The Will to Kill Page 10

  “Said the guy in the log cabin. Look, I’m just here to say if anybody touches Dex Dunbar, they answer to me. Got that?”

  The plump little hands came up, their palms facing me. “You need to think this through, Mike. In just a few years, Dex will have over a million dollars to play with. You saw him out there tonight—do I need any help getting him to give me money?”

  “You’ve been threatening him.”

  “There’s been some negotiation, yes. But my people didn’t shoot at him. I want him alive and gambling. Where I’m headed in these negotiations is getting him to sign an agreement to pay me back with interest when his trust-fund money comes in.”

  “Loan shark interest?”

  He shook his head. “No. Standard banker’s interest.”

  “Would you be willing to show me that agreement, after you’ve negotiated it with Dex? Before he’s signed it?”

  “Yes. Why not?” He tamped cigar ash into a round glass Log Cabin tray. “Now. Is there anything else I can do for you? Arrange a line of credit with the house, perhaps?”

  I stood. “No thanks. I’m not a gambler.”

  Abe chuckled. “How can you say that with a straight face, Mike?”

  He had a point. And he was also right that his best play was to let Dex keep losing and racking up interest for the few years between him and his inheritance. Nothing wrong with getting the Dunbar loot on the instalment plan.

  I nodded to Dex as I passed his blackjack table. He nodded back. Brenda gave me a smile, a rather sweet one, and a little-girl wave. I collected Dorena at her slot machine. She was seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents ahead.

  In the parking lot, she paused as I held the door open for her. She said, “I saw you go into that office.”

  “You did, huh?”

  “Yes. You talked to that Abe person, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you straighten everything out for Dex?”

  “More or less.”

  She showed me a nice coral smile. “Good,” she said, and gave me a kiss. It wasn’t hot and sloppy and sticky, but it wasn’t bad.

  * * *

  When we got back to the Dunbar place, around eleven, I pulled Dorena’s Thunderbird into its space in the garage. Dex’s Lincoln was still gone, of course, and Wake’s Jaguar was M.I.A. as well. But Madeline’s little green Triumph TR4 was snug in its spot.

  I climbed out of the T-bird and came around to open the door for Dorena. As I walked her up to the house, I said, “I thought Madeline was out for the evening.”

  “I did, too. She almost always is.”

  “I need to ask her a few questions.”

  “Oh?”

  I nodded. “She was in the house the night your father died, and she’ll eventually benefit from your butler’s death.”

  That was all true, but really I was thinking about Wake and the broken stair-step in the garage and the brake-hose puncture in his Jag.

  “If she’s back,” Dorena said, “I can tell you where to find her.”

  Off the kitchen was the TV room, an unpretentious space that had once been a bedroom for live-in staff. A blond TV/stereo console was against the wall to my left as I entered, with shelving above perfect for the extensive LP collection. By the windowed sidewall, a card table was set up with four chairs and two waiting decks. On the cushioned window seat were casually stacked board games, Monopoly and Clue and the like, and a few jigsaw puzzles. Along the wall to my left was a zebra-striped bar with black-cushioned stools.

  Facing the TV, in the middle of a three-seater brown leather couch on a braided rug, sat a beautiful redhead, her bare feet crossed on a matching ottoman. Her toenails were bright red. So was her lipstick, that mouth so swollen-looking she might have been recovering from a nasty slap. Her emerald capri pants were a little too short for those long, muscular legs, and under the light green fuzzy sweater, she might be smuggling cantaloupes across the border. Ben Casey was on, the pretty nurse on screen.

  “We haven’t really met, have we?” Madeline asked in a throaty purr that must have taken a while to perfect.

  “No. But you know who I am.”

  “I do. You’re Mike Hammer, who makes such a hit in the tabloids.”

  “A hit in the tabloids can be very painful.”

  She laughed at that and patted the seat next to her. “Join me.”

  I did. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

  She wiggled fingers at the TV. “Not till after my show. Then it’s the news and who gives a damn? We can talk during commercials, too.”

  Well, the show was almost over anyway. The plot was the guest star was sick and Dr. Ben Casey was treating it. Wake Dunbar’s wife smelled of Arpège perfume, which Velda sometimes used.

  During the last commercial, I asked, “Didn’t you go out tonight?”

  She nodded. “But just for dinner. We talked about a movie, but I had shows on.”

  “You and your husband?”

  She laughed again and gave me a sideways are-you-kidding look. “No, it was this guy who is very nice and has a good job, but God he’s dull. If you were out with me, wouldn’t you make a move?”

  Only if I still had a pulse.

  “Of course not,” I said. “You’re a married woman.”

  This time the sideways look had a smirk in it. “Are you really a detective?”

  “Doesn’t it show?”

  She glanced at my lap. “Something does. Shush, shush… it’s back on.”

  The patient lived, but Ben Casey didn’t seem very happy about it.

  She got up and leaned over as she turned off the TV, her rounded backside to me, and I was proud of myself for not passing out. She scooted back and curled up under those endless legs and stretched her arm along the top cushion behind me.

  “Fire away,” she said. She was smiling, eager to help. To please. Her make-up was a little overdone, mostly to hide freckles that would only have made her more genuinely beautiful.

  “What can you tell me about the night your father-in-law died?”

  She hadn’t heard or seen anything. Her room was toward the other end of the hall. Her room? Or her and her husband’s room? Another are-you-kidding look. She slept alone. When she was home.

  What could she tell me about the butler? Not much. He was sweet, quiet, and really looked after Chickie well. Showed real affection for the boy, which is more than could be said for his stepbrothers.

  “The unusual way Chester Dunbar’s will is set up,” I said, “everyone in the family, including yourself, would benefit from Elder’s death. A quarter of a million is a lot of money.”

  “Split five ways? Chickenfeed, compared to a mil, right?”

  “I suppose so. Isn’t a million what you’d inherit if Wake died?”

  She batted that away, the red nails blurring past me. “He’s healthy as a horse, my loving husband. No, Mike, I gotta wait this one out. Just a few more years.”

  “But I hear Wake is talking divorce now.”

  She shook her head, all that hair bouncing; she wore lime-green plastic earrings. “Not going to happen. He’s not going to embarrass himself. It’s all a bluff.”

  “Embarrass himself? Why?”

  Her expression flickered; perhaps she’d spoken too freely. She said, “Well, not because I’m a little round-heeled whore, as he so affectionately likes to call me. Not that.”

  And I had it. Separate bedrooms. Trips nightly into the Village. Those delicate features, the artistic bent. Wake was gay. Madeline was his live-in beard. Only she wasn’t behaving. But could he risk outing himself in a divorce case?

  “I understand,” I said carefully, “that Wake’s had a few narrow scrapes of late.”

  She shrugged. “Not that he’s told me about. Of course, we don’t exactly communicate much.”

  I told her about the broken step and the hole in the brake hose.

  She was frowning now. “And Wake’s implying I’m responsible?”

  �
��Not necessarily,” I lied.

  “You ever consider he might be trying to make me look bad?”

  “It did occur to me. Could I offer some friendly advice? It’s free and worth every penny.”

  She nodded and all that lush red hair came along.

  I said, “Try to work out a settlement with Wake. He’s got fifty grand a year coming in and he’s selling his paintings both here and in the Village. Come to an agreement for a monthly sum. Come to an agreement of what your share of the trust-fund money will be. Then legally separate so that you-out-having-fun doesn’t embarrass him or make you look bad.”

  This was the second time tonight a beautiful woman had looked at me with the blankness that conceals thought.

  Then she said, “You’re a nice man, Mike. A caring human being.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  She rose and went to the door and clicked the knob lock. The room was already dimly lit. She positioned herself between me and the TV and provided substitute entertainment, pulling the fuzzy sweater off and revealing twin braless globes of flesh with tiny hard tips. The sweater she tossed off with casual abandon. The capri pants came off with a little more effort, requiring a kind of shimmy. The only thing she had on were the lime-green earrings. She stepped out of the little capri pile and put her head back and her hands on her hips, legs apart, the thatch so red it burned.

  “Would you rather hump a man?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She came over and sat sideways in my lap and nuzzled my neck. I gave her a kiss, to show I appreciated the effort, but then I held her face in my hands and said, “A lovely girl like you has nothing to prove.”

  Tears glittering like gems, she nodded.

  I kissed her again, then made a hasty exit.

  Damn! This lousy case came complete with hot and cold running dames. I went up to my bedroom and climbed in the rack and tried not to think about what I’d just walked away from.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The drive to the Condon Hale estate on Long Island from Monticello took a good two-and-a-half hours. Near Glen Cove, in an area known for parking couples, trapshooters, and notorious recluses, I was here to see one of the latter. I turned at a sign that said PRIVATE PROPERTY—TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

  What the hell, I was armed… but I was also expected. As if it had been dropped by a twister, an Edwardian mansion perched itself on a sandy, grassy bluff overlooking the beach. The place must have been built around the turn of the century, brown brick with fancy white wood trim, including a pillared front porch. But the old girl wasn’t aging well—the brick could use re-grouting, the paint was blistering, the roof tiles loose, and instead of ladies and gentlemen in their Gibson girl dresses and high-hats formal attire, what you pictured was their tormented ghosts.

  I left the Galaxie on the apron of the circular brick drive and went up a short flight to the porch, where I rang the bell.

  A chauffeur answered. Not a butler—not in that gray livery, minus cap but including SS leather boots and pistol in a leather quick-snap holster. The sign did say trespassers would be shot, after all.

  He opened the door maybe a third. He was a big man, bigger than me, with the hard-eyed, seen-it-all gaze of a combat veteran. He looked a little like Kirk Douglas without the chin dimple.

  “Mr. Hammer?” His voice was a low rumble, like a car engine starting up. Well, he was the chauffeur, wasn’t he?

  “Yes,” I said, removing my hat. “Michael Hammer.”

  He nodded. “I’m who you talked to on the phone. Mr. Hale is expecting you. He’s waiting for you on the veranda. He enjoys the ocean.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  The inside was in better shape than the out. The chauffeur moved me through a generous central hall where turn-of-the-century details blurred by—stained glass windows, dark sculpted woodwork, fancy light fixtures, all of the era. There was still a sense of gloom, though, and the antique furniture had seen use since before it was antique. But if I’d been expecting Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion, I was mistaken.

  I fell in beside him and asked, “How big a staff does it take to maintain this place?”

  We were moving past a slightly sunken low-ceilinged dining room with wide flat woodwork and small high windows. Dark in there. They used to think it helped the digestion.

  “Only two of us are live-in,” he said. “Mr. Hale’s nurse and myself. But a cleaning crew comes in once a week. The upstairs has been closed off for some time, however.”

  So that was where I might expect to run into Miss Havisham and maybe get a slice of ancient wedding cake.

  Finally we were in a big white kitchen that looked modern, or more modern than the rest of the place. Probably remodeled in the ’30s. I asked, “What branch?”

  He gave me a sideways look. “Army. Rangers.”

  “Not every day you meet a real live commando. Me, I was just another G.I. Joe.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “Pacific. You?”

  “France. North Africa.”

  “You took the scenic route.”

  The veranda was fieldstone and provided a fine view of the ocean: foamy tide caressing the beach, gulls wheeling on a gray sky where the clouds were sparse, like dying smoke. A little too cold for swimmers, but this was likely private beach anyway.

  The man in the wheelchair was small and shrunken, one of those skeletons you see in a doctor’s office but with skin pulled over it, loosely. The scant hair on his head was like white wispy thread, the eyebrows a memory. He was ninety if a day, bundled in a red-and-black plaid blanket beneath which were heavy, dark flannel pajamas. What was left of his feet lived in fur-lined bedroom slippers, propped on the wheelchair footplate.

  A wooden folding chair was set up next to him. The chauffeur gestured for me to sit, and I did, and he took a few paces back but stayed with us.

  The old man hadn’t looked at me or acknowledged me in any way, but he said, “Do you like the scent of the sea, Mr. Hammer?”

  It appeared there would be no introductions.

  “I do, Mr. Hale.”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “Crisp, with a hint of algae. Salty. Bitter yet clean, fresh. Sometimes fishy but not today.”

  “You like the water.”

  “I do. I spend time in Florida now and then.”

  “I can’t smell it at all.”

  “Oh?”

  “Lost my sense of smell in a laboratory explosion some years ago. But do you believe me when I say I can remember how it smells? That I can feel on my face the way it smells, the breeze, the bite?”

  “I do.”

  Now he looked at me, his eyes brown and bright in their sunken holes. “You want me to tell you about Jamison Elder and Chester Dunbar and me.”

  “I’d like that, yes.”

  “You think they were murdered—that all the talk of accidental death is bunk.”

  Gulls swooped, squawked, chirped, wailed, answering distant caws.

  “They were murdered, all right.”

  “You know this, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Call it an educated guess. I know something about murder.”

  His nod almost creaked. “Yes, I’ve heard of you. Read of you. You are an energetic young man.”

  Not so young, but compared to this coot, a baby. Still, something remained very much alive in that bloodless, skin-draped skull.

  “Tell me what you know about murder, Mr. Hammer.”

  “That would take all day, Mr. Hale.”

  “I have time.”

  Actually, he didn’t have all that much time, did he?

  I said, “My time is limited, Mr. Hale. I have a meeting with a NYPD Homicide captain this afternoon.”

  His laugh was like someone had hit him in the stomach. “Murder again. Tell me at least a few things about murder, Mr. Hammer. From your experienced vantage point.”

  I shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t just happen. It’s planned. Sometimes
in haste, but it’s planned or else it’s just manslaughter.”

  “So we’re talking legal definitions, then?”

  “That figures in. The other thing about murder is that, nine times out of ten, there’s cold hard cash at the root of it.”

  “Root of all evil, they say.”

  “There’s a book that’s written in, yeah. But the list of motives is surprisingly short—love, greed, revenge, and lunacy. Everything else is a variation on those themes.”

  The gulls were making lazy circles now. “Or a combination thereof, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Or a combo, yeah.”

  “Do you suspect me of murder, Mr. Hammer?”

  “I don’t know enough about the trouble between you and Jamison Elder, and Chester Dunbar for that matter, to make that judgment. I doubt sincerely that a man in your physical state could have murdered anybody, even three years back. But that commando chauffeur of yours sure could. And with his skills, he could get in and out of a house without a soul any the wiser.”

  I didn’t glance back at the guy, but I could hear his breathing go deep.

  Condon Hale laughed; it sounded like paper rustling. “My man Reeves would be capable of that and much more, Mr. Hammer. You are correct. He could dispose of you this afternoon, and who would know?”

  “He could try.”

  “Reeves! Show Mr. Hammer out.”

  The chauffeur came at me quick, but I was out of the chair fast enough to swing it at him; it broke like kindling. He was all muscle, even twenty years after the war. And I was only in fair shape—not long ago I had made a seven-year habit of getting the shit kicked out of me and waking up all puffy in a gutter.

  His fists were extended, stretching out for me, but all the muscles in the world won’t save you when a hard heel slams into your knee. He went down on the other one, smacking the fieldstone, his face clenching, but his eyes were open enough to see the .45 staring him in the face.

  I reached down and unsnapped the holster and tossed his gun way down on the sand.

  “Go in the house,” I told him, with a friendly wave of the weapon, “and stay there. I don’t mean any offense—we’re just a couple of slobs doing their jobs. But if I see you come back out, I’ll assume you’re armed and I’ll kill your ass.”