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  Roses Are Dead

  A Peter Macklin Thriller

  Loren D. Estleman

  To my brother, Charles

  Chapter One

  Goldstick thought, here’s my partnership.

  With the marinated grace of a professional pallbearer, the young attorney held the door for the frumpy woman in the dark skirt and beige silk blouse and drifted past her to slide out the chair on the clients’ side of the desk. When she sat down, a small triangle of bare flesh showed at her waist where she’d neglected a button. Wads of Kleenex boiled out of her shoulder bag when it touched the floor. But it was an expensive bag.

  From behind the desk he liked what he saw even better. In the puffy face framed by its horseshoe of gray-streaked blond hair he read anger and the ache for revenge. It carried down to her hasty dress and the solid way she sat, as if she were filling a notch in a fort wall. This one wasn’t going to go gooey on him at the bargaining table and accept the first offer made by her husband’s attorney. It shaped up to be a profitable relationship, one an ambitious young barrister with a Galahad flair could ride to a slot on the company letterhead.

  He touched the razor point of a hard pencil to the page of notes his secretary had taken over the telephone. “Your husband’s name is Peter Macklin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’ve been married seventeen years?”

  “As of last May.”

  “You have a son named Roger, age sixteen?”

  “Seventeen next month.”

  The next month was November. Goldstick did some mental arithmetic and decided not to press the matter. He was of a generation that was always a little surprised to learn that it had not invented sex before marriage. “You’re seeking a divorce on what grounds?”

  “Well, the legal terminology is your department. But I’m sick of being married to the son of a bitch.”

  “Breakdown of marriage,” he wrote in the margin of the sheet before him.

  “May I ask who recommended us to you?”

  “My neighbor, Marge Donahue. You handled both her divorces and she owns a Mercedes.”

  He loved it. Aloud he said: “The object, of course, is not to make you wealthy, although your support is imperative. We’re chiefly interested in seeing that you receive fair compensation for the years you invested in the partnersh—the marriage.”

  “Mr. Goldstick.” She finished lighting a cigarette and spoiled the immaculate brass ashtray on her side of the desk with the burned match. “I’m chiefly interested in taking the bastard for every cent he has. You’re chiefly interested in getting your cut. Let’s get that straight before we both climb in up to our chins.”

  He watched her for a moment. She looked like a woman in her forties but was probably younger, given the statistics involving parents of teenaged children. Her eyes were light and pretty in a face going to fat and showing the beginnings of whiskey welts. Take off fifteen pounds, cut back on the chain cocktails; he had seen the transformation take place enough times once the pressure of a bad marriage was released. He asked some more questions, not paying much attention to the answers, letting the rhythm lull them into the conspiratorial atmosphere so crucial to a successful divorce action. There would be plenty of time later for his secretary to get the stuff down.

  “What does your husband do for a living, Mrs. Macklin?” he asked.

  “He’s a killer.”

  It took him a moment to assimilate the answer. By then he had already written it down. He read it and looked up. “I’m afraid you misunder—Do you mean to say he beats you?” His inner cash register chimed.

  “No, I mean he kills people for a living. He’s a killer for hire.”

  He smiled tentatively. Her face didn’t move. Smoke curled in front of it. “You’re serious?”

  “Ask the widows of his victims.”

  “A hit man.”

  “A killer.”

  He nodded, made two marks with the pencil, and sat back, tickling his ear with the eraser. “And what is his gross income?”

  Jack Dowd drove into the little lot behind the apartment complex in Southfield, spotted the silver Cougar, and parked two slots down.

  He didn’t get out of the car. At forty-six, with twenty-two years in the investigation business, he knew better than to accost a subject at his door, on enemy ground with only one way to run when the job was finished. What you did was you followed him to neutral territory and served the papers there. Preferably with a fence to jump over afterward and a supply of witnesses handy, not so much to confirm success as to save yourself a severe beating like the one he had drawn his first week on the job from a Chrysler dock foreman. The court had awarded Dowd twenty-five hundred dollars in damages (someone else had served those papers), and he had given no one else the opportunity to be sued by him.

  The weather was cooling, but the sunlight refracting through the windshield was drowsily warm. He cranked down the window to avoid succumbing, tilted his porkpie hat forward, and slid a fresh toothpick between his lips from the pocket where he used to keep cigarettes. This had the effect of shooting his jaw and bulldogging his potato-lumpy face. It was how he had posed for the picture he ran with his display in the Yellow Pages.

  After two hours the mark came out of the building in jeans and a white knit shirt and got into the Cougar and drove out of the lot. Dowd took a second to compare the man’s features with the photograph he’d been given. An ordinary face, a little jagged under a middle-aged quilt of tiredness and worry, hairline creeping back from a sharp widow’s peak. The investigator gave the car two blocks, then pulled out behind it.

  The Cougar was fast, its driver the kind that seldom misses a light. Dowd had to knock a piece off the red at Eleven Mile Road to keep up. The Cougar cruised along at forty-five for another minute, then made an abrupt lane change and turned into a mall at Twelve Mile. Dowd started to follow. A blue hatchback coming up on his right blatted its horn and he swung back into his lane. He squirted ahead to the intersection, made a right, and came in the back way. Meanwhile he’d lost sight of his quarry.

  Prowling the lot, he worried. Getting shaken was nothing. It was the risk you ran when you tailed someone solo, and there were always other chances. But he didn’t like thinking that maybe his man had made him. He knew nothing about this one beyond his name, Macklin, and license plate number and that he was self-employed. Usually he insisted on more information, but this particular legal firm paid a healthy retainer for the privilege of playing close to the buttons and Dowd had no wish to work past fifty. Still, the older a man got the more aware he became of the crazies around him.

  But when he found the car, parked a quarter mile from the mall entrance with its nose pointed toward the driveway leading out, he stopped worrying and backed into a vacant space across the aisle to wait some more.

  The wait was much shorter this time. When Macklin appeared at the head of the aisle carrying a large paper sack in the crook of his arm, Dowd got out and started toward him, eyes on the other end, hurrying his gait a little like a busy man on an errand. Which he was, but not in the way he wanted his subject to think. As they drew near each other, Macklin’s gaze flicked over him casually and moved away.

  They were almost abreast when Dowd reached two fingers into the inside pocket of his jacket for the summons. Instantly that wrist was seized in an iron grip and he was spun and his own arm was jerked across his throat with his elbow under his chin, and something stiff found his right kidney. He was dimly aware of loose oranges and food cans rolling across the pavement from the sack the man had dropped. Prope
lled between parked cars by his assailant, he stumbled over one of the items.

  A woman in her thirties pushing a cart down the next aisle with a small child in the seat glanced at the two men, then stepped up her pace, staring straight ahead.

  “I’m unarmed!” Dowd gasped.

  A pause, then the object was withdrawn from his kidney and an empty hand came around in front of him and prowled over his chest and abdomen, paying special attention to the pocket the investigator had been reaching for. It slid inside the jacket and drew out the fold of fine-printed paper. The man’s breathing was close to Dowd’s ear and he heard the whispered words “dissolution of marriage.”

  A further search uncovered Dowd’s credentials and honorary sheriff’s star. Then he was released with a shove. He clawed at the door handle of a battered van to keep from falling. When he turned, Macklin gave him back his badge and ID. Something bulged above the waistband of his jeans under the white shirt.

  “Okay, I’m served,” he said. “Get out.”

  There was an unspoken or in the speech that the investigator didn’t wait around to hear. He adjusted his hat and walked back to his car, leaning forward on the balls of his feet with his shoulders hunched, still feeling the thing that had been prodding his back.

  A loud bang shattered the peace of the parking lot and he screamed. Two lanes over, a supermarket bag boy in an orange apron and leatherette bow tie stared at him curiously, then resumed slamming abandoned shopping carts into the train he was pushing. Dowd started moving again. The toothpick he had been chewing was gone. He hoped he hadn’t swallowed it.

  Getting into the car he thought, Four years to retirement is too long.

  Peter Macklin waited until Dowd’s car was in the street before looking again at the paper in his hand. He read it all the way through, then refolded it and doubled it and thrust it into his hip pocket. He scowled at the scattered groceries. He hadn’t wanted them, had only used the shopping trip as an excuse to lure out the man he had seen watching his car in the lot behind his apartment house.

  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 freelancer’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 t
o 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?”