Roses Are Dead (9 page)

“Corrections and updates. He no longer associates with the Lucarno woman, and this man Pinelli is dead, murdered in his shop after a struggle. That bit about going unarmed cost our last man his life. Our fault, I'm afraid. We try to stay abreast but the human factor is vexing.”

“It is infuriating and exhilarating. It is my specialty. Ah.” The maid came in and served their meal. Brown's assistant wrinkled his nose at the steaming patty on his plate. The man called Mantis inhaled, cheeks reddening with delight. “Meat loaf. A dish only Americans know how to prepare. You are a good host, Mr. Green.”

“Brown. Mr. Green is my associate.”

“Yes. Well, does it matter? We are three men with not a genuine name among us.”

“I was told you favored meat loaf. Anya disapproved, but she's incapable of laying a poor meal. We can talk freely in front of her, incidentally. She has been with us since the Nine Hundred Days.”

“Stalingrad, yes. I helped relieve it. There was not a dog or a cat or a rat to be found in the city after the siege was lifted.”

Brown raised his fork, only to lower it as the old man folded his hands and sank his collection of chins onto his chest with his eyes closed, moving his lips silently. The overhead light made blank circles of his eyeglasses. Green started and glanced at his superior, who shook his head.

Mantis stirred and became animated, unfolding his napkin and draping it over his swelling middle and eagerly cutting himself a morsel of meat loaf with the edge of his fork. “Superb! Just a bit heavy on seasoning, but it's better than any I've had since my last visit.”

“It is better than any you have had,” returned Anya in a heavy accent. The maid was tall and white-haired, with a nose that just missed being aristocratic and an old scar at the corner of her left eye. She finished serving and went back into the kitchen.

“America, it corrupts,” the old man sighed.

Brown ate only vegetables, having forsworn meat in 1962, and studied his guest. Mantis had spread out the dozen shots of Macklin he'd found in the folder and gazed at them on the tablecloth as he chewed. His shoulders were rounded under the green sweater and he was bald to his crown, from which he grew his dull gray hair straight down and cut it off square at his collar. He drew out another typewritten sheet and read it, his eyes light and humorous behind the bifocals.

“Who is this woman Moira King?”

“Right now she's our only link to Macklin except Howard Klegg, and the police are watching him too closely,” Brown said. “He moved out of his house in Southfield some weeks ago, and we haven't his current address. I doubt he's using it. Two separate attempts on his life have put him on his guard. He's a difficult man to kill at any time, but now he'll be doubly so.”

“I am your last best hope.”

“I wouldn't go so far as to say that.”

“Of course you would not.” The old man went on looking at him over the tops of his spectacles for a moment, then returned his attention to the sheet. “He has business with this Moira woman?”

“They are in contact.”

“They are friends, lovers, what?”

“There is a connection. That's all you require.”

Mantis slid everything back into the folder and held it out across the table. “I am not the man for you, Mr. White.”

“Brown.”

“You want one of these young lizard-eyed animals from Moscow, a robot in his twenties with his head full of Marx and Lenin that you can point like an arrow and know he will fly true and hit his target and obligingly destroy himself in the process. I would give you a list of names, but the list is always changing, as you can imagine. Instead I will thank you for the trip and for this excellent meat loaf—except for the rich seasoning—and go back home to Sofiya.”

Brown didn't take the folder. “What do you want, Mr. Mantis?”

“Just Mantis, please.” He laid the material between them on the table. “Information, Mr. Brown. Meat for the skeleton. When you have told everything I will decide how much I require and forget the rest. That I have attained this age in my profession is sufficient evidence of my powers of forgetfulness.”

“Insubordination!” shrilled Green.

“I am not a subordinate.” Mantis continued to watch Brown, who was staring thoughtfully at his plate.

“It's a clear violation of policy,” he said then. “But I have latitude.”

He spoke for ten minutes while the old man ate slowly and made no interruption.

When he was finished, Brown said, “How soon can you act?”

“A week perhaps.” Mantis selected a warm roll from the basket on the table and tore it in half.

“That's too long. Macklin may have made his move by then.”

“Not if he is the professional you have described. These matters require time. One does not …” He paused, made an exasperated face, and put down the roll half with which he had been sponging orange sauce from his plate. He bounced up and down on his chair, slapping an ample flank significantly while the others stared.

“Cowboy!” supplied Green finally.

“
Da
. One does not cowboy. It is this that has cost you two men. A man is not a target silhouette. If you are to penetrate his skin, you must wear it first. A week is the bare minimum. More if you want it to look like something other than murder.”

“That's not important,” said Brown.

“Excellent.” Mantis popped the rest of the soaked roll into his mouth. “You know, the more I eat of this the better I find it. Does Miss Anya serve seconds?”

Chapter Twelve

Oral sex, he was sick of it.

Cranking the Moviola a little faster, the man seated behind the glass-topped desk shook his head at the tiny naked figures jerking and bobbing through the machine. He could never figure out how a copulating couple managed to kiss so ardently after just having had their mouths full of each other's genitals. He stopped cranking and drew over his memo pad and wrote: “Sam—Whatever happened to the good old missionary position? FYI,
The Joy of Sex
, diagram G-12.”

He had never seen a copy of
The Joy of Sex
and didn't even know if that was how the diagrams were labeled. But the director would get the idea.

His intercom buzzed. He pressed the speaker button. “Yes, Angel.”

His secretary's name was Pamela. He never let her forget that she had once appeared in films under the name Angel Climax. Coolly she replied: “There's a Mr. Macklin here to see you. Shall I send him in?”

He felt his blood drain into his feet.

“Mr. Payne?”

“Tell him I'm not in. I'm on vacation.”

There was a pause. “He heard that, Mr. Payne.”

He looked around the office for any exits he might have missed in four years in residence. In his late forties, Jeff Payne wore muttonchop whiskers and had his graying blond hair tinted and teased into curls to cover the thin spots. He jogged, stopped eating a dish as soon as it turned up on the cancer list, counted his cholesterol, and only went out with women under twenty-five. He hadn't celebrated a birthday in eleven years. He was contemplating his third-floor window when Macklin came in.

“Oh, hello, Mac.” His eyes went automatically to his visitor's hands. They were empty. He felt himself starting to fall in on himself with relief.

“Jeff, I'm working for me now,” said the killer. “Even if I weren't, I wouldn't come at you through your secretary.”

“Hell, Mac, you didn't think I was afraid of that.” He started to rise but couldn't find the bones for it and stretched out his hand sitting. Then he remembered the other's aversion to the gesture and let it drop. His palm left a wet mark on the desk's glossy surface. “Have a seat. How've you been?”

Macklin remained standing. “How's the dirty picture game?”

“In another year I can sue you for accusing me of being in it. Hard-core is out. There's no money in stag parties and old men in raincoats. This is the age of cable and videocassettes, software and soft porn. More story, fewer orgasms. Today's hip married couple wants something to get the juices flowing after the kids are in bed, but they want to think they're being enriched too. Hell, I burned five miles of mask-and-black-socks footage last month to make room in the warehouse for the new stuff. Nowhere to lay it off.”

“Who's financing this big changeover?”

Payne, who had been warming to his own enthusiasm, felt the fear creep back in. “Is that why you're here? They always used to spot me at least a week before sending in the team.”

“No. I told you my business isn't with you. I need a line on a model or an actor or whatever you're calling them now. He appeared in some films locally a couple of years ago.”

“That's forever in this business.” The other relaxed a little. Not completely; he had been given his entire operation five years earlier for services rendered and rumor had it Macklin was responsible for the vacancy in management. “The burnout factor's pretty high when you have to get it up on demand.”

“He's between films, been there for sixteen months. He may be just getting back into it.”

“What's his name?”

“Roy Blossom.”

“Know his screen name?”

“What's that mean?”

“Johnny Wadd. Will Hung. Peter Prong. Back then they didn't exactly want their baptismal handles up in lights. I used to go with an actress called herself Joy Trail.”

“I didn't think to ask. Last time I saw one of the things the actors weren't using any names at all.”

“Those were good days. There wasn't any art to the things but they had a raw vitality you don't see today.”

“Jeff, I could stand here all day reminiscing about the golden age of skin flicks.”

Payne got the hint. He pressed the intercom button and asked Pamela to look up Roy Blossom in the talent file.

“I got a short here's got to be shot all over again,” said Payne while they were waiting, slapping the Moviola. “They're always going down on each other, plenty of wet close-ups. I'd have to unload it on a Woodward Avenue grindhouse to get anything back on my investment. Care to see?”

“No.”

They waited some more. When the intercom buzzed Payne jumped on it.

“No Blossom,” reported the secretary. “I've got a Bliss and three Blooms.”

“Thanks, Pam. Sorry, Mac.”

“Where else would he apply?”

“I can give you some names. But we're the biggest in town. If he's making the push to get back in, we'd have his résumé on file.”

“Okay. Thanks, Jeff. You didn't see me.”

“See who?”

After Macklin went out Payne gave the Moviola crank a few more turns, then pushed away the machine and sat back, feeling wrung out. He made a mental note to borrow some money to pay off his debts.

Macklin used a telephone inside a service station to dial Howard Klegg.

“I expected you to call before this,” said the lawyer.

“I've been busy. Anything yet on who signed the paper on me?”

“No. I told you, Boniface came up empty. How's it going with Moira?”

“I'm not into talking about my work with anyone who happens to ask.”

“Okay, okay. I've got a meeting in my office with your wife and her lawyer tentatively set for three this afternoon. Can you make it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Klegg paused. “Can you come early, say two?”

“How come?”

“Not over the phone.”

Macklin watched the fat woman cashier make change for a customer. “What's it going to be this time, a bomb? Or is that too run-of-the-mill?”

“For Christ's sake, Macklin!”

“Two o'clock.” He broke the connection.

He was there at one. The stairwell still smelled of burning trash and the fireproof paneling was scorched and bowed slightly outward. He climbed the three flights with his gun in his hand, making sure the hallway was deserted before he put away the weapon and swung the door wide.

Klegg was out to lunch. His secretary, a trim woman of forty with tawny hair caught with combs behind her ears and a white ruffled blouse under a tailored tan jacket, told Macklin he could go into his office and wait. Her face betrayed no memory of the commotion surrounding the killer's last visit. He let himself into the sanctum.

“Mr. Macklin.”

He tore the .38 out from under his sport coat. A black man with a graying fringe was sitting behind the lawyer's desk with his hands flat on top. He had gray eyes and wore a suit that fit him well.

“Put it up.”

This was a different voice. Macklin shifted his attention slightly left, to a revolver of the same make and caliber in a fat hand belonging to a broad man wearing a yellow sport coat in need of a press. His face was flat and pockmarked and he wore his red hair in a bowl cut.

Macklin said, “Uh-uh.”

The man behind the desk lifted one of his hands, palming a leather badge folder. “I'm Inspector Pontier. That's Sergeant Lovelady, my partner. When Klegg made the appointment for two I said to the sergeant you'd be here at one. We've been waiting since noon. This is why your city income tax is so high. I don't guess you have a permit for that gun.”

Macklin said nothing. He and Lovelady watched each other. The sergeant's eyes might have been two more pits with paint on them.

The black man gestured with the folder before putting it away. His partner hesitated, then elevated his barrel. Macklin kept his level.

“You First,” Pontier said. “It's a game most of us quit playing after we get our first hard-on. The cops and robbers business is just grown-up kid stuff. It's okay, Sergeant. Mr. Macklin is a professional. He doesn't shoot police officers.”

After a space the sergeant returned his weapon to a clip under his left arm. Macklin hung on another moment before he started to feel silly, like the only person with his clothes on in a nudist camp, and leathered his own. Pontier spoke again.