Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Page 16

  So something among that vast pile of currency was even greater than the money itself.

  I asked, “What exactly is a pile of cash that size ‘secondary’ to, Frank? Stocks? Bonds?”

  “Indeed yes, Mike.” His eyes tightened and took on a gleam. “But also deeds to some of the most valuable properties in Manhattan. Eighty-nine billion? Think twice that, and more. As for the cash, those large denominations are problematic. But we have a way of dealing with them.”

  “By paying off Uncle Sam?”

  “Perhaps. But certainly by paying off the person who leads us to this modern-day Eldorado.”

  I took a nice big final sip. “Make up your mind. A minute ago it was the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.”

  “Either way, Mike, it’s a fortune.”

  He handed me a card with several numbers on it, one of which was circled. “That’s my cellular phone. When you are ready to take these negotiations to the next level, Mr. Hammer, call me there, and only there. But I would suggest sooner rather than later.”

  He walked me out and offered to call a cab for me, but I told him I preferred to walk back. My fireman friend Darrell returned my trenchcoat and hat and opened the door onto the foyer for us as Hellman accompanied me. On the way to the street, the greeter opened the door and gave us both a sickly smile. Maybe the younger man had learned his lesson.

  Out under the gloomy sky, Hellman offered his hand and I shook it.

  “One perk of our negotiation,” he said, “might include a membership here at the Canterbury.”

  Well, it was for paranoid old men with guns, wasn’t it? Maybe I qualified.

  Hellman was saying, “You’d be a great member, Mike. You are one hell of a shot.”

  I could have been gracious about it, but that just wasn’t me.

  I said, “I draw fast as hell, too, Frank. And keep one in the chamber, remember.”

  “I won’t forget,” he told me with a smile.

  And I wasn’t about to forget him, either. He wasn’t a bad shot himself, for a fancy-ass mob front man.

  * * *

  Before I could report the details of my meeting to Velda, she had news for me.

  “Sit down,” she instructed me like a strict school teacher, indicating the client chair in front of her desk. She lacked only the ruler.

  I sat.

  She said, “You and your damn hunches. Could you please be wrong once in a while?”

  “I’ll work on that. What is it?”

  She frowned, just a little. “First, my contact writing the book about the Lower East Side knew of no formal chess clubs, but plenty of chess and even an occasional tourney, back in the fifties and sixties.”

  “Where?”

  “Various defunct coffee houses. Spillover into the Bowery from the Village—Beat Generation days. Plenty of similar coffee houses in the Village itself, where chess players were welcome to hang out, through that same period. And of course, a lot of the game was played in Washington Square Park and others, and still is.”

  I shifted in the chair. “Doesn’t help us much. Sounds like a lot of leg work against terrible odds.”

  “Doesn’t it.”

  “Those coffee houses are long gone, and talking to old-timers playing chess in a park, in hopes of linking Dooley to Brogan or Olaf? That’s the worst kind of fishing expedition.”

  But now her lush lips formed a smile both teasing and triumphant. She had been sandbagging me. “Oh, we don’t have to go fishing to do that, Mike.”

  “Yeah?”

  She put a hand on her phone. “Five minutes after you left, Marvin Dooley called. He sorted through half a dozen boxes of his father’s things, as he promised us, but said it was mostly a waste of time. Clothing, old family pictures, and the accumulated junk of a lifetime.”

  I gestured to myself with a thumb. “I still want to go through that stuff myself.”

  “Take it easy, Tarzan. Seems Marvin did find one item of interest…” She smiled devilishly, making me wait for it. “…a 1941 yearbook from Metropolitan Vocational.”

  The Bowery high school Dooley attended.

  She slid a crisp new manila folder toward me. I opened it and saw two black-and-white slick-paper print-outs, first the cover of the yearbook (METROPOLIS 1942), then an activities page that included faded photos of the debate team, Quill and Scroll, and the chess club.

  Pleased with herself, Velda was saying, “I had Marvin go to a copy center and fax us those.”

  There were five members of the 1942 Metropolitan High School chess team, all of them wearing sweaters and ties and embarrassed grins, several in glasses. These were the dorks and twerps and nerds of my high-school years, and I would have known them well without ever having met them at all.

  But three of them I knew, all right: Henry Brogan, Marcus Dooley and Rudolph Olaf.

  “The creepy thing,” I said, “is that Olaf doesn’t look all that different. Even his damn hair’s the same.”

  “So you were right, Mike,” she said, acknowledging me with an open hand. “Brogan was Dooley’s chess buddy.”

  I tossed the fax sheets back on her desk. “Olaf may have been, too. We can’t know who Dooley was trading chess moves with by mail during the war.”

  “No,” she said, “but what’s important is after the war. His regular, drive-into-the-city chess pal couldn’t be Olaf, not unless Dooley was visiting Sing Sing.”

  She was half-kidding I knew, but just the same I said, “Impossible. Brogan was the only visitor Olaf had for forty years.”

  Tapping the faxed photo, she said, “You’re right, Mike. Brogan’s the chess pal. But what does it mean?”

  “I’ll be damned if I know,” I admitted.

  “If Brogan is the old buddy enlisted by Dooley as helper in hiding the mob money, where is Rudy Olaf in that equation? If at all?”

  I asked my own question: “What does Brogan coming forward to take the rap for Olaf after all those years have to do with the billions?”

  She shook her head and the raven locks came apart in sections, then reformed themselves perfectly. “Does it have to have anything to do with the billions? You’re the detective who believes in coincidences, remember.”

  “Not this blatant, doll. Somebody sends a hitman to kill me—twice. At the same time that Olaf is getting sprung by his old Bowery buddy Brogan, and just as I’m getting it right and left by parties with renewed interest in the billions.”

  I told her about the meeting with Hellman.

  “So our Wall Street biggie is a mob shill,” she said. “But which mob?”

  “You mean which family? Probably the Pontis—they’ve been leaderless and in disarray since Don Lorenzo bought it and Ugo went to stir.”

  Velda sat forward, her hands folded, as if she were saying grace at a meal. “Mike, whatever’s going on, one thing seems clear. Marcus Dooley had something in mind for all that cash. He risked his life hiding it for a reason.”

  I shrugged. “But he died before he could tell me.”

  She tapped the fax sheet again. “But isn’t it clear? Dooley wanted you to find it, right?”

  “Right. That’s what he asked me to do, right before he kicked.”

  “His dying wish, right? Why? So you could have it, the old war buddy he’d barely seen since? No. It was for his son, Mike. They’d had a strained relationship from the start, and after Marvin’s mother died, you might even say they were estranged. Isn’t it natural Dooley would want to make it up to his boy somehow?”

  I said nothing.

  She pressed: “You don’t take the kind of risk that your friend Dooley did just to put one over on Don Ponti. Just to tweak a very dangerous damn man. What, for a horse laugh?”

  I still said nothing.

  She got up and came around the desk. She put a hand on my shoulder, and her voice was gentle but firm. “Mike, last year, when we were on the hunt for that money, you weren’t thinking clear. You weren’t yourself. How many times during that case did your fri
end Dr. Morgan have to sedate you and take you off the front lines to recover?”

  “Once.”

  “No. Three times. Shot you up and sat you down.”

  “More like laid me out.” I shrugged. “Okay, kitten. So you’re right. I was off my game and not thinking straight.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s obvious, now. Dooley wanted me to take care of his son with that dough. What do you suggest we do?”

  She sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. This was hardly fair. She said, almost cooing, “I think you should take the government’s offer. You’re not about to get in bed with the mob. We know that much.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So get in touch with that Treasury guy—Buckley. Take the finder’s fee. Split it with Marvin, or if you’re too high and mighty, give Marvin all of it.”

  “But you’d rather I hang on to half.”

  She settled herself a little bit in my lap in what was perhaps her most convincing argument. But what she said made sense as well: “Is it wrong for us to have some cushy years together, after all we’ve been through? Did you do it all, over all these years, just to build a collection of bullet scars?”

  I said nothing. She slid off my lap, straightened her skirt, smoothed her silk blouse, and took her place behind her desk again.

  I picked up the chess-club fax sheet again and studied it. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  “What do you think I’m doing? I’m advising.”

  My eyes went from the youthful Dooley’s smiling face to Brogan’s to Olaf’s. Olaf’s smile was slighter, but even the fax image from an ancient yearbook gave a hint of a glimmer in his eyes. He was a snake, Rudy Olaf. A fucking snake. I knew one when I saw one.

  “I’m not doing anything until I figure out what the hell is going on,” I said. “Fair enough?”

  She nodded, then her eyes flashed. “Oh, Pat called. He wants you to meet him at Pete’s Chophouse at seven. I said you’d be there.”

  “Are you coming?”

  “He didn’t invite me. Mike, he doesn’t know that you know he’s being forced out. He probably wants to tell you. One on one.”

  “All right. Then we’ll wrap it up for the day.” I got up. “Can you fend for yourself tonight, doll?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The blast came out of the window of the parked car, a fiery red finger that put a sudden crimson glow in the night air and hit Pat right in the belly. The sudden force was enough to knock him into a fetal position before he even hit the sidewalk with a sickening-sounding thud.

  When the driver hit the gas pedal, wheels shrieked against pavement, then took hold in a leap forward that scattered traffic and in that one second as the open window went past me, I got a good look at the grinning idiot who still had the gun in his fist and in that same second he saw the .45 in mine as I squeezed the trigger and that copper-covered slug got him in the right upper shoulder, slamming him into the driver with such a jolt that the latter wrenched the wheel too far, couldn’t recover, and the big eight-wheeler truck coming down the street mashed both of them into instant remains.

  Pat was lying there, his knees drawn up, both hands grabbing his belly, red squirting between his fingers, his breath coming in short wheezes. He could barely talk, but I could still make out what he was saying: “It hurts, Mike, damn… it hurts… it burns…”

  A dozen people were already crowded around and somebody was calling 911 on a cellphone, a young woman standing with the instrument still in her fist, and I yelled, “Tell them an officer is down!”

  She got the message, and added the information, then asked, “Who?”

  “Captain Pat Chambers!” I called out his shield number; I knew it by heart. Almost instantly I heard sirens open up, heading our way.

  I was kneeling beside him. His face was pale and contorted as he lay with his knees up, helpless as a turtle on its back. Gently I pushed his hands away and opened his trenchcoat and suitcoat to where blood soaked what had been a white shirt. I applied pressure.

  He gurgled a cry of pain.

  “Stay with me, Pat.”

  Now blood was squirting through my fingers.

  “Mike… Mike…” He was looking skyward, past me, like he was looking for that shaft of white light to take him away. But every word was for me: “We… know who… who did this… don’t we?”

  “I’ll get him, buddy.”

  He nodded his approval.

  Once, long ago, Jack Williams had died, a guy who’d given an arm for me in combat and over whose gut-shot corpse I had made a youthful self-righteous speech about the lousy court system and how the only jury that would judge Jack’s killer would be me. Pat had been there, and had tried to calm me, had tried to convince his hot-headed friend to let the wheels of justice turn, but I had done it my way, and the killer had died.

  So many years later, and here we were full-circle, Pat and me. But this time he was down and gut-shot.

  And this time I had his permission.

  Pat was half-gasping, spitting up blood, but he was hanging on. Sirens were coming in from Broadway even though this was a one-way street in the wrong direction. That helped them cut off escaping traffic more effectively.

  “Hang on, pal,” I said. “Hang on.”

  He was half-awake when I helped him on the gurney and up into the ambulance, and I thought about accompanying him but knew I needed to stay at the scene. I went over and guarded the puddle of red, and I didn’t have long to wait. I dealt with the uniforms and then the plainclothes, going through the preliminary details. Yes, I got a good look at the shooter. No, I didn’t know him. He was white with spiky hair and teardrop tattoos trailing down his cheek—a gangbanger, probably the Red Commando bunch.

  Mandy Clark, the lovely redheaded assistant D.A. who had joined us after supper, found her way to my side about half-way through the proceedings. When the questions were over, she asked me how I was doing.

  “Better than Pat,” I said.

  “Can you make any sense of this, Mike?”

  It had always been “Mr. Hammer” before—tragedy breeds familiarity.

  I gave her a hard sideways gaze. “I think it fits in with what we discussed, don’t you?”

  Her eyes were tight and she nodded. “I do. You’ve got me convinced, all right. But it’s still all theoretical. That limits us.”

  “It limits you.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. Then she shivered, hugged herself; she wore a lightweight raincoat. “Where did this cold snap come from, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re lucky it isn’t snowing. Mike, someone from Pat’s office will be in touch, and I’ll be in touch, too.”

  I nodded.

  “You should wash your hands,” she said.

  Pat’s blood was all over them, sticky going dark and dry. The coppery smell of the stuff was in the air. I would wash my hands, but not of what happened here tonight. Until this was over, I would look at my palms and see them scarlet.

  Time slowed and sped up and then finally the last of the squad cars was ready to go. The forensics team was still working, flash cameras strobing the night, but everyone else had gone. Behind me, the lights of the restaurant suddenly cut off and the chill wind picked up. I pulled the trenchcoat around me, buttoned it and made a mental note to put the winter liner in. Maybe I needed something heavier. Trenchcoats were as out of style as the Old School detectives who wore them.

  Detectives like Pat and me.

  And for one second, no more, just one second the wind got colder than made sense for this time of year. It had a cutting, icy edge to it and it came straight at me, a howling, shrieking, bitter thing with razor-sharp claws curved to kill.

  Pat’s coat was almost a duplicate of mine. A little cleaner, a little newer, but in the same dim light of night you couldn’t tell the difference. We were roughly the same height and weight, and were among the few m
en in this city who still wore hats. I hadn’t had mine on when I stepped outside, lagging behind Pat a few steps having picked up the check. He might have been me.

  Would Pat be the latest “accidental” cop fatality?

  Had the killer thought he was shooting at me?

  * * *

  An hour ago, we had been in a back booth of Pete’s Chophouse. I’d finished off my center-cut pork chop and Pat had eaten most of a bone-in rib-eye, rare. We’d shared an order of Pete’s signature hash browns with onions, a mammoth plate no one man could handle, and were passing on dessert in favor of highballs. No business had been discussed.

  “Man,” Pat said, after the bus boy had cleared our table, “even after all these years, I crave a smoke after that kind of meal.”

  “Not me. But I admit I may miss the second-hand smoke when New York gets around to banning smoking in bars.”

  He shook his head. “That’ll never happen. That’s California-thinking, Mike, not New York.”

  “Well, if it does go through, at least you won’t have to make the arrests.”

  He gave me a look. “Then you know?”

  I nodded. “Tim Darcy told me. Give me a list of guests and I’ll organize the retirement party.”

  He sipped his drink. “Won’t be for a while yet. No paperwork has gone through. End of the year and I’m out, though.”

  “Why are they letting you hang around that long?”

  His smile was rueful. “They don’t want some reporter as smart and shifty as Tim telling the public that I was the sacrificial lamb who made the Rudy Olaf settlement possible.”

  I gave him half a grin. “So are you going to dog it, these last few months?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re going to try to hang Rudy Olaf up with piano wire. And I’ll be glad to help.”

  He gave me the other half of the grin. “You already are… Ah! Here’s Mandy Clark. I asked her to join us after supper.”

  “Why her?”

  “She’s an ally, Mike. Really. Truly.”

  The good-looking redhead was picking up a martini at the bar. Then she came over, with a fluid feminine walk that was worth taking in, her hair up, her nice figure downplayed in a trim black-and-brown business suit. She shook hands with me, by way of paying respect, and slid in on Pat’s side of the booth.