Kill Me, Darling Read online

  Not with me it couldn’t.

  I had plenty of time and money enough.

  When the rain let up, I was standing there staring at the streaky smear of rusty sand when the squad car eased up to the curb, catching a strobe of lightning as it did, and the old harness bull beside a punk-ass driver called over: “Hey, Mac—you okay there?”

  After a second or two I looked at the car.

  The bull yelled, “Didn’t you hear me, bud?”

  “I heard you,” I told him.

  “This is a rough area. You need to move along. Find someplace else to be.”

  I ignored him. The older cop said some words to the kid driving.

  For ten seconds there was nothing but a grumbling sky, then the door of the police car snicked open and the driver got out. He was one of that new breed. All done up in a new unwrinkled uniform and wearing one of those cool expressions that the young ones try so hard to adopt. Too much Marlon Brando and James Dean. He came right up close, real sure of himself, big and tough and young.

  But too young.

  Aging drunks hate anybody sober and young.

  The rookie cop said, too nasty, “Listen, buster, you heard the man. You need to move along or get rousted into the drunk tank.”

  He seemed to be hoping I’d get wise with him. His hands were all ready for it, fingers curled and ready to become fists. Maybe he wanted to show off for the older cop.

  Evenly I said, “I’m not bothering anybody, kid. I’m just standing here on a sidewalk my taxes helped pay for.”

  No slurring. Maybe a little over-enunciated in that way drunks do trying to play down their condition.

  The rookie’s upper lip curled. “So… you’re a smart guy.”

  There hadn’t been anything at all wise-ass in my tone.

  But I bristled and said, “Yeah, rookie, smart as hell. So goddamn smart I’ll knock you on your skinny tail if you don’t back off before nothing turns to something.”

  “Sarge,” he called back to the bull he’d been chauffeuring. “This guy smells like a brewery… we better take him in.”

  But now he was sounding like maybe he needed some help doing that.

  “You’re so damn green,” I said. And I leaned in and grinned at him. Breathed on him. “That’s not brewery, pup. That’s distillery.”

  Nostrils flared. “Last warning. Move along.”

  My grin turned sneery. “Get back in the car and buzz off, you little jerk. I’m busy here.”

  There wasn’t much color left in his face. He was blister white and his face got pinched-looking, the cords in his neck standing out. Whatever he figured rousting a drunk would be like, this wasn’t it—they taught him to do things by the book, but the problem was the book didn’t quite cover me.

  The older cop spoke out the rider’s window of the cherry-topped vehicle.

  “George…” the older cop began.

  “I can handle this, Sarge.” Hand on his billy now.

  I said, “You think I won’t splash you, ’cause you’re a cop? You better learn to read a guy’s mood better, sonny. You got one more chance. Blow while you can. Get out of here while this is still a funny story about this big-mouth asshole you ran into on duty who thought he was tough, but you just couldn’t be bothered… understand?”

  The young cop’s left eye was twitching.

  The older cop, a beefy one, was getting out of the car, saying, “Now, George…”

  I said to the kid, “You figure me for a hood, then take me in. But if you think you’re dealing with some rummy, guess again. Just put a hand on me and see what happens, laddie. You know?”

  The young one was all set to throw one at me when the bull was at his side, touching his arm, saying softly, “Ask him for his ID, George. Do it the right way.”

  The rookie took a breath and the older cop’s presence seemed to remind him that he too was a cop and that this kind of stuff needed to stay impersonal and official. The kid let the mad seep out of his face and held out his hand.

  “Sir, your ID please?”

  I grinned. “Sure. Glad to oblige.”

  I fingered out the small wallet and flipped it open. The driver’s license was on one side and the P.I. ticket on the other. His eyes pinched near shut when he spotted the name. Those eyes got even tighter when he slipped out the folded ticket that said I could pack a gun.

  “Are you carrying right now, sir?” he asked.

  I nodded and opened the trenchcoat—the suit coat underneath was already open, the butt of the iron apparent under my left arm, showing the rookie just what he’d been messing with because he hadn’t learned yet how to read a situation.

  Or maybe how to read a mean-ass drunk.

  The older cop took the wallet and he didn’t register anything much. Just enough for me to pick up on.

  He looked at me and amusement played on his lips. “You’re somebody on our list, Mr. Hammer.”

  “The one that starts with ‘S’?”

  “No. The one that starts with ‘C,’ son. Captain Chambers wants to see you.”

  “That right? I’ll be sure to drop by headquarters tomorrow and see how he’s doing.”

  A big hard hand gripped my shoulder, the bull’s smile not threatening but the fingers meaning business. Just how Wade Manley would have handled it, I thought.

  “No, that won’t do, Mr. Hammer. The captain said bring you around to his apartment. No matter what time.”

  “Oh. Well, okay then. I’ll drive over there now. Thanks for your trouble, officers.”

  The older cop’s smile was wide and toothy, but his eyes weren’t smiling at all. “Mr. Hammer, you’re damn near drunk on your ass. Why don’t you let us drive you over there? So we don’t have to arrest you for driving under the influence. Unless you have your heart set on a night in the drunk tank, and would maybe like to earn yourself a hefty fine.”

  “Since you asked polite,” I said.

  As the bull escorted me to the back seat, I glanced over at the rookie and said, “See, kid? That’s how it’s done.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pat said, “How do you feel, Mike?”

  I opened my eyes a little bit. It wasn’t any harder than lifting a couple of concrete blocks.

  “Nuts,” I said.

  His hand went up and nudged the shade of the standing lamp so the light wasn’t in my face any more. He was sitting opposite me in a comfy chair, a drink in his fist, a tall glass coated with frost, and he raised it to his lips. There was an icy glass just like it on the end table beside me too, but I didn’t want any. Against my head maybe, but not in my stomach.

  This was the living room of Pat’s apartment, a place I’d been many times but not lately. Nothing fancy—the kind of bachelor pad an upper-tier civil servant could afford. A window air conditioner was chugging. Esquire wouldn’t be doing a photo-spread soon.

  I was sitting toward the end of his nubby-upholstered couch. I didn’t remember how I got here. Maybe a vague sense of those two uniformed cops, old and young, squeezed in on either side of me hauling me up two flights with the toes of my shoes thumping at every step.

  “Whatever happened to that fabled Mike Hammer luck?” Pat asked.

  He was in a sport shirt and chinos, looking more like a guy who wandered in from a backyard barbecue than a Captain of Homicide. A big young guy with all the talent in the world and trained to needle-point perfection in every trick and gimmick the department could think of. Brainy. Shrewd. He knew every angle there was and could figure out a few of his own.

  “I ran out of luck a long time ago,” I told him. My words hurt my throat trying to climb out.

  “You did that all right.”

  He drank the drink half-way down, stared at the glass a moment, then set it on the coaster on the arm of the chair. He reached out and fiddled with the radio and stopped at Gerry Mulligan doing an easy “Stardust” and let it drift through the room.

  I kept waiting for it but it didn’t come. Any second now, I
thought, and the lecture would begin. Cop talking to old friend. Cop with feet on the ground talking to guy with head in the gutter. First I’d get the serious look, or maybe the disgusted look, then the yak-yak. This time the floor would be all his. Before, I had an answer for things, but not any more. When your life is one bottle after another, one slopshop after another, you don’t have an answer for anything.

  So I waited and nothing happened. Pat sat there stretched out, his head back against the chair, dreaming with the music. I forced a grin across my mouth but he didn’t see it. The grin faded back to where it came from. Once he opened his eyes, seemed to look past me a second, then closed them again.

  Damn it, what was he waiting for! If he was expecting me to groove out on modern jazz he should have known better! I was strictly a classical guy.

  Oh, it took a while, but I got it. Pat wasn’t waiting for anything. I could sit there or get up and go if I felt like it. Pat just didn’t give a damn any more either.

  The hollow place inside me got bigger. A guy always figures he’s got one friend left no matter what happens. Everybody else could go jump, but he’s always got that one friend. That’s what I thought. Now it was different and it wasn’t much fun coming back from the dead after all.

  I stared at him and, almost as if he read my mind, his eyes came open. “Say it, Pat.”

  His hand went out for the glass. “How long has it been since I saw you, old buddy?”

  “Four months maybe.”

  “Where you been keeping yourself?”

  “Who knows? Here, there, everywhere.”

  “More like down, down, down. Going lower all the time.”

  I shrugged. “So what skin is it off your ass, Pat?”

  The gray-blue eyes narrowed. He was just pretending not to give a damn. “Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?”

  “I got better things to do.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Who cares how I look? I know how I feel. Maybe I look the same as ever.”

  “Not hardly.” The glass went up and he finished it off. He looked at it as though he was sorry to see it go before setting it down again.

  “You’re a lot of things, Mike,” he said.

  “I’m a versatile bastard.”

  “And you’ve been a lot of things. But this is the first time I ever made you for a sucker.”

  I could feel the red starting to creep up my neck. My hands were two balls that wanted to bust him in the teeth. “Shut up, Pat.”

  “Or what? You’ll shut me up?” He didn’t scare a bit. “Four months ago you could take me, kid. Right now I can say anything I feel like to you and the first time you get tough, I’ll turn you inside out and sideways.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Not even a little. His face wasn’t smiling and he looked all nice and loose, the way a guy should be when trouble is in front of him. He wasn’t all knotted up like me and his belly was flat under his belt, where I’d gone flabby. The eyes were clear and dangerous, but would stay friendly if I wanted it that way.

  The mad that was inside me drained out and I leaned back on the couch. “Okay, so I’m a sucker. So I’m getting soft.”

  “In the head, too.”

  “Why don’t you lay off me.”

  “We used to be pretty good friends, Mike.”

  “Then lay off me.”

  He sat forward, the eyes tensed but not angry. “Not me, pal, I’m not laying off you. Maybe everybody else can keep out of your way, but not me.”

  Now I felt better. As long as there’s one friend left, a guy always feels better.

  “What was the idea,” he said, “of giving those cops a hard time?”

  “The young one gave me a pain.”

  “He’d have given you a pain, all right. You really think in your condition you could take a young buck like that?”

  “On my worst day.”

  “Maybe on your best. If Sergeant Clancy hadn’t been there to stop it, you’d be in Bellevue right now. Or in stir, if you’d got to that .45 of yours.”

  I said nothing.

  “And what the hell’s the idea of going around in this alcoholic haze with that rod, hammer-back, one-in-the-chamber? You really think shooting your own balls off is a good play?”

  I patted my left side. The gun was gone. He nodded over to a table where it lay like a decorative touch.

  “You can have it back when you go,” he said.

  I started to get up but my legs went wobbly.

  Pat held up a hand. The gesture was gentle, not forceful. “Just sit back. We’re going to talk.”

  I sat back, but I didn’t talk.

  “You been on a four-month bender, Mike. That’s your privilege. I think you’re on a collision course with getting dead—some barroom fight you lose all the way, or maybe your liver gives up the ghost. But that’s your business.”

  “Damn well told.”

  “I been keeping track of you, pal. Oh, not messing in your business. Just put the word out to the boys on the street to let me know what’s going on with you. They call them ‘Hammer spottings.’”

  “Cute.”

  “But a few days ago you dropped off the radar. Where you been, Mike?”

  “Rio. I do out of town jobs sometimes.”

  “You don’t do any jobs, not lately. You see, I expected you to turn up.”

  “That right?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. I expected to see you at the Big Man’s funeral, but you didn’t show. Maybe your good suit was in the cleaners.”

  I said nothing.

  “I figured when Manley bought it, you might pull out of your stupor. Get some ideas about doing something about it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Here’s how I figure it, Mike. You were so far down your drunken rabbit hole, you didn’t even know the Big Man was dead. Then somebody mentioned it to you, maybe in passing, and you crawled out and confirmed it and that’s why you were down near the riverfront studying a certain patch of sidewalk tonight.”

  I said nothing.

  “Something stirred in the back of that scrambled skull of yours, buddy. Some old juices got flowing. Even half in the bag you could look at the circumstances of the killing of Captain Wade Manley and know that the conventional thinking on the subject was horseshit. That was no mugging. He was down there for a reason. Somebody conned him down there and killed him. Am I on the mark?”

  I said nothing.

  The eyes tensed again and the friendliness was gone. “Well, you’re not Mike Hammer anymore, get it? You’re just a screwed-up drunk walking around inside his skin. You are no more ready or qualified to go on a kill hunt than the next Bowery bum.”

  “Somebody murdered him, Pat.”

  “I already said that. Pay attention. If you can. You need to go crawl back into the gutter, Mike, or check in for the cure someplace. You want the latter, I’ll help. I’ll be your best friend again. But if you go out in this… this feeble condition, looking for Manley’s killer? I’ll take you off the streets myself. For your own damn good.”

  He was breathing hard now.

  “You through, buddy?” I asked.

  He said nothing.

  “So then who’s going to get the bastard who did it, Pat?”

  He swallowed. “I am.”

  “The by-the-book way? Or the other one?”

  He said nothing.

  “You know what ‘other one’ I mean,” I said, and showed him the nasty grin. “The Mike Hammer way. The bullet in the guts and put a gun in the dead man’s hand to make it self-defense way? Come on, Pat. Spill.”

  Again he swallowed. “I don’t really know, Mike. I just know Wade Manley’s murder needs a full investigation. Writing it off as a mugging gone wrong doesn’t cut it.”

  I kept the nasty grin going. “No. No, I don’t think that’s it. You loved that old bastard. Like I did. You want the killer yourself. Maybe… maybe if I was in better shape, you could stand back and let me handle it. Ho
w would the shrinks put it? I’m the id and you’re the ego or the superego or some crap? Hell, maybe I’m the super-id.”

  Very quietly he said, “I’m asking you as a friend, Mike. I’ll give you whatever help you need right now to get yourself back on your feet. But leave this one to me. Please.”

  Damnit, he was right. I was in no shape to take one on. And maybe he could handle this one. By himself, backed up by the expertise and resources of the NYPD.

  “Could you do it, Pat?”

  “What?”

  “Back a guy up against a wall and pump four into his guts and watch him die?”

  “…I think I could.”

  “But could you live with it? Would you be killing Pat Chambers as much as the bastard who killed Manley?”

  He said nothing.

  “Better think it over, kiddo. Better think it through. Being Mike Hammer has its benefits.” I gestured to myself. “But it has its costs, too.”

  Mulligan was playing “My Funny Valentine” now.

  “Ever hear from Velda?” he asked.

  It was a low blow and a sucker punch and I grabbed either side of the couch cushion beneath me and squeezed. Slowly. I didn’t want him to see what was happening to me. I kicked the things in my mind back into the niches where I had stored them and clamped my teeth down hard to keep them there.

  “Pat,” I managed, “you can be a real sweetheart when you want to. Why don’t you shut the hell up.”

  He laughed, a nasty hard laugh that was like a slap across the jaw. “Why is that such a sore subject, pal? It’s just another dame, right? How many have you run through in your time, Mike? Some you use and throw away.”

  “I said shut up, Pat.”

  “Some you really go for, really fall head over heels for—how many of those have they had to bury because of you?”

  “Pat…”

  “You’re a real he-man with the women. Even when one dies because of you, you come out of it twice as tough and nastier than ever and the babes think it’s great. Hell, they love it. Love the big hero of the headlines.”

  “Enough, man.”