The Will to Kill Page 7

  “Ah. You sound like a relic of the Beatnik days, my friend.”

  “I’m a relic of further back than that.”

  He put his palette on the worktable beside him and finally met my eyes. He looked a lot like a blond version of his brother, but the handsome features had a delicacy that Dex lacked.

  “I bet you have questions for me,” he said, wiping his hands with a rag smelling of turpentine. He was much more pleasant than he’d been the other night. “Shall we sit?”

  He gestured to a low-slung couch whose sparkly upholstery spoke of an earlier decade, and whose threadbare cushions said secondhand. Perfect for a studio like this.

  The artist crawled out of the smock and flung it carelessly onto a plank floor that might have been a Jackson Pollock painting, exposing a light blue work shirt with its sleeves rolled up. The ankles of the chinos were paint-spattered, but not to the degree of the smock.

  I sat, and he was about to, when he stopped and said, “You look like you could use a beer.”

  I grinned at him. “I could. I almost let your brother talk me into some Jim Beam, but I came to my senses.”

  He went over to a nearby cooler and got out two cans of Pabst, used a churchkey on them, and handed me mine. He settled in next to me, sipping, leaving the center cushion open. Relaxing, a leg over a knee, glad to take a break.

  “My brother is a lush, Mr. Hammer. Isn’t that a wonderful word? Lush. The dictionary meaning is ‘rich.’”

  “I think that’s a different lush.”

  “Are you sure? Plenty of rich people qualify. So. I know you have questions to ask about my stepfather and the late Mr. Elder. What would you think about a painting in tribute to friend Jamison? An overhead view of an ice block afloat with something on it that might be half a man? They’d study that one in the Village, that’s for damn sure.”

  I gestured to the canvases leaned against the wall on either side of the couch. “Is that where the real paintings go? To the Village?”

  He nodded. “I have a wall of them in a Houston Street gallery. Go for thousands, when they sell.”

  “Do they? Sell?”

  “Not frequently, but you know the story about the lover boy who asks every good-looking girl he sees if he can screw her. Ninety-nine say no, but oh that hundredth.”

  I gave that the chuckle it was worth. “What do the landscapes go for?”

  “A couple hundred each. I have a gallery, all mine, in Monticello, on Broadway. They do well. So what can I tell you about dear dead Daddy and our late lamented butler?”

  I asked him the same questions as his brother, and his answers were very similar, without sounding rehearsed. He said if his stepfather was killed, he agreed that somebody in the house would have to have done it.

  “But nobody immediately benefitted,” he said, shaking his head, frowning. “Stepdad was in poor health. He’d have run out of gas on his own before very long. And as Dex may have told you, the four of us have trust funds. With Daddy alive or dead, we get access to those at forty. That’s when life begins, they say.”

  “So I hear. I’ll know soon enough.”

  We toasted beer cans.

  “Now I have another question,” I said.

  “Shoot. Whoa, not a smart thing to say to Mike Hammer. But shoot.”

  “Okay. Why are you so goddamn cooperative?”

  “Well…” His grin was of the shit-eating variety. “…I have a favor to ask of you. No, that’s wrong. I can afford to pay you. But this is a perfect situation for me.”

  “It is?”

  He nodded. “With you here—working for Dorena, investigating two deaths that I personally think are accidental—you can do a job for me without raising any suspicion.”

  “What job would that be?”

  He waved the question off. “Let me give you a little background first. You met Madeline, my lovely wife?”

  “Yes, briefly. And she is lovely. You’re a lucky man.”

  “You don’t know how lucky. And, Mr. Hammer…”

  “Mike,” I corrected.

  “Mike… when you say Madeline is lovely, what you mean is, she’s one incredible piece of ass.”

  “I generally don’t say as much to the husbands.”

  He grunted a laugh. “Well, she is. She’s fantastic. And plenty of guys agree with me. She’s out almost every night with such admirers. Giving it away. Flaunting it. If she were discreet, I wouldn’t mind so much. I’ve asked her to curtail her extracurricular activities, and she just laughs at me. Lately I’ve been talking divorce, and ugly though it might be, embarrassing as it would be for the Dunbars, what she’s been doing would be ludicrously easy to prove.”

  I put up a hand. “Let me stop you there, Wake. I don’t do divorce work. Not my specialty, not my deal.”

  He sat forward and, with his free hand, touched my arm. “No, you misunderstand. I tell you all of this strictly by way of background.”

  “Well… okay…”

  He gulped some beer, belched, said, “We have a prenup that states Mad gets nothing from me until my trust fund kicks in. If I divorce her, with the endless list of correspondents she’s racked up? She’ll get little or no alimony.”

  “I follow,” I said, and was starting to.

  He gestured toward the hole in the floor where the steps emptied out, attic-style. “Did you happen to notice the one new slat in the stairs?”

  I nodded. “About three down.”

  “What’s below it?”

  “Cement.”

  “What might a fall like that do to a person?”

  “Break his damn neck.”

  He nodded in smiling agreement. “Well, that new slat replaces one that broke on me. But I caught myself and don’t seem to be dead.”

  “Was the broken slat sawed to make that happen?”

  “Not apparently. It was a rough break, jagged. I would guess pre-broken and then fitted back together. Understand, Mike, that no one comes up here but me. The studio is strictly off limits when I’m working.”

  I was proof that this wasn’t entirely accurate, but I didn’t comment.

  He said, “Did you happen to notice the white ’56 Jag below?”

  I’d gotten that one right. “Oh yeah. A honey. Who belongs to the Lincoln, by the way?

  “Dex. It’s his boring style.”

  I frowned. “How’d he get into the office this morning, then? Hitchhike?”

  He smirked. “Dexie’s latest chippie probably picked him up. My brother’s had a succession of ’em, sometimes more than one at a time, sniffing around the money he’ll come into, before they lose interest and get tired of waiting. They usually chauffeur him home, too, because at the end of his ‘work’ day, he’s frequently a little too lubricated to drive.”

  That had me thinking. “Any of these women married?”

  “I believe the latest one, Brenda Something, used to be. Why?”

  Somebody besides Abe Hazard might want Dex dead.

  “No reason,” I said. I’d got him off track, so I steered him back on course. “You mentioned your Jag—a real beauty.”

  “Yes, it is. Of course it’s getting a little long in the tooth. I almost had a very bad accident last week, y’know.”

  “Oh?”

  He shrugged, but it was feigned casualness. “I’m afraid I’ve been known to break the speed limit from time to time. Well, almost all the time. I have to make many, many trips into the city, to the Village, and it’s two hours within the law. Traffic allowing, I can make it in eighty minutes. And of course some of these roads wind around awfully… some are even mountainous.”

  “Your brakes went.”

  His grin was a bitter thing. “All at once. After the Jag got towed into the shop, I learned that the brake hose had a hole deep enough so that the thing would hold, under moderate braking… but give way with heavy braking.”

  “It was clearly cut?”

  He shook his head. “No. The brake hose was old and needed replac
ing… but someone may have helped a possible hole reach its full potential, shall we say.”

  “And you didn’t report either this incident or the broken step, knowing they’d be written off as accidents.”

  He finished his beer, belched again. “Correct. Now, getting back to the little woman… if a woman with legs that long might be termed little… there’s one way she might get around our prenup.”

  “If you were to die,” I said.

  He smiled. “If I were to die.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Half an hour past Monticello, outside the town of Montgomery, I pulled into the chain-link fenced-off parking lot of the low-slung fieldstone building labeled NEW YORK STATE POLICE. With the sun really taking it out on the remaining snow, I wore my sunglasses to ward off the reflectiveness.

  A figure in the gray woolen uniform and tan, purple-banded Stetson hat of the State Police was leaning against a black-and-white patrol car near the building, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing sunglasses too, a big man, as big as me, with a square jaw and Apache cheekbones, and somehow his very casualness said, “Don’t mess with me.”

  This had to be Corporal Jim Sheridan, who I’d spoken to on the phone, arranging a meeting.

  I pulled into one of the VISITORS stalls in front of the building and took the short walk over to him. We introduced ourselves, went through the handshake ritual, and I lighted one up while he pitched his away.

  “I thought, Mr. Hammer, that you might like to see the scene of the accident.”

  Not “scene of the crime.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Call me Mike, and is Jim okay or do you prefer Corporal?”

  A shy smile flickered on a craggily, almost-handsome face. “With no one else around, make it Jim. I kind of feel like I know you.”

  “Well, you’re a friend of Pat’s. I come with the package. You’ve worked a couple of shared investigations, I hear.”

  “Yup, but we really got to know each other at police conventions around the country. Still waters run deep with that guy.”

  “They do, but it’s usually branch water.”

  He chuckled and got in behind the wheel. I came around and climbed into the rider’s seat.

  “I get the feeling,” I said, “that you don’t make the Jamison Elder death a murder.”

  He started up the engine; it had a throaty hum. “I can’t honestly say I have an opinion… certainly not one that might clash with the Orange County coroner’s.”

  I frowned. “Has there been an inquest already?”

  “There won’t be one. That’s purely at the coroner’s discretion, and he labels Elder an accident.”

  “Does your nose agree with it?”

  “It doesn’t disagree. We’ll be there in half an hour and you can form your own opinion.”

  We were out of the parking lot now, and on the road.

  I said, “You’ve talked to Pat about this, right?”

  He nodded. “And it seems to me his suspicions grow mostly out of misgivings about that other accidental death—Chester Dunbar. Mike, I’ll tell you what I told Pat—I’m just not familiar with that case.”

  “Was it a case?”

  “Well, not really. The trooper who covered—what the record says was—Dunbar’s accidental death chose at the time not to call in the B.C.I.”

  The Bureau of Criminal Investigations was the plainclothes branch of the State Police that responded to situations called to their attention by uniformed men like Sheridan. Troopers handled assault and larceny and malicious mischief, but not murder.

  “What if I come up with new evidence?” I asked, and shared my thoughts about the two pill bottles that may have been emptied and then refilled, and not by a pharmacist.

  He glanced at me, rays glinting off the sunglasses. “That’s not evidence, Mike. It’s a theory. And it’s a theory about a three-year-old closed case.”

  There might have been a hint of sneer in my smile. “See, even you can’t call it anything but a ‘case.’ Where I come from, there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  I’d let a little edge into my voice, and he glanced at me with a world-weary smile, eyes hidden behind the dark lenses.

  “Mike, I know all about you. I even envy the short-cuts to justice you can take that somebody like me mustn’t. Pat says you have a nose that can sniff out murder like nobody else. So if you turn something up, by all means I’ll take it seriously.”

  “Thanks.”

  An eyebrow rose above the sunglasses. “Now that’s not carte blanche to do as you please, understand. The way we’re overworked, as shorthanded as we are, I’m happy to have you sniffing around two accidental deaths that might be a little too convenient.”

  I would like to have told him about the possible murder attempts on Dex and Wake Dunbar. But as my clients, they’d been pledged confidentiality. Still, I knew damn well their respective assumptions about who was out to kill them—Abe Hazard and Madeline Dunbar respectively—might be dead wrong. Someone might be trying to increase the estate’s money pot. Someone like sweet Dorena, for instance, or either one of the two brothers, if one was lying to me about murder attempts. Even supposedly harmless Chickie, who also stood to gain.

  I stabbed out the butt in the ashtray and asked, “Why are you so overworked? It’s still the off-season, isn’t it? For a while yet?”

  “Catskills aren’t what they used to be,” the trooper said, both hands on the wheel. Traffic outside Montgomery was a little heavy. “But the tourist trade is still a year-round thing. You might even be able to get some skiing in.”

  “No thanks. My idea of exercise is chasing my secretary around the office.”

  “Ha. What’s hers?”

  “Chasing me when I get winded.” I lighted up another Lucky. “Jim, if you don’t want to tell me what’s giving you troopers heartburn, I understand.”

  He gave me a quick grin that was an admission that he’d been ducking my question. Then the grin faded as quickly as it came.

  “We’ve had another missing girl,” he said.

  “Another?”

  He nodded. “Number eight over the past couple of years.”

  “Runaways?”

  His headshake was barely perceptible. “That’s the thing—they’re all of age. Eighteen to twenty-two. They’ve been vacationing on their own till this last one. You know, spring breaks and that kind of thing. One was a secretary from the city on her week off.”

  “And since they’re of age, they might just have taken off somewhere because they felt like it.”

  Half a humorless smile carved itself in a craggy cheek. “In this latest instance, the girl was vacationing with her parents… but was eighteen. And they were overbearing types. You know how over-protective a Jewish mother can be.”

  “I know how over-protective an Irish mother can be. So the current missing girl looks like maybe an of-age runaway.”

  “She does.” His sigh rattled out of his chest. “The only lead we have is a guy about five eight, broad-shouldered, seen chatting up this latest girl in the parking lot at the All-Night Room at the Concord resort, outside Monticello. Or anyway we think it’s the same guy—descriptions tally.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Well, you can bet we’re taking this seriously.”

  “Why the troopers? Why not the B.C.I.?”

  The blank lenses swung momentarily my way. “These aren’t murders, Mike. Not that we know of, anyway. And these little towns, even the bigger ones like Monticello, don’t have police departments with the capacity to do missing persons investigations. And no state lines have been crossed to our knowledge, and anyway we have no bodies, so the FBI aren’t in it. We’ve had some support from the local paper. But it feels tragic. It smells tragic.”

  “Now who has the nose for murder?”

  He grunted something that was almost a laugh. “This is the case I’d like your help on, Mike.”

  “I wouldn’t mind giving it. But if some si
ck prick is killing these girls, I can’t promise I’d call you before I did something about it.”

  “Like blow the bastard away with that fabled .45 of yours?”

  “If I couldn’t think of something more fun.” I sat up. “Say—something just occurred to me… what car was Elder driving?”

  There had been four vehicles in the four-car garage, and the car the butler had driven was still impounded.

  The trooper said, “One of those woody station wagons. ’61 Country Squire. The family lets the help use it sometimes, I’m told, to go buy groceries and pick up cleaning and such. But it belongs to Wake Dunbar, who uses it to pack up his artist’s gear for when he wants to go out and paint in the great outdoors.”

  “He did seem anxious nothing had happened to it, and that he’d get it back.”

  “He will, soon enough.”

  The drive along the country road was so scenic it might have been a worthy subject for an artist like Wake—plush tall pines touched with clumps of snow holding out against the spring thaw, occasional non-firs standing skeletal like ghosts haunting the woods.

  Finally we approached a rustic, almost ramshackle covered bridge, its blistered wood gray with age, its peaked roof like a wounded soldier’s proud cap. The ground fell somewhat steeply on either side, the stream the bridge crossed interrupting a gentle hillside. Chunks of ice still floated, making their way to the Hudson, but none were floes big enough now to carry even half a body.

  Corporal Sheridan pulled over and we got out. The ground was soft and still clotted with snow. We walked across the narrow macadam road, and the trooper pointed at muddy tire-tread gouges in the shrinking snowbank.

  “Elder must have caught a patch of ice,” Sheridan said, “and plowed in here.”

  “Were there skid marks?”

  “No, but with black ice, you don’t always have them. And there was still enough snow the night it happened to stop him. The coroner thinks Elder hit his head on impact, on the steering wheel, where considerable blood of his type was found. That’s consistent with his head wound.”

  “What about the idea that some other driver came along and hit him after he locked and walked away from that Country Squire?”

  “That’s a possibility.” The trooper turned and pointed to the one-lane bridge. “Elder must have stumbled out of the car and walked across the bridge toward Bear Mountain Bridge, where he could phone for help. This road curves around and hugs the embankment. A dark night, stumbling around maybe in the middle of the road, poor guy might’ve been clipped by another driver and gone rolling down into the stream and, well, you know the rest.”