Roses Are Dead (5 page)

Chapter Six

Brown was appalled at the Oriental's lack of size. “Why, he's just a boy!”

“He's thirty-seven,” said the other spectator.

They watched the two men on the mat bowing to each other. The Oriental, half his opponent's size in a white pajama outfit knotted with a plain cord, appeared impatient with the polite opening ceremony. When it was finished and the other man started to circle he launched himself from a standstill, arching his back and driving a pointed bare foot at the end of a straight leg at the man's solar plexus. His opponent dodged late but quickly, catching a glancing blow under his right arm. He spun and lashed out but kicked only empty air as the smaller man ducked, driving in low with his arm stiff. Again he missed the pressure point but drew a satisfying grunt as his bent knuckles found the larger man's ribs.

For a while they circled each other, feinting and drawing back. Then the larger man moved, pivoting on the ball of his left foot and swinging the right high at his opponent's head. Instead of ducking, the Oriental snatched the flying ankle and pulled, at the same time stepping in and hooking a leg behind his opponent's stationary one. Falling, the man twisted to put his hands under him. But the smaller man straightened him with a stiff backhand swipe across his midsection and, in a series of moves too fast for the pair watching to follow, scissored at him with hands and feet until the man lay in a heap on the mat, his chest pumping. The Oriental turned away. Hissing like a reptile, the man on the floor sprang to his feet and threw himself at his opponent's back. The other spun suddenly and jabbed straight out at shoulder level and the hiss turned into a loud croak and the larger man folded up and lay on the mat, rolling from side to side with his hands clutching his throat and his mouth open wide and making no sound.

“Call the paramedics,” Brown said calmly.

His companion hurried off to comply. The gymnasium was large and high-ceilinged, with natural light sifting through frosted panels and glimmering on the varnished floor beyond the edges of the mat. Without looking back at his beaten foe the Oriental crossed noiselessly through a door into the locker room. Brown followed him inside without pausing to knock. He was a broad man but not fat, built like a professional wrestler with shoulders that strained the material of a suit that otherwise hung on him like sacking. His square face was doughy-pale, divided exactly in half by a line of blue beard and topped by thick dark graying hair that he combed back with his fingers. His eyes were cod-colored.

“Mr. Shang?”

Naked before an open locker, stuffing his white outfit into a leather gym bag, the Oriental said nothing. He looked even younger without clothes. He was smooth all over, not muscular, and had no hair on his body. His penis was no larger than a boy's. He zipped shut the bag and turned to the clothes in the locker, paying no attention to his visitor.

“The showers here are excellent,” Brown tried. “The pressure could pin a man to the floor.”

“I didn't work up a sweat.”

“Yes, I saw. Did you have to be so rough? Kung Fu sparrers are expensive and hard to come by in this part of the country, unlike California. We'll have to pay him a bonus on top of his hospital bill to keep him from running to the authorities. If he survives.”

“I don't work for Occidentals.”

He had a slight singsong accent, miles removed from the broad man's lathed-down, carefully cultured American euphony. He buttoned a blue dress shirt and stepped into black wool slacks. He wore no underclothes.

Brown said, “Then may I ask why you accepted our invitation to fly here?”

“I'd never been to Detroit.”

“Sure it wasn't something else?”

Shang slammed shut the locker and turned, holding patent leather loafers. “Your name is what?”

“You can call me Mr. Brown.”

“Not Smith?”

“For now I like Brown. Chih Ming Shang.” He pronounced the name correctly. “I understand a little Mandarin. The name means ‘deadly wound,' doesn't it?”

Shang slipped the loafers on over his naked feet and straightened, saying nothing.

“You came because Michigan offers anonymity,” Brown suggested. “Your growing reputation has begun to hobble you on the West Coast. Once you've acquired a nickname, your effectiveness is cut in half. The Tongs call you the Shadow Dragon.”

“The Tong is an Occidental invention.”

“And the Mafia and the KGB are the creations of popular novels and the Sunday comics. But the organizations that bear those misnomers exist. By now you know we didn't bring you here to see this building—which, by the way, I own through a string of dummy corporations that would take Antitrust the next two presidential administrations to sort out. We want you to remove a problem. If you do well we may retain you permanently.”

“I'm a martial arts instructor.”

Brown laughed softly, spreading his coat.

“I'm not wired. The room isn't bugged. If I were a police officer, I think you'd agree that flying you two-thirds of the way across the continent to trick a confession out of you would fall under gross entrapment.”

“Now that I know what you aren't.” He let it dangle.

“I'm a government bureaucrat.”

“Which government?”

“Do I detect a streak of Chinese-American patriotism, Mr. Shang?”

“I'm half Japanese. My parents spent World War Two behind barbed wire at Manzanar because their eyes slanted. What do you think, Mr. Brown?”

“A good answer. Have you visited your bank lately?”

“Why?”

“I'll take that as a no. If you had, you'd know that at four o'clock yesterday afternoon, Pacific time, the sum of two thousand dollars was deposited in your account. An additional deposit will be made later. Say, five thousand total?”

“I don't do political assassination.”

“Just a moment ago you didn't work for Occidentals,” Brown mused. “No, this man is quite anonymous, or at least no better known to the general public than you.”

“A professional?”

“A user of weapons.”

“Guns?”

“Usually. He has a curious superstition, however. He never arms himself unless he's working. At the moment he isn't.”

“I can handle a man with a gun. But I have to know he has one.”

“He won't if he follows his usual pattern. Can I take it you're hiring on?”

“Why me?” Shang asked. “There are more locals working here than in L.A. and San Francisco combined.”

“We tried one. He didn't work out. He was semipro at best. The man who made that mistake is on his way home. I'm his replacement.”

“You have a workup?”

“Workup?”

“A report. Description. Habits. Perversions.”

“It's waiting for you at your hotel. It's quite thorough. We bought it from one of our underworld contacts with your same realistic approach toward nationalism.”

“There's a difference. I'm not a traitor.”

“You're a martial arts instructor.”

Shang didn't smile. His masklike face looked like the illustrations of Oriental villains on the covers of the smuggled pulp magazines that Brown had read as a boy.
The slitlike eyes of Wu Fang
. “When can you start?”

“After I've read the workup. And called my bank.”

Brown showed him a way out of the locker room and the building that wouldn't take him past the ambulance attendants on their way inside to tend to Shang's vanquished opponent. He'd been hearing the sirens coming for minutes. Carrying his gym bag, the small man moved with fluid grace down the narrow alley and around the corner. Brown was glad to see the last of him for a while. Killers had no sense of humor and he never enjoyed working with them.

Chapter Seven

The bar was a green-painted concrete building with a gravel parking lot on a corner across the street and down the block from the General Motors assembly plant in Westland. The lot was deserted, and when the woman entered and her eyes adjusted to the medium light inside she saw no one but a white-haired bartender dozing while standing up in front of the beer taps. She glanced down at her watch, stood there a moment longer, and was about to turn and walk out when a man rose from the other side of the jukebox and beckoned her over.

By the time she got there, he was seated again. The table was narrow, barely large enough to support two drinks, with a hard chair on either end. She said, “I'm Moira King. Are you the man who called?”

“Yes.”

“Could we move to a booth? I'd feel more comfortable.”

“Booths are too hard to get out of.”

When he said nothing more she sat down opposite him, resting her purse on her lap. She was twenty-three but looked much older, her face anorexic-looking with the bones prominent and her eyes large and bright as from fever. She wore her auburn hair short and combed behind ears with amber buttons in the lobes. Her dress was a plain brown shift through which the straps of her white brassiere showed. She dug a cigarette out of her purse and let it droop from the center of her mouth with her thumb poised on the wheel of a disposable butane lighter.

“You didn't give me your name,” she said, and lit it.

“You're Louis Konigsberg's daughter.”

“Yes.” She blew smoke away from the table. “I had my name legally changed. I was going to be an actress for a while. Now I make recordings for the telephone company. When you call for the time? That's me.” She closed her mouth before she could run on further. The man's tired-looking eyes seemed to see through her skull. She wondered if he was a policeman.

“Klegg said you had a problem. He didn't tell me what it was.”

She puffed at the cigarette, flipped ash into the tin tray on the table, puffed again. She never inhaled. “Can I get a drink? Whiskey sour.”

He went on looking at her, then got up and walked over to the bar, rapping a knuckle on the top to wake the bartender. He returned carrying only one glass, which he set in front of her.

“Aren't you drinking?”

“Not when I'm working.”

He was a policeman. She sipped her whiskey and set it down. “I don't see how you can help me. The other police said there was nothing they could do until Roy committed a crime.”

“Who's Roy?”

“He was my boyfriend. He thinks he still is, that's the problem.” She looked around at the empty tables. “I don't see how this place stays in business.”

“The shift at the assembly plant doesn't change for two more hours. Then the place is jammed. That's why I picked this time. What's Roy's last name?”

“Blossom. We—made some films together in Detroit two years ago, before I found out I wasn't going to cost Faye Dunaway any sleep. We saw each other off the set. He was good-looking, about twenty-five, tall and blond and fantastic in bed. The joke around the studio was that when the lights went up so did he.” She got a sour smile on her face. It wasn't returned. She sent some more ash at the tray. “Then he got arrested.”

“Pornography?”

“Murder. He got in an argument with a man in a parking lot over a scratched fender and cut him up with a pocketknife.”

“What'd he get?”

“The jury found him innocent by reason of insanity and he went to the forensic psychiatry center at Ypsilanti for sixteen months. They let him out five weeks ago. He called me the day he got out. He's called almost every day since.

“I told him I didn't want anything more to do with him. I said I had a good job and I was happy with my life and I didn't want to go back. I told him it had nothing to do with what he did. It did, of course, but I wasn't going to tell him that.”

“He didn't take it well.”

She looked at him quickly. His expression hadn't changed. “He said I'd be sorry.”

“He say how?”

“He's too smart for that. He calls me at all hours. I changed my number to an unlisted one, but he found it out somehow. I'm afraid to answer the phone. But the ringing and ringing is almost as bad as listening to him. He never says anything specific, just talks about what he's been doing and how he thinks about me all the time. Hell, I can't even get him for making obscene calls. If they were they wouldn't be so bad. It's what he doesn't say. Then last Monday I saw him.”

The bartender cruised past, stopping to wipe off a table nearby. She waited until he moved away.

“It was on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. I was coming home from work and there he was. He was thinner than I remembered and his hair was shorter, but the time in the hospital didn't seem to have hurt him physically. He had a knife with him.”

“He threaten you with it?”

“Yes. Well, not really. He didn't wave it at me or even mention it. He just cleaned his fingernails with it. All the time he was talking he was cleaning his fingernails. It was one of those fancy ones with a lot of attachments. We used to call them Swiss Army knives.”

“What'd he say?”

“Nothing. He just said it was good to see me and that I looked good, said he was job-hunting; small talk. He pretended we met by accident. But he was waiting for me. He offered to see me to the door of my apartment. I said that wouldn't be necessary and he didn't push it. I don't think we were talking for more than five minutes. But all the time he was cleaning his nails with that big knife.”

“Anything else?”

“I think he's been following me. I never see him doing it. I just feel him. He means to kill me, and you people won't do anything to stop him. He was declared sane by psychiatrists, but he's just as crazy as he was when he went to the hospital, and he's going to cut me up just like that man in the parking lot and no one's going to stop him.”

She had raised her voice. The bartender was watching them from across the room. The man stared at him until he looked away. Quietly the man said, “I'm not with the police.”