Murder Never Knocks

Chapter Thirteen

Not so long ago, when you got within a few blocks of the place, a riot might have been going on, judging by the backed-up traffic, night-piercing floodlights and crowd noise spilling down the skyscraper canyon. You’d have to hoof it the rest of the way because even if your car or cab got through, a police barricade would be waiting, and mounted cops would be herding an excited throng of kids who looked like refugees from American Bandstand mixed with swells in gowns and tuxes, swarming the sidewalk all the way to Broadway at least. Only a few limos conveying celebrities to the hottest night spot in town got squeezed through the sawhorses, because a whisper of fame and money could out-yell any crowd.

But four years later, on a week night, the Peppermint Lounge on West Forty-fifth didn’t even have a doorman when the cab dropped Gwen and me off. A few patrons, couples mostly, were coming in and out, in no hurry, and lackluster rock ’n’ roll bled out, blaring when a door opened, muffling when it closed.

“My,” Gwen said, on my arm. “What a difference from the last time I was here!”

Her blonde hair ponytailed back, she wore a white mini-dress, matching go-go boots, and a knee-length camel coat with a white mink collar. I let my porkpie hat and trenchcoat make my fashion statement.

I said, “When was that?”

“Oh, ’61, ’62.”

Now the place was a shadow of its former faddish self. The candy-striped canopy drooped under red letters spelling out the club’s name on a cracked white facade. A window display of photos of yesterday’s celebrities reminded today’s visitors that the joint was “World Famous” — and of course when you have to post reminders, you aren’t world famous any more.

We checked our coats and moved through the bar into the shabby L-shaped club, met by a short, hawk-faced maître d’, who seemed depressed he wasn’t getting the big tips any more. He showed us to a table up front in the sparsely lighted, low-ceilinged, under-populated showroom, though mirrors surrounding the elevated dance floor were doing their best to make it seem bigger. A four-piece combo on stage was dragging its ass through “The Peppermint Twist.” Only half a dozen dancers were out there, college kids doing the Watusi and adult tourists feeling obligated to do the dance the house helped popularize.

In their white tops and red ski pants, all the waitresses were cute, since they doubled as on-stage dancers, and our redheaded one was no exception. She had to work at being bubbly, though. She wouldn’t make enough tips tonight to cover carfare.

Looking around at the half-filled place, Gwen said, “The last time I was here, you know who was on that dance floor? Greta Garbo!”

“She should have come tonight,” I said, “if she wanted to be alone.”

“It does seem more a museum exhibit than a nightclub,” she said, with something of a shudder. Then she beamed at me, clutched my hand. “Mike, it was nice to hear from you. As you can imagine, it’s been a real drag since, well, since that son-of-a-bitch fiancé of mine got himself killed.”

Appeared she was doing well getting over Borensen’s passing. Not all mourners could carry off white like she did.

“You may not give a damn who killed Leif,” I said. “I mean, after all — somebody did you a kind of favor. But keep in mind — the same somebody killed your father.”

“Leif killed my father.”

“Had him killed.” I squeezed her hand. “I asked you out tonight, honey, not to cheer you up but to see if you can identify that creep you saw your late unlamented Leif sucking up to.”

“The creep’s the one who...?”

“No. But he can lead me to the assassin. If this place were busier, it wouldn’t be so tricky. But when our drinks come, take a sip and glance around like you’re taking in the whole place... but glom the guy sitting in back at a table in the corner, on your side.”

“It’s awfully dark, Mike.”

The ceiling spotlights aimed at the stage were about it for illumination.

“I know,” I said, “but do your best. Tell me if there’s at least a possibility it’s the creep in question.”

The waitress brought my Four Roses and ginger, and Gwen’s peppermint schnapps. When I handed the redhead a twenty and said keep the change, I made a friend for life, or at least the rest of the evening. Meanwhile, Gwen sipped the sweet liqueur and glanced casually around.

She didn’t say anything till the band was between numbers. With a sweet feminine smile that might have accompanied almost anything, she leaned in to say something that it didn’t.

“Mike, that’s definitely the scumball whose ass Leif used to kiss.”

I sipped my highball and smiled back at her. “I’m going to go back there and just say hello. Listen, if things should get lively, just sit tight. Like the man said, I will return... unless I get killed or something.”

Her facial expression stayed casual and even amused, but her hand gripping my sleeve wasn’t. “Mike, you’re scaring me.”

“Not a bad thing to be, considering.”

Because this was a no-cover-charge joint, the path to the bar was kept clear. When I was almost there, I veered off the central aisle and wove through the tight-packed but mostly empty tables and chairs, coming to a stop at the table for four where one man sat. Where he always sat.

Small but compactly muscular, Joey Pepitone wore a dark gray sharkskin suit with white silk shirt and black silk tie. Diamonds winked off tie-pin and cufflinks, and gold rings winked back from slender fingers that had never seen a real day’s work. He was a slimily handsome hoodlum whose most distinctive features were his sleepy eyes, constant faint sneer, heavy dark eyebrows and prematurely gray hair. He’d be a living, breathing cliché, if he and his ilk weren’t where the cliché came from.

“Mike Hammer,” he said looking up at me. His voice was a smooth tenor. “I never took you for a rock ’n’ roll fan.”

I pulled out a chair and sat across from him, leaning back with my arms folded. “Nah, I’m more a classical guy. Give me the old masters. And I don’t mean Joey Dee and the Starliters.”

He smiled, just a little. He had an iceless tumbler of dark liquid in front of him and a cigarette going, waiting in an ashtray for his attention.

“Pretty girl you got with you tonight,” he said off-handedly, nodding toward Gwen at our table up front. He had a decent look at her in profile, since her chair was angled toward the stage.

“Would you believe it? She’s grieving over her fiancé’s death. Kind of an almost widow.”

He pretended that didn’t mean anything to him. “Well, I hope she’s wearing black undies. Otherwise, she seems a little disrespectful.”

I let that pass. “Business always this shitty, Joe? Nothing like being yesterday’s big thing, huh?”

“We do all right on the weekends,” he said. “And the tourists keep us going in between.”

The success of the Peppermint Lounge had been a fluke. It had been a gay bar Joey Pep took over from a pal of his who had to lam it out of town. Once he took over the joint, Joey worked out of the back room, where he gave the Bonetti family’s blessing (for a piece of the action) to various illegal activities — loan-sharking, fencing, bookmaking.

Then the hot band he hired, just for show, started pulling in the kids, and the Twist craze took off, and suddenly a mob front was a legitimate goldmine. But right now, that goldmine seemed tapped out.

“Did you come here to depress me, Hammer, or do you just like to watch young stuff shake it on a dance floor?”

I grinned at him. “I can do both at the same time, Joey. I can include chewing bubble gum if you like.”

He smiled back, but of course the sneer was in it. “Well, thanks for stopping by, Hammer. Always good to renew an acquaintance. You need a cab? I’ll have one called for you.”

“Joey, I just got here. I’m trying to show the little lady a good time.”

“Is that what you’re doing.” He picked up the cigarette, drew in smoke, then sent it my way. “Blow, why don’t you? You’re very old news.”

I looked around us. “Then I’d seem to be in the right place. Why don’t we keep it friendly, Joey? I just stopped by to see how you’re doing, after your tragic loss.”

“What tragic loss would that be?”

I nodded toward Gwen, sipping her schnapps. “The loss of a longtime, valued business associate.”

“Maybe you know what you’re talking about, Hammer, but I don’t.”

I uncrossed my arms and met his sneer with my own. “Don’t be coy, Joey — Leif Borensen goes way back with the Bonettis, and I hear you were his contact man. He was a kind of one-man Peppermint Lounge himself, wasn’t he? A guy who could provide a front and be a cash laundry when needed, and other times a cash cow, pulling down some real Hollywood bucks.”

He looked past me and nodded. I glanced back and saw two big men in skinny ties coming my way. Their dark suits looked sewn on. But their bulges seemed to be muscle and some occasional fat, so at least they weren’t packing.

“Lenny, Turk,” he said to them.

One was on either side of me. They were tall and they were wide, and the fists hanging at their side were like hams.

Pepitone looked up and gave them the sneer-smile. “You remember Mike Hammer, don’t you, fellas? He used to be a big deal, a long, long time ago.” He lowered his eyes to meet mine and gave me the same nasty smile. “Lenny and Turk here, they were big deals, too, not so long ago. Pro wrestlers. All my bouncers are ex-wrestlers, Hammer. One look at them and most smart-asses piss themselves.”

“I don’t have to go,” I said.

“Oh yes you do... Put Mr. Hammer in a cab.”

A big hand latched onto my left elbow, and another one latched onto my right.

“Don’t worry about Miss Foster,” Pepitone said as I was hauled up and out of the chair. “I’ll see she gets home safely.”

Right now she was on the dance floor with a college kid, doing the frug. She didn’t notice the bum’s rush I was getting, and that was all right. I wanted her kept out of it.

The boys lifted me up and walked me, if walked is the right word when your feet aren’t touching the ground, through the tables and chairs and out into the bar and through the front door, where we paused under the canopy. Turk, shaved bald with dark eyebrows on a shelf of forehead, a handlebar mustache over thick lips, slipped behind me, took both my arms and yanked my elbows behind my back, making the upper half of me lean forward, while Beatle-haired Lenny, with beady black eyes crowding what must once have been a nose, lumbered to the curb to flag a cab that was a good half-block down.

Lenny was doing that when I rammed my head up under Turk’s chin and as his neck snapped back and his grip loosened on my arms, I pulled away and swung around behind him and kicked him with the flat of a gum-soled foot behind the knee, one of the few places he wasn’t muscle-bound. Turk went down on the other knee, like he was waiting for a king to knight him, but I crowned him instead, with two fists coming down like sledges on the back of his bald skull. He belly-flopped onto the cement, by which time Lenny, wide-eyed, wild-eyed, was charging at me like a bull. When he was almost on me, I swung my leg around and let his ugly face taste the gum sole. He staggered back, spitting teeth like bloody Chiclets, and then I shoved my left forearm into what little neck he had and he started coughing and gargling the foamy blood in his mouth. To one side, Turk was getting up, and I grabbed onto him by the tie and a fistful of too-tight suit and flung him into Lenny, sending them both down in a pile. I let them wrestle for a few seconds, catching my breath, then went over and started kicking the shit out of them. Muscles or not, they had ribs and they hadn’t been in the ring for a while, so their stomachs had some flab going, and I kicked them there, too, just till they puked all over each other. Somehow they managed to get to their feet, so I got out the .45 and let them see where bullets blossom. That froze them, and I slapped them with the side of the barrel, in one swift hard continuous move, like Moe slapping Larry and Curly in one hilarious swing, only seeing those guys tumble to the cement unconscious was a hell of a lot funnier.

The cab had pulled up by now, and the cabbie was looking out at the two fallen, bleeding, vomit-spattered human wrecks like he was having an hallucination. He was a mick who’d been around, probably in his fifties, and looked like he was about to take off, when I waved at him with the .45, not meaning to threaten him exactly. The gun just happened to be there.

“Give me a hand with these clowns,” I said.

Leaving the cab running, he came around and helped me lug the two bouncers, one at a time, into his backseat. It was like hauling beef carcasses at a slaughter house. They filled that back nicely, sprawled on top of each other like teenagers at Lover’s Lane.

The cabbie was breathing hard. “God, they smell.”

“Well, they’re covered in puke.”

“What do you want me to do with them?”

I got in my pocket and fished out some dough. “What do you think? Take ’em to the nearest emergency room.”

He had the expression of a guy who couldn’t decide whether to shit or go blind, but when I gave him the fifty, he saw that just fine.

As he rolled off, I smoothed myself out — neither one of the slobs had laid a glove on me — and then I went back inside the lounge and wove through the tables and chairs over to Joey Pep’s table. He was goggling at me with his tongue showing, like I was a naked babe in a window.

I sat down. “Where were we?”

A guy like Joey Pep has seen a lot of things. Such people don’t impress easily at all. But right now he seemed to be.

“Damnit, Hammer — where are Turk and Lenny?”

“On their way to the hospital. That cab came in handy.”

He didn’t know what to say. His hands were shaking and the cigarette had fallen out of his mouth onto the floor.

I patted his shoulder and grinned in his face. “Joey, ease up. Don’t you know those wrestlers need a script to pull anything off? Me, I like to improvise.”

“What... what kind of shape are they in?”

“Serious but stable, I’d say.” I shifted in my chair. “Joey, here’s the thing. Don’t go hiring ex-wrestlers. Get guys who are wrestling now, and haven’t gone to fat yet.”

The redheaded waitress came over to see if we needed anything. I asked for another Four Roses and ginger, and Pepitone another bourbon.

“So, anyway, Leif Borensen,” I said, sitting back.

He was lighting up a cigarette, hands steadier but not entirely recovered. “Yeah, he was ours, for a long time. What about it?”

“Had Leif broken loose from you boys, to pursue his Broadway producer ambition? Was he going straight, I mean?”

The little mobster shook his head, sighing smoke. “No, that was strictly an ego deal. But he was staying in the movie business, maybe expanding if he got a Broadway hit he could get a film out of. Come on, Hammer, you know we don’t let people out till they hit retirement age.”

Retirement age tended to be however old you were when you wound up in the trunk of a stolen car with your throat slashed and your nuts in your mouth. Gold watch not included.

I said, “So Borensen was still your guy?”

“Still our guy.”

“Which is why he came to you, a few months ago, to get put in touch with a professional who could remove a problem he had. A problem called Martin Foster. His prospective father-in-law, no less.”

Pepitone took smoke in and let it out. Quietly he said, “When you’re in business with somebody, you do them favors. We had nothing against Foster and had nothing to do with his removal, either. Sometimes these business associates ask for a... referral. You know, like a doctor.”

“And Borensen wanted a specialist.”

He nodded, once. “He wanted a specialist.”

“This is somebody you’ve used.”

“I don’t see that that’s pertinent to your line of inquiry.”

“Maybe not.”

The redhead brought our drinks. I sipped mine. Pepitone sipped his.

I asked, “If Borensen had access to a ‘specialist,’ why did he pull that hit-and-run kill himself?”

He laughed and smoke came out of his nose, like a dragon. “For a stupid reason. A very stupid damn reason.”

“Which was?”

He sighed. No smoke this time. “The specialist I refer to is very expensive. You don’t go to a specialist for just any operation, right? When it’s something really serious, you go to the best. And the best is who I sent Borensen to. And that was pricey.”

“Twenty-five grand.”

That I knew this surprised him, and his nostrils flared, like a horse rearing. “You do get around, Hammer. You’ve always had a goddamn nose. Yes. You have the figure exactly right.”

I sat forward. “Are you saying Borensen ran down Dick Blazen himself because he was too cheap to have it done?”

He gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “Draw your own conclusions. Certainly he could have afforded another twenty-five. But some of the richest people on the planet are the tightest damn wads around. After the fact, I told him so. Said when you’re dealing in matters like this, you can’t treat it like one of your goddamn B-movies where you pinch every goddamn penny.” He shrugged. “Of course, our friend learned his lesson, when he came to the rather obvious conclusion that running some prick down can leave witnesses.”

“You mean, when he decided to have me killed, he gave up do-it-yourself, and went back to the specialist, and paid the freight.”

He gave me a slow-motion shrug. “I wouldn’t know, Hammer. I wasn’t part of it. I just made the original referral.”

I grinned at him. “You must be wishing you hadn’t, about now. Because your specialist is getting way out of hand, Joey. He killed Borensen and — what you may not know since it was withheld from the papers — he staged it as a suicide that exactly mirrored the Foster one, right down to the specific type of rod.”

“What? Why the hell would he do that?”

“Because your specialist has a screw loose. He wanted to tell me and the cops to go screw ourselves. He wanted to have a big old belly laugh on us.”

He reached for the glass of bourbon and finished it.

Then he said: “To be honest with you, Hammer... we decided to drop our... specialist... when we saw that he was going after you, in such a reckless, foolhardy manner. Sending second-raters to take you on, instead of tending to business himself. No, we’re done with him.”

“Would you like to know why he did that?”

“Why, do you?”

“Oh yeah.”

I told the Bonetti capo about the late-night phone call, and the killer’s desire to challenge me, to take me on. To see which of us was the real killer among killers.

“He’s gone off the deep end,” Pepitone said, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch is screwier than an outhouse rat.”

“Doesn’t that worry you, Joey? This loose cannon knows where the bodies are buried, because he buried them... for you.”

Pepitone waved that off with a gold-ring-laden hand. “Oh, he won’t talk. That’s not a problem. Anyway, he’ll be out of the picture soon.”

“Because you’re removing his ass from Planet Earth?”

His smile was sly. “No. Something’s doing it for us.”

Not somebody — something.

I lighted up a smoke and smiled around it, as I got it going. “You wouldn’t be referring to Phasger’s Syndrome, would you?”

He grunted a laugh. “Damnit, Hammer. You have a nose. You do have a nose. Where... how... did you...? Hell with it. I don’t care. As I get it, the specialist’s maybe two weeks away from that disease kicking in and blotting him out, nice and slow. He thinks he’s a killer? That shit has it all over him.”

“He wants to shoot it out with me first.”

“Some advice, Hammer? Don’t do it. Don’t go looking for him. If you kill him, you’ll be doing him a favor. Wouldn’t you rather have the bastard suffer? I would.”

“So if I asked you for his name, or his address, you wouldn’t give it?”

“You’d have to haul me off and beat it out of me. And you could do that. We both know you could. But then you’d have a real problem, bigger than this asshole. You’d have to take on the Bonetti family, all their soldiers, all their guns. Is it worth it, just to have the pleasure of shooting this killer in the guts? You need to weigh the thing in your mind, Hammer. A sadistic prick like you should want to let that foul disease have him.”

He had a point.

“Or maybe he’ll track you down,” he said with a shrug. “If so, maybe you’ll kill his ass.”

“Or he’ll kill mine.”

He sneer-grinned, blew out smoke. “Either way, it’s a winner from where I’m sitting... Stay as long as you like, Hammer. Run a tab on the house. Take that pretty girl out on the dance floor. I’ll have those long-haired dipshits play a slow tune, so an old warrior like you can keep up.”