Kill Me, Darling Page 6

  “Pat’s been talking.”

  He shook his head real slow. “No. He didn’t say a word about your… condition. He just asked me to consider helping you out if you needed it. I’m not sure I want to honor that request. What the hell happened to you, Mike?”

  A woman.

  Pell was saying, “All of a sudden I’m sorry I ever looked up to you, and ashamed for reading all those things about you and feeling things nobody but me ever knew about. You make me feel like a fool, Mike.”

  “Don’t crucify yourself, Captain.”

  “I should. I should climb up there and let ’em start nailing. I was a damn fool for thinking your vigilante tactics were a decent means to an end when the system got clogged up.” He grunted a laugh. “What a damn dope I was. Hell, there isn’t anybody on any department in this country that wouldn’t toss this whole private eye business out the window, if they had half a chance.”

  “I’m just one private eye, Barney. And I’m not even licensed in Miami.”

  He pointed the cigar at me. “A good thing to remember, Mike. No, I don’t think I’m going to be helping you out while you’re in my town. For some reason, Pat Chambers has a soft spot for you, in his head most likely. But I have a feeling I’m immune.”

  “Why don’t you hear me out first?”

  His grin came back and got bigger and wider and I never would have minded it a bit except that at the corners, it wasn’t a grin. More like a slap in the teeth that said I was as rotten as Pat had told me I was.

  He said, “You know what it was that kept you out of the department, Mike? Not rules. Not the old army rebellion against superior authority. You’re something that police departments don’t like to have around. You’re a killer, man.” His mouth tightened and something funny happened to his eyes. “Or I should say, you were. Now you’re a has-been. You’re a drunk. You’re a nothing, Mike. I’m sorry to say it, but I see all the signs and they’re not new to me. You’re a drunk without a bottle, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And how’s that going?”

  “Like I said. So far so good.”

  “Do you have a gun on you?”

  I opened my coat and let him have a good look at the empty place under my arm.

  “Smart,” he said.

  Then he looked at me with contempt and laughed the same way.

  He never should have laughed.

  I got up. “That one you’re allowed, Barney. That one laugh. That one I make you a present of, but don’t laugh at me again. I’m a nothing, like you said, I’m a has-been, like you also said, but don’t laugh. I just came off a drunk that was a mile wide and a mile high and let me tell you something, brother, let your wife die while she’s having that kid of yours, and the bender you pitch? Man, it will be even wider and higher than mine, and when you’re on it, when you’re deep in it, maybe we’ll meet up and then you can tell me what you told me just now, and see if you can make it stick while you’re saying it into the mirror of some slimy bar along skid row. They do have a skid row in Miami, don’t they? If not, you’ll make one.”

  His eyes were wide and his face was white, but as I turned to go, he said, “Hammer… Mike. Come back. Sit down. Let me… let me hear you out.”

  I turned and his expression was neither that of expectant daddy nor contemptuous cop. He was just one human being looking at another with something like respect. Or anyway understanding.

  I sat down in the chair again.

  “You want some coffee, Mike?” he asked.

  “I could use some. Milk and sugar if you got it.”

  He went out and his nervous energy brought him back quick with cups for both of us. I tried not to let my hand shake noticeably as I sipped some.

  Affably, he said, “I’ve been through my share of java lately.”

  “Bet you have.”

  He took down a healthy swallow and his smile had nothing contemptuous in it at all. “So, Mike. What brings you to Miami?”

  I told him about the so-called mugging murder of Captain Wade Manley.

  “Pat is working the New York end,” I said. “But I think the answer may be in Miami. And I think you know what else brought me to your town. After all, you’re the one who spotted Velda down here and told Pat about it.”

  He nodded. “I knew her from the articles I read about you. And it’s no surprise they’d run photos of a beauty like her. Anyway, she rated a sidebar or two on her own.”

  “But those write-ups never revealed her former status as an undercover vice cop. She worked for Manley, right after the war, and when she’d had it with working with vice, the Big Man recommended her to me. She made a perfect secretary and had her own P.I. ticket, thanks to her police background.”

  His cop eyes were searching my face. “She was more than that, wasn’t she, Mike? You two were an item.”

  I just nodded. “You already know she’s latched on to Nolly Quinn. Or maybe vice versa.”

  He sat forward and stubbed out the cigar. That freckled face had a softness that the hard blue eyes belied. “And you think your Velda may have a hidden agenda? Like maybe revenge for what happened to Captain Manley?”

  I shrugged. “I’d like to think she left me in the lurch to bring Nolly Quinn down, but hell… she’s been here four months, and Manley was only murdered a few weeks ago. That wasn’t the spark.”

  “Then there must have been a fire going already,” he said. “Still, the Manley murder could be related.”

  “Could be.”

  He folded his arms, his manner as casual as his eyes weren’t. “What do you need from me, Mike?”

  “Mostly just a friend on the Miami P.D. I’m here to make waves, after all. I may need somebody to run interference with other cops, and I know you have a complicated structure down here, with the sheriff’s office and Miami Beach department and all. I’m going to be bumping up against Nolly Quinn, and I hope to drag my straying secretary back home, so things could get ugly.”

  Those eyes were slits now. “After she’s been with Quinn, you still want her?”

  “Do you love your wife, Barney?”

  “Of course I love my wife.”

  “Then shut up about it.”

  He got it. He knew.

  I sat forward. “Barney, is there any way you can put through a temporary P.I. ticket and gun permit for me?”

  He thought about it only a second before saying, “We’ve made that kind of arrangement with out-of-town investigators before. Usually it’s taken care of long in advance, and I’ll have to cut through some red tape and call in some markers, but… yes, Mike. I’m pretty sure I can do that. Where are you staying?”

  I gave him that, he jotted it down, then I said, “I already got a decent rundown on Quinn from Ben Sauer over at the Herald. But if you have anything off the books to share, I’d appreciate it.”

  The cop rose and went to a file cabinet and came back with a file folder that he tossed in front of me. I thumbed through. No booking sheets or other official data. Just surveillance photos blown up to 8" by 10" like movie stills.

  “Oliver Thomas Quinn, thirty-six,” Pell said, “has no Florida arrests. Oh, he should have, if nothing else than for running a casino wide open at his nightclub in Miami Beach.”

  Nolly Quinn was tall and dark and handsome, with a nice smile and a cleft chin and an athletic build. He was Cary Grant with a Clark Gable mustache and George Raft eyes. In most of the photos, he was in a tuxedo and in almost all of them he had a babe on his arm. A succession of babes, including several bosomy blondes of the Marilyn Monroe variety, but also—in just two of the shots—a gorgeous, tall black-haired doll.

  Velda.

  He saw me lingering over the two photos in question and said, “She’s a lovely woman. I hope you can haul her back home. Whether she really is another of Quinn’s conquests, or is here for some other reason, it doesn’t really matter. Either way, she’s in danger.”

  I looked up sharply. “Why?”<
br />
  He spread the photos out and pointed to one of Quinn with a blonde and another of him and a redhead.

  “Two of his previous paramours turned up suspiciously dead,” Pell said. “The redhead is Dotty Flynn, a hatcheck girl at his club. She killed herself, wrist-slash job in the tub, six months back. The blonde is Kim Carter, a singer at Quinn’s club. Hit-and-run death, last year. First ruled a suicide, the second accidental if homicide by definition.”

  My neck was bristling. “Two deaths by girls with the same place of employment run by the same boy friend? It stinks.”

  “To hell and high heaven. But we haven’t proved anything otherwise.”

  “What, is he a goddamn Bluebeard? Kills them when he’s finished with ’em?”

  Pell raised an eyebrow. “No. He runs through these dames quick, a month to three months, then dumps them. Half a dozen in the last year and a half just went their own way. Several are working in the area as anything from waitresses to strippers. But these two… maybe they knew too much.”

  “What about?”

  The other eyebrow raised to join its brother. “That’s probably why they were bumped—so we wouldn’t find out what these two girls knew.” He shrugged. Sighed. “Who knows what they witnessed? We suspect Nolly Boy is involved in illegal narcotics smuggling, by boat and plane.”

  “Cuba?”

  Pell nodded. “But if your Velda is down here on some mission of her own doing… like maybe one of these dead girls was her favorite cousin or something… she is exactly the damn type who would find out things worth getting killed over.”

  My fists were tight, nails digging into the flesh. I stared at Nolly Quinn’s slick, handsome face and thought about ripping it off like a scab and revealing the bloody visage beneath.

  “Mike… Mike, are you okay? You all right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” I shook a fist into fingers and picked up the coffee cup and drank some. Going cold already.

  A young patrolman opened the door and stuck his head in, wearing a big goofy grin. “Captain Pell? The hospital called. Time.”

  Pell got to his feet, grinning back almost as goofily, and stuck a big paw out to me. I shook it. First time we’d shaken hands.

  “Wish me luck,” he said, and was grabbing his hat and slamming it on.

  “You won’t need it,” I said.

  “Everybody needs it,” he said, his grin just slightly off-kilter now.

  Then he was gone, and I was alone with my tepid coffee and two glossy photos of a beaming Velda in a low-cut gown on the arm of a slimy hoodlum named Nolly Quinn.

  * * *

  It was almost three a.m. when I got back to the motel. All the lights were out, even the neon sign off. The only illumination came from a hunk of moon and some stars spilled around up there, and the only sounds were the insistent lapping of waves and a breeze rustling through fronds. The night was warm but not hot, humid but not dank. A little sweaty and a lot sultry, like a belly dancer on her last set.

  I left the Ford four slots down from my room, on the off chance somebody tailed me here, but before I went inside, I found myself staring at the stand of palms and semi-tropical flower bushes that separated me from the ocean. I felt weak but not shaky, and I craved neither a drink nor a cigarette. I’d had so many smokes coming down from Manhattan that my throat burned and my mouth had tired of the taste, and no real nicotine need had asserted itself since I tossed my Luckies in the gutter. At least not yet.

  I might have been on that island in the Pacific where a tropical paradise had turned into a surreal hell, death all around me, buddies torn apart by bullets, ripped to shit by shrapnel, blown apart by grenades, vaporized by shelling, my M-1 barrel glowing orange-hot from all the fire I was laying down, my first kills distant, like carnival targets going down, but soon carnage was close range, where I could see and hear and smell them, the fear and hate in their faces reflecting my own, and we called them yellow bastards but they bled the same red we did.

  I moved through the stand of palms slowly, ears perked for snipers, and half-way through I wanted to turn and retreat to that motel and my room and my bed and away from this memory-turned-reality.

  But I trudged on through, and then the beach was there, its stretch of gold turned ivory by moonlight, the surf foamy and steady but gentle. Lulling. I looked left. I looked right. Either direction there was nothing and nobody at all, not on the beach anyway, though the lights of the city were a smeary distant haze. The water called to me in throaty tones and I got out of my suit coat and dropped it to the gently sloping sand and walked some more before pausing to step out of the pants and pull off my socks. Then I began to walk again, toward the dark white-capped water, dropping the rest of my clothes like breadcrumbs as I went.

  The night was warm like the sand under my bare feet, but the water wasn’t, and the bracing rush of it nearly woke me from my semi-sleepwalker state. But not all the way. I walked on, right into the water, like Moses expecting the Red Sea to part, only it didn’t, instead rising to my waist, then my chin, until finally I swam out a ways, working against the tide.

  How far out I got I couldn’t tell you. I reached a point where if I went any farther, I couldn’t be sure in my weakened condition I could make it back. Treading water a while, I took in the wet black vastness around me and the beach and the palm trees and also a sky that made even the ocean seem pitifully finite.

  Don’t, Mike, Velda said. Don’t even think about it…

  I swam back, easily, steadily, in no hurry. I emerged from the water as naked as the day I was born but with plenty of scars to prove that I had been. I felt better. I wasn’t shaking at all. The best part was I felt tired, the kind of tired that tells you sleep will come easy.

  I gathered my clothes and, without getting back in them, walked swiftly through the tropical mini-jungle that separated me from a bed that called to me now the way the ocean had.

  I went inside and dove in.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I woke up with sun at the windows and came around slowly enough to know I’d slept a good long while. My wristwatch on the nightstand said it was nearly four o’clock—almost twelve hours.

  I sat up and drank in fresh sea-tinged air—before I hit the rack, I’d shut off the air conditioner and opened some windows. Despite my grogginess after so much sleep, I knew something had changed. When I stretched, it didn’t hurt so much. My mouth was thick with sleep, not cottony from lack of booze. I didn’t even seem to crave a cigarette. And I wanted breakfast, not a beer.

  My shower went on a good fifteen minutes. I started it out steamy hot and wound up letting icy needles have at me. After I’d toweled off, the damnedest thing happened: the face in the mirror was me. My hands were steady as I shaved, the first time in a long while Mr. Gillette hadn’t tried to cut my throat.

  I went to the closet where the clothing bag was hanging and selected the lighter weight of the two remaining suits I’d brought. Yesterday’s was sandy and rumpled and abandoned on a chair like a skin a snake crawled out of. Before I put on the coat, I climbed into the shoulder sling, as if it were no big deal at all. I got the little can of oil from my duffel and shot a few drops into the .45’s slide mechanism and checked the clip. Satisfied, I used a washcloth to wipe the gun off before I slipped it into the holster. The suit was custom-cut and concealed it nicely.

  With that familiar extra weight under my left arm, I felt whole again. Complete. I was straightening my tie in the dresser mirror with the confidence of a human being when somebody knocked.

  I reached for the rod but then the motel manager’s friendly voice came through the wood: “It’s Duff, Mike! Envelope came for you… You okay in there?”

  Leaving the .45 in its cradle, I went to the door and opened it. Duffy’s jowly, thick-lipped, bright-eyed puss beamed at me. The sun behind him made the fuzz on his balding head glow like a halo. He was in a pale yellow sport shirt and darker yellow trousers with the usual sandals.

  “I was gettin’
worried about you, Mike. Here.”

  He handed me a manila envelope. I motioned him in and stepped away to open the thing up. New baby or not, Captain Barney Pell had come through: I was looking at two white cards, each with TEMPORARY stamped on them and my basic information typed in. One was a gun permit for Dade County, the other a P.I. ticket for the state of Florida. I slipped them in my wallet.

  “You know who delivered that?” Duffy asked.

  “A cop in a squad car.”

  He goggled at me. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “Educated guess. Has anybody else been asking about me?”

  “No, Mike.” He gestured vaguely. “Listen, usually the wife changes the towels and sheets and stuff in the morning, but with your car here, we figured we better not bother you. Even without the do-not-disturb on.”

  “Thanks, Duff.”

  “You going out? You want Martha to tidy up in here?”

  “Naw. I haven’t had a woman make my bed for me since I went in the service. Fresh towels and soap tomorrow morning would be swell.”

  Duff nodded. “Sure thing. You… look different.”

  “I feel pretty good today. I’ve been coming off a bender. Haven’t had anything stronger than a beer in five days. Stopped smoking, too.”

  He grinned lopsidedly. “You do look better. But best be careful, feller.”

  “Yeah?”

  The homely mug grew grave. “I come through my share of toots and let me tell you, after you sweat and piss and shit the poison out, you get on this kind of… hopped-up high. Like you’re sailin’. Like the sun is shinin’ out of your backside. It don’t last.”

  “Thanks, Duff.” Smiling, I put a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate that. But I’m not an alky. I didn’t fall off the wagon. A woman sent me spiraling. The booze isn’t the disease. It’s a symptom I thought was a cure.”

  “You know better now, huh?”

  “I know better. I am better.”

  The motel manager drifted toward the door, paused when his hand hit the knob. “How’d your night on the town go? If you don’t mind my askin’.”