Murder, My Love

Chapter One

The gray sky hanging over the city didn’t promise rain. You couldn’t make out any clouds in that slate dome, and only the sodden feel of humidity said that ashen sky might ever let loose. Was that the rumble of thunder getting itself in the mood, or the dissonant song of a distant train yard? Maybe all that gray would just turn into night; it had been this way since mid-afternoon and, in late fall, darkness came sudden.

The new Vankemp Building at sixty stories held up its shimmering middle finger to that gray sky and the gloom it threatened, or maybe to the ghosts of those who’d dwelled in the tenements such new buildings displaced, the sweatshop workers and their progeny who had made the original Vankemp richer than sin. Such staggering wealth Thadeous Vankemp’s great-great-grandchildren still shared, including the famous socialite Nicole Vankemp, even as the causes she championed may have made the old boy spin in his fancy marble mausoleum.

Fighting for women’s rights, campaigning against land mines and throwing AIDS fund-raisers? How could she?

And beautiful Nicole’s brand of sin was nothing old Thadeous would have recognized — free love, Park Avenue style, including one lover who she told Vanity Fair was “a Nijinsky of cunnilingus.”

Nor would the original Vankemp likely appreciate this new glass-and-steel monolith on Fifth Avenue bearing the family name. He and others with the famous surname had seen very different buildings go up in the 1900s into the 1930s, buildings that still dominated Manhattan today — edifices with architectural dignity, reflecting the stature of the men they’d been named for. Not a giant glass tombstone.

No question about it. Once you die, you really start losing control of things.

The sky rumbled again and the vast gray ceiling bore darker patches now. I shrugged the collars of my trenchcoat up and tugged my porkpie fedora down. I looked like a refugee from some old private-eye paperback cover, which is what I was. You had to have an image to make it, and maintain it, in New York, New York, the city so nice they got redundant about it. The shamus schtick was mine, my coat and hat like the dirty talk and public service characterizing that Nicole dame.

I might be meeting her tonight. Cunnilingus wasn’t on the menu, but you never knew what might get served up in this town. Of course, her husband was who I was meeting, in his office on the top floor of this not-open-to-the-public-yet building. Hell, right now it was just this shiny slab rising out of a work site, no landscaping yet, just rough, clod-flung earth decorated with everything a worker might need from a wheelbarrow to a crane, from a pile of sheetrock to a Caterpillar tractor.

I found my way to the gate in the chain-link fence. I was expected, but I still had to yell at the security guy in a uniform as gray as the sky. I showed him the badge and the operator’s ticket in the leather fold. He had the look of a cop who retired and then boredom set in, or maybe a pension just wasn’t cutting it. Which had put him back on the job. Sort of.

“Michael Hammer,” he said, reading. He had a face like an old catcher’s mitt that had caught a couple eyeballs. “You wouldn’t be Mike Hammer, would you?”

“Yeah. Mr. Winters is expecting me.”

“He said a Mr. Hammer would be around.”

“Well, I’m Mr. Hammer.”

“I didn’t know Mike Hammer was still alive!”

“Think of my surprise.”

Grinning, he let me in, locked the gate behind us, and led me down a gravel path through the construction site to the building. He was chatty but wasn’t asking questions, so I didn’t have to listen.

He unlocked one of the half dozen glass doors fronting the place. He was smiling as he opened it for me, shaking his head. “Mike Hammer, still above ground. Who’d have thunk it? You used to be in the papers.”

“So was Happy Hooligan.”

“I remember that comic!”

I was almost inside when he blurted, “Hey! You still pals with Captain Chambers? He still on the job?”

“Yeah,” I said, figuring it covered both questions.

“Tell him Murphy said hello. He’ll remember!”

“Sure.” After all, how many cops named Murphy could there be on the NYPD?

All the fresh building odors were waiting, as unmistakable as new car smell. Glue and paint and putty and grout, all mixed up in an olfactory cocktail. What would soon be a gleaming tiled lobby looked even larger minus any furnishings, dirtied up by occasional footprints and areas where finishing touches were yet to be made.

The bank of elevators, with shiny steel doors bearing occasional dirt smears and handprints, maintained the same almost complete but untidied status. I pushed the button, the door slid immediately open and I stepped on. To gain access to the sixtieth floor required a key. I’d been sent one. Jamie Winters himself had called me and I asked why we were meeting in a building not yet open to the public.

“It’s a secure location,” the smooth, familiar baritone stated, over the phone.

I asked, “Don’t you have your office swept for bugs, regularly?”

“I do.”

“So do I.”

“I’m sure that’s so, Mr. Hammer. But not for your own devices.”

The senator was no dummy. I had the capacity to record client meetings, all right, and I almost always did. Velda, my secretary who is the other licensed P.I. of MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS, keeps the current tapes in the office wall safe and the rest in a safe deposit box.

I considered wearing a wire to this meet, just to have a record of it, and say a silent “screw you” to my celebrated client. But I skipped it. He wanted privacy and I’d go along.

I stepped off the elevator on the sixtieth floor. The unfinished nature of the building was even more obvious here, the floor lacking carpet, the ceiling unfinished with wiring hanging like the veins and arteries of a body opened up in an autopsy. Windows at either end of the hall were minus glass and instead covered in heavy plastic sheeting that pulsed with wind. The open space I’d entered appeared to be set aside for a reception area.

A mahogany door, center stage, had a nameplate that read SENATOR JAMIE B. WINTERS, a firm declaration in the midst of incomplete surroundings.

I knocked and said, “Mike Hammer, Senator!”

“Come in, Mike!”

That was a typical politician’s phony familiarity — we’d never met and on the phone had addressed each other as “Mister.”

I went in and the coldness of the night was waiting. The sidewalls would be windows onto the city, but right now were just rectangles of duct-taped plastic, trembling and crackling in the wind. The office, like the hallway, was unfinished, the ceiling tile uninstalled, more innards-like wiring lurking above, and a few bare temporary light bulbs hanging, more suited for a flophouse hallway. Like a parody of the fancy desk that would be installed before long, a chunk of plywood rode two sawhorses with Senator Winters seated behind it on a metal stool.

Two more such stools waited, facing him like clients’ chairs. On the makeshift desk sat an ashtray with a cigarette burning, and next to that a bottle of Canadian Club and another of Canada Dry. Three glasses, in hotel-style wrappers, were on the plywood, too.

“I understand,” the senator said, “Canadian Club and ginger is your drink.”

“That or Miller Lite.”

Jamie Winters got up and came around and extended a hand as if pointing to where a tree should be planted. He was boyishly handsome and looked about thirty-five, though I knew him to be eight years past that. His dark brown hair was medium on top and short on the sides, a cut that would’ve cost him a C-note at least. His olive shoulder-padded blazer was unbuttoned over a black silk t-shirt, and his blousy, pleated chinos were a matching olive — an ensemble as casual as it was expensive.

His shake was firm, not sweaty at all, and he had the kind of white smile and perfect teeth that cost real money.

While he got back behind his plywood desk, I tore off the wrapper on a glass and poured myself a drink. “You don’t need me,” I told him.

“Why is that?”

I shook my head, got myself perched on the stool. “Sounds like you already have an investigator on staff, if you know what I drink.”

His smile really was a dazzler, but I could already see the troubled man behind it — the eyes, as olive as the suit, gave it away.

His padded shoulders shrugged. “I just called my clipping service and they put something together on you. You were really something, back when.”

“Yeah. In my impetuous youth, I racked up what they call these days a substantial body count.”

He worked to make his reply sound off-hand. “Mobsters, mostly, right? But sometimes just plain killers.”

I shook my head again. “No such thing. Killers come in all shapes, sizes and sexes.”

“Is that so, Mr. Hammer?”

The voice decidedly female, though it was almost low enough to be male.

I hadn’t heard her come in, but don’t figure me for losing my edge — it was the flap of plastic non-windows and the wind whistling behind them that covered for her.

So I took a chance and showed off a little. With my back still to her, I said, “That’s right, Mrs. Winters.”

Then I turned to get a look at her, where she stood just inside the office.

I said to her, “I’ve killed men and I’ve killed women. One man was even dressed as a woman. There was a kid once, and a ‘special needs’ case, you’d call him. No ‘just plain killers’ in the bunch.”

She moved like sex on springs, a tall, lithe woman in a black leather catsuit that zipped up in front and lacked only a whip for the S & M crowd to go all giggly. The size of those thrusting breasts was wrong for the otherwise fashion model frame, but what the hell — nobody’s perfect.

But her face was. Perfect. Big green eyes, dark eyebrows that were full and real and arching, high cheekbones, and blazing red hair that was a damn mane of the stuff, tumbling to her shoulders, brushing her forehead, as if it just happened that way and wasn’t the work of a hairdresser whose hourly rate was probably twice mine.

Oh, and her lips. A wide mouth, probably too wide, but my God so full and moist. Was that dark red, almost black lipstick in fashion? Not that I gave a damn.

They said Senator Winters was headed for the White House. But we never had a First Lady who looked like this. Not even Jackie Kennedy. And Nicole Vankemp-Winters sure wasn’t Mamie Eisenhower.

At the plywood-plank desk, she unwrapped a glass and poured herself a drink, twitching a smile at her husband. He looked at her almost greedily, like he knew what he had. Maybe he did.

Then she unwrapped another glass and built her hubby one. Everybody was having what I was.

“My husband,” she said, in her Lauren Bacall purr, turning my way, “tells me the clippings say that you have more killings to your credit than—”

“I don’t think ‘credit’ is the word.”

She finished her thought: “More killings to your credit than any other living man.”

“Civilian killings,” I corrected.

“Explain, Mike. You don’t mind the familiarity?”

“There’s a distinction, Nicole... no, I don’t. Plenty of combat soldiers, and I was one for a while, racked up more notches than I ever did, on their belts or their guns or whatever. Audie Murphy took out two-hundred-and-forty and that’s strictly Germans. The Sicilians were just gravy.”

I was really only fucking with her, but I saw something in her eyes that disturbed me. Like the smells in the unfinished lobby, it was a cocktail of things — fear, excitement, anticipation.

I finished the CC and ginger and stood. “Okay, I think we’re done here.”

They both looked alarmed, and exchanged glances to that effect, and then the senator was on his feet. He had a decent build under those loose olive threads and that black t-shirt. These two were prime specimens, all right.

Winters said, “We’re just getting started, Mr. Hammer.”

“No. What you want is a hit man. I don’t kill people for money. It’s more for... sport.”

They both looked afraid now. Good.

But just between us, it’s never been for sport. It’s been to settle scores and balance the scales of justice, when the system screwed up, or I craved the satisfaction.

“I don’t like murder,” I said. “I put up with a lot out of people — humanity as a species is no prize... yet I have this old-fashioned respect for human life, anyway, that might seem...”

“Hypocritical?” she asked, arching a brow.

“Paradoxical,” I said. “You can’t imagine how many people I’ve killed. Most of ’em haven’t made the papers. But the people I took out, well... all put together? Collectively, they’d have gone on to kill far more than I ever managed.”

“You sound,” she said dryly, “like a pest control man.”

“Sometimes it works out that way,” I said with a shrug. “But you people seem to expect me to kill somebody for you. Well, I don’t do that anymore. Not so much, anyway.”

She put a hand on my arm. The full breasts under the black leather seemed to move of their own accord. She had my attention.

“Sit down, Mike,” she said. “We don’t want a hit man. And what we’re interested in is not the way you handle your enemies with... such ruthless dispatch. But rather...”

“...your reputation,” her husband said, sitting down again, “for coming through for your clients.”

The wind was playing banshee beyond the plastic windows.

Winters got out a pack of Salems, offered me one, and I raised a hand in a “pass” gesture.

“Everybody knows Mike Hammer smokes,” he said with a smile.

The clipping service again.

“I gave it up,” I said. “A couple of times, but it finally took. That stuff can kill you. Do I look reckless to you?”

They both smiled at that.

In that throaty purr, Nicole said, “What do you know about my husband?”

I shrugged. “United States senator from New York. Democrat but not crazy liberal. Rose through local ranks to the state legislature.” I shifted my gaze toward Winters. “Formerly a NYC-based publicist for TV and movie people, a skill that comes in handy now that you’re promoting yourself. And with the talk about a possible White House bid, your Hollywood connections will come in handy.”

The dazzler smile again. “Do I have your vote, Mike?”

I shook my head. “My secretary says I’m just to the right of Attila the Hun. Not that winning me over matters. I haven’t voted in years.”

Nicole frowned in confusion. “Why not, Mike?”

I looked at her husband. “It only encourages them.”

They were frozen for a couple of seconds, then burst into laughter.

“Mike,” Winters said, “you strike me as someone who has his ear to the ground, in this town.”

“I have my ins. With the cops. With the press boys. Uh, that’s what broken-down P.I.’s like me call the media.”

They were smiling. They seemed comfortable. And then they exchanged lingering glances that I couldn’t quite read.

Finally Winters looked right at me, as if landing my vote might yet be possible, and said, “Okay, then. What negatives have you heard about me?”

“Other than that you’re too damn liberal? Actually, some of my Democrat friends... and I do have some... think you’re not liberal enough. That you ride the center lane and try to make everybody love you.”

Winters said, “Is that so wrong?”

“No. Go for it. I mean, everybody loves me, and it’s really great.”

They laughed at that, too, gently. Which was about all it deserved.

“I take it,” I said, “that there’s something I might have known. Had my ear been even closer to the ground.”

They again looked at each other, and Nicole pulled in a deep breath and let it out slow. Which was something to see.

Then she nodded and her husband turned to me and said, “There might be scuttlebutt about our private life. We’ve largely been discreet, but... well, sometimes it’s hard to keep, uh...”

“The cat in the bag? Or should I say pussy?”

He swallowed and her eyebrows flicked up.

“Tell me,” I said.

He swallowed. Let out a long sigh.

“Mike... Nicole and I love each other very much. We’re devoted. And she’s devoted to my career, too, and I support her in her causes, and—”

“Keep that up and I might puke all over this lovely new office. It’s a hard smell to get out. What smell are you hiding?”

They looked at each other again, blank stares that spoke volumes. Then they nodded at each other.

The senator said, “From the start of our marriage... even before that, when we realized we wanted to be together... we also wanted to be with other people. We have... healthy appetites.”

“We have an open marriage,” Nicole said bluntly.

“Open to you,” I said, “closed to the public.”

“There was a time,” Winters said, gesturing off-handedly, “when the press looked the other way about such things. JFK and Marilyn and all that. But that time appears to be over.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Goes back to when Gary Hart suggested the press follow him around and see for themselves how he wasn’t cheating... and as I recall, he didn’t get to be president, did he?”

“Didn’t even get to try,” Winters said.

“You two will have to change your ways,” I said, “if you’re going for the big brass ring on the Pennsylvania Avenue merry-go-round. At least till you’re out of office... then nobody will care, or anyway not so much.”

He reached his hand out to her and she took it; they squeezed. “We know.”

I shook a finger at them. “From here on out, you need to be the most faithful couple this side of Missionary Position, Montana.”

They smiled a little. Nodded.

“But,” I said, “somehow I don’t think you called me here for marriage counseling.”

Again, they exchanged glances.

“Blackmail?” I asked.

He nodded. Then she did the same.

“An anonymous male caller,” Winters said, “is in possession of a tape recording of... of a sexual episode of mine.”

I frowned. “Caller, you said. This was a phone call?”

“Yes.”

“No idea who?”

“None.”

“Any money demand yet?”

“‘The price will follow,’ he said.”

With Vankemp money in the mix, that would be hefty.

I said, “Yet you’re sure he has such a tape?”

Winters nodded glumly. “He played part of it for me, over the phone.”

“Did you recognize the voices on the tape? I assume it was more than just slap-and-tickle that got recorded.”

Nicole slipped her arm around her husband’s shoulder. “Jamie and his secretary, Lisa Long, have in the last year or so had a sporadic... dalliance.”

“And it was Lisa’s voice on the tape?”

Again Winters nodded glumly. “And mine.”

“Okay, does Lisa know about this open marriage of yours?”

Another exchange of looks.

But it was Nicole who answered. “No. I’m afraid she’s in love with my husband. He intends to break it off, gently, and he believes... and I believe... he can do that. Of course, if Lisa has sensed something...”

I said, “She could be behind this. Or at least an accomplice.”

Winters batted that way. “Impossible. She’s a very moral girl. She wouldn’t do any such thing.”

“Like,” I said, “she wouldn’t fool around with a married man.”

The wife’s eyebrows went up. The husband’s chin dropped down.

I stood. “I need the names of the women you’ve been with since you married Nicole. And I need all the information you can quickly put together on these women, including current addresses and phone numbers. You may have to pay some of them off.”

“Oh,” he said, “I can’t imagine...”

“I can. Look, this is not my usual kind of job. I don’t handle divorce work, for example. But I will do my best for you. Blackmailers piss me off. Please tell me you aren’t involved in swinging, and that this catting around hasn’t been with a dozen damn women.”

“No swapping,” he said, holding up a palm as if swearing in, in court. “Just three women. Not counting Lisa.”

“So what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“What can you do?”

“Try to lay hands on that tape and any copies. Act as a go-between with the blackmailer and pay him off, at the same time making it clear any subsequent attempts for further payment will be dealt with harshly. Mike Hammer style.”

They traded nodding looks.

The senator said, “How can you assure us confidentiality? Blackmail is a crime, after all.”

“Yes, and a licensed private investigator is an officer of the court. But my contracts all go through an attorney. Technically you’ll be his firm’s client. That makes me a lawyer’s leg man and protects you with attorney/client privilege.”

They were openly smiling now.

Nicole asked, “Will a $10,000 retainer, non-refundable, do the trick?”

I grinned. “It’ll stand up on its back legs and balance a ball on its nose. Based on $250 a day with my expenses covered.”

Nicole, very efficient, said, “I’ll gather those materials and have them for you... will tomorrow afternoon be soon enough? At your office?”

I said to him, “You should make her your secretary.”

They were holding hands as I went out, the wind whipping at those plastic rectangles. The sheets fluttered like human flesh in a wind tunnel.

The gray sky rumbled more aggressively as I left the construction site, escorted by the chatty rumple-faced ex-cop in the security uniform. But the storm never came.

Not just then.