Kill Me, Darling Page 11

  I just pushed through.

  This I did along one side of the place, via a less secluded yard next door. Any noise I made was covered by music coming from either a radio or a portable phonograph around back—Doris Day singing “Secret Love.” The hedge left just enough room to allow me to move down a flagstone path that widened into a patio with a big kidney-shaped swimming pool. Its waters were gleaming like somebody had pitched in handful after handful of diamonds.

  On a beach towel on the flagstone, a beautiful woman lay on her stomach, sunning in the nude, her face turned away from me, her dark hair damp from a recent swim. A white terry-cloth robe was slung over the back of a white wrought-iron chair nearby, at a matching table that was home to a red Bakelite portable radio. Doris kept singing. The beauty just kept sunning. I just kept looking.

  She had a long lovely back, sloping gently to the narrow waist that curved back to her hips, the firm dimpled roundness of her bottom the gateway to long, sleek legs, a little heavier than Hollywood would have it. The tan was coming along nicely, a healthy golden glow.

  “You’re done on this side,” I said.

  Velda yelped a little and turned over fast, reaching for the robe. When she saw it was me, she still went for the robe but was in no hurry slipping it on, her expression running a gambit of emotions from relief to fear, from joy to dread. I stood there rocking on my gum-soled shoes, looking casual, as if glimpsing the full high breasts and flat muscular stomach and the tangle of dark hair at the V of her thighs didn’t tear me apart like some rabid animal was ripping at my guts.

  “Mike,” she breathed, eyes flaring, nostrils too. The raven-wing hair made delicious gypsy tendrils. “You mustn’t be here.”

  I pulled up one of the white wrought-iron chairs and sat down. “And yet I am.”

  She got up and took the chair where the robe had been draped, reaching to turn down the radio, where Tony Bennett had just begun “Rags to Riches.” Her elbows were on the table and she was so close to me I could smell the suntan oil. No make-up. Just sheer classic beauty.

  “You have to go,” she said, the deep brown eyes begging me. “This is beyond dangerous.”

  “Then why don’t you come with me?”

  “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “A little greenery isn’t going to keep me away from my girl. You are still my girl, aren’t you, kitten?” I touched her hand, the one with the sapphire ring, and she drew it away like a hot stove had touched her.

  Her chin was up. “I told you last night, Mike. It’s over between us. You need to move on. We had something wonderful, but—”

  “Bullshit. And here I used to think you could have made it in the movies. I have my own ideas about what you’re up to here, and why you don’t think you can involve me. But I know you’re still mine. It makes my skin crawl to think of you with that bastard, but…”

  You could still hear the song playing, faintly, on the radio. I swept it off the table and it broke into pieces on the flagstone.

  Velda jumped a little. But only a little.

  “…but baby, I know you’re still mine.”

  “No, Mike. Go. I told you before that—”

  “I’ll go. I’ll leave you to your handsome keeper. And I’ll stay out of it. I won’t even chop the son of a bitch into pieces. Just tuck my tail between my legs and head back to Manhattan. But first, tell me this, doll. Tell me why you held onto that picture of us, and hid it away.”

  Her eyes were jeweled with tears and she reached for my hand and held it and squeezed. She was swallowing and then about to speak when a male voice behind her intruded.

  “Well, Mr. Hammer!” Nolly Quinn said.

  A slender young dark-haired servant with a white jacket and a black mustache was holding open a sliding glass door and pointing to us.

  Quinn came over, in no hurry. He looked like he’d walked out of a men’s fashion spread in his off-white linen suit, cream-color shirt and chocolate tie. The young butler shut himself back inside the house.

  “I’m rather relieved it’s you,” Quinn said, looming over us. “Half an hour ago, my houseboy noticed someone suspicious who was apparently casing the place, and gave me a call. I rushed right over.”

  He came around the table and took the remaining wrought-iron seat, putting himself between us. Elbows on the arms of the chair, he knitted his fingers at his chest. His expression, even his manner, seemed pleasant enough.

  “Boy’s too tightly wound,” Quinn said regretfully, “and I really should give him the boot. But Ron does everything around here, cleaning, cooking. After all, lovers come and go, but a good servant is hard to find.”

  This seemed to be a not too subtle message to Velda, who said, “Mike stopped by unannounced, Nolly. I’ve just asked him to go. I’ve made it clear that—”

  “She has made it clear,” I said. “And I apologize for showing up here today. And even more for making a scene last night.”

  He touched his throat, smiling, raising an eyebrow. “Rather more than just a scene, I’d say… but believe me, I do understand. That girl I slapped… that was simply unacceptable. It’s just that she’s a crazy possessive little bitch, and… well, sometimes people just don’t understand when a love affair is over.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Anyway, Mr. Hammer… Mike? Apology accepted.” A smile blossomed under the Gable mustache. “Apologies accepted. But I don’t think it serves any purpose for us to prolong this discussion… do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  And it was the truth. It was all I could do not to pistol-whip him here and now.

  But I wanted more. I wanted the goods on this bastard, and I needed to stop acting like a spurned, wronged lover and get back to some real detective work. Once I’d proved he was a murderer, it would be much easier to get away with killing him.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said, the perfect host. “I’ll have to let you out the front gate.”

  Quinn took the lead and I gave Velda a backward glance that said, Later, kitten. I followed him down the flagstone path and around to the gate. There he used a little intercom to have the houseboy unlock it from inside. It opened automatically, swinging out a little and then all the way back in. The thing must have dated back as far as the house, because it creaked like a door in a haunted-house picture.

  He said, “Mr. Hammer… Mike… I choose to believe you’ve been sincere with me today. Velda is a very special girl, and she and I are at the beginning of something that I think could last a very long while. You need to know that I fight for what I want, Mike, and that your well-earned reputation does not dissuade me in the least. I came up on the streets, too.”

  That had seemed friendly and reasonable and not at all the threat of death that it was.

  Velda came rushing out of somewhere, still in the robe, her hair nearly dry from the afternoon sun. “Mike!”

  We had both already turned to her when she approached us, took my right hand with both of hers. “Mike, I’m so sorry to have hurt you. And I want you to know how very grateful I am that you’re taking this so well.”

  She flashed me a brave little smile, then took Nolly’s arm and they walked briskly toward the stucco manse on flagstone weaving through a manicured landscape fringed with palm trees and punctuated by bursts of flowers.

  I went out, the gate grinding shut behind me.

  Then I looked at the note that Velda had passed me.

  Pigalle, 9 tonite.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The “World-Famous” Place Pigalle, just west of Collins Avenue, dressed up its undistinguished yellow-brick facade by writing its name in black letters outlined in pink neon and displaying movie-house-style posters of such top-name peelers as Tempest Storm and Dixie Evans.

  But “The Fabulous 4D Gal” and “The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesk” were strictly Thanksgiving-to-Easter material. The rest of the year, the facade’s boldly lettered guarantee of “15 Exotic Dancers 15” was honored by unkno
wns. Famous or novice, all take-it-off talent at the Pigalle was required A.K. (“After Kefauver”) to put the brakes on at bras and g-strings.

  I thought the gorgeous taffy-haired no-name doll sharing the stage with a Cuban combo was doing just fine, her bump-and-grind mixing well with Latin rhythms. She was a game kid, considering the place was barely a third full. Purplish lighting turned cigarette smoke into a garish haze while a handful of lone men got hustled for drinks at the bar by strippers who’d finished their sets. Despite the Cuban band, the place lived up to the Parisian promise of its name by way of Can-Can-Girl wall murals from some modestly talented but highly horny local Lautrec.

  Velda was in a booth in the back, waiting, half of her highball gone. A lovely woman with midnight hair brushing mostly bare shoulders, the straight-across cut of her bangs echoing the horizontal neckline of the black sheath dress. Only about a third of her bosom was exposed. Just enough to turn my mouth as cottony as going off the booze.

  “We don’t have long,” she said. No hello or other preamble. “Quinn is out on ‘business’ and didn’t say what kind or when he’d return. I told that houseboy of his that I wanted to go shopping on Lincoln Road.”

  “You have a car to do that?”

  “Quinn said I could drive his Jag when he was out. But I want to be there when he gets back. We shouldn’t risk it for very long.”

  “Risk seeing each other, you mean.”

  She swallowed, nodded. Her eyes seemed only able to meet mine momentarily. “I don’t suppose it will do any good to ask you to trust me? And to ask you again to just…”

  “Go? No.” I gave her the nasty grin. “The time to ask for my trust was right before you blew town. Of course, you did leave me that sweet kiss-off. ‘Goodbye.’ Yeah, that about covers everything.”

  A waitress in an Apache dancer getup came over and I ordered a beer.

  Velda was looking at her folded hands. I expected tension in her face, and maybe I’d thought my little speech would make her cry. It hadn’t quite. Her eyes glistened some, but her face had a softness that comes with resignation.

  I said, “You want to tell me, or should I take a stab?”

  “Go… go ahead.” Her voice was small with some tremor. I’d never heard it like that.

  I folded my arms, cocked my head. “I figure around four months ago, maybe five, your old boss Wade Manley approached you. He had an undercover assignment that needed doing, and he just knew that you were the only policewoman who might be up to it. Never mind that you weren’t a policewoman anymore. That you had other things going on in your life right now. How am I doing?”

  She nodded twice, still not looking at me. Sipped her highball.

  I went on: “Nolly Quinn was a very nasty piece of work who had slipped through Manley’s fingers back in the old days. A hugely successful call girl racket that the Big Man had never been able to shut down, and then Nolly gathered his bankroll and left. Well, that stuck in the Big Man’s craw. Then years later, somehow your old boss got a line on what Nolly was up to now—specifically that he was setting up a major drug smuggling operation in Miami.”

  The Cuban combo was doing a big finish. The taffy-haired doll must have been down to her bra and g-string. Scattered applause and a few hoots and hollers seemed to confirm that.

  “For some reason, Nolly was back in our town, the big town, probably to let interested parties know that he could supply quantities of certain products that they would be very much interested in merchandising. The Big Man moved fast, pulling you in, convincing you that this was a job that simply had to be done. Nolly is a notorious ladies’ man, and that provided the perfect opportunity to get a man… that is, a woman… on the inside. He put you next to Quinn and let nature take its course.”

  She shivered. “You make it sound…”

  “Like you ran around on me? And then ran out on me?”

  My beer came.

  She looked up and it was as if raising her head was lifting a thousand-pound weight. “Mike, this isn’t just any undercover assignment. Nolly Quinn may look handsome and seem charming, but he’s a killer many times over. When he was running that call girl operation, half a dozen women who crossed him disappeared. Just fell off the earth. Now, he’s putting together a network importing drugs from only ninety miles away, a flow of misery that once started will be impossible to stop.”

  Something came out of me that pretended to be a laugh. “And all that’s supposed to make me feel better about this? Velda, two recent valentines of Nolly’s got massacred. A suicide and a hit-and-run. Did you know about that?”

  She nodded, still only making occasional, momentary eye contact. “I… I knew going in. Mike, he has to be stopped.”

  “Let me stop him.”

  She shook her head and her eyes met mine for several seconds, a new record. “No. That’s… that’s one of the reasons I couldn’t tell you what I was going to do, where I was going to go. Because you would solve the problem the Mike Hammer way, and this has to be done with evidence.”

  “Evidence is optional in my book.”

  A twitch of a smile flickered in the morose face. “Exactly. Look at what you’ve done since you hit town! You sent Quinn’s top two boys to the emergency room. Then you stormed into that club and almost choked Quinn to death.”

  “Almost only counts in horse shoes,” I muttered.

  “Very funny, Mike. And believe me, I wouldn’t mind watching you take him apart piece by piece. But there are two key players in this who I haven’t identified yet. Silent partners, without whom we have nothing. And on top of that, I’ve been keeping track of all his contacts. I’m building a list of the plane pilots and boat captains he’s using. I even have names of representatives of the Cuban government he’s in bed with.”

  “Oh yeah. We definitely want who he’s in bed with.”

  Her eyes closed, two seconds passed, and they opened again. “That’s the other reason, Mike. The reason why I couldn’t tell you about any of this. Why you had to think that it was over between us… and maybe it will be anyway, but…”

  “You said there was another reason.”

  “A detective of your skills hasn’t deduced it?” She gave me a heartbroken, heartbreaking smile. “What would you have said if I told you I was going undercover to get as close as possible to a notorious ladies’ man of a mobster?”

  I didn’t need to answer. We both knew.

  She took a gulp of her highball. “And now… now this investigation has cost my old boss his life.”

  I made a fist and managed not to slam it onto the table. “That’s right, it has. Your old boss is very goddamn dead. Making you an undercover agent without a superior to report to. That means it’s time to pack up and leave, baby. In anybody’s book.”

  Now she dared to hold my eyes. “That’s Wade Manley you’re talking about, Mike. Remember him? He put us together. Sure, you and I had met, you’d bailed me out of a jam… and blown my cover. But the Big Man looked at us, and maybe he saw a couple of people who were bruised and battered, and could tell what we might be able to do for each other. What we might mean for each other.”

  Now I couldn’t look at her. “Well, he didn’t hesitate in pulling you back in, and wrecking what we built.”

  “Is it wrecked, Mike?”

  Could not goddamn look at her.

  “Kitten… undercover is one thing. Under covers is another.”

  Her sigh began in Manhattan and came out in Miami Beach. “Mike, Mike… it’s not that way. Quinn hasn’t touched me. Well, he’s touched me… he’s kissed me…”

  “Have fun?”

  She made a face. “It’s like kissing a mannequin. He doesn’t have any real human feelings that I can see. Maybe greed and jealousy. What he really wants is a beautiful woman on his arm.”

  “I’m supposed to believe that.”

  “It’s true. Oh, eventually he’ll want more than kissing and… petting. He’s very serious about me, Mike. He thinks I’m as s
mart as I am beautiful. That I’d make a great… partner in life.”

  “I’ll position myself up front to catch the bridal bouquet.”

  She laughed a little, a horrible thing. “He’s like you, Mike. Wants to save it for the honeymoon. Who would think a hound like him would be so old-fashioned? Who would think a hound like you would be so old-fashioned?”

  I said nothing.

  She finished her highball. “But that’s not all of it. You see, he’s got a dose, Mike. The good ’ol V.D. He’s popping penicillin like M&M’s. He doesn’t want to take any risks that his ‘baby’ might catch it.”

  I frowned at her, something wiggling in the back of my head. “That cure takes weeks, not months.”

  Lightly she said, “I know, but he’s paranoid about it. You can see how vain he is.” Then she leaned forward and now she had no trouble looking right at me. “And I’m close, Mike. Very damn close.”

  I shrugged. “So you’re close. Fine. Swell. But listen to me, doll—things are different now. I’m in this. You know it, and Nolly Quinn knows it. Putting you in harm’s way was never my plan… but my presence here does that. That much you and your old boss were right about.”

  She sighed, nodded.

  I leaned way forward, my voice so hushed God couldn’t have overheard. “You need to promise me that you’ll call me in if there’s any sign of trouble.”

  With one hand she touched the sapphire ring on the other. “I will, Mike. I promise. I will.”

  I gave her the number at the Sea Breeze.

  “Just so you know,” I said, “I’m legal down here. A pal of Pat’s on the Miami P.D got me a temporary gun permit and a P.I. license.”

  That seemed to amuse her. “Well, I know what a stickler you are for the legal niceties.”

  It’s not polite to point but that’s what I did. “Things are changing, kitten. Ramping up. This afternoon a consortium of gangsters with legit business interests tried to hire me to kill Nolly Quinn.”