Baby, It’s Murder

Chapter Nine

Lights were winking on like fireflies in the quiet suburban Sunrise Hills neighborhood at dusk as I pulled the heap in behind Velda’s Mustang at the Sterling bungalow. All seemed right in this quiet world.

Then why wasn’t Velda on her way to Dr. Larry Snyder’s clinic with Mikki by now? There hadn’t been enough time to make that trip and back again. Just getting the girl admitted would make that unlikely.

An uneasiness quickened my step up the sidewalk and the short flight of steps onto the porch, and I had moved my .38 from the hip holster to my hand before I went in, low and ready.

On the living room floor, amid the little-old-lady curios and plastic-covered furnishings, was the garish cover of a true-crime magazine come to life.

Velda lay just this side of the couch — her whole body, head first, belly down, pointed toward the mouth of the hallway connecting the bedrooms. The white silk blouse bearing a few telltale blood droplets, black skirt hiked and exposing lovely legs, she lay sprawled like a runner caught in motion — not that she was going anywhere. Her kitten heels were off and askew and a blade of raven hair somewhat obscured her face. Above her left ear, like a ghastly flower in her hair, was a ragged red circle, matted but for an oozing center.

I knelt over Velda and said her name, first a cry of anguish from deep within me, then various levels of volume as if that mattered, as if a whisper were better than a scream.

Reluctant to move her, I holstered the .38 and lifted her nonetheless and lay the woman out on the same couch where we’d confronted Mikki not long ago. The girl’s junkie “works” were still there like an obscene centerpiece. I slipped a throw cushion under Velda’s head to keep it slightly elevated, her face toward me as if she were blissfully asleep, a condition belied by the blossom of scarlet in her hair.

Weapon back in hand, I quickly but carefully checked the rooms. Nobody was present, nothing else seemed amiss, with one exception. In Mikki’s bedroom, the girl’s suitcase lay open on the bed like a yawning mouth, partially filled with clothes while some other things were stacked alongside waiting to be packed. Clearly the girl had been interrupted.

So had Velda.

I went to the phone in the kitchen and dialed 9-1-1.

The heap rode the rear of the screaming ambulance all the way to the Sidon Medical Center; then I was sitting in the waiting room among other worried souls. Half an hour or so went endlessly by before a middle-aged female doctor in whites approached, stethoscope around her neck, clipboard in hand.

I stood.

The doctor looked at me with clear blue eyes that had seen too much in their day, and her short gray-streaked black hair stood up like she’d been frightened once and it stuck. There was something Bride of Frankenstein about it.

But the woman’s voice was businesslike with a cushion of compassion — exactly right, not that it helped. “You’re Mr. Hammer?”

“Yes. How is she?”

“You checked her in?”

“Yes. How is she?”

“Not next of kin?”

“No. Fiancée. How is she?”

She decided to tell me. “Miss Sterling appears to have a concussion and will need to stay with us overnight for observation. Needed a few stitches, but all in all, the prognosis is good.”

“That’s a relief to hear. But is she conscious?”

A cautious nod. “Yes, in and out. We’ve sedated her, mildly — anything too extreme in that regard might mask symptoms.”

“Could I sit with her?”

The doctor indicated the direction from which she’d come. “We haven’t moved Ms. Sterling to a private room as yet. Right now she’s here in our triage ward. It’s snug but you’re welcome to stay with her. Understand, you may be asked to leave at any moment.”

I nodded.

The doctor had a nurse escort me to Velda’s curtained cubicle among half a dozen others. As promised, it wasn’t roomy, but the closer I could be to her, the better. She was on her side, the shaved place evident where a bandage had been applied to the stitched wound. A single chair was available and I pulled it close, sat and held her hand. When those big brown eyes snapped wide open, I almost jumped.

“Mike...”

“Take it easy, baby. You’re in good hands. Mine included. This is the Sidon hospital. You up to telling me what happened?”

She started looking around, though the effort made her wince. “Mikki — where’s Mikki?”

“Not here. And she wasn’t with you. You were alone in the house. I found her suitcase, half-packed.”

Her mouth pursed, as if she tasted something very sour.

“Second,” she said, bitterly, collecting thoughts that were surely scattered. “Mike, he’s not what we thought he was.”

“No. I confirmed that with the Ellis boy.”

“You believe the Ellis boy?”

“I do. He told a convincing tale and I buy it all the way — Second is not only Mikki’s connection, he’s got his dirty little fingers in the drug traffic at high schools and colleges all over Long Island. He’s a mini-fucking-kingpin. We’ll get him. Don’t worry. We’ll stop him. He’s who sapped you?”

Her nod was small but it spoke volumes. “Mike, Mikki wasn’t complicit. You need to know that! Second was dragging her out of her bedroom into the hall when I tried to stop him and instead he stopped me. Hit me with... something.”

She raised a hand toward the bandaged wound but didn’t touch it.

“I got played for a sucker,” I said. Then I shook my head. “No. I played myself for a sucker. I looked at long hair and motorcycle boots and saw a creep. I took a clean-cut kid at face value and bought in whole hog. Forgot every suspicious instinct that’s fared me so well over the years.”

“Mike... Second hit me with something...”

“You said that.”

Was she getting ready to pass out again?

“No,” Velda said firmly. “You aren’t following. He hit me with... it must have been your .45. Slapped me with it. The barrel of it...”

She closed her eyes.

When were they going to have a room ready for her, anyway? The sounds and smells of this triage area were unnerving. Alarms and beeps, low tones, high-pitched ones, dissonant and shrill and constant. Noise from patients, noise from staff. Antiseptic smells, with a biting edge, the artificial fragrances of soaps and cleaners hiding fecal sins... tired... so tired...

“Mike... Mike...”

I sat up. I was still seated next to Velda, but we were in an actual hospital room now. A private one. She was hooked up to the usual machines, and propped up a little with a pillow, keeping her head higher than the rest of her, as I’d done. The sounds of those machines were muted, the air cool.

“How did I get here?” I asked, scratching my head.

Velda smiled, an angel in a white hospital gown. An angel with a bandaged head. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking that?”

“Tell me they didn’t wheelchair me in here. I got a reputation to protect.”

Her smile wrinkled one side of that lovely face. “No, I believe you came under your own steam. Half asleep, though.”

I sat up. My mouth tasted like I’d been sucking on an inner tube. I began to rise. “I should let you get some rest.”

“Don’t go just yet.”

“I, uh... have things to do.”

Places to go, people to kill.

“Please, Mike. Stay.”

“Sure, doll.” I settled back; my chair had just the right amount of padding for hospital-room seating — enough to be temporarily comfortable without encouraging visitors to stay long.

“I’m going to be fine now,” Velda said.

And her voice sounded surprisingly strong.

“But you have to go,” she said, almost scolding.

Wasn’t that what I’d started to do before she stopped me? Had that blow to her head made her loopy?

“You have to go and find Mikki,” Velda said. Orders from headquarters. “Bring her back. Bring her back to me, Mike.”

I was sitting forward again. “Of course I will. You know I will. Whatever it takes.”

“But not just yet...” She was looking past me. “I’ve been thinking, Mike. Thinking ever since I got to Sidon. I believe... I believe it’s time.”

“For what, doll?”

Now her gaze returned to me. Something unsettling about it...

“Time to own up,” she said. “Time for a little... truth telling.”

I grinned at her uneasily. “What are they pumping into you through that IV, anyway?”

A small smile came and went. “No, I’ve been mulling this ever since I got back to Mom’s this trip.”

I stood, leaned a hand against her bed.

“Listen, baby, you better take it nice and easy, like Sinatra says. You need your rest. Just get some sleep and let these medics take care of you. You can bet I’ll get your sister back, safe and fucking sound, and that damn kid Second and whoever else is behind this is going down for the long drop.”

But it was almost like she wasn’t listening. Wasn’t like she hadn’t heard me spout off like that before.

“Mike... about my sister...”

“I told you. I’ll find her and those that took her will—”

“Yes.” She was smiling, but it was just barely a smile. Rather a Mona Lisa kind of unknowable thing. “About Mikki... there’s something I need to tell you. Something you need to know.”

What the hell was this? Maybe she got sapped harder than the docs realized.

“What do I need to know, doll?”

She gestured. “Better take a seat, Mike.”

Something about the tone, both distant and in my face, set my ass back down in that chair. Like right now.

Her voice was so hushed it claimed my attention, like a priest in a confessional: “Just listen. Please listen. And don’t judge. I know you, Mike Hammer, and you’re the jury and all that goes with it. But for once... don’t judge. Don’t judge me.”

I was shaking my head. “I would never do that, kitten.”

An eyebrow arched. “You might... so listen. Just listen.” Her voice was soft and barely audible, and yet in a way she projected it at the top of her lungs, rattling the cages of my existence. The story she told... well.

Judge for yourself.

“Years ago... almost two decades ago,” Velda said, “I had to go west to help my aunt. My sick aunt, remember? No, don’t answer. I know being without me for those months was hard on you. But you were, at least for you, understanding. Supportive. I’d always been close to my aunt and I told you she was very sick and she needed me. You offered to hire a nurse but I insisted on doing it myself... like now, when I wanted to come home and help Mom out after her hip surgery, and look after Mikki... you understood. Tough for an only child like you, but you did. You did. Thing is, Mike — it was just a story. My aunt wasn’t sick at all. I was the sick one. Well. Not sick exactly... pregnant.”

It was a gut punch. I was shaking. Not with anger or rage or even surprise for that matter. Just shaking.

“Mom went with me, remember?”

I nodded, numbly.

“Mom came home with the late-in-life baby she’d had. Hadn’t realized it when she went out west with me, to help out my aunt. No idea that she was pregnant, she told the world. My daddy didn’t know, either, but he was thrilled. That was the story. But it was a lie.”

I was shaking. I was goddamn shaking.

“I had a baby, Mike — our baby, yours and mine. I named her ‘Mikki’ after her grandfather who everybody called Mickey. You can figure out the rest. I brought the little girl home and she was a sister to me and my mother was a mother to her, and my police officer daddy went along with it. He died on the job, heroically, not long after. You stepped in to a degree. You were... you were her godfather, her ‘unofficial uncle,’ and someone Mikki and I could always depend on. Who the girl could look up to, this famous, notorious, adventurous man. Do you understand, Mike?”

How can you be furious with a woman who’s lying in a hospital bed? With her sweet head bandaged? How could I ever be furious with this woman at all? But I was astounded and hurt. Most shit rolls off of me, but this... cut deep. Wounded me. Rocked me.

I sat back in my barely padded chair. Not anger. No anger. Disappointment. Shocked realization.

My voice never trembles. But it did then.

“Why, Velda? Why would you do that? I would’ve embraced that little girl. She would have been ours. We would have raised her together. How could you... deny me that? Deny us that?”

I could barely see her through something in my eyes.

“Because, Mike,” Velda said, and she was as stern and loving as a stern, loving parent, “eighteen years ago you were a psychotic and a drunk. A recovering drunk... but an acute alcoholic fighting the urge every day.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“You were a man taking on the world, cleansing it of the ‘evil ones’ whenever they made the unwise decision to get in your line of fire. You were a man laughing in the face of death. And I thought, I really thought, I would lose you someday to that madness. But I didn’t. At least not yet I haven’t. And I am so glad. Or maybe... relieved? I could never resist you, Mike. And perhaps I suffered from a milder case of that same madness. So how could I expose my daughter to that kind of danger?”

“Our daughter,” I corrected, sullenly.

For a moment bitterness touched her expression. “You don’t even remember the night we conceived our daughter, Mike — you didn’t even remember being with me that one time, at all. Do you recall that night even now? That terrible, lonely night, when so many men died, and you rescued me, my knight in... shabby armor. That was the first time, the only time in those days, that you threw any hesitation between us out the window...” Then archness colored her tone. “...and the fair maiden willingly rewarded Saint George, didn’t she? And the next morning? Nothing from you. Like the blackout drunk you could still be back then. And this was tomorrow and I was still your holy virgin. The pistol-packing Madonna you whored around on.” She raised her hands, palms out, as if in surrender. “No, no, no judgment. Not from me, so none from you, if you don’t mind. I loved you then and I love you now. I knew you were a lot of things, Michael Hammer — hero, villain, and so much in between... just not a father. Not then.”

This time my whisper shouted.

“I’m ready now,” I said.

The almond eyes narrowed, this beauty with the bandaged head. “Maybe. But look at the life we lead. Look at where we are right now.”

“It’s the path we chose.”

“Yes it is,” Velda said, and nodded as much as she dared. “And there was never any room for a family on it.”

A machine beeped its ellipsis.

I stood. “I’ll find her, kitten. I’ll get her back. Then we can sort this out. Right now, Second or somebody he works with is holding her. Maybe the plan is for Mikki to turn up an overdose victim, a fatality of her own frailty. Maybe she’s been booked on a tramp steamer to some overseas hellhole to sell herself at some pimp’s pleasure. Whatever sick shit Second’s got in mind, I swear to you I will stop it. You think I was a psychotic in the old days, doll, get ready for the sequel.”

I rose and started for the door.

Velda called out to me. “Mikki went under duress, Mike. Remember that! This is not a young woman under that nasty brat Second’s spell. She’ll cooperate with whatever you need to get her out of there, wherever ‘there’ is.”

I turned and looked back at her. “I know. Look, Velda, you’re safe here. If they release you before I get back, go home and stay put till you either hear from me or, maybe, Mikki.”

Her eyes flared with hope. “You think I might? Might hear from Mikki?”

“I do.”

Velda, bandaged or not, sat up sharply. “Mike... you think it’s possible Mikki could find some way to escape on her own?”

I was halfway out when I said it: “She’s our daughter, isn’t she?”