Kiss Her Goodbye

Chapter 13

THE CLOUDS OVER the city were as gray as industrial smoke, and you could smell the rain up there. But whether the stuff would get dumped on us again was hard to say. The gentle mist barely registered, a little thunder grumbled, and I had a feeling the worst was over.

Or soon would be.

A pity, in a way—when a heavy rain came, city sounds were overwhelmed by nature, traffic thinning, pedestrians driven indoors and leaving the sidewalks to those who liked walking in the rain. Velda and I had gone out in it often enough, grinning into the wind and spray like sailors riding the bow through choppy stuff, and if it caught up with us today, we wouldn't mind at all.

Still, we were prepared—I was in the trench coat and she in her raincoat when we stepped from the cab in front of the East Side address of the turn-of-the-century former residence that housed the Enfilade gun club. It was pushing noon. I had skipped the Bing's workout and didn't swim either, because I got my exercise yesterday at the Y and S Club.

And in the Honeymoon Suite. Our reunion had been a loving, gentle affair, as I was recovering from that pummeling my midsection had taken under the bulletproof vest. Bruises blossomed overnight like exotic purple and black flowers. At breakfast—where we sat and talked and worked at putting the remaining puzzle pieces together—Velda had fed me more aspirin.

There had been no effort by her to get me back on the prescribed meds. Just the opposite. She had looked at the vials, reading over their contents, and her dark eyes flashed at me as I stood nearby shaving.

She said, "Do you know what you've been taking?" I said no, and she just shook her head... and shook the contents from the bottles into the toilet and flushed them all away.

Gerald, the dignified grayed guardian of the Enfilade gates, was at his nicely carved antique desk as usual. Velda smiled a little at the formality of his manner and his funeral director garb. He rose and bowed to her, which was pretty goddamn cute, I have to admit, then we stood before him like employees reporting to a benevolent boss.

"Mr. Hammer," Gerald said. "You are welcome to bring your lovely guest along this morning. But you must both sign in..."

He pushed the book toward me when I held up a hand. "We're just here with a couple of questions, Gerald."

"Oh? Detective business?"

"Gathering background."

"Nothing regarding our members, I hope."

"Well, frankly I'm investigating Inspector Doolan's death. It may not have been a suicide."

Gerald frowned thoughtfully. "He did seem an unlikely candidate for such, so vital an individual. How may I be of service?"

"I've never been an Enfilade regular, Gerry, so I'm not sure about certain procedures. Do members store their weapons here? I find it difficult to believe they hop out of a cab, or walk over from their parked cars, lugging firearms."

His smile was gentle, as if he were dealing with a child. "Some, like yourself, Mr. Hammer, have permits to carry." He nodded toward my left shoulder, indicating he could again tell I was packing. "Of course, there are firearms in use at the Enfilade, some of them vintage weapons, which would be difficult to transport in that fashion."

"The range downstairs—I've only seen handguns in use. Do any of the members keep rifles here?"

"A number do. Yes."

Velda was looking at the book that Gerald had pushed our way. Her eyes came up sharply to mine. "You need to see this, Mike. A couple of interesting entries...."

I checked them out, and said, "I see that Congressman Jaynor is downstairs."

"Yes he is. This is not a busy time—he's one of a handful using the facility. Your friend Mr. Webb is here again, and a few other members. Would you like to go down?"

After asking Gerald a few additional pointed questions, we did, passing the framed photos on that celebrity wall. Velda paused to look at several where Doolan posed with a group that included Anthony Tretriano and Alex Jaynor. We could make out the very muffled sounds of gunfire from the enclosed target range, but found Alex in the lounge area, seated with Smith & Wesson's resident champ, Chuck Webb. Two Wall Street boys sat with them in the midst of friendly conversation.

Introductions were made, with everybody standing to smile and nod at Velda, all of them taking in her beauty with open but not offensive admiration. I helped her out of her raincoat and she showed them what a real woman could do with a simple white blouse and black skirt.

I draped my trench coat over the back of a chair, and the Wall Street pair—in running clothes—excused themselves to go into the range. Chuck, in another polo shirt with the S & W logo, followed them in, throwing me a secret look and head wag, in back of Velda, letting me know what a lucky stiff he thought I was.

The sandy-haired, brown-as-a-berry politician was apparently not here to shoot. Alex was in a well-tailored black suit with white pinstripes and had enough bulk that I could tell a bulletproof vest was a part of his ensemble. When you get shot at from the street often enough, that kind of vest can become a necessary fashion accessory.

"So this is Velda," Alex said in the smooth, resonant voice that had served him well on television and in the political arena. "Doolan spoke of you warmly. He said you were the brains in the Hammer agency."

She shrugged and smiled.

I said, "Making me the beauty, I guess."

The light blue eyes in the narrow handsome face turned alertly serious. "Are you getting anywhere with your investigation into Doolan's death, Mike?"

"I've wrapped it up," I said, "as much as possible. In a case as complicated as this, not every loose end gets connected."

"Does this Tretriano killing factor in?"

I nodded. "At least in a peripheral way—Doolan was closing in on Little Tony. I believe the old boy was able to get close to 'Anthony,' and even scored an all-access pass to Club 52, thanks to their shared membership here."

Alex's expression grew thoughtful. "Well now, Mike—they weren't exactly close friends. Of course, all of the members here are sociable, and I suppose that did provide a certain common ground...."

"It must have. Doolan was fairly regular at Club 52 for a while, and he amassed evidence that connects Tony and his club to drug trafficking. These new clubs Little Tony's opening—or anyway was opening—would have expanded that operation nationwide."

The politician's expression combined alarm and disgust. "My God. Why didn't Doolan share this with me? I would have helped!"

"He was a sneaky old coot. He compartmentalized. You were close to him and shared his concern about illegal drugs in the city. And yet Doolan kept you unaware that Velda here had been working for him for nearly six months, the last two in South America, gathering intel on the cocaine cartel itself."

"Remarkable," he said, looking at Velda through new eyes.

I said, "This is far-reaching, Alex. Where all of the tendrils will finally reach remains to be seen ... but you can bet they'll be gathered up by federal investigators better equipped for the job than an old-time private dick like me."

Alex sat forward, his gaze going from me to Velda and back. "Was it the Bonetti bunch? The news is full of that shoot-out at that Mafia social club. If Doolan really was murdered, they make a good candidate for instigator. The Bonettis, remember, are the family behind the drug operation that Doolan and I ran out of his neighborhood."

"Hard to say," I said with a shrug. "If Little Tony got wind of what Doolan was up to, he might have been behind that fake suicide. And old Alberto Bonetti had his own reasons to get rid of Doolan, too. We'll probably never know."

Alex squinted at me, like he was trying to get me in focus. "You're not just going to walk away, are you, Mike?"

"Why not? It's over. That sniper who took Tony Tret out was almost certainly a survivor from the Y and S Club melee."

"A reprisal?"

"What else? When the rival mob families trying to control the narcotics racket are both in shot-to-shit disarray, what's left for me to do?"

Now he shrugged. "I guess ... nothing."

"Well," I said absently, "there is one thing. There's a very valuable item I came across, early on in this mess. I haven't even told Pat about it."

"What is it?"

"Can't say, or anyway shouldn't. You'll read about it eventually. Let's just say it's priceless and is nothing I should be holding on to. Frankly, it probably belongs in the estate of a poor dead kid named Ginnie Mathes."

With an alarmed glance, Velda said, "Mike, this 'item'—is it somewhere safe?"

"Oh yeah. I hid it where nobody will find it." I grinned at Alex. "You'll love this. It's stashed in Doolan's apartment. Little hiding place that only he and I knew about. Fitting, huh?"

I exchanged casual smiles with Velda, and we got up, shook hands with the politician, and excused ourselves.

"Mike," Alex said, "if you think of anything ... if there's anything I can do..."

"You'll have plenty to do," I said. "When the feds come in and mop up after me, you'll be in a position to keep the drug racket at bay in this town for a goddamn change."

I put the hat on, grabbed my coat, nodded at him, and followed the nice view Velda provided up the stairs.

Out on the street, she said, "Think he took the bait?"

"Oh yeah." My grin felt like it might burst my face. "Oh yeah...."

This was where it had started.

And started long before I'd returned from Florida, this quiet neighborhood that had gone from fashionable to rundown only to be rebuilt and reinvigorated before finally fading into a low-key, livable area where its many older residents felt comfortable and secure—like a certain Bill Doolan, who had been through fifty-two years of changes. Then a peaceful, even dull way of life had been threatened by the intrusion of a criminal element that the old retired cop had risen up on his haunches to help drive out like the plague-carrying rats they were.

So once again I went up the sandstone steps into the small vestibule with its old-time ornamented brass mailboxes. This time the inner door was locked, and when I hit a random buzzer—not Doolan's—no one asked before buzzing me through.

The door behind me closed of its own will, shutting out street sounds and replacing them with the stillness of the lonely life the old building's residents endured. I went up the two flights of stairs and down the hallway to the door of Doolan's apartment. I still had Pat's key for the padlock that had been affixed to the damaged door of the crime scene, but I didn't need it.

Someone had forced it off, hasp and all.

The lock lay on the floor, sleeping on a small bed of sawdust and splinters. Wouldn't have been much of a job, even with just a screwdriver, any noise minimal. Even as watchful as older tenants could be, the hearing-aid crowd would not likely be alerted by this break-in at Doolan's lonely, dimly lit end of the corridor.

The trench coat was unbuttoned and my hand slipped easily under it and the sport jacket to bring out the .45 from its snug home under my left arm.

Could the trap I'd set have been turned around on me? Had I been so obvious that the drama I'd staged would wind up starring me as its tragic hero? Was a cold-blooded killer waiting on the other side of that door with his own gun?

But when I walked into the old, slightly musty space—no lights on but enough of the gray day seeping from windows deeper in the place to help me navigate—no one greeted me with a gun or otherwise. I moved through the well-decorated, tidy quarters that still bore the signs of the cops who'd been here—print powder, cigarette butts—past the master bedroom and bath and on into Doolan's office/den.

The antique desk that faced a window, adjacent to the wall that held the old man's beloved stereo system and books and mementoes, had its swivel chair pushed away to give the intruder better access to the hidden button that opened a side panel.

Alex Jaynor had emptied the hideaway of the four guns stowed there, and they lay on the blotter of the desk like a courtroom exhibit. He had a hand stuffed in the compartment, feeling around, searching, obviously frustrated.

From my trench coat pocket, my left hand withdrew the rough pebble with the shiny little window. I had it poised between thumb and middle finger, held up to window light, before I said, "Is this what you're looking for, Alex?"

He whirled. That hard-edged, handsome face had a new wildness, the eyes wide and bright with something feral, the sandy hair not so perfect, three or four lacquered strands sticking out this way and that, like springs liberated from a threadbare couch. Only his pinstriped suit retained its dignity.

"It was never in there," I said.

I slipped the stone back in my pocket. What the hell—I put the .45 back in its sling, too.

He swallowed, straightened himself, smoothed his suitcoat, though it didn't need smoothing. His head went back, and only the stray manic strands of hair betrayed him. Those and a seldom-blinking intensity of the sky-blue eyes.

"That little stone is worth a lot of money," he said.

"Yeah. The last of Basil's crop. Maybe you felt honored, being the final 'honest' man bought off with one of them. A lot of corruption flowed from a simple pouch of pebbles over the years. Enough money generated to make Nazis into good South American citizens, and to keep Colombian officials at arm's length while a cartel developed cocaine into the country's leading cash crop."

His words were tight, bit off, with an undercurrent of indignant hysteria. "Haven't you heard, Hammer? You can't legislate morality. Look at how eager the mayor and every politician in this town were to rub shoulders with celebrities at Club 52. No one cares about drugs. No one cares about anything anymore."

I wasn't here to talk philosophy or social mores. "You were supposed to get that gemstone handed off to you by Ginnie Mathes. That out-of-the-way location was chosen because it was close to where you'd be that evening, and yet was an area no one would associate with you. Only you didn't get to her in time—her sailor boy Joe Fidello mugged his own girlfriend for it, and when she saw it was him, he panicked and killed her."

"He killed her, Hammer. Not me."

"But Fidello missed the stone. He got her purse, but she'd tucked the little beauty away in her sleeve, and it fell out onto the street where, as fate would have it, I ran across the thing. Ain't kismet a bitch?"

"Hammer, that stone is immensely valuable. If you deliver it to me, and forget any of this happened, then—"

"You mean forget you tried to run me down with a stolen car? Forget that a young woman named Dulcie Thorpe got splashed on the pavement because you weren't up to the job? What I'm wondering is, why such a big payoff? You're just a local politician. But then I thought about it—you're young, good-looking, personable, with TV experience. Your roving reporter background gives you contacts here and in Canada. You're a natural conduit to get cash to other bent politicos, plus down the road, you'll make an ideal candidate for governor or maybe U.S. senator. Who was it that said someday the Mafia will own the man in the White House, and he won't even know it? That's almost right. You'd know it."

He was shaking his head, desperation in his tone. "All right. All right. I admit I panicked and I stole that car and ... but you weren't killed, you were barely injured." Hope leapt into his eyes. "So we can still do business."

"Dulcie Thorpe can't do business anymore."

That remark astounded him. "A hooker? A filthy little street tramp, and you pretend to care? I made a mistake, Hammer, and now you can take advantage of it, and me. You can go back to Florida and retire out of the New York rat race with an ongoing pension the likes of which you never dreamed."

"Okay, Alex. Let's shrug off Dulcie Thorpe's life and death. In her game, her life expectancy was a big question mark anyway, right? But how do you justify Bill Doolan? Your mentor! A man who valued you and your friendship, encouraged you, but who you only got close to for your own aggrandizement, and to keep an eye on the enemy. No wonder the Bonetti family tried to hit you in those drive-bys! You helped run them out of the neighborhood at the very same time you were partnered with Little Tony Tret!"

He had been shaking his head ever since I mentioned Doolan, and now he got a word in: "I cop to the hooker, but not Doolan. I didn't kill him, I would never kill him, I loved that old guy!"

"Maybe. I don't think so, but maybe. I know for sure you killed Tony Tret. I can sell it to Captain Chambers, too. I saw your name in the Enfilade book—you were there yesterday in the late afternoon, picking up a rifle from your locker. The little guy on the door, Gerald, saw you leave with a zippered carrying bag. And he saw you bring it back this morning. Ballistics will take about five minutes to make a match with the shell casings from that office window. You left a kind of funny signature—you have a rep at the Enfilade for not being much of a shot. And it took you three tries to nail Tony."

Jaynor was smiling now. Still nervous, but smiling. "All right, Hammer. Am I supposed to believe you take any offense at me getting rid of a mob lowlife like Anthony Tretriano? There are some people saying that what happened at the Y and S Club yesterday wasn't two warring mob factions—that it was just you, a one-man army, who did it all. You're a murderer yourself, Hammer. Where the hell do you get your moral indignation? Your sickening self-righteous attitude?"

"I like to think of myself as the guy who puts those extra little weights on the scale ... to make things balance out. But maybe I'm as evil a shit as you. I don't think so, though. Because there's still Doolan, isn't there? There's still Doolan."

"I told you, I had nothing to do with that!" Jaynor pointed at the chair. "He sat right there and thought about the protracted death sentence he was facing and took the easy way out. He was an old man, and you can't blame him."

"I don't blame him. I blame you. I'm guessing you spent the evening with him, and drugged his coffee or his beer—there'd be no toxicology screen on a gunshot suicide victim. I figure you had a key to the place, to lock up after—you and Doolan were that tight. Just like you were tight enough to know about his secret stash of handguns in the desk. You selected one, and when he fell asleep in that chair, you pressed one of his prize guns in his hand and helped the unconscious old man pull the trigger. And burst his heart. At least he slept through it. Had he been awake, you'd have broken it before you exploded it."

"I had no reason to do that."

"Sure you did. I think Doolan finally told you about Velda and the work he and she did, investigating Little Tony and 52, and how she'd been in Colombia for months gathering intel that would be shared with the feds. You knew that Doolan was getting close—that he'd be onto you very soon. I'm guessing you figured you would find documents in his desk, not knowing he kept his work-related files with Peter Cummings, the P.I. he sometimes worked for. Even then, even before the handoff of Basil's pebble was botched, you were in damage-control mode. And you have been in that mode ever since, panicking. Killing Doolan. Trying to kill me. Shooting Tret. An amateur, just floundering around, trying to save his ass."

He grabbed the nearest of the guns, one of the matched German P38s. He pointed it at me and it clicked and clicked.

"If you really knew anything about guns," I said, "you'd have noticed the weight was off. I unloaded all of those. You can keep trying if you like."

He looked down aghast at the other weapons on the blotter that were just useless hunks of metal without their little messengers.

I didn't fool around, since he might have another rod on him, one that did have ammunition, and whipped the .45 out and squeezed off a round, hitting him right in the heart.

It rocked him back a little, against the desk—the .45 had considerable recoil. He winced. It hurt. He braced himself on the lip of the desk with the heels of his hands.

"That's where you shot Doolan," I said, gesturing with the .45 at his chest. "Of course, he wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest."

"You ... you made your point, Hammer. Call your friend Chambers. I want a lawyer. We'll see ... see how much evidence you really have."

"That's a good one," I said with a chuckle, and shot him in the stomach. "Like I give a shit about evidence."

He was bent over clutching his belly, his mouth open, the air knocked out of him. The next shot was in the sternum and I heard the splintering crack of bone. He made a gargling sound and went down, hard, across the chalk outline of where the chair had been, where Doolan had been found.

"It's like getting punched by Joe Frazier, huh?"

I put one in his rib cage and he squirmed like a bug on its back. "I could unload a dozen clips into you, and this standard army cap-and-ball ammo would never penetrate that vest of yours. These are just nice soft lead slugs that will tenderize your muscle tissue and puree your organs and break every goddamn bone in their path. Hard to say how long it will take you to die, Alex, but you should have time to work up a good speech for Saint Peter. Kind of think you're heading south, though, no matter how glib you are."

I had four more in the clip and I spread them around evenly, two for Dulcie Thorpe, two more for Doolan, and a free pass on Tony Tret, and he just took them, shuddering under the impact, not even screaming because the soupy insides of him couldn't make it happen, all he could summon was bloody bubbly froth.

"I have another clip here," I said conversationally, "but now I think I have made my point. When I leave, the door will be open. Maybe you can crawl out of here. Maybe you can get help."

He was crying, but when a sob came, it hurt too much and he forced it back.

"There's one last touch I think you'll enjoy," I said. "Smart guy like you, you might savor the irony."

I bent over and showed him the .45.

"This is Doolan's gun," I said. "When the cops check out these shell casings, that's where it will lead them. Same gun was used at the Y and S shoot-out, which will tie you to a mob hit. Anyway, my point is—in a way, it's like Doolan himself killed you."

I holstered the gun. He was on the floor, crawling. He hadn't made much progress when I exited the room, but I left the door open for him. He probably couldn't make it down to the street alive, but I liked the idea that he'd die trying.