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  "I oink in a different tone of voice, Susie." I gave her a business card. "The others who come around will have a little more pork behind them."

  She started to change somehow, like the slow cracking of an ice floe. Her tongue made a nervous pass over suddenly dry lips and she shook her head in bewilderment. "But Russ was never ... I didn't know ... didn't see anything that..."

  "Everybody hides things," I said. "You're a hip chick, not some teenybopper, even if you like to act like one. You didn't notice anything hinky when you were at Russell's pad?"

  "I ... I just didn't think much about it."

  "About what?"

  "Like ... well, his apartment. He made over the loft in that funky old building, and laid out a lot of bread on it. The big stereo with the record collection, and the tape recorders and the big color TVs—all of that was awfully expensive. You can buy toys like that on time and all, but he bragged about paying cash. I thought it was more of his big talk, until, you know..."

  "The phone calls and Cadillacs?"

  Susie nodded, her eyes worried. "One time I answered his phone and got an overseas operator."

  "Remember the conversation?"

  "No. Russell took the call in the bedroom. I was in the living room."

  "When did you see him last?"

  "Just two nights ago. He was going to take me to that new 'in' place—the Pigeon? Then he called it off because something came up."

  "What?"

  "He had to meet somebody."

  "Who?"

  "Russ didn't say. He was all excited and sort of, well, secretive. Like, I offered to go with him but he didn't want me along."

  "He say why?"

  "No." She stopped and looked down at the table again and the watery designs she'd made. "I broke it off right after that. Funny. You know, before that? I was set to see him tonight. He was taking me to a ball game to celebrate."

  "There aren't any ball games in town tonight, Susie."

  Her eyes came up expressionlessly. "Not that kind of ball game. I mean, the swinging kind we played at his apartment—you've really got to stay with it, Mr. Hammer, the new culture, the new language."

  "I'll try to catch up with you kids. Susie, you've obviously been to Russell's place lately—I was told he moved out."

  She shook her head. "He had a hotel room somewhere, where he'd been staying, but I think that was for business, mostly."

  "Were you ever at this hotel room?"

  "No, and I don't know what hotel or even what part of town. I do know, with his loft pad? Russ had some troubles with the neighbors, and stopped having parties there, and kept a way lower profile. I gave him a bad time about having to sneak around going into his own place."

  "You have a key?"

  She nodded, fished in her little purse, and held out a key in her palm.

  I didn't make any move to take it. "Susie, you can hold that for the cops or give it to me. Your choice."

  Her hand stayed outstretched. "Why break the door down? Besides, whatever you are, you're not exactly an Establishment type."

  "That's a character reference I can appreciate, sugar."

  That made her smile a little. I plucked the key from her palm and dropped it in my pocket.

  When I paid the bill, and walked her to the door, she stopped me with her hand on my arm. "I feel awfully funny, Mr. Hammer, now that I think back."

  "About what?"

  "Having balled a dead man."

  "He wasn't dead then."

  She took her hand away and let it drop at her side. "Yes he was," she said.

  Chapter Four

  RUSSELL FRAZER'S APARTMENT was everything little Susie had said, and more.

  She had apparently never opened the mahogany box with the heavy-duty diamond cufflinks and the Cartier jeweled watch. She had not found the two packets of fifty-dollar bills, or seen the empty wrappers for three others, because they were tucked in back of a bottom bureau drawer otherwise occupied by black silk socks, the kind worn by guys with dough or as the primary costume of some stud in a stag reel.

  Frazer hadn't lied to Susie when he said he'd paid cash for everything. His receipts were all filed in one compartment of a black-lacquered wall unit with built-in storage cabinets and shelves for his hi-fi components and enough electronic gadgetry to make NASA turn green.

  The living room motif was black and white, from the thick white pile wall-to-wall carpet to the black couch and stacked black cushions and white ones that apparently took the place of chairs for guests. The walls bore black-lacquer-framed black-and-white nude female photos that must have been art because the pubic deltas weren't airbrushed out, and the built-in bar in one corner was mirrored where it wasn't a black-and-white checkerboard design.

  With the exception of the white carpet, though, the bedroom was in shades of brown and black, since the center-stage round bed's leopard spread seemed the focal point—a mirror above said Russell Frazer was no spring sybarite. That opinion was confirmed by the lavish bathroom's big sunken tub with its water-jet sprays, perfect for two. Or more.

  Oh, it was an expensive, elaborate layout all right, taking one hell of a lot of bread, too heavy for a hundred-plus-a-week ceramics worker to handle; but if you had a good sideline going for you, it could be bought.

  That character reference Susie had sketched for me was turning into a full-scale portrait as I shook down the rooms. This was all just one big playhouse and these were a little boy's toys. Russell Frazer probably never had the likes of them before, except in his fantasies or reading Playboy magazine.

  But he sure had made up for lost time. There wasn't one sign of anything of solid investment value—just the ephemeral junk of a have-not who'd been given his head in some overpriced, trend-happy department store. The black satin sheets and the brass cigar humidor on the nightstand were the crowning touches.

  Except the humidor didn't hold cigars—it was packed with dozens of condoms topped by a dozen fancy French ticklers, so he could do his entertaining in style. Either he had never heard of the Pill or he was understandably paranoid about VD.

  One thing he did have: sense enough not to leave anything around that had a name or a number that wasn't his. And if he had a drug stash, I sure didn't find it. I was starting to wonder if I'd been the first guy to look this coop over.

  Because I know how to shake a place down, and nothing pertinent turned up. I double-checked to make sure I hadn't missed anything, then finally headed out. The Homicide team could take it from here and put it through their own system of analysis, and maybe those sharp-eyed boys you never see because they live in labs could work out better answers than yours truly.

  All I had going for me was a tight feeling across my shoulders and those funny fingers flexing in my mind and tapping out the message that something in this horny bachelor's pad was emitting a bigger smell than even my trained nose could sniff out.

  Near the door, a four-shelved niche showcased a set of male-joined-to-female statuettes depicting just about every sex act imaginable. These weren't the kind of knickknacks you found for sale back at that pottery shop. They were arranged in an almost studied progression, lessons in a book to be learned and practiced, each one more acrobatically ambitious than the next.

  Apparently Frazer was pretty serious about his Don Juan image. I could picture him hopping out of bed for a quick run to his knickknack rack to review a posture, then scurrying back to correct his technique. I grunted out a laugh.

  His collection was pretty complete, plaster figures based on the most famous Hindu temple reliefs, hand-painted with loving care for detail ... and nothing that was new to me at all.

  I could have told my pal Russell Frazer that he was missing at least one good arrangement Velda had devised.

  Hell, I had muscle cramps for two days after.

  It took me three hours of talking to half a dozen merchants and citizens, but I made the connection between Norman Brix and Russell Frazer.

  Alex Singer, a retired
tailor whose stone front stoop was his bleacher seat on the world, remembered them both and didn't have a good word for either.

  He was a small blue-eyed man with thin white hair, looking lost in a dark woolen suit the temperature didn't call for. No doubt he'd perfectly tailored that number for himself some years ago, but age was shrinking him.

  "Mr. Hammer, that Frazer was a real nogoodnik. The kind of slimeball that can bring a neighborhood down. The kind of crudder that can give young kids the wrong idea about what is 'cool,' and send them off down the wrong path."

  "You make him sound like Fagin."

  "I don't mean to say he paid any attention to the younger kids, nothing more than a grin and a nod. But when they saw him usher sexy young women up his front steps, and watched him getting in and out of expensive cars with a driver no less, well ... it gives those kids the wrong kind of ideas."

  I didn't point out to the old gent that he seemed to be paying pretty close attention to the dolls parading in and out himself.

  "Now older kids?" the geezer was saying. "That's another story. Like that Brix boy. Ever since Frazer moved into the neighborhood, occupying that apartment by himself? It turned into the worst kind of hangout for street punks and these trashy little girls they attract. Sometimes I'd see him go in with about five of these punks, Brix and these other greasy-haired bums, and just one girl ... and she would come out looking tired and frazzled, but counting her money."

  "Any specific girl?"

  "No. A good half-dozen of them. Skinny with dead eyes, all of 'em."

  "There's a little doll named Susie, with a short haircut and long legs, skinny like a model—you see her?"

  He nodded. "She'd go in there with him, sometimes. She looked nicer than the others. She wasn't one of those, uh..."

  "Gang-bang gals?"

  He shivered as if the early fall evening had turned bitterly cold. "Not her. Those parties of his, though ... you could smell the stuff coming out of his windows at night."

  "What stuff?"

  "Marijuana!"

  How much of the old tailor's tale was envy for the younger generation—he probably went 23 skidoo with Charleston fillies and drank hooch in speaks in his day—and how much was righteous indignation, I neither knew nor cared. But the picture of Russell Frazer having dough to throw around, and maybe access to narcotics, kept getting clearer and clearer.

  Singer suggested I talk to Angelo Sito. I knew the name—Sito had been a heavyweight back in the '40s, had been a contender for a couple of years, then in the '50s became a semi-name who could throw a fight and build a younger slugger's rep. The fight racket had made Sito enough dough to retire, not to luxury, but to an apartment on this almost respectable street.

  I bought the old boxer a beer at the corner tavern. He had been a mauler and had come away with the requisite cauliflower ears and bulbous nose broken so many times, it qualified more for decoration than breathing apparatus. With his full head of salt-and-pepper hair, he had a rough-hewn dignity about him, wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and tan slacks that were clean and fairly new.

  "I heard of you, Hammer," he said, his grin big and white and store-bought. "You had a few fights yourself in your day."

  "Not in the ring."

  "Safer in the ring. They don't shoot at you."

  Not unless you don't throw the fights you're supposed to, I thought.

  But I said, "Alex Singer told me you could fill me in on Russell Frazer. Your neighbor who got stabbed to death yesterday?"

  Sito sneered. "He should have only bought it sooner. He was a miserable lowlife bastard."

  "That's okay, Angelo," I said, and sipped my Blue Ribbon. "They probably don't need you to deliver the eulogy."

  The fighter's lopsided grin said he liked that crack.

  Then he went into it: "I got a kid in his twenties. He's married, has a little boy, and he's got a decent job in the Garment District. Then he starts hanging around that fuck pad across the street. Pot, booze, broads."

  "Some people would say that's just a good time."

  "Not when you risk your job and marriage and your kid's welfare." His eyes managed to narrow, despite their puffy surroundings. "I think there was more'n pot up there, Mike. Hate to say this, but ... my boy, I think, was maybe doing harder stuff. Not horse or anything, but the nose candy, might be."

  "You said he was in his twenties. He's a big boy."

  He shook his head. "I can't give you anything but a feeling, Mike. A hunch. But I think that this louse Frazer was trying to get my kid into some kind of ... illegal crapola. I don't know what. Could be dope. Could be a goddamn bank robbery, I don't know."

  "No offense, Angelo, but it's no secret you got your hands dirty back in the old days."

  He just shrugged. "Doesn't mean a guy can't want better for his kid. Anyway, what harm did I ever do anybody? Fight game's just entertainment."

  "So is dope, some would say."

  "You don't O.D. watching boxing."

  I sipped the Pabst. "So you told your boy to stay away from Frazer?"

  "I did. And his mother did, and his wife did, and he's straight as an arrow now, Mike, I swear to you."

  "And that's all it took?"

  "No. I also went across the street and told that lowlife bastard Frazer to get lost or get broken up."

  Even in his fifties, Angelo Sito could put the hurt on a guy.

  He added, "Bum moved out."

  "Wise decision. You know where to?"

  "Some hotel downtown, I think. I ain't seen him around since."

  "You know a kid named Norm Brix, Angelo?"

  "Yeah. He's in the hospital, I hear."

  "I put him there."

  His scar-tissue-heavy brows beetled. "He tried to jump some other kid, right? Yeah, it was in the papers! Were you mixed up in that...?"

  "What about Brix?"

  "His parents used to live on this street. Mom was decent, Pop was a drinker. The father burned himself up in bed, smoking and drinking. The mother moved upstate with her sister, but the kid stayed around here."

  "What about the kid?"

  "Nasty. A bully. A dropout. He was pals with this Frazer slob, you know. That's one thing I can give my son credit for—he never liked the Brix kid."

  "Well, thanks, Angelo."

  "Thank you, Mike." He got up and slid out of the booth. "I'll buy next time."

  "Deal."

  I stayed put and finished the beer I'd only nursed along, talking to the old pug. Just sat there, thinking it through....

  The connection was there, all right, and maybe Velda had it figured—these punks have strange loyalties, and Frazer trying to knife me really could add up to revenge.

  I let it go through my mind once more, then threw the notion on the discard pile. So I'd caused Brix some grief, so what? Brix was still just a punk. Frazer had something going for him, something bringing in real dough. Punk loyalties stop when one of them jumps from the minors over into the big league.

  I couldn't help but picture those hippie kids in Frazer's fancy pad, a guy in mod threads and Beatle boots lording it over kids in T-shirts and jeans, playing the big-shot host. He would not view the likes of Brix, Felton, and Haver as equals, or even associates, much less the kind of friends whose misfortune might inspire him to take it upon himself to go wipe out the guy responsible.

  Frazer was a god to these punks, but in the greater scheme, he was just another minion—a minion someone above had dispatched to take me out.

  I picked up the afternoon paper and read it over another cold beer. On page three I found the story that Frazer had been identified, but was still classed as a victim of a mugging-kill. When I finished the funnies and the coffee, I threw a buck on the counter and went outside.

  Saxony Hospital was two blocks away.

  Billy Blue had been released from his bed and was back working, taking inventory of boxed medical supplies in a storeroom. The short-haired kid, in blue-and-red-striped shirt and jeans and tennies, was mo
ving awkwardly, holding himself stiff. It hurt his face when he got a smile through, but he was clearly glad to see me.

  He perched on a carton, and I did the same. I asked if it was okay to smoke and he said it was, but turned down my offer of a Lucky.

  He told me, "Dr. Sprague figured I might as well be hurting down here as in a bed."

  "How'd you manage it?"

  "Ah, I psyched him out. Told the doc I was getting stir-crazy, and said I would sue if I got bed sores." He shook his head. "I couldn't take it, man, those nurses are always fussing around with me. Gives me the jumps."

  I grinned and shook my head. "You don't know when you've got it good."

  He made a face. "I don't like older women."

  "Why, how old are these hags?"

  "Late twenties, early thirties, I guess—flirting and flitting around like a bunch of girls."

  "Yeah," I said, letting smoke out around my grin, "that does sound like hell."

  "I mean, they're nice enough, but what if you want to sleep or read or watch TV? They don't give a guy a minute's peace. Like with that cowboy actor, who got tossed off his horse at the Garden? Nonstop attention. You better not be some old guy with a hernia or some housewife with a broken ankle or something, when there's a man around here, under thirty, with a pulse."

  "Sounds like sheer agony, kid."

  "Or like when that Evello guy was in there. He wasn't even some good-looking actor. I mean, he's an old guy, fifty or something. But he's a celebrity, and of course that's how it goes in the celebrity suite."

  I frowned at him. "Who are we talking about?"

  "You mean, the actor?"

  "No," I said. "I know who the actor is—Lance Vernon." I also knew those nurses wouldn't get very far with Lance. "You said ' Evello'—did you mean Junior Evello?"

  "Yeah, yeah, Evello. Right name, Carlo Evello—old-style don, head of the sixth Family. Don't you know about him, Mr. Hammer, in your line of work?"

  "Yeah, I do, but where do you come off?"

  He laughed through his cracked lips. "Menial staff at a hospital doesn't exactly draw executive types, Mr. Hammer, and I work in the basement. Some of these neighborhood guys tell some pretty crazy stories. Sounds like Junior Evello's a real big shot in their backyards."