A Long Time Dead Page 11

  “My what?”

  “Come on, Mike. Don’t shit a shitter. You were waiting for them. How, why, did you know they were coming?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, Pat?”

  Now he leaned back and his smile was cold. “When you visited the Chief, he gave you something. Or you took it. What, Mike? This is an investigation into the homicide of one of this city’s great chiefs of police. Don’t hold out.”

  “Like you held out on me?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I grunted at him. “You knew two guys had searched the Chief’s nursing-home room last night. Guys matching the description of those two overripe lasagne lads, right? And I bet they were seen at the hospital this morning, too. You knew that when you hauled me in for the D.A. and Milroy to roast.”

  He sighed heavily. Searched his pockets for a deck of smokes and came up with an empty package; he crumpled it up in a crinkly wad and tossed it on my desk. “Why the hell did you have to quit smoking?”

  “Your concern for my health is touching, good buddy. Of course, you might have told me a couple of old-time Mafia cannons were on the prowl.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know that’s who they were till just now. They do go way back. Before the war. Vito Madoni’s crew, if you can believe that.”

  I showed no reaction. “Gino Madoni’s little brother.”

  “Yeah. Here’s a piece of history I bet you didn’t know—the Chief, back when he was a rookie detective, shot Gino and killed his ass. Had him cold on a bank guard killing.”

  “You don’t say. Man, no detail slips past you, does it, Pat?”

  “The Chief’s also the guy who sent brother Vito to jail, ’41 I think it was, and after that, the Madoni family was never a major mob player. If I remember, those two in your reception area are Bonneti boys now, or were until they retired a year or so back.”

  I rocked in my chair, saying nothing.

  Pat said, “What?”

  “A couple of Mafia enforcers come out of retirement, to kill the Chief. Suggest anything to you, Pat?”

  “Sure it does. Revenge.”

  “When he’s almost dead anyway? No. I think this has more to do with there being no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “What murder?”

  “I don’t know. But I got a feeling that over there at Homicide, you may have a few unsolved ones on the books.”

  “Mike, we have thousands of unsolved homicides, dating to Prohibition. You know that.”

  “Well, I should let you go back home then, and catch some Z’s, so you can get to work on them tomorrow, nice and fresh.”

  “Mike, unless you cop to the Chief giving you some item that those two were looking for, this case will be closed by noon tomorrow. You may not like revenge as a motive, but everybody else will.”

  “You know what they say—a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” I got to my feet, yawned. Busy evening. “I’m surprised your buddy Milroy wasn’t along for the ride.”

  Pat shrugged as he stood. “Me, too, actually. I called him and gave him the opportunity. He made me promise to keep him in the loop on this one.”

  “He passed up an opportunity to bust my balls?”

  “Yup. Said I could fill him in tomorrow. Maybe he’s mellowing in his old age. … Listen, you’re free to go, Mike.”

  “You mean I can leave my own office? Why are you so good to me?”

  He just smirked and batted a wave at me, letting me have the exit line.

  Only I didn’t exit. I sat back down at my desk and thought some more, while some morgue wagon attendants in the outer office were taking out the trash.

  The next morning I caught a cab over to One Police Plaza, near City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge, a thirteen-story pyramidal glass-and-concrete tribute to the Holiday Inn school of architecture. The baroque old building on Centre Street had been good enough for the Chief, but the army of button-down bureaucrats who had replaced him, and who were making the likes of Captain Pat Chambers obsolete, required more modern digs.

  Milroy, on the eleventh floor, had a civilian secretary/receptionist seated outside his glassed-in office. I could see the inspector at his desk and he could see me. The secretary, attractive despite horned-rimmed glasses and pinned-up hair, wanted to know if I had an appointment, and I just nodded to where her boss was waving at me to come in.

  I did so, shutting the door behind me. I stuck my hat on the coat tree. Milroy didn’t rise, just sat there going over a stack of computer printouts. Without looking at me, he gestured to the chair opposite him, and I sat. As I waited for him to grant me his attention, I took the office in.

  It was twice the size of Pat’s glassed-in cubicle, with a round table off to one side for conferences. Industrial carpet. A coffee machine. The walls were filled with framed citations of merit and photographs of Milroy with various NYPD chiefs of police over the years as well as every mayor from the last three decades. His desk was neat and arrayed with framed family photos—his pleasant-looking wife and their two clean-cut sons at various ages, the boys as young as grade school and as old as college.

  He put the printouts down and worked up something like a smile, one of the few he’d given me over the years. He’d been a good-looking man in his younger days, a freckled, broad-shouldered blond. After his automobile accident twenty years ago, he began to get heavier and his face took on the reddish cast and slightly exploded features of the heavy drinker. Still, his record as a police inspector was commendable, as all the citations attested.

  “I hear you pulled one of your fancy self-defense plays last night,” he said, his growl more good-natured than usual.

  “I did. I’m surprised you didn’t come around with Pat to look for loopholes.”

  He shook his head. “For once I’m on your side, Hammer. Captain Chambers says those two over-the-hill wiseguys were seen at the Chief’s nursing home and at the hospital. He feels they were responsible for our friend’s murder.”

  “No question one of them used a knife on the Chief. We’ll never know which.”

  A small smile flashed. “Actually, when you talk to Captain Chambers next, he’ll tell you—Rossi had a switchblade in his pocket, and forensics ties it to the Chief’s wound. So I guess I owe you a debt of thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For wrapping this thing up.”

  “There’s still a bow that needs tying on.”

  “Oh?”

  I leaned in. “You see, Inspector … the Chief gave me something. Entrusted me with it, you might say. And now I have to make a decision.”

  His frown was curious, not hostile. “A decision?”

  “Yeah. About what to do with it. I’ll probably give it twenty-four hours.”

  The frown deepened into confusion. “Give what twenty-four hours?”

  “Before deciding what to do. Better to give it to the current chief, or hand it over to the media? I wonder.”

  “Hand what over?”

  I glanced around, smiled pleasantly. “Nice office, Inspector. You just moved in, right? And now you’re retiring soon, lot of trouble and bother for such a short stay. Still, I guess you gotta enjoy it while you’ve got it.”

  “What the hell are you getting at, Hammer?”

  I sat back, folded my arms, put an ankle on a knee and got comfy. “I have a little story to share with you, Inspector.”

  “Hammer, I’m not retiring today. I’m still a busy man.”

  “Just … humor me, okay? Our friend the Chief, back before the war, took on the mob like nobody who sat in his chair ever dared before. And at the same time, he cleaned out a whole passel of bent cops.”

  “Not a new story, Hammer. It’s well-known.”

  “The broad outlines are. But how did he manage it? One thing he would’ve needed was
somebody on the inside—a crooked cop, particularly one close to the mob, who could feed him names and information. He had something on this cop, or else he wouldn’t have been able to put the squeeze on. And the Chief filed that away, as a kind of life insurance policy. If anything happened to him, that evidence would come out.”

  Thick fingers drummed on the desk. “Interesting theory. But also ancient history.”

  “Some history never gets ancient. Like I was saying to Pat, there’s no statute of limitations on murder, for example.”

  His eyes, a bloodshot sky blue, flared.

  I went on: “The Chief, of course, never fully trusted that cop. He couldn’t fire him without giving away both of their secrets. They had each made their respective deals with their respective devils. So the Chief kept this cop on staff, kept him close—you know the old saying, ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’”

  Very softly he said, “You don’t have anything on me, Hammer.”

  I looked toward the little desk altar of framed family photos. “The ironic thing is, that crooked cop kept his act clean after that. Never was his reputation sullied thereafter. Won himself a wall full of awards, medals, commendations. Even after the Chief retired, that cop stayed on the straight and narrow. But I bet he never proved himself to the old boy. Never good enough for the Chief to feel he could either turn that evidence over to the now-reformed cop, or just destroy it. So that evidence, that sword of Damocles, it just hung over that poor bastard’s head—an old sin that all the new good deeds in the world just couldn’t make go away. And as the Chief neared the natural death at a ripe old age that his life insurance policy had bought him, the cop was worried it would all come out. Disgrace. Maybe even jail time. A hero who was suddenly a villain. A proud man with two sons would find that hard to take. Don’t blame the guy.”

  His jaw was set but trembling. “What did he give you, Hammer?”

  “So the cop reaches out to some old mob cronies and convinces them that what the Chief is holding back is going to ruin what little is left of their own sad, sorry lives. I’m going to guess that the cop didn’t tell them to kill the Chief. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt that they adlibbed that one. But, hell, it should have occurred to him what they would do—that they’d have to shut the old guy up before making their search.”

  He was getting flushed. “What did he give you, Hammer? Where is it?”

  I got the old .38 Police Positive out of my suitcoat pocket and I set in on the desk, right on top of that pile of printouts he’d been reading.

  “That’s one of the things he gave me,” I said. “I think he probably wanted you to have it.”

  Milroy stared down at the old revolver.

  “I saw the Chief shoot Gino Madoni with that piece,” I said, “when I was a kid. First bad guy that I ever saw shot. And it was up close and personal, let me tell you.”

  I went over and got my hat and placed a hand on the door knob. “You have several choices, Inspector, including coming after me. Hell, I’ve even provided the gun. If you want to find me, I’ll be at my office this afternoon, the Blue Ribbon restaurant for supper with Captain Chambers, and at my apartment after that. I’m in the book.”

  His hand was on the gun—not gripping it, just resting on it, like a fire-and-brimstone preacher laying on a healing hand. His face was red now and the lightning bolt scar stood out starkly.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said, “I’ll turn over what I have to the current chief. That gives you another option—take your chances and take your medicine.”

  Very quietly he said, “But there’s another option.”

  “There is. A lot of good cops have taken it, for all kinds of reasons. Depression. Family problems. A fatal illness. Men who live by the gun … you know the rest. You make the right decision, Inspector, and I won’t have to come forward. And I’ll get rid of the evidence once and for all.”

  He glanced up at me. “You’d do that for me?”

  “You have my word. But you know something? I believe the Chief wouldn’t have hung you out to dry, not after all these years … unless you reverted to form and came after him. That gun there? He had it in his hand, under the sheet, in that hospital room. Ready to do what he had to.”

  Milroy sighed. “Yeah. He was a hell of a guy. I came to respect him. I don’t think … I don’t think I was ever able to gain his.”

  I shrugged. “Never too late to try.”

  And I left him there with his thoughts and the gun and all the rest of it.

  The gunmetal sky was grumbling. Cloud cover was low and dark with lightning bolts shorting in and out. I was in my raincoat and hat standing outside the Blue Ribbon, as if I were waiting for it to come down after me.

  Really, I was waiting for Pat, having already sent Velda inside to grab our regular table. My stomach was grumbling worse than the sky, but some of George’s knockwurst would cure my ills, whereas the sky would have to bust itself apart to get over its lousy attitude.

  As if the sky had already done that, Pat came running from somewhere, also in raincoat and hat. When he saw me, he slowed and then we stood there while he lit up a Lucky. He was the kind of gentleman who didn’t like to smoke at a table in a restaurant when a lady was in the party. But this was something else.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Mike,” he said. “All hell’s broken loose at the Plaza.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, but Milroy went home this afternoon and blew his brains out in his den.”

  “No.”

  “He used a gun that once belonged to the Chief. They were really tight, you know. It was probably a gift to him.”

  “Probably.”

  Pat drew in smoke, exhaled it, sending a small blue cloud up to join the big bad black ones. “He left a note. Turns out he had a brain tumor. Been having blinding headaches and just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Pity. Will there be an autopsy?”

  “No. What the hell for?” Then he eyed me sideways with the usual suspicion. “You don’t sniff foul play, do you, Mike? Some suicides really are suicides, you know.”

  “No, no. You’re right.”

  “Probably the Chief’s murder sent him over the edge. You never really know people, do you?” He sighed and pitched the cigarette sparking toward the street. “Velda inside?”

  “Yeah. Go in and join her, will you? Something I need to take care of.”

  “Sure.”

  Pat went in.

  The sky came apart in pieces, thunder like cannonfire, rain sheeting down. I slipped under the Blue Ribbon canopy and still got wet, watching jagged white streaks carve the deep black smoke of it.

  I walked through the downpour to the curb, let the key bounce in the palm of my hand a few times, then tossed it into the gutter, where the rush of water carried it to the sewer and gone.

  “So long, Chief,” I said, and went inside.

  A Dangerous Cat

  Somebody had let the cat out.

  It jumped off its perch by the hallway window outside my apartment and came over to rub itself against my legs with the tip of its tail making little sexy twitches of hello.

  Maybe the gray-and-white female felt when that instinctive sense of survival hit me, because the animal drew back a second, gave a soundless meow and stiff-legged itself to the door, waiting for me to move.

  A few hours ago, that cat—who had adopted me when the neighbors across the way left her behind—had been locked inside my apartment and nobody but me had the keys.

  Well, me and Velda, my secretary and partner in Michael Hammer Investigations. She lived in the building, too. But I’d just come down from her apartment, where we’d shared breakfast.

  That makes three tries, I thought, the hair on the back of my neck standing up like I was the cat. The other two times
hadn’t been accidents or coincidences at all.

  No jimmy marks on the door frame or around the lock, no signs of forcible entry evident, but the cat was out here, and that meant somebody had been in there.

  I took out the .45, jacked a shell into the chamber and worked my key in the slot and opened the door. It was a steel fireproof job and I got well down under any logical line of fire, if the setup was meant for sudden ambush.

  But that damn cat got in ahead of me and I could tell right away that the place was empty, otherwise puss would have stuck her tail up in immediate alert.

  All she did was run for the kitchenette milk bowl as I closed the door, probed the area, then holstered the .45 and picked up the phone on the little table by my recliner facing the TV.

  Captain Pat Chambers of the NYPD was still at his desk, getting the paperwork out on the Lightener case, and however tired his hello might sound, it was good to hear.

  “It’s Mike, buddy. Feel like some action?”

  “Knock it off, pal. You know my ass is dragging after yesterday.”

  “Humor me, anyway.”

  I could hear his chair creak as he sat back. “Okay, consider yourself humored. Now what?”

  “Turns out somebody doesn’t like me.”

  A weary chuckle. “And this is news?”

  “Not so much. I’ve been set up for a kill before.”

  This time the creak of the chair meant he was sitting forward. “So what’s different this time around?”

  “What’s different is there’s no reason for it.”

  His voice shifted into concern-tinged professionalism. “You’ve been around too damn long, Mike, to get easily rattled. What’s got your hackles up?”

  The tabby came out licking milk from its chops.

  I answered his question with one of my own: “You know anybody out at Kennedy who works with sniffers?”

  “Dogs, Mike?”

  “Dogs, Pat.”

  “Well, Bill Champlin works with the grass variety. They can point out everything from daisies to hashish, but what—”