomenon.” He stumbled over the syllables. “Aw, but then the rest of the shrinks got together and turned me loose. She wouldn't of been too bad if there was a paper bag handy. Nice high tits. How's yours, Slick? They still nice and high?” He looked.

“I'll call security.”

“I'll wait.” He drew her empty cup over to his side of the table and started working at it with the knife, carving curved slices out of the side.

She didn't move. “I'll lose my job.”

“There's jobs and jobs. You put on a couple of pounds, use that body makeup, you'll do okay. Look at Linda Lovelace. Bowwow.”

“I'm out of that, I told you. I made my decision when you killed that man. Did I tell you I wasn't surprised? What surprised me was I stayed long enough to see you do it.”

“You wasn't there.”

“I didn't mean it literally.”

“Who's your boyfriend?”

“I don't have boyfriends. I'm not a cheerleader.”

“Maybe I find out myself.” He had finished cutting up the cup and was subdividing the pieces, the edge of the blade clicking on the table's metal top.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You got to use a knife now and again or you're always sharpening it.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We're just talking. I like to talk. So do you. Didn't matter what we was doing, you just went on jabbering right through it. Remember? It's the one time I wanted you to shut up.”

“My break's over.” She rose.

A hand shot out and closed tightly on her wrist. The other held the knife with its butt on the table and the blade pointing up. “Dump Grandpa, Slick.”

“You're cutting off my circulation.” But she made no attempt to pull free.

“There's better ways.”

“Miss King?”

They looked at the doorway. A middle-aged man with gray hair and a moustache and glasses stood in it. He had a hearing aid clipped to the handkerchief pocket of his blue suit with a wire leading to a plug in his right ear.

“I'm just going back, Mr. Turner.” She was watching Roy now, who smiled and let go of her wrist. He had folded the knife one-handed and put it away.

Mr. Turner looked at him for the first time. “Sir, are you an employee? If not I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave.”

Roy opened his mouth and closed it several times without making a sound.

“I'm sorry?” Mr. Turner twisted the dial on the hearing aid.

Roy got up and leaned forward and cupped his hands around his mouth, opening it wide. Nothing came out. Turner unclipped the instrument and frowned at it, tapping the case.

“Roy—” Moira said.

The man in the suit caught on then. He returned the device to the outside of his pocket. “I see. Very funny. Is this man a friend of yours, Miss King?”

“I was just giving him directions to the billing department.”

“You the guy in charge?” Roy said.

“I'm the supervisor on this shift.”

“I got a bill needs adjusting. You guys stuck me with two long-distance calls I didn't make. I figure you're making up for all them other phone companies taking away your business.”

“I'm sure it was an oversight. If you'll—”

“Oversight hell!” He was shouting. His face was white, the skin drawn tight. “You fuckers think you got us all by the balls. How you like I cut off that flash necktie and shove it up your ass?” His hand went to his pocket.

Turner looked away. “You'll find that department on the ground floor. Miss King?”

She hesitated, watching Roy. His hand was out of his pocket now, empty. His color was normal again. She turned toward the doorway.

Roy said, “I mean it, Slick. Old fart stays he could get hurt.”

She went out past the man in the suit without turning around.

“I'll show you to the right elevator,” Turner said. “Mr.—?”

“Bates.” The young man walked out in front of him. “Norman.”

Chapter Twenty

Judge Flutter closed the file, handed it to his bailiff, a retired black Wayne County Sheriff's deputy with a smudge of purple ink on the left side of his nose, and folded his big slow hands on the desk in front of him. “Very equitable. I think we can set the date for a final hearing. Does November the eighth meet with any strong objections? It's a Thursday.”

Howard Klegg, seated at one corner of the desk with his long thin legs crossed, glanced at Macklin, who nodded. He raised his eyebrows at Gerald Goldstick, sitting next to Donna Macklin at the other corner. The young lawyer was studying a pocket calendar card. Klegg distrusted people who carried them. They always knew exactly where they would be on any given date three months in advance. It suggested an arrogant faith in their longevity.

“Friday's better,” Goldstick said, looking up.

“This court doesn't sit Fridays,” the judge explained.

“Thursday then.”

Little twerp had Thursday clear all along, thought Klegg.

The lawyers shook Flutter's hand and the four left. In the hallway outside chambers, Macklin trotted ahead of Klegg to catch his wife. Goldstick hesitated, but Donna touched two fingers to his forearm and he went on ahead. Klegg, lagging along behind, caught some of the conversation as the pair walked.

“Seen Roger lately?” Macklin asked.

“No. I called Lonnie Kimball's. He moved out yesterday. Lonnie didn't know where.”

“That stinks.”

“What do you want me to do, put a detective on him?”

“Call the cops. He's still a minor.”

“He'd just run away again. If what you said to him did any good, that might be enough to change his mind back the other way.”

“It didn't do any good,” he said. “I just wasted time.”

“You don't know that.”

“I know Roger.”

“Like hell you do. If you knew him, we wouldn't have this problem. You were never home.”

“You were, though. All you had to do was count the empties to see that.”

They walked along for a few yards without saying anything. “Why didn't you call Klegg when you found out he left the apartment?” he demanded.

“I'm through running to you.”

“When did this happen?”

“I'm a grown woman. I don't have to tell my soon-to-be ex-husband when I'm going to the toilet.”

He looked down the hall at Goldstick, who was standing before the floor directory with his hands folded in front of him on the handle of his briefcase. “Yeah.” Macklin fell back.

“What was all that about?” asked Klegg, drawing abreast.

“Not much. My wife's sleeping with her attorney.”

“It sounded serious.”

“With her it never was a lot of laughs.”

The old lawyer glanced sideways at Macklin, wondering if he was developing a sense of humor.

“Roger Macklin,” Gordy announced.

Charles Maggiore, bench-pressing on the Nautilus in his basement gym, paused with the bar across his naked chest. “On the phone?”

“On the stoop.”

“Shit.” He resumed pressing.

“I should tell him scram?”

“Give me a couple of minutes, then chase him in.”

The big manservant nodded once and turned around and started up the stairs. The room seemed much larger in his absence.

Maggiore did two more reps and locked the bar in place. Getting up from the bench, he hooked a towel off the padded exercise horse and used it on his face and chest, avoiding his reflection in the bank of mirrors mounted across from him. That alone would have been enough to sour his mood if it were any brighter. Normally he was a man who liked mirrors, or anything else with a surface shiny enough to show him his good build and careful tan and Beach Boy good looks, so youthful for a man in his fifties. But of late all those hours locked up with his lawyers and accountants had kept him from his sunlamps and his exercise and he was unwilling to face the ravages of neglect. He valued what time he could steal to slow them down.

He finished toweling off and slid into a terry robe with a padded left shoulder to balance the hump on his right just as Peter Macklin's boy came down the stairs. Roger was wearing a faded blue plaid workshirt open over a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans at least a size too large for him around the waist. His tightened belt drew pleats in the worn material and his bare bony ankles made his feet look big in soiled track shoes. His young face was lined under the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Maggiore.” He held out a skeletal hand.

The Sicilian, a gang-war veteran who shared Roger's father's distrust of the gesture, let go quickly. “What can I do for you, son? I'm meeting the bean-counters again upstairs in twenty minutes.”

“I was just wondering if you had anything for me yet.”

“Not yet. I said I'd call.”

“See, that's another reason I came. I'm not at that number anymore. I got an attic room in a place off Gratiot, doing fix-up work for the old lady that lives there. No bathroom or telephone.”

“Need money?”

“Well, I want to earn it.”

Maggiore smiled and clapped Roger's shoulder. “Let's go upstairs.”

In the library the Sicilian slid out the top drawer of the desk and lifted out a triple-decker checkbook. Writing: “Couple of hundred see you through?”

“This a loan, right?”

“Let's call it an advance against your first job.”

“I'm ready to work, Mr. Maggiore. My nerves are settling down.”

“Seen your father lately?” He signed the check and tore it free.

“Other day.” Roger reached for it, but Maggiore held it back, looking at him.

“You didn't tell him anything.”

“You mean about working for you? Well, yeah, but he already knew, sort of. Ma told him.”

“You told your
mother
?”

“She guessed it. She's sharp that way. See, she's a lush, and sometimes I can get away with—well, a lot. Then other times—”

“I can't believe you told your mother you're going into the killing business.”

Roger shrugged, eyeing the check.

Maggiore sat back, absentmindedly folding the check lengthwise and stroking it between two fingers. Finally he flicked it out. When the boy's fingers closed on it he held on.

“What'd your father say?”

“Tried to scare me out of it. Gave me the royal tour of the morgue.” He tried a grin. “Hell, I guess he don't know I have worse dreams. Snakes and spiders, my dick falling off. They're going away now, though,” he added quickly.

“I mean did he say anything about me.”

“He called you a son of a bitch.”

“Anything else?”

He shook his head. “Hey, are you afraid of him?”

Maggiore's other hand made a short, swift arc. Roger howled and jerked back the hand with which he'd been holding the check. The fountain pen the Sicilian had used to sign it stuck out of the back, its point half buried in the flesh. He pulled it out and clapped his other hand over the pumping blood.

“I was younger than you when I killed my first man,” said the Sicilian. “Caved in his skull with a rock. You come back to me after you've done that and tell me about being afraid.”

Gordy filled the open doorway.

“Treasury men outside,” he announced. “Say they got a warrant to search the place.”

Maggiore said shit. “You see it?”

“Just the envelope.”

“Read it.”

“Fine print?”

“The watermark, everything. Get me two minutes.”

The big man paused, looking from his employer to the boy holding on to his right hand with his left. Then he left the room. Maggiore pushed the check closer to Roger's side of the desk.

“Think you could remember a telephone number without writing it down?”

Roger sucked at the wound. “I guess.”

“Because if you can't and you do and it gets found on you, the medical examiner's going to wonder where that mark on your hand came from.”

“I'll remember it.”

Maggiore told him the number. Roger repeated it twice.

“Call between six and six-ten any night, give your name. If there's no answer, it means there's nothing for you. Otherwise listen to the instructions.”

“Okay.”

Maggiore stood, adjusting the tie of his robe. “Use the back way out, past the pool.”

Roger turned to leave. The other called him back.

“Forgot your check.”

The boy picked it up.

“You better get that hand looked at. Blood poisoning's nothing to fool with.”

Randall Burlingame placed a thin sheaf of neatly typewritten sheets on Louise Gabel's desk. He had his topcoat folded over one arm.

“Get these out tomorrow, okay? They're expense vouchers, and Washington likes them nice and slow.”

She nodded and glanced coolly out the window on the Detroit side of the outer office. “It could rain. You ought to wear a hat.”

“I stopped doing that the day Hoover died. He had a Hung about fedoras in public at all times. Thought the head was another erogenous zone.”

“You catch pneumonia, that'll show him.”

“How long have you been mothering me, Louise?”