Roses Are Dead (2 page)

Something poked him in the stomach when he bent to retrieve the sack. He straightened, pulled the loose green banana out from under his shirt, and dropped it in the sack with the others before attending to the rest of the mess. A man facing divorce couldn't afford to waste food.

Chapter Two

Howard Klegg's office looked like a lawyer's office in an old movie. It was a comfortable old shoe of a room with a dizzying tower of leather-bound books against one wall and a single window looking out on the rough neighborhood, and a big bleached desk with a wing-backed chair behind it, and a sofa and two easy chairs covered in green leather in one corner. Its only luxury, a Persian rug embroidered in gold and silver thread, left the hardwood floor bare for two feet around it.

The lawyer caught Macklin looking at the rug and said, “A gift from a temporarily embarrassed client in lieu of my fee. Times are tight. So far I haven't accepted any chickens or homemade apple pies.”

Macklin made himself comfortable in one of the easy chairs and said nothing about Klegg's eight-hundred dollar suit or the ruby studs in his cuffs. Beyond that, and except for his manicure and the expensive cut of his thick white hair, the old man might have been as bad off as he pretended. He was painfully thin, as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. Macklin had had to wait an hour and a half for him to come back from lunch at the Renaissance Club.

Now Klegg walked back and forth the length of the office, carefully avoiding the costly rug as he read over the summons his visitor had handed him. His tongue bulged inside his cheek and Macklin imagined he could see it through the translucent skin.

“It's very much in order, medieval phraseology and all,” he said, returning the document. “Why did you come to me? This firm has never handled divorce cases.”

“At the moment you're the only lawyer I know. I thought you could recommend someone. For old times' sake,” he added.

“You needn't remind me of past services, Macklin. Just because a man is no longer interested in women doesn't mean he's grown senile too.”

Macklin didn't think Klegg had lost interest in women either. “How's Maggiore?” he asked.

“Holding his nose against the water rising around him, I suppose. In any case his legal problems are not mine. I never did represent him, just his predecessor. Boniface's case comes up before the parole board next month, incidentally.”

“I heard.” Nine people had died to arrange the hearing, all by Macklin's hand.

“I saw him yesterday. He wants you to come back to work for him. At a substantial salary adjustment, naturally.”

“Tell him thanks.”

“The free-lancer's is a precarious existence,” Klegg said. “If you thought supporting a wife was tough, wait until you try supporting a divorced one. Boniface can handle that, set up a decoy statement of earnings that would satisfy any court-appointed auditor. It's one of my specialties. And we haven't even discussed the legal protection available in the event of your arrest, which is a danger you can't overlook in your work.”

“I just want the name of a good divorce lawyer.”

“You don't understand the extent of your former employer's generosity. Quitting is not a word in the jargon of this organization. Your past record is the only reason your case hasn't been disposed of as others have.”

“Also Boniface can't afford the loss of manpower.”

Klegg lowered membranous eyelids showing a network of tiny blue veins. Then he raised them, nodded once. “I'll represent you at the divorce hearing.”

“I can't touch your fee. I don't own a Persian rug.”

“We'll trade services.”

Macklin said, “You?”

“No.” The lawyer walked back to his desk, wrote something on the top sheet of a yellow legal tablet on the blotter, tore it off, and brought it over. “This is the number of a young woman named Moira King. Her late father, Louis Konigsberg, was my partner. We started this firm together.”

“What's she want?”

“She doesn't know. Yet. I do, and when you've heard her out, so will you. One of your jobs will be to convince her of its wisdom.”

“I kill people, Mr. Klegg. I don't debate them.”

“That's why the trade.”

Macklin looked at the sheet in Klegg's hand. He hadn't taken it yet. “My part is just seeing her. Anything else I do I get paid for.”

“That's between the two of you.”

Macklin read the number, memorized it, and waved away the sheet without touching it. He handled as few objects as possible in unfamiliar places. He liked to keep track of his fingerprints. Standing: “I'll call her. No guarantees.”

“None requested.” The lawyer was back at his desk, his hand on the telephone-intercom. “I'll have my secretary call this fellow Goldstick, arrange a meeting.”

In the hallway outside, Macklin walked past the elevator and opened the red-painted fire door to the stairs. He hadn't taken an elevator in years, not since a colleague of his had been shot full of holes riding one. He never armed himself except when working, preferring to practice evasion over the risk of being caught carrying a concealed weapon. In his business success was measured in birthdays.

He had gone down three steps when a door sighed shut below and the stairwell echoed with heavy footsteps climbing up. He hesitated, then started backing the way he had come. In this mechanized age he rarely met anyone else using the stairs.

When he was on the landing, a denim-clad black man with a walrus moustache rounded the turn below, clanking as he came. A square backpack affair wrapped in green canvas rode high on his shoulders on a web harness and he cradled a long black tube along his right forearm with a tiny yellow feather of flame wobbling on the end. Their eyes met just as Macklin cleared the entrance and swung the steel door into its frame.

The man on the stairs set his feet and depressed the tube's trigger, trying to beat the closing of the door. A geyser of liquid orange and yellow gushed up the stairs and splattered against the door, blistering the paint and licking back along the fire-resistant walls. The temperature in the stairwell soared. Sweat prickled under the black man's clothes and evaporated as soon as it hit the heated air. He felt as if the oxygen were being sucked from his body and he opened his lips to inhale, charring his lungs with a sudden crackling sear that stopped his heart instantly. His clothes and hair and moustache caught fire and he was still falling when the gasoline in the tank on his back blew, bulging the brick walls beneath the fireproof paneling and shattering every window in the old building.

Klegg's office door sprang open just as Macklin got to it. Except for a quarter-inch horizontal red line on his right cheek that started bleeding while Macklin was looking at it, the lawyer's face was as white as his hair. His eyes flicked behind Macklin to his secretary, getting up from the floor where she had flung herself after the blast, then back to Macklin. “What—”

The killer took Klegg's silk lapels in both fists and rode him inside. The lawyer's feet went out from under him but Macklin held him up by the force of their momentum and Klegg kept going backward until the backs of his legs touched his desk and he sat down hard on top, ringing the bell on the telephone. Macklin hung on to his lapels. The younger man's face was liver-colored.

“I'm set up,” he said. “I wonder who.”

His tone was dead even. Far away, a fire siren started up, drawn thin and high through the broken window. Klegg said, “I don't—”

“Someone who knows I always take the stairs and who knew when I left this office and called someone.”

“Think straight, Macklin. Why would I want you dead?” Klegg's fingers were spread on the killer's forearms, his thin wrists jutting like stemware from the loose whiteness of his cuffs.

“‘Quitting is not a word in the jargon of this organization.'” Macklin mimicked the lawyer's querulous tones.

“In my own building? With a big noise?”

Logic was an attorney's weapon. A fissure showed in the blank wall before him and he pulled at it with all his training. “I'm a professional, like you. How do you think I've lasted this long with my reputation downtown?”

The other held his grip on Klegg's lapels. His face was unreadable. The lawyer built on his silence.

“Get out of here before the police show up. Call me later.” He told Macklin his home telephone number. “Can you remember that? After six.”

The air was a riot of sirens, the keening of the fire trucks joined by the deeper bellowing yelp of police cars. Macklin opened his hands. The lawyer's bunched jacket bore the imprint of his fists. “It only takes a second to kill you.”

“Use the back stairs.”

Macklin used the elevator. A lawyer of Klegg's standing who kept his practice in that neighborhood would be too cheap to hire
three
killers. He slid into the crowd gathering in front of the building and away.

When the first man in a helmet and raincoat bounded into the foyer, he found threads of black smoke twisting out of the seam around the fire door on that level, carrying with them a sweet smell of roast meat.

Chapter Three

“Mr. Klegg?”

“Yes.”

“My name is George Pontier. I'm an inspector with Detroit Homicide.” He snapped his badge folder open and shut with a little turning movement of his wrist.

“Odd, you don't look French.”

The black detective grinned appreciatively. He was tall and trim, though not cadaverous like the lawyer, and his soft moustache and gray fringe were barbered to draw the eye down from his bald head to the rough sculpture of his face. His eyes were a startling gray against skin as dark as oiled wood.

“I don't know why they're so down on you at headquarters,” he said. “It takes a special kind of person to make that sort of joke knowing how many times I must have heard it.”

“Sorry, Inspector. I just got through telling your men for the fifth time what happened here, and it looks like I'm going to have to tell it again.”

“Actually, they're not mine. They're with the arson squad. The body makes it my case. But it shouldn't take so long since I'm told you say you don't know what happened.”

The corners of Klegg's lips twitched. “You've studied law, Inspector. Don't deny it.”

“Two semesters. We didn't get along.” He moved his shoulders around under his gray wool suit coat. “Chilly.”

“I haven't had time to call a glazier.”

Pontier gestured amiably and the lawyer buzzed his secretary and asked her to make the call. Meanwhile the inspector studied the office without moving his eyes. The desk Klegg was standing in front of had been knocked crooked, and some stray pieces of broken glass from the missing window glittered on the floor. The rest would have been driven outward, but one at least had flown inside with enough force to nick the lawyer's cheek, which now wore a fresh pink Band-Aid. Pontier charged the other disarray to the officers who had been tramping in and out for the past two hours. Every place they entered was their place of work and they treated it accordingly.

“You didn't know the dead man?” he asked when Klegg had finished with the intercom.

“I never said that.”

“You didn't identify him.”

“I was escorted downstairs and shown a charred something in the stairwell. It could have been my brother, if I had one. It could have been barbecued beef or a Chevrolet seat cover. May I ask why I'm being singled out for all this questioning in a building full of witnesses?”

“Top floor's a good place to start. Also you own the building.”

“Also?”

“Also you've represented more men with Italian names before grand juries than Campbell has soups and it isn't every day a man pressure-cooks himself to death with a flamethrower in a fireproof stairwell in this city.”

“I conduct a legitimate practice according to the ethics of my profession.”

“There are easier ways to commit suicide. Someone else was supposed to be standing in front of that nozzle, and if it wasn't you, it was one of your clients.”

“That's a broad assumption, Inspector. No wonder you gave up law.”

“Your secretary says you came back from lunch about two o'clock. The blast was reported at two forty-two. What were you doing in the time between?”

“I was in conference.”

“That's what she said. She wouldn't say with who.”

“She'd be fired if she did. Privilege extends to the entire legal staff.”

“Excuse me while I brush all these split hairs off my shoes,” Pontier said.

Klegg let his shoulders slump. “I'm an officer of the court, same as you. We both have confidences to keep. We live in a world where anyone who hears voices in his head can arm himself and spray lead into fast-food franchises packed with innocent people. We can't abandon our precepts every time a troubled person cracks.”

“Why do I get the feeling you're not going to help me on this?”

“If there are no further questions, I have some more calls to make. You can appreciate what all this has done to my schedule.” Klegg circled behind his desk. When he sat down, the detective was leaning on his hands on the other side.

“You're wrong about why I got out of law,” he said. “I'm looking at the reason.”

Pontier rode the elevator down to the foyer. There the air was thick with wet char and the bitter-metal smell of carbon tetrachloride from spent fire extinguishers. The door to the stairs was propped open, the burned corpse having been removed by men from the medical examiner's office. The inspector spotted a fattish man in a crumpled yellow sport coat standing in a group of officers in uniform. “Lovelady!”

The man wobbled over. He wore his red hair in bangs and his face was a flat white slab with features among the pockmarks. Pontier said, “Trot Howard Klegg through the computer downtown. I want his associates.”