Roses Are Dead (7 page)

“I never stopped.”

“Don't try to tell me you still love me, you son of a bitch. If you do I'll take you for everything. I won't stop at half.”

“I don't know that I ever did love you. But so many habits are fatal in my work you tend to hang on to the ones that aren't. I'll give you a lift home if that's where you're going.”

“The long way.”

She watched him check the Cougar over and let him open the door on the passenger side for her. He hadn't done that in ten years and she hadn't expected it in eight. They seemed to have fallen back into their premarital pattern in every respect but one. When they were moving up Woodward, she said, “I always liked this car. I want it.”

“It's yours.”

“Forget it. I'll take my part of the hundred.”

“I want a less conspicuous car. I'll tell Klegg and he can work it out with your guy.”

“Klegg doesn't look like a divorce lawyer.”

“Goldstick looks like a lounge singer.”

They passed through two traffic signals in silence. Lone dry leaves jiggled on the naked branches of trees planted in boxes on the sidewalks. The gutters were full of those already fallen.

“Mac, it's Roger.”

“They bust him for drugs finally?” He had given up on their son months ago.

“No, he's off them. Working on it, anyway. He took your advice and went to that clinic you told him about. They locked him in. It was bad and they told me I saw the best of it.”

“I didn't think he had it in him.”

“He's only just stopped talking about killing himself.”

“So what's the problem?”

“Now he wants to kill other people. For a living.”

He was picking his way around a refrigerator truck double-parked on the right with its lights flashing. When they were back in their lane he glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead through the windshield.

“I wonder where he got the idea,” she said.

“He tell you that?”

“I caught him playing with a gun in his room. He's been living at home since you moved out. He said he bought it off a man in a bar. When I told him he couldn't stay under my roof and keep a gun too he said that was fine with him, he'd soon have enough to buy a place of his own just as nice. Nicer. He said you did all right.”

“He's just a kid.”

“He's almost seventeen. How old were you?”

“Maybe he was just having fun.”

“Not him. He's like you that way.”

“He hates my guts.”

“Obviously not, or he wouldn't be thinking of making your work the family profession. Maybe you can talk to him where I can't. You're his father.”

“That doesn't cut anything with him. You give them a roof and three squares a day and put clothes on them and go into hock seeing them through school and it's not good enough anymore. Now you have to play baseball with them, go to father-and-son picnics. Be a pal. My dad never was, but I respected him.”

“Yeah, and you turned out just swell.” She dug a loose cigarette out of her purse and punched the dash lighter.

“He at home now?”

“He's staying at Lonnie Kimball's apartment on Lahser. They went to school together before Roger dropped out. You going to talk to him?”

“I've got too many other things to do right now. Maybe later.”

“Later might be too late.”

He said nothing. The lighter popped out and she lit up.

“Crack the window, okay? I like to see.”

She lowered the glass on her side two inches. “If you talk to him today I'll tell Goldstick to forget the hundred grand.”

“Roger isn't worth it.”

“You're not his mother.”

He swung left onto McNichols. “I'll see him tonight. I've got a full schedule all day.”

“Things to do, people to kill.”

Neither of them spoke the rest of the way to Southfield. Macklin dropped her off in front of their old home and took off with a squirt of rubber as soon as she slammed the passenger door. Minutes later he felt silly, but by then he was halfway back to Detroit.

Chapter Nine

NAME:
Roy Blossom

AGE:
27 (approx.)

HEIGHT:
5′ 10″ (approx.)

WEIGHT:
125–130

HAIR:
Blond

EYES:
Blue

SCARS:
1½″ bet. index and median fingers right hand, appendectomy, right side abdomen

CHARACTERISTICS:
Head leans left, toes point out walking

FAMILY AND BIRTHPLACE:
Tamaqua, Pennsylvania; father coal miner, mother's occupation unknown

OCCUPATION:
Handyman, actor pornographic films, male model, mined coal while attending school

HOBBIES:

Seated at the tiny glass-topped secretary in his Harper Woods motel room, Macklin stared at the blank space on the neatly printed sheet before him, then wrote in: “Killing.”

He flung down the pencil and read the information. Again he felt the sore lack of an efficient organization behind him. True, toward the end of his association with Boniface the background team had begun to get sloppy and the information nearly as sketchy as this, but at least they were professionals and the data they collected could be depended upon. He hated having to rely on the poor memory of a frightened woman who didn't even know where her tormentor—and Macklin's prey—was living.

Their second meeting had taken place on Belle Isle, where Macklin and Moira King had walked past the fountain and along the tourist paths while she twisted her hands on the strap of her purse and massaged her brain for useful details about Roy Blossom. She had explained that upon returning home from their first meeting she was seized with the certainty that someone had been inside her apartment in her absence. Nothing had been taken, but some small items were out of place and there was a smell about the rooms that told her they had been invaded. She had no doubt as to who it was and had immediately signed and mailed the two documents Macklin had given her. His subsequent call had been forwarded to a friend's house where she was staying. She was afraid to remain in her apartment.

“Has anyone been following you besides Blossom?” he had begun, without greeting.

“No, I—who else would be?”

“Did you tell anyone where we were going to meet yesterday?”

“No. Is something the matter?”

“Just that I haven't breathed safe air since I first heard your name. I hope you're telling me the truth. Being a woman doesn't buy you anything. It didn't with four others.”

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “I went to Uncle Howard to get Roy off my back and all I got was another Roy. Leave me alone, Mr. Macklin. Just leave me, period.” She hung up.

He had called her back and soothed her and made the second appointment. Pegging the receiver, he had wondered if he would have bothered if the bulk of his hundred thousand dollars wasn't still hidden in his apartment where he couldn't get to it.

Now, fresh from the second meeting, he laid down the sheet containing the bare material on Blossom and picked up the photograph she had given him. It was two years old, scuffed and creased from many months spent rattling around forgotten in a drawer, but the details were sharp. It was an arrogant face, good-looking in a fussed-over way, with the lowered lids and the curled lip Macklin knew so well, having worn a similar expression in the early days of his career. He marveled that he had lived long enough to grow out of it. He committed the important features to memory, tore the picture and the hand-printed sheet into long strips, and set fire to them in the big glass ashtray the motel provided. The flame towered briefly, then abated, the strips darkening and curling. He broke up the ashes with the end of the pencil and dumped them into the midget wastebasket by his knee.

He counted six hundred dollars out of the thousand in his wallet and stashed three hundred in each breast pocket in case he lost the wallet, which he returned to his pants. The money was operating expenses provided by Moira King against the power of attorney. Then he put the room key in the ashtray for the maid to find.

From the drawer in the bedstand he scooped the Smith & Wesson in its holster and clipped it to his belt under his coat. Wearing it made him feel oddly vulnerable. He had never before carried a gun he had used once, had always been careful to ditch it, knowing he could lay hands on another without a history for the next assignment. Lugging around a weapon traceable to a dead Chinese in Westland was a one-way ticket to life in Jackson. But going unarmed was even more dangerous in his present situation, and he couldn't afford to go back to Treat for a replacement. Just going there the first time had been a risk. He had lost count of all the ironclad rules he had broken since visiting Klegg's office two days before.

Chapter Ten

Brown nudged his companion, who lurched forward to help the man with his suitcase. The man was one of the first out of the tunnel that led from the jet airliner into the concourse, thin and gray-faced in a tight black overcoat that reached below his knees and tinted glasses in the shadow of a gray felt hat with a broad brim. He looked as much like a killer as a killer could look. But before Brown's assistant could reach him, a fat woman with red-dyed hair wearing a fur coat swept past and threw her arms around the man's neck. He took off his hat to kiss her and they walked away toward the escalators, hugging each other's hips. Brown shrugged at his companion's dismay, uncorking a broad Slavic smile.

It was a big plane and they waited a long time while it emptied, stirring themselves for two more false alarms before the pilot came out followed by the copilot and three stewardesses. When an obvious plainclothes detective emerged handcuffed to a black woman, the two waiting men turned away.

“He must have missed his connection,” Brown said.

“Inspires confidence.” His assistant was a narrow American with deep sideburns and a weakness for orange neckties.

“After two failures I assume nothing.”

“Mr. Brown?”

The pair turned. A man approaching sixty stood at their end of the tunnel, uncovering an impressive set of false teeth in an anxious grin. He had a big strapped leather suitcase on either side of him and his baggy overcoat gaped to expose a paunch gobleted in a green sweater. He wore black-rimmed glasses with round lenses and a maroon fur Tyrolean hat square on his head with a yellow feather in the band. His round face glistened pinkly.

“Mr. Brown?” he said again. He had a thick, furred accent.

Loath to ask the obvious question, Brown said, “Yes?”

The man gave a little pleased grunt and seized both suitcases and wobbled forward and set them down again, thrusting out a soft moist hand with bitten nails. “Dreadfully sorry to have kept you waiting, but I had my bags in the rear compartment and was forced to let everyone else pass down the aisle before I could go back for them.” He wiggled the hand, as if the other hadn't noticed it. “I'm Mantis.”

While the two shook hands a telephoto lens with a range 310 feet longer than any on the market blinked, freezing the pair amiably for the ages. The man behind it worked the shutter twice more, then melted back into the crowd around the metal detector and thumbed up a button on the lapel of his topcoat, murmuring into the grid pattern.

“Intertrap three, this is Intertrap two. Call Intertrap one and tell him contact has been made repeat contact has been made. Am continuing surveillance. Out.”

The two men he had photographed were moving up the concourse, the third man struggling along behind with the newcomer's suitcases. The man with the camera waited until they passed, then hoisted the strap over one shoulder and fell into step several yards behind them, pulling a face at the silly kid things a grown man had to say and do in his business.

Sergeant Lovelady entered the office without knocking and found Inspector Pontier on the telephone again. The sergeant was retiring in fourteen months and most of his memories of his superior would be of him in his office with the receiver screwed to his ear. Lovelady spoiled every detective show his wife watched by carping about all these upper-level TV dicks who ran around trading lead with bad guys and never did any paperwork. He tipped the contents of his manila folder out onto Pontier's desk.

The inspector went on talking and fanned out the three black-and-white blowup photographs. He finished the conversation and hung up. “What's this?”

“Three possibles on those eyewitness descriptions at Klegg's building. Lyle Canaday, two arrests extortion, one conviction ADW. Philip Vernor, one suspended sentence aggravated assault. And Peter Macklin.”

“Macklin, Macklin.” Pontier stared at the third photo, a grainy shot taken with a long lens.

“FBI sent that one. Wait'll you see what's on the back.”