Kiss Her Goodbye Read online

  "And it's a pretty routine killing, Mr. Hammer. She was stabbed in the heart—she bled out very quickly, was dead in seconds."

  "Her body was twisted when she was stabbed, right?"

  "Correct. Her assailant came up from behind, apparently cut her purse straps with his knife, and then she turned and he used the knife again. Tragic, but hardly unusual. Not in this city."

  "No," I said, getting up, "not in this city."

  I was heading south on Third Avenue, on foot, aware of the graduated flow from one neighborhood into the next. Here, money would swell out like a pouter pigeon's chest, next a block might get skinny with the dust of an excavated building only to erupt into noisy ethnics before getting back into the blender of lower Manhattan, where you were no better than what you could hang on to.

  A halter-top/hot-pants girl in a doorway, pretty despite her drug habit, said, "Hey, handsome—you want to party?"

  That was New York again, anytime, anyplace. At night in the dirty Forties, or before noon in lower Manhattan, sex was always for sale.

  I looked at my watch, pretending to consider it, then shook my head. "Too early, sweetheart."

  She let out a little laugh and shrugged. "Your loss."

  Actually, my gain. What was funny, after all these years, was how few tourists knew the halter-top honey was only bait. Day or night, upstairs some punk would lay open your head with a sap, grab your loot, and drop you off a block away.

  Better off with a pickup in a bar. If you knew the ropes, all you got was a possible VD. Hell, sometimes it was for real too, maybe you found a chickie who really did want some company; but you damn well had better use some finely tuned professional judgment.

  I met Pat outside the baroque old building on Centre Street where TV cameras were filming a documentary on the early years of the city. There was no show-business hype on this one, no stars, no press agents—just a second-unit camera crew doing MOS filming of exteriors, a standard union bunch making a routine buck.

  When I spotted Pat on the sidewalk, I walked over and said, "Looking for a part?"

  He didn't even turn his head. He had a battered manila envelope under his arm. "Yeah, as the fall guy in your life story."

  "Ms. Marshall called, huh?"

  Now he looked at me like I'd asked to borrow a C-note. "She was not thrilled with me, passing you off as an NYPD cop last night."

  "But you got off with a spanking, right? Worse dames to get a spanking from."

  He picked out a stick of chewing gum, unwrapped it, and shoved it in his mouth; he'd stopped smoking, too. "You've been back one day."

  "Almost."

  "Uh-huh." He chewed on the gum, dragging out the flavor, then asked, "Why'd you have to pick La Marshall to move in on, for Christsakes?"

  "It was at her invitation, remember?"

  "Hey—she invited you through yours truly. You accepting that invite involved me. And I have to work in this department, you know."

  I shrugged. "I think she enjoyed herself. Women love me, Pat. Remember?"

  It was as if no year had passed. It was like those days when we were a little younger and still breathing hard.

  He frowned at me, but his eyes weren't angry at all. "Mike—what the hell is going on?"

  "Nothing's going on, Pat. I just asked what brought an important gal like her to the scene of some unimportant mugging."

  His frown tightened until his eyes were almost shut. "Goddamn you, Mike. Why do you have to be such a fucking catalyst? You come back, and everything gets activated."

  "Bullshit."

  "No. Not bullshit. The guys at Doolan's funeral knew it, seeing you materialize like a goddamn apparition. Those goombahs sure as hell knew it. Les Graves knew it, seeing you at that crime scene last night. Now finally I know it. Finally it gets through my thick skull that Mike Hammer has decided an open-and-shut suicide is a murder, and so is a mugging fatality so routine it barely made the papers. One lousy goddamn day, and you've turned it all upside down again."

  "It's a gift, Pat."

  But there was no way to tell him that coming up on the plane, I'd had the same feeling—vague, but there. Not that I was going to do something, but that something was going to be done to me. Done to me good—real good. It wasn't a nice feeling at all.

  "So what was Marshall doing at that crime scene?"

  His turn to shrug. "Far as I know, just checking out a murder."

  "And that's it?"

  "She wanted to know whether Homicide was looking into that girl's murder."

  "Virginia Mathes, you mean."

  His eyes widened. "How the hell do you know her name? It wasn't in the papers."

  "Maybe I'm psychic."

  "Mike ... Mike. I'm getting too near retirement to play your kind of games."

  A little laugh rumbled out of me. I took a look around, saw every crack in the masonry, and smelled the garbage in the gutter. Where I came from, the ocean would be warm, the sand squeaky-crunching under bare feet, and the boat ready to nose out into the Gulf Stream.

  I said, "Who was she, Pat?"

  He made one of those little noncommittal gestures. "You said it yourself—Virginia Mathes."

  "Pat..."

  "She was nobody."

  "Nobody's nobody."

  "She was," he told me. "Six years ago, she made a stab at entertaining in a club and got printed as part of our licensing requirement. We ran her through Social Security, got her address and where she worked. She was a waitress at Ollie Joe's Steak House for two years, was well liked, had nothing against her in our files, just walked out of Ollie Joe's last night and got herself killed."

  "Just like that."

  "You were there, Mike."

  "Ollie Joe's sure as hell isn't in that neighborhood. But you've already been to Ollie Joe's, haven't you, Pat? And found out something else, too?"

  Ten seconds dragged by; we were just two gawkers on the street watching a film crew. Finally he looked at me.

  "Mike, I didn't find out a damned thing."

  "What didn't you find out?"

  I knew he was going to tell me. He ran it around his brain a couple of times, but we had been together too many times on too many things for too goddamn long.

  "Before she left," he said with a sigh, "a guy came in and—according to the cashier—seemed to know her. He had a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. She was a little more attentive to this patron than usual, but since there weren't many customers there, the cashier didn't think anything about it. The girl liked to gab, I guess."

  "What time was this?"

  "Just before she punched out. She signed her paycheck at the desk, picked up her cash, and left."

  "How much cash?"

  "Thirty-five bucks. Her big money was in tips. The cashier said something seemed to be on her mind when she left."

  "What about the patron she got friendly with?"

  He pitched his gum in the gutter. "He waited maybe two minutes, then he went out too."

  "Like maybe she was about to date this customer...?"

  "Maybe. And according to the cashier, that was unusual. Ginnie—that's what they called her—never did that."

  I gave him the slow grin. "You haven't scratched on Ginnie Mathes's door yet, have you?"

  Pat rubbed his hand over his hair, then took a deep breath of polluted air. "I didn't want to spoil your fun, buddy. Here."

  He slid the manila envelope out from under his arm.

  "What's this?"

  "Doolan stuff. All copies, and you can keep 'em—and keep 'em confidential."

  "Sure."

  His gray eyes studied me like I was a fingerprint under a microscope. "You going to his apartment now?"

  I nodded. "Right from here."

  "Thought maybe you'd hit the Mathes girl's pad first. You're a busy guy for a retired detective—two suspicious deaths to look into, and not back a day."

  "You said that before."

  "Did I?" He slipped a hand into his suitcoat pocket an
d brought out a key paper-clipped to one of his cards. "This is for the police padlock on Doolan's door. We have a light cover on the place, so if anybody tries to stop you, give them my card. If I'm not in the office, my guys will confirm things."

  I nodded my thanks. "Pat, you're welcome to come along. That'd make it official."

  "Since when did you want anything official? Anyway, Mike—what's to see? I told you we picked that place apart. No, this is all yours, my friend. I want you to be totally satisfied with the answers. What I don't want is for you to get a bug up your ass, and go prowling for something that's not there."

  I looked at the key like I was imagining things. "You're fine with this?"

  "I'm fine with this. For once we have a commissioner who likes your style. Why, I'll never know, but he okayed this bit of action. At least I got my ass covered this time."

  "If Doolan's suicide is so open-and-shut, why bother?"

  His grin was an odd mingling of amusement, frustration, and maybe affection. "Mike, you're one of those weird Irishers, the kind they say carries little people in his pocket. You've always had a nose for murder, and you've always been able to smell out the bizarre posing as the routine."

  "Thanks."

  "On the other hand? Sometimes I think when something's going down, and you're riding along, white becomes black, wrong becomes right, and the whole works gets turned upside the hell down."

  "My track record isn't all bad, kiddo."

  "I know, and that's what shakes me up. This Doolan deal is suicide, all right. But I want there to be no doubts. I figure if you're satisfied, anybody would be satisfied."

  "I hope I am, Pat." I meant it, too. "I'm not looking for trouble."

  "Not looking for trouble—do you expect me to believe that? Do you really have yourself believing that?"

  I said nothing.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. "Listen, Mike—on this Mathes thing? I do need to come along. I'll be free in a couple of hours. You call me before you go over there."

  "If Doolan is a straight-up suicide," I said, "and the Mathes kid is a run-of-the-mill mugging turned fatal ... why sweat letting me look into it, Pat? What have you got to lose?"

  "With you around, Mike? Just my badge. Or maybe my sanity."

  I didn't argue the point, just assured Pat I'd call him before I checked the Mathes girl's pad, then grabbed a cab, and gave the driver Doolan's address.

  Chapter 4

  BACK IN THE LATE nineteen-thirties, this neighborhood had been fashionable enough to attract those who had survived the Depression in style. But that bunch moved outward and upward during the Second World War years, and new generations changed the face of it as the growing pains of the city wrenched neighborhoods apart and then rebuilt them all over.

  For twenty years, it had been livable again, a strangely quiet area hoping it wouldn't be noticed. And Doolan had lived there through all the changes, fifty-two years' worth, the last ten as a widower.

  I went up the sandstone steps and pushed the street door open. The vestibule was tiny, the four mailboxes on the left, old-fashioned ornamented brass rectangles with no jimmy marks scarring their surfaces. All had yellow lottery announcements in them.

  I tried the inner door and that was open, too. When it snicked shut behind me, all the street sounds were magically gone and I could feel the loneliness of the place. No sounds at all drifted down the staircase that led to the upper apartments, no cooking smells, not even the feel of life that should be there.

  But there were occupants in those flats, all right—the old and unseen, whose very quietness had an awareness to it.

  And somehow they were watching me.

  Damn, I felt like an idiot letting a thought like that put a tingle at the back of my neck. A couple of years ago, this would have been just another building on another street.

  I walked down the corridor to Doolan's apartment door, read the police notice stapled to the panel, then hefted the padlock that held the door shut. Below it, pieces of wood had been ripped out by the force of the kick that smashed the door open.

  I keyed the padlock, took it out of the hasp, and pushed the door. It swung open with a small squeak from a twisted hinge, and I stepped into Doolan's life and flipped the light switch on.

  There was nothing spectacular about his quarters. I had been there often enough in the old days, and nothing seemed to have changed—the furnishings were nice quality and very functional, everything seeming to belong exactly where it was, as if a decorator had arranged it all and the resident hadn't changed things around to suit himself.

  But that's the way Doolan had been, one of those neat freaks. He would have been teed off to see the way the cops had left it, print powder taking the shine off wood finishes, cigarette butts in a pair of Wedgewood ashtrays that were meant for eye appeal only, chairs out of line, cabinet drawers not completely shut.

  Suicides don't require extensive shaking down of their premises, but Pat made sure every angle was being covered in this situation. I went through the living room, touching some of the things I remembered, then into the bedroom where Doolan had slept on the same side of the old-fashioned double for so long, one side lower than the other, the place where his wife once slept raised like a pedestal to her memory.

  The bathroom was almost clinical, everything in its assigned place. Hell, it was the army again in these quarters, where even inanimate objects seemed to be well-disciplined.

  His office/den was different, though. Many years ago it had been his late daughter's bedroom, now it was the place where he had really lived...

  ...and died.

  His office-style swivel chair wasn't behind the desk, but next to the wall of shelves with his stereo system and its speakers, LPs, cassette tapes, books, magazines, trophies, framed photos, stacks of this and that. The neatness of the rest of the apartment was not reflected here. These shelves held escape and memories and music. He'd been listening to one of his beloved classics when he took the bullet in his heart.

  On the floor, outlined in chalk, was the exact position of the chair when he was found, facing the door to the living room, the one flanked with framed photos of old wooden sailing ships and seaports in the distant past. On his left side, against the window, was the antique desk, a handmade oaken relic from the captain's cabin of some forgotten clipper ship.

  Twice I walked around that comfortable room, mentally cataloging every item I saw, trying to put it into a perspective that would change a suicide to a kill, without success.

  Then I stopped beside the desk, which reverted to Doolan's meticulous form—no unruly work in progress, just an orderly arrangement of pens, pencils, yellow pads, and so on. But a long time ago Doolan had shown me the hidden button that opened the side panel of that museum piece. I pushed it in, gave it a half turn.

  Silently, the panel swung open and there, on mounts, were five of the six guns Doolan had so carefully preserved. They were cleaned, oiled, and I didn't have to check them to know they were fully loaded. To Doolan, a gun was only a gun when it was ready to be used and to hell with safety rules. A bag of silica gel lay at the bottom of the enclosure to absorb any moisture, a cleaning kit and a can of Outers 445 gun oil beside it.

  A real heavy-duty arsenal, a pair of matched German P38s from World War II, a .357 Magnum, a .44 Colt revolver, and a standard Colt .45 automatic. The missing piece was in the property clerk's office downtown waiting to be claimed.

  I took the .45 off the peg and held it in my hand. It felt good. A weapon just like it was sandwiched between piles of clothing in a drawer back at my hotel room. Then a tightness ran across my shoulders, and I put it back. I closed the panel to that secret place and felt my mouth go into a tight grin.

  The police shakedown hadn't been that thorough after all.

  Strange that Pat had missed that. But then again, there was no reason for him to know that it was there—I imagined precious few of us had been shown that hiding place.

  I sat on the edge of t
he desk. Everything still fit in place—knowing the reality of the world of pain he faced in coming weeks, Doolan would have taken out his old .38 Special, sat there in the dark being saturated by the music he loved, savored the familiar feel of the gun in his hand, then when he was ready, simply shot himself.

  I said a muffled "Damn!" and got off the desk like it was a hot burner on a stove. I snapped off the light and went back to the door in the living room.

  Doolan had been a typical New Yorker and kept himself barricaded in at night behind four solid locks fastened to the fire-resistant steel shell that backed up the door. Had it been fully latched, no cop could have kicked it in. Only the old original Yale lock had been torn loose, the kind you could open with a credit card, but was okay to keep kids out.

  For a while I just stared at the splintered wood around the tongue of the lock, realizing that Doolan didn't have any reason to button himself up completely that night. He had committed himself to a decisive move that didn't concern itself with visitors. That was undoubtedly the thinking that had satisfied Pat.

  I stepped into the hall and hooked the padlock back in the hasp.

  Everything still fit. Pat was right.

  And I still said, Bullshit!

  Doolan had been a man of habit. No matter what he had planned, he still would have buttoned up behind locked doors, just as he had done every other night in his life. Nothing cancels out a ritualized, internalized program like that.

  At any other time, when he was opening the minimum security of the old Yale lock, he would have had weaponry at hand that he damn well knew how to use. He was well aware that the old lock wasn't able to cope with so modern a chunk of high technology as a piece of plastic.

  Pat wanted me to be satisfied that Doolan had committed suicide. I was halfway there—I was convinced Doolan was dead.

  But why?

  The facts and his doomed situation seemed to say it all, sure. Then why the hell did something bug me the way it did?

  Doolan had a motive for suicide, all right, an undeniably perfect motive to call it quits on his own terms in his own special way—papers in order, music playing softly, his own weapon in his hand, and then kiss this life goodbye.