Kiss Her Goodbye Read online

  "We can make it separate checks."

  Even so, I had the feeling that with this doll I'd pay, all right.

  "P.J. Moriarty's at eight," I said. "I'll book the reservations."

  "See you there, Mike."

  She returned to the latest crime scene and I got out of there before Pat Chambers guessed anything else right.

  Lonnie Dean and I sat in the same old-time bar in a different booth. Ernie, who'd introduced us, wasn't around. The young reporter on the organized crime beat may have had the mustache and long hair of a hippie, and the ridiculous pointed collar of a circus clown, but he was a pro, all right.

  The kid lighted up a cigarette and sucked some smoke down, held it like it was grass, then let it go, adding to the fog in the crowded gin mill. It was just after six and the bar was three deep, and the voices and laughter of reporters topping each other made a harsh music punctuated by the clinks of glass.

  The young waitress smiled at me—she knew me now, especially since I'd left her a five-spot last time—and delivered an icy draft Miller without my asking. She might get another fiver.

  "There's no talk of gems being used for money-laundering purposes," Lonnie said with an apologetic shrug. "I have good contacts on that front—the freelance fences, the pawnshops who work the angles, nobody indicates anything along those lines."

  "New York's a big town. You can't have contacts with everybody."

  "No, but these are the major players, Mike. If we are talking mob, and we are talking the kind of valuable stones it would take, then I would say nothing's shaking."

  "Be a good laundering operation."

  "Sure it would. Something as small as stones, and uncut ones would be virtually untraceable, no photos in insurance company files to cause trouble.... Cash for stones, then stones for cash. Put a jewelry store or two in the mix, and the green's clean again."

  I sipped the cold brew. "Also be a good way to make a big payoff. A million in cash makes a big bundle to move around. You could set a lot in motion with a simple handoff."

  Lonnie nodded. He was having a beer, too. A bottle. Heineken. Kids. "Look, Mike, it's not all bad news, or I wouldn't have called you for a meet."

  "Okay."

  He sucked a little more smoke. His eyes were bright. I was his hero and he was about to please me. "I did a little digging on the Club 52 front. I called the guy I replaced at the News —you remember Tommy Bellinger?"

  "Sure. I know Tommy well. He's out in Arizona, right?"

  "Yeah. It's good for the lungs." This he emphasized with another pull on the cigarette. A good thing young people live forever. "But he's got a phone, and I called him. Turns out this Chrome used to be the main squeeze of somebody you know. Or, somebody you knew."

  "Such as?"

  "The late and conspicuously not great Sal Bonetti."

  ...blood smeared across the Bonetti kid's mouth, tight in a mad grin ... Bonettis head came apart in crimson chunks...

  "I didn't know Sal ever had a main squeeze," I said. "Word was he would diddle anything with two legs, including little boys and billy goats."

  "That's four legs, Mike. Yeah, they say he was a twisted mother, but Tommy says Sal discovered Chrome on a South American trip—she's a star down there, you know—and booked her into a showroom at a Vegas casino that old Alberto still has a piece of. Apparently Howard Hughes doesn't own every damn craps table in Nevada. Anyway, Sal panted after her like a horny puppy dog and she liked the attention. That was the word on the Strip, anyway."

  "So Little Tony probably saw her perform there. Maybe stole her away from Sal."

  He shook his shaggy head. "No. He didn't get interested till after you rid the world of Sal. Who, one would think, would find plenty of billy goats and little boys to diddle in whatever circle of hell you dropped him in."

  "Let's hope the little boys and billy goats are doing the diddling, Lonnie. So what's the deal with this Chrome broad and these bent lasagne boys? Is she their beard or what?"

  He waved that off with the hand holding the cigarette. "Naw, she's just another show biz type who cozies up to whoever has the money to make her famous. She's gone as far as she can in Latin America—like anybody in her game, Chrome knows she's not a real star till she makes it in the real America."

  "You think Tony really digs her?"

  "Who knows? I heard those young bartenders of his march in and out of his penthouse like a parade of little tin soldiers. My guess, and it's just a guess, is Chrome and Anthony are strictly business partners. But, hell, maybe he does love her, considering the money he's spending on the broad."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Man, he's laying out hundreds of thousands launching this tour of his new locations, nationwide. They have their own Lear jet, and are taking her full band and all of their gear."

  "Their own damn plane?"

  "Yeah, like Hefner or Sinatra. Lavish layout, lounge with a bar, plus she can fly home and see her folks and do gigs down south of the border that she already had booked. Maybe Tony is crazy about her. She is one big, beautiful animal."

  "So I hear," I said.

  "Anyway, this wild-ass seventies lifestyle—guys like Sal and Anthony, they swing in ways that even an old prowler like you could never imagine. No offense meant. You been at Club 52, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well you saw the scene. Men and women, women and women, men and men, two men and one woman, it's a Rubik's Cube of fleshly delights. To guys like Anthony, gender labels are just labels. Lot of that going around these days, Mike." The reporter flashed me a mocking smile. "Hey, man, aren't you into androgyny?"

  "I don't dig science fiction," I said.

  I let him wonder about that and slipped out of the booth, leaving a sawbuck behind to cover the damage and the tip. I needed to get to the hotel to clean up a little.

  After all, like the old song said, I had a date with an angel. Even if she was an assistant district attorney.

  Chapter 10

  WE SAT AT THE bar at P.J. Moriarty's at Sixth and Fifty-second, waiting to be seated. It was a straight-ahead steak and chop house that the restaurant critics looked down on and hungry patrons packed. John, the Irish bartender, brought me an icy Miller without asking and took Angela's drink order. She said she'd have the same, so I slid mine over to her.

  "You look great," I said.

  And she did, in a cream-in-the-coffee silk blouse and a simple short black skirt, her long, full black hair touching her shoulders. The strength of her face and the intelligence and beauty in those big dark eyes recalled Velda, even if this one lacked my ex-secretary's distinctive fashion-flouting pageboy. This woman's forehead was high with a strong widow's peak, as if the brain in that lovely noggin demanded air, like electronic equipment that might otherwise overheat.

  "You clean up pretty well yourself," she said. Her beer arrived and I took it—it had taken almost thirty seconds. John was slipping.

  "Thank the Commodore Hotel," I said, gesturing to the dark gray suit. "If they didn't have in-house dry cleaning, I'd be screwed, with as little wardrobe as I brought up from Florida."

  Her eyes tightened, just a little, and she sipped her beer and didn't look at me when she asked, "When this is ... over ... are you going back there?"

  "Don't know."

  Half a smile blossomed. "Well, that shows the city's back in your blood. Before, you were just vacationing here."

  "I know. Maybe I love smog and panhandlers."

  Her half smile was both sweet and teasing. "How do you make a living, anyway? Everything I hear about you says you've spent decades doing favors and cleaning things up for friends and, well, mostly dispensing a sort of rough justice, when you deem it necessary."

  "The big-paying cases don't make the papers." I shrugged. "All that publicity attracts business. I do all right."

  "Will you open your office back up?"

  "Maybe. Is that why you asked me out to dinner? To get my life story? I mean, this is our second date, an
d it's your idea again."

  She laughed just a little. "No. We have things to talk about. I saw the questions in your eyes in that hallway outside Joseph Fidello's apartment."

  "That place was an apartment like a matchbox is a fireplace. But I do have questions, yeah."

  She cocked her head and the dark hair fell nicely. "I'll try to give you some answers. But first—can we eat? I'm starving."

  Her timing was impeccable, because the head waiter, Samuel, motioned me from his stand that our booth was ready. I'd asked for one back by the kitchen, normally a lousy seat but I liked that the clatter and in-and-out of waiters would cover our conversation.

  But Angela hadn't lied—she was hungry, all right, and she was no vegetarian feminist, despite the light breakfast I'd witnessed a couple of days ago. She got the lamb chops special and she put it away like a stevedore who missed his last meal.

  "Watching you make those chops disappear," I said, working on my medium rare New York strip, "makes me wonder if I'm the next lamb set for slaughter."

  "I skipped lunch," she said as delicately as possible with a mouthful. "This always happens. I try to skip a meal, to be good, then dinner comes around and I'm very bad. Good thing I burn a lot of calories. But it's tough, watching my figure."

  "Not from where I sit," I said.

  We shared cheesecake off a communal plate. The dessert was almost as good as the sense of shared intimacy. She was a strong woman, smart and big with the kind of curves the fashion magazines abhor. Like Velda. I frowned at my mind's damn insistence on bringing up past history....

  "Something wrong, Mike?"

  "No. I want to ask you something—were you working with Bill Doolan on a case?"

  She shook her head. Her tongue licked whipped cream off her upper lip. "I never even had the honor of meeting him. He was a legend."

  "No, he wasn't. He was a man. Flesh and blood. He had his weaknesses—like an eye for pulchritude."

  She laughed.

  "What?"

  "I don't think," she said giggling, "I ever heard that word spoken out loud before."

  "My vocabulary might surprise you."

  "You're a surprise in general, Mike. Why do you ask if I knew Doolan?"

  I gestured to her. "Because here you are—sniffing around the edges of my investigation into his murder."

  "Don't you mean suicide?"

  "No. It's a murder. It might not be ready for presentation to your office, Angela, but I'm completely convinced Doolan was murdered. Somebody close to him did it—a woman, maybe. That was his weakness."

  "Pulchritude," she said, not clowning it. "My interest is strictly Club 52. I can't imagine your late friend was a habitué of that Weimar Republic flashback."

  "Actually, he was. He was viewed as a lovable eccentric by Little Tony."

  She nodded sagely. "Anthony Tretriano." Then she frowned. "Doolan was a regular at 52?"

  "For a while, anyway."

  "Why in the world would he be? And if you say 'pulchritude'—"

  "He was taking pictures, Angela. Mostly of that disco doll ... Chrome?"

  Her expression changed so radically it was damn near comic. Her eyes tightened and popped at the same time, and her face turned so pale the bright red of her lipstick was like blood on white linen.

  "We shouldn't talk in public about this," she said quietly.

  "We're all right. With all this kitchen noise—"

  "Not here."

  "Well, if we're at the 'your place or mine' stage, I don't have a place, other than my room at the Commodore."

  "That should do fine. But we shouldn't go up at the same time. We're both well known, and I don't want anybody getting the wrong idea."

  I grinned at her. "Including me?"

  Her smile had a nice naughtiness to it that was brand-new. "I've already learned, Mike, not to try to control your thoughts...."

  The Commodore near Grand Central Terminal was probably due for an overhaul, and at twenty-six stories wasn't much in skyscraper terms, but it remained my favorite hotel in the city. I always used it for out-of-town clients and maybe now and then for a conference with a good-looking female, sometimes work-related, sometimes not. My stay here so far had been just fine. And it looked to improve....

  Angela Marshall was lounging on the dark blue spread of my brass double bed, facing me as I sat in the comfy chair in a corner by the window. I had ordered room service for four more cold Millers, in bottles, and those had arrived. My guest, in her silk blouse and short skirt, had her shoes off, leaning on one hand, sitting on one hip, with lots of stretched-out bare leg showing as she spoke animatedly, like a girl at a slumber party. With the lucky guy who'd crashed.

  The only light on was the nightstand lamp on the other side of the bed, and the limited lighting and the shadows thrown made for a nice mood, enhancing the already beautiful features and shapely form of the assistant district attorney.

  My hat and coat were tucked away in the closet, and my tie was loose. We had a nicely cozy thing going.

  She was on her second beer (fourth, counting those at Moriarty's) and that may have accounted for her lively manner.

  "Mike, I've been investigating Club 52 as discreetly as I can—I went there a couple of times myself, but that really told me nothing. But I'm convinced the club has been a major conduit for cocaine and other controlled substances in this city since the day it opened. And now Anthony Tretriano is opening up Club 52s in half a dozen major cities, all around the country. With more to come."

  I nodded. "You figure he's not just franchising his club, but setting up a nationwide distribution system."

  "Yes! And there's a kind of twisted genius about it. The blessing given by local law enforcement to the recreational use of drugs by his celebrity guests, the hands-off, benign neglect bit ... it plays right into Tretriano's ability to move narcotics in and out of there."

  I was frowning. "Why do you have to investigate discreetly? Since when does the New York County District Attorney's Office give drug running a free pass?"

  "Have you been to Club 52?"

  "Just the other night."

  "See anybody interesting there? In terms of officeholders?"

  I grinned. "Only the mayor and two local legislators and one national one. I see your drift."

  "I have no way of knowing who in the current local administration, or on the national scene, are just naive, starstruck nincompoops buying the Club 52 glitz, and who's been bought off all the way. Mike, these are dangerous waters to swim in. God, you don't know how relieved I am to be able to finally talk to somebody about it."

  "What about this new federal group, the D.E.A.? Have you contacted them?"

  "That's the plan, when I feel I really have something more than hunches and suspicions."

  She was ambitious. If those hunches and suspicions were right, she might become the city's first female D.A. And then mayor, and...?

  I sipped the Miller. I was still on my first (or third, but who was counting). "Baby, these are dangerous waters. The kind a girl can drown in."

  "I'm a big girl, Mike. But I admit ... I admit liking to have a guy like you on my team."

  "If I'm on your team, I have a right to ask a few questions."

  "Yes you do."

  I sat forward. "What brought you to that crime scene the other night? Ginnie Mathes is a small kill for such a 'big girl.' And then there's earlier today, this afternoon, over at that flophouse—why does the late Joseph Fidello get on your radar? And don't say because he was the Mathes kid's ex-boyfriend. I want the whole story."

  She reached for the beer, chugged some. A little Irish courage for the girl.

  Then she said, "Mike, Ginnie was in a dancing class, off Broadway, using the same private tutor as Club 52's star attraction."

  "Chrome?"

  She nodded. "I talked to the tutor, and I think I did so in a way that raised no suspicions. I'm not as skilled an investigator as you, but I didn't dare use any of our investigative team,
and—"

  "Skip it. What's the connection?"

  "Chrome had been grooming Ginnie to be a backup dancer in her act."

  "She doesn't use any backup dancers in her act."

  "Well, not her current act, maybe. But Chrome's preparing for this big national tour, and she'd been dangling that opportunity over Ginnie's head, as recently as the day the young woman was killed. Chrome had really been courting her—otherwise Ginnie wouldn't have been on my radar at all. They often had lunch together, after dance class, and Ginnie seemed enthralled to be in the star's company."

  I sipped more beer. "If you did your research, which I'm sure you did, then you know Ginnie took out a cabaret entertainer's license a while back. Making it as a performer was apparently a long-held dream."

  "Right," Angela said, nodding. "And when I heard the description of the dead girl who was a mugging fatality, it sounded awfully close to Ginnie—not just physically, but down to the clothes I'd seen her wearing earlier ... so I checked it out."

  "And we had our first star-crossed meeting."

  She smiled. "Boy, did I hate your guts."

  "I wanted to ram that Japanese sports car of yours up your rear highway."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. Or ram something somewhere."

  She almost blushed at that. Damn, she was cute.

  "But, Mike—now Ginnie's boyfriend has been murdered, and there can be no question about that. Nobody could write Fidello's death off as a mugging. And it's sure not a robbery, considering where he lived."

  "No," I confirmed. "That was as cold-blooded as kills get. So how do the pieces fit? You're looking at Tony Tret as a drug kingpin. What does that have to do with Chrome making friends with Ginnie Mathes?"

  "Simple." She shrugged. "Chrome works for Anthony. She may even be his main squeeze, if rumor can be believed."

  "I say Tony's gay, but go on."

  "Whatever the case, this may just be a matter of Chrome enlisting Ginnie for some purpose. An errand of some kind, which might explain what Ginnie was doing on that rough patch of real estate where she died."

  Delivering Basil's diamond to somebody. But who? And why?