Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Read online

  This one I heard coming.

  He was moving quickly but quietly, and he was all in black, black sweatshirt and black jeans and black tennies, blending nicely in the darkness and staying low. The two men in the treasure chamber did not notice his approach, but I did. I moved quickly toward him and when he sensed me, he swung the .357 magnum my way and I held up my hand in stop fashion.

  Marvin Dooley had never resembled his father particularly, other than his general build, but I would swear at that moment I saw my old buddy in the clenched features of his son. I had figured Marvin would follow us here, just as I knew Hellman would, thanks to the descriptions of them Rita Callaghan had shared with me.

  I whispered, “I’m unarmed. Can you take them?”

  He nodded. Moving low like a commando, like the soldier his father had been, utilizing the military training his own navy service had provided him, Marvin crept quickly, soundlessly, toward the portal torn in that wall of rocks.

  I followed him, but kept a decent distance, and I did not go with him when he bolted up the mini-slope threshold of the treasure chamber and stopped there to say, “Put the guns down, gentlemen! Slow and easy and down. Don’t turn around! Just do it.”

  Still paused at that first carton, Hellman and Buckley glanced over their shoulders stricken, then bent at the knees and deposited their weapons on the hard earthen floor.

  “Now you can turn around,” Marvin said. “Slowly.”

  The two respectable-looking men in the expensive suits turned and faced Marvin, disappointment and surprise commingled in their expressions, and rage was in there, too. The blood mask of Hellman’s face had a streakier look now, but the whites of his eyes still made them pop crazily.

  From the darkness I called out: “Allow me to introduce Marvin Dooley! He’s the son of the man who stored this money away.”

  Buckley said, “Hammer told me about you. You have a right to a share of this. We can talk.”

  Hellman was nodding.

  Marvin stood on the hillock of stones at the entry, like he was about to plant the flag at Iwo Jima. “I have a right to all of it!”

  His voice echoed in both halls, filled with indignation and frustration and so much more.

  I called out again: “There’s a case to be made for Marvin taking the whole magilla, fellas! After all, he killed his own father for it.”

  Marvin sort of hung there in midair for a moment. Then he looked over his shoulder at me and just smiled. No denials. But it was an awful goddamn smile. I almost couldn’t hear him say quietly: “Took you long enough to figure it, didn’t it, Hammer?”

  Too long. Ugo Ponti had blustered to me that he had killed Marcus, but that had just been to twist the knife. I’d have known the truth from the start, if I hadn’t been half-crazed by pain and sedatives last year, after almost dying on the waterfront.

  There had been no sign of forced entry. The killer had unlocked the door with a key given to him by Marcus, or perhaps he just knew where Marcus kept it—under a mat or a flowerpot, maybe. Or was that door just unlocked because his son was dropping by? And the killer had stood in the doorway and fired his .357 as the seated Marcus had turned toward him. That was as close as the killer could bear to stand to Marcus Dooley.

  They were father and son, after all. Which was why Dooley hadn’t fingered his killer to Pat or me, blaming a shadowy figure in the doorway. And why he’d wanted me to take that urn of his ashes to his son. The urn with a clue to the whereabouts of the treasure. Even in death, the father had wanted to make it up to the son.

  The billions were rightly his.

  In a way.

  “He promised you a windfall, didn’t he, Marvin?” I called out. “But you waited and waited, year after year, and it never came. You didn’t realize your old man had to wait out Don Ponti—nobody thought that old boy would survive deep into his eighties. You got understandably impatient. You figured your pop would have to die if you were ever to inherit whatever-it-was, and finally you struck preemptively. But then the shit hit the fan—I came around, Ugo Ponti and other hoods came calling, and the shooting started, and you backed away, forced into a waiting game again. Well, Marvin—the time has come. It’s here. There’s your windfall. All eighty-nine billion of it.”

  That froze him at the gateway to that fortune, but his eyes were still focused on the darkness from which my voice emanated. Then he turned his gaze on the treasure chamber, walking carefully down the piled stones into the big carton-filled cavern where he approached the two men already in there, skirting piles of rodent pellets to do it.

  Hellman and Buckley spoke quietly with Marvin, all of them glancing my way, into the darkness. A new partnership was being formed. This became particularly apparent when Marvin allowed them to pick up their guns, and they stood together quietly discussing how exactly they would manage my removal. It was as if the blackness of the first cavern had become home to some bloodthirsty beast that required a hunting party to seek it out and slay it.

  They weren’t wrong.

  Then she was at my side in the darkness, pressing my spare .45 into my right fist. She had a .38 in hers, crouching there in her olive commando jumpsuit, smiling at me, though I sensed that more than saw it.

  I whispered, “Beautiful timing, kitten.”

  “Marvin led me here like you said he would,” Velda whispered back.

  “Go right. I’m heading straight in.”

  Then I was running, and my first thunderous shot caught Marvin in the left shoulder, thrusting him back into the nearest carton. The other two yelped with fright and surprise and ran with their handguns deeper into the chamber, cutting down a corridor between stacked cartons, throwing shots at me around the corner, gunfire echoing and booming above us as if promising a quenching rain that would never come.

  They didn’t concern me. I stayed low, knowing I didn’t need to see them to take them out, just like I knew I didn’t need to hit Marvin when he took cover behind a high pile of black pellets. I could shoot damn near anywhere and take all of them out, though whether it was my rain of .45s or Velda’s shower of .38s that started the fire, I couldn’t say.

  But suddenly that first carton was wearing flames like a festive hat, leaping orange and blue, and sparks were spitting, and when the hill of guano he was hiding behind exploded, Marvin stood screaming, his whole body ablaze. He ran and danced and shook his arms and tumbled and tripped and landed in another pile of guano that exploded in a smoke puff like a genie might appear and ended his dance in a cracking, crackling percussive display. The other two came running out from the corridor between piled burning cartons, and they were on fire, too, screaming and shooting randomly, their shots coming nowhere near us.

  I didn’t waste any ammunition on them. They could die on their own steam in with the billions they coveted, cash and deeds and stocks and bonds that were going up in flames that spread row to row, swaying like the upraised arms of exotic dancing girls, sending billowing smoke upward to seek the exit the bats had used, foul-smelling smoke as dirty as the money that made it. One of the screaming flaming men fell and twitched and stopped screaming and died. Impossible to tell which. Not that I gave a damn. The other shot himself in the head and cut off his scream and went down on a scattering of droppings that popped like corn all around him.

  The heat was incredible, the entire chamber an enormous furnace, the corpses on the floor flickering with orange and blue flames but already charred black, hints of green in those cartons turning dark and crispy, until one huge tongue of flame seemed to travel with a roar racing down the endless row of piled cartons, turning cavernous darkness into a hellish glowing thing whose teeth gnashed and ate and ripped and consumed.

  The heat and light sent a pulsing glow through our adjacent chamber and we had no trouble seeing where we were going now. We left the Buick and the Mercedes to be devoured by the flames that had taken their owners. I spotted the wedding-gift gun and retrieved it on the way out. Nice piece of luck. We were coughi
ng some as we exited into a dusk that was damn near night, and made our way to where Velda had left the Ford, half-way up the grassy slope.

  Heading down the lane as we drove away, we saw black smoke climbing from a high crevice on the mountainside, as if the aftermath of an erupting volcano.

  “So much for our cushy retirement,” she said.

  “You know me, baby,” I said. “Money always did burn a hole in my pocket.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Any New Yorker who thought the Tombs was an underground catacomb of jail cells flunked history. Back in the first half of the nineteenth century, the original structure had been built on an Egyptian mausoleum motif that inspired the familiar grim nickname. The original structure and several others over the years had been torn down or remodeled, while the current version was two towers joined by the pedestrian walkway known as the Bridge of Sighs. The South Tower, where Rudy Olaf currently resided, was twelve stone-and-steel stories on the corner of White and Centre Streets on a plot of land no bigger than that of a suburban home.

  Just two days after Velda and I returned from our upstate day trip, Assistant District Attorney Mandy Clark brought multiple charges against Rudolph Olaf, including conspiracy, attempted murder, and first-degree murder. Olaf had been arraigned, denied bail due to the extent and seriousness of the charges, and was currently in a one-man holding cell on the sixth floor of the Tombs, awaiting transfer to Riker’s Island.

  After going in under an art-deco archway dating back to the 1941 version of the building, I had to stand for a frisk, a sign telling me what the guard was looking for:

  POSSESSION

  OF

  CONTRABAND

  (WEAPONS)

  RAZORS KNIVES SHANKS SHIVS BULLETS

  And any other weapon capable of causing injury and/or

  otherwise endangering the safety of the institution

  WILL RESULT IN YOUR IMMEDIATE

  ARREST

  I’d been through the drill before and had left my .45 at the office. Why go through the hassle of checking it? The guard said other prohibitions included chewing gum, electronic devices, camera, mirrors, aluminum foil, pencil sharpeners, glass, and mace. Though there was NO SMOKING IN THIS FACILITY, visitors were not being relieved of their cigarettes. A correctional officer walked me through several gated, guarded areas to the sixth-floor holding-cell area.

  This was a rarity in the Tombs—an under populated mini-cell block, though it had the same stale locker-room smell of the full-size variety. Of these eight cells, only four were in use. Assistant D.A. Clark had arranged a brief visit for me, but not in a visitation area or an interrogation cell. I would just stand on my side of the bars and Olaf would stay on his. We did not inform him I was coming.

  The six-by-seven cell was concrete block painted cream-color, which went swell with the cream-colored bars. Bars were on the narrow vertical window, too, with mesh beyond that—Rudy Olaf was one of the privileged prisoners with a view on the street. He also had a cot and a stainless steel crapper and not much else. A book was folded open on the cot—Karpov on Karpov—but it apparently hadn’t held his attention.

  The tall, nearly skeletal prisoner was pacing as best he could in the limited space, and his longish gray hair had an unkempt look. He looked even grayer than usual, in part because he had swapped Sing Sing green for Tombs orange. His arms hung loose and he was wiggling his fingers and there was a twitch in his shoulders.

  I’d just planted myself at the bars when he turned in his pacing and the washed-out blue eyes, bloodshot now, flared. “Hammer! What the hell are you doing here?”

  I glanced at the big black guard who’d delivered me and nodded. “I’ll be all right, officer. Thank you.”

  He nodded back and returned in no hurry to his post, a desk at the end of the corridor.

  I folded my arms and smiled affably. “I arranged for us to have a little talk, Rudy. Thought we should catch up. Compare notes.”

  He scowled. “Go fuck yourself, Hammer.”

  “Disappointing repartee from a literate fella such as yourself, former librarian and all.”

  He clutched a bar. His narrow oval of a face had been deeply lined before, but his grimace emphasized the grooves. “You wouldn’t have a goddamn smoke, would you, Hammer?”

  “I told you I don’t smoke anymore.”

  He let go of the bar and walked to his window and back again, saying, “It’s bullshit! What kind of jail doesn’t let you smoke? How do they do business in this hellhole? The unfair thing, the unconstitutional travesty, is that they let the guards smoke. What the hell!”

  “How many days without a smoke, Rudy?”

  “…three.”

  I beamed at him. “You know when I quit, I just quit. Didn’t have one tough day or night. But I hear it can be rough—headaches, constipation, nausea. You can feel tired as hell yet not be able to sleep. Anxiety can set in. Depression. They say it can be a rough damn ride, Rudy.”

  “You’re a sadist.”

  I unfolded my arms. “Coming from you, that’s saying something. Why don’t we chat, just for a few moments? I can fill in some blanks for you, you can do the same for me.”

  Now both bony, vein-streaked hands clutched the bars, like in the old prison pictures. “Why should I talk to you?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I can get a carton of smokes smuggled in to you.”

  He swallowed thickly. He blinked his eyes repeatedly. Then he said, “You’re an officer of the court, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Goes with the P.I. ticket.”

  “So if I ask you if you’re wired…”

  “Rudy, I’m not wired. I’m in more of a laid-back mood.”

  “…if I ask you if you’re wired electronically, smart-ass, you have to say so. Otherwise it’s not admissible.”

  I waved that off. “I’m not wired for sound, Rudy. Lighten up. How about these new digs of yours? Have you checked it for bugs?”

  That rip of a mouth in the gray face formed a sneer. “I’ve checked for bugs, all right. I’ve got more varieties of cockroach in here than Carter has pills. But no eavesdropping type bugs.”

  “Good.” And I almost whispered now. “Because I need to share a few things with you. Since you’ve been inside, you haven’t heard from your man Hellman, have you?”

  That seemed to startle him almost as much as my showing up had. He frowned, and his eyes focused on me, tight. “My man?”

  “Let’s not waste time here, Rudy. They’re giving me about five minutes. Frank Hellman was your man. He was setting things up so that when you got your hands on that eighty-nine billion, plus those deeds and stocks and all, you could buy your way in as the leader of the floundering Ponti family.”

  He tried for an innocent expression and it was pitiful. “What eighty-nine billion?”

  “That’s not how you get smokes for Christmas, Rudy.” I grinned at him. “Marcus Dooley, the guy who hid the money for those aging capos, was an old army buddy of mine. But your pal Brogan was an old high school buddy of his—and so were you, Rudy. Chess club champs, the three of you. Wow, you must have been big men on campus in those days. Bet you got loads of tail.”

  “If you only have five minutes, Hammer, maybe you want to skip the comedy.”

  “Dooley got Brogan’s help in moving that money, and promised him a cut when Don Ponti died, when that hoard would be all Dooley’s. Likely they’d have to peddle it back to the mob or maybe to Uncle Sam, but that would mean a finder’s fee of a billion or so. Couple of middle-aged guys could probably scrape by on that. Only they got old, waiting.”

  He said nothing, but his expression was foul.

  I went on: “I’m guessing Brogan didn’t tell you about this until his cancer came into the picture. How was a sick old man going to access that much money? And what the hell would he do with it, if he got it? So he came to you, Rudy, and the whole scheme came together in your grand chess master fashion. Dying as he was, all Brogan wanted from y
ou was to cut his beloved grandkids in for his share. Of course, that’s just not your way, is it, Rudy?”

  He was frowning again, and the grooves were deep and plentiful. “What about Hellman, Hammer? Why haven’t I seen or heard from him?”

  I gave him half a smile. “Well, Rudy, I’ve got bad news and I’ve got bad news. Hellman was trying to double-cross you, scrambling to get that hoard of dough for himself in the small window of time that it would take you to get out of prison, settle up with the city, and set yourself up as a player in the Ponti power grab. Three days ago, Hellman and a crooked T-man he was partnered with were killed.”

  “Killed?”

  I nodded. “Burned to death.”

  The washed-out blue eyes went wild. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Well, it was an offshoot of me setting those cartons of money on fire. All those billions of yours, Rudy, that new life you were planning? Nothing so shabby as king of Sing Sing, but as the head of the Ponti organization… what can I say? Burn, baby, burn.”

  He was shaking his head as if he weren’t hearing right, and looked like he was having one of those nicotine nausea attacks. “Hammer… why the hell would you take such a destructive, insane, idiotic course of action?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do at the time. You see, Hellman and his buddy were shooting at me and I was shooting back. The boxed-up dough was in a cave up in the Adirondacks, but you probably heard that rumor. Bats live in caves, you know. Thousands of them were living back there with all that money, sealed in for decades. Oh the bats could get in and out, but the money couldn’t. Still, it made a nice comfy home for those critters. For years and years. So…”

  The de facto head librarian of Sing Sing was a reader. A smart man, maybe a brilliant one. He knew. “My God,” he said, his gray face turning even more ashen. “Sodium nitrate…”