Masquerade for Murder

Chapter Eleven

NoHo — the area north of Houston Street, with its quiet tree-lined streets, early 19th-century homes, and former factories with cast-iron facades — had been turning trendy for a while now. Three main arteries and small, sometimes cobblestone side streets hosted boutiques, eateries, art galleries and avant-garde theaters. Artistic types and Yuppies had discovered the neighborhood a while ago, but the tourists hadn’t gotten wise. You didn’t have to be rich — not yet anyway — to live in a loft-like pad in a former dry-goods warehouse like this one.

You could also die here.

Just ask Gino Mazzini.

He was where I’d found him, a corpse in his jockey shorts leaning against a wall of the sparsely furnished apartment, his legs akimbo, forming a V that pointed to the rest of him, his head so slumped he might have broken his neck trying to fellate himself.

But he was a casualty of something even nastier: the now-familiar cannonball blow to the chest, which had driven his blue-and-red Mets 1986 World Series t-shirt into him like a line drive with a bowling ball. He’d been killed at least three or four hours ago, because this stiff was stiff all right — rigor mortis had set in.

The mist had kept its promise, though the thunder had overstated its case, raindrops half-heartedly spattering, then angling down the slanted glass like unattended tears, throwing eerie shadow streaks on a room lighted only by a bedside lamp. It was half an hour or so past my discovery of the body, which I’d made with a key and directions from Sheila Ryan, who’d remained with her friend Julie.

Seemed when she’d got there to collect her things, Sheila had knocked, no answer, then used her key to get in. She found her ex-boyfriend dead, with his chest pushed in. That’s all I bothered to get from her before heading to the bartender’s NoHo loft apartment — Pat would get the details out of her later.

The apartment was mostly one big room, dominated by a king bed with black faux-silk sheets and a few cheap black-and-white modern furnishings from one of those “apartment living” joints; a fridge hummed in the kitchenette, its overhead light the only other illumination, and the john was boxed in at a corner (I checked, but no corpse was seated in there this time).

The gray walls were bare but for a pair of framed movie posters — Rocky, signed “Best,” with a fluid scrawl that presumably said, “Sylvester Stallone,” and The Godfather Part II autographed to the late tenant by Robert DeNiro (“You mix a mean Martini!”).

Pat Chambers, glancing at the posters with a humorless smirk, said, “Well, at least he was proud of his heritage.”

We stood there in our trenchcoats and snapbrim hats, daring the rain to get at us, two men from another time, staring at a man totally out of time. The forensics team hadn’t arrived yet, but one uniform was on the landing outside and another at the bottom of the stairs at the street.

The captain of the Homicide Division worked days, of course, but I’d called him at home, knowing if I didn’t somebody else would. Everybody at the PD knew who among the brass was personally handling the murders that the newspapers had not realized constituted a single story yet, since the small detail of victims with caved-in chests continued to be withheld.

“This will get out,” I said. “Four kills with the same distinctive MO. Four kills tied to each other in various ways.”

“Jasmine Jordan isn’t.”

He was staring at the dead man. We were maybe four feet from the body’s bare feet.

“Not yet she isn’t,” I said. “But three victims definitely are — Kraft, Shannon, and now the Italian Stallion here. And you and I both know the Jordan broad is somewhere in the mix.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

Rather dryly, Pat commented, “The papers will say we have a serial killer on the loose. Another Son of Sam.”

“Will they be wrong?” I gestured at the flesh-and-blood pile of evidence before us. “Just because some thread connects the murders doesn’t make this less the act of a homicidal maniac.”

His laugh was short and had little to do with the normal reasons for laughter. “The FBI would disagree with you. They define a serial killer as someone who commits at least three murders over more than a month... with an emotional cooling off period in between. No traditional motive but a deviant sexual aspect.”

“You say tomato.”

The gray-blue eyes looked at me now. “Mass murderer is closer. Anyway, who are you to talk? You make Jack the Ripper look like a piker.”

“Hey, I’m just a good citizen, helping keep the city clean.” I shrugged. “So he’s not a serial killer, technically — but he is a cold-blooded bastard, removing people who know too much about him.”

Those eyes narrowed. “You mean, your client. Vincent Colby.”

“He’s not my client, his father is.” I started counting off on my fingers. “Shannon was zeroing in on young Colby for the strangled secretary and the hit-and-run boiler-room broker. That dominatrix kept a little black book with her clients in it, and if she wasn’t blackmailing a certain one, who liked to dish it out rough — and if his name wasn’t Vincent Colby, whose favorite room at the Tube is the S & M suite, then I’m in the wrong damn business. As for our dead mixologist here, he was the previous boy friend of Vincent’s current squeeze — a young female that Vincent is obsessive about, who the ex here liked to pound like minute steak.”

He was nodding, barely. “The girl who found the body.”

“Sheila Ryan, yeah. You’ll be talking to her. Tonight, I bet.”

Another non-laugh. “How smart you are. But smart enough to explain the second hit-and-run? The one that clipped young Colby right in front of your private eyes?”

I thought for a moment, then shrugged again. “Could be Colby and Kraft had a prior grudge. Maybe Colby’s been backing the play of that bank-heisting crew. Maybe he staked them and was getting a cut of the action, and the crew got more successful than they ever dreamed of and Kraft was sent out to get rid of a troublesome ongoing expense.”

“Oh brother.” His eyes rolled. “You are really reaching.”

I leaned in and thumped his chest with a forefinger. “Or maybe Kraft was hired to do that first hit-and-run in the parking ramp! Maybe for some reason Vincent Colby wanted that broker dead and hired a hit, and then stiffed Kraft or otherwise had a falling out with him. So Kraft tried to run him down, too.”

He was shaking his head. “Sad. Really sad to see the depths a once great deductive mind has sunk to.”

It was time to throw my hands in the air, so I did. “Okay, so our killer isn’t a textbook serial. He isn’t a mass murderer by standard thinking, either. Neither was Penta — he was a hit man who left a serial-killer-style signature.”

“Granted.”

“But for some reason, somebody — and it looks like Vincent Colby to me, just about has to be Vincent Colby — is settling old scores or cleaning up after himself. Right now we can see no connective tissue between the kills, other than Colby himself — he’s the connective tissue. Colby, who has martial arts training. Colby, who has outbursts of rage since his concussion. And all of these bunkai kills, remember, came after Vincent got hit by that car.”

Silence.

Then, finally, Pat said, “I don’t disagree.”

“Good. Nice to see your great deductive mind hasn’t sunk.”

His eyes returned to mine. “I’m making no deductions yet. Not necessary. Simply experiencing the resistance any good cop has to coincidence. A resistance a certain Michael Hammer claims never to have had.”

“No resistance, buddy,” I said, “when there are this many coincidences.”

The forensics team arrived and Pat gave them some instructions, then he sent me home. I offered to sit in on the Ryan girl’s interview, but he said no. He was still going this one alone, and I, if anybody, understood the impulse.

I had called Velda to say I’d be late. She met me at her door, hair freshly washed, all that creamy skin smelling of soap and wrapped up in a pink chiffon robe that hugged her figure in a way that made that Julie Olsen kid look sick. Of course, that kid was sick with that daddy complex of hers.

With it going on two a.m., I suggested we go down to the all-night diner for a breakfast that was either very early or really damn late; but she cooked me some eggs and bacon herself, instead. I risked a cup of coffee because I didn’t think there was enough caffeine in the world to threaten my tiredness at the end of this interminable day.

So I filled her in about the new murder — all that got was wide eyes and a shake of the head out of her — and recapped my conversation with Pat.

She sat down with her own plate of just one scrambled egg and a cup of coffee, incredibly beautiful without a bit of make-up, and said, “You really think that’s what’s going on?”

“It’s got Vincent Colby written all over it, doll. He’s gone psycho after the head injury, and he’s going after a laundry list of people who crossed him or offended him. The trouble is, unless Pat gets lucky with a witness who saw him at one of the scenes, or some other standard perp failing... each one of these murders has to be individually looked at, because the motives are singular.”

An eyebrow went up. “This doesn’t seem like a perp with many if any failings.”

“I did keep one thing from Pat.”

“Oh?”

“He doesn’t know about Chris Peters and me making that trip to Shannon’s place, or the floppy disk we found. Poor ol’ Patrick would have a cow. So my sniffing Obsession on my attacker I kept to myself, too.”

She smiled wryly over the rim of her coffee cup. “Popular cologne, Mike. Narrows your suspect list to a few hundred thousand New York males. Not your usual mystery, is it, darling?”

“What do you mean?”

She made a cute face. “No whodunit with a big surprise at the end.”

“You never know. I may come up with a big surprise for this prick yet.”

The phone rang — always a startling thing in the wee hours. She took the kitchen extension on the wall nearby.

“Yes... yes, Pat... Well, he’s right here... Oh. Oh, okay... All right, I’ll tell him.”

She hung up. Her expression was dazed.

“What?” I asked.

“Pat interviewed Sheila Ryan,” Velda said, and sat back down. She was looking past me, into thoughts that were forming. “Sheila was with Vincent Colby earlier this evening — all evening.”

I set my cup down, sloshingly. “Is Pat sure? She was at that Olsen girl’s apartment earlier, I thought.”

“No, that was later. Exact time of death is yet to be determined, remember, but rigor had set in...”

“So when Sheila found Gino,” I said, my words in slow motion, “he had been dead at least three or four hours.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Mike... if Vincent Colby didn’t kill that bartender, then somebody is fitting our client’s kid for a frame — elaborate enough to fool Mike Hammer.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe.”

Gansevoort Street — running east to west in downtown Manhattan’s riverfront neighborhood, till the Hudson cut it rudely off — undulated its cobblestone way along the foot of the brick warehouses known as the Meatpacking District. Here animal carcasses began their travel to the kitchens of Manhattan restaurants and residences from considerately distant slaughterhouses. Little had changed for decades in this foreboding, desolate-looking section of the city, though a few galleries and eateries had started popping up, like stubborn mushrooms, to foretell a fashionable future. On this sunshiny but chill November afternoon, a red-trimmed black 1985 Ford Mustang LX pulled out from in front of a warehouse onto an all but deserted Gansevoort. The driver immediately hit the gas, really punching it with a clear straightaway ahead.

Clear, anyway, till a dark green Mercury Capri emerged from an alley and into the Mustang’s path.

Honking his displeasure, the driver swerved around the Mercury, just missing collision, but before any sense of relief came, a mother in jeans and a parka came out from between parked cars, jaywalking a baby in its stroller right in front of the oncoming Mustang.

With a screech of brakes, the red-and-black vehicle wheeled around the obstacle, the woman helping avoid tragedy by running, the cobblestone street giving the stroller and its contents a rough ride, but safely out of harm’s way.

All well and good, but the driver in the Mustang now confronted two town cars coming right at him, taking up both lanes of the one-way street, and he could only avoid them by riding up on the sidewalk, sending a few random pedestrians scurrying.

Swinging back into the street now, the Mustang and its driver were confronted by a pile of construction materials beyond which were heaps of sand. The former acted as a ramp, overturning the vehicle and returning it to the street upside-down, the latter stirring up a hazy cloud to makes things even worse.

The Mustang skidded down the street on its roof, like a turtle some cruel child had uncaringly tossed. It came to a spinning stop, finally, but its tires continued on their ride to nowhere.

“Cut!”

The B-unit director, a guy in his thirties in an NYPD baseball cap, Yankees t-shirt and sweats, turned to a clutch of waiting crew members. “Go! Get over there!”

Three guys in sweatshirts and jeans scurried to help the driver out of the turned-over car. Four 35mm cameras, at strategic locations, including one riding train-like tracks and another on a crane with a jib, had captured the elaborate stunt, which had seemed to be the work of a major male star behind the wheel. You’d recognize him.

But as soon as he got his feet under him, the driver yanked off the rubber mask resembling that famous white actor — who was watching from the sidelines, smiling, chewing gum — and revealed himself as my African-American friend Thalmus Lockhart who was stunt and special effects coordinator on the film.

Velda and I were sightseers, approved in advance thanks to Thalmus. I just couldn’t seem to get away from warehouses and cobblestones.

Thal spotted Velda and me, on the sidelines, and grinned and nodded and waved, then took off Caucasian-colored gloves and handed them to a crew member.

The B-unit director yelled, “Okay, next set-up! Warehouse rumble! Check your bullet hits and blood bags, boys!”

My friend — a muscular six-footer with a shaved head and a close-trimmed horseshoe mustache — came trotting over to us in a yellow turtleneck, jeans and running shoes. This side of the street had been off-camera, lined as it was with Ryder rental trucks, Winnebagos, honeywagons (semi-trailers of portable toilets), massive lights and craft service (snack) tables.

We shook hands and exchanged grins.

“When I drive like that,” I said, “I get my ass in stir or the hospital or both.”

“When I do,” Thal said, “I get paid. You want to say hello to Burt?”

“Why not?”

“Well, he may be grouchy. He hates not doing his own stunts.”

Velda and I went over and met the star of the film, who was dressed identically to Thal. But the actor (and former stunt man) was not grouchy at all, and flashed his trademark smile at Velda, who could compete with any actress Hollywood threw at him. The guy could barely keep his eyes off her, and who could blame him?

After a brief jokey chat with movie royalty, Thal took us inside the warehouse and over to a craft service table in a corner. The lighting was being tweaked on much of the yawning space nearby with its iron catwalks and brick walls. We helped ourselves to coffee and a cookie or two before the stunt coordinator showed us to waiting director’s chairs with GUEST on the canvas backing; we sat, Velda in the middle, out of the path of the bustling, buzzing movie set.

Thal, as a stunt coordinator, did many of his own gags — as movie folk called stunts and on-set “practical” special effects. About forty, he’d made a splash in the early seventies as Richard Roundtree’s stunt double. He was expert at non-stunt effects, too, such as horror make-up and prosthetic masks like the one he’d worn today. But his specialty was stunt driver.

“Mike, my man,” he said. “I only have a few minutes. Big scene coming up. But you can hang till after, if you like.”

Thal nodded toward the set, where much of the warehouse was now bathed in moody lighting. A young woman in torn clothing and carefully mussed hair, center stage, was tied into a chair with a shaft of light singling her out. A make-up woman was applying smudges to the face of the actress, who was frowning in concentration. She’d been in a couple of movies lately, good roles.

Thal said, “I have to help Burt rescue that little Satan’s spawn.”

Velda asked, “That’s what she’s playing? Is this an Exorcist movie or something?”

“No. She’s just an awful person. What can I do for you two?”

I said, “Did you ever work with a guy named Roger Kraft?”

Thal’s eyes tightened and he grunted, then nodded. “I saw in the News that somebody murdered that crumb bum. Sorry to speak ill of the dead.”

“Feel free,” I said.

He shifted in the canvas-and-wood chair. “Yeah, I did work with the S.O.B. a few times. He was good — very little he couldn’t do as a driver, and he had mechanical know-how, too. But he was baaaaad news.”

“How so?”

“He took too many risks, always cowboying up. Sometimes that’s what the job calls for, and the combat pay justifies. But you learn pretty quick this trade is about safety, not thrills. About helping tell an exciting story, y’know? Also, he was a fuckin’ liar... pardon the language, Velda.”

She smiled. “An f-bomb drops around the office occasionally.”

I asked, “A liar how, Thal?”

“Well, I was stunt coordinator on those Shaft TV movies, a while back. First time in my career I was more than just a guy doing gags. A series is an ongoing gig and you have would-be hires fill out applications like on any job. He lied on his. He’d been in the joint for armed robbery, turns out.”

“You wouldn’t have hired him, if you’d known?”

That made a face. “That’s not it — I would have given him a break. Stunt men are a mixed bag — they’re all a little crazy. Ex-bouncers, circus acrobats, wing-walkers, cowboys... I mean, real cowboys... all types, and that includes ex-cons. Anybody who’s done his time, I’m fine with givin’ a second chance. But I do not like to be, excuse me, fucking lied to.”

“Thal,” I said, “let me tell you about a hit-and-run I witnessed recently.”

And I went into what happened outside Pete’s Chophouse, including the sense I’d had about it that something just didn’t feel right.

As I wrapped it up, I said, “Could that have been faked?”

His frown was thoughtful. “You mean, could Kraft have hit that guy just right and not hurt him? Not unless they were both in on it.”

Velda gave me a sharp look.

I said, “What if they were? For example... is that a stunt you could stage for a flick?”

His laugh was big. “Oh, hell yes. Easy peasy. But you’d have to be a pro... both of ya, not just the driver.”

“A talented amateur couldn’t pull off the victim role? Somebody with martial arts training and an athletic background? Former college athlete, maybe?”

He shook his head. “Probably not without some special training. Some real practice. Likely some padding under the clothes too. In that case... doable.”

Velda and I exchanged glances.

I said, “Can you think of anybody locally who might be up for that? A trainer who thought he was getting somebody ready for a movie stunt... or just didn’t give a shit how his training got used?”

This laugh wasn’t so big. “I know exactly the guy.”

I blinked. “You’re kidding. How can you be so sure? Zero in right away like that?”

“Because you’ve been asking me about that Kraft dude, Michael my man, and this is a guy who knew Kraft, who worked with him, both hand-to-hand stuff and stunt driving. I fired both their asses off that Shaft shoot.”

Velda got out her notebook and took down the name — Harry Strutt.

“No idea,” he told her, “what address. And whether he’s even still around town. But if he is? He’d be the natural one to work with Kraft on somethin’ shady.” He winked at her. “Maybe you can find a detective who can track him down.”

“Maybe,” Velda said.

A pretty young woman in a baseball hat, NYU t-shirt, and jeans with a clipboard in her hands came up to Thal and said, “You’re needed, Mr. Lockhart.”

“Thank you, Sal.”

She went off, providing sweet rear view.

Thal asked me, “You know what she’s paid?”

“Not enough,” I said.

Velda elbowed me.

“Not a red cent,” Thal said. “She’s what you call a production assistant. An intern, college kid. Does more work than any salaried man on the picture.”

Velda said, “I know the feeling.”

Thal stood and so did we.

The stuntman stuck out his paw and I shook it.

“Listen, Mike,” he said, settling a hand on my shoulder, “you ever need anything, you know where to come. Just say the word and I’m there. That was one hell of a jam you got me out of.”

Couple years back, he’d been in a bar fight in which a guy had died. I had found the other two guys involved and proved one of them had delivered the killing blows. Thal had nixed the heavy drinking after I cleared him. Win — win.

We stayed around to watch the little Satan’s spawn gal get rescued a couple of times. Thal fought the six bad guys holding her; shot two of them, went martial arts on the asses of the other four. One knocked Thal behind a crate, but it was Burt who came out from behind it to untie the distressed damsel.

She was grateful, till the director called, “Cut.”