Complex 90 Read online

  “I have no idea. But his last words may point us in the right direction. Which brings us back to ‘Complex 90,’ Lisa. What is it?”

  She thought for a while, hands folded in her lap like a wallflower clutching a corsage, hoping to get a dance. I leaned back and sipped Guinness and waited for her decision.

  Finally, she said, “Complex 90, putting it simply, is an organic formula that protects astronauts from space viruses.”

  Giles had said something on the subject at the party. It had, of course, gone over my head. Right into Outer Space.

  “I didn’t even know viruses could exist beyond the atmosphere,” I said.

  “Bacteria can travel, but that is only part of the problem. A latent virus can reactivate on a space flight, something as minor as a cold sore erupting into a life-threatening problem for an astronaut. There is also a theory that assorted influenzas that have hit hard in various countries have entered our atmosphere via cosmic dust and micro-meteorites.”

  “And this Complex 90 is a kind of. inoculation against space viruses?”

  “It would be or could be, if Dr. Giles is successful in developing it. From everything I understand, despite several breakthroughs, he’s years away.”

  “But tell me this, Lisa. Suppose he’d found it, the answer, the cure. Or even just had research pointing in the right direction. Is that something the Soviets might want?”

  She laughed and the red smile was wide and lush. “Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. Whoever has this formula will be way, way ahead in the space race. We would vault into a first position the Russians could only dream of attaining.”

  I thought about that. Then I asked, “But why would ‘Complex 90’ be the Dorfman kid’s last words?”

  She shrugged and her expression was weary and frustrated. “At first, I spent hours thinking about that very thing, wondering if perhaps he’d made a breakthrough and wanted to make sure we knew.”

  “Had he?”

  “No, not according to Dr. Giles. But I finally came to understand, or at least I came to hold a belief that I find. comforting.”

  “Okay. What is it?”

  “Dennis was unconscious at the accident scene, the ambulance attendants said, but then came around when they were loading him in, but was in a delirious state. The project had been so important to him, those words were a natural thing to come to his lips. I think, I really believe, that he knew he was in trouble, even knew he was dying, and the importance of the project he was being forced to abandon sprang to his consciousness.”

  That was a pretty long-winded way of saying, “Because it was important to him,” but maybe when you were under thirty and had a doctorate in physics you had a right to be windy.

  “Mike. do you really think Dennis was murdered?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Are you looking into it? Would you look into it? For me? If it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of this government investigation you’re conducting, I could hire you as a private investigator. That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

  “It’s what I am.”

  “I make a decent salary. What kind of retainer would you need?”

  “Nothing. I’ve already decided to look into Dorfman’s death, whether it’s part of the federal inquiry or not.”

  She closed her eyes and her smile was one of relief, but there was sorrow in it, too. When she opened those eyes again, they were glistening. “Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Dennis didn’t deserve to die like that. So young. So brilliant.”

  Everything she said about him screamed respect, but nothing murmured passion.

  I gestured around the place. “I didn’t know you lived above Dr. Giles. Does he own this townhouse?”

  She nodded. “I’m very lucky. It’s a little extra that comes with my job. He likes having me handy. Really facilitates the work, whether it’s here or when we ride together out to the university.”

  “Can I be blunt again?”

  “Certainly, Mike.”

  “Is your arrangement strictly business?”

  “What do you mean... oh!” She laughed. “No, Mike, no, there’s no personal relationship between the doctor and myself. We’ve become good friends, but it’s, as you say, strictly business. Or in our case, strictly science. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m a snoop.”

  She cocked her head, regarding me like something on a slide under her microscope. That lush, red mouth angled in a sly smile. “You certainly have a lot of questions about my personal life, don’t you? Wondering about me and Dennis. Now about me and Dr. Giles. How does this factor into your investigation, Mike?”

  “No reason. Just gathering information.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She leaned in and that mouth melted over mine, and she found my hand and guided it to a satin-covered breast where I could feel the hardening of her nipple as it tried to burst through the smooth cloth. Then she found my other hand and guided it up under the skirt, moving it up to where her panties should be but instead I felt the pleasant harshness of forbidden curls. The kiss continued, and her tongue probed my mouth, like another scientific experiment she was conducting, and under my hands in those two intimate places, her body tightened and moved spasmodically, an invitation that became a demand.

  Her hand was on me, too, and as her fingers scrambled like playful kittens after my zipper, and her mouth drew away for a breath, I said, “Lisa. sweetheart. no. Not right now.”

  She reared back, damn near startled. Her voice became husky, nothing of the no-nonsense scientist in it.

  “No? Don’t you want me? I wanted you the moment I saw you at Jasper’s, Mike.” Those big brown eyes got sleepy. “You were right about me. I need a man. A real man. Sweet as Dennis was, he was a boy. Show me what I’ve been missing, Mike. show me.”

  “Not the right time, baby,” I said, and I gave her a quick kiss, and got to my feet. She looked up at me, a beautiful mess. The Carmen hair was a mad tumble framing a face where that mouth was a sensuous smear of lipstick, and her skirt was hiked high enough to offer a glimpse of paradise. Her top two buttons had popped undone, and the braless breasts were heaving.

  “You don’t want to go, do you, Mike?” she laughed, and a hand of hers gripped me through my trousers, grabbing the part of me that wanted to stay.

  “Lisa,” I said, “that’s the best retainer I’ve been offered in ages, but we’ll have to take this up later.”

  I jammed my hat on and grabbed my trenchcoat, and she did not show me to the door. She stayed there on the couch, laughing at me in a way that seemed not at all intellectual.

  On the way down the stairs, I used a handkerchief to wipe off the lipstick. I would have to remember to toss that damn hanky in a BEAUTIFY NEW YORK bin. If Velda found it, there’d be hell to pay.

  Glass houses was right.

  * * *

  At the Blue Ribbon Restaurant on Forty-fourth, I sat at my corner table in the bar nursing a Four Roses and ginger, waiting half an hour for Des Casey to meet me, as we’d arranged. Then I asked for a phone and Angie brought one over. I tried my apartment number, where I thought Casey might be.

  No answer.

  I called Velda, who had stayed home for the morning, waiting until I came up with a new assignment for her. She had heard from Casey mid-morning.

  “Des said he connected with an old cellmate pal of this Romanos character,” she told me. “Apparently the week of the Jasper party, Romanos was bragging about a big job he had coming up. Something that would change everything for him.”

  “That could be a jewelry heist.”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t give that to you exactly right, Mike. It was a ‘big-paying job.’ And there’s one other interesting wrinkle— Romanos told his pal he’d be out of touch for a while. Not just laying low—out of the country.”

  “A guy doesn’t have to leave the country after a jewel heist.”

  “Not usually. You’ve lost track of your M.P.?”

  �
�Yeah, Des was supposed to meet me at the Ribbon over half an hour ago.”

  “Well, you know traffic in this town.”

  “Vel, where was he calling you from? Did he say?”

  “I think he was right here in the building. In your apartment. Should I go down and check?”

  “No. Stay put. You’ll hear from me.”

  We said goodbye and I hung up. I went out the back way, cut over to Broadway and caught a cab. Nobody seemed to be following. If that was bad guys who’d lost my trail, that was fine. If I’d shaken the good guys, maybe not so fine...

  I could have said something to the agent posing as a doorman or the agent playing porter in the lobby, but I didn’t. I just got on the elevator. When the doors closed, I pressed 9, then slid the .45 out of the sling, thumbed off the safety and full-cocked the hammer back.

  I tucked myself by the front right corner of the elevator car and when the doors opened, I was ready. But nothing happened. I edged out into the hall and made my way down to 9-E. Carefully, as close to silent as humanly possible, I got to my door, and listened.

  Nothing.

  Just silence, but that funny kind of silence that wasn’t silence at all, because city sounds were mixed in and building noise and then the soft speech of two men exchanging a few words, not outside, not elsewhere in the building, but right inside my apartment, not far beyond that door, just some friendly, small conversation.

  In Russian.

  I didn’t use my key. I used my foot, which was risky, because kicking open doors isn’t as easy in real life as it is in the movies and on TV, and if I didn’t hit just the right spot with just the right force, I would be announcing myself and bullets could come punching through the wood of that door into me, ending this before it began, getting me out of the game before I even the knew players.

  I kicked it just right.

  It flew off its hinges and I flew into the darkened apartment, no lights on in my little living room, the blinds onto the street shut, but the hallway light exposed them, all three of them, the smaller one in the topcoat and the big man in the raincoat and the M.P. in civvies on the floor, sprawled there, possibly dead, certainly unconscious, his face to one side in a pool of blood from his nose and mouth.

  The prone Des Casey was between us but the smaller of the two—a man said to be a master of disguise, though in the muted light the shape of him was the same—was my visitor from the office, aka Soviet assassin Felipe Mandau, who was digging in his topcoat pocket for his weapon when my .45 slug caught him in the shoulder and knocked him back on his ass. The other guy, a big bald guy deeper in the living room near the window with the blinds, was just a monstrous silhouette, but he already had his gun out, and it blasted orange flame at me, the bullet going way high as I dropped to the floor, near where Casey lay—breathing, I could see him breathing!—and when I came up with the .45 ready to return fire, the big guy threw a lamp at me, catching my shoulder, and the .45 sprung out of my grasp as I saw him lumbering toward me. I scrambled to my feet just in time for him to grab me by the trenchcoat lapels and toss me like a shot put into my couch, sending it over on its back and me with it, ass over teakettle. Then he was looming over me, just a black shape, and the barrel of his Makarov was pointing down at me.

  “Do not move, Hammer,” a thickly Russian-accented voice ordered. The guy was six two, easy.

  I was on my back on the overturned couch, and that put my feet in a perfect position to kick him, and both feet caught him in the chest and he went back, smacking into a cabinet, the Makarov flying. I threw myself at him, taking him the rest of the way down, and I slammed my fists into him, his face, his chest, his breadbasket, but nothing seemed to have much effect. The big man scrambled backward under me, grasping at anything, and that was when he grabbed the blinds and pulled them down just as sun was finding its way through the clouds to send a laser beam of light into my face...

  ...through the scarred-edged quarter-size hole in the middle of the big man’s right palm.

  The hole that I had made with a ball-peen hammer when I slammed a twenty-penny nail into his hand into the floor of that barn.

  The face looking up at me, with big yellow teeth bared under a thick mustache, his cheekbones Apache high, nostrils flared in the Slavic face, belonged to an assassin named Gorlin. Code name: the Dragon. The surviving half, anyway.

  I was straddling the son of a bitch now, my knees on his shoulders, pinning him down, a great big man like a little bug on its back, wriggling, squirming, but I just hunkered over him and laughed in his face, my spittle flecking his high cheekbones like tiny tears, my hands digging in around his throat and I squeezed and squeezed and savored the way his eyes popped out and how his tongue lolled like a thirsty dog’s.

  I had damn near finished the fucker when an arm looped around my neck and yanked me backward and I turned my head just enough to see Mandau, his eyes popping there, too, but not the way the Dragon’s had been, his smaller yellow teeth exposed in an awful smile, and his free hand with a hypodermic needle in it was seeking the exposed flesh of the side of my neck.

  Mandau hadn’t been going for a weapon, at least not a gun: it was a needle! They did want to abduct me again, that’s why the Dragon hadn’t shot me when he had the chance, and my hands were off Gorlin’s throat and reaching around to try to get at my hypo-wielding attacker when the Dragon grabbed me by the wrists and held me there, that needle in his comrade’s grasp maybe an eighth of an inch from my throat when something, somebody, ripped the smaller man off the back of me like a scab.

  Des Casey, his face bloody, looking as dazed as a drunk, which meant he was likely badly concussed, had hauled the little man with the big needle off me and I was still smiling like a lunatic when the Dragon was on me, flinging me aside again, and I bumped hard against the underside of the couch, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, so that I was just half-sitting, half-standing there when the Dragon, who had found his gun, shot Des Casey in the head.

  The M.P.’s eyes emptied of life and that once strong body fell like a stringless marionette to the floor and I saw my .45, dove for my .45, and it was in my hand as the two Russians ran pell mell from the apartment, my slugs raining their way, chewing up walls and furniture and making thunder in the small room, taking Mandau’s head apart in red jagged chunks, but the Dragon was out the door, and by the time I got to my feet and pursued, navigating the dead, I slipped in somebody’s blood and knocked my head into the side of a table. It stunned me just enough to slow me, and when I got into the hall, it was empty, other than the billowing curtains down at the other end where the window on the fire escape was up.

  I ran there, leaned out with my rod ready but saw no one on the metal stairs and wondered if I’d been suckered, that maybe Gorlin had taken some other escape route. I went to check the elevator just as Velda stepped off, wide-eyed and ready with a .32 Browning in her hand. She had heard the shots from two floors down and come up to help.

  But when we went back to check Des Casey, there was no helping him.

  The M.P. was dead.

  “He’s back, Velda,” I said.

  “What? Who?”

  “The Dragon. Comrade Gorlin. Rickerby lied to me—and I will know the goddamn reason why!”

  That was when a brace of Rickerby’s agents, those faithful watchdogs from across the street and down in the lobby, came racing up to our rescue.

  “Just in the nick of time, boys,” I told them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the conference room at Peerage Brokers, I again sat at the big oblong table. Narrow-faced Vincent Worth of Special Sections, in another three-piece suit, played paterfamilias at its head. That gray little fed Art Rickerby again stood at the window, with his back to us, and Tony Wale sat opposite me with a wary expression, maybe afraid I’d drag his ass across the table again.

  Not a word had yet been said, though I’d come in a good two minutes ago. It was like hot-rodding kids playing a game of chicken, and whoever went
off the line first might drive off the cliff. But I was going to make them go first. I was curious to see just how stupid these feds could be.

  Rickerby couldn’t look at me. He pretended to be studying what was left of the overcast afternoon, separating two slats of the blinds to do so. But I knew he couldn’t meet my gaze. My buddy Art. My pal Art. My betrayer Art.

  The aftermath of the melee in my apartment might have taken the rest of the day sorting out, but it didn’t. That’s where it comes in handy having an NYPD Captain of Homicide for a best friend. Shortly after several of the federal watchdogs had come rushing belatedly to my defense, two uniformed beat officers were on their heels. Just for the entertainment value, I stood by listening to them argue jurisdiction for maybe five minutes, then told the older of the uniformed pair to call Pat Chambers.

  Within an hour, Pat had worked things out with one of Rickerby’s people, and I had given a detailed statement. The crime scene and whatever follow-up was necessary would be handled jointly by the Homicide Bureau and the local F.B.I. office. Everybody was happy, except maybe the late Felipe Mandau.

  And me.

  “Mr. Hammer,” Worth said finally, “this incident changes everything. It will be almost impossible to keep this out of the press. And if it’s known we’re allowing you to traipse around the city getting into shoot-outs and creating general mayhem, we will be rightly accused of reckless endangerment of the public.”

  I said nothing.

  Worth’s frozen gray eyes remained fixed on me. “That leaves us with only two viable options. One, that you go into immediate protective custody at a military base, and I would suggest that Miss Sterling accompany you, to prevent her from being used as leverage against you. This, obviously, would be the most prudent option.”

  I said nothing.

  “Two,” Worth continued, “we step up our protective measures, even as we appear to back off—giving the impression that we have thrown our hands in the air and left you to your own devices. In reality, you would be virtually surrounded by our people.”

  I said nothing.