A Long Time Dead Read online

  The traffic light goes red and I stop at the curb. No cars coming either way and I could go right across, but I don’t. Like the late Fainey dame, I almost got tagged by some speeding soused-up asshole when I crossed here last night.

  The light turns green but I don’t cross. Empty street or not.

  Quietly, I pull my trenchcoat collar up and my hat brim down, and say, “Damn.”

  Half a block to my right an all-night diner’s sign is blinking and I cut toward it. I’d never been there before but the counterman gives me that look that makes me as a regular city slob and starts pouring me a coffee before I even ask for it. I order a hard buttered roll, dunk it and it tastes swell.

  Then what was wrong?

  The counterman said, “Lousy night, eh, mac? Cold’s comin’. More damn rain.”

  “Could be worse,” I told him in a way that said the roll was great but hold the side order of talk. He was fine with that. He rubbed the counter with his dirty wet rag.

  Then I knew what was wrong.

  For about two months now, I would hit the rack around midnight, then wake up at three and there was nothing left but to walk it off. And it came to me I had been tracking down the same path the same way at the same time for all that while. This was the first time since the Salem shooting that I’d even crossed a street to a different place.

  Stupidly, I had set a pattern. Now I knew what that asshole driver was aiming at the other night. Make that who. Only he wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t an asshole, either. He was a pro, a very specialized one.

  And that fight some hothead started at the Forty-second Street BMT subway station last week wasn’t just some idiocy that almost took three spectators and me onto the tracks.

  And that long-haired buck-tooth druggie trying to mug me on Eighth Avenue wasn’t a simple stick-up try, it was a for fucking real hit that didn’t quite go down. Not after I broke the jerk’s arm, jammed his shiv in his ass and kicked his guts loose for trying that action on somebody sober and big enough to walk that area alone.

  But I’d been stupid then, too.

  That was no mugging. That prick had been trying to kill me. He’d come in with a grin and a knife held low in his palm with the cutting edge up and the swipe he took was pure professional. Anybody else he would have taken out, but I’d been tuned into garbage like that for a long time and put him down like I was swatting a bug.

  A long time.

  Time.

  It was catching up with me. Ten years ago, I would never have let myself get so sloppy. I had been following patterns those other times too. Back then I would have smelled it sooner. Well, I could smell it now, the dark wet clouds rolling in around me. Seconds ago, I’d been blissfully sitting here in an off-street diner dunking my buttered hard roll in hot coffee, when what I should have been doing was watch my damn ass … because somebody was coming after it.

  Great feeling. Scary as hell. I don’t mind somebody coming head on at me, but sneak-attack crap that you can’t anticipate is something the hell else. All you know is that somebody has a kill on his mind and you are the target. And making it worse was knowing they were pros.

  Pros, but on the low-end side. They’d missed three times. But now I smelled them.

  I paid the bill, gave the counterman a buck and went back out onto the street. The dull acidity of the city was gone now. The total boredom that seeps into Manhattan natives wasn’t part of me any longer. For the first time in a long time, I had that itchy feeling again and it was running up and down my back like a lover’s fingers and if anybody saw me grinning, they’d wonder why my teeth were showing when really nothing was funny at all.

  So I stayed with the pattern and took the rest of the walk that traced the path I had been following for months. It was getting cooler but I opened my trenchcoat and unbuttoned my suitcoat for easier access to the .45 under my left arm. Finally I got to the Hackard Building, where my office had been till the renovations got under way, and went into the lobby where old Gus presided after hours over the facelift in progress.

  Only Gus wasn’t there. His crumpled lunch bag was on the big crate he’d been using for a desk and the Daily News was under it, but he wasn’t there. Then I edged along the wall and saw the bulk jammed under the crate and Gus was there after all.

  You don’t need doctors or coroners or medical examiners to tell you when somebody is dead. Not this kind of dead. You say, “Shit,” because you knew this dead somebody and he was a great old guy who was your friend. And because he was your friend, you are the reason he is stuffed inside a wooden crate with bullet holes in him leaking red.

  And there was no reason for Gus dying except that I’d broken pattern to have that buttered hard roll and coffee and somebody came looking for me and Gus got suspicious. Some killer tried to make his presence seem innocent and a lobby guy who knew what it meant to have Mike Hammer in his building had betrayed disbelief on his face and got dead for his trouble.

  But somebody else would get dead now.

  With .45 in hand, I prowled the lobby and any open doors off of it to see if the killer was still around. No surprise that he wasn’t—he’d killed Gus out of some kind of reflex and wouldn’t be hanging around to see if I ever did show up.

  I folded a Kleenex around my fingers, lifted the phone on Gus’s crate, and dialed. Even out of a deep sleep, the voice was alert and controlled.

  Just one word. It wasn’t even a question: “Yes.”

  Flat.

  “Sorry to break a promise, kid,” I said.

  “… Mike?”

  “Yeah.”

  There wasn’t any friendliness in either of our voices. It had been a long time since Pat and I had that old smooth feeling.

  “I’m on one,” I said.

  “You always are.”

  If he wanted to know, he needed to ask. I let a few seconds go past.

  Finally he said, “Where.” No question inflection at all.

  “The lobby of the Hackard Building,” I told him. “Somebody murdered the lobby guy. Gus Smalley.”

  “Hell. That nice old guy?”

  “That nice old guy. I’ll wait.”

  “Yes you will,” he said and hung up.

  Pat played by all the rules. He always had. The nearest squad car came in, did their bit, the detectives followed and a forensics team showed up to make it an official crime scene. Pat was right behind them, looking like a jaded New York cop who had seen too many dead bodies, attended too many autopsies and been part of too many take-downs. And he had seen and done all that and more. But Pat Chambers jaded? Forget it.

  Hell, he didn’t even have to be there. He wasn’t on duty. He was a Captain of Homicide and the only reason I called him was to shove a needle up his tail. Finding me at a murder scene meant he’d have to deal with me again. And maybe we could start putting that falling out behind us.

  He played it cool. Good old Pat Chambers, I thought. The Charlie Brown of the NYPD. They passed him over for inspector. Some said that was because he was friends with a “controversial” private investigator. Really it was because he stuck to the rule book. Mr. Honesty. Straight shooter. Go against the politicians and be right when they are wrong and see where it gets you.

  “Let’s hear it, Mike,” he said.

  He was as big as me but not quite as heavy. He left his hat on, like me. Just two tired trenchcoats facing each other.

  “Not much to tell.” I shrugged. “I came in here to say hello like every night lately. And there he was.”

  Pat had those funny gray-blue eyes that can seem calm when really they’ve gone sour. “And there he was,” he repeated.

  I shrugged again.

  “Why?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Bullshit. What are you up to, Mike?”

  “Not a damn thing. When did you get so damn nasty, Pat? I didn�
�t think police officials used that kind of language around the general populace.”

  “Screw you, buddy.”

  He pointed a finger at me that said, Stay put.

  Seconds dragged out into minutes while he looked around, checking the work of the plainclothes officers and the forensics team. Wasn’t like Pat was somebody new. He was an old hand and he wanted to see it all for himself. And whatever he saw, he remembered.

  Then he came back over and rocked on his heels gently. The eyes were hooded now. His head back.

  “This is fallout from the Salem shooting,” he said, “isn’t it?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Yeah. How should you know.”

  “Come on, Pat. What’s all this beefing about? I didn’t kill that slob. I shot him. That’s all.”

  For a second, fire flared in his eyes. “You just shot him?” He paused, groping for words. “Hell, Mike, you didn’t just shoot him—you shot the shit out of him. You tore his hands up, you mangled his feet, you got his ribs broken, his teeth knocked out … and that was all?”

  “How many ways do you want me to paint it?” I asked him. “I heard shots coming from that lawyer’s office and then this Salem character I’d seen in the papers burst out. He was a big sweaty wild-eyed guy with a .357 magnum in his fist, running toward the stairwell. Anyway, a lot of that damage was from the fall he took.”

  “The first one was a hip shot,” Pat stated flatly.

  “There wasn’t time to aim.”

  “And then you took his feet out from under him with the second shot.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “Both feet. They just happened to be lined up perfectly.”

  “Oh, so you did have time to aim.”

  “You got it all wrong, kiddo.”

  “You’re saying they were, what? Lucky shots?”

  I shrugged. “Too bad he fell down the stairs.”

  “Too bad?”

  “Yeah. He was screaming real nice up till then.”

  His eyebrows rose. “You enjoyed it?”

  “Didn’t bother me.”

  Pat shook his head and grunted. “Your luck is amazing, pal. You nail an escaped, convicted murderer, you damn near destroy the guy and you get the greatest press coverage in the world. Nobody even inquires what other options you had, nobody wants to know if you were aware of the police cordon around the building, or why the hell you were there to start with.”

  “I was there on unrelated business. Anyway, Pat, you forgot the good side of it.”

  “Sure. Remind me about the ‘good’ side.”

  “Thanks to me, you NYPD guys put Rennie Salem under arrest, his rights were read him and he confessed on the spot. Wasn’t like his lawyer could talk him out of it, since he just shot the guy. And all I had to do was show my license and gun permit and put in a cameo appearance at the inquest.”

  They had Old Gus laid out now, getting him ready for the body bag. He look shrunken in his coveralls, like the bullets had let all the air out of him.

  “This had nothing to do with you,” Pat said.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But it could have.”

  “It’s the Hackard Building. I’ve been dropping by at a fairly regular time. Figure it out yourself. You’re a detective. Anyway, that’s the rumor.”

  He gestured toward what used to be Gus. “Am I supposed to believe you aren’t gonna go off half-cocked over this thing?”

  “Fully cocked, Pat. Always fully cocked.”

  “Old joke. Bad joke. You can go, Mr. Hammer.”

  “One more thing, Captain Chambers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You might want to check into what Salem’s brothers are up to.”

  An eyebrow rose. “His older two brothers are in stir. You know that.”

  “But the younger ones running that garage in Queens? Suspected of running a chop shop? They aren’t. Wonder what they were doing tonight?”

  The gray-blue eyes were lasers now. “You do think this is fallout from the Salem shooting.”

  I turned over a hand. “I think it’s the kind of thing you and your little elves can track easier than me. Since you don’t want me getting involved or anything.”

  His grunt was almost a laugh. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yeah. See if anybody wanted Gus out of the way. He’s who got murdered, after all. You’re good at that kind of thing.”

  His smile was mostly sneer. “Which means you don’t want to screw with it, since you figure this was about you, not him.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  “Sure you are.”

  I didn’t bother saying goodbye.

  Neither did Pat.

  I was camped out on the leather couch in the outer office when Velda came in. My coat was off and my shoes and tie too, but I hadn’t been sleeping.

  “You here early?” she asked, hanging up her poncho in the closet. “Or late?”

  I sat up, put my feet on the floor, rubbed my unshaved face with both hands. “Split the difference, kitten.”

  Velda walked with liquid confidence over to an antique desk that was a happy anachronism amid modern office furnishings in the space we were renting while the Hackard Building renovation was under way. She tossed the Daily News there that she’d brought in under her arm.

  She was tall enough not to need heels but she wore them anyway, emphasizing the kind of high-breasted, long-legged figure that could make a guy’s eyes water. His mouth, too. Her raven pageboy brushed her shoulders, making tiny whispers on the cotton of the simple white blouse. She made it and that black skirt seem like something out of Frederick’s of Hollywood.

  She went over to start some coffee and said, “Another sleepless night?”

  “Naw. I got a good three hours, anyway.”

  Anybody who thought Velda was strictly here for decorative value didn’t know the score. She was my secretary and secret weapon … and partner in Michael Hammer Investigations, right down to her PI ticket and the .22 automatic in her purse.

  “So,” she said, getting behind her desk and glancing at page two of the News, “I suppose you and Gus talked sports till the sun came up again.”

  “The sun came up,” I said. “But I didn’t talk to Gus.”

  I told her.

  Halfway through it she came over and sat next to me, putting an arm around my shoulder. “You liked that old guy, didn’t you?”

  “He was nobody special. Just another old fart waiting out his pension and spouting how the coaches stink these days and the fighters are just a bunch of pansies since Marciano.”

  “I liked him, too. You don’t think he was the target, do you?”

  “No. But Pat’s looking into that.” I shrugged. “He’s good for something, anyway.”

  “Don’t be so hard on him,” she said. “You’ll be friends again one of these days. … You figure this is payback courtesy of the Salem brothers?”

  “I’ve got Pat looking into that, too.”

  She squeezed my hand. “So … where do we come in? Or do we?”

  “Oh, we come in all right. You remember that hooker at Lex and Thirty-ninth who I saw get run down a couple weeks ago?”

  She nodded. “Helen something. You gave a statement at the scene, but it didn’t go anywhere. They found the car with the plates you reported, and it was stolen. Some joyriding punk off on a drunken tear.”

  “That’s what they thought at the time. That’s what I thought.”

  I told her about my own recent brush with a drunk driver, and the subway incident. I’d told her about the mugging, back when it happened. She put it together immediately.

  She spoke as she fetched coffee for us. “You’ve been out on your insomniac walks, every night passing by where the Fainey woman g
ot it. Somebody noticed. Somebody who thought Mike Hammer was looking into things and planning to do something about it—you do have a reputation for that.”

  “Yeah.” I sipped the coffee. She got the cream and sugar just right. “Lots of people know about my altruistic nature.”

  She was sitting beside me again. “Somebody figured you were coming after them, and also figured to beat you to the punch.”

  I thought about it. “I didn’t really get a look at the driver who nailed the Fainey dame. I was way the hell across the street.”

  “Somebody doesn’t know that.” She half-turned and her fanny made the leather couch squeak. “Did you know her?”

  “Not really. She was just somebody I walked by. She came on to me first time I passed, I told her the score, and after that it was a nod or hello.”

  “Listen, Mike—these three tries on you … could it have been the same guy?”

  I frowned. “Possible. The only one I got a good look at was that hippie mugger.”

  A half smile blossomed. “Mike, hippies aren’t muggers. The peace-and-love crowd don’t pack switchblades.”

  “If they need drug money they do.”

  “Did he look strung-out, this guy?”

  “No,” I admitted. “So it was a … costume? A disguise?”

  She shrugged. “Could it have been? Could the long hair have been a wig?”

  I nodded. No matter how much sleep I’d missed last night, I felt wide awake now, thanks to her. “It sure as hell could. And the blurred glimpse I got of the driver who nearly clipped me is consistent with the better look I got at that mugger.”

  “So … do we go from mugger to mug books? Why don’t I call Pat and you can go down and—”

  I raised a hand to stop her. “No, Vel. Let’s let Pat do his cop thing. He has solid leads to follow—the Salem brothers, Gus’s private life. What we have is a theory.”

  “But a good one, Mike.”

  I grinned at her. “Damn straight. I’ll take your theories over facts any day, sugar.”

  “Thanks. So where do we start?”