The Big Bang Page 4

  I wasn't kidding, but I knew there was no convincing him, so I let it go.

  I had sat too long in one position and the wound on my side was feeling like leather drying in the sun, pulling everything in with it.

  Pat offered to drive me back to my apartment, but I opted to walk, told him so long, and took off east on Forty-fourth Street at an easy lope.

  At Sixth Avenue a pair of hookers in miniskirts and blouses that were all chest almost gave me a pitch, but turned it off after a second glance. Sometimes vice cops can even look like vice cops, and I grinned at them for giving me the benefit of the doubt.

  "Business must be off," I said, waiting for the light, "if a couple dolls like you don't have any takers."

  This was generous but not a total lie.

  The brunette with the pretty, green-stockinged legs flashed me a smile. Either I was a native straight who knew the dodge, or a cop skipping the entrapment angle—making the first overture louses up the case for a cop when there's a witness around.

  "Sometimes," she said, "I think I shoulda hung on to my fuckin' pimp."

  I shook my head. "But that cuts the pie in half, cutie."

  "Half a pie beats hell out of a whole cookie."

  Wisdom is where you find it.

  She took a risk. "You looking for some company?"

  "Thanks. Not tonight."

  She nodded, then indicated her friend. "The two of us, honey, we could turn this dull conversation into a real lively party...."

  "I imagine you could."

  The light changed to green and I winked and started across the street. On the opposite corner, another pair who'd gathered that I'd turned down the other gals didn't bother chasing this foul ball, and let me go by with barely a glance.

  On Sixth Avenue I walked north, remembering the way the street used to look and trying to picture it after the city planners and developers would finally get through. The decay had taken hold twenty years ago, but instead of treating the rot and restoring the originality, they had decided to extract each structure, replacing the street's aging smile with architectural dentures that seemed to be trying to take a jagged bite out of the sky. In between, where the holes were, the decay still showed, the infection deadly—right down to the gums of the sidewalk.

  When I reached Forty-ninth Street, I cut east again, threading my way through another parade of faded fun girls looking for the tourist dollar, and almost made the middle of the block without having to deal with any wilted flower's offer.

  An ancient rose of thirty in a too-tight dress split up the middle to where her wares showed was about to fall in step with me; her unlit cigarette in its long, slender holder was the opening gambit for the "got a light" come-on.

  But her eyes, which had seen too much already, suddenly reached behind me and widened just enough to touch off all those old reflexes and I twisted out of the way of the knife that was supposed to have gone into me, hit the guy on the shoulder to spin him my way, and smashed a fast right to his face that splintered his nose into fragments of bone and flesh, then got him twice more before he lifted off his feet and plopped into the gutter between parked cars.

  I kicked the six-inch open switchblade knife over beside him and looked down at the mashed face bubbling with blood. My mugger was damn well-dressed—that was no off-the-rack suit he was wearing. But he was too slippery and red for me to walk away with a decent description, so I knelt and patted him down until I found his wallet, took out his driver's license and social security card, shoved the wallet back, and stood up to grin at the ancient rose.

  She was wondering whether to puke and I was in no mood to help her decide, so I left her standing there, unable to take her eyes off the smeary human fingerpainting in the gutter.

  No crowd had collected, nothing seemed to have upset the ecology or the decorum of the street. A few eyes looked and a few mouths spoke, but there was no change in the tempo. It was simply a moment of waiting to see what would happen next.

  When I crossed the street, I didn't even bother to pick up the pace. I was in no hurry.

  But I knew that what I'd told Pat was wrong—this wasn't over, not when a "mugger" in a tailored suit had tried to knife me. Billy might not need my help anymore, but somebody did.

  A guy named Hammer, who person or persons unknown had decided needed killing.

  Chapter Three

  UNDER THE PAGE FIVE photograph, the mini-headline read MIDTOWN MURDER, and beneath that the caption: Unidentified Man Knifed in Mugging Attack.

  I was behind my desk and Velda was draping the Daily News across my blotter with narrow-eyed accusation. I had called her last night and filled her in on the day's events, including the attempted mugging.

  I shrugged, flipped the paper closed, and handed it back to her. "Doll, he wasn't like that when I left him. Scout's honor."

  She gave me a long, slow look and I saw the tension creeping across her shoulders. That same old worry was back in her voice, tight, low, and a little breathless, as she said, "Then this is the guy who came at you?"

  "Yeah." I gestured with open hands and gave her as innocent a look as I could muster. "The bastard tried to knife me and I splashed him—what do you want from me?"

  "Mike..."

  "Hey, he was flat on his back when I left the scene—out cold, plenty the worse for wear, but breathing, baby. Breathing."

  She opened the paper again, held it out in front of her. I couldn't see the page she was perusing—the front page faced me, full of Casey Stengel, recently retired as Mets manager—but I knew she was studying the face-down corpse in the crime-scene photo.

  "If this isn't your handiwork..."

  "It isn't."

  The dark eyes flared. "Then whose is it?"

  I shrugged again. "Plenty of easy answers, kid. Either there was a backup man, to pay the guy off the hard way, if he bungled the job—which he did, remember—or maybe one of those faded flowers started frisking him for his loot and the guy started coming around and the gal had to kill the son of a bitch, to keep him quiet. I mean, that knife was right there beside him, kitten, when I took off. It was only later the thing got stuck in his back."

  She pulled up the client's chair and sat, her expression empty of accusation, full of thought.

  "You had just left Pat," she stated, "and were on your way home. The guy really could have been just trying to mug you, you know."

  I shook my head. "No dice, honey. Open street muggings are usually strong-arm attempts and involve two people, one to latch on to the mark and the other to beat and bash him. This was a solo kill, carefully set up to be enough like a mugging to be written off as one."

  "You just said yourself there may have been a second person...."

  "Yeah, but not in the mugging-team sense. Hit men often have a backup, you know, running interference, waiting with wheels." I batted the air. "And even from that newspaper photo, couldn't you catch how wrong that bozo's threads were?"

  "Not exactly typical mugger attire."

  "Naw. That was one sharp suit. Tailored, British kind of cut."

  She was shaking her head, the dark tresses dancing. "But, Mike—you weren't working on anything."

  My eyebrows went up. "I'm beginning to wonder. Anyway, that isn't the point, whether I was working on something."

  "What is?"

  "Whether somebody might have thought I was."

  I pulled the license and social security card out of my coat pocket. The name was the same on both: Russell Frazer—address, the Avondale Hotel on upper Broadway.

  I reached for the phone and dialed Pat's number. They located him in a police cruiser, gave him my message, and told me to stay put until he got there.

  Fifteen minutes later, Pat brushed by Velda at her desk with a polite nod and locked himself in with me in my private office, obviously trying to decide whether to haul my ass downtown to the cooler or listen to me try to worm my way out of the bind. He tossed his hat on my desk, deposited himself in the client's chair,
and his eyes dared me to win him over. It took me all of three minutes to give him the details, and he was good enough not to interrupt. Then I let him check Russell Frazer's ID cards.

  When he was finished looking those over, he gave me the long-suffering face and said, "I'm supposed to ignore you walking away from an attempted mugging? A mugging where you beat the hell out of the guy? The day after you send two other guys to the morgue and another to the critical ward?"

  I lifted a shoulder and put it down again. "Would you rather I called it in, and the two of us had another scintillating session with that assistant D.A., Traynor?"

  He just scowled at me.

  "What did the medical examiner come up with?"

  Pat tucked the cards away, gnawed at his lip a moment, then said, "It could have been a fight that ended in a knifing. Or it could have been a mugging. Poetic justice—mugger gets mugged. Guy's pants pockets were turned inside out, some loose change was in the gutter nearby, and his wallet was missing."

  I held up an honest-injun palm. "I didn't take the wallet—just his license and social security."

  "Any dough in the thing?"

  "There were bills in it when I stuck it back in his pocket, yeah. You got any witnesses?"

  He smirked without humor. "You kidding? Right now, you'd think that corner last night had been as deserted as Sunday morning. Nobody saw a damn thing, and the girls who work that block must be working some other block today." Then he shrugged. "But just as soon as we let a little heat loose, we'll get it put together."

  "You're giving this that kind of priority?"

  "I am now that I know you were on the scene." He crossed his arms and glared at me, tiny lines showing at the corners of his eyes. "So—what's your angle, Mike?"

  "Quit playing the heavy," I told him. "All I did was protect myself."

  "That's all you ever do," he said sarcastically. "Why did you lift his IDs?"

  I got up, walked over to the mini-refrigerator, took out a can of Pabst beer, and popped it open. Hadn't had time for breakfast. Pat waved it off when I offered him one.

  "You didn't answer me," he said.

  "Because," I said, settling back behind my desk, "if there was another reason for the attack, besides a mugging, I wanted the bum to know I could finger him."

  "Don't give me that mugging crap, Mike. You're not exactly the kind of target those guys pick on. They go after little old ladies or rabbity tourists who won't fight back. Most of these muggers have a habit, and they don't want to do any cold-turkey time in a jail cell."

  I leaned back in my swivel chair. "Okay, so there's only one angle left—somebody had to be tailing me."

  "And the great Mike Hammer didn't notice?"

  I batted that away. "Hell, Pat, I didn't have any reason to sweat it—I wasn't on anything active. Only you and Velda knew I was going to be at the Blue Ribbon last night, so they had to pick me up someplace before I got to the restaurant."

  He was frowning. "Why would they bother tailing you? And if this wasn't a mugging, who wants you dead? Scratch that—plenty of people want you dead...."

  "It's bugging me, too," I said, ignoring his last statement. "I'm going to have to think about it."

  Pat and I had been friends too long for him not to know when a conversation of ours had come to the end of the line. The gray eyes narrowed and he was very likely still considering putting a hold order on me for my own good; but we were both pros, and he would hold the reins loose until I started to bolt. My sources of information weren't as broad as his, but sometimes they were a lot more specific when some long green was handy to grease the way.

  So he nodded curtly, a silent acknowledgment that I could try to satisfy my curiosity just a little bit. A very little bit. He plucked his hat off my desk, put it on, and headed out.

  At the door, though, he stopped, turning around and saying, "By the way, Mike, where were you before we met up at the Blue Ribbon?"

  I made a face and shrugged. "Pat, believe it or not, I was visiting a sick friend."

  "Horseshit," he said.

  But it was fairly good-natured, and he even threw me a kind of wave.

  I heard him tell Velda so long and, when he was gone, she came into my inner sanctum and up to my desk and handed me a memo. "You didn't exactly put a big smile on his face," she said, though she was smiling.

  "He should buy me a six-pack for what I gave him. Right now he's one up on every other cop in town."

  "Not on us." She flicked the memo. "I took the liberty of calling Bud Tiller to do a little work for us."

  "Yeah? He does owe me a favor."

  "Not anymore. Bud pried a little information out of the desk clerk at the Avondale Hotel, which is not a flophouse exactly, if only a couple rungs up."

  "My mugger in the mod suit was living in less than luxury?"

  "So it would seem. Russell Frazer moved out of that place six months ago after a two-year stay. Apparently he never bothered changing his address on his driver's license. Anyway, he moved someplace up near his job and gave his work as his forwarding address, in case he got any mail." She gave me a look that said another shoe was about to drop. Then she dropped it: "Russell Frazer was employed six blocks from Dorchester Medical College."

  I let out a low whistle. "Isn't that interesting? Where exactly did my well-dressed attacker work?"

  "It's a ceramics shop. Apparently he drove the delivery truck, but we'll need to do some more digging. And you'll want to do some digging, because I've got a connection between Frazer and one of the freaks who jumped Billy Blue."

  If I had straightened any more, I'd be standing. "Spill it, sugar."

  "Before Frazer moved to the Avondale? He lived on the same street as the Brix kid—just a few blocks away."

  My eyes tightened; so did my hands. "What a cute little play this is...."

  She cocked her head. "Mike—if they were friends, hitting you could have a revenge motive."

  "Naw, it's thin."

  She arched an eyebrow. "People have been known to kill other people, over revenge, you know."

  I gave her a look. "Sarcasm doesn't become you, baby."

  She was smiling. If I weren't preoccupied, I would have smashed her in that mouth. With my mouth.

  "So," I asked her, "were they friends?"

  "Bud didn't get that far. But it's possible. Frazer was three years older, and that's roughly the same age bracket."

  "It could make sense," I said, and sighed. "But where could he have picked me up? Nobody knew I was going to the hospital. Not even you. Not even me."

  Her smile had settled on one side of her face, and she shook the dark tresses again. "You're not exactly hard to find, Mike. The papers didn't carry your address, but we're in the book. It wouldn't have been tough. He could have tailed you all day, waiting for the right opportunity, and you wouldn't have known it."

  "He'd have to be good for that."

  "Not necessarily. You weren't expecting anything."

  I'd made the same point to Pat. "You'd like it that way, wouldn't you? Just somebody settling a score?"

  "Well, if it were a simple revenge factor, it'd all be over now."

  "Unless there are some more out there who'd like to try their hand at the same game."

  "What happened to Frazer," Velda said with an eyebrow high again, "wouldn't exactly encourage them to try again."

  "Maybe ... but I think I'd better emphasize the point a little."

  She smiled at me and went back to the outer office and her desk, leaving the door open. I sat there and stared at her legs and she parted them to give me a better view and then stuck out her tongue at me, in that taunting, tantalizing way of hers.

  She was damn lucky I was preoccupied.

  I flipped a paper clip at her, but it only made half the trip. Then I got my .45 out of the top desk drawer and checked the clip, and shoved the rod in the holster and got up.

  Outside it had started to rain.

  The state of mind called Greenwich V
illage had gone through another of its periodic shifts, though you would find the same zigzag streets and street-corner poets and shaggy-haired oddballs selling canvases that would make Picasso say, "What the hell?" But the beatniks were gone and the hippies were here, the folk music electric now, and the shops had tourists in mind, not the local populace.

  Both large windows facing the street read VILLAGE CERAMICS SHOPPE in Old English lettering, the rain hitting their surfaces and blurring the multicolored pieces on display behind them. It was a three-story renovated building tucked between two newer, higher ones, faced with stucco and stained timbers like an old London townhouse. A pair of young housewife types, heads tucked under those silly mushroom umbrellas, ducked around me, went inside, and I followed them in.

  The interior was bare brick walls and a hardwood floor with aisles of pine shelving displaying glazed pottery, mostly in shades of green and brown but with the occasional more colorful item. The feeling was of spare simplicity and, for a few minutes, I just went up and down the aisles, looking at the finished pieces with price tags that landed somewhere between reasonable and outrageous. A few aisles were devoted to the practical—vases and bowls, plates and cups and other dinnerware—but the majority were decorative pieces, cats and leopards and female nudes as well as abstractions.

  Eventually the heavyset woman at the counter waiting on a customer noticed me, hit a hand bell, and the curtains to the rear section flipped open and a lovely blonde in a paint-stained smock stood there filling the archway. She was in her mid-twenties, maybe five five, with the kind of curves even a loose-fitting outfit like that couldn't hide, her eyes big and brown and generously lashed.

  She used those remarkable orbs to look around until she found the unattended customer, then smiled and happy-hipped over, trying to wipe the stains from her hands on a paper towel. A little smear of green highlighted one cheek, but that only made her prettier, and then she asked, "May I help you, sir?"

  It was in a voice that fit the rest of her perfectly—smooth, rounded, and velvety.