Don't Look Behind You Read online

  “Or at least half down,” Pat said, nodding. “But that much loot would mean there’s plenty more where it came from. Meaning the client can afford to lay out a new bundle for another contract. So I will be investigating this incident, Mike. Personally. Count on it.”

  I wiped my hands across my eyes. It had been a long night. That snooze had been at the price of a wooden-bench backache. “And I’ll do the same thing, old friend.”

  “That I don’t like hearing. That’s not your role here. You’re the potential victim.” His sigh started at his toes. “Could you just for once let me do my damn job, Mike?”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  “Well, having you to trip over around every corner is not my idea of a good time.”

  “It isn’t much fun for me either,” I told him, sitting forward, my hands clasped and draped between my legs.

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me it’s getting to you. That this made one kill too many.”

  My laugh was as grating as a cough. “Are you kidding? Wiping out a punk like Woodcock doesn’t strain my conscience any, Pat… but it sure can mess up an office. Cleaning blood and guts off the wall—you know the stain it’ll leave? So there’s a new paint job, and who pays for that? And a bullet hole in plaster, that’s gonna need some work.”

  “Cut the comedy,” Pat said.

  I straightened up in the chair, tugged my hat down, and reached across the desk for my P.I. ticket and the .45 automatic that Pat shoved at me. The gun was going to need a good cleaning to get the fingerprint powder off it and one edge of my license was torn.

  I said, “I guess you know the score here. The pattern.”

  “Let’s hear your version,” Pat said.

  “Contract killers come in from the outside,” I said. “The farther away the arrangements are made, the better. But L.A. and Frisco have their own internal problems right now, and anyway their business dealings are too closely allied with New York’s to call somebody in from those locales. If your boys picked up a hitman from either city, you’d just assume the local mob was bringing in out-of-town talent, which negates the effort.”

  “With you so far, Mike.”

  “And then there’s Chicago, Woodcock’s former recent domicile. That’s a kind of middle ground—the windy town isn’t in the pocket of the New York crime families, and plenty of talent’s available there, plus the transportation options are so many you can get lost in them.”

  He was staring at me. “Which adds up to…?”

  “The contract originating in New York.”

  “That’s what I think,” Pat said, nodding his admission.

  I grinned at him. “Which means somebody around here doesn’t like me.” I shoved the .45 into the shoulder holster and slipped the P.I. ticket back in its plastic slot in my wallet. “And here I thought I was a beloved local institution.”

  “Whoever hired this thing is going to love you even less now, Mike. Taking Woodcock out means the price will go up.”

  “How about that?” I said.

  His eyebrows climbed. “The man in the big chair at Gracie Mansion has surely been advised by now that you’re potential trouble for the Big Apple.”

  “Am I?”

  “Sure—a famous, dangerous target walking around the streets of Manhattan, just waiting to turn it into a Wild West show. Add to that, publicity about you reaches out all over the country. Right now our governor’s pretty damn sensitive about his position, and his state’s image.”

  “Screw him. I didn’t vote his ticket.”

  “You don’t vote at all, Mike.” He shook his head, smiling, but there was no amusement in it. “They’ll be watching for developments. The gov’s got his own personal bird dogs, you know.”

  “Screw them too. I’m a tax-paying citizen.”

  “So you seem to remind me every time we get together.” Pat’s face turned a little grim. “Whether you’re a local institution or not—or just deserve to be put in one—you are not exactly a desirable character. Our elected leaders will be waiting for just one wrong move if you go barreling out on your own.”

  “Is this where I bust out crying?”

  Pat’s face got very hard and yet something soft lingered in his eyes. “Stay out of my way on this one, okay, Mike? Just for this once?”

  I got up and leaned two hands on his desk. “Buddy, if there’s a contract out on me, me is who they’ll come looking for. Not you.”

  “Granted, but—”

  “I told you. Jump in. The water’s fine—maybe a little cold this time of year. Anyway, it promises to be interesting. Do I have to tell you how I feel about this kind of thing?”

  “No. I know how you think.” Pat looked at me a long moment, then added, “And I know something else.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That you can be just as bad as the bad guys yourself sometimes.”

  “Sometimes somebody has to,” I said softly. “Sometimes you have to be worse.”

  He was shaking his head again. “You and that damn .45 of yours.”

  “It has been a big help, from time to time.”

  I started for the door. Pat’s voice stopped me when my hand was on the knob. “Mike…”

  “Yeah?”

  “High-priced killers don’t usually make mistakes.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Well, our friend Woodcock—what was his mistake?”

  I grinned at him and opened the door. “He was a secret admirer of mine.”

  Pat goggled at me. “An admirer?”

  “Yeah… on a professional basis. A real fan.”

  “So then what was his damn mistake, Mike?”

  I shrugged. “He talked too much.”

  And I left him there to chew on that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hell, when was the war?

  How many years ago?

  You lay in the mud waiting to shoot and get shot at, and you wind up shooting a lot of people you never saw or knew and when you did a really good job of killing, you got a medal or two that you could stick in your desk drawer and look at, whenever the scarred tissue in your body told you it was going to rain. They didn’t always get the little shrapnel pieces out in those field hospitals and you never really had time to deal with it after you got home. So when it rained, you remembered, and if you were me, you wondered why it was they didn’t give you medals any more for killing guys who needed it.

  The closest thing, over the years, had been the headlines, but that was a mixed bag. Good for business in its way, but turning you into some kind of cockeyed celebrity. To this paper you were a hero, to that one a villain or maybe even “a psychopathic menace to society.” That one popped into my mind a lot, sometimes making me grin and sometimes not.

  Of course, the power that was the press had been chopped down by the demands of supposedly honestly elected crooks who seemed curiously inspired to curtail the news and events from the biggest city of them all and divert them into preselected channels that didn’t need direction to be cautiously liberal to the point of fear, or consciously radical enough to be dangerous.

  The World Telegram was dead, the Journal-American gone and the Herald Tribune buried, and with them the reporters and columnists, like my pal Hy Gardner, who could have laid on a rebuttal to the two papers that chewed me up without having all the facts. Somebody at the News had gotten the word, though, and the story was minimized and presented as an attempted murder and my action as justifiable homicide. Nobody played it up really big. Luckily, the Mid-Eastern thing was still a hot issue in the UN, so there wasn’t enough space to bear down really hard.

  I tossed the papers in the receptacle outside the elevator, then walked down the corridor of the old Hackard Building to my office, and opened the door.

  No day can be all bad. This one blossomed like a rose in sunlight because Velda was bent over filing papers in the lower drawer of a file cabinet with her back toward me, standing with that stiff-kneed dancer’s stance, feet together,
and no woman in the world has legs like she has. Those calves and thighs, and the lush globes they led to, came from an era when women were fully-fleshed and the posture she was maintaining would be damn near obscene if it weren’t unintentional. And what this big luscious brunette could do to a simple white silk blouse, a black pencil skirt and nylons was sheer sexual alchemy.

  She heard me, glanced around and stood up quickly, almost having the decency to blush. Almost.

  I said, “Didn’t anybody ever warn you about picking up the soap in the shower, doll?”

  “A guy could knock,” she said.

  “And then a guy would miss the sweetest surprises.” I pushed the door shut. “Besides, I’m a true connoisseur of the female form.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I think of it as living erotic art.”

  Her mouth pursed into an amused kiss. “Do you now?”

  I tossed my hat on her desk, slung my hip on the edge and picked up my mail. “Anything come in?”

  Velda tugged her skirt down, got back behind her desk and said, “A couple of bills, two checks and a referral from the Smith-Torrence Agency.”

  “Referral, huh?”

  “It’s in that stack there.”

  I sorted the envelopes and fingered out the agency one. “What’s with Smitty, anyway, calling me in? He knows I don’t handle auditing cases.”

  “Well, read it and see.”

  I yanked out the letter and glanced at it. “Hell, it’s six pages long and starts with his latest fishing trip. I wouldn’t want to read about my own fishing trip. Brief me.”

  Velda reached out, took the letter and selected the last page. “Smith-Torrence has a request for the kind of thing they don’t handle. Seems one Leif Borensen has security needs.”

  Sitting perched where I’d been when Woodcock came in yesterday, I glanced back at her and asked, “Where do I know that name from?”

  “You got me,” she said with a shrug. “I never heard it before, and haven’t had time to run a check.”

  “Don’t bother. If I decide to take this, Smitty will fill me in. Just give me the basics, baby.”

  She shrugged again. “Borensen’s somebody with money who’s getting married. He wants security in attendance at his fiancée’s bridal shower. It’s at the Waldorf.”

  I made a face. “If it’s a female shindig, you should take the gig.”

  Velda shrugged again. “Smitty says he needs a security man. I’d never pass the physical.”

  “Truer words.”

  She flipped a hand. “Anyway, if we’re talking high society, the gifts could be worth a small fortune and the gals in attendance might be swimming in jewelry, and not the paste variety. My guess is that we should both be working it.”

  Like I said, Velda was no mere secretary. She was a full partner in this firm. Some day I’d make her a full partner period.

  I swiftly scanned the paragraphs she indicated and let out a snort of disgust. “Why pass this on to me? If this guy Borensen wants to make a show of it, he’ll want uniformed guards. Burns or Pinkerton make those scenes. I’ll look like a damn clown in that circle.”

  She shook her head and grinned at me. “Quit being touchy about your obvious lack of class. If you’d read the letter, you’d see that the client doesn’t want to be ostentatious. He just wants somebody handy to avoid pilfering by the hotel staff and in the unlikely event of a robbery. Nothing you haven’t done before.”

  I said, “Back when I was scratching out a living, maybe.”

  “You’re not all that rich yet.”

  “Balls.”

  “See what I mean about your lack of class? Anyway, Smitty’s doing you a favor.” She nodded toward the bullet hole in the wall behind her, and gestured toward the faint red smear across the way, made by Woodcock’s insides. “Your recent surge of publicity gives you a stigma that may be off-putting to a certain breed of client.”

  “Where would I be,” I said, “without you to cut me down to size.”

  Her smile had something impish in it. “I’m the only person in town who would have taken a bet that you could have wiped that Woodcock character out the way you did—a guy with a gun in his hand, facing you down like that.” Her eyes grew grave. “Listen, Mike, I’m sorry about…”

  I swung around so I was sitting on the side edge of the desk now and rested my left hand against the top so I could lean in and face her. “Forget it, kitten.”

  “I put you in that spot. I can’t believe I left that door unlocked when I left.”

  “Your girl friend had a doctor’s appointment and needed your support. You were distracted, and you’re human. I said forget it and I mean forget it.”

  She touched my hand. “I appreciate that, Mike. I’m supposed to be as professional as you are, and—”

  “Honey, stop. How did that come out, anyway? With your friend, Karen?”

  Her big brown eyes were pearled with tears; her lush, red-lipsticked mouth went crinkly with a smile. “It was benign. She’s all in the clear.”

  “That’s great. That’s fantastic to hear.”

  The emotional moment over, Velda smirked up at me. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me how this played out.”

  “I should be dead,” I admitted. “He was a contract man with a long list of kills. Somebody paid him to lay me out, but he got chatty and gave me a window.”

  I told her the rest of the story, including what Pat had come up with on Mr. Woodcock, formerly of Chicago, formerly not shot to shit.

  When I finished, her brow creased with suspicion and she said, “Mike—are you into something I don’t know about?”

  I shook my head.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Then… any ideas what this could be?”

  “Not a one.”

  “You wouldn’t kid a girl.”

  “Sure I would. But I’m not.”

  She gave me a humorless smile. “Well, you don’t seem very damn worked up about it.”

  “That’s close to what Pat said.” I picked a loose cigarette from my coat pocket and held a match to it.

  “I wish you hadn’t started that up again,” she said with a mild frown.

  “What, smoking? You think this is what’s gonna kill Mike Hammer? You shouldn’t have told me I was getting a paunch. These coffin nails are my diet pills.”

  “It does seem like it helped fake out that hitman. A glass ashtray in the head can daze a person.”

  “Damn straight.” I blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling, then said, “A lot of guys would pay to have me dead sooner than cigs can make me that way, kiddo. Some I helped send up might be out by now and getting the loot together to pay for the job. A relative of somebody I knocked off could feel it’s his duty to take care of me before he kicked his own pail over. Maybe it’s a longtime grudge deal. Hell, I don’t know and I don’t give much of a damn. I’m no kid any more, and if there’s any survival pattern needed here, I picked up on it a long time ago. This is a pretty stinking goddamn world when you consider our end of the business, but if somebody wants to pay to bump me, then he’d better have one piss-pot of money to put on the line.”

  She was slowly shaking her head. “You’re getting jaded, Mike.”

  “No. Just a seasoned professional, sugar.”

  “You don’t fool me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She grinned at me. “You don’t give much of a damn, huh? You aren’t going to find out who hired this? You’re not going to settle the score? What great man was it that said, ‘Balls?’” She shook her head some more and the sleek black locks danced. “You and that damn .45 of yours.”

  “Pat said something like that, too.”

  “When are you going to grow up,” she asked, just a little cross, “and stop playing cops and robbers?”

  “I thought it was cowboys and Indians.”

  “Either way, what will you be when you finally grow up?”

  “The master. And you can be the mistress.”


  “I’m that already.”

  “Then why do you blush when I see those legs of yours climbing all the way to heaven?”

  Her chin came up. “Because ‘mistress’ is a thankless role. Because a marriage license isn’t expensive.”

  “Why buy a cow when milk’s so cheap?”

  “Sweet talker. If you knew what I was saving for you, for the really big night? You wouldn’t be so damn vulgar.”

  “Tell me. Maybe I’ll spring for that license.”

  She rose from the chair and came up into my arms, that big, lovely woman with the startling pageboy hair that shimmered in crazy black-chestnut colors, and let me feel all of her against me and then she whispered in my ear what she had in mind for me, some day.

  Some night.

  I cocked my head back. “Now who’s being vulgar?”

  “I am,” she said. “But it takes real bait to land a big fish.”

  Then she did that thing with her mouth when she kissed me, like she was slowly, sensuously trying to twist my lips off my puss, that left me feeling turned inside out.

  “Let’s go in my office,” I said.

  “Dictation?”

  “Something like that.”

  “This time I’ll lock that door.…”

  * * *

  Marion Coulter Smith was an ex-arson squad cop who would likely belt you in the mouth if you called him by his first name.

  Fifteen years ago he retired and teamed up with Jules Torrence, a lawyer with a C.P.A. certificate, and formed an investigative firm specializing in industrial accounts with offices in one of the high-end steel-and-glass mausoleums on Sixth Avenue in the heart of the computer district.

  It had taken age and business demands to tie Smitty to a desk, and pour him into a three-hundred-dollar suit; but any excuse was good enough to get him in a bull session about the old days or fire up his eyes when the topic got around to crime.

  The balding bulldog kept popping open cans of beer from a little fridge in the corner and passing them across his desk to keep me placated if not plastered while I detailed the shoot-out in my office, and the squirming dance the politicians wound up doing, to keep me cooled down enough not to throw any heat back at them.