Murder Never Knocks

Chapter Fifteen

I figured my next move was to corner Joey Pep again, and tell him his high-priced hitman had knocked off an innocent girl last night. Make him see that his so-called Specialist had gone off the rails and needed stopping, right now. Maybe Pepitone would see the wisdom of that and lead me to the bastard. Or maybe I’d have to give Joey a taste of what his bouncers got.

So what if the Bonettis got pissed at me over it? I’d had mob trash pissed at me before. Sure, they knew where to find me. But I knew where to find them.

If memory served, the Peppermint Lounge opened at eleven a.m., typical for a Manhattan bar, but also to accommodate the tourist crowd who hadn’t heard the twist craze was over. Pepitone still had his office in the backroom, so from my desk phone I called over there and asked for him. He wasn’t in yet. Usually showed around one. You wanna leave a message? I said no thanks, and I didn’t leave a name, either.

I’d barely hung up when the phone rang. I answered and heard Pat’s voice, hushed yet anxious.

“Mike, can you get over here?”

There was nothing official in his tone.

“What is it now?” I asked. “Did that kid find somebody in a mug book?”

“Just get over here, Mike. Please.”

Please, yet!

“Okay,” I said, hung up, grabbed my hat and trenchcoat and headed out into an afternoon where the sky had deepened from gray to black, like God was in a bad mood. Maybe He was hungry, too, because it sure as hell sounded like His stomach was growling.

Pat’s office door was open. He was in his shirtsleeves and a loosened tie behind his desk, and he looked haggard. He waved me in and said, “Shut it.”

I did, then went over, tossed my hat on his desk, and slung myself into the chair opposite him. He already had coffee waiting. I sipped mine. Milk and sugar. Perfect.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”

“I’d like your help.”

“Any time, buddy.”

He sat forward, his voice soft yet with an underlying edge. “I need you to back me up on something. Something that’s a little... dicey. Something more along, you know — your lines.”

I was interested, but couldn’t resist needling him a little. “What happened to ‘by the book?’”

His smile was rumpled and maybe a shade embarrassed. “We’ll leave it open on my desk. Face down.”

I nodded. “So spill.”

His eyes narrowed. “We had that kid in here for an hour. Looking at mug books. He came up with nothing. I was grasping at straws, I admit. So I showed him a wire photo the LAPD sent me just two hours ago.”

“Why did the LAPD do that?”

He leaned back in his swivel chair, the gray-blue eyes troubled but steady. “You know, Mike, you’re not the only detective in this town.”

“Well, it’s a big town.” I was lighting up a Lucky. “Bound to be a few. Maybe even some on this department.”

“Generous of you to admit.”

I waved out the match. “Let me guess. You’ve been contacting big city police departments, chatting up friends working homicide, guys you met at police conventions maybe. And you ran the profile past them.”

Something flashed in his eyes. “What profile would that be?”

I blew a smoke ring, feeling cocky. “Guys who had small, seemingly legit businesses, like one-man insurance agencies or travel agent set-ups or maybe accountants, who got pulled in on suspicion of a killing, but walked. Guys whose businesses were legit but barely making it, and that just might be fronts for contract killers to hide behind between jobs. Guys who, finally, booked it out of town when the cops were getting on to them.”

He gave me half a smile and a whole laugh. “Okay, so I’m not the only detective in town, either. You’re right, Mike. I wanted to see who else our hitman’s hitman might have brought in to join his stable of hired guns.”

“And you found a possible. Or rather the LAPD did.”

He nodded emphatically. “But we may have caught a bigger fish than I figured.”

The wire photo he handed over to me showed, in typical front and side views, a blank-eyed, square-faced guy with short dark hair and regular features. Name: Dennis Clark, thirty-five, six one, two hundred pounds. He had the bland, clean-cut good looks of a Madison Avenue ad man. Native of Southern California.

“This goes back five years,” I said.

Pat nodded again. “The profile is the same, but Dennis Clark has been in Manhattan, running a small insurance agency, for just that long.”

“Not a recent import.”

“Not at all. And if he’s hiding, it’s in plain sight. Took me about three minutes to get his home address.”

I sat forward. “So maybe this is our man. The top of the food chain.”

An eyebrow went up. “I think he is. And there’s more than just theory behind that.”

I tossed him back the wire photo. “You mean, that kid Shack identified him?”

“Well... yes and no.”

“You might want to break that down.”

Pat sipped some coffee, shrugged. “It was ‘yes’ at first. Kid made the guy. He had to study it a while, and of course that wire photo like all wire photos is crappy quality. But then he started nodding and tapped it with his finger and said it was the man he saw go into the girl’s apartment. He was sure it was him.”

“So why aren’t you out there picking Dennis Clark up?”

His smile had a bitter twist. “Because when I told that kid that we’d be bringing Clark in for a show-up, he got nervous. Started asking questions, like, ‘Will he know that I identified him?’ And I had to tell him, yes, eventually, if this made it to trial, he would have to testify. He’d have to point Clark out in the courtroom as the man he saw go into Marcy Bloom’s last night. That is, if Clark indeed was who the kid saw. We hadn’t even had a show-up yet.”

I was ahead of him. “And that’s where the ‘no’ half of ‘yes and no’ comes in. The kid suddenly didn’t recognize the suspect. Got unsure of himself, then finally said, ‘I don’t think that’s the guy,’ or words to that effect. And hustled his skinny scared ass out of here.”

“Like they say in the Village,” Pat commented bitterly, “it’s a bummer.”

“It’s a bummer, all right. The kid was nuts about that girl, but it’s not hard to rationalize saving your own skin. Helping haul her killer to justice doesn’t bring the girl back.”

Pat pounded a fist on his desk. “If that hippie hadn’t retracted his ID, I’d be over at Clark’s apartment house right now, with men on the street and all over that building. And I’d be going in there heavy and taking him down. Personally.”

“Arresting him, you mean.”

Pat frowned at me. “If he cooperates. If he doesn’t... he goes down all the way. He goes down hard.”

“Now you’re talking.”

He sat forward, frustration tightening his face. “Only, Mike — I can’t do that. I don’t even have enough to bring the S.O.B. in for questioning. All I have is a wire photo from L.A. that might back up a theory I have that could just be a wild hair up my ass. I have a witness ID that’s been withdrawn, worthless. What if I go there, and bring Dennis Clark in, and I’m wrong? Well, I’m getting a little old to pound a beat on Staten Island, and too young for early retirement.”

My grin must have been horrible; I was glad I didn’t have to look at it. “Old buddy, you are screwed sideways. You really don’t have enough to bring him in. You don’t even have enough to talk to him. Anything that came of it would get tossed out by some holier-than-thou judge.”

“You’re wrong, Mike.”

“I am?”

“It would never make it past the D.A.” He leaned both elbows on his desk and looked right at me. “But what if I told you about all this? Off-duty. Over beers, maybe. Since we’re old friends and you’re involved in the case.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“And you tell me you’re going over there to shake the truth out of this new suspect. I of course would tell you not to, try to stop you, and finally insist if you’re determined to talk to Mr. Clark — as a part of your private investigation into the case — that I have to come along.”

I considered it, then said, “You might get in a little hot water over that. But not boiling.”

“What do you think, Mike?”

“I think... what are we waiting for?”

The somewhat pricey neighborhood in Upper Manhattan called Washington Heights was home to seemingly countless apartment buildings, Dennis Clark’s among them. The nine stories of rust-brick on the corner of West 187th Street and Cabrini bore a stark prewar modernity, though the inset twin front doors with their brass-trim and geometric designs, surrounded by panels of pink marble and two square windows above, formed the mouth of a startled Art-Deco face that gaped at your approach.

We took my car, since Pat was supposedly tagging along with me, though it was actually vice versa. It wouldn’t seem like he was trying to keep me out of trouble if he drove me here. We snagged a nice close parking place, which was a small miracle and a relief, as the sky looked as if it were made of billowing black smoke from a terrible fire, though rain was what it promised.

There was no doorman outside and no sign-in post inside, just a small lobby with a marble floor and more ’30s-modern trimmings. We walked to a bank of two elevators where Pat punched UP. In our trenchcoats and hats, we looked no more like cops than guys in ten-gallon numbers and chaps did cowboys. Behind us, through the closed doors, came a sudden machine-gun downpour.

“We just made it,” I said.

Pat barely noticed. He had the expression of a father driving his thirteen-year-old sheltered son to a dance with a fifteen-year-old girl wearing too much lipstick.

“I want him alive,” Pat said, staring me down. “Understand, Mike? Alive.”

“Yeah, yeah, breathing and everything. Christ, Pat, we don’t even know for sure he’s the guy and you’ve got me shooting him already.”

“Since when were you fussy?”

Despite this, on the self-service elevator, Pat got out his .38 service revolver and shoved it in his right raincoat pocket. I did the same with my .45.

Clark’s apartment was on the eighth floor, a few doors to the left of where the elevator deposited us. Pat took the lead. He was poised to knock when I whispered, “Take no chances, buddy.”

Pat nodded, and put his back to the wall nearest the knob and I did the same to the other, each of us with a hand in our right pockets gripping a gun. He reached his left fist over and knocked.

We heard movement within.

“Mr. Clark,” Pat said, loud but in an even, unthreatening manner. “NYPD Homicide. We’d like to speak to you, sir.”

A few seconds passed, and Pat seemed about to say something else when the flurry of bullets punched through the wood of the door, accompanied by mini-bursts of thunder that the sky might have envied.

Though our backs were to the wall, literally and maybe figuratively, we both ducked down anyway.

“Next time,” I said tightly, “skip the ‘Homicide.’”

“Point well-taken.”

We both heard something in there.

A window was being forced up and open, confirmed by the abrupt loudness of a raging storm that had been muffled till now.

“He’s going out,” I said to Pat, across the bullet-puckered doorway.

“Where the hell to? We’re eight stories up, man!”

“The fire escape.”

Pat frowned. “There’s no fire escape out that window. It’s around the corner on the other side of the building.”

No more time for talk. I didn’t think I’d be at any risk of more gunfire coming through that door. So I kicked it open in a splintering crunch, pushed the damaged result aside, and rushed in. With .45 in hand but shedding the trenchcoat and hat, I crossed the living room of a modern apartment toward a window that yawned wide and spewed rain to discourage me.

From the doorway, Pat yelled, “Mike, what the hell...?”

“Find something useful to do,” I told him.

“I’ll call for back-up,” he said, and was gone.

I peered out around the window frame and there, through the driving sheets, was a man in a dark, already dripping suit hugging the brick, his shoes angled sideways to take advantage of the six-inch ledge of cement. He faced away from me as he moved incrementally toward the corner of the building, around which the fire escape waited.

Just barely peeking out, my face streamed with the sky’s tears, my upper clothes already soaked. I leaned out to get a better look at him, specifically to see if he’d put his gun away.

He hadn’t.

It was in his right hand, and flat against the brick. In the limited visibility of the downpour, I could tell only that it was an automatic, a nine millimeter possibly or maybe a .45.

But the gun was, no question, slowing him down. It gave him only one hand to secure purchase on the brick, and he was inching his feet along. I’d be inching along too if I carried my .45 out there. I could shoot him from the window, but Pat wanted him alive, and I owed my friend that much. Anyway, if this was the Specialist, I didn’t want to give him the easy mercy of a .45 slug in the head. He had much worse coming.

So I stuffed the .45 in my waistband and slipped out of the already sopping suitcoat. Then I leaned out into the torrent, my fingers testing the slipperiness of the narrow ledge, and it seemed more wet than slick.

Right?

Then I was on the cement tightrope myself, pressed against that building like it was the most beautiful, desirable woman in creation, my fingers clutching where brick met mortar, my feet turned sideways like a figure in an Egyptian hieroglyphic.

Out here came a rush of sudden cold, and the slanting rain whipped my back with surprising power. I was drenched now. But with both hands free, I made quicker, surer progress than my quarry, though once I got overconfident and my foot slipped off into nothing at all and I froze against the beautiful woman and clung for my life.

The barrage of rain created a pounding din that seemed like the loudest thing on earth until thunder like terrible cannon fire made something insignificant out of it.

Yet still I edged, getting closer. Only he was getting ever nearer to that corner, and if he beat me there, and made it around, then when I did the same, who could say what I might be facing?

The sky was roaring with laughter now, raucous belly laughs, as one man pursued another at the rate of an inch for every step, a snail chasing a snail. And yet finally he made it to that corner, and as he slipped around he saw me for the first time, his eyes flashing at me before he disappeared.

What could I do but keep going?

I was passing windows on other apartments, but a man on a six-inch ledge can’t kick the glass in or even hurl himself through. The former might send him toppling backward, the latter would have him bouncing off, not through, the window, tumbling back into the abyss.

And the sky laughed deep.

Then I was there, at the corner myself. I stopped to catch my breath, but taking air in through my nose, not risking letting rain in through my mouth — a coughing fit right now could be fatal. I was a sodden excuse for a human, the moisture half-blinding me now, streaming down my face, weeping for me. But I’d reached my goal.

Rounding the corner was a trick in itself, but I didn’t make the turn completely, instead froze there hugging the central sharpness of brick.

He’d made it to the fire escape. He was on it. He was waiting. Even in the rain I could see that this man wore the face in the LAPD wire photo. This was almost certainly the Specialist. He had said he would take me on and beat me at my own game.

And he was about to.

Maybe madness had taken him, as I’d speculated, because he was laughing back at the sky, laughing at me, his demented eyes blinking away rain even as he brought the automatic up to pick me off my perch. My hand fumbled for the .45 in my waistband and I waited for the gunshot...

...and it came.

Like more thunder, but sharper, only I felt nothing — he’d missed! My eyes struggled open under their cargo of raindrops and saw him tottering at the edge of the fire escape. He hadn’t missed, someone else had fired, and the bullet caught him in the shoulder but the shock of it sent the automatic in now loose fingers dropping harmlessly into the maw of the storm.

Then he fell into it, too.

Screaming, but the gods laughing thunderously at him made it sound small even before it receded with him to the pavement where he splattered like a tomato flung at a wall.

Down on the street, a barely visible figure in a trenchcoat pointed up. Maybe a gun was in its hand. And I was pretty sure it was Pat. Then from behind me a voice called over the rain, “Get back here, mister! Careful! I’ll help you in...”

Somehow I managed, and a frumpy woman about forty, as plain as a paint can, helped me in, and I never saw a female who looked better.

I was sitting on the floor in a puddle, some of which I may have made myself, near the now-closed window, still breathing hard, when somebody knocked on the door. My hostess went and answered it and Pat came quickly in and right over to me.

He kneeled down, face taut with concern, hat shedding water. Put a hand on my shoulder.

“You okay, buddy?” he said.

“I thought you wanted him alive.”

He gave me what they call a rueful grin. “Yeah, well, priorities. Somebody’s ass needed saving.”

The woman came over and said her husband was about my size, and brought me fresh underwear and a suit they were planning to give to Goodwill. I accepted the offering. Frankly, the suit looked decent enough that I might keep it.

In a nice warm bathroom, I toweled off and got into the threads, then gave the gal a kiss on the cheek and went down the hall to see Pat, where he was in Dennis Clark’s apartment.

The place was very modern in a sterile kind of way, with not a picture on the wall or book on a shelf, though it had a nice twenty-four inch TV and an impressive sound system with a record collection running to Mingus and Davis. There were clothes, including some expensive conservative suits, and food in the fridge, import beer, deli cold cuts, milk and so on. But no bills or other correspondence, the stuff that lives are made of.

Pat did find two things of interest. One was a little black book, the kind a guy keeps the names and numbers of his favorite females in. Only this little black book had the names of men, and just a handful — a very specific handful.

“The three assassins,” Pat said, “who came after you. Names, phone numbers, addresses.”

“It’s impressive, watching your detecting skills at work.”

A few minutes later he came up with a bank book from under some clothes in a dresser drawer.

He thumbed through it, then whistled slow. “Dennis Clark has a hundred grand and change in savings, Mike.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t take it with you.”

Outside the storm was dissipating. The machine-gunning was tap-dancing now, and the view out the window was gray, not black. Distant sirens announced the cavalry coming, just as late as in the movies.

“Doesn’t it feel a little convenient, Pat? A little easy?”

He made a face. “It’s the guy, Mike. Don’t be a sore loser.”

“Sore loser, how?”

He grinned at me. “Because for once I beat you to it.”