Kill Me, Darling Read online

  “I don’t mind. I never quite got around to it. Handled some business affairs instead. But I’m thinking about trying Nolly Q’s in Miami Beach tonight.”

  The ugly face frowned, not doing itself any favors. “I don’t know, Mike. I hear a gangster runs that place, and it’s got a reputation as a clip joint. A fabulous one, but a clip joint.”

  “I’m a big boy. I’ll take my chances. Where can I get a decent steak?”

  That turned out to be a boxcar diner on the way to Miami. They served breakfast all day and all night, so I had a rare steak and scrambled eggs and American fries. I was hungrier than a lumberjack on pay day. Seemed like food was my only craving right now. My stomach must have been starved for calories that didn’t come from fermented grain.

  The day was so sunny and clear and bright I stopped to buy sunglasses. The top on the maroon Ford was down as I rolled through little communities of cottages and haciendas, bungalows and trailer camps, all nestled in stands of palms and tropical flora that didn’t give a damn what kind of money you had.

  Miami itself was a different story, looking like what Manhattan might have been if Hollywood were in charge. I was soon in light traffic traveling briskly down four-lane Biscayne Boulevard where handsome older residences quickly gave way to white and buff skyscrapers. The Seventy-ninth Street Causeway took me across the blue shimmer that was Biscayne Bay, its docks given over to fishing and excursion boats, its roomy harbor home to private craft from houseboats to yachts. Before long I was cutting down Miami Beach’s main stem, Collins Avenue, which ran the length of the island, hugging the stretch of golden sand.

  Miami Beach claimed to be a separate city from Miami and had the local government to back it up. But how could a place with no manufacturing, no commerce, no slums, no railroad, no airport, call itself a city? It did have schools and churches and hospitals, and golf courses and parks. But mostly it was five miles of oceanfront hotels, ritzy nightspots, and swanky shops, all catering to the wealthy who flocked there in winter.

  Right now its opulent white hotels might have been the towering vestiges of an ancient civilization, attended by archeologists making a trek to some distant land, not tourists enjoying off-season rates. At a modest six stories, the narrow white apartment building just half a block off the main stem might have been a toolshed for one of the nearby white monoliths. A geometric slab bore the street number and held in place a marquee-style overhang around which curved the words WINTER HARBOR.

  The building had a nautical look down to its oversize porthole windows. There was no doorman, but security wasn’t entirely lax, because you still had to get buzzed through the vestibule. I only had to try seven of the twenty-four buttons before I got the only kind of buzzer that says you’ve just won something.

  I pushed through double glass-and-steel doors into a pink-walled air-conditioned lobby with an ocean liner feel, thanks in part to its metal-banistered stairway and the life buoy design in the terrazzo floor. This pastel cavern I had all to myself—even the elevator was self-service.

  One of the vestibule buttons I hadn’t pushed was 504, labeled V. S. But I already knew that was Velda’s number, thanks to Ben Sauer at the Herald. I went up to five and quickly determined there were four good-sized apartments per floor. Even the hallway was air-conditioned, its walls a light pink, the floor gray slate.

  Velda didn’t have the money or the attitude to stay in a place this posh. According to Sauer, she wasn’t being kept, but the evidence said otherwise.

  Like the lobby, the curving hallway was empty. This was late afternoon but there were no sounds of TV or smells of cooking. Maybe the residents were too high-class for something as plebeian as television, much less cook for themselves. On the other hand, I figured the apartments were mostly unoccupied off-season.

  I stopped at 504 and rang the bell twice and knocked several times, but nobody seemed at home.

  From my wallet I withdrew from their hiding place a small pair of lock picks. My hands were steadier than they’d been for a long time, but it still took ten seconds instead of the usual five to crack the new-model Yale number.

  I stepped inside and called, “Velda? Velda!”

  Nothing.

  I almost tripped over the two suitcases just inside the door. Seeing the familiar copper-brown leather bags confirmed this as Velda’s apartment, and made my stomach clench like a fist, as if I’d caught her with that bastard Quinn. I hefted the bags and found them heavy. Going on a trip? Moving out, maybe? Already gone?

  But the fragrance of her was still here. Not perfume. That special scented soap she used…

  Otherwise the pad didn’t speak of her at all. Not that it wasn’t classy with its light pink walls and light gray carpeting with darker pink streaks. Modern yet comfortable-looking furnishings included a pale pink sofa with red pillows, a low-slung white marble-topped coffee table, brass-based lamps, a dark rose chair with feminine lines. The floor-to-ceiling windows were sheerly curtained, and the framed pictures on the wall were pretty fair Jackson Pollock imitations.

  Carefully decorated digs, yes. But not by Velda’s hand. For one thing, she didn’t like the real Pollock. She’d hang him on the wall before one of those kicked-over-paint-can paintings of his.

  The living room was sunken with a kitchen off to one side. You went up three steps to get to the other rooms, including the bedroom. The scent of her was even stronger in there, though again nothing spoke of the woman herself. The walls were off-white, the carpet buff, the furnishings modern in the way of an expensive hotel. The double bed had a pink satin spread with a row of red satin pillows.

  My eyes fixed themselves on that bed.

  My hand twitched and rose to my chest and my fingers drifted inside my suit coat and then I was gripping the butt of the rod. It came half-way out like a beast from its cave after a twig snapped. I thought about shooting that goddamn bed and those goddamn pillows until the air was full of cordite and stuffing and sprung springs and goose feathers.

  Then I eased the beast back into its cave.

  The closet was empty and so were the dresser drawers. An adjacent bathroom was devoid of her personal articles. Those suitcases didn’t represent a trip she was taking—she had moved out. Or anyway was moving out.

  What did that mean?

  Was she heading back to Manhattan to beg her way back into my good graces? A voice in my head said, Fat chance. Or was she moving in with Nolly Quinn? The voice said, Now you’ve got it…

  In the living room, near the front door, I tried the suitcases and they weren’t locked. I opened them one at a time and went through them. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I told myself I was searching for clues. What I was probably doing was feeling the fabrics she wore, the jersey, the silk, the cotton. Smelling her. Touching her by proxy.

  A small zippered area gave up a copy of Quick, a little mini-magazine with a picture of Janet Leigh in a swimsuit on the cover. Absently I thumbed the pages and caught the stiffer edge of a photo. I pulled it out.

  It was a snapshot-size print of the two of us smiling at the camera, toasting the photographer, maybe with a little buzz on. One of those photos some doll takes at your table and if you like how it comes out, you buy a copy. I didn’t remember ever buying the thing, so Velda must have.

  Something warm flowed through me. Something like hope. Something that wasn’t hurt or hate. She had still cared enough about me to bring this photo along and hide it away. To risk her new boy friend finding it and belting her one over it.

  They came in talking and for a fraction of a second I saw them first—two big well-tanned crew-cut guys in expensive suits with the kind of shoulders that made pads superfluous. The one in front was so blond he was almost albino with light blue movie-star eyes and an ex-pug’s battered mug. The one in back had bristly black hair and heavy black eyebrows over dark, close-set eyes under a shelf of forehead that gave him a caveman look.

  That fraction of a second got me half-way to my feet before
the near-albino rushed me. No discussion. No queries. Nobody caring why I was here or what I was doing, just that I didn’t belong, and in a flash I knew this was not Velda’s pad but the digs Nolly Quinn provided whoever his current flame was.

  I managed a toreador side step and shoved the bull-necked blond skidding to the floor on his face, the carpet cushioning him some but not much. Then the black-crew-cut caveman was rushing me, and I thought about yanking the .45 out and slapping him with it, only once a gun came into play things could get out of hand, especially since I had no doubt these boys were packing, even if their suits were linen custom-cut numbers like mine.

  I gripped the handle of the bigger of the two suitcases and swung it at the caveman, clipping him on the chin, sending him windmilling back against a wall and sitting him on his ass. While he was dazed, I dropped the suitcase and went over fast and grabbed him by an ear with one hand and hugged the shelf of his forehead with the other and smashed his skull into the wall until his eyes rolled back white and he slumped unconscious under the mini-Pollock he’d made.

  The near-albino was getting noisily to his feet behind me and I swung around and charged him this time, tackling the bastard, taking him across the living room, his feet doing a stupid dance as they tried to find purchase until my weight made him lose balance and brought him down, his head hitting the edge of the marble coffee table. He went limp and fell over to one side, the back of his head wet with blood. But he was breathing.

  So was I, sucking air in and letting it out, ragged wind as erratic as a short circuit, my heart beating fast, my head spinning a little. I was in no shape for this, and I either needed to kill these sons of bitches while I still could or else get the hell out before they came around.

  I got the hell out.

  * * *

  Miami Beach was brighter by night than by day, and busier. The plush white hotels of Collins Avenue dolled themselves up with brilliant, multi-colored lights that bathed them in blue and pink and purple and green, casting a dizzying aurora borealis into the dark sky. Even off-season, the stem was alive with gussied-up tourists showing off their finest vacation wear and their brand-new sunburns. The retirement types had near-black tans and garish casual attire, parking themselves in beach chairs outside their hotels, watching younger and prettier generations parade by on their way to nightclubs luring them with a gaudy neon siren’s song.

  If the Winter Haven apartment house had been an ocean liner, then the nightclub just west of Collins Avenue on Twenty-second Street was an iceberg, a big block of white with pink and green trim and NOLLY Q’S in pink script neon filling a fourth of the facade. The windows were glass-block, letting light in but keeping the unpaying out, with a dark pink canopy and matching carpeted steps up into the joint.

  Several well-dressed couples were going in when I came around from the self-park lot in back. The place seemed to be doing okay for this time of year, but I quickly realized I might be under-dressed. I was standing on the sidewalk staring at the place, like a kid considering an outfield-fence climb, when I felt a gentle hand on my arm and heard a tentative feminine voice say, “Excuse me… excuse me?”

  I turned to see a delicate doll in a green satin gown and a mane of hair a shade of red unknown in nature but fine by me. Her face was heart-shaped, her lips thin but beautifully formed and moistly scarlet, her eyes as green as her gown. Her make-up was light, expertly applied. She was slender but in an appealing, long-limbed model manner that made her seem taller than she was.

  “No apologies necessary, honey,” I said, grinning at her.

  “I don’t mean to sound rude,” she said, her voice an unlikely but fetching combo of little girl and worldly, “but are you alone tonight?”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a hooker in her league working outside a high-priced joint like this. I kept my grin friendly as I lifted her hand from my arm like a butterfly I intended to let go.

  “Sorry, baby,” I said, “that’s not how I play. Thanks, though.”

  She flushed in embarrassment. “Oh, this isn’t a pick-up! I just need to go in the club, and they don’t allow in unescorted females. There’s somebody I need to see, somebody I simply must… could you walk me in?”

  Desperation throbbed in her voice and in the almond-shaped, long-lashed green eyes.

  “Love-life problems, doll?”

  She swallowed and nodded, chin crinkling.

  “I know the feeling.” I glanced at the club, thought about my own situation. “How about we go in together and then take a table for a while? No come-on, kid. I just need to blend in better than some rube out on the town solo.”

  She nodded and smiled. It had a nice pixie-ish quality.

  I held out my arm and she took it. Maybe the Hammer luck was making a comeback. This was not the kind of fluff a bum just in off a bender, adrift in a strange town, usually rated. Particularly without paying.

  We went in and I checked my hat. I tipped the maître d’ a buck and he walked us to a table toward the front off to one side. The interior was what the suckers took for class these days—linen tablecloths, red carpet, mirrored walls, glass stage. A dance band in white jackets up on the latter was playing a rhumba. About half the male patrons out on the dance floor were in tuxes and all their dates were in gowns. I was under-dressed, all right.

  “You smell good, sugar,” I said, as I held out the chair for her at our table for two.

  “It’s ‘My Sin,’” she said, and this time there wasn’t any impishness about it.

  “Well, it’s a good sin to have,” I said and got seated. “I’m Mike. Mike Hammer. Down here from New York.”

  She leaned forward. The gown had some neckline but she didn’t have much in the way of breastworks. What the hell—I was a leg man anyway.

  “I’m Erin,” she said. “Erin Valen. Vacationing, Mike?”

  “More like a business trip. What do you do for a living, Erin?”

  “A little modeling. Some acting, some dancing. Waitressing, if I get desperate. I was in the chorus line here, till just a month or so ago. They don’t bring in name acts off-season. No floor show now, just dance bands.”

  The place seemed fairly full, but a close look revealed landscape enough for twice as many tables. During the winter months, there would be.

  “Not surprised you’re a model, Erin. You’re a natural beauty. And that’s no come-on either.”

  She touched the emerald ribbon at her throat and seemed to hold back a blush. “What do you do for a living, Mike?”

  “Insurance investigator,” I said. Not a lie. Just a reduction of the truth. “Have you eaten?”

  “I’m not hungry. But go ahead if—”

  “No, I ate earlier. Let’s get something to drink.”

  She had a champagne cocktail and I ordered a beer, which rated me a patronizing look from the waiter. Apparently he wasn’t interested in a tip.

  I said to her, “There’s gambling here, I understand.”

  “Yes,” she said, and nodded toward the curtained wall nearby. “We can go back there if you like… in a while.”

  “We’ll see. Full casino set-up?”

  “Oh, yes. Everything you could want, slots to roulette. As big as this room. Bigger. The only casino in Miami Beach right now.”

  “The guy who runs the place,” I said, “must know what wheels to grease.”

  She nodded, but her nostrils and eyes flared. I wondered if I’d touched a raw nerve. She got into her little green purse for a cigarette case, got a smoke out and looked to me for a light.

  “Sorry, honey,” I said. “I quit.”

  She dug in her purse some more and found some matches. Lighting up, she said, “Must be hard for you being in here. With all this smoke.”

  “Nah. Actually just makes me kind of sick.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry…” She was about to put the cigarette out but I stopped her, gripping her easily by the wrist.

  “Doesn’t bother me that much,” I assured her. �
��And if it did, it’s something I better start getting used to.”

  Our drinks came and we flirted a little as she told me about things to do and see while I was in town, and what not to bother doing and seeing. She had a bubbly personality that never crossed over into dumb-broad giddiness. In fact, despite the banality of our conversation, it was clear she was one smart cookie.

  I took her out on the dance floor for a slow Latin number, “Perfidia,” that the dance band’s girl singer was singing in a sultry, romantic Spanish. That was when I spotted them.

  Velda and Nolly Quinn.

  They were at a ringside table and he was holding her hand while she gazed at him in apparent contentment. The reflective sheen of Velda’s black hair was like a rain-slick street at midnight. It went well with the midnight-blue satin dress that left her creamy shoulders bare, touched by a Miami tan, the round ripeness of her breasts all but spilling out like fruit from a tipped cart. Her dark eyes were on him, that lush mouth smiling just a shade. She was everything the delicate creature in my arms was not—big, bold, brashly female.

  And then there was the bastard holding her hand.

  He was handsome, all right, and big, every bit as big as me, and in the flesh the Cary Grant resemblance was striking. The thin mustache might be a lame try for sophistication, but those hooded eyes told the real story—he came from the streets, where the only guys who wore tuxedos were lucky stiffs who landed jobs as waiters.

  He was smoking, but not just smoking, that wasn’t nearly good enough—he was using a goddamn cigarette holder. Christ, the son of a bitch could stand killing for that alone.

  Erin said, “Isn’t she a lovely woman.”

  “Yeah. Who is she?”

  “She’s Nolly Quinn’s girl. That’s Nolly Quinn with her.”

  “The guy with his name outside in neon.”

  She smiled up at me just a little. “That’s right. You seem… are you all right, Mike?”

  “Let’s sit the rest of this one out, okay, kid?”