Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Read online

  A single bulb, its yellowish glow giving us immediate jaundice, hung high in a common vestibule where all but one of the mailboxes had slots with a scrawled identifier. The blank one was Marvin’s and that was the button I pushed. We went through the door and up a creaking wooden staircase into a world of ethnic cooking smells and the muffled behind-closed-door sounds of rock radio, squalling babies, and screaming domestic quarrels.

  I knocked at Marvin’s paint-blistered door and waited while he checked the peephole that was as upscale an extra as this dump provided.

  Then he opened the door and gave us each a nod by way of greeting, offering me no hand to shake.

  In his late forties, Marvin Dooley had his father’s rugged build but his mother’s dark blond hair and dark blue eyes. His expression was one of weariness and barely withheld irritation. He wore a light blue polo shirt with a frayed collar, blue jeans, and white socks, no shoes. He looked tan in the weather-beaten way that said he hadn’t got it on vacation.

  “You remember Ms. Sterling, my associate,” I said with a nod toward Velda.

  He found a smile for her. He may have been grumpy but he wasn’t dead, and this timelessly good-looking older woman in a khaki jumpsuit got his attention. He even gave her an additional nod, as he gestured us into his apartment, which was one large single room.

  There had been improvements and additions since we met with him last year. The place had received some fresh coats of pale institutional green, a step up from peeling yellow. A decent second-hand sofa that no doubt folded into his bed replaced the military-style cot. The stove was new and the refrigerator, too, or anyway newer than the appliances whose places they’d taken. A fake-leather recliner was arranged before a big-screen projection TV as if the latter were an altar. The rest was as before: a scuffed chest of drawers, a few odd pieces of Goodwill furnishings, and an old Formica kitchen table with several wooden chairs.

  And as before, the most striking aspect of this generous cell of an apartment was its neatness—no scattered dirty clothes, no dishes in the sink waiting to be washed, no layers of dust. On our previous visit, Marvin had explained he’d picked that habit up in the navy.

  He asked us if we’d like beers and we declined. He didn’t get himself one, just invited us to sit on the couch. We did, and he pulled over one of the kitchen chairs and sat facing us.

  “I suppose I owe you a debt of thanks,” he said with obvious reluctance. His voice was the only thing about him reminiscent of his father, and that gave me a slightly spooky feeling.

  I said, “Why’s that, Marvin?”

  “You tracked down my father’s killer. That Ugo Ponti son-of-a-bitch. Thank you for that. But I figure you might be… unhappy with me.”

  “Not at all. What makes you think so?”

  He raised his eyebrows in tandem with a shrug. “I suppose I must have led him to you. Ugo, I mean. That night, he came by waving a gun, demanding to know what I’d told you. I cooperated and told him about my pop’s boat and that urn with the numbers on it, the works. I thought I might still get a bullet, but instead he gave me a C-note.”

  “Classy guy, Ugo.”

  His face went tight with controlled anger. “Why didn’t you kill him, Mr. Hammer? That’s what you usually do, isn’t it? That Jack Williams, who was in the service with you and Dad, you killed his killer.”

  I sighed. “That was a long time ago, Marvin. I hurt Ugo bad and turned him over to the cops. If he ever gets into the general prison population, he’ll be dead in a couple of hours.”

  “But right now he’s on Riker’s Island, waiting for trial. I hope he gets lethal injection.”

  “Bet on it. Anyway, Marvin, I don’t blame you for talking your way out of Ugo killing you. Good for you, man. Above ground is the place to be.”

  He was sitting with his shoulders hunched, his legs apart, the interlaced fingers of both hands hanging between, like a prayer that gave up on itself. “I appreciate that, Mr. Hammer.”

  Velda said, “You spruced the place up.”

  “It’s still a hole, Ms. Sterling. But I inherited my father’s house in Brooklyn, sold it, and that gave me a little something to supplement my income.”

  I asked, “What are you doing these days, Marvin?”

  “Still following in my father’s footsteps. You know, after I got out of the navy and found out that Dad had gone out of business, I started up my own lawn service. Just mowing and trimming. Just me, nobody working for me—not a big outfit like Dad had going for a while.”

  “That was in Brooklyn,” Velda said.

  “Yeah. Then things slowed down, some heavyweight competition pushed me out, and I moved up here not quite a year ago. Partly to be near a woman I was dating.”

  Her smile was sympathetic. “You aren’t any longer?”

  “No.” He returned the smile, rather shyly. “But I got a new girl. Life goes on, you know.”

  I asked, “Is your love life why you didn’t just move into your father’s house?”

  He gestured around him, still smiling. “What, and leave all this behind, you mean? No, I couldn’t live there, Mr. Hammer. Not in the house where that bastard killed Dad, just waltzed in and blew his guts out.” He shuddered. “Anyway, it was no better a neighborhood than this. He took decent care of that house, but I got a hell of a lot less than I would’ve in a decent neighborhood.”

  I shrugged. “This is a nice pad.”

  “It’ll do till I move in with Heather.”

  Velda smirked cutely. “She wouldn’t be younger than you by any chance?”

  He laughed once, first I’d ever heard from him. “Yeah, not a hell of a lot of Heathers my age.”

  I said, “You and your dad weren’t close in recent years, were you?”

  “No. No we weren’t. I worked for him and Mom in the yard work business from junior high through high school. I was always tighter with Mom than Dad, which I hear is typical with only children. Then I went in the navy, and while I was stationed overseas, Mom died. I found out she’d… fallen off the wagon. Friends back here told me Dad had dropped her when she started drinking again. I confronted him about it, and it got ugly, and after that… well, we saw each other a handful of times. Kind of patched things up in recent years, but it was… strained.”

  “I’m sorry,” Velda said.

  “You know, now that I have a few miles on me,” he said, and his eyes looked moist, “I can understand why Dad had to walk away from Mom. He was a lush, too, you know, or anyway a reformed one. An old AA guy from way back. If she was drinking, he just couldn’t be around her. Not without risking… joining her.”

  Velda glanced at me. Her expression seemed bland but her eyes told me her heart was breaking for this forty-something “kid.”

  He sat with his head down for a few seconds, then straightened and gave me a nervous smile, asking, “So, what can I do for you, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Well, first of all, I’m giving you a heads up. Do you own a gun?”

  He nodded. “I have a Beretta M9 I brought back from the service.”

  “Good. Last year I told you that certain people may think your father entrusted information to you, and might come around wanting it.”

  “Ugo did come around,” he reminded me.

  “Right. But the hunt seems to be on again.”

  “Hunt for what?”

  I felt Velda’s eyes on me. “Marvin, your father did a sub rosa job for Don Lorenzo Ponti. A real cloak of secrecy deal. He was entrusted with some valuables and he hid them away.”

  He frowned in confusion. “What kind of valuables?”

  “I need to keep it vague. Less you know, the safer you are. Just know that you should stay alert, and keep one in the chamber, got it?”

  “Got it. So who’s looking for whatever-this-is?”

  “Mob. Feds. Them for sure. But maybe some interlopers as well. That’s why I’m here. Did your father have any friends, particularly any one close friend, who he might trust to help him o
n a dangerous job? Somebody who could keep his mouth shut?”

  Marvin was already shaking his head. “Mr. Hammer, I can count on one hand the times I saw my old man in the last twenty years. I knew he was working for Ponti as a groundskeeper and glorified handyman. That’s partly why I steered clear of him. I didn’t want anything to do with mob types. Still don’t.”

  Velda said, “They may want something to do with you.”

  He nodded. “Understood.” Then to me he said: “Mr. Hammer, I’m afraid I’m no help to you here.”

  “What about friends from back in the Brooklyn days? Back when your Mom and Pop’s yard service business was thriving? Maybe somebody who worked with him?”

  “No. He was a loner, my pop. He didn’t let anybody in, except maybe Mom. He had a low tolerance level for stupidity and incompetence, and he would fire guys after three or four months. No second-in-command for him.”

  Velda asked, “What about old friends? From the war, or even before?”

  The dark blue eyes narrowed. “Well, Dad grew up on the Lower East Side, you know. My grandfather owned a drug store, so they weren’t as poor as a lot of people around there. I don’t know much else about those years. I do know Dad went to some vocational high school.”

  I asked, “Metropolitan Vocational High School?”

  “That could be it. He never said much about it, other than joke about being the toughest chess club president on the Bowery.”

  The Bowery again. Chess again. Coincidences?

  “You know,” Marvin was saying, “that was a kind of bone of contention between my pop and me. He loved chess. He and Mom used to play, and they were about equally good at it. But me, I’m strictly a checkers type.”

  “You and me both,” I admitted. “So, did he have anybody he enjoyed playing chess with, back in Brooklyn?”

  “Other than Mom, I couldn’t say. Sometimes he’d be gone on Sundays and Mom would joke that he was off beating Bobby Fischer in the Chess Nationals.”

  “Then he may have had a chess buddy or two in the city.”

  “It’s possible.” He shrugged. “Maybe dating back to before the war, in high school. Who knows? Listen, I got some boxes of Dad’s stuff in a storage facility. Some of it goes back a long, long way. You want me to sort through it for you?”

  “I’d rather do it myself,” I said. I was on the edge of the couch.

  “Let me gather it up,” he said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  On the way out, he finally shook my hand. “There were two guys who were really tight with my pop. He didn’t see ’em much, but those two he talked about often.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, half-way out into the hall where the crying kiddies and battling parents fought their muffled wars.

  “You, Mr. Hammer,” he said. “You and Pat Chambers. That was his one regret—that you guys didn’t stay in closer touch.”

  Hearing those words spoken in a voice that might have been Marcus Dooley’s was like taking two more slugs to the heart.

  I managed, “And I bet you know the feeling, right, Marvin?”

  “That, Mr. Hammer, I do.” He smiled at Velda. “Nice seeing you, Ms. Sterling.”

  And he closed the door on us.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I stood near my side of the bed and opened my belt, unhooking the clasp on my pants and pulling my shirt out. In the muted glow of a nightstand lamp, everything in Velda’s bedroom seemed feminine but not overstated, nothing frilly or frou-frou, just soft colors and soft fabric and a few framed tasteful modernistic pieces dating back to the sixties by a starving Village artist who was worth dough now.

  I draped my clothes over a nearby chair. Usually I only spent a weekend night or two here. Despite our decades-old relationship, Velda and I both knew I was a crusty old bachelor set in my ways, and liked living alone. This would change one day soon, but that wasn’t the reason we were shacking it. I was still a target for parties unknown, making her a candidate for collateral damage. Steering clear of my apartment made sense, and it put Velda where I could protect her. And where she could protect me.

  Standing there in my boxers, I looked down at the damage done me by bullets, old and new. Plenty of faded scars, of course, including souvenirs from the Pacific. And the blossom on my chest from the recent double-tap was taking on shades of purple and pink and yellow that rivaled any of the framed abstractions around me.

  But it was the scarred area on my side that I wanted a closer look at—I had landed on it hard in that parking garage this morning, stirring up the old ache. It had been over a year since Azi Ponti’s slugs had ripped those holes in me, outlets that would have drained the life out of me like rain from a sewer pipe if the weather hadn’t been below zero and a drunken doctor hadn’t been on the spot.

  The healing had been slow but successful. Now the area around the scar tissue had taken on a pinkish glow where the skin had tightened over swelling flesh. The pain was minimal, but only in contrast to what it used to be.

  Velda came in from the adjoining bathroom, toweling off all that hair, bundled in a white shortie terrycloth robe that showed off the muscular perfection of long legs still pearled with water from her shower.

  Her dark eyes flashed with concern. “Mike… are you all right?”

  “I’m swell, even if I’m as achy and stiff as an old whore working overtime.”

  She grinned and plopped herself on the bed, still drying her hair with the towel. “You do have a gift for the romantic turn of phrase.”

  I crawled up next to her, propped a fat pillow against the headboard and sat there, breathing slow. She paused in her toweling and had a look at the old wounded area.

  “No fresh bruising. Hurting?”

  “Some.”

  “How’d you antagonize it?”

  “When I hit the deck this morning, the cement didn’t do me any favors. Plus twisting away from those shots the other day didn’t help either… At least nothing tore apart.”

  Her voice was gentle. “Maybe it’s time, Mike.”

  “For what?”

  “For hanging it up.”

  “Well, I admit I’m not gonna be running any foot races for a while.”

  She said nothing more on the subject, but everything was written right there on her face, framed by the mass of damp, dark gypsy curls that the shower had made out of her smooth pageboy.

  Those lovely features were telling me the game was too rough to play it like I used to. Since that waterfront rumble, the odds had changed, the enemies younger and faster, and there were so many of them now. And I was just an aging P.I. hauling an anchor around by way of those sealed-over holes in my side.

  I said, “I’ll guess I’ll just have to be smarter, doll.”

  She let out a short chuckle. “Little late in the game for that, isn’t it?”

  “I might surprise you.”

  “Okay, surprise me. What will your first smart move be?”

  “Finding out who Dooley’s chess partner was.”

  She dropped the towel in her lap and goggled at me, a friendly Medusa with that curly head of dark hair. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not at all. But I need to take you back before we ever met, for you to make sense of it. Back to the war.”

  Velda knew I rarely spoke of what had happened over there, so her response was a cautious nod.

  “You can imagine what leave means to a guy who’s been in combat, and who faces more. Pat and I did a lot of wild-ass things to keep our minds off the carnage. We thought we were having some good dumb fun, but in reality we were escaping the madness of death and destruction, any way we could, for just a few days, a few hours.”

  She nodded, respecting what I was sharing.

  “But, Velda, it’s the damnedest thing—Dooley never went on leave with us. Not once.”

  She frowned, then asked, “What did he do?”

  “He played chess,” I said.

  “He… played chess.”

  “Played it with
anybody who knew the game at all. He had one of those miniature pocket boards, and if he couldn’t find a partner, he’d play against himself. I always wondered how he kept managing to line up any worthy opponents to compete with.”

  “He was really that good?”

  “Well, he always had more money in his pocket than he made in the army, that’s for sure. There was this two-week period when we were assigned to back up another unit. One of their men was a lieutenant whose father in the States was a big-band leader, and this kid was loaded with loot. And he was a chess player. World class, or so he claimed. Somebody put him onto Dooley and the two of them spent every free minute over that pocket-sized chessboard. Two weeks later Dooley mailed a fat packet of dough back home.”

  “Who to?”

  “No idea. His parents, his girl, who knows? Maybe his high-school chess pal, because Dooley was playing by mail, too—one game went on the whole time Pat and I were with him, and he never wrapped it up. Mail was too slow and sporadic.”

  “Men are strange animals.”

  “Oh yeah? How many shoes are in your closet?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  I let out a sigh. “You know, never occurred to me at the time, but Dooley was like a damn drug addict with that game. Couldn’t stay away from that chessboard. Sure, he’d stow it to fight the war, including teaching survival tactics to Pat and me, but when the shitstorm stopped? That miniature chessboard came out.”

  “Must have been what he needed.”

  “Must be.”

  “So, Mike, how did you and Pat get tight with a brainy guy into chess?”

  “Behind the lines, when Hell was raining down, you bet we got tight in a hurry. And barracks life, we had plenty of fun, horseplay and sometimes dice or cards. But when the rest of us would be reading or heading off into town or taking in a new movie at the rec hall, that’s when Dooley would disappear with his little chessboard.”