A Long Time Dead Page 7

  When I burst into the bathroom with the .45 in hand, he and his big hard piston practically jumped out of the big deep tub. The hot bubbles were going, and more drinks sat on the edge of the tub, but I motioned with the gun for him to sit down and stay put. The girl didn’t notice me, or anyway didn’t notice me much. She was half-unconscious already, leaning back against the tub, a sweet little nude with hooded eyes and pert handfuls with tiny tips poking up out of the froth like flowers just starting to grow.

  I held the gun on him as he frowned at me in seeming incomprehension and I leaned over and lifted the girl by a skinny arm out of the tub. She didn’t seem to mind. She might have been a child of twelve but for the cupcake breasts. If I hadn’t got here when I did, she wouldn’t have ever got any older.

  She managed to stand on wobbly feet, her wet feet slippery on the tile.

  I took her chin in my free hand. “I’m the cops. You want to leave. Wake up! This bastard doped you.”

  Life leapt into her eyes, and self-preservation kicked in, and she stumbled into the other room. I left the door open as I trained the gun on Kratch.

  He was a handsome guy, as far as it went. His hair was gray and in tight Roman curls, with a pockmarked ruggedness, his chest hair going white, too, stark on tanned flesh. His erection had wilted. Having a .45 pointed at you will do that.

  And he frowned at me, as if I were just some deranged intruder—he didn’t have to fake the fear.

  “My name is Grossman. I’m an insurance salesman from Nebraska. Take my money from my wallet—it’s by the bed. You can have it all. Just don’t hurt the girl.”

  That made me laugh.

  She stuck her head in. She was dressed now. Didn’t take long with those skimpy threads.

  “Thank you, mister,” she said.

  “I never saw you,” I said. “And you never saw me.”

  She nodded prettily and was out of the door.

  I grinned at him. “Alone at last. Are you really going to play games, Kratch?”

  He smiled. “Almost didn’t recognize you, Hammer. You’re not as young as you used to be.”

  “No, but I can still recognize a piece of shit when I see one.”

  “No one else will. I’m a respectable citizen. Have been for a long, long time.”

  “I don’t think so. I think Grossman is just the latest front for your sick appetites. How many young girls like that have you raped and killed in the past ten years or so, Kratch? I will go to my grave regretting I didn’t kill you the first time around.”

  “My name isn’t Kratch.” The fear had ebbed. He had an oily confidence—if I was going to kill him, he figured, I’d have done it by now. “It’s Grossman. And you will never prove otherwise. You can put all your resources and connections behind it, Hammer, and you will never, ever have the proof you need.”

  “Since when did I give a damn about proof?”

  The radio made a simple splash going in, like a big bar of soap, and he did not scream or thrash, simply froze with clawed hands and a look of horror that had come over him as the deadly little box came sailing his way. I held the plug in and let the juice have him and endured the sick smell of scorched flesh with no idea whether he could feel what I was seeing, the all-over blisters forming like so many more bubbles, the hair on his head catching fire like a flaming hat, fingertips bursting like overdone sausages, eyes bulging, then popping, one two, like plump squeezed grapes, leaving sightless black sockets crying scarlet tears as he cooked in the gravy of his own gore.

  I unplugged the thing, and the grotesque corpse slipped under the roiling water.

  “Now you’re fucking dead,” I said.

  Grave Matter

  If I hadn’t been angry, I wouldn’t have been driving so damn fast, and if I hadn’t been driving so damn fast, in a lashing rain, on a night so dark closing your eyes made no difference, my high beams a pitiful pair of flashlights trying to guide the way in the vast cavern of the night, illuminating only slashes of storm, I would have had time to brake properly, when I came down over the hill and saw, in a sudden white strobe of electricity, that the bridge was gone, or anyway out of sight, somewhere down there under the rush of rain-raised river, and when the brakes didn’t take, I yanked the wheel around and my heap was sideways in a flooded ditch, wheels spinning. Like my head.

  I got out on the driver’s side, because otherwise I would have had to swim underwater. From my sideways tipped car, I leapt to the slick highway, as rain pelted me mercilessly, and did a fancy slip-slide dance keeping my footing. Then I snugged the wings of the trenchcoat collar up around my face and began to walk back the way I’d come. If rain was God’s tears, the Old Boy sure was bawling about something tonight.

  I knew how he felt. I’d spent the afternoon in the upstate burg of Hopeful, only there was nothing hopeful about the sorry little hamlet. All I’d wanted was a few answers to a few questions. Like how a guy who won a Silver Star charging up a beachhead could wind up a crushed corpse in a public park, a crumpled piece of discarded human refuse.

  Bill Reynolds had had his problems. Before the war he’d been an auto mechanic in Hopeful. A good-looking dark-haired bruiser who’d have landed a football scholarship if the war hadn’t got in the way, Bill married his high school sweetheart before he shipped out, only when he came back missing an arm and a leg, he found his girl wasn’t interested in what was left of him. Even though he was good with his prosthetic arm and leg, he couldn’t get his job back at the garage, either.

  But the last time I’d spoken to Bill, when he came in to New York to catch Marciano and Jersey Joe at Madison Square Garden, he’d said things were looking up. He said he had a handyman job lined up, and that it was going to pay better than his old job at the garage.

  “Besides which,” he said, between rounds, “you oughta see my boss. You’d do overtime yourself.”

  “You mean you’re working for a woman?”

  “And what a woman. She’s got more curves than Storm King Mountain road.”

  “Easy you don’t drive off a cliff.”

  That’s all we’d said about the subject, because Marciano had come out swinging at that point, and the next I heard from Bill—well not from him, about him—he was dead.

  The only family he had left in Hopeful was a maiden aunt; she called me collect, and told me tearfully that Bill’s body had been found in the city park. His spine had been snapped.

  “How does a thing like that happen, Chief?”

  Chief Thadeous Dolbert was one of Hopeful’s four fulltime cops. Despite his high office, he wore a blue uniform indistinguishable from his underlings, and his desk was out in the open of the little bullpen in Hopeful City Hall. A two-cell lockup was against one wall, and spring sunshine streaming in the windows through the bars sent slanting stripes of shadow across his desk and his fat florid face. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, eyes hooded; he looked like a fat iguana—I expected his tongue to flick out and capture a fly any second now.

  Dolbert said, “We figure he got hit by a car.”

  “Body was found in the city park, wasn’t it?”

  “Way he was bunged up, figure he must’ve got whopped a good one, really sent him flyin’.”

  “Was that the finding at the inquest?”

  Dolbert fished a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket, right behind his tarnished badge; lighted himself up a smoke. Soon it was dangling from a thick slobber-flecked lower lip. “We don’t stand much on ceremony around here, mister. County coroner called it accidental death at the scene.”

  “That’s all the investigation Bill’s death got?”

  Dolbert shrugged, blew a smoke circle. “All that was warranted.”

  I sat forward. “All that was warranted. A local boy, who gave an arm and a leg to his country, wins a damn Silver Star doin’ it, and you figure him getting his spine snapped
like a twig and damn near every bone in his body broken, well that’s just pretty much business as usual here in Hopeful.”

  Under the heavy lids, fire flared in the fat chief’s eyes. “You think you knew Bill Reynolds? You knew the old Bill. You didn’t know the drunken stumblebum he turned into. Prime candidate for stepping out in front of a car.”

  “I never knew Bill to drink to excess …”

  “How much time did you spend with him, lately?”

  A hot rush of shame crawled up my neck. I’d seen Bill from time to time, in the city, when he came in to see me; but I’d never come up to Hopeful. Never really gone out of my way for him, since the war …

  Till now.

  “You make any effort to find the hit-and-run driver that did this?”

  The chief shrugged. “Nobody saw it happen.”

  “You don’t even know for sure a car did it.”

  “How the hell else could it have happened?”

  I stood up, pushed back, the legs of my wooden chair scraping the hard floor like fingernails on a blackboard. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  A finger as thick as a pool cue waggled at me. “You got no business stickin’ your damn nose in around here, Hammer—”

  “I’m a licensed investigator in the state of New York, Pops. And I’m working for Bill Reynolds’ aunt.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Working for that senile old biddy? She’s out at the county hospital. She’s broke! Couldn’t even afford a damn funeral … we had to bury the boy in potter’s field …”

  That was one of Hopeful’s claims to fame: the state buried its unknown, unclaimed, impoverished dead, in the potter’s field here.

  “Why didn’t you tell Uncle Sam?” I demanded. “Bill was a war hero—they’d’ve put him in Arlington …”

  Dolbert shrugged. “Not my job.”

  “What the hell is your job?”

  “Watch your mouth, city boy.” He nodded toward the holding cells and the cigarette quivered as the fat mouth sneered. “Don’t forget you’re in my world …”

  Maybe Bill Reynolds didn’t get a funeral, or a gravestone; but he was going to get a memorial by way of an investigation.

  Only nobody in Hopeful wanted to talk to me. The supposed “accident” had occurred in the middle of the night, and my only chance for a possible witness was in the all-night diner across from the Civil War cannon in the park.

  The diner’s manager, a skinny character with a horsey face darkened by perpetual five o’clock shadow, wore a grease-stained apron over his grease-stained tee-shirt. Like the chief, he had a cigarette drooping from slack lips. The ash narrowly missed falling into the cup of coffee he’d served me as I sat at the counter with half a dozen locals.

  “We got a jukebox, mister,” the manager said. “Lots of kids end up here, tail end of a Saturday night. That was a Saturday night, when Bill got it, ya know? That loud music, joint jumpin’, there coulda been a train wreck out there and nobody’da heard it.”

  “Nobody would have seen an accident, out your windows?”

  The manager shrugged. “Maybe ol’ Bill got hit on the other side of the park.”

  But it was just a little square of grass and benches and such; the “other side of the park” was easily visible from the windows lining the diner booths—even factoring in the grease and lettering.

  I talked to a couple of waitresses, who claimed not to have been working that night. One of them, “Gladys” her name tag said, a heavyset bleached blonde who must have been pretty cute twenty years ago, served me a slice of apple pie and cheese and a piece of information.

  “Bill said he was going to work as a handyman,” I said, “for some good-lookin’ gal. You know who that would’ve been?”

  “Sure,” Gladys said. She had sky-blue eyes and nicotine-yellow teeth. “He was working out at the mansion.”

  “The what?”

  “The mansion. The old Riddle place. You must’ve passed it on the highway, comin’ in to town.”

  “I saw a gate and a drive, and got a glimpse of a big old gothic brick barn …”

  She nodded, refilled my coffee. “That’s the one. The Riddles, they owned this town forever. Ain’t a building downtown that the Riddles ain’t owned since the dawn of time. But Mr. Riddle, he was the last of the line, and he and his wife died in that plane crash, oh, ten years ago. The only one left now is the daughter, Victoria.”

  “What was Bill doing out at the Riddle place?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? Maybe Miz Riddle just wanted some company. Bill was still a handsome so and so, even minus a limb or two. He coulda put his shoe under my bed anytime.”

  “Victoria Riddle isn’t married? She lives alone?”

  “Alone except for that hairless ape.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got a sort of butler, you know, a servant? He was her father’s chauffeur. Big guy. Mute. Comes in to town, does the grocery shopping and such. We hardly ever see Miz Riddle, ’less she’s meeting with her lawyer, or going to the bank to visit all her money.”

  “What does she do out there?”

  “Who knows? She’s not interested in business. Her daddy, he had his finger in every pie around here. Miz Riddle, she lets her lawyer run things and I guess the family money, uh, under-what’s-it? Underwrites, is that the word?”

  “I guess.”

  “Underwrites her research.”

  “Research?”

  “Oh, yeah. Miz Riddle’s a doctor.”

  “Medical doctor.”

  “Yes, but not the kind that hangs out a shingle. She’s some kind of scientific genius.”

  “So she’s doing medical research out there?”

  “I guess.” She shook her head. “Pity about Bill. Such a nice fella.”

  “Had he been drinking heavy?”

  “Bill? Naw. Oh, he liked a drink. I suppose he shut his share of bars down on a Saturday night, but he wasn’t no alcoholic. Not like that other guy.”

  “What other guy?”

  Her expression turned distant. “Funny.”

  “What’s funny? What other guy?”

  “Not funny ha ha. Funny weird. That other guy, don’t remember his name, just some tramp who come through, he was a crip, too.”

  “A crip?”

  “Yeah. He had one arm. Guess he lost his in the war, too. He was working out at the Riddle mansion, as a handyman—one-handed handyman. That guy, he really was a drunk.”

  “What became of him?”

  “That’s what’s funny weird. Three, four months ago, he wound up like Bill. They found him in the gutter on Main Street, all bunged up, deader than a bad battery. Hit and run victim—just like Bill.”

  The wrought-iron gate in the gray-brick wall stood open and I tooled the heap up a winding red-brick drive across a gentle treeless slope where the sprawling gabled tan-brick gothic mansion crouched like a lion about to pounce. The golf-course of a lawn had its own rough behind the house, a virtual forest preserve that seemed at once to shelter and encroach upon the stark lines of the house.

  Steps led to an open cement pedestal of a porch with a massive slab of a wooden door where I had a choice between an ornate iron knocker and a simple doorbell. I rang the bell.

  I stood there listening to birds chirping and enjoying the cool breeze that seemed to whisper rain was on its way, despite the golden sunshine reflecting off the lawn. I rang the bell again.

  I was about to go around back, to see if there was another door I could try, when that massive slab of wood creaked open like the start of the “Inner Sanctum” radio program; the three-hundred-and-fifty pound apparition who stood suddenly before me would have been at home on a spook show, himself.

  He was six four, easy, towering over my six-one; he wore the black uniform of a chauff
eur, but no cap, his tie a loose black string thing. He looked like an upended Buick with a person painted on it. His head was the shape of a grape and just as hairless, though considerably larger; he had no eyebrows either, wide, bugling eyes, a lump of a nose and an open mouth.

  “Unnggh,” he said.

  “I’d like to see Miss Riddle,” I said.

  “Unnggh,” he said.

  “It’s about Bill Reynolds. I represent his family. I’m here to ask some questions.”

  His brow furrowed in something approaching thought.

  Then he slammed the door in my face.

  Normally, I don’t put up with crap like that. I’d been polite. He’d been rude. Kicking the door in, and his teeth, seemed called for. Only this boy was a walking side of beef that gave even Mike Hammer pause.

  And I was, in fact, pausing, wondering whether to ring the bell again, go around back, or just climb in my heap and drive the hell away, when the door opened again and the human Buick was replaced by a human goddess.

  She was tall, standing eye to eye with me, and though she wore a loose-fitting white lab jacket that hung low over a simple black dress, nylons and flat shoes, those mountain-road curves Bill had mentioned were not easily hidden. Her dark blonde hair was tied back, and severe black-frame glasses rode the perfect little nose; she wore almost no make-up, perhaps just a hint of lipstick, or was that the natural color of those full lips? Whatever effort she’d made to conceal her beauty behind a mask of scientific sterility was futile: the big green eyes, the long lashes, the high cheekbones, the creamy complexion, that full-high-breasted, wasp-waisted, long-limbed figure, all conspired to make her as stunning a female creature as God had ever created.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in a silky contralto. “This is a private residence and a research center. We see no one without an appointment.”

  “The gate was open.”

  “We’re expecting the delivery of certain supplies this evening,” she said, “and I leave the gate standing open on such occasions. You see, I’m short-handed. But why am I boring you with this? Good afternoon …”

  And the door began to close.