The Will to Kill Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  More Mike Hammer from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Co-Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  A Tip of the Porkpie

  About the Authors

  Mike Hammer Novels

  Also Available from Titan Books

  MORE MIKE HAMMER FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Lady, Go Die!

  Complex 90

  King of the Weeds

  Kill Me, Darling

  Murder Never Knocks

  Killing Town (March 2018)

  Murder, My Love (March 2019)

  Masquerade for Murder (March 2020)

  The Will to Kill: A Mike Hammer Novel

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783291427

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783291458

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2017

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Copyright © 2017 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Mickey’s friend.

  DAVID GUNDLING –

  “He gives lawyers a good name!”

  CO-AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Once upon a time a thirteen-year-old Mickey Spillane fanatic grew up to be not just a friend of the great mystery writer, but a collaborator.

  We worked together on comic books, anthologies, short stories, and a documentary. But novels were a form Mickey had no inclination to share with anybody—that was where he had made his fame and fortune, and that venue was his alone.

  This changed in 2006 when, faced with rapidly failing health, he called to ask if I would finish his current Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone—“if necessary.” He also instructed his wife Jane to turn over his work files to me, including incomplete novels, several unproduced screenplays, and fragments that could be developed into short stories. Being so entrusted by the writer who had inspired me to become a writer myself was the greatest honor of my career.

  The main task was finishing the Mike Hammer novels in progress. Hammer—“my bread and butter boy” as Mickey called him—had only appeared in thirteen novels published during Mickey’s lifetime. Most fictional detectives of Mike Hammer’s fame—Nero Wolfe, Perry Mason, Hercule Poirot—appeared in scores of novels. So expanding the Hammer canon using Mickey’s own material became my first priority.

  Six substantial manuscripts—of 100 pages or more, often with notes, sometimes with roughed-out endings—were my first order of business. These have all been completed. A number of shorter but significant Hammer manuscripts—again, sometimes with notes and rough endings—were also worthy of completion. The Will to Kill is the third of these.

  This time I had only thirty pages or so from Mickey from which to develop the novel. But, as you will see, Mickey set everything nicely in motion in an unusual Mike Hammer mystery, the premise of which invokes none other than those of that other very tough-minded mystery writer, Agatha Christie.

  Or maybe it’s not so unusual. One of the characteristics of the Hammer novels, rarely commented upon, is that—sex and violence not withstanding—they are rather traditional mysteries at heart, tricky tales with clues fairly placed and unlikely villains who are hard to spot. Almost every Hammer novel includes a final chapter in which the detective faces down the murderer and explains every twist and turn of the plot.

  One of the challenges of completing these novels is to figure out when Mickey began them, so I can keep them consistent with what he intended—Hammer and Spillane are ever-changing with the times and with age. A few of the manuscripts had dates on them, but most didn’t. Some had pop-cultural references that helped fix the time frame or references to New York newspapers or restaurants having gone out of business.

  This manuscript was tricky, with Mike and Pat clearly older (referring to each other as “old buddy”) but World War II still a reference point (the first murder victim once worked in a defense plant). I have settled on around 1965 as my best guess.

  M.A.C.

  CHAPTER ONE

  They came for the body at a quarter to four in the morning.

  I had been looking at it for over an hour but hadn’t bothered to call it in till not long ago. Some guys might have gone running into the night, looking for help or somewhere to puke. Me, I’d seen too much in my time to be shaken.

  Anyway, there isn’t much you can do for a man whose top half is lying on a jagged slab of ice that broke off from the main floe coming down the Hudson River to wedge itself against the pier.

  And whose lower half isn’t around.

  Sometimes an oddity like that is a good point of focus when you have other things to think about and you can stare at such things for a long time while you clear away the roadblocks the world insinuates into your mind.

  Like what was it about me that attracted death? What turned a reflective moment at the waterfront into a damn crime scene? And what put an ivory-washed half a corpse on a slab colder than the morgue tray awaiting it?

  Behind me, the flashing red light of a squad car kept interrupting the brilliance of the full moon that had staged the little scene so well. One of the uniformed cops had already secured the chunk of ice while the other radioed in the situation before he walked back to me again.

  He was blond and lanky, one of the new ones, still young enough to be dedicated, but experienced enough to be touched with that subtle cynicism that marks all the pros. When he flipped his book over to take down my story, his voice had that odd flat, casual tone ready to take note of everything, but disbelieve anything.

  “Your name?”

  “Mike Hammer.”

  “Full name Michael?”

  “Right.”

  “Address?”

  I gave it to him.

  “You found the body?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “When?”

  “Two-forty. I checked my watch.”

  He checked his. “It’s now… ten after four.”

  “How about that.”

  His eyes flicked at me curiously. People
don’t find a body and act that blasé about it. People don’t lean up against a crate thinking about something else when a torso spilling out its contents is only a few feet away. Not people in a new suit and a raincoat carelessly slung over their shoulder, even when it’s cold as hell out.

  “Mind telling me what you were doing here, Mr. Hammer?”

  “I’m a night walker,” I said.

  He wrote it down. More to be polite than anything else.

  “Occupation?”

  I grinned at him. “Buddy, if you don’t know by now…”

  But I didn’t have to tell him. The other cop came out of the shadows with his hands buried under his overcoat armpits to warm them, saw me plainly for the first time and said, “Hi, Mike. I thought they said it was gonna warm up tonight.”

  “It did for a while,” I said.

  He was one of the old ones—bucket head, jug ears, sharp eyes. The dedication was still there, but the years of experience had turned the cynicism into resigned acceptance. He looked at his partner and said, “Meet yourself a celebrated public figure, Frank. The tabloids’ favorite private dick.”

  Frank squinted at his partner as if the older man were nuts.

  The old harness bull nodded my way, a smile tickling his thin lips. “He doesn’t make the headlines he used to, but he’s got more kills on him than a Bengal tiger, and yet he still keeps his P.I. ticket. Don’t ask me how. Better you call Captain Chambers and tell him his boy’s laying off another stiff on us.”

  “Look, Hal…”

  He shook a forefinger at his young cohort. “Just can it and do what I told you, Frank. Even without that stiff on ice, the water could get choppy.”

  Frank sighed and went off to do as he’d been told.

  Hal said, “How’s it going, Mike?”

  “Smoke’s still coming out the chimney.”

  “Must be. You didn’t always look this prosperous. Brooks Brothers? Burberry? Who says crime don’t pay.” He gestured toward the half body on its slab. “What’s this bit?”

  “You got me, friend,” I said. “I’m standing here, catching a smoke, and enjoying the moon on the Hudson, when that ice slab moves in and, being a trained detective, I notice it has half a body on it.”

  He wasn’t sure he was buying it, but he also wasn’t sure he cared. “Anybody you know?”

  I shrugged. “It’s getting so I know more dead ones than I do live ones. But I don’t think so.”

  “Want to take a closer look?”

  “Why not?”

  Half a person isn’t a pleasant thing to see. There’s something obscene about a foreshortened human who is only a head and shoulders, arms and belly. We looked down from the pier at the expressionless face turned sideways against the ice, one arm folded under his chest, the other sprawled out awkwardly in front of his head. The way the water lapped around the edges of the grotesque raft made it sound like the river was bored.

  “No blood on the ice,” the cop stated.

  “Water probably washed it off.”

  “Wonder why there’s only half of him.”

  I squatted down on the pier and had a look at the corpse. To make it easier, the cop turned his flashlight on the mess so I could see it better. There was a peculiar configuration to the lower part of the torso.

  When I stood up, I said, “Looks like it was pinched. That ice is twelve inches thick, easy, and if a couple of floes came together, they could have snipped him in half like a paper cutter.”

  He winced but nodded. “They’re going to have a hell of a time determining time of death in this weather,” he said. “Recognize him or not?”

  “Not.”

  He let the light play over the body again. “Looks pretty well-dressed. Decent suit on him and his clothes, what’s left of ’em, don’t seem messed up very much. He’s taken a bash on the side of the head but that could have come from anything. Blood’s been washed off there too. Screwy. Suppose he was a leaper?”

  I answered him with a question. “How old do you figure him?”

  “About sixty-some. Why?”

  I shrugged, looking at the body again. “Somebody that age would have been wearing an overcoat. You’d hate to catch cold on your way to pull the Dutch act.”

  He’d been around enough to see the absurd truth of that. “So maybe it was an accident. There’s still ice on the roads and bridges upstate, and if he got flipped out of a car and landed on that ice…” He saw me smirking at him and stopped. “What’s so funny?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure. You’re still making excuses for the world. You’ve seen so much dirt, you’ve started hiding it under the rug.”

  He frowned just a little. “Just because Mike Hammer found him doesn’t make this guy a murder victim.”

  “No. There are various possibilities.”

  This time the cop’s face twisted into a puzzled frown. “Such as?”

  “You know how a magician saws somebody in half?”

  “Sure.”

  I grinned at him. “Maybe this guy was working with a beginner.”

  “Oh, hell, Mike,” he said, grinning back.

  * * *

  By the time the lab crew had finished, the sun had eased up over the apartment houses and draped the area in a baleful gray. The two reporters on the night beat had shrugged the thing off pending investigation when they found out I was only a disinterested spectator and left me alone with Pat Chambers.

  Pat didn’t arrive till they were carting the body away in the morgue wagon. He was a big, rangy guy in a trenchcoat, blond with gray-blue eyes and in his late thirties like me. The only reason he was giving this his personal attention was because I was involved—that, and guys who make captain in the Homicide Division seem to have a perverted sense of curiosity.

  When he was satisfied with the investigating officer’s report, he walked back to me, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and let me light it. “Why the hell don’t you go to bed at night like everybody else?”

  “Somebody’s got to check the debris in this river,” I told him.

  He looked at me over the flickering match. “Not at this hour.” He blew a cloud of smoke past me, his face expressionless. In the east the dawn was coming up, outlining the irregular skyline. “You got anything going, Mike?”

  I shrugged and lit myself up. “Just petty stuff. Nothing rating a half a corpse. What did you get on the guy?”

  Pat shrugged and took another drag on the butt. “Accident or suicide,” he said. “There was no wallet in his coat, but he may have carried it in his pants. No attempt was made to rip out any labels in his clothes. If we can’t make him from his prints or photo, we can check through the laundry marks. He’s got plenty of those, including two dry cleaner tags still on his jacket.”

  “Any money?”

  “Some change in a side suitcoat pocket. But, like the wallet, he could have carried it in his pants pocket.”

  “So put out an APB for the other half of him.”

  “Very funny.” He took a last pull on the cigarette and flipped it into the river. “Any opinion, Mike?”

  “Probably an accident. He could have stalled his car up where there’s snow and started walking. He’s old enough to’ve had a heart attack and tumbled into the river. The ice could’ve done the rest. Why make a federal case out of it?”

  Pat shrugged and glanced at me. “Because nature has given you a freak propensity for tripping over things that aren’t just accidents.”

  “Not this time, old buddy,” I said.

  “That blow to the head—you aren’t thinking blunt instrument?”

  “Why should I think anything? You’re the cop.”

  “You got no ideas at all?”

  “Sure. Let’s go have some breakfast.”

  “You can eat after finding that?”

  “Why, you aren’t hungry?”

  We grabbed some bacon and eggs in Riker’s on Sixth Avenue.

  * * *

>   At NYPD HQ on Centre Street, I lounged with my milk-and-sugared coffee in the visitor’s chair while Pat sat behind his desk checking through the missing persons sheets without finding anything tallying with the description of the half-body. Then he took my statement for the files.

  Just as I finished signing the report, McGee—a dumpy veteran detective who was better than he looked—knocked once and came in. He was in his shirtsleeves. With a nod to me, he laid a paper on Pat’s desk.

  “We have a make on the body in the river, Captain,” McGee said, his voice a chesty rumble that seemed to come out of a well. “Guy’s prints were on file from a defense job during the war. Harry’s checking Social Security in Washington to see if they have a current address on him. Last one was in a building they tore down ten years ago.”

  Pat scanned the report quickly and nodded, and McGee went out. Then the Homicide captain looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Jamison Elder. Age would be sixty-four this year. Born in London, took out naturalization papers eighteen years ago. Former occupation, domestic and chauffeur. Prior to the defense job, he worked for Condon Hale out on the Island.”

  “Condon Hale—the moneybags inventor?”

  “That’s him,” Pat said, nodding. “Out on Long Island.”

  “He’s a crazy old coot, I hear.”

  “We should all be so crazy,” he said. The phone rang and he reached for it.

  The Medical Examiner had finished the preliminary autopsy and was ready to state (as I already speculated) that the body had been pinched in half by an ice floe. There was a contusion on the head that could have rendered him unconscious, a result of a fall or (as Pat already speculated) the usual blunt instrument, but wasn’t the primary cause of death.

  “Death came from either exposure or being cut in half about the same time,” Pat said, reporting what the M.E. had told him. “Frozen condition of the body makes it difficult to pinpoint an exact time of death, but a little speculation could narrow it down.”

  “So speculate.”

  “It’s improbable that the body would have gone unseen all the previous day because of the constant traffic on and along the river. And if you factor in the tidal flow, it couldn’t have been much more than twenty miles from the farthest point upriver.”