A Long Time Dead Read online

  After three tries on my own door, I had the routine down pat. Once it was in place, the little spring-loaded gimmick was hardly noticeable. I eased out into the hall, walked down to room 620, slipped the gizmo into the proper spot, then went back to my room again.

  After two rings, he answered the phone with a pleasant, resonant, “Hello?” He sounded curious but not at all anxious.

  I put something nasal in my voice. “Mr. Grossman?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the front desk, sir. When we entered your credit card in our machine, there was a malfunction and the printout was illegible. Strictly our problem, but would it be too much trouble for you to come down and let us do it over?”

  “Not at all. I’ll be there right away.”

  “Thank you. The management would like to send a complimentary drink to your room for the inconvenience.”

  “That’s nice of you. Make it a martini. Very dry.”

  “Yes. Certainly, sir.”

  He was punctual, all right. His feet came by my door, and I waited until the elevator opened and shut, then went to his room and went the hell on in. Wouldn’t be time to shake the place down. All I wanted was one thing and I lucked out: he had used the water glass in the bathroom and his prints were all over it. I replaced it with one from my room, after wetting it down, then took the gimmick off the door, which I let close behind me.

  The hall was still empty when I shut myself up in my own room. I pulled the bed covers down, messed up the sheets, punched a dent in the pillow and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door knob.

  When I got to the lobby, the guy calling himself Grossman was just leaving the bell desk with two no-nonsense security types. They both wore frozen expressions, having been through countless scam situations before. Grossman’s face seemed to say someone was playing a joke on him, and nothing more.

  My pal Pat Chambers was Captain of Homicide and couldn’t be bothered with chasing wild gooses.

  “No it’s not Grant Kratch’s print,” he growled at me over the phone, after running the errand for me. “Jesus, Mike, that guy is dead as hell!”

  “I wish I’d made him that way. Then I could be sure.”

  “The print belongs to Arnold Veslo, a smalltime hood who hasn’t been in trouble with the law since the mid-fifties.”

  “What kind of smalltime hood, Pat?”

  “He had a couple of local busts for burglary, then turned up as a wheelman for Cootie Banners in Trenton. Did a little time and dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Dropped off the face of the earth when? About the time the state fried Kratch?”

  “I guess. So what?”

  “Messenger over Veslo’s photo and anything you got on him.”

  “Oh, well, sure! We aim to please, Mr. Hammer!”

  “I pay my taxes,” I said, and hung up on him.

  Velda had been eavesdropping from the doorway, but now the big beautiful brunette swung her hips into my inner sanctum, pulled up the client’s chair and filled it, crossing long, lovely legs. She could turn a simple white blouse and black skirt into a public decency beef.

  “You want me to start checking on this Arnold Veslo?”

  I shook my head. “We’ll wait and see what Pat sends over. What about the aunt?”

  Most people thought Velda was my secretary. They were right, as far as it went—but she was also the other licensed P.I. in this office, and my partner. In various ways.

  “Long time dead,” she said. “Some bitterness about that in the old neighborhood—seems Kratch didn’t leave the old lady a dime.”

  I was trying to get a Lucky going with the desk lighter. She got up, thumbed it to life with one try, and lit me up. “Sure you aren’t seeing ghosts?”

  “Once I’ve killed this guy—really killed him—then maybe I’ll see a ghost.”

  She settled her lovely fanny on the edge of my desk, folded her arms over the impressive shelf of her bosom, and the lush, luscious mouth curled into a catlike smile. “That all it takes to get a death sentence out of you, Mike? Just resemble some long-gone killer?”

  I grinned at her through drifting smoke. “That was Kratch, all right, doll. And I don’t think there was anything supernatural about it.”

  I’d already filled her in on what I’d got at the Commodore. It wasn’t the kind of hotel where engravings of George Washington could get you much information. But Abraham Lincoln still had a following.

  “So you’re stalking an insurance salesman from Lincoln, Nebraska,” she said, her mouth amused but her eyes worried, “in the big city for a convention.”

  “Not just a salesman. He has his own agency. And he’ll be here through Sunday. So we’ve got a couple days. And I hung onto my room on the sixth floor. So I have a base of operations.”

  “So there’s no rush killing him, then.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Remind me how this pays the overhead again?”

  “Some things,” I said, “a guy has to do just to feel good about himself.”

  The file Pat sent over on Arnold Veslo seemed an immediate dead end. During the war, young Veslo had been tossed out of the army for getting drunk and beating up an officer. As Pat indicated on the phone, the lowlife’s stellar postwar career ran from burglary to assault, and notes indicated he’d been connected to Cootie Banner, part of a home invasion crew whose members were all either dead or in stir.

  But where was Veslo now?

  If that fingerprint was to be believed, he was an insurance broker named Grossman staying at the Commodore. But as far as the states of New York and New Jersey knew, Veslo had been released from Rahway a dozen years ago and done a disappearing act.

  This time I was in Velda’s domain, the outer office, sitting on the edge of her desk, which visually doesn’t stack up with her sitting on the edge of my desk, but you can’t have everything. I was studying the Veslo file.

  “I can’t find any connection,” I said. “But I do have a hunch.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Rarely a good sign. …”

  “Stay with me.” I showed her the mug shots. “You remember what Kratch looked like, right? Would you say this guy bears a resemblance?”

  She squinted at the front-and-side photos I was dangling. “Not really.”

  “Look past the big nose and the bushy eyebrows. Check out the bone structure.”

  “Well … yeah. It’s there, I suppose. What, plastic surgery?”

  I shrugged. “Kratch had dough up the wazoo. It’s Hollywood bullshit that you can turn anybody into anybody else, under the knife—but if you start out with a resemblance, and the facial underpinning is right …”

  “Maybe,” she said with a grudging nod. “But so what? You aren’t seriously suggesting a scenario where Kratch hires Veslo to undergo plastic surgery, and then … take his place?”

  “Kratch had enough dough to pull just about anything off.”

  For as beautiful as she was, she could serve up an ugly smirk. “Sure. Makes great sense. Here’s a million bucks, pal—all you gotta do is die for me. And by the way, let’s trade fingerprints!”

  “There are only two places in the system where fingerprint cards would need switching—Central Headquarters and the prison itself—and suddenly Kratch’s new swirls are Veslo’s old ones.”

  She frowned in thought. “Just bribe a couple of clerks. … It could be done. So what now, Mike?”

  “Doll,” I said, sliding off the desk onto the floor, “I got things I want you to check out—you’ll need the private detective’s chief weapon to do it, though.”

  “What, a .45? You know I pack a .38.”

  “That’s an understatement.” I patted the phone on the desk. “Here’s your weapon. You walk your fingers. Mike has to follow his nose.”

  I told her what I wanted done, retr
ieved my hat from the closet and headed out.

  George at the Blue Ribbon on Forty-fourth Street had a habit of hiring ex-cops for bartenders. It wasn’t a rough joint by any means, in fact a classy German restaurant with a bar decorated by signed celebrity photos and usually some of the celebrities who signed them. Still, a bar is a bar and having aprons who could handle themselves always came in handy.

  Lou Berwicki was in his mid-sixties, and worked afternoons, six-two of muscle and bone and gristle, with a bucket head, stubbly gray hair and ice-blue eyes that missed nothing.

  He was also an ex-cellblock guard from Rahway State Prison.

  Lou got off at four-thirty, and I was waiting for him at my usual table in a nook around a corner. I had ordered us both beers and, as his last duty of the shift, he brought them over.

  We shook. He had one of those beefy paws your hand can get lost in, even a mitt like mine.

  “Great to see you, Lou.”

  “Stuff it, Mike—I can tell by that shit-eating grin, this is business. What the hell can an old warhorse like me do to help a young punk like you?”

  I liked guys in their sixties. They thought guys in their thirties were young.

  I said, “I need to thumb through your memory book, Lou. Need some info about Rahway, and I hate driving to New Jersey.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “You didn’t work Death Row.”

  “Hell no. My God, it was depressing enough on the main cellblocks.”

  “But you knew the guys who did?”

  “Yeah. Knew everybody there. Big place, small staff—we all knew each other. Paid to. What’s this about?”

  I lighted up a smoke; took some in, let some out. “About ten years ago they gave Grant Kratch the hot squat.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  “How well did you know the bulls working that block?”

  “Enough, I guess. What’s this about, Mike?”

  “Any rotten apples?”

  He shrugged. “You know how it is. Prison pay stinks. So there’s always guys willing to do favors.”

  “How about a big favor?”

  “Don’t follow. …”

  “I have a wild hair up my ass, Lou. You may need another beer to follow this. …”

  “Try me.”

  “Say a guy comes to visit Kratch, maybe the day before he’s set to take the electric cure. This guy maybe comes in as Kratch’s lawyer—might be he’s in a beard and glasses and wig.”

  “I think I will have that beer …” Lou gulped the rest of his down, and waved a waitress over. “I didn’t know you were still readin’ comic books, Mike.”

  “Hear me out. Say this guy has had plastic surgery and is now a ringer for Kratch—”

  “This may take a boilermaker.”

  “So they switch clothes, and Kratch walks, and the ringer gets the juice.”

  Lou shook his head, laughed without humor. “It’s a fairy tale, Mike. Who would do that? Who would take a guy’s place in the hot seat?”

  “Maybe somebody with cancer or some other incurable disease. Somebody who has family he wants taken care of. Remember that guy in Miami, who popped Cermak for the Capone crowd? He had cancer of the stomach.”

  The old ex-prison guard was well into the second beer now. Maybe that was why he said, “Okay. So what you’re saying is, could you pull that off with the help of the right bent screw?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Was anybody working on Death Row at that time that could have been bought? And we’re talking big money, Lou—Irish sweepstakes money.”

  The beer froze halfway from the table to his face. Lou was a pale guy naturally but he went paler.

  “Shit,” he said. “Conrad.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Conrad. He was only about fifty, but he took early retirement. The word was, he’d inherited dough. He went to Florida. Him and his wife and kids.”

  “He was crooked?”

  “Everybody knew he was the guy selling booze and cigarettes to the inmates. Legend has it he snuck women in. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you something that’ll curl your hair.”

  “Go, man.”

  He leaned forward. “Somebody murdered Conrad—maybe … a year after he moved down there. Murdered him and his whole family. He had a nice-looking teenage daughter who got raped in the bargain. Real nasty shit, man.”

  I was smiling.

  “Jesus, Mike—I tell you a horror story and you start grinning. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Maybe I know something you don’t.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “That the story might have a happy ending.”

  Velda was in the client’s chair again, but her legs weren’t crossed—her feet were on the floor and her knees together. Prim as a schoolmarm.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “I said it was a hunch.”

  She was pale as death, after hearing what Lou had shared with me.

  “Arnold Veslo had a good-looking wife and child, a young boy,” she said, reporting what she’d discovered. “Two weeks after Kratch was executed, Mrs. Veslo was found at home—raped and murdered. The boy’s neck was snapped. No one was ever brought to justice. What kind of monster—”

  “You know what kind.”

  She leaned in and tapped the fat file folder on my desk. “Like you asked, I checked our file on Veslo—it’s mostly clippings, but there’s a lot of them. And I put the key one on top.”

  I flipped the folder open, and they stared back at me, both of them—Arnold Veslo and Grant Kratch. Veslo in a chauffeur’s cap and uniform, opening the car door for his employer, Kratch, who’d been brought in for questioning two weeks before I hauled his ass and the necessary evidence into the Fourth Precinct.

  “You were right,” she said, rapping a knuckle on the yellowed newsprint. “Veslo worked for Kratch. How did you know? What are you, psychic?”

  “No. I’m not even smart. But I saw a murderer today, a living, breathing one, and I knew there had to be a way.”

  She shrugged. “So we bring Pat in, right? You lay it all out, and the investigation begins. If Grossman really is Kratch, then before his ‘death,’ Kratch had to find a way to transfer his estate into some kind of bank setup where his new identity could access it. That kind of thing can be traced. You can get this guy, Mike.”

  “Velda, we know for sure Kratch killed and raped thirty-seven women over a five-year period. Mostly prostitutes and runaways. You remember our clients’ faces? The parents of the last girl?”

  She swallowed and nodded.

  “Well, it’s a damn sure bet that he also killed that prison guard’s family and Veslo’s, and got his jollies with a couple more sexual assaults along the way. And do you really think that’s his whole damn tally?”

  “What do you mean, Mike?”

  “I mean ‘Grossman’ has spent the last ten years doing more than selling insurance, you can damn well bet. Think about it—you just know there are missing women in unmarked graves all across the heartland.”

  “God,” she said, ashen. “How many more has he killed?”

  “No one but that sick bastard knows. But you can be sure of one thing, doll.”

  “What?”

  “There won’t be any more.”

  Back in my hotel room, I was still weighing exactly how I wanted to play this. I’d been seen here, and a few people knew I’d been asking about Grossman, so even if I handled this with care, I’d probably get hauled in for questioning.

  And of course Captain Pat Chambers already knew the basics of the situation.

  With my door open, and me sitting in a chair with my back to the wall, I had a concealed view of the hallway. I wasn’t even sure Kratch was in his room. I was c
onsidering going down there, and using the passkey I’d taken Spider up on, and just taking my chances confronting the bastard. I’d rigged self-defense pleas before.

  Which was the problem. I was a repeat offender in that department, and the right judge could get frisky.

  I was mulling this when the bellboy brought the cute little prostitute—because that’s surely what she was—up to the door of 620. She had curly blonde Annie hair and a sparkly blue minidress and looked about sixteen.

  I could see Kratch, in a white terry cloth Commodore robe, slip into the hall, give the bellboy a twenty, pat him on the shoulder, send him on his way, pat the prostitute on the bottom, and guide her in.

  Knowing Kratch’s sexual proclivities, I didn’t feel I had much choice but to intervene. My .45 was tucked in the speed rig under my sport jacket, the passkey in my hand. It was about ten p.m. and traffic in the hall was scant—too late for people to be heading out, too early for them to be coming back.

  So I stood by that door and listened. I could hear them in there talking. He was smooth, with a resonant baritone, very charming. She sounded young and a little high. Whether drugs or booze, I couldn’t tell you.

  Then it got quiet, and that worried me.

  What the hell, I thought, and I used the passkey.

  I got lucky—they were in the bathroom. The door was cracked and I could hear his smooth banter and her girlish giggling, a radio going, some middle-of-the-road station playing romantic strings, mixed with the bubbling rumble of a Jacuzzi.

  I got the .45 out and helped myself to a real look around, this time—this was a suite, a sprawl of luxury. There was a wet bar and I could see where he’d made drinks for them. In back of the bar, I found the pill bottle, and a sniff of a lipstick-kissed glass told me the bastard had slipped her a mickey.

  That wasn’t the most fun thing he had in store for her—I checked the three big suitcases, and one had clothes, and another had toys. You know the kind—handcuffs and whips and chains and assorted S & M goodies. Nothing was in the last big, oversize suitcase.

  Not yet.

  So he had a whole evening planned for her, didn’t he? But there’s always a party pooper in the crowd. …