Murder, My Love

Chapter Ten

The roiling clouds had smoothed themselves out into a vast gray ceiling, but the threat of rain still made itself felt in air you could have swum through.

The bodies had been carted off, the morgue wagon gone, while inside the brownstone, lab techs were still dusting and photographing. I was out front behind the wheel of my parked Ford with the engine going and the motor running, the heat on. Another kind of heat was seated beside me in the passenger seat: Detective Earl Brice of the Brooklyn Borough Homicide Squad.

Brice, black, maybe thirty-five, had a tamed Afro and a trimmed Shaft mustache to go with a handsomely carved face. He was in a tan raincoat over a sharp charcoal suit with a black-and-white striped tie. He’d been pro all the way, so far, but he stopped short of being friendly.

“You could have a serious concussion,” he said, his tone thick but his articulation crisp.

“I’ve had concussions before,” I said. “I can tell a bad one.” I shrugged. “I carry aspirin and I took four. There’s a doctor in my building back in the city. He’ll check me. Let’s get this over with.”

His eyes took me in quickly, then looked straight ahead. “We’ve never met, have we?”

“No.”

“Does it surprise you I’ve heard of you?”

“A little. You’re young. And I keep a low profile these days.”

Another quick look. “Three dead bodies is a low profile?”

I shrugged again. “I didn’t make them dead. Look, I get along with most of you guys. I’m tight with Captain Chambers at One Police Plaza. Check with him.”

He was staring out the windshield at a squad car. Uniform officers were milling on the sidewalk nearby. They were joking and laughing, nothing really inappropriate — just evidence that violent death was nothing new around here.

“You waited over half an hour to call this in,” Brice reminded me.

“I got kicked in the head. I sat down and gathered myself and when my noggin felt up to it, I went down and used the phone.”

“But you don’t need a trip to the ER.”

“No. I told you. I—”

“Right. You took four aspirin. Okay. Let’s take another run at this.”

My smile was as pleasant as it was insincere. “Sure. I came out here to your sunny borough to talk to the Dunn woman and this Tony Licata, her live-in boyfriend. She worked in the city at the Flatiron Building, nights, part of the cleaning service that handles the place. My client has an office there. Something was taken from that office — stolen — and so Dunn needed an interview. I gave it to her.”

“Yesterday.”

“Right. And I came back today with some follow-up.”

“Follow-up about what, Mr. Hammer?”

“We can get into that if it becomes necessary. And, no, the robbery wasn’t reported. As I explained, I work for an attorney. The client is technically his, which takes us into areas of attorney/client privilege.”

The look he gave me wasn’t so quick this time. “That doesn’t cover the identity of the client.”

“You’ll have to talk to the attorney in question. I’ve already provided his contact information.”

The detective sighed. “What’s your take on this, Mr. Hammer? You’ve worked an unusual number of homicides for a private investigator.”

“Well, it’s kind of a specialty.” I smiled at him some more, trying to make him stop looking out the windshield and make some eye contact. “Do you have a low opinion of people in my trade?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Wouldn’t blame you if you did, Detective Brice. It can be a filthy way to make a buck, if it’s about divorce or skip tracing and such. But for all the homicides I’ve been involved with... all of the self-defense pleas, which is probably why you’ve heard about me... I still have my license. I’m still in demand with the top insurance companies. No other private inquiry agency in New York as small as mine does as much big business.”

That got a dryly amused smile going under that Richard Roundtree mustache. “Fame is the name of the game, huh, Hammer?”

The “Mister” had disappeared suddenly.

“I’m fine with giving you my take on this thing,” I said. “But you go first.”

He was still looking straight out the windshield. We hadn’t yet made much eye contact. I couldn’t tell if what he was holding in was contempt or respect or maybe just a general weariness that came with working the homicide beat.

“I can tell you how my boss is going to read it,” he said, “without him ever setting foot at the crime scene. He’s going to say it’s a typical case of some junkie looking for money or swag.”

“But that’s not what you think.”

Now he looked at me. Really looked. The eyes were as black as his hair and his mustache, and those eyes knew how to convey cool and heat all at once. “No. And it’s probably not what you think went down either, Hammer. And I’ll tell you why.”

“Please.”

Eyes on the brownstone now. “This was premeditated. Somebody came to the door, the old landlady answered, that somebody forced his way in... or maybe her way in, probably his, though... and the old girl got scared and ran down the hall and got chased and whacked on the head in the kitchen. Whacked, period, hard as she got hit.”

I nodded.

“Then he or she, but probably he—”

I raised a palm. “A ‘he’ jumped me. You can stop hedging.”

Brice nodded. “He went upstairs to a specific apartment. There are three floors of apartments to choose from, and four apartments per floor. Each floor only has one of the ‘larger’ apartments, which is two rooms and a kitchenette. The others are single-room affairs. And the intruder knew which room on what floor to hit.”

“Could have been luck.”

A rare grin flashed under the black mustache. “Could be I’ll win the lottery, but I don’t think so. You said he had a silencer on that piece.”

“He did. That’s illegal in this state.”

“So is killing three people, Hammer. Junkies on the prowl, lookin’ to feed their habit, don’t use noise suppressors. If they had one of those—”

“They’d hock it,” I said with a smile.

He smiled a little at that. Nodded again. “This was somebody prepared to kill. Possibly intending to kill. If he was searching for something, he likely did it after the kills. The place wasn’t torn apart like a druggie on a wild-ass hunt for cash or valuables.”

Silence. For maybe a minute that silence was broken only by a distant siren and the chatting and laughing of the two uniformed cops at their post.

I said, “I could offer a scenario.”

“Why don’t you?”

“The old lady was a real piece of work. He probably figured he could talk his way past her, but that didn’t pan out. So he ended up pushing his way in and chasing her into the kitchen and cracking her head like an egg.”

Brice nodded, real slow.

I said, “She was fixing lunch for the boarders. The killer knew this was a boarding house and the pot on the stove with enough to feed everybody in the place would tell him that the old broad would be discovered soon enough. Probably within half an hour, an hour at the outside.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well, a junkie might have panicked and split. But the killer goes on up and takes care of business. I don’t think he expected the boyfriend to be home. Licata would likely have been at work. But he was in the hospital the day before, maybe overnight and just got home, and was taking it easy today.”

Brice’s eyes narrowed. “Go on. I’m with you.”

“So the killer waves the gun at the Dunn woman and says, ‘Where is it?’ and she tells him it’s in the bedroom, whatever it is he’s after. When the killer goes in the bedroom, she makes a break for it and he hears and sees and shoots her. Licata in the bedroom maybe tries to hide or go for that little gun in the nightstand, but he doesn’t get it. Instead he gets shot, too. Two in the belly.”

“Yeah.” Brice shuddered a little. “Slow fuckin’ death.”

“Not my choice of an exit, either. For me, I mean. For certain people, I’m fine with it. Where was I?”

“The killer is alone in an apartment with two corpses and a ticking clock by way of a dead landlady downstairs.”

“Right,” I said. “So what does he do? Split the hell out of there, ’cause everything has gone tits up? No. He calmly searches the place. Doesn’t toss it, but methodically looks for a specific item or items. It’s not a tough place to search, but since he’s in the bedroom, he starts with the two dressers. He finds jack shit. So he starts on the closet, and then some damn fool comes in.”

“You.”

“Me. Possibly he glimpses me, and sees I have a gun in my mitt. He ducks in the closet. I come in and have a look around and he waits. If I look in the closet, he’s ready for me.”

“And you look in the closet.”

“I do.”

“And get jumped and kicked in the head and close to shot.”

“Close only counts in horseshoes.”

“One last question, Hammer.”

“Yeah?”

“When he pointed that silenced rod at you?”

“Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you crap your pants?”

I grinned. “I was busy having my life pass in front of my eyes.”

Detective Brice took all of my contact information and shook me loose. On Fifth Avenue, I pulled over and stopped near the phone booth that I used the day before and used it again, calling Velda at the office.

I filled her in.

“You’re determined to get yourself killed,” she said as I wrapped it up, “before you make an honest woman out of me.”

“It’s the only way out left to me, doll. Look, before I called it in, I gave that apartment a thorough search, from the kitchenette drawers and cabinets to the shelves in that closet.”

“And?”

“No Maxwell cassette tape.”

“Damn.”

“But... I found two little cassette players and some cables that could be used for dubbing. And half a carton of blank Ampex tapes, each one still in its plastic wrapper.”

Excitement colored her voice. “Which means copies of the sex tape had probably already been made.”

“And the guy who jumped me may have gotten them.”

“Could have found the original, too.”

“Yes.”

“Who sent the guy, Mike? Any idea?”

“Several. But all I have to work on is that he had dark eyes, a decent build, and was maybe as tall as me.”

“Sounds like a real brute... Mike, I have another call. That’s the number from Pat’s car phone! I better take it.”

She was gone for almost thirty seconds. I was just starting to think we’d been cut off when she was back.

“That was Pat,” she said. “He’s at the scene, outside the Flatiron Building — on Broadway. There’s been a hit-and-run. Mike... it’s the Long girl! Lisa Long’s been killed.”

I swallowed. “Stay put, kitten. I’m heading there.”

A sob caught in her throat, but she got the words out: “Mike, does murder have to follow us?”

“No. But we have to follow it.”

The shouting, like they say, was over by the time the cab dropped me on Broadway outside the Flatiron. No ambulance, just a squad car pulled over to block a lane of traffic, its cherry top whirling. The sad chalk outline of a sprawl that had been a young woman’s body could be seen, as could the dark Rorschach stain of blood that the outline didn’t contain. Two uniformed officers were still at the scene, one on the sidewalk and another in the street. A plainclothes man was questioning shell-shocked pedestrians.

One of the uniforms, Manny Romero, recognized me and told me where I could find Captain Chambers. Romero was middle-aged and said, “I see you still wear a hat. Weather like this makes me think I should dig one of mine out.”

The sky was grumbling and night was moving in early.

I said, “They issue a hat and a trenchcoat, you know, when we take out a P.I. ticket.”

That amused him, barely. “Is that right?”

“What do you make of this one? Straight hit-and-run?”

“I would’ve said that,” Romero said. “But the newsstand guy? Claims the car accelerated. He hit that poor girl like a torpedo.”

“‘He’?”

“Some baby-faced teenager. Rebel without a clue. Out gettin’ his kicks, little fucker.”

I nodded, patted the cop on the shoulder, and headed across Broadway.

When I went through the revolving doors into the narrow lobby, Pat was over at left, notepad in hand, interviewing the fifty-ish uniformed guardian-at-the-gate behind his little white desk. In a raincoat and no hat, the big rangy blond captain of Homicide heard me come in, wrote down a few final notes, nodded in curt thanks to the interviewee and tucked his spiral pad away. Then he walked out of the guard’s earshot and summoned me with a curled finger.

When he got a closer look at me, Pat asked, “What happened to you?”

He meant the nasty hematoma at my left temple.

“Like Dino says,” I said, “ain’t that a kick in the head.”

His chuckle was dry. “From this afternoon, huh? You should get that looked at.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

Pat nodded toward the guard at the desk. “Just picked up an interesting tidbit,” he said. His smile was the kind that went well with hard, irritated eyes.

“Must be gratifying when that happens,” I said pleasantly. “So little wheat and so much chaff in an officer of the law’s day.”

He ignored that. “Seems the late Erin Dunn’s section of the building to clean included Senator Winters’ office. That’s Senator Jamie Winters, whose secretary became a hit-and-run fatality a little over an hour ago.”

“Now you’re going to remind me,” I said, “that I asked the Super for Erin Dunn’s contact information the other day.”

The grin didn’t pretend to be anything but sarcastic. “Oh, I thought we might skip that and go right to a phone call I got from a Detective Brice over in Brooklyn.”

I folded my arms and gave him a nice friendly smile. “So that saves me from having to fill you in about that little incident.”

“That ‘little incident’ where three people got killed and you had a run-in with their killer? No. I’m up to speed, thanks. We can jump right to where you tell me how this all connects up.”

The best way to handle a smart cop is to answer a question with another question. Or two. “Have you talked to the senator? Was he still here when this happened?”

“He was. He still is.” Pat nodded upward. “He’s waiting in his office because so far I’ve only interviewed him in the most perfunctory way. You see, he saw it happen.”

“Oh?”

Pat nodded. “He’d been chatting with the Long woman outside the building. End of their workday, see-you-tomorrow kind of thing. She was heading to a bus stop and he was about to go the other direction to a parking garage. He saw her cross the street, in the middle of the block, and she turned to wave, and he waved back, just as a car came up fast. A big Buick Riviera, dark blue with white trim. Hit her so hard, she flew up and rolled off the hood and windshield, and the bastard went right over her. Some of the witnesses lost their lunch. Some damn near lost their minds.”

I shook my head. “I spoke to her yesterday. She was a nice kid.”

“Skip it. What I want to know is — was this simple hit-and-run, or just...”

“A hit? A murder? Could be, Pat. Anybody get a good look at the driver?”

“A look, yes, several of the sickened spectators. That’s what doesn’t feel like anything but a real accident — it was young kid, smooth-faced boy maybe in his teens, in a red stocking cap and a Jets sweatshirt. And here’s the kicker — somebody got the license plate number.”

“Well, great!”

“Not so great. We ran it and the car was reported stolen earlier this afternoon. Which makes this sound like a joyride.”

“Maybe it’s supposed to sound that way.”

He frowned; all the homicides he’d seen, something like this could still tie his guts into knots. “Mike, what the hell is this about? Where does the senator come in? I’ve got a hunch he’s your client. That the murdered cleaning gal and her boyfriend are tied in with, what, blackmail? The senator has a rep as a womanizer.”

I gave him half a grin and a shoulder pat. “You’ll make a good detective someday, Captain Chambers. Tell you what — let’s go up and talk to the senator.”

“Yeah. Let’s.”

“But first, me.”

“Whaddya mean, first you?”

I gestured to myself. “Well, let’s say, hypothetically, that the senator is my client. In such a case, I’d want to get his permission before answering a question from you about a hypothetical extortion attempt. And maybe other information that I couldn’t otherwise reveal.”

Pat was quietly steaming. He knew about my arrangement with a lawyer in the Hackard Building that gave me attorney/client privilege with all of my clients. Knew damn well it was standard with me.

“All right,” he said, sighing. “We’ll go up. You can have a few minutes with your... hypothetical client. I’ll even let you sit in on the interview... but I’m asking the questions. Understood?”

“Understood. You’re the law enforcement professional, after all.”

That actually made him laugh. Nice to see his mood improve so quick.

So we went up to the nineteenth floor and Pat stayed out in the hall and had a smoke. He’d quit that nasty habit more times than I had, and was between tries at the moment.

I found my client sitting behind his secretary’s desk. He was slumped there, leaning on his elbows, hands covering his face. Hearing me come in, the hands lowered but the elbows stayed put. His green eyes were bloodshot and his perfectly barbered dark brown hair had an atypically unruly look. The dark gray suit coat of a tailored number was still on, but the pink-and-white tie around the white collar of his pale gray shirt was loose, a knot the hangman hadn’t snugged yet.

The boyishly handsome face looked its full early-forties reality for a change. “Mike... what are you doing here?”

“I guess you could say I’m reporting in.” I sat in the visitor’s chair opposite him. Tugged back my hat.

“What happened to you?” he asked, nodding toward the black-and-blue blossom to one side of my forehead.

“Turns out not everybody likes me,” I said.

He didn’t know what to make of that.

I folded my arms again, put an ankle on a knee. “You got lucky. Captain Chambers is a friend. Probably my best friend in the world. Or we wouldn’t be having this pre-interview chat.”

“Captain Chambers... he... he already interviewed me.”

“That was just the warm-up. You’re in for more, maybe much more. I don’t have to level with Chambers for him to find out what’s been going on. He’s already jumped to blackmail without any help from me.”

“I... I can’t even think of any of this... not after...” He swallowed hard. “I saw her die, Mike. I saw that car come roaring out of nowhere and then she was just... in the air... and then... you could hear the crunching... bones... things inside her...” He covered his face, shuddering, shivering.

“You should save that stuff for Chambers. I don’t have time for melodramatics, whether they’re sincere or not.”

The bloodshot eyes flared and he leaned back in his dead secretary’s chair. “Are you accusing me of...?”

“Nothing. I believe you cared about that girl.” I believed he cared about all of those girls, in his way. “But right now, Jamie boy, I need instructions from you, and you need some from me.”

“In... structions?”

“How much do you know about what’s happened today?”

He said his wife had informed him that the cassette tape that ex-Governor Hughes had sold us was a copy.

“What else is there to know?” he asked hollowly.

I told him that I had spoken to the governor this morning and revealed to him that Erin Dunn and her boyfriend had swindled him. That Hughes had hired me to handle the situation, including preventing his exposure and likely arrest as a blackmailer. When my client started to react, I added that the governor’s fee would be contributed by me to the Vankemp Foundation.

Then I told him about my second visit to the brownstone in Park Slope.

“Three dead,” he said, his expression glazed.

“And me damn near dead,” I pointed out.

He threw his hands in the air. “What the hell is going on, Mike?”

“Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your secretary was a vehicular homicide victim the same day Dunn and Licata were shot to death. And neither does Captain Chambers. Understandably.”

He was sitting forward now. “You think the same person killed all three?”

I shrugged. “The same person could be responsible, but a grown man killed that couple, and some young male was behind the wheel when Lisa Long got hit. And in the latter case, ‘hit’ is the right word. Someone likely contracted both kills. Someone connected. Someone with money.”

He winced in thought. “Could the governor be cleaning up after himself?”

“That thought has occurred to me. He doesn’t seem the type, but then he’s a politician... no offense.”

“None taken. So what about those instructions you have for me?”

I held up a “stop” palm. “Don’t withhold anything from Chambers. But don’t offer him anything, either — make him ask. Let him dig for his share of our taxpayer dollars.”

He nodded, his eyes sharp now.

I continued: “Specifically, keep the governor out of this... unless the captain directly asks. You received an anonymous blackmail call. You hired me and I learned that Dunn had stolen the tape. Leave it at that, if you can.”

“What are you going to do, Mike?”

“Well, the governor and I are going to talk again. But I have a few other things in mind to do first. For now, I’ll sit in on the interview with Chambers. I’ll give you an occasional prompt. Okay?”

“Okay.”

So Pat came in and I kept my chair while the Homicide captain made a looming presence, trying to intimidate a man who met important people every day, including his own damn wife.

Jamie was properly upset about the accident, but avoided melodramatics, and in a fifteen-minute interview that covered no new ground at all Pat didn’t ask about the governor. Apparently he was still in the dark there.

I had bought myself a little time.