Roses Are Dead (19 page)

“Gotcha, fucker,” he said.

No, too gung-ho. Something with more style.

“Too bad, brother.”

Yeah, better. He tried it a couple of times, dry-firing the .22 on “brother,” until something thumped the floor under his feet. It was the old lady rapping her bedroom ceiling with a broomstick, the one she carried around inside the house for protection in case someone broke in. Roger rewrapped the gun and put it back into its hole, moved the bureau back in front of it, and spent the rest of the evening reading a long article about the new lightweight .45 the army was developing. Then he switched off the light and lay on the bed, mouthing, “Too bad, brother,” and grinning at the feel of it in his mouth.

Fucking computer really was down this time.

Randall Burlingame replaced the receiver on the telephone-intercom, not gently, and switched on his desk lamp to glower at the Xerox copy of the West German passport on his desk, at the cherub's face with its high bald forehead and Coke-bottle glasses, an overweight Lionel Atwill, only more amiable-looking. The name underneath was Ingram Wanze, no middle name or initial. Birthplace: Cologne, West Germany. He was as German as a Russian wolfhound.

It was dark outside the window. The cityscape across the river had lost its shape, taking on skeletal configurations made by lighted windows stacked one on top of another, describing cruciforms and inverted pyramids and random letters against many coats of black. On this side, Burlingame's window was the only one showing light on his floor. It was the latest he'd worked in weeks. The passport copy had come through finally from Customs just before quitting time and the computer had shut down just as he was requesting file information on Ingram Wanze. He was missing a double birthday celebration for his daughter and granddaughter, and he was a little afraid to call home again to say he'd be even later than expected. Although Elizabeth, his wife of thirty-three years, never shouted and seldom showed anger in any of the conventional ways, she had a way of saying “I understand” that made him feel as if he had just flashed an orphanage for girls. He was about to call downstairs again when the telephone rang.

“Working, sir,” said a young male voice on the other end.

“Okay, let me know as soon as something comes through.”

“Er, we lost the input when it went down. Could you repeat the information?”

He ground his teeth on the stem of his cold pipe. “Never mind, I'll feed it through up here.”

He went through Louise Gabel's domain, deserted now, her typewriter covered, and down the hall to the office of his assistant. They hardly ever spoke. Ten years Burlingame's senior and awaiting retirement, he had come as part of a package with ten new field agents the bureau director had requested from Washington to expand the local force and replace personnel lost to resignations and transfers. He would come in at noon, stretch out on his sofa, and go home at two if someone remembered to wake him. His secretary had mastered Rubik's Cube and was taking a mail-order course in general accounting.

Without turning on a light Burlingame sat down at the computer console behind his assistant's desk and flipped the toggle, bathing himself in green illumination from the screen. Theoretically the instrument was his, but this was as close to his own office as he would allow one to be installed. Having apprenticed in Records during the Korean war, he had spent too much of his youth memorizing columns of information to surrender his autonomy to a microchip. He entered the code, tolerated the slangy printout greeting some smartass had programmed into the central unit, fed in his request from memory, and sat back to unscrew his pipe and run a straightened paper clip through it during processing. In less than thirty seconds the first line of data came tripping out across the screen, then the next and the next, left to right, faster than a human could type, little green-glowing letters machine-gunning across his vision. He sat there holding the halves of his pipe while the information rolled past, row upon row, stack upon stack, like a roll call of the dead.

Which in truth it was.

The guy that used to be on
Star Trek
, wearing a kinky wig these days and a blue uniform that fit him like the foil on a stick of chewing gum, was under hack for shooting a supposedly unarmed suspect, that old saw, but instead of suspending him or placing him on restricted duty his watch commander had assigned him to the same case. Unreal.

The telephone rang in the dining room. He let his wife get it. Jesus, the
Star Trek
guy had already creamed three parked cars in this one chase. He wanted to watch long enough to see if the guy had any paperwork to fill out after. It would be, let's see, one copy of the report for the file, one for I.A.D., one for each insurance company, that's times three—no, four, there goes a civilian ‘Vette caught in the intersection—Christ, he'd qualify for a disability for writer's cramp.

“George, it's that Sergeant Love-something.”

He scowled at the screen—shot of the police cruiser's undercarriage shooting up over a steep hill, six hundred dollars' suspension replacement right there, one more copy for the department's insurer—and got up out of the easy chair to accept the receiver from his wife.

“Thought you went home.” He leaned against the dining room arch, watching the chase.

“I'm working the double, Christmas coming up,” cracked Sergeant Lovelady's voice. “Girl in Traffic just finished running a plate number on a total out in the country, torch job, probable stolen. Her husband's attached to Homicide. She recognized the owner's name and hustled it up here. I thought you'd want to hear it.”

Nice close-up of a windshield shattering, cut to a commercial. Pontier turned his back to the screen. “Reel it out.”

“Belongs to a two-year-old Mercury Cougar, silver. Registered to Peter Macklin, 10052 Beech Road, Southfield.”

“Who called it in?”

“County sheriff's deputy out there name of Connor. That's Charlie Only Needle Needle—”

“Yeah, yeah. You call him?”

“Not yet.”

“Well?”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Then call me.”

“'Kay.”

He hung up, shaking his head. When he got back to his chair, the
Star Trek
guy, in civvies now, was having a beer with his partner, who looked like a white Michael Jackson. It was still daylight out. Pontier decided in California each cop got his own secretary to fill out the reports and wondered what he was doing watching this crap while
Mr. Ed
was playing on HBO.

Chapter Twenty-five

“How was the party?”

“Good, the part I got in on anyhow. Answer these any way that seems right.” Burlingame deposited in front of his secretary all but a few of the letters she had had waiting for him.

In fact he had gotten home the night before just in time to kiss his daughter and granddaughter good-bye as they were leaving and help his wife clean up the mess. He had spent half of the rest of the night listening to her tell him she understood.

He went into his office, where he unlocked the top drawer of his desk and read the computer printout sheet once again. He had half hoped he'd dreamed the whole thing, but here it was by morning light, and it was no more believable than it had been at night. It was one of those times when any man over fifty thought of investing in one of those fishing caps with an ornamental beer can on the band and leaving the store to someone who could still get up in the morning without having to brace himself on the night table.

The intercom buzzed. He raised the receiver, his eyes still on the printout.

“Call on one,” Mrs. Gabel informed him.

“Who?”

“I'll let him tell you. You wouldn't believe it from me.”

He laid down the sheet and punched the button.

The alley behind the yellow brick building stank of rat dung and stagnant water. Macklin tugged on the handle of the scuffed-iron fire door and found it open. The only light in the entryway came from a fifteen-watt bulb that barely managed to illuminate itself. When his pupils adjusted, he pressed a button in the tarnished panel on the wall in front of him. It glimmered and after a long wait the elevator wheezed down like an old man lowering himself into a tub, and the doors trundled open. He went in gun first.

“Fieldhouse.”

Air swished. A hammer of pain struck the bone of his wrist and his forearm went numb. The 10-millimeter clattered on the floor. A foot kicked it across the elevator, where the square, graying man in the three-piece suit bent down and scooped it up. Macklin lunged for it and stopped when the bore came up to face him.

“You're slowing down, Macklin,” Burlingame said.

Macklin placed his back to the doors, watching the two men who shared the elevator car with him. The one the FBI bureau director had called Fieldhouse was in his twenties, sandy-haired, and good-looking in a male model sort of way. His dark suit and vest fit him well, unlike his superior's, which was starting to show strain at the buttons. Fieldhouse was rubbing the edge of his right hand. Macklin hoped he'd broken it.

He really hated elevators.

Burlingame glanced at the young agent, who pressed the elevator stop button. The car lurched to a halt between floors, and that was the first the killer realized that it had been moving.

“I've heard of these. This is the first one I've seen.” The director turned the pistol over in his hands. “I guess you won't tell me where you got it.”

Macklin said nothing. Burlingame found the magazine release, popped it out, and worked the slide to eject the cartridge from the chamber. It made a little clattering sound on the floor. Then he returned the empty gun to Macklin, who stood there holding it for a minute, then returned it to its holster. He tugged the waist of his wool jacket down over the butt. Fieldhouse goggled.

“We're all equal here,” Burlingame told him, pocketing the magazine. To Macklin: “You called the meeting. I'm not earning your tax dollars hanging around a building we only use for interrogations. What's your business?”

Macklin said, “You picked the spot. I was willing to meet you in your office.”

“The lobby of the Federal Building's full of reporters looking for another Daniel Ellsberg. One of them might recognize you on your way up. You know how it works.”

“Where's your pipe?”

“Fieldhouse is allergic. I hear you're running your own game now.”

The killer grinned wolfishly. “No one ever said that to me before. About running a game.”

“Fieldhouse likes that kind of talk. He grew up in front of the tube.”

“Fieldhouse counts for a lot.”

“He's like a second son to me.” Burlingame winked at the young agent. “Put out any good fires lately? Macklin fights them in stairwells,” he told Fieldhouse. “He's sort of an urban ranger.”

“Fire follows me. I almost got burned again last night.”

“That what happened to your coat?”

“We're boring Fieldhouse. What do you know about what's been going on?”

“I know you're running scared or you wouldn't have pulled that bonehead stunt with a pistol against two armed federal agents. What is it about you people don't like?”

“I was hoping you'd tell me.”

Burlingame said, “Shit. Macklin, let's get squared around. I don't like killers. I don't even admire them. Last week an eight-year-old kid in Seattle blew off his brother's face playing with a shotgun. I have less things to respect as I get older, and I don't have any at all for a guy who does for money what any eight-year-old kid in Seattle can do without even trying. Aside from all that I don't like you personally. But if I hung out paper on you it wouldn't be just because I don't like you, and I wouldn't send in a psycho with a pregnant Ronson to do it.”

“I keep getting that speech. So who would?”

The director was silent.

“Come on, Burlingame. You owe me.”

“I owe you shit. The street says Boniface paid you a hundred long ones for the Boblo job. He's getting his hearing like we agreed and we're all back in our places just like we were before.”

Macklin reached for one of his slash pockets. Fieldhouse grabbed his arm. The killer relaxed. “Get it out yourself.”

Still holding on, the young agent burrowed his other hand into the pocket and came up with a hollow brass cylinder the size of the cap on a ballpoint pen. He patted down the rest of Macklin's pockets and stepped back, handing the cartridge case to his superior. Macklin had gotten rid of the 10-millimeter shells on his way back to the city.

“Who's carrying a Walther these days?” he asked.

Burlingame examined the shell. “MI-6. Scotland Yard. The Sûreté. Any collector with a line on ammunition. It's a popular gun in a lot of places.”

“The KGB?”

“Some. The Russians have better weapons, though. Anyway, they're CIA meat.”

“Not inside the U.S.”

“What do you know, Macklin?”

“I don't
know
anything or I wouldn't be here. But so far I've been jumped by an American ex-Marine, a Chinese jack-in-the-box, and a guy that dresses like the little old winemaker and fires a gun that's most popular with foreign agents. Also, he uses exploding bullets. Not dum-dums, something more sophisticated. Also he rigged my car, which was how he really planned to get me. The shooting was just to make me forget myself; beat the bush, then spring the trap. He's better than either of the others, a professional. I know all the pros in this area and he's not one of them. You throw a wider loop.”

“The Russians don't kill for sport, not here,” Burlingame said. “You have to bite them on the butt first.”

“Before this guy the closest I ever got to Russia was a fifth of Smirnoff's. If he is a Russian.”

“You're working, right?”

“I'm a consultant.”