Murder, My Love

Chapter Thirteen

Leaving the scorched odor behind, I found a phone on the wall of a kitchen that was as white and modern as the living room. The entire apartment seemed at odds with the Dakota’s Addams Family motif, although the fresh corpses did fit in.

I called the Waldorf’s switchboard and asked to be put through to the governor’s suite, figuring Pat would still be working the crime scene — I was right, because Pat himself answered.

“This is Captain Chambers with the NYPD. Who is calling?”

“Pat,” I said, “I hate to tear you away, but I have two more dead bodies you might find interesting. One is Nicole Winters, whose Dakota Building penthouse this is — residence 72. The other is her male secretary, who killed those people in Brooklyn and staged the governor’s suicide.”

“Mike!”

“I can just call the Homicide Bureau or you can take it yourself. Dealer’s choice, buddy.”

Even on the phone you could tell he was talking through clenched teeth: “What the hell have you done this time... ‘buddy’?”

“Be easier to walk you through. Phone won’t do it justice.”

I hung up. Grinned. Nice to be able to do that under these circumstances.

But I had barely hung up, my hand still on the receiver, when the damn thing rang again and made me jump.

I started, “Look, Pat—”

But the familiar voice that interrupted was not the Homicide captain’s.

“Who is this?” Jamie Winters demanded.

“Oh. Senator, this is Mike Hammer.” I made a quick decision to keep him in the dark... and away from the Dakota. “There’s a situation here. The police are headed over, Captain Chambers specifically. Looking into a certain blackmail matter and a suspicious suicide.”

“What the hell is going on? What are you doing there?”

“Advising you as a valued client, I would strongly suggest that you stay away from home base right now. I can explain my presence and everything else, but first I have to deal with Chambers and the cops and talk my way out.”

“I want to speak to my wife.”

“She can’t come to the phone right now.” Well, she couldn’t. “Look. We need to meet tonight. Let’s say midnight. Somewhere private and out of the way.”

A tortured sigh. “Well... my unfinished office at the new Vankemp Building should do. It worked before as a secure location.”

“And it’ll work again,” I said. “See you there. If I’m late, hang around. Give me at least an hour. I don’t know what I’m in for at this end with the cops.”

I hung up. I just stared at the phone for a long ten seconds, in case it was in the mood to ring again and scare the crap out of me. It wasn’t. It didn’t.

But my mind was racing. I had things to do. I had those young women to protect. If I stayed around here and talked to Pat, it could take hours. I might even get hauled over to One Police Plaza and checked into a private room, and it wouldn’t be a penthouse. Couldn’t be having that.

On the counter near the wall phone was a yellow pad of Post-it notes with a pen. I huffed a laugh and grinned again as I wrote: “Had to run, Pat. See you tomorrow. Love, Mike.” I tore the note off and went out into the living room. Strolled over and pressed the Post-it note to the chest of the late Andrew Morrow, who was staring up at the ceiling like the other corpse lounging out here.

After getting into my hat and trenchcoat, I slipped into the hall, snugging the collars up. The doorway down the way opened and a petite attractive Japanese woman, who I’d never met but immediately recognized, peeked out. I got a glimpse of a black-and-red silk kimono.

“I hear something,” she said.

“There’s been a shooting,” I told her. I got out my leather fold and held the badge up for her to see, and from where she stood it must have seemed legit enough. “More police are on the way, ma’am. Everything’s under control.”

She nodded and sealed herself back up.

I didn’t blame her for being gun-shy.

A cab wasn’t hard to catch and within half an hour I was sitting on the couch with Velda in the outer area of the safe house, our backs to the tight-shut doors of the rooms of our female guests, the lights out here dim, the TV aglow with Johnny Carson going but the sound way down.

I was in my shirt sleeves, tie loose, and she was in gray sweats — clothes she could sleep in but didn’t have to change if something sudden came up. Nothing had so far.

It took a good half hour to fill her in on the events at the Dakota. She stared at me through the telling, rarely blinking, but never interrupting.

Her arms were folded, her gym-stockinged feet on a divan, her dark eyes wide as she looked at me. When I was done, she said, “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble, Mike, leaving the scene of a crime like that.”

“Don’t sweat the small stuff, baby. Bigger fish to fry and all that.” I was seated the same way, arms folded, feet up, shoes off. “Something Nicole Winters said is bothering me.”

She smirked. “No kidding. Everything she said is bothering me.”

I shook my head. “No, what I mean is... she started out lying, then essentially copped to being responsible for the Brooklyn murders and faking the governor’s Dutch act. She claimed to the end that it was all her doing, with her boy toy’s help. Insisted that her husband had nothing to do with the killings. Had nothing to do with trying to erase everybody and everything, on and surrounding that sex tape.”

Now she was shaking her head. “But why would Nicole stop lying only to tell the truth about everything except that? Why would she go to such lengths to protect her husband?”

I shrugged. “Because she loved him. Jamie screwed around on her, yes, but with her blessing, and she herself seemed to consider sex just another flavor of aerobic exercise. But the bottom line, baby, is she loved the guy.”

Velda smirked again, this time accompanied by her eyebrows going up. “Well... women have been known to fall in love with cheating bastards before.”

I half-smirked. “Let’s not get personal, doll.”

“Didn’t mean to cross the line.”

I shifted my position to look right at her. Really lock eyes. “But there’s something in all those lies and truths Nicole spun for me that really sticks out.”

“You’ll have to point me to it, Mike, because it’s all one big blur in my brain by now.”

“The only murder Nicole didn’t openly cop to was Lisa Long’s. She even seemed... emphasis on ‘seemed’... to think it might really have been an accident.”

Velda squinted at me. “What do you make of that?”

I shrugged a shoulder. “Not sure. It doesn’t jibe with her insistence that the senator wasn’t part of the killings that she and the majordomo hatched. Because if she really didn’t know that the Long hit-and-run was a murder, that indicates her husband arranged it. Without her knowledge.”

Velda nodded again. “Because otherwise she’d have taken the blame for that, too.”

“Right.”

“So what does it all mean, Mike?”

“I’m not sure. But one thing jumps out about that kill — the ‘hit man’ was a kid. A fresh-faced boy. What kind of hired killer is that?”

She couldn’t tell me.

I got up, stretched, and went for my coat and hat. I was almost out the door when Velda was right there, handing me something.

She smiled just a little. “You don’t want to forget this.”

“No,” I said, tucking it away in my suit coat pocket. “I don’t. I’d sooner leave my .45 behind. Which I’m not about to.”

I told Velda to keep an eye on our slumber party participants while I made one last call on this very long day and night.

At the Vankemp Building construction site.

The rain finally came.

Had it been any colder, it would have been snow or sleet or even hail again. Thunder roared like King Kong and lightning curled its ragged spooky fingers while the wind seemed to be angry that just about everybody had made it inside, leaving the streets and sidewalks as close to empty as New York ever gets.

The downpour was brief, the onslaught starting in just as I was climbing into a cab outside the safe house. By the time I reached the stretch of Fifth Avenue where tenements used to rule and which now was home to high-rise wealth, the attack was over, with only the wind remaining to let you know who was boss. It whipped at my trenchcoat and made me hold my hat on as I approached the chain-wire fence. A few last bursts of electricity were reflecting off the sixty-story glass-and-steel obelisk of the Vankemp Building like a lighting effect in a dance club.

Nothing had changed but the newly added pools of rainwater around the construction site grounds, the machinery huddling under skins of raindrop-pearled plastic, tarps shielding them in anticipation of the sky exploding, a promise that had been kept. The Caterpillar tractors looked like oversize pooches that had forgotten how to shake the wetness off after an unwanted bath.

The chatty old cop at the chain-link fence’s gate recognized me and let me in without fanfare. Still dripping from the cloudburst, he was not in the mood to talk tonight. Some cardboard sheets spread around outside the multiple entry doors allowed me to wipe my feet after the walk across the muddy work area. The old boy unlocked the glass door and let me in, managed a damp smile and a nod, then disappeared.

The smell of rain had found its way in to mingle with the glue and paint odors of a building in progress. The somewhat dirty, tile-floored lobby looked the same as a few days ago.

A few days ago! Was that really all it had been? So much deception, so much corruption, so much murder! And in so short a time?

Full circle so soon, pushing the up button, stepping on the elevator, using the key I’d held onto to access the sixtieth floor. Whisked up to an unfinished lobby with bulging plastic over uninstalled windows and those autopsy-like hanging veins and arteries of wiring dangling over uncarpeted floor. Knocking at a mahogany door that said SENATOR JAMIE B. WINTERS. And without saying a word, hearing, “Come in, Mike!”

Was I here again, or just still here?

Again, Jamie Winters was behind the makeshift desk of plywood and sawhorses, seated on a stool, with a metal stool waiting opposite. He wore a very conventional but clearly tailored charcoal suit, padded shoulders the only fashion concession, with a white shirt, collar open, no tie in sight. His boyish countenance could have stood a shave — it had been a long day for him, too — and his dark hair’s hundred-dollar cut had been mussed some by wind before he got here.

Right now the dazzling white smile had been put away. His expression was business-like with a dollop of skepticism, and maybe a hint of anger, his forehead and eyebrows tight. No bottles of Canadian Club and Canada Dry awaited me this time. No wrapped hotel-room glasses. He had a cigarette going in the ashtray, a pack of Salems nearby.

He gestured to the stool. “Sit. Please.”

Another stool had been pushed to one side. I slipped out of my trenchcoat and draped it over the seat, set the porkpie fedora on top. It was cold enough to leave them on, but I thought I might not want to be encumbered. I unbuttoned my suit coat. I sat.

The floor-to-ceiling windows at either side of the room were fluttering, or anyway the plastic was where soon glass would be, sometimes expanding, sometimes contracting, like this large, mostly empty office was a living, breathing animal. A dangerous one.

“I heard on the radio,” he said.

“What did you hear, Senator?”

“That Governor Hughes is dead. Unconfirmed sources are reported as saying it’s suicide. Was it you, Mike?”

That surprised me. I admit it. I gestured to myself as I said, “Me? Hell no.”

One eyebrow went up. “You must admit it sounds like you. And if you’ve overstepped your role in so ghastly a fashion, as my representative? I am having none of it.”

I almost laughed. That was good. He was smart. Turning it around on me like that? With that touch of righteous indignation? There was a natural politician sitting across from me, all right.

“I had nothing to do with that,” I said. I held up a palm, as if swearing in at court. “Let’s make some ground rules. I’m here to report on what I know. May take a while. When I’m done, ask whatever questions you like.”

He thought about that, or anyway pretended to. Then he nodded and said, “Fair enough.”

“Before we get into that, I have sad news. Senator, I’m sorry to have to tell you... but your wife has been killed.”

There was no pretending in his reaction. He was genuinely astonished. Quickly, eyes flaring, he said, “Who did it?”

I hadn’t said she’d been murdered. I might have meant it was an automobile accident — like the one Lisa Long died in, only not a contrived one. Or maybe she slipped in the tub and cracked her skull — a bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house, you know.

But he went right to murder.

“In a way it was accidental,” I said. “Her accomplice, Andrew Morrow, came at me with a gun. We struggled, and he fired the thing and a stray bullet took Nicole down. I’m sorry. It was quick. You need a minute?”

Senator Winters took a few seconds, then shook his head. His jaw muscles were flexing; it took the boyishness away. He reached for the cigarette and sucked on it, let smoke out, then returned the cig to the tray.

He said, “I am going to ask a question, Hammer — fuck your ground rules.”

“Okay.”

“What do you mean, Morrow was her ‘accomplice’?”

“Earlier this evening, Nicole confessed to me that she was attempting to protect you by getting rid of Erin Dunn and Anthony Licata. An innocent bystander, their landlady, was also killed by Morrow. What you heard about on the radio, our ex-governor’s ‘suicide’? That was Morrow’s work, too. The police are well aware he faked that. They will soon know, if they don’t already, that Nicole was involved.”

Winters had started shaking his head halfway through that. “Foolish damn woman. Goddamn her.” He swallowed, held back tears, or gave that impression. “God love her...”

“Question is, did you love her?”

Choking back what might have been a sob, he said, “Very much. I’m sure the... unconventional nature of our relationship is something... something you can’t grasp. But yes, I loved her.”

“Well, she loved you, all right. She really did. Oh, she loved the idea of being a ’90s version of Jackie Kennedy, too. But she truly believed in you. Believed in the social issues and concerns you espouse.”

He was nodding somberly. “I’m sure she did.”

“And I believe — I really believe — that if the terrible things she undertook for your benefit would’ve been exposed, she would have fallen on her sword for you. Right up to its emerald-studded hilt.”

His head went back and his eyelids went up. “What do you mean, ‘my benefit’?”

“As much as the role of First Lady was something she hoped to inhabit, and even to redefine, she wanted most for you to be president. Even if she couldn’t be at your side. She’d take the blame. The fall. For everything you did.”

“What did I do?”

I gestured to him. “Only everything. You’re the chess master. She was your queen, all right, but ultimately the queen is just another game piece on the board.”

His eyes were narrow now and he spoke through a slit of a mouth. “What exactly happened tonight? At the penthouse. Do you still work for me or not?”

“Sure I do.”

“Then tell me. In as much detail as you like. I won’t interrupt. Your ground rules, Hammer.”

So I told him. Writing up my cases as I have over the years has developed in me a fairly remarkable recall, and I was able to repeat what both of us said, more or less. Just as I’ve given it to you.

“I fail to see,” Jamie Winters said, after another drag on that cigarette, “how anything Nicole said incriminates me. She did, as you say, take the blame for all of these foolish actions.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s one ‘foolish action’ she denied doing that most incriminates you.”

“Is that right?”

“It is. She denied having anything to do with the Lisa Long hit-and-run kill. She even seemed to think it might really have been an accident.”

“And how is that damning to me?”

I shrugged. “Why should Nicole deny that one murder? She took responsibility for all the others. That would seem to indicate you hired the ‘accident’ done.”

That rated a sneer. “‘Seems’ is hardly proof.”

“You were right there at the scene, Jamie, outside the Flatiron. Chatting with the woman on the sidewalk. Were your eyes on that car, parked down along the curb? Its driver waiting for the traffic to thin enough for you to signal it to pull out? Or were you just waiting for that speeding car to come into sight and then distract Lisa and send her on her way... to her death.”

Winters shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “Not proof. What do you want from me, Hammer? What are you after?”

I beamed at him. “Money would be a start. This began with blackmail. Let’s end it that way. With Nicole gone, you’re going to be a very rich man. You could keep me on retainer. Say $100,000 a year? I could be your damage control guy. I have a feeling you have a lot of damage that could use controlling.”

The senator studied me. Studied me for a very long time — probably thirty seconds, which is an eternity. Try it and see. Time it on your watch.

Then, slowly nodding, he said, “All right. All right, Hammer. I think you may just be the man I could use, long-term. Could I hire you through that attorney you work for? To keep the client confidentiality intact?”

“You bet. But tell me something.”

“Certainly.”

“Why keep Nicole in the dark about Lisa Long?”

He shrugged. “It came up rather spontaneously. When the blackmail scheme seemed on the verge of exposure, removing Lisa from the scene... in an accident... made sense. I don’t relish having that done. I was fond of the girl. But in a larger sense, she was expendable.”

I waved a hand, like a diner at 21 summoning the check. “I thought you were a romantic, Jamie. That you loved these women... as long as the affairs lasted, anyway.”

His smile was a mildly self-mocking thing. “I am a romantic, actually. I do love them, usually. Lisa... well, she was convenient. How can a man resist a beautiful secretary like that, particularly one as interested in you as you are in her?”

“Tell me about it,” I said with a smirk. “One thing. What about the other girls? The ones you and Nicole gave me to check into? I hope I haven’t been... well, the phrase ‘stalking horse’ has come up. I wouldn’t like to see wholesale slaughter become the policy where all your former girlfriends are concerned.”

He raised a “perish the thought” hand. “Certainly not! Am I some kind of monster? No, Lisa had to go because she’d become intertwined with this blackmail business — a victim, like myself, but caught up. The other girls whose names Nicole gave you, well, that was before we knew whether any of them might be involved in this blackmail scheme. No, they’re quite safe.”

“What if any of them came forward at some future date?”

He batted that away. “I don’t believe any of those three would dream of embarrassing me or themselves. I can’t imagine it from them.” He shrugged. “Of course, if any of them should... misbehave... accidents do happen. And I’d have Mike Hammer on staff to deal with it, wouldn’t I?”

We exchanged smug smiles. Two men who wouldn’t murder a woman unless they really had to.

“Since you’ve made a confession of sorts,” I said, with an embarrassed shrug, “perhaps I should do the same.”

He was stubbing out his cigarette in the tray. “Oh?”

I reached in my right-hand suit coat pocket and withdrew the object Velda had passed me on my way out of the safe house: the same little metal-case cassette recorder that, at the Dakota the other day, I’d used to play the sex tape for Nicole’s entertainment and edification. Or I should say, a dupe of the sex tape.

I said, “For the record... and this recording... I hereby state I have no intention of taking a yearly retainer from Senator Winters, and my offer to do his dirty work was simply a method of getting him to own up to what he’s done.”

“Goddamnit!” he blurted, halfway off the stool.

The .45 came out from under my left arm so fast even I was impressed. With my free hand, I stopped the cassette recorder and popped the little gizmo with the tape still in it in my suit coat pocket.

“Thank you, Senator,” I said.

The wind outside was such that I hadn’t heard the elevator ding and the doors slide open. Of course, I hadn’t been listening for it. But somebody had been listening for a while — at the door to the senator’s office.

Somebody named Nora Kent.

“Put down the gun, Mr. Hammer!”

Very carefully, slowly, I craned to look back at her.

She was in jeans and an untucked pink-and-white plaid flannel shirt open over a gray t-shirt, both hanging over her jeans. She wore no make-up and her black hair was so short, she might have been a boy. Had she tucked it under a stocking cap, and with no make-up, she’d have looked even more like a boy.

A teenage boy.

The kind who might go out joyriding in a stolen car.

She had a gun in her hand. It wasn’t as big as my gun, just a Baby Glock, but it could shoot nine-mil slugs and if we’ve learned anything here, it’s that a nine-mil slug can kill you very damn dead.

She was twirling the forefinger of her left hand as she gave me orders: “Hold the butt by two fingers! Put it down! Don’t throw it!”

She was smart. She knew that if I dropped the .45, particularly dropped it hard, the thing might go off. So I knelt. And put it down, gently, by two fingers. Then stood again, slowly.

“Jamie,” she said, in her breathy Julie London voice, “what should I do with him?”

Winters was holding his hands up, palms out, almost like he was the one being threatened by a woman with a gun.

“Don’t kill him here,” he said. “We’ll take him down and get him out and away somehow. We’ll have to get past the security guard.”

She shook her head. “I already took care of the geezer.”

Winters frowned. “How hard did you hit him?”

“I didn’t hit him, I shot him. The wind covered it. He’s dead.” She shrugged. “He had a nice long life.”

Winters frowned, but any regret was a momentary thing.

I was facing her now. “So what’s this about, honey? Getting a recording contract through Jamie’s show biz contacts? Or maybe you want to be First Lady, too?”

Her teeth were small white feral things. I hadn’t noticed that before. And her eyes — those oh-so-blue eyes... Christ, they were crazier than mine!

“I want it all, Mike!” she said, her smile shining with greed. “But there’s something I want that you would never understand...”

“What’s that, baby?”

She grunted a laugh as her little automatic stared at me with its black noncommittal eye. “‘Baby,’ ‘honey,’ ‘doll’... what a cornball old creep you are. Do you even know what love is? Or is it all just rutting to you? What do I want? I want Jamie Winters, you fool. Because I love him, and he loves me. Have you even heard of that?”

I had, but I also heard something she hadn’t, because this time I’d been listening for it. The elevator. I’d told Velda not to fall asleep till I got back. I’d told her that if one of the girls ducked out, she had to follow that girl. Because one of those dolls might have been eavesdropping when I filled Velda in and mentioned the meeting with Winters at the Vankemp Building. Because I may be dumb, but I’m smart enough to know a young woman with no makeup and a stocking cap pulled down can pass for a teenage boy, particularly in a car speeding by. And I figured one of those cute hens in our charge really might be a fox...

Winters came around the makeshift desk. He stood next to me, at my left, taking me by the arm. Said to her, “Go get that big gun of his and hand it to me. He’s a tricky mother. Both of us need to cover him when we go down.”

Nora nodded and was keeping her Baby Glock trained on me as she came over to my right to lower herself and reach for the .45, where I’d dropped it a few feet away.

“Put the gun down, Nora!”

Velda, a goddess in gray sweats, was standing just inside the unfinished office, that little hammerless .32 of hers in one sweet hand, its barrel pointing like a scolding finger at the petite crouching singer, who had not yet retrieved the .45.

“Do it, Nora! A gentle toss!”

Nora, her cute face ugly with hate, pitched her Baby Glock off to one side, nice and easy.

“Good girl,” Velda said, holding her position.

That was when Nora went for the .45, coming up with it in her two hands, springing to her feet and charging at Velda, firing wildly. The thunder of it rivaled anything the sky had produced on this terrible night, but the rounds only chewed up the senator’s mahogany door, because Velda had already hit the deck.

And when my raven-haired partner’s .32 barked a bullet up into the songbird’s chest, spinning her around to face Winters, my gun fumbling from her uncaring fingers, Nora Kent looked at Jamie Winters in desperate love and sudden pain, reaching her arms out to brace herself or perhaps embrace him.

Horrified, the senator tried to back away only to bump into the bulging plastic covering a window where glass wasn’t yet, popping it like a blister, and they both tumbled through, letting screaming banshee wind in, her limp form chasing him as he windmilled face-up, all the way down, the bloody stain on her back a ragged valentine, his scream not dying until he did.

Then Velda was there hugging my arm, looking at the tiny torn figures in the construction rubble below, the plastic they’d taken with them providing no cushion at all, just flapping around them in the wind that whipped Velda’s hair and my suit coat, as well.

“Don’t say it,” Velda said.

“What, that they really fell for each other?” I grinned at her. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”