Roses Are Dead (24 page)

“Stop! Police!”

A swallowed
blam
rent the air left intact by the shotgun blast. Macklin thought he heard the bullet shrilling over his head, but he put it down to imagination. You seldom heard them coming from a magnum. In any case he didn't stop. The night welcomed him as one of its own.

“Radio call, Inspector!”

Lovelady had thrown open the door to Pontier's office without knocking. The fat sergeant was out of breath, although he couldn't have run more than twenty feet from the monitor in the squad room. Pontier, on the telephone, knew the answer to his question before he asked it.

“Who?”

“Connely and Petersen.”

He slammed down the receiver without saying goodbye—forgetting even in the act to whom he'd been talking—and hastened out of the office behind the sergeant. He heard the telephone begin ringing as he left. He kept going.

Burlingame, working late, counted sixteen rings before giving up. Less than a minute had passed since his last attempt to get through to Pontier, which had ended, as had all the previous ones, in a busy signal. The man spent as much time on the horn as every other police inspector the FBI man had ever known.

In between tries he had called other sources in an effort to lift the APB on Macklin, but all had declined, maintaining that only the officer in charge of the investigation had that authority. Which was pure bullshit, but go identify yourself as federal and try to tell a city man what to do. Now the officer in charge was either out or not answering his telephone. Burlingame, himself a Bell fetishist, knew that men of their persuasion would sooner pull out before sexual climax than sit by placidly and let a telephone go on jangling.

Cradling the receiver, he told the formal portrait of the President of the United States hanging on the wall opposite his desk that something was happening.

“Honey? More coffee.” Blossom held up his empty cup.

The waitress, a lumpy blond girl in her late teens with dark circles around her eyes, filled it from the carafe, glancing at him curiously. He ignored the look and she walked off. She didn't have much up top, but he admired the way her buttocks moved under the white uniform, like—what's that line?—like two cats fighting under a blanket. Any other night he might have been working on her. But he was waiting for Brown to call him back and he didn't want anything to distract him from the telephone. Christ, if someone tried to answer it before he did, he'd use the knife on the bastard.

He was hyper, really wired. He should've made his call from farther away, some other place where the help wouldn't wonder what he was doing back after eating there just half an hour before. Where he didn't have to keep looking at the door and seeing the old guy coming in with the shotgun, Jesus, seeing him just like he was there, that face with its down-drawn lines and a splattergun short enough to hide under his cheap sport coat, cut back beyond the choke so that the pattern spread a yard for every foot, clear the whole restaurant like a firehose. Blossom could see it happening.

His imagination had always been extra vivid. Once when he was in junior high he had had the same nightmare three nights running, about putting his hand through a hole in a wall and having dozens of rats come squirming up his arm, squealing and slashing at him with their sharp little fangs, and after that he had stayed awake for a week before exhaustion took him. Then he had it again. He had slept in some dumps with holes in the walls since then and every time he looked at one of the holes he still saw the rats clear as anything. He didn't even have to think about them and there they were, all slick gray like seals, fangs showing outside their lips. The last time he had seen them, four male attendants were required to strap him to his bed in Ypsilanti. The time before that had been just before he cut up the colored guy in the parking lot.

Now he was afraid to look around him too closely. The restaurant was in an old building and there might be a hole in one of the walls.

The telephone rang and he slopped coffee on himself putting down the cup. His waitress was just passing the instrument. He beat her there by half a step.

“Mr. Blossom?”

He recognized the familiar burring voice and said, “Where the hell you been? Didn't Green tell you my ass is out?”

“Obviously not too far, or you wouldn't have been sitting there poisoning your system with caffeine for the past ten minutes.”

How in hell did he know that?
“It's my ass, I guess I know when it's out. Who's the guy with the sawed-off, he one of yours? 'Cause if this is a cross I'll carve on you so good, your friends'll give up looking for the pieces.”

“Very colorful. But we gain nothing by threatening each other. The man you described to Mr. Green is named Peter Macklin. He's a professional working for the woman you eliminated. That wasn't very intelligent of you, Mr. Blossom. These petty personal vendettas are messy and in the long run extremely costly. Frankly, I'm not sure you're useful enough to justify the expense.”

“You hang me out to dry I'll open my mouth wide, fucker.”

“A response like that is hardly calculated to win my cooperation, Mr. Blossom,” said the other, after a pause.

“Yeah, well, hang on to a quarter for tomorrow's
Free Press
.”

“The Macklin situation is being attended to. We have a good man on it. I suggest you proceed as if nothing has happened. Go home, watch television, go to bed. Get up in the morning and go to work.”

“Sure, wake up with my brains plastered to the headboard. Jerk off, Brown.”

“I've said the situation is in hand. We know far more about this man Macklin than you and he is too cautious to risk coming back tonight. But just in case he does, we have that end covered. It's important that you behave normally. The police are watching you.”

The information startled him. “How come?”

“Don't be alarmed. It's Macklin they're after. But we can't afford your attracting their attention.”

“They ask me what happened I tell them what, my interior decorator uses double-o buck?”

“Tell them nothing. You were out to dinner, and when you returned you found your apartment a shambles and the police on the premises. They won't believe you, but they won't press the matter. Macklin's the one they want.”

Blossom remained silent while a pair of businessmen who had just entered the restaurant removed their overcoats and hung them on the tree next to the telephone. After they moved away: “You better hope what you're telling me sticks, Brown. I'm down in the books as whacked out. Even if I go away for Moira, I'm out of the hatch in two years tops. Then I come looking.”

Hanging up, he heard a faint squealing, the gnashing of tiny teeth.

Floyd Arthur had the old man down as a teaching fellow, one of these Old World types who had grown tired of waiting for their accreditation to catch up with them and resigned themselves to assistant professorships in departments too broad for their specialties. He had that slightly seedy look, a topcoat too light for the November-like weather and a silly hat and those round-lensed bifocals you couldn't get here, reflecting the light flatly as he looked around on his way up to the counter—that studied, unfashionable academic conceit fading into bored complacency. He used to see them often in his little chemist's shop off the University of Detroit campus before the new breed of post-Watergate liberals came in wearing their blown hair and windowpane jackets over turtlenecks and shoved them aside. He missed them.

“Yes, sir,” Arthur said brightly, leaning on his palms on the countertop.

“I did not expect you still to be open when I called,” returned the old man. His voice was heavily accented, with a slightly British inflection. He had learned his English overseas.

“I get most of my business after classes are out. I open in the morning for two hours at seven and then close until noon. You asked about mercury.”

“Yes, I need it for a classroom demonstration.”

“I don't get much call for it anymore, after all the bad publicity. I'll have to see your faculty card. Some proof you're authorized to handle it.”

The old man produced a decaying wallet from his hip pocket and selected a blue-and-yellow card from a thick bundle of them in the photograph section. It was smudged and dog-eared, the lettering barely legible. Arthur accepted it. “Oh, you're with the U of M. I thought you were local.”

“No. I filed a requisition with the university, but the shipment hasn't come in and I need the mercury tomorrow. None of the shops in Ann Arbor carries it.”

The chemist returned the card, unlocked a cabinet behind the counter, and took down a half-pint plastic bottle from the top shelf. It was much heavier than its size indicated.

“It's fascinating stuff,” he said, squinting at the price code on the label. “When I was in eighth grade science, we used to sneak into the room during lunch hour and play with it, chase the little drops around a desktop with our fingers. We didn't know it was poisonous then. I guess that's why none of us got sick. That's twenty-six dollars with the tax.”

“Yes, it is deadly.” The old man counted two tens, a five, and a single out of his wallet.

Arthur rang it up on the register, slipped the bottle and the receipt into a paper bag, and held it out. “Thanks for coming in, Dr. Wanze,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Chapter Thirty-two

Morning glowered sullenly through a thin sheeting of dirty white cloud, graying out the skyline to the east and flattening perspectives so that the entire city looked like a dusty board game turned on end. Entering suburban Melvindale, Macklin told his cabdriver to slow down as they passed the entrance to the subterranean salt mines. From the street he could see only the outbuildings and part of the well-marked opening of the shaft and men in yellow hard hats and caked coveralls moving around in front. The cab passed within inches of a plain gray Chevrolet parked across from the entrance with two men in the front seat. Raising his hand on that side as if to scratch his temple, Macklin directed the driver to keep going.

After leaving Roy Blossom's duplex the killer had caught a late supper in a diner, then returned to his motel room to sleep the rest of the night. He had been jumpy after the debacle, angry with himself for his lack of caution, but he had ceased thinking about it the minute he hit the sheets. A lifetime of conditioning and the legacy of a father who had worked years of double shifts as a junkman and truck dispatcher (and weekends cracking skulls for pin money) had given him the ability to sleep anywhere without fanfare. He had risen with the sun, cleaned and oiled his pistol, brushed his clothes and dressed with all the elaborate attention to detail of a matador preparing for the bullring. After that he had gone straight to a cab stand without stopping for breakfast.

Three blocks beyond the mine entrance he told the driver to pull over and paid him and got out. He kept walking in the direction they had been going while the cab was in sight, then reversed himself as it turned the corner and made his way back. The cold air chapped his hands and made an ice mask of his face, but the synthetic material of the sport coat trapped his body heat. Adrenaline crackled through his veins.

A bar with a red Budweiser sign in the window stood in the middle of the last block before the mine. Macklin pushed through the glass door, blinked in the dim interior lighting, and took a stool at the bar, behind which mirrors plated the wall in back of the bottles. At that hour he shared the bar with only two other customers, large men approaching middle age and seated together at a back booth. They wore rough gray coveralls salted white in the creases.

While Macklin was watching them in the mirrors, a stout waitress in her fifties with a beehive of hair dyed bright copper trundled up to their table and set a pair of foaming glasses in front of them. “Salt in your beer, Ed?” she asked.

“That's funny, Arlene. I ain't heard that one all week.” The older of the two, a graying giant with an old forked scar on one leathery cheek, excavated a crushed bill from the breast pocket of his coveralls and paid for the beers.

“What's yours?”

Macklin looked up at a freckled bartender in a green T-shirt and dog tags standing behind the bar. “Coke.”

After paying for it he sipped it slowly, pretending to listen to the call-in program droning out of the radio over the beer taps. A woman with a Little Rock drawl was asking the guest, a writer, where he got his ideas. The writer said, “Cheboygan.”

Ed's companion finished his beer first and got up to leave. Ed rose too, and they shook hands. With a little wave to the waitress the other man left, after which his friend sat down and drank the rest of his beer. He stood again finally, laid two quarters on the table for a tip, and went back toward the rest rooms. Macklin drained his glass unhurriedly and followed.

Ed was standing at the gang urinal, a long tub with black iron starting to show through the white enamel. He glanced up at the mirror in front of him as Macklin entered, nodded a greeting, then shook off and zipped up his fly. Passing behind him, Macklin jerked his right arm up stiffly, driving the heel of his hand into the back of the man's head. Ed's forehead struck the mirror hard, shooting spidery cracks out from the point of impact. He grunted, his forehead bleeding, but before he could move Macklin bounced the edge of the same hand off the big muscle on the side of Ed's neck and his knees buckled. The killer caught him as he fell, lowering him to the floor gently.

Working swiftly, Macklin got the big man's coveralls off and stepped into them. They were big enough to fit into without taking off his sport coat, but he did so anyway, to keep the sleeves from binding, and turned back the cuffs on the coveralls sleeves and pants legs. He looked at his bee-eyed reflection in the broken mirror. It was a loose fit but not enough to attract attention. He took a moment to turn out the sport coat's pockets for forgotten evidence, then dropped it to the floor beside Ed's unconscious form. He was a lousy tipper anyway.