A Long Time Dead Page 14

  We used the back door to the semi-private staircase the janitor used for emptying the trash, and went down to the street. There you can talk. Traffic and pedestrians jam up microphones, movement keeps you away from listening ears, and stuck in the midst of all those people, you have the greatest privacy in the world.

  We strolled. It was a sunny spring morning but cool.

  A block and a half later, Hanson said, “A United States senator is in Manhattan to be part of a United Nations conference.”

  “One of those dirty jobs somebody’s gotta do, I suppose.”

  “While he’s in town, there’s an item the senator would like you to recover.”

  Suddenly this didn’t sound so big-time, senator or not.

  I frowned. “What’s this, a simple robbery?”

  “No. There’s nothing ‘simple’ about this situation. But there are aspects of it that make you … ideal.”

  My God, he hated to admit that.

  I said, “Your people have already been on it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not your concern, Hammer.”

  Not my concern?

  We stopped at a red light at the street corner, and I asked, “Where’s the FBI in this, if there’s investigating to do? A U.S. senator ought to be able to pull those strings.”

  “This is a local affair. Strictly New York.”

  The light changed and we started ambling across the intersection in the thick of other pedestrians. There was something strange about the term Hanson used—“recovery.” If not a robbery, was this mystery item something simply … lost? Or maybe I was expected to steal something. I deliberately slowed the pace and started looking in store windows.

  Hanson said, “You haven’t asked who the senator is.”

  “You said it was local. So that narrows it to two.”

  “And you’re not curious which one?”

  “Nope.”

  Hanson frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll tell me when you’re ready, or I’ll get to meet him myself.”

  No exasperation showed in the cop’s face, and not even in his tone. Strictly in his words: “What kind of private investigator are you, Hammer? Don’t you have any questions at all?”

  I stopped abruptly, turning my back to a display window and gave them each a look. Anybody going past would have thought we were just three friends discussing where to grab a bite or a quick drink. Only someone knowledgeable would have seen that the way we stood or moved was designed to keep the bulk of a gun well-concealed under suitcoats, and the expressions we wore were strictly for the passerby audience.

  I said, “No wonder you guys are pissed off. With all the expertise of the NYPD, the senator decides to call me in to find a missing geegaw for you. That’s worth a horse laugh.”

  This time Hanson did choke a little bit. “This … ‘geegaw’ may be small in size, Hammer, but it’s causing rumbles from way up top.”

  “Obviously all the way up to the senator’s office.”

  Hanson said nothing, but that was an answer in itself.

  “What’s higher than that?”

  And it hit me.

  It was crazy, but I heard myself asking the question: “Not … the President?”

  Hanson swallowed. Then he shrugged again. “I didn’t say that, Hammer. But … he’s top dog, isn’t he?”

  I grunted out a laugh. “Not these days he isn’t.”

  Maybe if they had been feds, I’d have been accused of treason or sedition or stupidity. But these two—well, Hanson, at least—knew the answer already. I gave it to them anyway.

  “These days,” I said, “political parties and bankrollers and lobbyists call the shots. No matter how important the pol, he’s still a chess piece for money to move around. That includes the big man in the Oval Office.”

  Hanson’s partner chimed in: “That’s a cynical point of view, Hammer.”

  A kid on a skateboard wheeled around the corner. When he’d passed, I said, “What kind of recovery job rates this kind of pressure?”

  We started walking again.

  Hanson said, “It’s there, so who cares. We’re all just pawns, right, Hammer? Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To see the senator,” he said.

  We might have been seated in the sumptuous living room of a Westchester mansion, considering the overstuffed furnishings, the burnished wood, the Oriental carpet. But this was the Presidential suite of the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South.

  My host, seated in an armchair fit for a king, was not the president, merely a United States senator serving his third consecutive term. And Senator Hugh Boylan, a big pale fleshy man with a Leprechaun twinkle, looked as out of place here as I did. His off-white seersucker suit and carelessly knotted blue-and-red striped tie went well with shaggy gray hair that was at least a week past due for a haircut. His eyebrows were thick dark sideways exclamation points, a masculine contrast to a plumply sensuous mouth.

  He had seen to it that we both had beers to drink. Bottles, not poured glasses, a nice common-man touch. Both brews rested without coasters on the low-slung marble coffee table between us, where I’d also tossed my hat. I was seated on a nearby couch with more well-upholstered curves than a high-ticket call girl.

  The senator sat forward, his light blue eyes gently hooded and heavily red-streaked. He gestured with a thick-fingered hand whose softness belied a dirt-poor upbringing. His days as a longshoreman were far behind him.

  “Odd that we’ve never met, Mr. Hammer, over all these years.” His voice was rich and thick, like Guinness pouring into a glass. “Perhaps it’s because we don’t share the same politics.”

  “I don’t have any politics, Senator.”

  Those Groucho eyebrows climbed toward a shaggy forelock. “You were famously associated with my conservative colleague, Senator Jasper—there was that rather notorious incident in Russia when you accompanied him as a bodyguard.”

  “That was just a job, sir.”

  “Then perhaps you won’t have any objection to doing a job for a public servant of … a liberal persuasion.”

  “As long as you don’t try to persuade me, Senator.”

  “Fair enough,” he said with a chuckle, and settled back in the chair, tenting his fingers. “I would hope as a resident of our great state that you might have observed that I fight for my constituency, and try to leave partisan politics out of it. That I’ve often been at odds with my party for the good of the people.”

  “Senator, you don’t have to sell me. No offense, but I haven’t voted in years.”

  A smile twitched in one corner of his fleshy face. “I am only hoping that you don’t view me as an adversary. That you might have some small regard for my efforts.”

  “You’re honest and you’re a fighter. That goes a good distance with me.”

  His pale cheeks flushed red. Had I struck a nerve without intending?

  “I appreciate that,” he said quietly.

  Sunshine was filtering through sheer curtains, exposing dust motes—even the St. Moritz had dust. Horns honked below, but faintly, the city out there paying no heed to a venerable public servant and an erstwhile tabloid hero.

  “Nicholas Giraldi died last night,” he said.

  What the hell?

  Don Nicholas Giraldi, head of New York’s so-called sixth Mafia family, had died in his sleep yesterday in his private room at St. Luke’s Hospital. It had been in the evening papers and all over the media—“Old Nic,” that most benign of a very un-benign breed, finally gone.

  “I heard,” I said.

  His smile was like a priest’s, blessing a recalcitrant parishioner. “You knew him. There are rumors that you even did jobs for him occasionally. That he trusted you.”

 
I sipped my Miller Lite and shrugged. “Why deny it? That doesn’t make me a wiseguy any more than taking on a job from you makes me a liberal.”

  He chuckled. “I didn’t mean to suggest it did. It does seem … forgive me, Mr. Hammer. It does seem a trifle strange that a man who once made headlines killing mobsters would form an alliance with one.”

  “Alliance is too strong a word, Senator. I did a handful of jobs for him, unrelated to his … business. Matters he didn’t want corrupted by his own associates.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “No. Him dying doesn’t mean client confidentiality goes out the window. That cop Hanson, in the other room, has the receipt for that C-note I signed before coming. Spells that out in the small print, if you’re interested.”

  The dark eyebrows flicked up and down. “Actually, that’s something of a relief. What I want to ask you dances along the edges of that confidentiality, Mr. Hammer. But I hope you might answer. And that you would trust me to be discreet as well.”

  “You can ask.”

  He folded his arms, like a big Irish genie about to grant a wish. “Did you receive something from the old don, shortly before … or perhaps upon … his death?”

  “No. What would it have been if I had?”

  “A book. A ledger, possibly.”

  I put the beer bottle back on the coffee table. “No. Is that what you’re trying to recover? A ledger?”

  He nodded. Now when he spoke it was nearly a whisper: “And here your discretion is key. The don was in power a very long time … going back to the late ’40s. His ways, by modern standards, were old-fashioned, right up to the end. One particular antiquated practice peculiar to Don Giraldi was, apparently, keeping a handwritten record of every transaction, every agreement he ever made. No one knows precisely what was in that book … there were other books kept, accounting records that were largely fictional, intended for the IRS … but in this volume he was said to record the real events, the actual dealings of his business. When asked about such matters, he would say only, ‘It’s in the book.’”

  I shrugged. “I heard the rumors. That he kept a book under lock and key or in a safe somewhere, and all his secrets were kept in the thing. But I never believed it.”

  “Why not?”

  I pawed at the air dismissively. “He was too shrewd to write anything down. And incriminate himself if it fell into the wrong hands? Naw. It’s a myth, Senator. If that’s what you want to send me out looking for, my advice is forget it.”

  But the big head was shaking side to side. “No, Mr. Hammer, that book is very real. Old Nic told his most innermost associates, when his health began to fail earlier this year, that the book would be given to the person he trusted most.”

  I frowned, but I also shrugged. “So I’m wrong. Anyway, I’m not that person. He didn’t send me the book. But how is it you know what his ‘innermost associates’ were told?”

  “FBI wiretaps.” His smile had a pixie-ish cast, but his eyes were so hard they might have been glass. “Do you think you could find that ledger, Mr. Hammer?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a big city. Puts the whole needle-in-a-haystack bit to shame. But what would you do with the thing? Does the FBI think they can make cases out of what’s in those pages?”

  He swallowed thickly. Suddenly he wasn’t looking me in the eye. “There’s no question, Mr. Hammer, that names and dates and facts and figures in a ledger would be of interest to law enforcement … both local and federal. There’s also no question of its value to the old don’s successors.”

  I was nodding. “Covering their own asses, and giving them valuable intel on the other mob families and crooked cops and any number of public figures. The blackmail possibilities alone are …”

  But I didn’t finish. Because the senator’s head lowered and his eyes shut briefly, and I knew.

  I knew.

  “You’ve always been a straight shooter, Senator. But you didn’t come from money. You must have needed help in the early days, getting started. You took money from the don, didn’t you?”

  “Mr. Hammer …”

  “Hell. And so did somebody else.” I hummed a few nasty off-key bars of “Hail to the Chief.”

  “Mr. Hammer, your country would be—”

  “Can it. I put in my time in the Pacific. I should let you all swing. I should just sit back and laugh and laugh and let this play out like Watergate was just the cartoon before the main feature.”

  He looked very soft, this man who had come from such a hard place so long ago. “Is that what you intend to do?”

  I sighed. Then I really did laugh, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “No. I know what kind of foul waters you have to swim in, Senator. And your public record is good. Funny, the president having to send you—your politics couldn’t be much more at odds. But you’re stuck in the same mire, aren’t you? Like dinosaurs in a tar pit.”

  That made him smile sadly. “Will you walk away and just let us decay, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well, for one thing, somewhere out there, in that big city, or that bigger country beyond, are people that Old Nic trusted. People like you, who aren’t tainted by the Mob. And who are now in grave danger.”

  He was right about that.

  “And Mr. Hammer, the way we came looking for you does not compare to the way other interested parties will conduct their search—the other five families, for example. And they may well start with you.”

  I grunted a laugh. “So I owe you a big thank you, at least, since I would have had no idea I was in anybody’s crosshairs over this. I get that.”

  “Good. Good.” He had his first overdue sip of beer. He licked foam off those rather sensual lips and the Leprechaun twinkle was back. “And what would you say to ten thousand dollars as a fee, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Ten thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money?” I got up and slapped on my hat. “Yeah. Why not? It’s a way for me to get back some of what I paid in, anyway.”

  “Bring me the book, Mr. Hammer.” His smile was reassuring but the eyes remained hard. “Bring us the book.”

  “See what I can do.”

  Hoods always come in twos. The bent-nose boys accompany their boss to business meetings, often in restaurants. Sometimes they sit with their boss, other times at an adjacent table. Or one sits nearby while the other stays outside in the car, at the wheel, an eye on the entrance. Or maybe parked in the alley behind a restaurant, which is a smarter move. Mob watchdogs are always teamed up in twos. So are assassins.

  The guy waiting in the hall outside my office in the Hackard Building was in his twenties, wearing a yellow shirt with a pointy collar and no tie under a light-blue leisure suit that gave no hint of gun bulge. But a piece was under there, all right. He would have been handsome if his nose hadn’t been broken into a misshapen thing, stuck on like clay a sculptor hadn’t gotten around to shaping. His dark hair was puffy with hairspray and his sideburns were right off the cough-drop box.

  Hoods these days.

  “Let’s go in and join your boss and your buddy,” I said.

  “What?” His voice was comically high-pitched and his eyes were small and stupid, all but disappearing when he frowned.

  I made an educated guess. “You’re with Sonny Giraldi’s crew. And Sonny and your buddy are waiting inside. Inside my office. I’m Hammer.” I jerked a thumb toward the door. “Like on the glass?”

  He was still working that out when I went in, and held the door open for him.

  John “Sonny” Giraldi, nephew of Don Nicholas Giraldi and assumed heir to the throne, was seated along the side wall like a patient waiting to get in to see the doctor. He was small, slender, olive-complected, with a narrow face, a hook nose, and big dark eyes that had a deceptively sleepy look. The other bodyguard, bigger than the guy in the hall, was
another pointy-­collared disco dude with heavy sideburns; he had a protruding forehead and a weak chin, sitting with a chair between himself and his boss.

  Sonny’s wardrobe, by the way, was likely courtesy of an Italian designer, Armani maybe, a sleekly cut gray number with a black shirt and gray silk tie. No way a gun was under there anywhere. Sonny let his employees handle the artillery, and the bad fashion statements.

  “I’d prefer, Mr. Hammer,” Sonny said, his voice a radio-announcer baritone too big for his small frame, “if you’d let Flavio keep his position in the corridor. This is a, uh … transitional time. I might attract unwanted company.”

  “Fine. Let Flavio stand watch. Hell, I know all about unwanted company.”

  That got a tiny twitch of a smile from Velda, over at her desk, but prior to that she had been sitting as blankly unconcerned as a meter maid making out a ticket. The Giraldi mob’s heir apparent would not have suspected that the unseen right hand of this statuesque beauty undoubtedly held a revolver right now.

  I shut the door on Flavio, giving him a sneer of a smile, and turned to walk toward my inner office door, saying, “Just you, Mr. Giraldi. I take it you’re here for a consultation?”

  He got to his feet—his Italian loafers had pointed toes—and gave me a nod that covered both questions, though he gave a flat-hand gesture to the seated bodyguard to stay that way. Velda’s head swivelled slightly and I gave her a quick look that said be ready for anything. She returned that with a barely perceptible nod.

  I shut the door and gestured Sonny Giraldi toward the client’s chair. I got behind the desk as Sonny removed a silver cigarette case from inside his suitcoat. No chance he was going for a gun the way those threads fit. He reached his slender, well-manicured hand out to offer me a smoke from the case and I shook my head.

  “I gave those up years ago,” I said. “How do you think I managed to live so long?”

  He smiled, a smile so delicious he seemed to taste it. “Well, a lot of us were wondering. Mr. Hammer, do you know why I’m here?”

  “You want your uncle’s ledger.”

  “Yes. Do you have it?”