Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Read online

  I stared into nothing in particular. “Like I said, it was the case that made Pat, so it’s an embarrassment that it’s being re-examined after all this time. Funny thing is, it was just dumb luck. We were sitting in a diner after Pat finished walking his beat, still in his uniform, having coffee… of course, not as good as this, doll.”

  “Skip the soft soap. What happened?”

  “The most wanted suspect in town wandered in. Pat made him from an APB description that had gone around to all the precincts, went over for a friendly chat and the guy saw all that blue coming his way and made a break for it.”

  “And you didn’t just shoot him?”

  “No, Pat tackled him out on the sidewalk. My role was strictly to find a call box to phone it in.”

  “Pat couldn’t radio it in?”

  “Vel, this was forty years ago. Street cops weren’t wired into personal radio communications. Anyway, I made the call and in two minutes a squad car came on the scene and transported the suspect. Pat went with them. I stayed out of it until I was requested to give a statement later.”

  She cocked her head and one wing of raven hair hung prettily. “What was Olaf wanted for?”

  “Multiple murders. Today we’d call him a serial killer. He had knocked off nine guys who had staggered out of saloons, luring them into oddball places, shot and robbed them, all in a two-month period.”

  “Shot them dead?”

  “As hell, kid.”

  Velda didn’t need that new computer—she had a mind that contained computer-like information. I watched her eyes narrow while her sensors searched for answers she had stored away. When the expression on her face unlocked I knew she had finally found it.

  “They called it the Bowery Bum slayings,” she said.

  I nodded. “Today it would be the Homeless Homicides, but a rose by any other.”

  She was frowning as the vague outlines of a very old, notorious case took shape in her mind. “He killed his victims. How did they ever get a description for an APB?”

  “On the last kill, a kid saw Olaf coming up from the front basement stairs where he’d left his latest victim. Kid recognized Olaf as a guy from a tenement two blocks over.”

  She squinted at me, trying to pull all this into focus. “What made a random character coming up some basement steps suspicious?”

  “The kid heard the gunshot. Oh, he didn’t know that’s what it was at first—it was just a sound, a very muted pop.”

  A slow nod from her. “So the gun was silenced.”

  “Yeah. But it was loud enough for the kid to wait till the guy was out of sight and then go down to check things out…”

  “And find a fresh body.”

  “Very damn fresh. The kid walked over to the precinct house and told the story to the desk sergeant. A team hit the suspect’s flop, but he wasn’t there. A warrant was issued, the cops forced an entry, and inside, neatly arranged on a shelf, were four wallets, each one belonging to one of the dead victims. There was no evidence of a gun or a silencer, no money either, but that was enough for an APB.”

  She paused to search her memory some more, then said, “And it didn’t hit the papers till later, right?”

  “Right. Good recall, kitten. Yeah, in those days reporters had some goddamn sense—not that any information was offered to the press. Two days later, Rudy Olaf walks right into Pat’s arms with me as a witness to a quick and careful arrest procedure.”

  The frown creased Velda’s forehead again. “Olaf didn’t get a death sentence, did he? Despite so many murders. It was life, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” I told her. “General feeling was, had the cops located the gun, Olaf would have gotten the hot squat at that big emporium on the Hudson.”

  She smirked cutely at me. “Mike, you have got to stop talking like that. People are starting to look at you funny.”

  “Okay, excuse the archaic terminology. Sing Sing.”

  “No chair there now.”

  “No. They go the lethal injection route. Progress.”

  Velda got up, paced thoughtfully a little, then went over to her desk and hiked herself up on the edge of it, her dress inching up her thighs. She knew I was looking and tugged it back in place.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” she said with a soft laugh. “You’re wounded, remember.”

  “Wounded, not dead,” I said quietly.

  “Such a famous case, and a serial killer…” She shook her head, the dark hair shimmering. “I’m surprised the media hasn’t made something out of it being re-opened.”

  “You know how it is, kitten. Anything not emanating from Washington or a plane blowing apart from a terrorist attack or one of our embassies overseas being hit with a car bomb is hardly news.”

  I leaned back in my chair and ran my hand over my chest. The bruise mark had spread farther than my stretched palm. Now the black and blue discoloration had streaks of red and purple beginning to show and the ache seemed to come from the ribs, rather than the flesh.

  “Hurt, lover?” she asked.

  “Stupid question.”

  “So get back to old Olaf. After forty years, even a mass murderer with a clean nose might have a shot at parole.”

  “But Olaf doesn’t want parole. He was eligible twenty years ago. But he’s never copped.”

  “Never confessed?”

  “Nope. Haven’t you heard? He’s innocent—like everybody else in the slammer.”

  I didn’t have to remind her that in the last few years DNA test results had gotten a lot of wrongly convicted prisoners an overdue walk into the fresh air. The stink from a review of some cases has really made some notables squirm, so when Olaf’s came up, it was one of those “Man, let’s get him out of our face” jobs.

  “But so what, Mike? They had a witness…”

  “One witness—a kid with a juvie record. About two years later, he gets set up on a robbery beef and shoots his mouth off to another inmate about getting Rudy Olaf nailed for the sheer hell of it. Or almost the sheer hell—Olaf had cussed him out on the street one time.”

  She gave me a doubtful half-smile. “That doesn’t even make sense. Why go to that trouble over somebody just cursing you out? After what the kid claimed got reported, he got talked to hard, right? To see if his story held?”

  I shook my head. “No. The story got reported, but it was strictly hearsay. That young witness against Rudy Olaf died in prison. Shiv in the shower. Same old sweet song.”

  Her eyebrows shrugged. “Well, some second-hand rumor attributed to a dead con isn’t enough to get anybody a new trial.”

  “It didn’t stop Olaf’s lawyers from trying. And that second-hand statement went on the record book all those years ago… and is still there.”

  This time her frown was deep enough to risk wrinkles. “Mike… something had to have happened recently to get the case looked at again.”

  “It has. Somebody out of the past stepped up and confessed.”

  “After all these years?” Her voice was tinged with amazement.

  “Henry Brogan, an old crony of Olaf’s who lived down the street came in out of the blue and copped. Said he’d needed the money for medical bills—seems he had a very sick kid. So Brogan started pulling these small robberies and killing his victims to stop eyewitness identification. Then that kid ID’d Olaf, and Brogan seized the opportunity—he beat the cops to Olaf’s pad and planted the wallets where they’d be easily found.”

  “How did he get into Olaf’s apartment?”

  “Brogan knew where Olaf hid his key. I told you they were cronies. Olaf had nothing worth stealing up there. He only kept the door locked to keep somebody from getting to his wine bottle.”

  “Prints on the wallets?”

  “Brogan was smart enough to wipe his off by smudging them.”

  Still frowning, she asked, “But couldn’t the lab boys find anything…?”

  “Some things slip by the board, kitten.”

  “That slip took forty
years out of Olaf’s life.”

  I gave her a nasty grin. “If Brogan is telling the truth.”

  Her frown vanished. “You doubt him?”

  “Why, Velda? Do you like Brogan’s story? A sick kid—T.B., I think it was—and he decides to pay the medics by pulling a string of petty robberies in the damn Bowery? If you’re going to rob and kill, doll, it’s only a bus or subway ride to Park Avenue.”

  “So you don’t buy Olaf’s innocence?”

  I sneered at her. “In a pig’s ass I buy it. I feel sorry for Pat having this get stirred up, toward the end of a fine career.”

  That got a sympathetic series of nods from her. “So what happens now?”

  “Waste no tears on Rudy Olaf—he has himself a very high-priced criminal lawyer… Rufus Tomlin.”

  Her eyes widened for a moment. “Big media ties there!”

  “Big mob ties, too.”

  She just stared at me for a few seconds. “Man of mine, you just got shot. Witnessing an arrest forty years ago doesn’t buy you that kind of attention.”

  “Not unless there’s an angle I’m missing.”

  “Then who shot you, old soldier?”

  When my only answer was an eyebrow shrug, she slid off the desk, got behind it, pulled a bottom drawer out, and withdrew a package. Then she looked over at me and smiled a tilted smile and came over and handed the unwrapped box to me. I could hardly move my left arm, so took it with my right.

  It was heavy, much heavier than your average gift in a box of medium size, covered in silver-and-white paper, and when she saw me weighing it in my hand, she said, “That was going to be a wedding present, my darling… but I think you might need it more now.”

  She didn’t help me. She let me peel the wrappings off in a clumsy way with my fingertips, slice the taped edges with a thumbnail, then gently lift the lid off to see a beautiful Colt .45 automatic, its blued metal totally non-reflecting as it should be, a little lethal device that came alive solely at the discretion of its handler. It had that faint smell of gun oil, an instrument almost an anachronism among modern-day weapons, but a frightening and frighteningly effective piece of machinery when its mouth was pointed at you.

  “You trying to tell me something, kid?”

  She smiled with pursed-kiss lips, then nodded. “I don’t want you dead, lover boy. You are in a dangerous business and if any more high-end hitters get paid to burn you, I want you to have a reasonable amount of protection.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my old piece.”

  “Yeah? Then why don’t you wear it any more?”

  “It’s just such a big hunk of heavy metal.”

  “Heavy metal is music, Mike.”

  I hefted the new gun in my palm. “Music to my ears when I’m firing the damn thing, but—”

  “Wear that on your right side for a change.” She was not about to let me off the hook.

  I said, “I’ll take it under advisement… Give me your hand. Left one.”

  She gave me a puzzled look, but then slipped off the desk, showing off those classic gams again, then wandered over. She held her hand out to me like a princess doing a loyal subject a great honor. I took her fingertips gently.

  “I’ve got a gift for you too, baby,” I said, “but now’s not the time. I’ll just say it’s a band of gold with some diamonds and it matches up perfect with this two-karat number. I’m not about to die before I can give it to you.”

  When she sat in my lap and kissed me, it didn’t hurt at all, and I could feel the hunger in her and I wondered how I had let all those years go by before finally making this permanent, and the two of us legal.

  She whispered in my ear: “Somebody has a contract out on you, my dear.”

  Not exactly sweet nothings.

  “I know,” I said.

  “This is no local shooter, either.”

  “Yeah, and I walked straight into it. Dumb.”

  She slipped off my lap and sat beside me. “Mike… he would have expected you to be carrying. You have a Wyatt Earp reputation and no pro is going to overlook that. He could expect you to be one heavy target to put down, so he was ready for anything.”

  “The guy did his homework, sweetie. He would have known I was still recovering from being shot.”

  “Come on, you can still move. Your rep saved you, Mike—he didn’t stick around to confirm the kill, because if you weren’t dead, he would be.”

  “Once upon a time, maybe.”

  “No maybe about it. But stop skating on your rep, Mike. You have a conceal-and-carry permit. Use it.”

  I got up and started buttoning the shirt. “What gets me is why. What good would I be dead?”

  Velda retrieved my tie and slipped it over my head, tucking it under my collar. “Eighty-nine billion bucks is a good why, Mr. Hammer.”

  “Eighty-nine billion dollars is a good reason not to kill me, doll.”

  “Not if somebody else knows where that hoard is stashed, too, my love.”

  I nodded. In that case, eighty-nine billion dollars made one hell of a good why. Nations would go to war for that kind of loot, so eliminating one person should be a simple enough matter.

  But who besides Velda and me could know that a certain retirement age P.I. had a stash that size tucked away in a mountainside?

  CHAPTER TWO

  The $89 billion began for me with an old army buddy, Marcus Dooley. Toward the end of the war, he got Pat Chambers and me into the intelligence end of the military, steering us into police work. Pat and I had gone into the blue uniforms of the NYPD, though I quickly went private when playing by the rules became a problem.

  Dooley never made it onto the force. He never bothered trying, not when he’d been mustered out on a Section Eight. He’d gone Asiatic, as we called it in the Pacific, after months of backing Pat and me up during those deadly choruses of singing bullets and blazing shrapnel. Going crazy in the insanity of combat only made sense, but tell that to the peacetime hiring corps. In the years right after the war, Dooley was nothing better than a bum, boozing, womanizing, doing odd jobs to stay afloat, and there had been nothing Pat and I could do to guide him onto a better path.

  Finally Dooley fell in with a dipso dame and when a bender almost killed her, the couple staggered into a hospital and took the cure. They straightened each other out for a while, and he was running a fairly successful landscaping business in Brooklyn as recently as twenty years ago. He had a kid, too, named Marvin—well, no kid by now, probably in his forties, anyway—but the wife had died somewhere back in the fuzzy past, that liver she’d ravaged finally catching up with her. Or maybe she fell off the wagon. I don’t know.

  The truth is, we had lost touch. Pat delivered rumors about Dooley on occasion—the existence of the son, the passing of the wife, the business that fell apart—and the next time I heard about Marcus Dooley, he had been shot in the guts by an intruder in his house in Brooklyn. Pat had told me that, too, but it was no rumor…

  We were both wounded warriors, Dooley and me. I’d just spent three months in Florida trying to get over Azi Ponti’s .357 kisses in my side. I should have been dead, but it had been cold enough that night, six below, for surface blood to coagulate into cloth and skin, clotting into a kind of makeshift bandage. A washed-up drunk of a doc who happened on the scene decided to make me an experiment in redemption. He dragged me across the rough red-streaked pavement while men screaming made discordant harmony with approaching sirens.

  I had not fully recuperated when Pat called me to tell me our old pal Dooley had been murdered. Well, not quite murdered yet—he was in the hospital, holding death back till he could talk to me…

  And death was hovering in that hospital all right, waiting its turn with the husk of a once-husky man whose breathing was shallow and whose woozy gaze said narcotics were giving him a brief trip to Happyland before the lights went out all the way.

  He’d already told Pat that he hadn’t got a good enough look at the shooter to recognize h
im—just a dark shape in a doorway, an unlocked door shoved open onto Dooley sitting at a little desk, doing his monthly bills, fifteen feet away. Three slugs from a .357—one more than the late unlamented Azi Ponti had given me. But one more was enough to make me a survivor, and Dooley a casualty.

  He didn’t want to talk about getting shot at all. If I’d thought he’d called Mike Hammer to his bedside to avenge his ass, I’d got it wrong.

  Dooley had a story to tell me. A story he felt he just had to share before cashing out…

  And nobody ever cashed out richer than Marcus Dooley.

  * * *

  Like Congress, mob kingpins don’t have term limits—they rule as long as they can last.

  So the turnover at the top isn’t frequent, unless a killing war starts. Don Angelo lived to be ninety-something, and that kind of longevity was bad news for the latest generation of the five New York families. Many of them had seen their own fathers confined to minor roles, and the thought of never rising to the top while these retirement-home candidates maintained power was a bitter damn pill the Young Turks were not content to swallow.

  They demanded more control, more power. They were a college-educated generation, with technological skills, a computer-savvy crowd that had done much for the Mafia cause by moving into legitimate big business. The days of booze and whores were ancient history; the new mob was high-tech crime and Wall Street finance, with unions and entertainment industry remaining from the old days but contemporized into legality. Yes, drug trafficking continued, but on so large a scale that kilos of H were tonnages now, operations insulated with Russian and Colombian confederates that assured nothing bad could come home to roost.

  The dons were grateful to the young pups, paid them well, patted them on the head and back, heard their complaints and suggestions with silent understanding… but ceded no power. The new generation accepted this, perhaps too graciously. So much so that suspicions grew…

  The heads of the five families checked the records, computer and otherwise, using top-end independent accountants, who delivered the bad news: the younger generation… the youngest generation… was using their combined computer skills to screw their elders, siphoning off income in a cutting-edge variation on the old two-sets-of-books philosophy.