Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Read online

  He pointed a finger at me. “Which leaves you up Shit Creek without a paddle, Mike.” He shifted that finger to Velda, sitting sphinxlike, listening. “Both of you.”

  Then his attention returned to me. “On his deathbed, Dooley asked for you, Mike, and only you, and the reasonable supposition is he spilled his guts. And everybody knows you and Velda are a team. Anything you know, she knows.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that.” I gave him the nasty grin I usually reserved for guys who weren’t my best friend. “But you aren’t just my old bud, you were Dooley’s, too, going all the way back. Plenty of people would assume anything I got at Dooley’s deathbed, I passed along to you.”

  “Well, you damn well didn’t! Since when do you clue me in on anything till it’s too late for me to do anything about it!”

  That rated a chuckle. “You know that, Pat. And I know it. But no one else believes it. And that, my friend, leaves you up the same damn creek as Velda and me.”

  He frowned, shook his head. “Hoods don’t go after cops. It isn’t healthy.”

  “Trying to convince me or yourself? Anyway, who wouldn’t risk their health a little over a shot at eighty-nine billion bucks?”

  Pat stared at me for a long ten seconds, then said, “You want something out of me, don’t you?”

  “I’m a taxpayer, aren’t I?”

  “I’ll make you a deal. You don’t give me the taxpayer speech, and I’ll spare you the one where I threaten to toss your ass in the pokey if you take this on by yourself.”

  I grinned, not so nasty. “Deal.”

  “So?”

  My grin faded. “We’ve been thinking of Dooley as the sole survivor to the big money move. He claimed Ponti eliminated everybody but him, after the transport. If anybody on the inside knew where Dooley had hidden it, none of this would be an issue.”

  “Okay,” Pat said. “I follow.”

  “So find out if Dooley had another old buddy. Somebody he might have trusted with the big secret. It’d been a long time since we saw him, Pat, and even a loner like Dooley might have made some friend along the way, somebody like himself, someone he might confide in. An outsider like Dooley who didn’t give a damn about all that money, but got a charge out of a project, an operation, that size. Maybe another old military guy, out of army intelligence.”

  Pat was frowning. “Why do you assume Dooley had no interest in money?”

  “I don’t think it was in his character. He was a messed-up soldier who became a drunken bum, then remade himself into a glorified yard man. He knew where that money was for ten years, but his lifestyle didn’t change. If a softer life was his goal, he could have sold the loot’s location back to Ponti for a small fortune.”

  “And get himself wiped out for his trouble.” Pat’s eyebrows went up. “Hey… maybe he was waiting for Ponti to die. The old boy was in his eighties, even if it did take a bullet to take him out, courtesy of his own kid.”

  I hadn’t considered that. Was it possible Dooley had been playing a waiting game, looking to spend some cushy golden years on a bed of billions?

  “And even if you’re right about Dooley not caring about that dough,” Pat said, “he might have misjudged this pal you’re positing he had. Maybe that ‘helper’ played along with Dooley, figuring to get at that loot himself someday.”

  Velda leaned forward, placing her hands on the desktop; she was clearly intrigued by Pat’s notion.

  I said, “Then why hasn’t the helper made a move till now?”

  “Who knows? Possibly he lost his nerve, considering that he’d be robbing the mob. Or maybe he was playing a waiting game. If he even exists.”

  “Find out for me, Pat.”

  “Mike, it’s just supposition…”

  “It’s credible enough to check out, but it’ll take the kind of legwork that only the police can supply.”

  “And it has to be done quietly.”

  “Damn well told.”

  Thoughts were racing in his eyes again. “There’ll have to be inter-departmental cooperation. All the way to the feds, considering Dooley’s military intelligence background.”

  “Sure. Inter-city, too—Dooley worked upstate for Ponti, after all, on that estate in the Adirondacks. No telling just how far it can go.”

  He shook his head. “Great. Just swell. What did I do to deserve you as a friend?”

  “Velda says you’d have been an inspector years ago,” I said, “if you had better taste in drinking buddies.”

  Velda chimed in: “What do you say, Pat? You might as well pitch in. It’s too late to go looking for new friends.”

  He gave her a little smile that carried a hint of the torch he once carried for her, then he said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’re thinking about it now,” I told him.

  His eyes looked directly into mine.

  Then he took another sip of his coffee. “See a doctor yet?”

  “Mine’s in the building, but he’s not in his office this early.”

  “But you will make an appointment?”

  “What, and have my insurance rates go up?”

  His smile was as rumpled as his raincoat. “For a guy who knows how to get his hands on eighty-nine billion bucks, you’re awfully chintzy.”

  “I didn’t say I could get my hands on it, Pat.”

  “You don’t have to, buddy. Anyway, if I go poking around in Dooley’s affairs, you can bet both of us will get back on the IRS radar. And you’ll be the bogey blipping there getting the most attention.”

  I waved that off. “Won’t do them much good if all they’re working with is speculation.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “I don’t have to, pal.”

  “Oh you think so? There have been some mighty big Wall Street financiers who thought like you, and wound up in a federal prison.”

  “Because they committed overt crimes.”

  “You could end this,” he said, sitting forward, expression intense, “by simply telling the feds where that stash of cash is, and then you… and Velda, and maybe me… can find our way to shore off Shit Creek.”

  “If that’s what this shooting was about.”

  “So let’s assume it is, unless you have a better one.”

  “Not yet,” I admitted.

  “Damnit man, why don’t you ’fess up? What the hell would you do with eighty-nine billion dollars?”

  “I could use a new car.” I smiled innocently. “Anyway, I think somebody ought to prove there is some money first… don’t you?”

  Pat’s sigh had a laugh in it. “Sure I do, Mike.” He turned to Velda with a smile. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He got up and was putting on his raincoat when he said casually, “By the way, did you see that piece in the Times last week, about this new wave of super-computers? Very informative.”

  “What about the new computers?” Velda put in.

  Before Pat could answer her, I said, “They can work out several billion pieces of data per second.”

  From over by the door, Pat said, “Funny how that word billion keeps popping up.”

  I gave him half a smile. “But the principle remains the same, buddy.”

  He answered expressionlessly: “What principle?”

  This time Velda saw what I was getting at and beat me to it. “Garbage in garbage out—no matter how ‘super,’ any computer only knows what’s fed into it, Pat.”

  I filled in the rest. “If… if there is missing money, it went out of circulation before these new computers came on the general market. If such a mob pot of gold exists, with just about everybody connected with it dead, you could only feed a computer speculative information… getting back speculative answers that don’t hold up in court.”

  “You forgot something,” Pat said softly.

  “Like what?”

  “You’re not dead.” He paused and nodded his head sagely. “But they’re trying. What makes you think they’ll stop?”

  That mus
t have been a rhetorical question, because he was out the door before I could answer him.

  Not that I had one for him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was a bite in the air that whispered across the new cemetery grounds. Summer wasn’t long past and autumn was disappearing quickly, the sky gray but the clouds immobile and the smell of possible rain faint. In the background the concrete spires of the city’s skyscrapers made tombstones of their own, adults looking down on their boneyard offspring.

  The stillness was a kind only death could engender. It was an eerie quietness as though the small audience was holding its breath and for a while there was no sound of birds or traffic. No plane flew overhead. No insect made a chirp. From twenty feet away you could hear the rustle of the fabric of the flag being folded geometrically until it was completely tucked into a neat unit that would be a family’s tangible remembrance of a dedicated policeman.

  The rifle volley from the VFW honor league erupted into a farewell salute, the smell of cordite dredging up sudden, wild memories of distant killing fields.

  When the lieutenant from the Two One handed the cloth offering to the pretty young woman with the baby in her lap, she took it absently, silent grief making a blank mask of her face, her eyes looking far past the rows of ornamented tombstones, not focusing on anything at all. She held the flag against herself, the baby’s tiny hand grasping the corner of it for a moment.

  Beside me, I heard Pat let his breath out softly. It was rare that I saw him in his captain’s uniform, but although the stamp of the career officer was there in his demeanor, that tight glint in his eyes reflected his hatred for cop killers.

  Quietly, I said, “She’s awfully young, Pat.”

  “Twenty-two,” he told me. “He was twenty-six.”

  “Damn.”

  “Eighth officer lost in two months.”

  I nodded. It had been another one of those freakish occurrences—a cop on his way home from work caught in the hail of automatic fire from a stolen car in a drive-by shooting that took out three teenagers from the Red Commando gang… and one young off-duty officer.

  The drive-by crew had missed a fourth Red Commando hoodlum, who got off two shots from the .38 automatic he carried under his shirt and a lucky hit took out a shooter in the back seat, his buddies dumping him off in an alley to bleed to death.

  Just before the ceremony, Pat had been on his cellphone and I knew something had turned up. I half-whispered, “They got a lead on this one yet?”

  Muffling his voice, Pat told me, “They pulled in every gangbanger in that car. The one they tossed out fingered them before he died.”

  “Sometimes justice gets a shabby delivery system.”

  A day had passed since I’d stepped off an elevator at the Hackard Building into what was damn near my own funeral. Nothing related had happened since, other than Pat reporting that ballistics had run the slugs through the local and federal databases and come up empty. We’d been right that either a new weapon had been used or an old one with the firing pin and barrel switched out.

  When we’d spoken on the phone, Pat mentioned this latest officer death and that he was heading out for the funeral. I asked him if he’d like some company and he took me up on it. I’d never met the deceased, but I’d known hundreds of his dedicated kind.

  Riding back to the city we didn’t say much. I picked up the two New York papers on the seat and checked out the front pages. The big story was the outbreak of police officers’ deaths. News was slow enough that the coverage made speculative noises about possible serial killing, but that just didn’t seem the case. These appeared purely coincidental, the kind of accidental deaths that could happen to anyone.

  The rash of cop fatalities had started with a drunk running a red light and nailing a pedestrian crossing the street who happened to be a uniformed patrolman an hour from going off duty.

  The next death came courtesy of a delivery van blowing a tire and plowing into a squad car, killing the driver and injuring his partner.

  Fatality number three was assisting at the scene of a grocery store fire when a gas main blasted a ball of flame onto the street and consumed the cop who had waved civilians back.

  Four and five got it when they were responding to a robbery-in-progress call at a liquor store. They were only a block away when the silent alarm touched off by the owner alerted them. They had spotted the pair with drawn guns through the store window, but not the other two waiting across the street in a darkened getaway car. Those two had rifles. Each one got off three shots, dumping both cops dead on the sidewalk. The store was robbed and the four hoods got away, the owner a fatality, too.

  Six and seven were having supper together in an old Italian restaurant on Third Avenue. Once upon a time it had been a big favorite with the mob crowd, but for the past thirty years had been respectable enough to get top ratings in the places-to-eat-in-New-York columns. Then, after spending thirty-five years in Sing Sing, a cancer-riddled Monte Massino came in to commit suicide in his favorite old bistro, spotted two cops in uniform and decided to pull a grand slam, shooting them both in the head before blowing his own brains out.

  We had just buried the eighth.

  “Serial killing by coincidence,” I said.

  Pat gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Crazy. Do you know what the statistician says the odds are for this many cop fatalities in this short a time?”

  “The NYPD has a statistician now?”

  “No, but the city does. Anyway, the expert says it’s about ten times the likelihood of winning the Irish Sweepstakes.”

  “People do win that.”

  “I know you’re the rare cop type who believes in coincidence, Mike. But this is way off the charts.”

  “Anybody looking into it?”

  “I’ve got two teams on it, going over each death like it was a potential homicide, but so far we’re treading water.” He sighed. “Listen, I’m meeting Tim Darcy for lunch. You want to join us? Something you might want to get in on.”

  “Why not?” Tim had worked the crime beat at the News for going on twenty years and was one of the good guys—for a reporter, anyway.

  Pat glanced over at me—odd, and sort of fun, seeing him in NYPD blue, like he’d been when he took down Rudy Olaf way back when.

  “We’ll stop by my office,” he said, “so I can get into civvies.”

  “Sure.”

  Uniform or not, Pat had checked out an unmarked Crown Vic; the trouble with such unmarked cars is that they are as recognizable on the side streets of New York City as a Jaguar D-Type. Every kid with digital dexterity gave us the middle-finger salute with soundless but easily lip-read obscene suggestions as Pat coasted through, breaking up their stickball games while some players rolled out empty garbage cans and ran, waiting for us to play road hockey with the receptacles. Pat had a lot of experience with catching the cans just right and almost nailed a half-hidden perp with a galvanized missile.

  “Nice shot,” I told him.

  “My regular driver would have tagged him,” he told me.

  “You ever try to make friends with these alley cats?”

  Pat gave me a big grin. “What, and spoil all their fun? What do you think I drove up this way for?”

  “I figured you took a wrong turn.”

  “Like hell.” His grin got a little bigger. “I thought maybe they’d have added some new twists to the old routine. That’s what’s wrong with kids today—no imagination.”

  “I notice they don’t toss out any new plastic garbage cans.”

  “Of course not. Those don’t make any racket when you bang ’em.”

  There was always some logic in Pat’s observations. And I was glad to see the street skirmish get him out of his somber mood.

  * * *

  Tim Darcy met us at The Cavern. It was an old newspaperman’s hangout that became one of those showoff places the natives took out-of-towners to, not because it had a forty-foot bar that famous deceased TV newsmen used to
frequent, but because you couldn’t beat the seafood dishes old Tony G. could dish up. Tony claimed he wasn’t sure what the “G” stood for himself anymore, but said it was on his immigration papers if anybody cared to look.

  When we’d joined Tim in a back booth, I suggested that he try Tony’s Oysters Rockefeller, and the reporter reported that he didn’t like the slimy things. Nothing could persuade him otherwise. He ordered the corned beef and cabbage—about what you’d expect from a fortyish heavy-set redheaded character with a florid face and a green sweater vest.

  While he buttered his hard roll, Tim alternated his gaze from it to Pat, as he said, “Anything new on the sudden rise in cop fatalities?”

  “Mike and I just got back from the latest funeral,” Pat said glumly. “Accidents, coincidences, but it just doesn’t sit right. After the third one, every death has been investigated by my top two teams. How do you explain bad luck and fate, anyway?”

  Tim chewed roll as he said, “Is that what it is?”

  I said, “Call it kismet.”

  “Kismet is an old musical, Mike,” Tim said. “And I don’t work the Broadway beat.”

  Pat sighed. “Your paper and the rest of your crowd keep hinting at a possible serial killer… but that’s a bunch of garbage. Every one of those cops suffered a terminal case of wrong-time-wrong-place, pure and simple. Hell, there were witnesses on the scene in most instances.”

  “Well, you can’t blame us for speculating,” Tim said. “Otherwise, all we’d have is a lousy story.”

  I said, “Wouldn’t want to let the facts get in the way of that.”

  “Papers don’t hold onto their readers,” Tim said, “by boring the shit out of them. These are tough times for the Fourth Estate, my friends.”

  Our food arrived. Tim dug into a slice of corned beef and looked at Pat over his fork. His eyes narrowed, close-set things as green as his vest and as colorful as his blood-shot nose. “When you gonna ask me, Pat?”

  “Ask you what?”

  A grin twisted Tim’s plump lips. He chewed. Swallowed. Eyebrow-shrugged. “Man, for a couple of oldtime wild-ass players, you two don’t know much these days, do you? Is the shadow of impending retirement getting to you?”