Don't Look Behind You Page 14

  She wasn’t buying it. “That’s crazy.”

  “Well, so’s our killer. But more likely he views Billy as a loose end, and he’s definitely tying those off. Ask Borensen—just don’t expect much of an answer.”

  The frown was gone but her eyes were tight. “How is Billy a loose end with Borensen gone?”

  “Billy can confirm that Borensen drove the hit-and-run car, and if Pat mounts an exhaustive investigation into the full picture of the late Leif, Billy would provide the motive for Borensen hiring a contract on yours truly.”

  She just stared at me, arms folded, the beautiful brown eyes cold. “How dumb do you think I am?”

  “Not dumb at all, baby.”

  Her eyes were slits now and the full lips managed to set themselves in a narrow line. “It’s not Billy you want on ice. Not at this point.” She jerked a thumb at the shelf of her bosom. “It’s me.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. She had me. She did have me.

  I said, “I won’t deny that’s a factor. I’m a target for a madman, a madman who—despite being a twisted piece of shit—has been a successful professional killer for some time. You want me out there worrying about you, and getting my own head blown off?”

  Her mouth turned into lush lips again, and the eyes warmed. “I know, Mike. I understand. But I’m not some helpless female. You remember me, don’t you? Your partner in crime? The broad who shot down the last assassin sicced on you?”

  I put the cigarette out prematurely and went over to sit by her on the couch. I slipped my arm around her, drew her close.

  “Let me handle this, kitten. Please. Just for a few days. Then if I haven’t brought this mess to a successful conclusion, you can come back and join in. Play Tonto to my Lone Ranger.”

  She smiled some, then gave me a little nod that was a big capitulation.

  “You think those two slept together?” I asked her. “You know, around the campfire?”

  “Shut up,” she said, smiling some more. Then she asked, “What’s the latest?”

  I told her about my visit to the institute in nearby Cold Spring, including a thorough breakdown of the disease they were currently researching round the clock.

  She shivered. “Spare me the gruesome details, Mike. Why go into that, anyway? Maybe you are the sadistic bastard some people think you are.”

  “Probably, and there’s nobody researching a cure for that. The thing is, I think Phasger’s Syndrome is the key here.”

  She cocked her head and an arc of dark hair swung. “In what way?”

  “Understand, doll, this is a theory, and the paint on it isn’t even dry.”

  Tiny smile. “Okay. I won’t sit down on it and I won’t touch anything. But what are you thinking, Mike?”

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that our hitman among hitmen has this very disease.”

  “What?”

  I grinned at her. “I think he has Phasger’s Syndrome, and the clock has been ticking, and right now it’s ticking louder and louder, and the calendar pages of his existence are flying off faster and faster, like in an old movie.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Leif Borensen, who had no personal connection to the disease, wrote two checks for twenty-five thousand bucks to that institute.”

  A thoughtful frown. “Why?”

  “Because he was paying off two murder-for-hire contracts with our middle-of-the-night caller.”

  Her eyes showed white all around now. “You mean… the pro killer Borensen hired insisted on payment by way of contributions to that research institute?”

  “You got it, honey. And I think for some time now, months certainly, possibly years, this very successful hitman has channeled everything he earns into that institute, hoping against hope for a cure. The checks go directly to Dr. Beech’s facility.”

  Now the lovely eyes were narrow. “Two checks from Borensen of twenty-five grand each. Two contracts? First, the faked suicide of Martin Foster, and second…”

  “Wiping out a guy named Hammer,” I said.

  She thought about it. “And you figure, if you can get the institute’s records, we’ll find more high-ticket checks from other clients of the killer’s.”

  “Exactly right, doll. That will be a job for Pat and his troops, though. But a whole lot of open homicides are going to get cleared up, and the slobs who hired them done will get rounded up and face life without parole or better still get a ride on Old Sparky.”

  She shook her head, as if trying to get the absurdity and the enormity of it all to gel. “How does this lunatic calling you and challenging you to a duel of sorts figure into this?”

  “Don’t you see it, Velda? It figures right in. He’s dying. I’m guessing in a matter of weeks, the serious Phasger’s stuff starts kicking in. Well, before that ignoble ending, he wants to go out on a high goddamn note. He sees me as the only other killer around worthy of that honor.”

  “If you’re right,” she said, “maybe… maybe he wants you to kill him.”

  “If so,” I said, “he came to the right place.”

  * * *

  Before I left Valley Vista, I stopped by Billy’s bedside again, with Velda opposite me once more.

  “Bill buddy,” I said, “is there anything you can think of, however small, that might be of help? Maybe something you mentioned to the police and they didn’t seem excited, so you forgot about it?”

  The wrinkled face wrinkled further. “You know, there is something. Not something I ever told the cops, ’cause I didn’t know what it had to do with the price of beans. But there was this girl, this kind of… hippie chick. Glasses, short black hair, nice build, though.”

  Velda smirked at me. “Sounds like your kind of lead.”

  I ignored that. “What about this hippie chick?”

  “She came around to the newsstand, a day or two after the hit-and-run. She wanted to know anything at all about how this Blazen guy died. How the damn thing happened. I asked her why I should tell her anything—I mean, she was nobody to me.”

  “And?”

  “She said she’d been working with Blazen. Sort of his legman and, you know, researcher, helping on the writing. She does freelance for that giveaway rag, the leftie thing… what is it?”

  “The Village Voice?” Velda asked.

  “That’s it. She was sad. She’d been crying. You could tell she really liked the old boy. A week later, she come back with a bunch of questions written down, but I didn’t have any more for her than I did the other time.”

  I leaned in. “She ever give you a name, Billy?”

  “Yeah. She did. Marcy. Never got a last name, or if so, I forgot the damn thing. But she, you know, looked like a Marcy, so I remembered it. Does that help, Mike?”

  “It just might,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The state of mind that was Greenwich Village was changing, beatnik black giving way to rainbow tie-dye, finger-snapping egocentric poetry getting drowned out by clap-along protest folk songs. Other things stayed the same, like the zigzag streets, art-gallery sidewalks, espresso joints, intimate jazz clubs, and theater ranging from Circle in the Square respectability to strip-joint sleaze.

  There was also no shortage of bookshops, running mostly to secondhand, and that’s where I asked about a girl called Marcy with short black hair and glasses, who might be doing research on the history of show business in the city. I got nowhere on this sunny but cool afternoon until I tried the Paper Book Gallery on the corner of Sullivan and West Third, a Beat Generation landmark still advertising poetry readings even though the kid at the register had long hippie hair and little square-lensed glasses.

  “You might mean Marcy Bloom,” the kid said. He wore a black vest over a paisley shirt. “That sounds like the project she’s been working on. I delivered her some old magazines she ordered, like a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Then you know where she lives,” I said. Not a question.

  He frowned. “I can�
��t give out a customer’s address, if that’s what you’re after. Would you want me giving out your address, mister?”

  I dug out my wallet and he was shaking his head.

  “Save your bread, man. I’m no sell-out.”

  But he was a weed smoker, judging by his dreamy eyes and the pungent scent clinging to his clothes.

  I flipped the wallet open and shut, just long enough for him to glimpse the badge there. That it went with my P.I. ticket and not a job on the PD was a distinction I didn’t figure he would make.

  He had to look it up in a card file, but he got me the address. He was shaking and afraid.

  “She’s not in any trouble, son,” I told him, taking the scribbled-on slip of paper he handed me. “And neither are you. Appreciate the help.”

  He nodded and started working up his story for his pals about how he’d been hassled by the man.

  Marcy Bloom’s building was a white-washed brick three-story that looked like a strong wind might crumble it. Green shutters and black ironwork dressed it up, and some of the city’s few remaining gas lamps lent a certain charm. But I wondered how long the quaint buildings on these cobblestone side streets could stand up against the intrusion of the world of commerce.

  On the second floor landing, I knocked at 2B. As I waited, the door across the way opened, and I turned. In the half-opened doorway, a skinny guy with a shoulder-length pile of curly brown hair was giving me a what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here look. In his mid-twenties or so, he wore a faded maroon T-shirt with a cracked white peace symbol, and his jeans looked older than he did.

  I gave him a smile that wasn’t pleasant. “Something I can do for you, man?”

  He retreated and shut the door, hard.

  I shrugged to nobody, turned back and knocked again on the paint-blistered door. I was just getting ready to knock a third time when a girl answered so suddenly I almost jumped back.

  “Sorry,” she said chirpily, as if we were old friends, “I had to throw something on.”

  She was petite but curvy, with boyishly short dark hair and big dark blue eyes that the black-framed, big-lensed glasses perched on her pert nose could hardly contain. She had a brightness and energy about her that came across right now, and was at least as cute as her navy white-polka-dotted mini-dress. She was maybe twenty-three and made me wish I was.

  “Say,” she said. “You’re Mike Hammer!”

  Surprised to be recognized, particularly by someone her age, I admitted it nonetheless. Was she Marcy Bloom? She was. She seemed not at all surprised I’d come calling.

  Looking past me, her cuteness took on sharp edges, and she said, “Shack! Quit that! Be good!”

  I glanced behind me just in time to see that door across the way slam again.

  “Don’t mind Shack,” she said, her smile dimpling one side of the adorable face. “He’s harmless. Poor puppy dog’s just in love with me.”

  “But is he house-broken?”

  She smiled at that and took me by the elbow like I was her father giving her away at a wedding. She ushered me not down the aisle but into her apartment.

  “You saved me a trip,” she said.

  “How did I do that?”

  She asked for my hat and coat, which she promptly dropped onto a chair. Then she led me past an odd work area on a braided throw rug in the center of the living room, with a table whose legs had been sawed off to put it a foot-and-a-half off the floor, a typewriter on it, and a throw pillow for a chair. The table had stacks of manuscript paper and various research materials, books, magazines, notebooks, all in cheerful disarray.

  My hostess deposited me on a threadbare couch while she sat on the floor like an Indian, giving me a glimpse of white inner thighs and dark panties. Well, more than a glimpse.

  She looked up at me like I was a guru and she was ready to learn the meaning of life. The way she was sitting, I could have told her.

  “I’ve been trying to get the nerve up,” she said, “to come see you at your office.”

  The couch, like the other furnishings in the Early Salvation Army decor, sat well out from the wall, which like the others was consumed by bookcases. Some were homemade concrete-block affairs, plus thrift-shop shelving she’d scrounged. She had built an enviable library, no doubt as secondhand as the furniture, the fiction running from Pride and Prejudice to Peyton Place, the nonfiction heavy on journalism and film and theater criticism.

  She said, “What brings you around to see me, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Maybe we should start,” I replied, “with why you were thinking of coming to see me?”

  Hands on her bare knees, she rocked back and forth a little on her crossed legs. As the original Billy Batson said, Holy moly.

  “Okay, I’ll start,” she said. The big eyes grew bigger. “I’ve been following this crazy thing in the papers and on TV. Do you know, when your name first turned up, I’d never heard of you? I’m from Ohio, which is my excuse. But from snippets in the newspaper stories, I got the picture—you’re a real character.”

  “I get that sometimes,” I admitted.

  She smiled and rocked. “So I did some research on you. Mostly at the library, but also some old magazines at a bookstore I frequent.”

  “The Paper Book Galley,” I said.

  Her eyes got wide again, like I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Or somewhere. “You are a detective!”

  “That’s the rumor. So you researched me. What did that tell you?”

  “That some of what the papers have been saying is b.s.—like the supposed robbery attempt at your office, and how the police were looking into that cabbie’s life to see why someone would want to take it, and how that high-society bridal shower got interrupted by an armed robber. And, of course, how you just happened to be there for all three. Killing the first two bad guys, and your secretary taking down the third.”

  “You left out the newsstand shooting.”

  She nodded, out of rhythm with her rocking. “I was saving that for last, because that was what made me start really, seriously thinking about approaching you directly. Did you know I spoke to Billy, that little person who runs the newsstand, several times?”

  I nodded back. “I did know. He told me you had, which is why and how I tracked you down.”

  “So then you know I was Richard Blazen’s legman?”

  “Yeah.” I gave all that exposed skin an unabashed look. “Coincidentally, I’m a leg man myself.”

  That only made her laugh. I’d thought maybe it would embarrass her into covering up a little. I’ve always been big on decorum.

  “When I was running through that list of fatalities,” she said, “I left the most recent one out. The most significant one.”

  “Leif Borensen,” I said.

  She nodded. “Was that really suicide, like the papers say?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. But it confuses me. I figured he was the party responsible for all this mayhem. He ran down Mr. Blazen in a car, and tried to have you killed several times before going after the little newsstand fella. Am I right?”

  I answered with my own question: “Why do you figure Borensen was responsible for the attempts on my life?”

  She shrugged. “I told you I researched you. I’m a ferocious researcher, Mike. I’ll call you ‘Mike’ and you call me ‘Marcy.’ Kind of a nice ring to it, Mike and Marcy. Anyway, you’re known to go on the hunt for anybody who hurts or… or especially kills… your friends. You’re famous for it.”

  “That’s ‘infamous,’” I said.

  Her smile was barely there. “That would depend on whether someone thought you were a bad person. I mean by that, someone who thinks it’s wrong of you to go out and, well, try to get even.”

  “I don’t just try, Marcy.”

  Her eyebrows went up and down. “I know. And I may live in Greenwich Village and write articles for the Voice, but I am an old-fashioned Midwestern girl at heart. I like to see scores settled. So, me? I think you’re a good
person.”

  She seemed at once ten years old and forty-five.

  “Nice to know, Marcy.” I leaned forward and said, “You say you were Blazen’s ‘legman,’ but really you were a lot more than that… right? I figure you were the one doing the writing. An old PR guy may know how to put together a press release, but not a whole book.”

  She was nodding, rocking a little while I talked, stopping when she talked.

  “You’re right, Mike. Richard Blazen knew everybody in local theater, going back to the 1930s, and in TV production back to the late ’40s. He had stories like you couldn’t imagine—the backstabbing by much admired stars, who was gay and who wasn’t, producers screwing over their backers, producers screwing over their stars, the sleeping around by just about everybody, the gangsters who backed productions to give their mistresses roles in shows, and drugs, drugs, drugs. Some of the show biz types who are so critical of my pot-smoking generation were outrageous hypocrites, snorting coke and shooting up H. Mr. Blazen knew it all.” She grinned and rocked again. “It’s going to be a fabulous book.”

  That stopped me for a moment. “You’re going on with the project?”

  “Oh yes. I have all the material here. It’s still a big job. I have to fact-check, when the people he talks about are still alive. It’s a legal thing.”

  “You say ‘talks’ like he’s still around.”

  “That’s how it feels sometimes. See, here’s how we went about it—I’d interview him on a tape recorder, and then we’d have the tapes transcribed. I have pages and pages of the stuff.”

  “So it really is a big job.”

  “Enormous! But it’ll make me. Put me on the map, as the cliché goes.” Gently, she pointed a finger at me. “The reason I wanted to see you, Mike, was to find out what you knew about this awful Borensen person. To see if you’d go on the record that he was the one who ran down Mr. Blazen.”

  “I can do that.” I sat forward, springs in the couch cushion whining under my tail. “But first I want to know what you know, Marcy… about your Mr. Blazen and Leif Borensen.”