Murder, My Love

Chapter Nine

The next day found gray massing clouds hovering over the city like giant wads of soggy dirty cotton, just waiting to wring themselves out. You could smell the rain wanting to happen, but the temperature was chill enough now that maybe it would be the icy variety or perhaps one of those crazy storms where it sleets and snows and thunders and lightnings all at once.

Velda and I had spent yesterday evening in her apartment, comparing notes over take-out Chinese and later in front of a fire by her couch. If you think I didn’t tell her about the distaff half of our client couple stripping down and baring her burning bush, you don’t know me very well. Or Velda either. She got mad. And I got even.

Hadn’t Nicole said that was what I was famous for?

But this morning I hadn’t gone right into the office. Velda did, to watch the phone and keep things humming. Me, I was calling on ex-governor Harry Hughes and not at 21, either, though the digs today would be fancy enough. I had called ahead, first thing, and Governor Hughes was expecting me at his apartment on one of the upper, residential floors of the Waldorf Astoria.

A light bagels-and-cream-cheese breakfast was awaiting me in the formal dining room of the suite, which also included a long marble-floored living room with matching marble fireplace (a portrait of the governor’s late wife over it, no Warhol or pop-art piece here), several bedrooms and a small but complete kitchen. The governor lived alone — no majordomo for errands or protection, either — and answered the door himself. He enjoyed cooking, he said, but often availed himself of room service, particularly for breakfast, like today.

The governor was in a maroon silk robe with black velvet lapels, seated at the head of the table, slathering cream cheese on his lightly toasted bagel. I was buttering mine. We’d had orange juice and were on to coffee.

“Mike,” he said, after chewing and swallowing a bite, “I give you my word that I did not make any copies of that tape. I didn’t even listen to much of it, just ascertained it was what I’d been told. It... well, this kind of thing is not what I generally traffic in.” He shuddered. “I’m not proud of myself for stooping so low.”

I shrugged, nibbled buttered bagel. “Governor, I can only tell you that I have it on solid authority that the tape is a copy.”

He frowned. “Was there some electronic way you could determine as much?”

“No. It has to do with the brand of tape. It’s not what’s regularly used at the senator’s office.”

My distinguished host shook his head of silver-streaked black hair, but not a strand came loose. “All I can say, Mike, is that the Licata boy came around a few days ago, and told me how his ‘woman,’ as he put it, had come to have the damned thing. That she was on the cleaning staff at the Flatiron, and happened upon it quite accidentally.”

That was almost true.

I said, “Licata just dropped by? Didn’t phone you first?”

“No. He wouldn’t have my number.”

Actually, Licata had the governor’s number, all right.

“But,” Hughes continued, “he knew where I lived because he was a bartender at a get-together I threw here earlier this year. That was how we came to converse, since he was here early and stayed late, and I was his employer for the event.”

“Who provided him?”

“It was done through the hotel here.” He turned over a hand. “I chatted with Licata at some length, before and after that event, as he was setting up and tearing down. I’m interested in what the real people are doing, you know, what it takes for them to make their way in this modern world. Meaning no condescension, what I’m talking about here is the common man.”

“Well, Licata seems to be trying to make his way by blackmailing the uncommon man.”

The square face with all that character carved in it turned somber, the flesh as gray now as the morning out there. He put down the bagel, as if he’d suddenly lost his appetite.

“And that’s what we have in common, Mr. Licata and I,” he said, “isn’t it? We’re both blackmailers. Isn’t that what you’re implying, Mike?”

I chewed bagel, swallowed the bite, shrugged. “I’m not implying anything. It’s a fact. What did he tell you, when you two connected before and after your cocktail party? How he hopes to get married? And better himself? Live someplace where the can isn’t down the hall and he and his honey don’t have to share it with recovering addicts and welfare cases?”

My host said nothing. His face looked cold, even coldly angry, but I could see the regret, even the shame, swimming in the dark eyes. Maybe that anger was turned inward.

Finally he said, quietly, “The young man’s stated ambition was a shabby little thing, by most standards. How he hopes to own a bar of his own there in Brooklyn.” He laughed humorlessly. “How very small the American dream can sometimes manifest itself.”

“And what big nightmares can follow, when you’re willing to do anything to pursue it. How much did you pay him?”

“...Five thousand dollars. In cash.”

“Small is right. That was a bargain rate. Or it would have been, if that really had been the original of the tape.”

Hughes gestured around him. He’d brought some of his own furniture in, apparently — a cabinet filled with china and silver looked heirloom.

“We’re alone here, Mike. If you think I’m lying... if you think somewhere I have a box of duplicates of that foul recording... take a look around. Or if I have it squirreled away in a safe deposit box or one of my homes, you’d be free right here and now to try to beat the truth out of me. There was a time when you couldn’t have, but you’re ten years younger than me and look to be quite physically fit for your age. Isn’t that what Mike Hammer is known for? Slapping people around?”

I shook my head. Slapped some more butter on my bagel. “No, I believe you, Governor. But you have a problem. With that tape an obvious copy, there’s no reason for Jamie Winters to cooperate with you. Don’t expect him to announce he’s decided not to pursue the Oval Office. Not with the original and other copies running around out there, impossible to contain.”

He sat forward. “In that case, Mike, wouldn’t he be ruined eventually, anyway? Wouldn’t his presidential hopes be dashed? Leaving him to serve out his senate term in disgrace?”

“Possibly. He might pay Licata and any other blackmailers off — he and his wife could certainly afford it. But your hopes may be dashed as well.”

“And why would that be?”

“If the senator is disgraced by the sex scandal, nothing would stop him from going to the police and ruining what’s left of your reputation. Ending your career in prison would make a hell of a last chapter for the next volume of your autobiography, Governor. You’d just have to work hard at not dying behind bars, or else you wouldn’t get to enjoy the royalties.”

Suddenly that famous face smiled at me. The only sound was the bite of bagel I was working on.

“Do you have a suggestion, Mike? Or are you just sitting in judgment? I remember that notorious newspaper headline, all those years ago — ‘I, the Jury,’ Says Mike Hammer. You avenged a fellow soldier. Now you want to humiliate another.”

I used a napkin on my mouth and hands. “Yeah, how the mighty have fallen and all that shit. Look, I do have a suggestion.”

“I’m listening.”

“Hire me to get your money back from Mr. Tony Licata. I can tell him that you are prepared to go public about the tape he sold you, unless he returns your money and hands over the original — and any copies — to me. That just might make him cooperate. And satisfy my clients.”

His eyes tightened with consideration. “But it couldn’t be a bluff.”

“No. You couldn’t be bluffing. Of course, if Licata calls what he thinks is your bluff, and you have to come clean? We could maybe spin it a little — isn’t that what you political types are expert at? Spin?”

A trace of amusement flickered on thin lips. “How would you spin this, Mike?”

I shrugged. “I would get my clients to say you didn’t try to blackmail them. That in fact you tried to help them. You would say your intent was not to blackmail anybody, but to acquire this damning tape to prevent just such a thing.”

He frowned in doubt. “Your clients would go along with this?”

“I think so.”

“But that would mean exposing the tape...”

I shrugged. “Not if I really do lay hands on the original and the duplicates first. And destroy them. Also, I still have a few media contacts of my own who remember my name. Who would spread the rumor that the tape was a phony, something Licata and his girlfriend cooked up.”

He gave me a sideways look that emphasized that shovel jaw of his. “It’s dangerous.”

“It got dangerous the moment you thought blackmail was an option you could justify. What do you say, Governor? Shall we give it a try?”

He held the thought in like a deep breath underwater. Then he exploded: “Yes! Yes!” He banged a fist on the table and rattled the breakfast dishes. “Let’s see if we can clean up after my own foolish mistake. You need a retainer, I trust?”

I pushed away from the table and stood. “If I pull this off, you can send five thousand bucks to the Nicole Vankemp Foundation. She’s got the morals of an alley cat, but it’d be fitting if some good cause she helps gets a boost out of this.”

The dark eyes narrowed as he gazed up at me. “What do you get out of it, Mike? Or are you just a good citizen?”

“I’m on a $10,000 retainer, Governor. I can afford to be generous.”

The gray sky escorted me on my second excursion to Brooklyn in two days. The clouds were tumbling, somersaulting, nasty billowing stuff that might have been pouring out of a burning building. Occasionally came a rumbling, like God was hungry and looking to make a meal of the pitiful creatures moving on their pointless way below. The cold that went with that grumble was a clammy thing, like a dead man’s handshake, but when I turned the heat on in the Ford, it got hot too quick, and when I turned it back off, the cold came back right away. No “just right” for Goldilocks or the rest of humanity.

Traffic was in a bad mood, too, and the Ford seemed to make every car and driver around us mad, horns honking at us for just being alive. Any urge to give the other guy an “Up yours!” went away when you saw the foul dark glares and knew maybe you’d get shot for expressing your opinion.

Finally, on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, where the graffiti couldn’t agree whether smack was heaven or hell, the sky exploded and what came down were pellets of hail, a furious sky wielding its machine gun with a madman’s indiscretion.

When I pulled over in front of the once-proud four-story brownstone on Seventh Avenue, I had to sit there for five minutes before the hail let up, watching little balls bounce off the hood of the Ford, hoping they wouldn’t leave dents, listening to their tuneless tap-dancing on the roof. The coldness did not stop my breath from fogging up the windshield and my turned-up trenchcoat collars didn’t provide enough warmth to stop my teeth from chattering.

Then the attack was over, and I climbed out, the brown grass of adjacent front yards littered with little white pellets, like a truck hauling mothballs had backed up and dumped its load. My feet crunched as I went up the walk and climbed the steps to the modest stoop and banged my fist on the door.

It jarred open.

I pushed it the rest of the way and was about to call out to the landlady when I saw her fallen form on the kitchen floor down at the end of the hallway that hugged the second-floor stairway. I shrugged out of the damp trenchcoat and shed it like a snake from its skin and moved quietly and quickly toward the kitchen, my hand filling itself with the .45 from under my unbuttoned suit coat, the weapon with its walnut grips completing my fist.

The old gal had been clobbered a good one, from behind, her white perm smudged scarlet in back. I knelt and checked her pulse at her wrist.

Nothing.

At her throat.

Nothing.

She was facedown in a kitchen that smelled of corned beef and cabbage again, a pot of the stuff simmering on a Depression-era green-and-white stove that was about a decade away from an antique shop. The boarders were getting leftovers today, but they would have to serve themselves. Their landlady was dead.

So now it was murder.

Blackmail got my business, but murder made me mad.

A phone on the kitchen wall had a posted list of emergency numbers and I considered using the one for the cops. But the old landlady was in no hurry, and it occurred to me to check a certain apartment first. I went up the stairs, as quietly as possible, which wasn’t very damn quiet, gum soles doing little to fight the creaking. When I got to the top, tragic faces peeked out of cracked doors and I waved them back and the doors closed reflexively.

The door to 2A was shut but not locked and I opened it slowly, then went in fast and low, the .45 moving right to left and back again.

Silence greeted me and an all-too-familiar scent — acrid-edged copper, the scorched aftermath of gunfire mingled with the odor of spilled blood. With my left hand I shut the door softly behind me, already mesmerized by the sight of the woman on the floor, right there in front of me. Maybe she’d been running for it.

She didn’t make it.

What a good-looking woman the Flatiron cleaning gal had been not long ago, a redhead like Nicole Winters, her pale flesh lightly freckled, and a lot of it showing. She was in that same green satin robe as the day before, sprawled on the floor in the midst of all that mismatched secondhand-looking furniture, the garment flung wide open with a cream-colored bra and sheer panties all that separated her nudity from prying eyes.

Erin Dunn was done, all right, a corpse on her back in a position a living person couldn’t assume for long, a twisted prone posture, legs going left, upper torso twisting right, one arm reaching for nothing, the other’s angle like a broken hinge, while sightless sky-blue eyes stared at a ceiling she could not see, not with the top of her head blown off, mid-forehead up, in a scattering of bone chunks and brain lumps painted as red by blood as the pool of the stuff they waded in, her hair fanned out in the crimson mini-lake like ghastly seaweed.

I kept low as I moved across the sitting area into the bedroom, its door open, thinking whoever did this might still be here. The corpse was fresh enough, the blood out there wet and shimmering, and maybe the cops were on the way already. A big gun had done this, probably as big as my .45, and even in the hailstorm some resident must have heard its mechanical thunder. But no tenant in this place had a phone, and the landlady hadn’t made a call, that was for damn sure.

Nor had any of those frightened faces come out of their hidey holes, not even to flee.

The sky roared, laughing at me, but no rain or hail followed, nothing battering the windows but wind-driven branches. So the silence wasn’t silence at all, not when you really listened, and that was when I heard the moaning.

He was on the other side of the bed, on the floor, on his back where I couldn’t see him from the doorway. The room didn’t have much in it — a double bed that looked like something a motel had thrown out, a couple of dressers that didn’t have anything to do with each other, this one maple and modern, that one walnut and Victorian.

And, also, a man named Tony Licata, down there on his back in his wife-beater t-shirt and jockey shorts and black socks, like in the smoker flicks. He was home from the hospital, but he looked pretty damn sick with that red-bubbling mouth and that belly wound and his bloody hands gripping himself, trying to hold the pain and his intestines in. His darkly handsome face wasn’t dark at all now — it was as white as a fresh pair of gym togs, but the only exercise Tony was getting was dying slowly.

I knelt and asked, “Who did this to you, Tony?”

But he couldn’t answer through the bubbling froth. His eyes beseeched me but there was nothing I could do for him. Oh, I could have told him I’d get him an ambulance, and one would come for him, all right, but he’d be making his exit in a body bag. Or I could have put one between his eyes, but I didn’t care to answer for that. I shook my head. My expression told him to make his peace while he had time.

The only other room in the excuse for an apartment was that half a kitchen. The counter was clean and the sink was empty — Erin Dunn ran a tidy ship. A back way out had an open door onto old weather-beaten stairs that were covered in melting hailstones. The hailstones didn’t show signs of anyone going down those stairs recently enough to turn them into crushed ice. That probably meant the killer had gone out this way before the sky spewed hail, a storm that hadn’t lasted more than five minutes.

Whoever did this was gone.

Maybe a neighbor saw the killer exit, either out the front or probably this back way, with the door standing open like it was. I’d tell the cops when they came and they could canvass the neighborhood. Of course what I should really do now was go down and step over the landlady’s corpse and use that list of emergency numbers on the wall to make the phone call to the Brooklyn PD.

What I did instead was start searching the place. I got my gloves on and started with the bedroom. Neither of the dressers had anything but clothes in them, one her stuff, the other his. A scuffed-up bedside table had a drawer with nothing special in, the usual junk, tissues, smokes, fingernail clippers, a romance paperback. Certainly not a Maxwell cassette tape, much less a box of duplicate tapes.

But I was sure that the soon-to-be-late Licata had the original, that selling a copy to the governor had only been one of the ways he had in mind to get rich off that sex tape, or anyway buy that dream saloon of his. The killer had come in, knocked out the old lady and headed upstairs and somehow got into the apartment. Maybe just knocked and the door opened a crack and he forced himself the rest of the way in. Or maybe talked his way in.

What a sloppy, reckless endeavor, though!

If the killer knew anything about this situation, he or she could have at least waited till Erin Dunn was at work. If it had been me after the tape, I’d have done this in the middle of the night and either beaten the thing out of Licata, or taken him down in his sleep, knocked him out or chloroformed him or some damn thing.

And searched the place at my leisure. Found the tapes, and if I didn’t find them, go back to Licata and get it out of him any way I could.

Or ideally, if there was a time when Licata was at his bartending job while the Dunn woman was in the city at her job, nobody at all would have to be rousted, let alone killed. You could sneak in that back way and not even deal with the landlady. Search the place and, if you didn’t find anything, wait for Licata to come home and only then beat it out of him.

That’s how I’d have done it.

But this fool had blundered in while they both were here, and wound up shooting them both... then what? Skedaddled without making a search? I didn’t see any sign that the place had been tossed. What the hell was going on?

There was another nightstand, mismatching of course, and it too had plenty of junk, Kleenex pack, pencils, a pack of Trojans, books of matches, half a pack of Camels. But tucked in back was a little Saturday Night Special, a .38 snub, which might’ve turned things around if Tony had got to it. Just ask Tony. Only you couldn’t. He was down there on the floor, unconscious, his mouth not bubbling anymore. Dead now. Lucky to be. Getting gut-shot is one of the worst ways to buy it.

I went over to the closet, opened the door, and from the darkness somebody jumped out at me.

Somebody who had just shot these two, and had heard me come in, probably already in the bedroom, and ducked in the closet and waited for me to run out and call for help.

But instead I’d poked around. Later it would amuse me to think of the guy stuck in that closet, not knowing what the hell to do, while I rustled through the place. It would also occur to me later that I was lucky a guy who’d just killed two unarmed people hadn’t gone ahead and burst out and put a round or two into me. Gut-shot me, maybe.

Right now, though, I was dealing with taking a hard straight-arm to my chest, knocking me back, then two hands — one clutching a big automatic with a bulky noise-suppressor on its snout — shoving me on the floor onto my back. I was clawing at my coat for the .45 when he kicked me in the head and leapt over me like the obstruction I’d become.

I should have been unconscious, but I wasn’t. The pain consumed my brain the way an auditorium gets filled by a philharmonic orchestra, but this was a discordant symphony and all my motor skills weren’t playing any song at all. Yet somehow my eyes managed to see. He was in black, all in black, including a balaclava that made a nonentity of him. He scurried awkwardly for the door, then turned and pointed the bulky-looking automatic at me, eye holes in the black woolen mask showing wide dark eyes, with white all around, that stared at me unblinking.

Even with my head a ringing, screaming thing, I knew this was the end. Finally all of it was catching up to me. I saw Velda’s face and she was beautiful and smiling and then in an instant she was gone, replaced by the faces of men I’d killed, laughing at me, this one merging into the next, and every laugh made the pain in my skull throb and then the bastard’s gun jammed and he was gone.