A Long Time Dead Page 2

  “Because I’d give him a couple of bucks to buy me a sandwich for lunch and he’d always bring the change back in the bag. He never stole a cent from me.”

  “What a recommendation,” I said sourly.

  “The best,” she came back at me. “Besides, we need to get out of this office for a while. It’s a beautiful Spring day, the bills are paid, there’s money in the bank, nothing’s on the platter at the moment and—”

  “And we might pass one of those ‘Medical Examination, Wedding Ceremony, One Day’ places, right?”

  “Could be,” she said. “Anyway, we could use a day trip.”

  “A day trip where?”

  “Someplace quiet upstate.”

  “A little hotel on the river, you mean?”

  “That’s right.”

  Sing Sing.

  A looker like Velda could have caused a riot in places that didn’t consist of concrete and cells, and anyway the court-appointed lawyer could only arrange for one visitor. So she sat in the car in a lot outside the massive stone facility, while I sat in a gray-brick room in one of several cubicles with phones and wire-reinforced glass.

  Dopey was a forty-something character who might have been sixty. He had a gray pallor that had been his before he entered the big house, and his runny nose and rheumy eyes spoke of the weed and coke he’d consumed for decades. Smack was never his scene, as his fairly plump frame indicated. His hair, once blond and thick, was white and wispy now, and his face was a chinless, puffy thing.

  “I think they musta framed me, Mike,” he said. He had a mid-range voice with a hurt tone like a teenage boy who just got the car keys taken away.

  My hat was on the little counter. I spoke into the phone, looking at his pitiful puss. “And you want me to pry it off of you, Dopey? You might have given me more notice.”

  “I know. I know.” Phone to his ear, shaking his head, he had the demeanor of a guy in a confessional. Too bad I wasn’t in the sin-forgiving game.

  “So why now, Dopey?”

  “I just been thinking, Mike. I been going back through my whole life. They say it flashes through your brain, right before you die? But I been going through my life, one crummy photo at a time.”

  I sat forward. “Is that a figure of speech, Dopey? Or are you getting at something?”

  Dopey swallowed thickly. “I never gave nobody no trouble, Mike. I never did crime, not even for my habit. I worked hard. Double shifts. Never made no enemies. I’m a nobody like they used to call me, just a damn inanity.”

  He meant nonentity, but I let it go.

  “So you been thinking,” I said. “What have you been thinking?”

  “I think it all goes back to me sending that photo to LaSalle.”

  “LaSalle? You don’t mean Governor LaSalle?”

  The chinless head bobbed. “About six months ago, I ran across this undeveloped roll of film. It was in a yellow envelope marked Phi U ‘April Fool’s Party.’”

  Where the hell was this going?

  “I remembered that night. Up at Solby College? It was wild. Lots of kids partying—girls with their tops off. Crazy.”

  “When was this?”

  “Twenty years ago—April first, like I said. I was taking pictures all over the frat house. They was staging stuff—lots of fake murders and suicides and crazy stuff right out of a horror movie.”

  “And you got shots of some of that?”

  Dopey’s head bobbed again. “I was going around campus taking oddball pictures. I even got some ‘peeper’ type shots through a sorority house window, where this girl was undressing—then this guy pretends to strangle her. It was very real looking. Frankly, it scared me silly, it was so real looking.”

  “Is that why you didn’t develop the film?”

  “No, the frat guys never paid me, so I said screw it. But when I ran across that roll of film, I don’t know why, I just remembered how pretty that girl was—the one that played at getting strangled? She had her top off and … well, I can develop my own pics, you know.”

  “And you did?”

  “I did, Mike. And the guy doing the pretend strangling? He looked just like a young version of Governor LaSalle! So I sent it to him.”

  I thought my eyes would pop out of my skull. “You what?”

  “Just as a joke. I thought he might get a kick out of it, the resemblance.”

  I squinted at the goofy little guy. “Be straight with me, Dopey—you didn’t try to blackmail him with that, did you?”

  “No! I didn’t think it was really him—just looked like him.”

  My stomach was tight. “What if it really was him, Dopey? And what if that wasn’t an April Fool’s stunt you snapped?”

  Dopey swallowed again and nodded. “That was what started me thinking, Mike. That’s why I hoped you might come see me.”

  “You told your lawyer about this?”

  “No! How do I know I could trust him? He works for the state, too, don’t he?”

  But he trusted me. This pathetic little doper trusted me to get him out of a jam only an idiot could get into.

  Well, maybe I was an idiot, too. Because I told him I’d look into it, and to keep his trap shut till he heard from me next.

  “When will that be, Mike?”

  “It won’t be next week,” I said, and got my hat and went.

  Our jaunt upstate didn’t last long. I called Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide from the road and he was waiting at our favorite little deli restaurant, down the block from the Hackard Building. Pat was in a back booth working on a soft drink and some fries. We slid in opposite him.

  The NYPD’s most decorated officer wore a lightweight gray suit that went with the gray eyes that had seen way too much—probably too much of me, if you asked him.

  “Okay,” he said, with no hellos, just a nod to Velda, “what are you getting me into now?”

  “Nothing. You found something?”

  Those weary eyes slitted, and this time his nod was for me. “Twenty years ago, April second, a coed from Solby College was found strangled, dumped on a country road.”

  “And nobody got tagged for it?”

  “No. There were some stranglings on college campuses back then—mostly in the Midwest—and this one got lumped in as one of the likely unsolved murders that went along with the rest.”

  “Didn’t they catch that guy?”

  “Yeah. He rode Old Sparky in Nebraska. But the Solby College murder, he never copped to.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it?” Pat sat forward. “Mike, do I have to tell you there’s no statute of limitations on murder? That no murder case is truly ever closed till somebody falls? If you have something …”

  “I do have something.”

  “What, man?”

  “A hunch.”

  The gray eyes closed. He loved me like a brother, but he could hate me the same way. “Mike … do I have to give you the speech again?”

  “No. I got it memorized. Tell me about Governor LaSalle.”

  The eyes snapped open. Pat looked at Velda for help and didn’t get any. “You start with a twenty year-old murder, chum, and then you ask about … What do you mean, tell me about Governor LaSalle?”

  “He got elected as a law-and-order guy. How’s he doing?”

  Pat waved that off. “I stay out of politics.”

  “Which is why you been on the force since Jesus was a baby and still aren’t an inspector. What’s the skinny on the Gov?”

  His voice grew hushed. “You’ve heard the stories.”

  “Have I?”

  “I can’t say anything more.”

  “Then you can’t confirm that an Internal Affairs investigation into the Governor’s relationship with a high-end prostitution ring got shut down because of political pressure?”
/>
  “No.”

  “Can you deny it?”

  “No.”

  “What can you tell me, buddy?”

  He stared at the soft drink like he was trying to will it into a beer. Then, very quietly, he said, “The word is, our esteemed governor is a sex addict. He uses State Patrol Officers as pimps. It’s a lousy stinking disgrace, Mike, but it’s not my bailiwick. Or yours.”

  “What about the rumors that he has a little sex shack upstate? A little cabin in the mountains where he meets with female constituents?”

  Pat’s grin was pretty sick. “That’s impossible, Mike. Our governor’s a happily married man.”

  Then Pat stopped a waitress and asked for a napkin. She gave him one, and Pat scribbled something on it, something fairly detailed. Then he folded the napkin, gave it to me, and slipped out of the booth.

  “Get the check, Mike,” he said, and was gone.

  Velda frowned over at me curiously. “What is it?”

  “Directions.”

  This time I took the drive upstate alone, much to Velda’s displeasure. But she knew not to argue, when I said I had something to do that I didn’t want her part of.

  The shade-topped drive dead-ended at a gate, but I pulled over into the woods half a mile before I got there. I was in a black t-shirt and black jeans with the .45 on my hip, not in its usual shoulder sling. The night was cool, the moon was full and high, and ivory touched the leaves with a picture-book beauty. An idyllic Spring night, if you weren’t sitting on Death Row waiting for your last tomorrow.

  It was a cabin, all right, logs and all, but probably bigger than what Old Abe grew up in—a single floor with maybe four or five rooms. Out front a lanky state trooper was having a smoke. Maybe I was reading in, but he seemed disgusted, whether with himself or his lot in life, who knows?

  I spent half an hour making sure that trooper was alone. It seemed possible another trooper or two might be walking the perimeter, but security was limited to that one bored trooper. And that cruiser of his was the only vehicle. I had expected the Governor to have his own wheels, but I’d been wrong.

  Positioned behind a nice big rock with trees at my back, I watched for maybe fifteen minutes—close enough that no binoculars were needed—before the Governor himself, in a purple smoking jacket and silk pajamas right out of Hefner’s closet, exited with a petite young woman on his arm. He was tall and white-haired and handsome in a country club way. She was blonde and very curvy, in a blue halter top and matching hot pants. If she was eighteen, I was thirty.

  At first I thought she had on a lot of garish make-up, then I got a better look and realized she had a bloody mouth and one of her eyes was puffy and black.

  The bastard had been beating her!

  She was carrying not a purse but a wallet—clutched in one hand like the lifeline it was, a pro doing business with rough trade like the Gov—and her gracious host gave her a little peck on the cheek. Then he took her by the arm and passed her to the trooper like a beer they were sharing.

  I could hear most of what LaSalle said to his trooper/pimp. “Take Miss So-and-So home, and come pick me up. I want to be back to the mansion by midnight.”

  The trooper nodded dutifully, opened the rear of the cruiser like the prostie was a suspect not a colleague, and then they were off in a crunch of gravel and puff of dust.

  There was a back door and opening it with burglar picks took all of twenty seconds. The Gov wasn’t much on security. I came in through a small kitchen, where you could hear a shower on in a nearby bathroom.

  That gave me the luxury of getting the lay of the land, but there wasn’t much to see. The front room had a fireplace with a mounted fish over it and a couch and an area to watch TV and a little dining area. I spent most of my time poking around in his office, which had a desk and a few file cabinets, and a comfortable wood-and-cushions chair off by a window. That’s where I was sitting, .45 in hand, when he came in only in his boxer shorts, toweling his white hair.

  He looked pudgy and vaguely dissipated, and he didn’t see me at first.

  In fact, I had to chime in with, “Good evening, Governor. Got a moment for a taxpayer?”

  He dropped the towel like it had turned to flame. He wheeled toward me, his ice-blue eyes wide, though his brow was furrowed.

  “What the hell … who the hell … ?”

  “I’m Mike Hammer,” I said. “Maybe you heard of me.”

  Now he recognized me.

  “Good God, man,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. Go ahead. Sit at your desk. Make yourself comfortable. We need to talk.”

  His shower must have been hot, because his doughy flesh had a red cast. But the red in his face had nothing to do with needles of water.

  “There’s a trooper on his way back here right now,” the Governor said.

  “Yeah, but he has to drop your date off first. Tell me, was that shiner and bloody mouth all of it? Or would I find whip marks under that halter top?”

  He had gone from startled to indignant in about a second. Now he made a similar trip from indignant to scared. I waved the gun, and he padded over to the desk and got settled in his leather chair.

  “What is this,” he said, “a shakedown?”

  “You mean, lowlife P.I. stakes out sex-addict governor and tries for a quick kill? Maybe. Your family has money. Your wife’s family has more.”

  He sighed. The ice-blue eyes were more ice than blue. “You have a reputation as a hardass, Hammer. But I don’t see you as a blackmailer. Who hired you? One of these little chippies? Some little tramp get a little more than she bargained for? Then she should’ve picked another trade.”

  “You know, they been talking about you running for president. You really think you can keep a lid on garbage like this?”

  He gestured vaguely. “I can reach in my desk drawer and get a check book, and write you out a nice settlement for your client, and another for you, and we’ll forget this happened. I just want your guarantee there will be no … future payments.”

  I shifted a little. The .45 was more casual in my hand now. “I have a client, all right, Gov. His name is Dopey Dilldocks.”

  He frowned. “Your client is a murderer.”

  “No, Gov. You are. My client is an imbecile who thought you might be amused by what he thought was a gag photo taken years ago, involving either you or more likely some college kid with a resemblance to you. But that was no gag—you really strangled that girl. You hadn’t quite got a grip, let’s say, on your habit, your sick little sex hobby.”

  The big bare-chested white-haired man leaned forward. “Hammer, that’s nonsense. If this is true, where are these supposed photos?”

  “Oh, hell. Your boys cleaned up on that front right after you framed Dopey. You’ve got underworld connections, like so many law-and-order frauds. You can’t maintain a sadistic habit like yours without high friends in low places—you’re tied in with the call girl racket on its uppermost levels, right?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Hammer.”

  I stood. I was smiling. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of that smile, but it was a smile.

  “Look, Gov—I’m not after blackmail money. All I want is a phone call from the governor.”

  He frowned up at me. “What?”

  “You’ve seen the old movies.” I pointed at the fat phone on his desk. “You’re going to call the warden over at Sing Sing, and you are going to tell him that you have reason to believe Donald Dilbert aka Dilldocks is innocent, and you are issuing the prisoner a full pardon.”

  “Isn’t not that easy, Hammer …”

  “It’s just that easy. Then you’re calling the Attorney General and informing her that you’ve made that call, and that the pardon is official.”

  And that
’s what he did. Under the barrel of my .45, but he did it. And he was a good actor, like so many politicians. He didn’t tip it—sounded sincere as hell.

  When he’d hung up after his conversation with the Attorney General, he said, “What now?”

  I came around behind the desk and stood next to the seated LaSalle. “Now you get a piece of paper out of your desk drawer. I want this in writing.”

  His face seemed to relax. “All right, Hammer. If I pardon Dilldocks, this ends here?”

  “It will end here.”

  He nodded, the ice-blues hooded, his silver hair catching moonlight through the window behind him. He reached in his bottom-right hand drawer and came back with the .22 revolver and he fired it right at me.

  The click on the empty cylinder made him blink.

  Then my .45 was in his face. “I took the liberty of removing that cartridge when I had a look around in here. Lot of firearms accidents at home, you know.”

  My left hand came around, gripped his right hand clutching the .22, and swung the barrel around until he was looking cross-eyed at it.

  “But there’s another slug waiting, Gov,” I said, “should the need arise.”

  And my hand over his hand, my finger over his finger, squeezed the trigger. A bullet went in through his open mouth and the inside of his head splattered the window behind him, blotting out the moon.

  “Some sons of bitches,” I said to the suicide, “just don’t deserve a reprieve.”

  Fallout

  Something felt wrong.

  It wasn’t the little gusts of wind that had rain smell in them, or that strange quiet that comes at night in New York when nobody expects it. Sometimes it’s evening and the cabbies park for a coffee break, and other times it’s into the wee-hours morning when there isn’t even a fire siren going anywhere in the city. All you can feel is that nobody’s moving and you wonder why. There really should be a horn honking somewhere or a scream someplace.

  But there’s nothing at all.

  You look down the street and you’re alone. It’s Lexington Avenue and Thirty-ninth and nothing’s happening. Helen Fainey was a hooker who worked that corner until a drunk driver wiped her out, but so far nobody else has taken her place. A truck growls by and the guy behind the wheel drops a cigarette out the window with a twitchy little motion like he senses something wrong, too.