Baby, It’s Murder

Chapter Seven

No excuse for it, really.

Chalk it up to me being off my home turf, or maybe letting my guard down because I’d just exited a millionaire’s mansion, about to climb into the heap where I’d left it on the curving brick drive.

However you slice it, though, I was a dope. An idiot who let somebody come up from behind him and, in classic private eye fashion, sap him... sap me... and the only break I got was I wasn’t fully unconscious when I felt the hands of two men grab me and lift me and hurl me like a sack of salt into what had to be the trunk of a car.

My car.

Before the lid slammed down, I sensed hands frisking me and the .38 Police Special on my hip holster under my sports coat got plucked off me like a metallic flower. My car keys were snatched from my already limp hand.

And now the lid came down, like a coffin sealing a guy in who wasn’t quite dead yet.

We rumbled off, my two new invisible friends and me, and I was coming fully around when I heard them up in that world beyond called the front seat, talking. Discussing my future.

My limited future.

“Do we have to snuff him?” a whiny male voice asked.

“Sal, we already kidnapped his ass,” a deeper male voice responded irritatedly. “That makes it felony murder, you dipshit.”

Sal sounded hurt, even over the throaty engine noise. “That’s not nice, Lou. I deserve better, you calling me that.”

“Fuck you, Sal. I’m no happier about this than you are.”

We weren’t going fast. This seemed to be a residential area or perhaps Sidon’s diminutive downtown.

“Our bum luck,” Sal said. “We hadn’t been up here making a drop, we wouldn’ta been the ones close enough to catch this call.”

“We’re convenient,” Lou said, resigned to his lot in life. “We were handy and Mr. Evello give us this job and that’s all she wrote.”

Sal giggled. “All he wrote. This Hammer wasn’t all they say he is. He didn’t exactly have the instincts of no cat.”

“He did not,” Lou said, almost cheerful now. “Surprisingly simple. Easy peezy.”

“Mr. Evello” could be any one of three or four members of the Evello crime family; I’d tangled with them plenty of times and, thanks to my efforts, they weren’t as powerful as they once had been. Word was they were reduced to playing middle-men for the emerging Russian mob these days. How the mighty have fallen, thought the man in the trunk of their car.

Their car or...?

My car. This was the heap. These pricks may have got the drop on me but they were sloppy. And fools to boot. Surely they’d figure Mike Hammer would have some kind of ordnance stowed in the trunk of his car.

“We better make sure,” Sal said, “nobody’ll be around.”

“Well, we’ll check, dumb-ass, won’t we?”

Silence but for the easy rumble of the wheels. My souped-up buggy had a nice purr going.

Sounding hurt, Sal said, “You’re in some friggin’ mood.”

“Don’t hold your breath for an apology, numb-nuts. I like this as little as you. Simple drop turns into a capital crime, fuck.”

Even in the trunk, Sal’s sigh was audible.

“We could just make it like, you know, a warning,” the whiny hood said. “Kick him, maybe stomp his gun hand till it snaps, crackles and pops, then leave him to bleed and think about it.”

Rumble of wheels.

Lou said, “What I hear about Hammer is, he thinks about something like this that’s gone down, he comes looking. You ever hear the story about the social club massacre? He machine-gunned a room full of goodfellas till they was good-and-dead-fellas.”

“Ah, that’s just a story. Never happened.”

“Only ’cause nobody lived to tell the tale. You be careful when we open that trunk. Be ready. He may pop out like the worst fuckin’ jack-in-the-box you ever the fuck seen.”

We picked up some speed. I started to smell and hear countryside. Cramped though I was, I was in a decent place, relatively speaking. The Ford trunk was roomy and I was on my side, like a giant fetus, with my hands free. They hadn’t bothered to bind me. Yes, they’d taken the .38. But the good news was that piece wasn’t registered, not licensed or anything. If I’d been packing the .45, it could have been traced to me, though admittedly the barrel had been changed a number of times.

But not since I took those drug dealers out in that alley.

Was that what this was about?

Those dead dealers might have Evello ties. Maybe I’d been tracked to Velda’s mom’s place, and shadowed till I landed somewhere making a snatch possible without attracting attention.

This was payback, wasn’t it?

The trouble was I’d been too smart for my own good. Or maybe too cheap. The .38 I kept stowed in this trunk I had shifted to that hip holster. So my firepower in this metal cage was non-existent.

We sped up for a while, a short while, then suddenly slowed.

“This is where we’re dumpin’ him?” Sal said, in stupid surprise. Not a lot of planning here, apparently, or anyway none shared with Lou’s excitable assistant. “A school? A goddamn grade school?”

“Look at the boarded-up windows, shit-for-brains. It’s closed down.”

“Doesn’t look that old.”

“They opened some kind of consolidated school for Nassau County, our guy says. Closed down this and a few others. Should be nobody here. Not even a fuckin’ janitor.”

We slowed.

“Better not be any kids,” Sal said. “I don’t kill no damn kids. That’s evil.”

Everybody has their standards, I thought.

“There ain’t gonna be no kids at a closed-down school, shithead. Jesus.”

“Lou.”

“What?”

“Be nice.”

Long pause.

“Oh-kay,” Lou said.

The car took a turn to the right and crunched over gravel.

“Why aren’t you stoppin’?” Sal asked.

“Better take him around back,” Lou said. “Little playground there, and nobody driving by could get even a goddamn glimpse of us. Outa sight, outa mind.”

Sal sounded very nervous now. “Okay. Okay.”

The heap veered off the gravel and onto slightly bumpy ground. Really slowing down. I took a couple of deep breaths. The air in the trunk was stale and stifling, but at least it was air.

The car bumped up onto what was apparently concrete and glided to a stop. Engine shut off. Lou’s door opened and closed; then Sal’s door, after a second, did the same. Their footsteps on paving announced them as they came around back. A key worked in the trunk’s lock. Before the lid was lifted, Lou had some advice.

“I think he’ll still be out,” Lou said, “but don’t count on it. Think about all those dead guys at that social club.”

“Aw, Lou, that’s just a story. It’s gotta be.”

The lid came up.

I came out with the tire iron in my fist, held high, like an Indian with a tomahawk in a John Wayne movie.

“Oh shit,” Sal said.

He was small and skinny and pockmarked and his suit was a gray sharkskin and his tie skinny and black and the side of his head caved in like an empty cardboard box you stepped on and he was dead before he knew it. He folded up like a three-legged card table and dropped, and Lou — fat, in a herringbone sports coat and Lee slacks — turned and ran. He had a pistol in his hand, some kind of revolver, but he didn’t take the time to turn and shoot.

I knelt over dead Sal, his head leaking brains, and found the revolver in his shoulder holster and removed it. I was in no hurry. Lou was fat and spooked and running for cover in a small playground of rusted metal, a slide, tire swings, a jungle gym. He had apparently decided taking cover before firing at me made more sense than standing his ground and blasting.

If he’d decided anything at all.

The revolver in my hand was a formidable one, a Colt Python, surprisingly big for a little guy like the late Sal to be packing. Maybe it was like a little-dick jerk driving a Firebird or something.

I shook myself — it’d been cramped in that damn trunk — and then went after Sal. Problem for the guy was how nothing here was anything you could hide behind — the best he could do was scramble up the ladder to the slide and position himself there, covered as best he could manage behind metal steps and curve of steel, in a position from which he could snipe down at me. A good plan, in the abstract, but when his head popped up and his pistol-in-hand pointed, I triggered Sal’s ridiculously oversize Colt Python and Lou’s ugly mustached puss imploded even as the head it rode exploded in a festive chunky spray like the world’s most ambitious pinata.

Then the headless kidnapper, whose worries about felony murder were over, slid belly down on the slide and stopped just before the end of the thing, leaving a smeary scarlet trail like a colorful snail’s slimy residue. Blood poured from his nearly headless neck at the end of the slide like an overturned can of red paint.

I left the wiped-down Colt Python near the slack fingers of the late Sal’s right hand, and retrieved my .38 from where the hood had shoved it in his belt. No scenario could explain this crime scene, but that was somebody else’s problem. I retrieved my key ring from where the trunk key was still in the lock and confiscated my own damn ride.

Left them there like the two dead children they were, class dismissed.

Back at the Sterling bungalow, where Velda was still away, I took a shower and got into fresh clothes. I’d brought along a second sports coat and had several polos and some black jeans. I put the things I’d worn earlier in the hamper; riding in a car trunk can create wrinkles and collect random dirt and grease, you homemakers may want to note.

I allowed myself a bottle of Miller and sat on the couch wondering if any of this would catch up with me. I was fairly keyed up but the beer settled me and I was stretched out napping there when the phone rang.

It was Pat.

“I’ve had an interesting report,” the captain of Homicide said in a just-the-facts-ma’am manner. No English on the ball at all.

I grinned at the phone. “Have you? What’s the subject? The need to re-stock the break room more frequently? The rise of juvenile delinquency in the greater Metropolitan area?”

“Go to hell, Mike,” he said pleasantly. “I am, as you may recall, heading up the Narcotics task force.”

“And no one could do a finer job, Captain Chambers.”

“Do you happen to know a Salvatore Romano and a Louis Marino?”

“Don’t believe I do.”

“Well, they’re bagmen and sometime dealers for the Evello Family.”

“Oh, are the Evellos still around?”

“Did I already tell you to go to hell?”

“I believe you did, Pat. If I run into anybody introducing themselves as... Sal who? Lou who?”

His voice took on some edge now. “You won’t be running into them except possibly at a Little Italy mortuary.”

“Deceased, are they?”

“Yes, and under suspicious circumstances.”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “Am I supposed to know something about those circumstances?”

Pat’s sigh was as long as it was familiar. “Mike, they were found dead in the playground of Sidon Elementary.”

“Elementary, my dear Chambers?”

“Not funny. Not funny. It’s defunct. A perfect dumping ground.”

I kept my tone light. “Are you implying I dumped them there?”

“Two Manhattan Island drug dealers found dead on Long Island... while Mike Hammer is visiting. What do you have to say about it?”

“Good riddance?”

That was his fist hitting his desk. “Jesus, Mike, can’t you even take a vacation without this sort of thing happening?”

“What sort of thing, Pat?”

Now his words flew: “If I were to advise the Sidon PD to pick you up and give you a paraffin test, would it show you’d used a firearm recently?”

“Probably. I was at the range a day before I came out here.”

“...Okay.” Another sigh. “You realize I’m not on the scene.”

“Obviously.”

“Maybe, with your skills as a trained detective, you might speculate on how this may have happened. Just to give law enforcement a hand. Might this be an execution of two drug dealers, for example?”

“I could take a wild stab at it for you.”

“Please.”

“Suppose those two picked someone up to take for a good old-fashioned ride and it didn’t work out for them.”

A very long pause ensued.

Then: “Mike, would you say that’s what happened?”

“Could have been. Could. If I had planned an execution, I would’ve left a tidier scene than what you’re indicating.”

Another very long pause. I could damn near hear his mental wheels clanking.

“Okay, Mike,” he said. “I’m not going to share certain thoughts I’m having with the Sidon authorities... unless it comes up officially. From them.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“Just keep out of any further trouble while you’re taking time off from work to help Velda out. Okay... buddy?”

I kept it light. “I haven’t been in any trouble that I can think of, Pat, but fine. By the way, a couple of things you could help me with.”

“I’m sure.”

“As the grand poobah of the Narcotics task force, could you find out for me who’s in back of the dealing on Long Island? I don’t require facts — rumor will do fine.”

“Jesus, Mike.”

“Simple question.”

You could almost hear his eyes glazing over.

He said, “I’ll check into that.”

“Promise?”

“Go to hell, Mike,” he said, and was obviously about to sign off when I stopped him.

“Pat, one other thing. There’s a biker who Mikki was seeing. They’ve broken up but he’s hanging around like a bad smell. Name is Brian Ellis. He’s maybe twenty, twenty-one, and enrolled at Suffolk Junior College. Run a check on him for me.”

“Okay.” His pencil was scratching that info down. “Why, if I might be so bold as to ask?”

“If he’s dealing, he may have drawn Mikki into his net.”

Alarm colored his voice now. “You’re shitting me.”

“No. I don’t want to say any more. There are some things we, Velda and I, want to deal with ourselves. It’s a family matter.”

Some urgency came now: “Family matters can get out of hand, Mike. They can become police matters.”

“When that’s appropriate, I’ll bring you in. I really will, Pat. You can trust me.”

“Oh, I know there are all kinds of things I can trust you to do. That’s what worries me.”

But at least he said, “Goodbye,” before he hung up.

I stayed around the Sterling place all afternoon. If the local cops got wind of me on their own — Pat wouldn’t clue them in, that much I knew — I wanted to make myself easily available, to deal with it head on.

Nobody showed. No squad car pulled up. And the phone never rang. Home free? I could only wonder.

Around four that afternoon, Velda came in, looking troubled and, for her, less than fresh. In one of those white silk blouse and black skirt combos she often wore to work, she might have stepped out of the office. She joined me on the couch. Sat close and rested a hand on my arm.

“Well,” she said, going straight to it, “Mikki did go to the mall all right, and she and her girlfriends did the typical high school stuff — trying things on, shopping, sitting at a table in the mall court sipping Cokes and giggling. Couldn’t have been more wholesome — a bunch of Bettys and Veronicas.”

“But?”

“But.” The dark almond eyes bored into me. “The girlfriends left without her and she met with the Ellis boy in the back mall parking lot.”

I couldn’t hold back the sneer. “Ellis ‘boy.’ He’s of age — a college student. Go on.”

Her head tilted toward me, the arcs of raven hair framing the lovely, troubled face. “I parked — it was fairly busy back there, and I made sure I wasn’t seen, kept well enough away to watch but not close enough to hear. They were standing talking near the double doors into Bloomingdale’s, under an overhang. The angle was such that I couldn’t lip-read.”

Like a lot of investigators, Velda’s lip-reading skills were formidable.

“They seemed to be arguing,” she went on, eyes tensed in thought now. “I may be assuming too much, but from gestures Mikki made to her purse, she seemed to be broke, and perhaps begging for him to supply her on credit. Just a guess, Mike.”

“An educated one.”

She let some air out. “At any rate, I didn’t see him hand her anything. If Mikki’s broke, she didn’t talk him into a one-way deal, at least that I saw. I suppose he could be trying to leverage her out of that relationship with Second, so our biker friend could get back in the game.”

I frowned. “If they were an item, would Ellis supply her in exchange for sex, you think?”

Velda opened her hands. “Who can say? I don’t think she’s a hardcore addict, not yet — the tracks on her arm don’t indicate that, anyway. But you know, Mike, and I know — junkies will do anything for a fix.”

No question about it. If you took drugs out of the equation, the World’s Oldest Profession would be doing considerably less business.

“And if that jerk loves her,” I said, “what some guys will do for love isn’t written in any rule book.”

“No.” She shook her head and the black scythe blades of her hair swung. “I feel like we’re on the verge of something happening, something... not good.” Her dark-eyed gaze fixed itself on me. “Can you make a phone call to your friend, Dr. Snyder? We’ve got to get that girl into rehab before she gets in any deeper.”

“I’ll make the call,” I said, got up, and headed for the phone.

Velda was on the edge of the couch. “Do you think he can help her?”

“Doll, if he can dry a dipso like me out, he can do just about anything.”

I made the call.