Complex 90 Page 12

  “I’ll have to make the suggestion upstairs. Washington is laying down some pretty heavy flak.”

  “Screw them. Ralph Marley is a homicide, and the last time I looked you were Captain of Homicide. And this homicide went down in your jurisdiction. Or is that ‘bailiwick?’”

  He let the grin crack through his frown. “You never change, do you? Okay, I’ll push the issue. We’ll backtrack on Romanos and see where it leads. But, listen, Mike.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender, “I know, I know. If I come up with anything, call you first.”

  He wagged a finger at me. “You obstruct justice, pal, and I’ll throw your ass in the slammer as fast as the next bad guy’s.”

  “You never change either,” I said, on my way out. “Do you, Pat?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  New York had clouded up again and the musky smell of rain was in the air. I stood in the doorway of Pat’s precinct building and cased the street, watching the traffic carefully. A row of police cruisers stood at the curb and the flow moved by cautiously. A few other cars were parked farther down and the taxi I’d arrived in sat in a slot outside a coffee house. I’d paid the cabbie twenty to sit with his meter off and his top light unlit while I was in with Pat, so I’d be assured of a fast exit.

  There are times when you can feel the trouble hovering, waiting to drop right on top of you. Even though I couldn’t put my finger on it, I knew it was there. The police aren’t the only ones who can sift through a person’s background and come up with information like known associates. Anybody who took even a casual stroll through my history would learn just how often Pat and I had worked together, and could stake out this building—even if it was a police station—to see if I’d show.

  Inside the station house’s high-ceilinged reception area, where a desk sergeant ruled from on high, I wedged into a pay booth, not needing anybody’s permission for my one phone call. I thumbed through the directory until I found the number of the nearby coffee house and got the manager to send a waitress out to summon my cabbie to the phone.

  “This is your fare,” I said.

  “That twenty bucks won’t last forever, bud.”

  “My name’s Mike Hammer. That mean anything to you?”

  “...I thought you looked familiar.”

  “I’m going to send a replacement fare out to you as soon as I can. You’re to drive him to the Hackard Building. He’ll pay the freight.”

  “This is way more complicated than ‘follow that car.’”

  “Yeah, but I just know you’re up to it, since there’ll be a five-buck tip in it.”

  I could hear the shrug in his voice. “Why not?”

  Now I looked around the station house reception area. A guy about my age and size in a raincoat was lodging a complaint against his landlord. I listened to him not get anywhere with the desk sergeant, and when I went up to him his face was red with anger. Seemed like perfect casting to me.

  “You want to make a quick fifty?” I asked him.

  “Who do I have to kill?” Not the smartest thing to say in a police station, but nobody but me was listening.

  I explained that he was to run out of here, fast, take that waiting cab across the street, and pay for the fare and a five buck tip out of a twenty I’d give him.

  “Go inside the Hackard Building,” I said, “wait a couple minutes, then go back out through the coffee shop entrance and take a cab home or wherever the rest of that twenty will take you.”

  “I got it,” he said, nodding. “So where’s the fifty?”

  I gave him a beautiful crisp engraving of President Grant.

  The guy was heading out, then turned and called, “What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “It’s about you making fifty bucks,” I said.

  That was good enough for him.

  I lagged back in the niche of the doorway. In the quick exit to the cab from the building, the guy could have passed for me. I watched the cab pull away. Right behind, a new black Ford with two men in the front seat pulled out and fell in line.

  I jotted down the plate number, and sent a note up to Pat, asking him to check it out with the Motor Vehicle Bureau. Then I took a side door just past the locker room out to the street.

  Fifteen minutes later, using a wall pay phone in a small gin mill on Eighth Avenue, I called Pat. He came on the line with a grunt, and said, “So where’d you come up with that plate number, Mike?”

  I told him about the stunt with the cab.

  “You’re getting cute in your old age, buddy. Let’s hope you didn’t get some poor schlub killed because he was wearing a raincoat and got out at the Hackard Building.”

  “If so, it’ll be a relief to that landlord he was bitching about. What about those wheels?”

  “Stolen vehicle. If you think that car is full of guys with guns, I can put out an APB.”

  “Do that.”

  “Anything to please a tax payer.”

  “Pat...”

  “What?”

  “That car was outside your station house. That means my Russian friends know you’re in this, too. That we’re friends. Watch your ass.”

  “Not a problem. My ass is in a sling thanks to you, and that makes it easy to keep an eye on.”

  He hung up.

  I used another dime to buzz the Blue Ribbon and Angie said Des Casey had called and left me a phone number that I recognized as that of Peerage Brokers on Broadway.

  The front for Rickerby’s New York office.

  “Your friend said it was urgent, Mike,” Angie said.

  “Thanks, Angie,” I said, and put the phone back.

  Everything was urgent with feds, except getting your tax refund back to you.

  I had other things to do, and they could take their damn turn.

  * * *

  The Wentworth Hotel’s rooms were either high-end residential or permanently reserved by regular wealthy patrons who couldn’t be bothered with the inconvenience of arranging lodgings or packing luggage on a trip to the city. It boasted neither marquee nor doorman, and announced its existence only by way of a small bronze plaque set into the brick beside the entrance.

  But once inside you realized its exclusiveness. You were visually inspected, your credentials requested, your presence announced by desk phone, and if found acceptable, you were escorted by private elevator to the appropriate apartment in the company of a cold, quietly contemptuous staff member, who delivered you like a package to the door of the guest or resident, not leaving until that staff member ascertained that you were indeed expected.

  And yet all of this exclusivity and security had not prevented Pietro Romanos from crashing the senator’s party the night that started it all....

  Irene Carroll thanked the assistant manager, who was so pompous that a tip would have offended him, and he went away.

  She stood there, posed in the doorway as if she were a picture and it were her frame, rather boldly outfitted in a Chinese-looking pair of silk lounging pajamas, sky blue with white trimmings, the tips of her full breasts apparent under the fabric. Her feet were bare.

  “I was wondering when you would come around, Mike.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Pleasantly so. Oh, I expected you to take me up on my invitation, just not so soon.”

  She turned sideways and gestured for me to come in. I did, brushing by her. She closed the door behind me and I moved through a rather blank entryway into a living room where I expected to find fine old original oil paintings and carefully selected antique furniture.

  There were originals here, all right, but of the blown-up comicbook panel and giant soup can variety. The walls and carpet were white, and the furniture geometric, solid blues and reds. I doubted these mod trimmings had come with a Wentworth apartment, and wondered if all the red, white and blue was meant to be patriotic, or was that just a pop art accident?

  “Now I’ve surprised you,” she said, smiling, arms folded on the shelf of
her generous bosom.

  “Not what I pictured,” I admitted.

  She sat down on a blue sofa and motioned with a sweep of her hand for me to take the red chair opposite her. When she crossed her legs, there was a sensual swish of silk. That magnificent body was completely covered, but the nakedness beneath the draped fabric taunted me.

  “My home in Georgetown,” she said, with a regal shake of her sleek chin-cut white hair, “is painfully, properly Early American. Frankly, to call it a home is a disservice. it’s a mansion. Lovely, tasteful, and filled with antiques that many a museum would envy.”

  “So when you come to the city, you like a change.”

  She shrugged. “I come here to have a good time. I don’t throw the parties, I just go to them.” She smiled to herself, laughed the same way, then shared her thoughts: “My late husband oversaw the decoration of the Georgetown place. He would have a shit fit if he saw this. Particularly if he knew how much that Warhol cost, and those Lichtensteins.”

  I smiled and nodded, like I knew what the hell she was talking about, then said, “You mentioned you might be able to help me with my current. situation.”

  “Your. situation, Mike, as you so euphemistically put it, has Washington in an uproar. and, in some respects, of course, I am Washington.”

  “And here I thought I had an ego.”

  “Not ego, Mike, rather hard reality. There are times when my services are essential in that town. Politics are not entirely made in smoke-filled caucus rooms, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. “But I try to stay out of politics.”

  “Lately you have a funny way of doing that, Mike.”

  “Politics is Republicans and Democrats, and I couldn’t have less interest in either. But when a bunch of slobs have world domination in mind, this old G.I. sits up and takes notice. Because that’s about survival, and survival’s a subject I’m an expert in.”

  She got her lovely, strange laugh going again, and I started to bristle, and she saw that. Her laughter stopped, her expression grew more serious, and she held her palms up in surrender.

  “I don’t mean to offend you, Mike. I’m not laughing at you.”

  “Well, you’re not laughing with me, lady, ’cause I’m not laughing.”

  “Now I have offended you. I’m sorry. So very sorry. I laugh because you are so impressive, such a rare example of the kind of man you rarely seen anymore.”

  “Try a museum. Ancient history wing.”

  “Mike... I’m interested in you. My meeting you this morning wasn’t entirely born of curiosity. It was suggested by certain people that I arrange to see you, draw you out, even get... close to you... and report back what I had learned.”

  “You’d be taking on some hard duty, kid.”

  That got a sudden smile and that tinkly laugh again. “Yes, I’m beginning to figure that out. I took the time to read up on you and ask a few discreet questions. That’s why I’m being so frank.”

  “Think you can learn more that way?”

  “Possibly,” she admitted. “But after spending even a little time with you, I don’t expect you to tell me any more than you want me to know... so now it’s back to a matter of curiosity again.”

  She flipped open an enameled box and held it out to me. “Cigarette?”

  They were black with gold tips. “No. I gave that up. Too risky.”

  That got a laugh out of her, that tinkling thing that was two parts bells ringing and one part breaking glass. She selected a cigarette, produced a small lighter from somewhere, then sat back smoking with her arms crossed under her breasts, lifting them, a pose that was intentionally provocative.

  I made a gesture with my shoulders and relaxed in the chair. The damn thing was actually pretty comfortable. “You were supposed to have been at Allen’s party the night the shooting took place.”

  “Thank goodness I was late!”

  “Yeah, thank goodness,” I said. I was starting to wonder about that. “You knew everybody on the guest list, didn’t you?”

  “Certainly. Quite well. Some were people of importance, others simply friends of Allen’s. It was a kind of going-away party for Allen, you know, with the Russian trip coming up shortly. It was a last-minute affair on his part and there wasn’t time for him and his wife. do you know Emily?”

  “Yes, I met her. Nice lady.”

  “Wonderful woman. One of the sweetest you could hope to meet. Anyway, it was too late for the Jaspers to arrange anything very elaborate. I think they got the idea of putting together a party the week before, when N.A.S.A. threw their own party after the successful Gadfly launch. Allen and Emily went down to be part of that, you know. He’s a big supporter of N.A.S.A., which isn’t the case with every senator of his political persuasion. He went down there in part as a show of support for his friend, Dr. Giles—Harmon Giles... whom I believe you know.”

  “Not well. He patched me up that night.”

  She looked skyward, as if she could see the satellites spinning up there. “Harmon Giles is one of the modern greats.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh yes, he was in the aerospace program as a surgeon-scientist since its inception. Overwork forced his retirement, and he went back to private practice after the last launch. They still call him in for consultations.”

  “I might check in with him myself. Leg is still buggin’ me a little.”

  Her smile was teasing. “Hope it’s nothing too serious...?”

  I smiled back at her. “Doesn’t interfere with anything important.”

  She gave me a sleepy-lidded glance. “No, I wouldn’t imagine so.”

  “How about filling me in on the other guests?”

  “You really should talk to Allen about them.”

  “I want your version.”

  She took a deep drag on the cigarette, blew smoke out through dragon nostrils, and snuffed it out in a red enamel ashtray.

  Finally, she said, “I don’t know what you’re looking for, Mike, but I do know this: most of the guests had security clearances, and the others were all personal friends of Allen’s. Allen would never associate with anyone disreputable or suspect in any way. He’s a fine man, a fine American, and he’s my friend.”

  I didn’t remember suggesting otherwise. Why was she defensive all of a sudden?

  “Anyway,” she was saying, the moment gone now, “my understanding is that the shooting you were involved in grew out of an attempted robbery.”

  “It could have been something else.”

  Her eyes tensed. “What?”

  “Assassination.”

  “Of whom?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering about.”

  “Of Allen?” She leaned forward, watching me as if she feared I might make a break for it. “Doubtful, Mike. Doubtful.”

  “Why?”

  “Allen is a controversial figure, at times, but he doesn’t have those kinds of enemy. Somebody might toss an egg, but not a.”

  “Bullet? Irene, he’s a United States senator. All it takes is one screwball—one disgruntled, homicidal constituent. You said other important people were there.”

  “Not of a similar stature. Anyone else there could have been replaced in their role by someone equally as competent.”

  “What about Dr. Giles?”

  She shook her head, the white hair shimmering. “Why attack a retired space program surgeon?”

  “Did you ever consider this?” I asked, sitting forward. “You were supposed to have been there too. You didn’t show up until after it was over.”

  Alarm dawned. “You mean, I could have been...”

  “The target? Yes. If it was an assassination attempt, why not you? You are Washington, remember?”

  “I meant that tongue-in-cheek, Mike!” Speaking of her tongue, it touched her lips and left them gleaming wetly. “I’m just a... a glorified hostess...”

  “You’re the only one left of your kind in Washington and you damn well know it. With your
contacts, you could have heard or seen something you weren’t supposed to, and if you ever put the pieces together, and exposed this knowledge, it might have national or even international ramifications.”

  “That is just ridiculous.” But even as she said it, her voice was shaking and her tone weak.

  “Is it?” I asked quietly.

  “Mike.”

  “Think about it, Irene. This began the night you were late to a party. Everyone figures your jewels are a possible motive. But maybe it was your life that guy was after.”

  She let her hands fall into her lap and I saw the machinery of her mind going into motion. She threw back a stray lock of hair and said, “You were the one abducted, Mike. In Russia. Not Manhattan.”

  “Right now, Irene, the heat’s on me because Soviet national prestige is on the line. But let’s assume that you are an unwitting part of this. that you do know something, even if you don’t recognize it, much less remember it.”

  “Mike, you’re scaring me.”

  “My showing up at that party was something Allen didn’t even know about till the last minute. I could have been there to make contact with you per your instructions. I have certain things in my background that would come in handy if you needed a strong defender in dealing with the Soviets.”

  “Oh, but you know it wasn’t like that.”

  “But does the K.G.B. know it, Irene?”

  She got up suddenly, tossed her hair and went to a small black-and-white bar in the corner and made a drink. I shook my head when she offered me one. When she walked over, her nervousness was palpable. “What you suggest just isn’t possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” I said. “Now I need to determine if it’s probable.”

  “I wish you hadn’t even mentioned it...”

  I got up and reached for my hat. “Had to, honey. I needed to see your reaction.”

  “You saw it. And?”

  “And I’m satisfied. If this starts to look like you were the catalyst, I’ll be in touch straightaway.”

  She put her drink down on the glass coffee table and almost ran to me. “Mike—please don’t go. Not yet.”

  “You’ll be all right here,” I told her. “The President couldn’t get in this damn hotel without getting patted down and grilled. But if you want me to put a man outside, I can arrange that.”