Kiss Her Goodbye Read online

  "Mike, what's on your mind?"

  "Just thinking, doll. Just thinking."

  "Can you figure why Fidello was murdered?"

  My eyebrows hiked. "Possibly he was getting back with Ginnie, and overheard something, and maybe became the kind of loose end that needs cutting off."

  "Somebody is killing awfully casually."

  "Little Tony comes from that kind of stock."

  She put the beer bottle back.

  "I have to tinkle," she said.

  "As long as you put it so sweetly, you don't even have to leave a quarter on the porcelain."

  Angela laughed at that, tipsy enough for my quip to seem funny. She snatched her purse off the nearby nightstand and scampered off. Always a kick to see a big, beautiful woman scamper.

  I sat there thinking about a young woman who dreamed of a show biz break and had done a star a favor, maybe delivering a valuable pebble. Her reward had been a quick, nasty death. If Angela was right, Ginnie was doing Tony Tret's bidding, in a roundabout way.

  What was Tretriano doing with Basil's diamond in the rough? And assuming Tony was using it as a small-size big payoff, whose palm was he greasing in such a magnanimous fashion?

  The toilet had long since flushed and she wasn't back yet.

  Then the door opened and she stepped out in the shaft of light, and all she had on was the silk blouse, buttoned up discreetly, but with the tail not quite hiding the dark tip of her pubic triangle. Her legs were long and with a little flesh around the thighs, which was fine with me because I hated these skinny kids. She was tiptoeing, like she was sneaking up on me, though I was right there staring.

  She stood before me like a good soldier waiting for inspection. But I was standing at attention, too, even if I was still sitting down.

  "Am I too forward?" she asked.

  "Not forward enough," I said. "That blouse is ruining the view."

  She made me crazy, working those buttons one at a time, taking several seconds each that made sweat bead on my forehead despite the cool spring breeze coming in the crack of the window under the closed blinds, which made a metallic rustling.

  When she'd shrugged out of the silk blouse, she put her shoulders back and the full breasts jutted proudly, displaying large, round, puffy nipples whose erect tips pointed slightly right and left, as if a practical joke to turn me cockeyed. Her waist was narrow and her stomach firm and well defined without losing its womanliness, and the dark, dark tangle of pubic hair promised a jungle well worth exploring.

  "Should we have some fun?" she asked.

  "I'm gonna say yes," I said.

  "Check my purse. See if anything interests you."

  I stood up and she giggled at the tent I'd made, and grabbed it, pulled it down, and let go. "Boiiiing," she said, and laughed.

  Maybe not just a little drunk.

  I went over and got in her purse and found what she was talking about—handcuffs. Well, she was an officer of the court.

  I stood by the bedside and dangled the shiny pair, which caught what little light was in the room. "I don't wear bracelets, honey—I'm a man."

  "I can see you're a man. But I'm a woman."

  She threw the sheets and blankets back, and crawled up on the bed, pointing a well-rounded, dimpled behind at me with a little teasing tuft sticking out from in between, where heaven met the earth, and she snapped her right wrist to the bedpost at left. Then she lay on her back, spread-eagled, pink peeking through the curly black, and looked over to where I stood getting out of my own clothes, and she said, "You'll never make me talk, officer."

  I didn't make her talk, but I did make her holler, and laugh, and even cry a little. She was moist and tight and wild, a prisoner gyrating for freedom that she didn't really crave, and as I was buried in her dark hair with her moaning in sweet pain, I thought, So like Velda ... so like Velda....

  "Velda," I whispered.

  Out loud. Not meaning to.

  "What did you say?" She stiffened under me. "What did you call me?"

  "Old Celtic term of endearment, baby."

  "What does it mean?"

  "Love of my life."

  "You're sweet..." Her hips began to grind under me again. "You're so sweet...."

  Wasn't I?

  She fell asleep almost immediately, despite her cuffed wrist. She was on her side, her back to me with the covers over her, snoring softly, when I slipped out of bed. I left my clothes on the floor, but got into my shorts. I went to her purse to find the handcuff key, though when I started to rustle in there, she stirred and made a protesting sound that made me shrug. If the cuff didn't bother her, it didn't bother me.

  We'd turned all the lights off, but I'd been in this room for enough days to easily make my way to the john without any help. I didn't even turn the bathroom light on until I'd sealed myself in.

  What a wonderful, smart woman this was. I'd thought Velda was one of a kind, but another had found me, and took me on my own terms, rough edges and all. It seemed a kind of miracle. I wouldn't say I loved her, not yet, but the sex had been great, hot and loving and crazy. The kind of memory you save up for your deathbed, when you can really use it.

  I did a few things in the john that don't really move this story forward. What may be relevant is that the lovemaking had been spirited enough to make my side ache like hell, particularly that hot spot under my ribs. The pill bottles were lined up behind the sink like members of the jury.

  The pill bottle for pain, which I knew to be a goddamn narcotic, I grabbed and held and sat staring at, like a kid in school with poor reading skills trying to make sense out of Dick, Jane, and Spot. My hand was shaking a little and my side was burning, like some sicko bastard with a red-hot poker was having a horse laugh at my expense, and I heard the door snick open out there.

  I got onto my feet without a sound. I put the plastic vial carefully on the counter without a single rattle of pills.

  Somebody was out there.

  I did not believe it was Angela, up and dressed and slipping out on me. No, she'd been too drunk to accomplish that quietly, and anyway she couldn't reach her purse for the precious little key, not in that handcuff. Not without my help.

  Somebody was out there.

  I had no weapon. The .45 in the speed rig was on the shelf in the closet. Just across the way, but it might as well have been in New Jersey. I was in my shorts and the closest thing to a weapon in here was a toothbrush.

  That room out there was dark. Pitch black. If I was someone's intended target, an intruder could easily take the slumbering Angela for me. The blinds were shut, I knew, no city light to speak of seeping in. Just enough to make out the vaguest shape, like that of a sleeper, primed to be an unwitting victim.

  The only weapon I had going for me was surprise.

  Leaving the bathroom light on, I opened the door, stepped into the shaft of brightness, and yelled, "Hey!"

  He was big, stupid big for the role he'd taken on, wearing the white shirt and black bow tie and black trousers of a room-service waiter. The sudden light had him squinting, and his whole face seemed to be clenched, his hair dark and curly with muttonchops, his nose a blobby thing, his chipmunk cheeks acned and pockmarked.

  And he was at the foot of the bed with his fist raised high, a long, wide, gleaming Bowie-knife blade reflecting the bathroom light back at me.

  This registered in a fraction of a second, and in the next fraction I was on him. He had two inches on me, but I was able to grip his wrist with both hands and stop its downward swing. We did an awkward, grunting dance for a few seconds, and Angela had woken up at some point, because she said "Mike!" softly and then, rattling the handcuff against the brass bedpost, trying vainly to escape, shrieked, "Miiike!"

  He was strong. Cords in his neck were standing out and veins made a nasty bas-relief on his forehead as he forced his knife-in-hand down, taking my gripped hands with him, edging that wide, pointed blade toward my throat even as his arm sent one forearm after another into me, m
aking that hot spot under my ribs issue lightning bolts of pain all through my torso.

  I let the knife inch its way toward me, then pulled back, and with all my strength, brought the blade down, all right, in his hands and mine, but swung it around into his midsection. Deep—the sound like a boot stepping in thick wet mud. His eyes bulged in fear and agony as we did the final steps of our dance, face-to-face, almost nose-to-nose, his mouth moving silently, maybe in a prayer, and I grinned as his hand fell away and my two hands gripped the handle of the knife whose blade was already all the way in and jerked it upward on a terrible path and then made a circular sideways motion, taking the blade on a grim ride.

  Then I stepped away.

  And grinned at him some more as he looked at me, astonished, then down at the red spreading across his white shirt and the knife pitching to the floor as a flap of flesh opened and he caught the tumble of bloody slimy intestines in his fingers, though some of the scarlet-smeared snakes slithered from his grasp, and I would swear he fainted before he fell to the carpet to die.

  That was when I realized Angela was screaming.

  I crawled up on the bed where she was still jerking that cuff and said, "It's all right, baby. He can't hurt you. He's dead."

  Only her horrified eyes weren't on the corpse, but on me.

  I had Angela uncuffed, and she had padded into the bathroom, taking her clothes with her, when the phone rang. It was the front desk, complaining about noise, which was quick, because the guy had only been dead a couple of minutes. I told the desk man to tell any on-duty manager that there had been an assault on a guest, me, and that the hotel doctor should come up, and the police should be called immediately.

  I hung up, got the switchboard, and gave the girl Pat Chambers's home number.

  "I need you to get over here," I told him.

  "Over where?" he said sleepily. "Jesus, Mike. I'm at home. I have a life, you know."

  "Is there a woman in bed with you?"

  "No."

  "Then I'd argue the point about you having a life. There's a dead body on my hotel room floor. I've already had the desk call for the cops. But I figure you'll want to be in on this."

  "Mike ... Mike. Did you make him dead?"

  "I didn't shoot him."

  "You didn't?"

  "He had a knife."

  A long pause.

  Then he said "Mike" again, almost sorrowfully, and hung up.

  I went to the bathroom door and knocked. "Are you all right, honey?"

  "...Yes."

  "I've called the police. A doctor'll be up soon to check on our friend."

  "He's dead! He has to be dead!"

  "Yeah, he's dead, all right, but there are procedures. Hell, I'm telling you? Listen, if uh ... if you want to slip out before anybody gets here...."

  "No. No, I'll stay."

  "Fine. Do you want the doc to check you over?"

  "No. No."

  The doctor came up, a sixty-ish gent, looked the dead intruder over, and got to his feet, a ghastly white. "This is a first at the Commodore," he said.

  "Come on, doc, people die in hotels all the time."

  "Not like this."

  "Oh. Yeah, well I can see that."

  The doc was long gone when the uniforms got there. The older of the pair wanted my story and I told him I was Mike Hammer and that Captain Chambers of Homicide was on the way. That satisfied him, and Pat made it in less than half an hour. He looked a little rumpled and he'd forgot his hat, but he made it.

  Pat stood looking down at the dead guy, shaking his head, hands on hips. "This tears it. This really fucking tears it."

  "You want to hear what happened?"

  He grunted something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Why not?"

  I told him, referring only to Angela as "a lady friend." I left the handcuffs out, too, basically starting with me getting up to go to the john.

  He glared at me. "You call this self-defense?"

  "Hell yes! The prick comes into my hotel room, with a goddamn Bowie knife, intending to cut me up while I slept."

  "But you disemboweled him."

  "Yeah. And?"

  "And? How the hell do you disembowel somebody in self-defense?"

  I shrugged. "He got on my bad side."

  Pat closed his eyes. I thought maybe he was praying. Then he opened them, but he didn't look at me. "Well, where is she, your lady friend? I hope she makes a good witness."

  The toilet flushed again. I figured the first time was her puking; the second was anybody's guess.

  She came out, looking fairly spiffy in the silk blouse and short dark skirt. Not a lovely hair out of place, but her eyes were off. I don't know whether Pat noticed that, because he was just gaping at her in general.

  "Angela Marshall," he said, to me, not her. "The assistant district attorney is your witness?"

  "She should make a good one," I said.

  Pat sighed heavily, then went to the phone and called for the lab boys. Then he gently walked Angela out to the hall, away from the body, and asked her to wait. After that, he returned to take a brief statement from me, just inside the door.

  When he'd slipped his notebook away, Pat said, "I don't mean to encourage you, but I do have a couple of pieces of information you might appreciate hearing."

  "Go ahead. Liven up my evening."

  "Remember Ollie Joe's Steak House, where Ginnie Mathes worked? Where she talked to a patron at some length before she left and went out and got killed?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Well, the register girl at Ollie Joe's identified Joseph Fidello's picture as the chatty patron."

  "Really. What do you make of that?"

  "Nothing yet. But there can be no question we're looking at murder, not some random mugging. Not with both of them dead. On the other hand, I believe we've confirmed that the little hooker, the Thorpe girl, was not the intended hit-and-run victim. It was all you, Mike."

  "Why do you say that?"

  Pat arched an eyebrow. "Washington kicked back some interesting info on Dulcie Thorpe's former pimp, the one she shot?"

  "What's the deal?"

  "The deal is he's dead. And has been dead for three months. The feds had him on tap because he was involved in some interstate heisting of stolen stereo equipment. Got killed in one of those falling-outs among thieves you hear about. Appears he gave up pimping, after Dulcie popped him."

  "Tough to keep discipline with the rest of the stable," I said, "once one of the girls shoots your ass."

  He glanced toward the dead body. "So ... I'm sure you've noticed something significant about your caller tonight."

  "You recognize him, too?"

  Pat's laugh rumbled out of his gut. "Oh yeah. That's Frankie Cerone. One of the top Bonetti guns. Seems old Alberto may still have a grudge against you after all, Mike. For taking out his boy Sal."

  "I don't think Alberto gives a shit about Sal."

  "What?"

  I shook my head. "Word is, old Alberto's been getting credit for staging Doolan's suicide, though I don't think he did. And for trying to have me run down, too, which I also don't think he did." I nodded toward the gutted killer. "I think he decided he might as well really get in the game."

  "What, to build up his rep?"

  I nodded. "My guess is the old man is trying to stage a comeback. Maybe I'll have a talk with Alberto."

  "Mike, you stay the hell away from him. I will throw your ass in jail so fast—"

  "How can you make that speech and keep a straight face? Listen, I'm going to call the desk to arrange for a new room. This one's a mess."

  I went over and stepped carefully across the corpse and called down to the desk. When the arrangements were made, I returned to Pat and said, "Take it easy on Ms. Marshall, Pat. She's had a bad shock."

  "I will. For political reasons if not humanitarian ones."

  "Give me a second with her."

  I went out in the hall. She was smoking a cigarette.

  "Thought you quit
," I said gently.

  "So did I," she mumbled. "Bummed one off an officer."

  The two uniforms were milling. We were down a ways and had enough privacy to talk.

  "You need to give your statement to Captain Chambers," I said.

  She nodded. Drew in smoke, closed her eyes, exhaled a blue-gray stream.

  "Listen," I said, "I arranged for another room. You'll love this, doll—a thousand rooms in this dump, and they only had one available. It's the Honeymoon Suite."

  She looked at me like I was a ghost that had materialized before her. Not a good kind of ghost either.

  "You have got to be kidding me...."

  I held up a palm. "Just to crash. Just to decompress from all this crap that went down."

  "Really?" She shook her head, sort of shivering, then she took another drag, let it linger, finally exhaled, and said, "Mike, I know you saved my life. I know you did."

  "You don't have to thank me, baby."

  "I'm not thanking you. I mean, I am grateful, but ... I saw what you did."

  "That was self-defense."

  "In its way, it was ... and I will back you up. I owe you that much. But you went over the line, Mike. You didn't have to do ... what you did. You enjoyed it. How can you enjoy killing? What is wrong with you?"

  "I don't enjoy killing just anybody," I said defensively.

  She laughed at that. There was hysteria in it, but she seemed otherwise calm as she stroked my face, and the gesture held genuine affection.

  "I was falling in love with you tonight, Mike. I was drunk, a little drunk, yes, but falling ... only now? I can't be with you, Mike."

  She went over to one of the uniforms and said she was ready to give Captain Chambers her statement.

  I could only sigh.

  And here I thought this doll was like Velda....

  Chapter 11

  ALBERTO BONETTI HAD a distinct advantage over most of his associates—he was an Ellis Island baby. Nine months earlier, he had been conceived in a squalid area of Poldosti, Sicily, fathered by a young anarchist with a passionate hatred of authority and nurtured in the belly of a plain and plump wife who was madly in love with her impetuous husband. Alberto's mama never even considered the fact that the child's father had no feeling at all for her, except that their marriage contract and her dowry bought them tickets out of that oppressive country to the new land of America.