Murder Never Knocks

Chapter Twelve

The state of mind that was Greenwich Village was changing, beatnik black giving way to rainbow tie-dye, finger-snapping egocentric poetry getting drowned out by clap-along protest folk songs. Other things stayed the same, like the zigzag streets, art-gallery sidewalks, espresso joints, intimate jazz clubs, and theater ranging from Circle in the Square respectability to strip-joint sleaze.

There was also no shortage of bookshops, running mostly to secondhand, and that’s where I asked about a girl called Marcy with short black hair and glasses, who might be doing research on the history of show business in the city. I got nowhere on this sunny but cool afternoon until I tried the Paper Book Gallery on the corner of Sullivan and West Third, a Beat Generation landmark still advertising poetry readings even though the kid at the register had long hippie hair and little square-lensed glasses.

“You might mean Marcy Bloom,” the kid said. He wore a black vest over a paisley shirt. “That sounds like the project she’s been working on. I delivered her some old magazines she ordered, like a couple of weeks ago.”

“Then you know where she lives,” I said. Not a question.

He frowned. “I can’t give out a customer’s address, if that’s what you’re after. Would you want me giving out your address, mister?”

I dug out my wallet and he was shaking his head.

“Save your bread, man. I’m no sell-out.”

But he was a weed smoker, judging by his dreamy eyes and the pungent scent clinging to his clothes.

I flipped the wallet open and shut, just long enough for him to glimpse the badge there. That it went with my P.I. ticket and not a job on the PD was a distinction I didn’t figure he would make.

He had to look it up in a card file, but he got me the address. He was shaking and afraid.

“She’s not in any trouble, son,” I told him, taking the scribbled-on slip of paper he handed me. “And neither are you. Appreciate the help.”

He nodded and started working up his story for his pals about how he’d been hassled by the man.

Marcy Bloom’s building was a white-washed brick three-story that looked like a strong wind might crumble it. Green shutters and black ironwork dressed it up, and some of the city’s few remaining gas lamps lent a certain charm. But I wondered how long the quaint buildings on these cobblestone side streets could stand up against the intrusion of the world of commerce.

On the second floor landing, I knocked at 2B. As I waited, the door across the way opened, and I turned. In the half-opened doorway, a skinny guy with a shoulder-length pile of curly brown hair was giving me a what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here look. In his mid-twenties or so, he wore a faded maroon T-shirt with a cracked white peace symbol, and his jeans looked older than he did.

I gave him a smile that wasn’t pleasant. “Something I can do for you, man?”

He retreated and shut the door, hard.

I shrugged to nobody, turned back and knocked again on the paint-blistered door. I was just getting ready to knock a third time when a girl answered so suddenly I almost jumped back.

“Sorry,” she said chirpily, as if we were old friends, “I had to throw something on.”

She was petite but curvy, with boyishly short dark hair and big dark blue eyes that the black-framed, big-lensed glasses perched on her pert nose could hardly contain. She had a brightness and energy about her that came across right now, and was at least as cute as her navy white-polka-dotted mini-dress. She was maybe twenty-three and made me wish I was.

“Say,” she said. “You’re Mike Hammer!”

Surprised to be recognized, particularly by someone her age, I admitted it nonetheless. Was she Marcy Bloom? She was. She seemed not at all surprised I’d come calling.

Looking past me, her cuteness took on sharp edges, and she said, “Shack! Quit that! Be good!”

I glanced behind me just in time to see that door across the way slam again.

“Don’t mind Shack,” she said, her smile dimpling one side of the adorable face. “He’s harmless. Poor puppy dog’s just in love with me.”

“But is he house-broken?”

She smiled at that and took me by the elbow like I was her father giving her away at a wedding. She ushered me not down the aisle but into her apartment.

“You saved me a trip,” she said.

“How did I do that?”

She asked for my hat and coat, which she promptly dropped onto a chair. Then she led me past an odd work area on a braided throw rug in the center of the living room, with a table whose legs had been sawed off to put it a foot-and-a-half off the floor, a typewriter on it, and a throw pillow for a chair. The table had stacks of manuscript paper and various research materials, books, magazines, notebooks, all in cheerful disarray.

My hostess deposited me on a threadbare couch while she sat on the floor like an Indian, giving me a glimpse of white inner thighs and dark panties. Well, more than a glimpse.

She looked up at me like I was a guru and she was ready to learn the meaning of life. The way she was sitting, I could have told her.

“I’ve been trying to get the nerve up,” she said, “to come see you at your office.”

The couch, like the other furnishings in the Early Salvation Army decor, sat well out from the wall, which like the others was consumed by bookcases. Some were homemade concrete-block affairs, plus thrift-shop shelving she’d scrounged. She had built an enviable library, no doubt as secondhand as the furniture, the fiction running from Pride and Prejudice to Peyton Place, the nonfiction heavy on journalism and film and theater criticism.

She said, “What brings you around to see me, Mr. Hammer?”

“Maybe we should start,” I replied, “with why you were thinking of coming to see me?”

Hands on her bare knees, she rocked back and forth a little on her crossed legs. As the original Billy Batson said, Holy moly.

“Okay, I’ll start,” she said. The big eyes grew bigger. “I’ve been following this crazy thing in the papers and on TV. Do you know, when your name first turned up, I’d never heard of you? I’m from Ohio, which is my excuse. But from snippets in the newspaper stories, I got the picture — you’re a real character.”

“I get that sometimes,” I admitted.

She smiled and rocked. “So I did some research on you. Mostly at the library, but also some old magazines at a bookstore I frequent.”

“The Paper Book Galley,” I said.

Her eyes got wide again, like I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Or somewhere. “You are a detective!”

“That’s the rumor. So you researched me. What did that tell you?”

“That some of what the papers have been saying is b.s. — like the supposed robbery attempt at your office, and how the police were looking into that cabbie’s life to see why someone would want to take it, and how that high-society bridal shower got interrupted by an armed robber. And, of course, how you just happened to be there for all three. Killing the first two bad guys, and your secretary taking down the third.”

“You left out the newsstand shooting.”

She nodded, out of rhythm with her rocking. “I was saving that for last, because that was what made me start really, seriously thinking about approaching you directly. Did you know I spoke to Billy, that little person who runs the newsstand, several times?”

I nodded back. “I did know. He told me you had, which is why and how I tracked you down.”

“So then you know I was Richard Blazen’s legman?”

“Yeah.” I gave all that exposed skin an unabashed look. “Coincidentally, I’m a leg man myself.”

That only made her laugh. I’d thought maybe it would embarrass her into covering up a little. I’ve always been big on decorum.

“When I was running through that list of fatalities,” she said, “I left the most recent one out. The most significant one.”

“Leif Borensen,” I said.

She nodded. “Was that really suicide, like the papers say?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. But it confuses me. I figured he was the party responsible for all this mayhem. He ran down Mr. Blazen in a car, and tried to have you killed several times before going after the little newsstand fella. Am I right?”

I answered with my own question: “Why do you figure Borensen was responsible for the attempts on my life?”

She shrugged. “I told you I researched you. I’m a ferocious researcher, Mike. I’ll call you ‘Mike’ and you call me ‘Marcy.’ Kind of a nice ring to it, Mike and Marcy. Anyway, you’re known to go on the hunt for anybody who hurts or... or especially kills... your friends. You’re famous for it.”

“That’s ‘infamous,’” I said.

Her smile was barely there. “That would depend on whether someone thought you were a bad person. I mean by that, someone who thinks it’s wrong of you to go out and, well, try to get even.”

“I don’t just try, Marcy.”

Her eyebrows went up and down. “I know. And I may live in Greenwich Village and write articles for the Voice, but I am an old-fashioned Midwestern girl at heart. I like to see scores settled. So, me? I think you’re a good person.”

She seemed at once ten years old and forty-five.

“Nice to know, Marcy.” I leaned forward and said, “You say you were Blazen’s ‘legman,’ but really you were a lot more than that... right? I figure you were the one doing the writing. An old PR guy may know how to put together a press release, but not a whole book.”

She was nodding, rocking a little while I talked, stopping when she talked.

“You’re right, Mike. Richard Blazen knew everybody in local theater, going back to the 1930s, and in TV production back to the late ’40s. He had stories like you couldn’t imagine — the backstabbing by much admired stars, who was gay and who wasn’t, producers screwing over their backers, producers screwing over their stars, the sleeping around by just about everybody, the gangsters who backed productions to give their mistresses roles in shows, and drugs, drugs, drugs. Some of the show biz types who are so critical of my pot-smoking generation were outrageous hypocrites, snorting coke and shooting up H. Mr. Blazen knew it all.” She grinned and rocked again. “It’s going to be a fabulous book.”

That stopped me for a moment. “You’re going on with the project?”

“Oh yes. I have all the material here. It’s still a big job. I have to fact-check, when the people he talks about are still alive. It’s a legal thing.”

“You say ‘talks’ like he’s still around.”

“That’s how it feels sometimes. See, here’s how we went about it — I’d interview him on a tape recorder, and then we’d have the tapes transcribed. I have pages and pages of the stuff.”

“So it really is a big job.”

“Enormous! But it’ll make me. Put me on the map, as the cliché goes.” Gently, she pointed a finger at me. “The reason I wanted to see you, Mike, was to find out what you knew about this awful Borensen person. To see if you’d go on the record that he was the one who ran down Mr. Blazen.”

“I can do that.” I sat forward, springs in the couch cushion whining under my tail. “But first I want to know what you know, Marcy... about your Mr. Blazen and Leif Borensen.”

“You bet.” She bounded up and sat next to me on the couch, with a leg tucked under her, giving me a new angle on how artistically black silk panties could contrast with white creamy thighs.

Hammer, a voice said, she’s young enough to be your daughter.

Another voice said, But she isn’t your daughter.

“Mr. Blazen knew Martin Foster for a very long time,” Marcy said. “Did PR work for him in the early days, and off-and-on in later years, too... and always respected and admired the man. Mr. Blazen said Martin Foster was a rare class act in an often no-class business.”

“I knew Foster a little,” I said. “I’d agree.”

She continued: “So when it became known that Martin Foster was planning to bring this Leif Borensen in as his co-producer, Mr. Blazen went to see his old friend, and warned him that this Hollywood pretender was no one to get involved with. That the man had been in league with mobsters since his unsuccessful stint as an actor.”

“Borensen was still mobbed up,” I said. “Right to the end. He’s been a major West Coast money laundry for the boys for decades.”

“Yes, Mr. Blazen knew that, too, or at least had come to that conclusion. And he was appalled to find out that Borensen was dating Foster’s daughter, Gwen.”

“Worming his way in,” I said.

She leaned forward, the cute face painfully earnest. “But, Mr. Hammer, isn’t this sorry, sordid affair now at an end? After the suicide of Leif Borensen? Only you say it was not suicide. Which makes it murder.”

“It’s murder, all right.”

“You didn’t do it, did you?”

The casualness of that caught me off guard.

I said, “Hell, no. Marcy, consider the three attempts on my life. You said it yourself — Borensen tried to have me killed. He didn’t have the balls to try to do it himself.”

And I told her that the bastard had been dealing with a top-dollar contract killer, with a stable of hitmen, and was now tying off loose ends. Including Leif himself.

“So this big-league professional assassin,” she said, “is who you’re looking for.”

“Yes. Would you like to help?”

“Just tell me how.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “What I need from you is a specific piece of information that might well lead me to this killer.”

“If I have that information, it’s yours. But what exactly do you need to know?”

I leaned back and a couch spring played stick-’em-up in my spine. “Maybe you’re still too much of an Ohio girl to know, Marcy, but there are five major crime families in New York. I am assuming Leif Borensen was aligned with one of them, going back to his drug-peddling days.”

“You think he’s been in with the same mob all these years?”

“Very likely. Those kind of people get their hooks in, and they stay in. Now, I’m known to all of these families, and they’re known to me. If you... or rather the late Richard Blazen... can point me to the right crime family, I may be able to ascertain the name of this contract killer.”

She nodded slowly. “That does make sense. They’re who Leif Borensen would have gone to, to obtain a professional killer.”

I grinned at her. “You’re right on the beam, kid.”

The earnest look returned, with some confusion mixed in. “You’re thinking maybe I know a name, or the name of the Mafia family... but I don’t, really.”

“It should have come up in research, and in the taped interviews.”

She shook her head, frustrated. “Well, I’m sure that name is something I saw or heard out of Mr. Blazen. But it wouldn’t mean anything to me. I have a vague memory that some Italian names came up in this context, which is probably no surprise.”

“No, no surprise. But the name of the crime family, or a member of it, would almost have to be in your notes or those transcripts, right?”

“Right.” She rose. An air of determination accompanied her. “We have a big job in front of us, Mike. Maybe you’d like some coffee?”

“I would. Milk and sugar.”

I thought she was going to go off to a kitchenette and make some, but she went to her door, opened it and crossed to knock at her horny neighbor’s.

The kid answered, more hangdog than puppy dog, as if maybe she was going to paddle him with a rolled-up paper.

“Shack, would you be a dear and run down and get us some coffee at the deli? Maybe some sandwiches.” She called across to me. “Sandwich, Mike?”

“Sure! Corned beef and Swiss, cold, plenty of hot mustard.”

She told him, “I’ll have the usual.”

“Bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayo?” he asked.

“Hold the mayo,” she said, almost testily. “That’s the usual. You need money?”

“No. You can pay me later.”

“Get yourself something, too. I’m going to have you join us, if you’re not doing anything.”

That brightened him. “Yeah? Sure, I’m available. You need help, Marcy?”

She was still in her doorway, he in his.

“We’re going to be sorting through some of the interview transcripts,” she said. “We can use your sharp eyes. You up for that, sweetie?”

“You bet!”

“Great. But before you go down to the deli, could you come over and carry the manuscript boxes in from my bedroom?”

“Glad to!”

From the sound of his voice, I could tell her bedroom was a place he would very much like to visit.

She came bouncing back to me, her full breasts making the white dots on the dark mini-dress dance. When Good Neighbor Shack was back in his own apartment, that bedroom was somewhere I would very much like to visit myself.

Don’t do this to Velda, a voice said.

Velda who? another voice said.

When Shack came in with three storage-file boxes stacked in his arms, and then plopped them down on the floor near Marcy’s low-lying work station, I said to her, “Brother. You weren’t kidding.”

“He was a talker,” she said, “my Mr. Blazen.”

Shack trotted off toward the bedroom again, and I asked her, “There’s more?”

“There’s more. Maybe you should help him.”

Nine boxes in all.

Not all of it was transcripts, but each box had its share. Included were newspaper clippings and photo files, plus Blazen’s early attempts in longhand at writing the book himself, before wising up that he needed a ghost.

After Shack got back with the deli food, which we ate as we worked, he sat on the couch next to me — well, putting a cushion between us, which became a shared desk. Marcy returned to the floor and her chopped-off table. She continued to sit cross-legged, angled toward us, and at one point Shack and I caught ourselves both looking at the same time. We just rolled our eyes at each other, forming a bond in our mutual lechery.

The three of us couldn’t read all that stuff, not in detail. Transcript is hard to read anyway, with its lack of paragraphs and occasional misrecorded words and phrases. The idea was to skim and scan and try to catch any mention of Borensen and his mob ties, as well as any Italian name that might turn up.

Finally, almost three hours in, Marcy blurted in mock-My Fair Lady fashion, “By George, I think I’ve got it!.. Do you know a gangster called Joey Pep, Mike?”

“Joey Pepitone,” I said, frowning. A longtime capo in the Bonetti mob family. “I know him, all right.”

“Could he be our man?”

I was nodding. “He could. He sure could. And I can check that out right away. Shack, much appreciated. Marcy, you have a phone?”

She did, in her bedroom — which was a mattress on the floor surrounded by more walls of books — and I used it and her Manhattan phonebook.

A maid or anyway somebody on the household staff answered, and I gave my name and asked for Gwen.

“Mike, it’s nice to hear your voice.”

But I wasn’t sure it really was. We’d been ships who passed in the night, and maybe I shouldn’t be pulling back into port.

“Honey, did you ever see Leif mingling or talking with anybody who struck you as... disreputable? Any associate who struck you as shady? I know that’s vague, but—”

“Actually, yes,” she said quickly. “I was going to call and say something to you, Mike, because I’ve been thinking, going over so much in my mind, so many things. I don’t know the man’s name, but there was a slick, nasty-looking character who Leif would treat with... well, undue respect.”

“Did he ever drop by your apartment, this guy?”

“Not that I know of. But if Leif and I were at 21 or the Stork, this well-dressed creepy character might turn up in a booth with one or two flashy women. Leif would excuse himself, and go talk to him, just briefly. Like he was... paying his respects. Is that anything, Mike?”

“Are you doing anything tonight?”

My shift of gears threw her a little. “Not really. I’ve had a tough day. Among other things, I made arrangements to ship Leif’s body back to Hollywood. Let them bury the bum.”

That made me grin, but of course I have a sick sense of humor. “What would you say if I asked you to go out dancing with me?”

“Well... what?”

“Sounds a little inappropriate, or at least it might look that way. But I have a real good reason. I want to give you a chance to identify that ‘creepy character.’”

I filled her in and said I’d come by in a cab and pick her up in half an hour or so.

When I returned to the living room, Marcy was walking Shack out, her arm in his as it had been in mine earlier. “Thank you, Shack. You’re such a dear. Such a wonderful friend.”

His hangdog puss got longer. “Oh, Marcy. No guy wants to hear that. The friend bit.”

“Now, you know that’s how it has to be.”

He was stumbling out toward 2B, as if the few steps were a thousand miles, when she shut her door.

“You’re pretty rough on the kid,” I said, reaching for my hat and raincoat on the chair where she’d tossed them.

“Oh, Shack should know better. Are you leaving, Mike?”

“I am. Here’s my card. I’ve written my home phone on it, too. Anything occurs to you, any hour of the day or night, let me know.”

“Well, you’re welcome here any time, Mike.”

My God, what an invitation. A stunning little Love Child was ready to corrupt an old rake.

Just as I was going, I said, “What do you mean, Shack should know better?”

“Well, Mike,” she said, with a big beautiful smile. “I am a lesbian, after all.”