Roses Are Dead (6 page)

“You're not? But, Uncle Howard said—”

“He didn't say I was a cop. How much do you know about the law practice he shared with your father?”

She crushed out her cigarette and sat back. “I'm not naive. I've known what kind of clients they represented since I was seventeen.”

“That would be about the time you got into moviemaking?”

“About then, yes.”

“I used to work for one of their clients,” he said. “Michael Boniface.”

“Oh.” She played with her glass. “A leg-breaker. Well, you won't scare Roy. They had some parts left over when they built him, and the ability to be scared was one of them. If you're the best Uncle Howard could do—”

“I don't scare people. Not for a living. I come in when the leg-breakers give up.”

His eyes were on hers. He watched the color subside from her face. She started to get up quickly, clutching her purse. He clamped a hand on her wrist and held it.

“I'm seeing you as a favor to Klegg,” he said. “I don't need the work.”

“Fine. Because if you think I'm going to pay you to—”

“Kill Blossom. Let's stop waltzing around it. Sit down.” His fingers tightened.

Glaring, she obeyed. He withdrew the hand. She rubbed the red spots on the underside of her wrist. “Violence never solves anything.”

“It solves almost everything. It's why we arm the police, and it's why we still have wars. Have you ever thought how many lives would have been saved if some enterprising assassin had stabbed Hitler in that beer hall in Munich?”

“That would have been sinking to his level.”

“There's only one level, Miss King. It belongs to the survivors.”

“I'm not a killer.”

“That's why you need me.”

She finished her drink and lit another cigarette, looking at him through the smoke.

“I don't even know you're what you say you are. Maybe you're just some grifter who'll take my money and go and I'll still have Roy to deal with.”

“My name is Macklin.”

A vertical line cracked her forehead.

“I'm sorry you recognize the name,” he said. “It's not good to be known outside the business.”

She said, “The Boblo boat last summer. Those terrorists.”

“My part in it hit the papers for one edition. One of them reported my name. Just once, though. Boniface cuts a wide swath in this area, the FBI too.”

“Isn't this out of your line? I mean, individual.”

“I'm working for myself these days.”

She was silent for a little. Then: “I don't want you, Mr. Macklin. I'm no one to judge what anyone else does for a living. But it was tough getting out and I'm not going back.”

“That what you told Roy?”

“I'm sorry. This was a mistake.” She started to get up again.

He drew a long fold of paper from inside his jacket, glanced at it to make sure it was the right one, and reached it across the table. She hesitated, then took it and unfolded it. “What's this?”

“In case you change your mind. It's a power-of-attorney form giving me title to everything you own. It's my standard fee.”

“Isn't it a bit stiff?”

“It's worth it. If he kills you, you won't need it, and if he doesn't, I'm not necessary. I had Howard Klegg draw it up. That's his secretary's signature in the witness blank. All you have to do is sign it. This too.” He handed her another document. “It's a formal confession that you've hired me to commit murder. Spreads the risk a little more evenly.”

“You don't take any chances.”

“I got out of the habit. There's a post office box number on the confession if you decide to go with me. Sign and mail both papers and I'll get back to you.”

She started to give them back. He didn't take them.

“Hang on to them at least until you hear from Blossom again,” he said. “You can always burn them. Next time the phone rings maybe you'll remember this moment.”

“I won't change my mind.” But she put the papers in her purse. She rose and looked down at him. “I'm curious.”

“You get one question.”

“When the census-taker knocks on your door and asks what you do for a living, what do you tell him?”

“Human relations consultant,” he said. “I'll look for your letter.”

The white-haired bartender leaning on the beer taps didn't stir as she went past.

Shadows were stretching when Macklin left the bar twenty minutes behind the woman, as was his habit. He had parked his car around the corner on a meterless residential side street. It was the only vehicle in sight at that time of day. With the end of the recession in the automotive industry, the GM assembly plant was running at white heat and everyone seemed to be working.

Before opening the door he routinely inspected the interior through the windows and ran the hood and doors for unfamiliar wires, finally checking the engine and getting down in push-up position to peer under the car. He was climbing to his feet when the man came at him.

He had been crouching behind a hedge in the front yard of the house across the street, and but for the scrape of one sole on the pavement he made no noise coming across, touching ground only once in a whirling bounce, all arms and legs and flying black hair, a tubular body dressed all in black and a flash of ivory face screwed into a grimace of concentration. A pointed foot at the end of a gracefully arched leg streaked toward Macklin's head and he squeaked the Smith & Wesson out of the holster in the small of his back and fired twice into the flying form.

The foot grazed his shoulder and the man on the end of it piled yelling into the side of Macklin's car and dropped in a tangle to the pavement. Macklin put the gun to the man's temple.

The man was still grimacing, his eyes glittering in their slits. “They said,” he whispered.

“Who said?” Macklin pulled back the hammer.

“They said you wouldn't—” Blood came into his mouth, choking him. He coughed, and then he stopped coughing.

Macklin lowered the hammer gently as the hate-face relaxed, freed from the burden of a soul. The body arched and settled.

A dog started barking. Putting away the revolver, Macklin patted the body down swiftly. The clothes had no pockets. He got into the car, started the engine, and backed up to drive around the dead Oriental in the street.

The next morning he found a thick envelope addressed to him in his post office box.

Chapter Eight

“Couldn't you have worn a suit?” Howard Klegg scowled at Macklin's brown-and-tan checked sport coat. The lawyer himself was wearing a gray three-piece with a silver stripe.

“It's in my apartment,” said Macklin. “I've been living out of motels for two days. I just bought this. It's the only thing I could find that hides a gun.”

“You're
armed?
Here?” Klegg swept a long arm around the lobby of the Old County Building. A circuit court judge Macklin recognized from television interviews was showing the sailing-ship mosaic on the floor to a visitor.

“Someone tried me again yesterday. Stairwells aren't good enough anymore. It's public streets now, in broad daylight. Why not a government building?”

“Well, let's just hope you don't bump into a bailiff on the way.”

They mounted a broad balustraded staircase. “You talked to Boniface?” Macklin asked.

“Twice since you and I last talked. He drew a blank with his people on why you're marked and who marked you. So far as the street talent in Detroit is concerned, there is no Macklin contract.”

“Tell that to the charbroiled stiff and the Chink in the morgue.”

“The police identified the man in the stairwell, an unemployed construction worker and ex-Marine named Keith DeLong. No known criminal record.”

“Ask higher,” Macklin said.

“You ask higher. I've enough to do with this divorce and repairing the damage to my building. My insurance doesn't cover flamethrower explosions.”

“Sell the Persian rug.”

They had entered pedestrian traffic on the second floor. Klegg held his retort and rearranged his face into the expression he reserved for judges' chambers.

The judge's name was Flutter, and Macklin thought he had never met a man whose name fit him less well. He was a pyramid of pale flesh poured into expensive tweeds and propped between the arms of a chair on a heavy steel frame behind a big desk. His hair was carrot-colored and his cheeks had a white consistency that looked as if they would hold the indentation of a finger minutes after it was withdrawn. Macklin's wife Donna occupied another chair, next to a young man with short black hair permed into glossy waves like corrugated steel and spaniel eyes in a face that came to a point at his chin. He got up to shake Klegg's hand and introduced himself as Gerald Goldstick, and there were more introductions while Macklin kept his hands to himself. In 1924, Dion O'Bannion, crime lord of Chicago's North Side, had offered his hand to a visitor in his flower shop and had it held while another man pumped six bullets into him.

It was a brief meeting, the sides feeling each other out under the somnolent eye of the fat judge seated behind his desk with his fingers lined up like frankfurters on the near edge. Even when the two lawyers were conversing, Macklin felt Goldstick's eyes on him. The young lawyer had a big ruby knot snugged up under his pointed chin and he was forever pulling at it and shooting his cuffs and fingering the spray of handkerchief in his display pocket like a small boy playing dress-up. Macklin supposed Donna had been telling him stories. He wondered if they'd slept together yet.

She looked better than he'd seen her in some time, but then he'd forgotten what she looked like out of the ratty old robe she wore around the house with cigarette burns on the front and drink stains on both sleeves. She had on a neat russet slack suit and cordovan boots and she'd been streaking her hair to disarm the gray, but she hadn't lost any weight and her lipstick was on crooked. He glanced again at Goldstick and decided he'd been wrong about the two of them. The lawyer could do better.

Sparks flew just once, when Klegg submitted Macklin's estimate of his current worth. Donna remained silent while it was being read, then said, “What about the hundred thousand?”

Macklin met her glare. “What hundred thousand?”

“The hundred thousand you got for killing those people on the Boblo boat. I hear things. Even your friends in the Sicilian Sewing League couldn't keep the lid down on that one.”

Judge Flutter appeared to waken. The viscous eyes in the yeasty face blinked slowly at her, then at Macklin. “What's this about killing?”

“Figure of speech, your honor.” Klegg was looking at Goldstick. “By surrendering this financial statement at this time, my client has more than fulfilled his obligations so early in the action. His investments and savings accounts are all listed here. You're welcome to go looking for secret caches.”

“Fuck investments and savings accounts.”

“
Mrs
. Macklin.” The judge tapped a thick finger like a gavel.

“You don't invest blood money. IRS would want to know where it came from. Under the laws of the State of Michigan I'm entitled to half of that hundred thousand.”

“Comment, counselor?” asked Goldstick.

Klegg was busy rearranging papers in his brown leather briefcase. “Mind you, I'm not saying there is any such sum. But if there were, my client's Fifth Amendment rights would shield him from having to declare it.”

Goldstick said, “Funny, Al Capone's attorney didn't try that.”

“Your precedents are rusty, counselor. Under a 1966 Supreme Court decision involving a number of bookmakers tried for evasion of taxes, immunity from self-incrimination applies to declaring illegal income. This is not to say, of course, that any such income exists in this case.”

“Kid games,” said Donna, setting fire to a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Shit.”

The judge drummed his finger.

“Gentlemen, I have seldom seen a divorce action or its answer so ill prepared before court. I suggest you meet on your own and discuss this matter of the hundred thousand dollars and then come back here with smiling faces all in a row. We adjourn for now.”

A rabbit warren of offices in a short corridor led to the main hallway. On their way down it Klegg leaned close to his client and whispered: “By the way, what
did
you do with the money?”

“I buried it.”

“You're joking.”

Macklin looked at him flatly. The lawyer smoothed his tie.

“I forgot. You don't have a sense of humor.” They started downstairs. “Call me later. We've got to work out this thing.”

“What about the Fifth Amendment?”

“No one listens to the Supreme Court anymore. Call me.”

They parted in front of the building. Walking away, Macklin heard quick footsteps clicking on the sidewalk behind him. He whirled, closing his hand on the butt of the revolver under his coat.

“Go ahead. It'll save you fifty grand.”

It was Donna. He let go of the gun. “Where's young Daniel Webster?”

“I sent him back to his office. Where can we talk?”

“I can't get to the money, and even if I could, you'd still have to prove there is any.”

“It can be proved. But it isn't what I want to talk about.”

They stood watching each other with the sidewalk traffic trickling around them. Under the sun her jowls were more evident and he could see the little cracks around her eyes under the thick mascara. But the eyes themselves were still pretty.

“My car,” he said.

“Can't we go someplace for a drink?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't and you can't.”

“Since when do you care whether I drink or not?” she demanded.