Roses Are Dead (18 page)

Actually she had lost just a little over a pound, but her cheap bathroom scales measured in twos, and when the indicator cleared a notch she rounded off the results. She looked slimmest in blue, and she was wearing that color dress tonight, straight up and down without a belt or any other kind of tie or ornament to interrupt the clean line and call attention to her various bulges. With Gerald's encouragement she was reawakening the fashion and practical dressing sense she had had before things got so bad with Mac and Roger that she had stopped caring.

She sipped at her wine. It started out a sip, but as the familiar warmth spread through her system she went ahead and drank off half the glass. Hurriedly she replenished it so Gerald wouldn't notice. She set the bottle back down an instant before he reentered with two dishes balanced on each forearm busboy fashion. He arranged the dishes on the table and took off his apron and held Donna's chair while she sat down.

“What's this green stuff in the cottage cheese?”

“Wintergreen.” He sat down opposite her and unfolded his napkin.

“That another of your mother's recipes?”

“Not exactly. Hers called for green onions. But she was married to Dad and didn't have to worry about her breath.”

“The soup's cold.”

“It's supposed to be. It's gazpacho.”

“Gesundheit.”

“Funny. Try it.”

She took a spoonful, caught herself blowing on it, and swallowed it. After a second she glared at him and grabbed for her wine. This time she emptied the glass.

“Now I know why you chilled it,” she gasped.

“Gazpacho takes some getting used to. Eat your steak before it gets cold.” He picked up the wine bottle and refilled her glass.

The steak was delicious and she told him so. He executed a little bow sitting down, like a boy at a dancing class. She said, “You were very good in the judge's chambers today.”

“I had to be. Flutter seems slow, but he's like a water moccasin if you try to slip something past him. I was impressed with Klegg. You're normally better off hiring a supermarket bag boy to plead a divorce case than a lawyer whose specialty is something else. But he was like a Vegas veteran in there. Your husband isn't so dumb.”

“He isn't dumb at all. Some people think he is because he's always so serious. It isn't that he doesn't get the jokes; it's just that he doesn't find them funny.”

“He isn't what I expected.”

“What were you expecting, a bouncer's build and a broken nose?”

“Something like that. He really isn't very intimidating. He's like a salesman or a junior executive that got stalled.”

“I've seen the blood run out of men's faces when they recognized him.”

“How many people has he killed?”

“I never asked. I didn't know for sure he'd killed any until recently. I suspected it for years, but I didn't want to bring it up. You know, like when someone close to you is dying. You're afraid if you talk about it, it'll be true. You know it's true, but there's always that little doubt and you hang on to it.”

He topped off their glasses. “Didn't he ever talk about it?”

“Never. It's how he got to be thirty-nine, doing what he does. He was doing it when we met. I'm sure of that now, though I didn't want to admit it when we were living together. What kind of wife stays married to a man almost seventeen years without knowing what he does to support them?”

“What tipped you?”

“He was always going off on business trips or working late at the office. Whenever I called the office, his secretary said he was in a meeting and couldn't be disturbed. For a long time I thought he was playing around on me. He was, but that wasn't the reason.”

She pushed her plate away and picked up her glass. “I don't know, it just sort of seeped in on me. Sometimes he'd be gone for weeks. Touring his company's branch offices, he said, helping them get organized. Once it was more than a month, and then I got a call saying he was in Detroit Receiving Hospital with a gunshot wound. They said it was an accident. He was hunting in the Irish Hills with a customer who mistook him for a pheasant. He had tubes sticking out all over. I didn't even know he was in the area. He was supposed to be in Chicago. That was in 1972.”

“The big gang war,” Gerald said.

“I didn't know anything about it. It was only after Mac got out of the hospital that I started paying attention to that kind of thing. Somewhere in there, I don't remember where exactly, I knew. Not
knew
knew, as in having evidence. But as in knowing.” She lit a cigarette. She didn't remember getting it out or putting it in her mouth.

“Is that when you started drinking?”

“That came later. I didn't drink at all before then. I didn't like the stuff. Hell, I still don't. But hot fudge sundaes won't get you through the long days and nights alone when your husband's out there killing people.”

“I think that's an excuse.”

“A damn good one.”

“I mean, I think you're dramatizing yourself. It hurt you more to find out your husband was keeping secrets from you. I think if he went on doing what he did and told you about it, you'd still be happily married. Give or take one mistress.”

She drank some wine. “You've been hanging around court-appointed psychiatrists too much.”

“Maybe.”

“I don't think I was happily married anyway. We only got married because I was pregnant. I thought I loved him later, but that was just being used to having him around. Roger's more like him than either of them will admit and that never made it any easier.”

“You love your son, though, don't you?”

“Same thing, I got used to having him around. Not even that, now. I was a rotten mother. Mac wasn't around when Roger needed him to be, and I spoiled him silly.”

“Isn't that what mothers do?”

“You better not let the feminists catch you talking like that,” she said.

“The feminists aren't here. You are.”

“He got mixed up in dope and I was too stupid to see it until it was too late. Or too drunk. He went sour long before that, though. Now he wants—well, forget what he wants. Say I messed up all the way around. I wouldn't have had to if Mac had used the house for something more than just home base.”

He was looking at her. “What's Roger want?”

“Forget it, I said. I talk too much. Mac always said I talk too much. I thought it was because he hardly ever talked at all. But since he moved out I haven't been able to stop my mouth from working. How about another slug of wine?”

“You've had enough. He wants to be like his father, right? A killer.”

“Let it go, Gerald.”

After a moment he sat back. “You know, those things aren't doing your heart any good.”

She glanced at the cigarette in her hand, took a puff. “We're all killers. Some of us just like to practice on ourselves.”

“No, they're a special breed. You have to be born missing something to go into that kind of work.”

“We're all just meat and muscle and bone to someone like Mac.” She put out the cigarette, smiled, and laid her hand atop the lawyer's on the table. “I didn't come here to talk about him.”

He smiled. “Dessert's in the oven.”

“Let it burn.”

“What am I, just a sex object?”

“I wouldn't say ‘just.'”

God, she was listening to herself.

He sat there a little longer, puffing up. Then he got up and held her chair.

Later, in bed, Goldstick lay next to Donna, looking at the darkened ceiling. He couldn't get over the fact that he was sleeping with a hit man's wife. It was better than oysters.

Chapter Twenty-four

It was past dark when the driver of the last hook-and-ladder turned over its engine, letting it warm up for a minute before gears shifted and the big truck swung around in a wide arc, its headlamps slicing through darkness like a sickle of light. Gravel crunched and it pulled out into the road and changed gears again and throbbed away, no siren.

For what seemed a long time afterward Macklin heard the last man walking around above, something making a chinking noise in rhythm with the footsteps. Handcuffs on a belt. Macklin was sure the man was alone. There was no conversation, and from the sound of things he wasn't making any special effort to be quiet.

The noise stopped. After a second a pebble rattled down the foundation wall, coming to rest on the ground within a foot of where Macklin lay. The man was standing right above him. He willed himself still. If a flashlight came on, a spotlight, he would play dead. If the man came down to investigate … He felt the weight of the 10-millimeter pistol lying against his right kidney.

Silence stretched. Then he heard a short zipping noise and then the sound of water running. Something pattered the leaves nearby. An acrid smell came to his nostrils.

Jesus Christ, he thought. I can only go uphill from here.

When it was over the man walked away. For a while Macklin didn't hear anything. Then a car door slammed. It sounded like a gunshot and he jerked involuntarily. A starter ground twice and an engine caught with a roar. Tires turned, zinging a little on flattened grass, then bit into earth. Macklin heard the car stop at the end of the overgrown driveway. The frame rattled a little as it bumped onto the road. He lay listening until the engine noise faded off into the distance. Then he stirred, flexing his muscles one by one, the legs first. He clenched his teeth before trying his stomach muscles, but his ribs held. He was just getting over banging them up the last time. His arms were okay too, a little sore, especially his left, which had folded under when he struck ground, pulling the bicep. He got his hands flat on the earth and pushed himself to his knees, stood. Some miscellaneous scrapes and bruises; he'd be sore later. He'd caught his right jacket sleeve on a thistle or something, leaving a three-cornered rip below the elbow.

He groped around until he found the steps that led up and out of the cellar. They were wooden and going to sawdust and splinters, but he tested his weight on each step, skipping a few when they started to sink. At the top he stopped to take in cool night air tainted with the stench of charred grass and scorched metal. There was no moon. A light hung here and there on the horizon like peaches on a dying tree. He could see his breath in the starlight.

He didn't bother to look at what was left of his car. It would stay there, a blackened shell sitting on wheels with shreds of melted rubber clinging to them, until a wrecking service with a county contract came to tow it away. Instead he walked down to the road, leaving open the gate, its wooden frame hacked to splinters by a fireman's axe. He started on foot in the direction of the main highway.

Something thudded the ground in front of him in the darkness, scattering stones. He unholstered the pistol in a single fluid movement that made him think of a movie cowboy even in the act, thumbed off the safety in the same motion, and fired. Something squealed and was silent. After a moment he stepped forward and lifted the thing by its tail.

Casting the carcass into the brush at the side of the road, he thought: Getting pissed on and killing possums, what next?

Ring, ring.

Standing in the light of an exposed telephone box on a corner three blocks from the house where he was staying, Roger counted the rings. At eleven he pegged the receiver. His dimes clunked down into the pan and he scooped them out. It was just 6:08 by the watch his mother had given him for his sixteenth birthday, which he had just got out of hock. He said what the hell and tried the number again. When no one answered after six rings, he gave up and went home.

The house was dark. The old lady had gone to bed. She always did, just about the time she would have to turn on a light. It pissed him off, because if he turned one on to get upstairs to his room in the attic she would see it under her bedroom door and give him a lecture about sharing the Detroit Edison bill that month. Jesus, it was just a few pennies. Groping his way up the stairs, he bet himself for about the thousandth time that she was one of these old bags who starved to death and then when the cops came to check out the place, they found a quarter of a million socked away in jars and cans all over the house. He'd thought of searching the place but she slept with one eye open for a goddamn light and never went out during the day. He did the shopping for her. She gave him money for it, fives and tens all wadded up in her apron pockets, and he never saw where it came from. Social Security, probably, only she never went out to cash a check. Well, she'd of cashed this month's already. And food stamps, Christ, she should see the looks he got from cashiers and people standing in line, women with their checkbooks out to buy a carton of milk, when he put the stamps on the counter. Like he was picking their pocket. Money wasn't everything, okay, but not having any was sure nothing.

When he was inside his room he closed the door and stuffed a couple of old T-shirts under the crack so he could switch on the light, a string attached to a bare bulb that swung from the ceiling, casting lariats of shadow up the walls until it came to rest. His quarters consisted of a mattress on an iron bedstead and a warped clapboard wardrobe and painted child's bureau with a mirror in need of resilvering. The ceiling came down at a forty-five-degree angle over the bed. He had bumped his head on it twice the first night but he was getting used to it now. The window at one end of the long room was old and discolored and he had to press his forehead against the glass anytime he wanted to see out. He didn't want to, though, after the first time. He had a breathtaking view of the old lady's wash hanging on the line in the backyard and the puddle where she threw out her dishwater because the pipes were always clogging up.

There were two magazines on the bureau, an
American Rifleman
and a
Guns & Ammo
he had bought as soon as he found out there was no TV, but he didn't feel like reading. He looked at himself in the mirror for a little, at his bad complexion, and then he slid the bureau away from the wall and knelt and reached a cloth-wrapped bundle out of an old squirrel-hole he had discovered the first day. He didn't trust the old lady not to search his wardrobe and drawers and probably under the bed while he was out. He unwound the cloth from the .22 semiautomatic and after admiring its racy profile for a moment he stuck it barrel-down into his right hip pocket and faced the mirror with his feet spread and his hands hanging in front of his thighs. Then he scooped out the pistol and drew down on his reflection, snapping on the empty chamber.