A Long Time Dead Read online

  His lips were thick and wet, and his bulbous nose had an exploded look. But the tiny dark eyes in their pouches were not stupid. “If I point you to him, Mike, will you take it outside?”

  “If I can.”

  He made an expansive gesture. “All I ask.”

  I put a hand on a soft shoulder with a bone poking out like a rump roast. “First, Benny Joe, tell me. Is Tony a pimp? Do his girls come around and drop off the proceeds around closing?”

  The froglike face frowned. “I don’t know what he is, but pimp? Not that I know of.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, he’s not muscle. Too wiry. Dealer, maybe. Possibly acquires things that are not rightly his. Various unsavory means toward an end. Follow?”

  “Yeah.” I sipped beer. “Is he a regular?”

  “No, more a now-and-then. I seen him time-to-time meeting in a back booth with possible business associates discussing potential deals, I would say.”

  “Anything else?”

  His shoulders shrugged but the rest of his body stood still. “Well, word is he’s a pretty fair wheel man. That bank robbery crew last year, hitting all around the boroughs? Might have been him driving. He did some stockcar racing upstate. They say. What do I know?”

  “Just everything, Benny Joe. Just everything.”

  He held up fat hands like a plump crossing guard. “Please try not to bust up the joint.”

  “Do my best.”

  “Last booth on the left. Back by the johns.”

  I finished my beer. “Got it.”

  The booths were packed with sailors and dock workers, drinking and laughing, some with women, hookers and cheap dates and what-have-you. And what these girls might have you didn’t want.

  Only one booth was home to a solitary drinker, at left next to the little hallway with the toilets. In a dark sweatshirt and jeans, he was working on a pilsner of beer in no hurry. He was medium-sized with dark brown hair just long enough to handle the sideburns. His eyes were brown, crowding his aquiline nose, and his teeth were slightly bucked. He was in his late twenties but his cheeks were still freckled with acne.

  He was my mugger.

  He was also Tony Dyne.

  The guy I came here to talk to.

  But he was in no mood to talk, judging by how seeing me he immediately abandoned his beer to go wide-eyed scrambling out of the booth and heading down toward the end of the hallway where the red EXIT sign glowed. I caught him before he got there and flung him through a door optimistically marked GENTLEMEN. He went flying into and through the door of the only enclosed stall and sat down there, jarringly. Two guys at the urinals finished up and went out without looking at us or washing their hands, either.

  Benny Joe came blustering in, saying, “Mike, Mike, damnit boy, I told you—”

  “Put a ‘Closed for Cleaning’ sign on the door, Benny Joe.”

  “I don’t have one!”

  “Then hang an ‘Out-of-Order!’ And get lost.”

  He sighed, shook his head, but went out.

  It smelled like you’d expect, excrement, urine and puke fighting for dominance. The floor was filthy enough to be modern art. The washstand looked like something leaned against the wall waiting to be thrown out, and the mirror was a smeary thing reflective of nothing at all.

  He was shaking. At first I thought he was in need of a fix. But he was no druggie. No longhair wig tonight, either. He was just flat-out scared shitless.

  “Three times you tried to kill me, Tony. Why?”

  He played no games. No denials at all.

  “I knew you were comin’ after me! Everybody knows about you. Everybody knows what you do to people.”

  “I wasn’t coming after you, Tony.”

  His eyes were wild, upper lip quivering over the bucked teeth. “You’re here, ain’t you?”

  “I’m here. Because you killed that old guy in the lobby of the Hackard Building.”

  He was shaking his head, but it didn’t mean “no.” “I … I … hell, man, I just lost my cool. I thought you’d be there and you wasn’t and he starts asking questions and got loud and …”

  “And you shot him.”

  He nodded. The close-set eyes looked sorry. “Didn’t mean to, man.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Hired me? Nobody hired me. I told you. Night after night, you went walking past where that hooker died.”

  “How did you know I did that?”

  “Your name … it was in the papers. Little squib on the accident, but your name jumped out at me. So I … started following you.”

  “I never saw you.”

  “I’m good at it. Mostly it was in a car. Different car every night.”

  “You’d boost a different car every night. Just to follow me?”

  He nodded. His tongue curved around the buck teeth. “Worked, didn’t it? And I was right, wasn’t I? Here you are!”

  “Take it easy. Now. Who hired you?”

  “I told you—”

  I slapped him. “Not to kill me. To kill Helen Fainey.”

  “Oh. Her.”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  He swallowed. His cheek was red. Then he spilled in a rush of words that would have challenged a court reporter.

  “A guy named Clifford. Lawrence Clifford. He’s from Nebraska, Omaha, but he does lots of business in New York. Insurance or something. You know, married guy, likes to fool around. I guess he took a shine to this Fainey bitch. Got to seeing her regular when he come to town. Then maybe she tried to blackmail him or some crap. I dunno. He wanted her gone.”

  I pointed toward the bar. “You arranged it here, didn’t you? Right out in that booth.”

  His eyes were wide under a furrowed brow. “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “How much did he pay?”

  “A grand. Cash.”

  I slapped him again.

  “What the hell was that for, man?”

  “Just for me, Tony. You were supposed to meet Clifford here tonight, right?”

  He frowned at me, studying me like I was a witch. “How do you know this shit?”

  “Why were you meeting him, Tony?”

  “I … I told him I needed more money. I needed to get out of town.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes widened again and his upper lip curled back over the bucked teeth. “Why do you think? Because Mike Hammer was on my ass! Get real!”

  That was when he sprang.

  Leapt right at me and took us both from the stall and I went backward, balance gone, hitting my tailbone on the floor and my head on the washstand pillar. Stunned, I heard the click and then he was over me, grinning like a demented surgeon, the blade the only gleaming thing in this dingy chamber. His hand with the knife moved and my knee drove his balls up into him and as he crumpled in two, screeching in pain, I grabbed him by the wrist and swung his hand with the blade into himself with a sickening squish and put everything into it as I swung the sunk-in blade around in an uneven circle that opened his stomach up and let him reconsider what he had for supper.

  I got to my feet, breathing hard. Hardly any gore on me. On the back of my head a bump was rising, but it wasn’t wet with blood.

  Tony Dyne lay sprawled on the grimy floor, his guts spilled out.

  Benny Joe pushed his way in and his expression was tragic. Somehow his men’s room had managed to get nastier. “Mike, Mike, boy, what have you done?”

  “I kept it in here, didn’t I? You got a phone I can use? I need to call Captain Chambers of Homicide.”

  The fat face fought hysteria. “The cops? Why, Mike? I can take care of this for you.”

  “You’re a pal, Benny Joe, but I need to do this the right way. Better leave the ‘Out of Order’ sign on the door a while.”

  We
both stepped out. Grissi was shaking his head. He looked like he’d lost his best friend.

  “This is gonna be so bad for business.”

  “A killing?”

  “No! Having cops in the place.”

  At a phone brought out from under the counter, I called Pat and told him where to send his team, asking him to come personally.

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” he said sourly and hung up.

  This time Pat got there before the forensics team. He looked around at the dismal, emptied-out bar and said, “Glad you found a new regular hang-out, Mike. Puts the Blue Ribbon to shame.”

  “Save the sarcasm,” I said.

  I walked him to the men’s room and explained in broad strokes what had happened.

  “I’m not surprised,” Pat said, nodding down at the dead man. “He killed Gus and you killed him.”

  “Hey, I was going to hand him over to you. As a kind of olive branch. But the guy jumped me. With a knife. What could I do?”

  “Help him disembowel himself, apparently.”

  Now the forensics crew came and we made way for them, stepping back out into the now-empty bar. A plainclothes guy was interviewing an obsequious Benny Joe Grissi.

  “Okay, Pat,” I said. “I’m going to prove myself to you. I’m going to give you a killer, and I’m not even coming along.”

  He grunted half a laugh. “This should be good.”

  “It is good. The guy who hired the late Tony Dyne to run down Helen Fainey is a Nebraska businessman named Lawrence Clifford.”

  I shared with Pat what Velda had dug up for me, including that our insurance contacts confirmed Tony Dyne as a suspected expert in staging vehicular accidents. And also that the “most successful ad agency in the Tri-State area” didn’t exist, among other interesting facts about our client. No wonder he’d paid me in cash.

  Like he had Tony Dyne.

  “You’ll find Clifford at the New Yorker Hotel,” I told him. “Registered as Andrew Fainey.”

  He frowned. “Fainey?”

  “Clifford came around to my office this morning pretending to be Helen’s father.”

  I gave him chapter and verse.

  “You saw through him right away?” Pat asked.

  “No, but enough to have Vel call around on him.” I shrugged. “The guy said himself that the story of his daughter was an old one, and he was way too vague—hell, he didn’t know the name of the detective hired to find his daughter’s killer!”

  “But he knew your name all right.” There was some sneer in his smile. “Your reputation precedes you.”

  “I guess it does. I think he arranged for me to meet up with Tony Dyne tonight to kill his ass …”

  “Which you did.”

  “… or maybe vice versa, which would’ve worked out almost as well for him. But I think he figured I’d prevail and all his problems would vanish.”

  Pat was thinking about it. “With Dyne dead, I wonder if we’ll have enough to put Clifford away.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “I can’t do your whole job for you, chum. I’ll testify to what Dyne told me before he died. Should be enough.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  And Pat Chambers shook his head and laughed.

  A Long Time Dead

  Kratch was dead.

  They ran forty thousand volts through him in the stone mansion called Rahway State Prison with eight witnesses in attendance to watch him strain against the straps and smoke until his heart had stopped and his mind quit functioning.

  An autopsy had opened his body to visual inspection and all his parts had been laid out on a table, probed and pored over, then slopped back in the assorted cavities and sewn shut with large economical stitches.

  One old aunt, his mother’s sister, came forth to claim the remains and, with what little she had, treated him to a funeral. Kratch had left a fortune but it was tied up, and auntie was on his mother’s side of the family, and poor—Dad had married a succession of showgirls, and Kratch’s mom had been the only one to produce an heir.

  Whether hoping for a bequest or out of a sense of decency her nephew hadn’t inherited, the old girl sat beside the coffin for two days and two nights, moving only to replace the candles when they burned down. Her next-door neighbor brought her the occasional plate of food, crying softly because nobody else had come to this wake.

  Just before the hearse arrived, a small man carrying a camera entered the room, smiled at the old lady, offered his condolences and asked if he could take a picture of the infamous departed.

  There was no objection.

  Quietly, he moved around the inexpensive wooden coffin, snapped four shots with a 35MM Nikon, thanked auntie and left. The next day the news service carried a sharp, clear photo of the notorious Grant Kratch, even to the stitches where they had slid his scalp back after taking off the top of his head on the autopsy table.

  No doubt about it.

  Kratch was dead.

  The serial killer who had sent at least thirty-seven sexually defiled young women to early graves was nothing more than a compost pile himself now.

  It had been a pleasure to nail that bastard. I had wanted to kill him when I found him, but the chance that he might give up information during interrogation that would bring some peace of mind to dozens of loved ones out there made me restrain myself.

  I knew it was a risk—he was a rich kid who had inherited enough loot to bribe his way out of about anything—but I figured the papers would play up the horror show of the bodies buried on his Long Island estate and keep corruption at bay.

  So I’d dragged him into the Fourth Precinct Station, let the cops have him, then sat through the trial where he got the death penalty, sweated out the appeal lest some soft-hearted judge drop it to a life sentence, then was a witness to his smoldering contortions in the big oaken hot seat.

  Oh, Kratch was dead all right.

  Then what was he doing on a sunny Spring afternoon, getting into a taxicab outside the Eastern terminal at LaGuardia Airport?

  Damn. I felt like I was in an acid dropper’s kaleidoscope—it came fast, so fast, no warning … just a slow turn of the head and there he was, thirty feet away, a big man in a Brooks Brothers suit with a craggily handsome face whose perversity exposed itself only in his eyes, and the hate wrenched at my stomach and I could taste the bitterness of vomit. I had my hand on the butt of the .45 and almost yanked it out of the jacket when my reflexes caught hold and froze me to the spot.

  Those same reflexes kept me out of his line of sight while my mind detailed every inch of him. He wasn’t trying to hide. He wasn’t doing a damn thing except standing there waiting for a taxi to pick him up. When one came, he told the cabbie to take him to the Commodore and the voice he spoke in was Kratch’s voice.

  And Kratch was a long time dead.

  I flagged down the next cab and told the driver to take me to the Commodore, and gave him the route I wanted. All he had to do was look at my face and he knew something was hot and leaned into the job. I was forty-five seconds behind Kratch at the terminal, but I was waiting in the Commodore lobby a full five minutes before he came in.

  At the desk he said his name was Grossman and they put him on the sixth floor. I got to the elevator bank before he did, went up to the sixth and waited out of sight until he got out and walked away. When he’d gone in his room, I eased past it and noted the number—620.

  Downstairs I asked for something on the sixth, got 601, then went up to my room and sat down to try to put a wild fifty minutes into focus.

  There are some things so highly improbable that any time considering them is wasted time. All I knew was that I had just seen Kratch and that the son of a bitch was a long time dead. So that put a lookalike on the scene—a possible twin or a relative with an exceptional r
esemblance.

  Bullshit.

  That was Kratch I saw. Not unless they had developed human clones, after all. I looked around the room I’d laid down eighty bucks for, wondering just what I had been thinking about when I registered. Been a long while since I’d taken off half-cocked on a dead run like this and I had damned near pushed myself into a corner.

  Great plan I had—push his door button, then pull a gun on him, walk inside and do a dance on his head—maybe I’d pop those autopsy stitches. Only if I had the wrong guy my ass was grass. I’d had to drop a credit card at the registry desk and a halfway decent description would point a finger right at me.

  Aside from a dead guy who was up and walking around, the basic situation wasn’t a new one—I wanted to look around somebody else’s hotel room. And after a lot of years in the private cop business in New York, I had plenty of options, legal and ill. I propped my door open enough to see anybody who might pass by, then dialed the Spider’s number and got his terse, “Yeah?”

  “Mike Hammer, kid.”

  It had been more than a year since I’d seen him, so I got a special greeting: “Whaddya want?”

  “That gimmick you use for not letting a hotel door shut all the way.”

  “You goin’ inta my business?”

  “Don’t get smart.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Commodore.”

  “And you can’t rig something up your own self? Hell, you got wire in the furniture, and in the toilet bowl—”

  “Look, I haven’t got time. Just bring it over.”

  “Give me till tonight and I’ll get you a passkey.”

  “No. Now.”

  “Mike—cut a guy a break. Security knows me there.”

  “Then send Billy. I’m in 601.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass, Mike.”

  “Tell me that when yours is back in the can again.”

  “Okay.” He let out a sigh that was meant for me to hear. “This better even up the books.”

  “Not hardly. But it’s a start.”

  Twenty minutes later, Billy Chappey, looking like the original preppie, showed up at my door to hand me a small envelope, winked knowingly and strutted off. He sure didn’t look like one of the best safe-crackers in the city.