The Body Lovers

Chapter 1

I heard the screams through the thin mist of night and kicked the car to a stop at the curb. It wasn't that screams were new to the city, but they were out of place in this part of New York that was being gutted to make room for a new skyline. There was nothing but almost totally disemboweled buildings and piles of rubble for three blocks, every scrap of value long since carted away and only the junk wanted by nobody left remaining.

And there was a quality to the screams that was out of place too. There was total hysteria that only complete terror can induce and it was made by a child.

I grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and climbed out, picked a path through the mounds of refuse and ran into the shadows, getting closer to frenzied shrieks, not knowing what to expect. Anything could have happened there. A kid playing in those decayed and ruptured ruins could be trapped without having to do more than nudge a board or jar an already weakened wall. Aside from the occasional street lamps, there wasn't a light for blocks, and even the traffic detoured the section that handled the heavy equipment of the demolition crews.

But there wasn't any accident. He was just sitting there, a kid about eight in baggy jeans and a sweater, holding two hands clawlike against his face while his body wracked with his screaming. I reached him, shook him to get his attention, but it didn't do any good. I had seen the signs before. The kid was hysterical and in a state of shock, his entire body rigid with fear, his eyes like two great white marbles rolling in hiss head.

Then I saw what he was screaming about.

They had dropped the body behind a pile of cement blocks from a partly shattered wall, pulling a broken section of sheetrock over it to hide it from casual view. But there's nothing casual about a little kid who liked to play in junk and found himself stumbling over the mutilated body of what had been a redheaded woman. At one time she would have been beautiful, but death had erased all that.

I bundled the kid in my arms and got him back to the car. Along the way the breath had run out of him and the screaming became muffled in long, hard sobs. His hands clutched my arms like small talons and very slowly the knowledge that he was safe came into his eyes.

There was no use trying to question him. At this stage he was too likely to be incoherent. I started the car, made a U-turn and headed back toward the small trailer the construction company used for a watchman's shack.

From outside I could hear a radio playing and I shoved the door open. A stocky, balding guy was bending over a coffeepot on the portable stove and turned around startled. "Hey..."

"You got a phone here?"

"Listen, mister..."

"Can it, buddy." I flipped my wallet out so he could see my New York State P.I. license and when he did he got a quick look at the .45 automatic in the shoulder sling. "You got trouble here. Where's the phone?"

He put the pot down shakily and pointed to a box built against the wall. "What's the beef? Look, if there's trouble..."

I waved him down and dialed Pat's office number downtown. When the desk sergeant answered I said, "This is Mike Hammer. Captain Chambers there?"

"Just a second, please."

Pat came on with, "Homicide, Captain Chambers."

"Mike, pal. I'm on the Leighton Construction site in the watchman's shack. You'd better get a crew and the M.E. down here in a hurry."

Almost seriously, Pat said, "Okay, who'd you kill now?"

"Quit being a comedian. There's a body all right. And get an ambulance here. I have a sick kid on my hands."

"Okay, you stay put. I'll get this put on the air and be there myself. Don't touch anything. Just let it be."

"Forget it. You tell the guys in the squad cars to look for my light. Somebody might still be there...and there may have been more than one kid involved. I'll leave this one with the watchman. Maybe a doctor can get something out of him."

I hung up, went outside and brought the kid in and put him down on the cot the watchman used. The guy wanted to know what it was all about, but I cut him off, covered the kid up and told him to stay there until the police arrived. He didn't like it, but there wasn't anything else he could do. Then I got back in the car, drove up the road to where I had found the kid, parked up on the remains of the sidewalk so my headlights could probe the darkness of the buildings and hopped out.

Rather than silhouette myself against their glare, I skirted the beams, picking my way with the flash, the .45 in my hand on full cock. It was doubtful that anybody would stay around a body he had disposed of, but I didn't want to take the chance.

When I reached the sheetrock I stood still and listened. Across town the thin wail of sirens reached me, coming closer each second. But from the interior of the buildings there was nothing. Even a rat crossing the loose litter in there would have made a sound, but the silence had an eerie, dead essence to it.

I pointed the flash down and looked at the body beneath the hunk of sheetrock. She had been in her late twenties, but now time had ended for her. She lay there on her back, naked except for the remnants of a brilliant green negligee that was still belted around her waist. Her breasts were poised in some weird, rigid defiance, her long tapered legs coiled serpentine-like in the throes of death.

She hadn't died easily. The stark horror etched into the tight lines of her face showed that. Half-opened eyes had looked into some nameless terror before sight left them and her mouth was still frozen in a silent scream of pain.

I didn't have to move the body to know how it had happened. The snake-tail red welts that curled up around her rib cage and overlapped all the way down her thighs showed that. Dried clots of blood mottled the nylon of her negligee, stiffening it to boardlike hardness, some of it making the edges of her long hair like an old paintbrush. Tendrils of her life streaked her calves and the back of her neck, but the entire naked front of her was oddly untouched.

Somebody had strung her up and whipped her to death.

The flat of my hand touched the cold flesh of her stomach. Whoever it was had had plenty of time to get away. She had been there a good twenty-four hours.

Behind me the sirens screamed to a stop and the bright fingers of their spotlights swung in arcs, focused on me and held there. A voice yelled for me to stand still and a half-dozen shadowed figures began clambering over the rubble in my direction.

Pat was the second one to reach me and he told the uniformed cop holding his service .38 on me to put it away. Then I stepped back and watched the mopup operation go into action.

The Medical Examiner had come and gone, the morgue attendants had carted the body away to the autopsy room, the reporters and photogs had left the area strewn with burned-out flash bulbs that winked like dead eyes in the floodlights the search team had set up and the kid had been taken to the hospital. Pat finished his instructions and nodded for me to follow him back to the car.

Not too far away was an all-night diner and we picked out an empty booth in the back corner and ordered coffee. Then Pat said, "Okay, Mike, let's have it."

"I gave it to you."

"Friend, I don't like that coincidence angle. I've found you on top of kills before."

I shrugged and took a sip of the coffee. "I'm not protecting a client, kid. Since noon I was out checking an accident report for Krauss-Tillman on the new Capeheart Building. That's five blocks north of the spot where I found the kid."

"I know where it is."

"So check on me."

"Hell, if I didn't know better, I would. Just don't make this any of your business."

"Why should I?"

"Because you have a big nose. That's what you told me at dinner last night. I'll be damn glad when you marry Velda and she nails your shoes down."

"Thanks a bunch," I grinned at him.

He nodded, picked up his coffee and tasted it, not answering.

Pat and I had been friends too long. I could read him too well. He could say as much without saying a word as he could in a conversation. The years since we first met had hardly left a trace on him; he still resembled a trim business executive more than he did a cop...until you got to his eyes. Then you saw that strange quality that was a part of all professional cops, that of having seen trouble and violence so long, fought it step for step, that their expression was like seeing instant history, past, present and future.

I said, "What's on your mind, Pat?"

And he knew me too. I was the same as he was. Our fields were different, but allied nevertheless. We had been together on too many different occasions and we had stood over too many dead bodies together for him not to get my implication.

"It was that thing she wore," he told me.

"Oh?"

"Remember that blonde we fished out of the river last month...a schoolteacher from Nebraska?"

"Vaguely. It was in the papers. What about her?"

"She wore a gimmicky robe just like that one, only it was black."

I waited and he looked at me across the coffeecups. "It's on the books tentatively as a suicide, but our current M.E. has a strange hobby, the study of chemically induced death. He thinks she was poisoned."

"He thinks? Didn't he perform an autopsy?"

"Certainly, but she had been in the water a week and there was no positive trace of what he thought could have caused it."

"Then what shook him?"

"A peculiarity in the gum structure common to death from that cause. He couldn't pin it down because of time submerged in water polluted from a chemical treatment unit that was located nearby. He wanted to do some exhaustive tests, but the possibility was so remote and the evidence so inconclusive that we had to release the body to the girl's parents, who later had it cremated."

"Something else is bugging you," I reminded him.

He had another pull at the coffee and set the cup down. "If the M.E. was right, there's another factor involved. The poison he suggested was a slow-acting one that brought death about very gradually and very painfully. It is used by certain savage tribes in South America as a punishment to those members who have committed what they consider to be a serious offense against their taboos."

"Torture?"

"Exactly." He hesitated a second, then added, "I got a funny feeling about this. I don't like your being involved."

"Come on, Pat, where the hell would I come in? I dumped it in your lap and that's as far as I go."

"Good. Keep it like that. You know how the papers handle anything you're involved in. It's a field day for them. You always did make good copy."

"You worrying about the new administration."

"Brother!" Pat exploded. "The way our hands are tied between politics and the sudden leniency of the courts it's like trying to walk through a mine field without a detector."

I threw a buck down on the table and reached for my hat. "Don't worry about me," I said. "Let me know how it turns out."

Pat nodded and said, "Sure." But there wasn't any conviction in his voice at all.

The morning was colored a New York gray, damp with river fog that held in suspension the powdered grime and acid grit the city seemed to exhale with its breathing process. It came from deep inside as its belly rumbled with early life, and from the open wounds on its surface where antlike people rebuilt its surface. Everyone seemed oblivious to the noise, never distinguishing between the pain sounds and the pleasure sounds. They simply followed a pattern, their own feet wearing ruts that grew deeper and deeper until there was no way they could get out of the trap they had laid for themselves. Sometimes I wondered just who was the master and who was the parasite. From the window of the office I looked down and all I could see was a sleeping animal covered with ticks he could ignore until one bit too deep, then he would awaken to scratch.

Behind me the door opened and the faint, tingling scent of Black Satin idled past on the draft from the hall. I turned around and said, "Hi, kitten."

Velda gave me that intimate wink that meant nothing had changed and dropped the mail on the desk. She was always a surprise to me. My big girl. My big, beautiful, luscious doll. Crazy titian hair that rolled in a pageboy and styles be damned. Clothes couldn't hide her because she was too much woman, wide shouldered and breasted firm and high, hollow and muscular in the stomach and flanked with beautiful dancer's legs that seemed to move to unheard music. She was deadly, too. The tailored suit she wore under the coat hid a hammerless Browning and her wallet had a ticket from the same agency that issued mine.

Pretty, I thought, and I was such a damn slob. We never should have let it go this long. I had tasted her before, felt that wild mouth on my own and fallen into the deep brown of her eyes.

Crazy world, but she was ready to play the game out as long as I had to.

"See the papers?" she asked me.

"Not yet."

"You did real well. I can't leave you alone for a minute, can I?"

I picked up the tabloid and shook it out. I was there, all right. Page one. The department had held back the details, but it was a big spread anyway. The inside story gave the account of what had happened in general, me hearing the kid and finding the body, but no mention was made of the way the girl had died. Most of the yam concerned the kid who had been playing on the site and accidentally came across the corpse when he lifted the sheetrock.

As yet no identification had been made of the woman and no witnesses to the disposal of her body had been located, but my accidentally stumbling on the scene was played up and some of my history rehashed for the public benefit. The writer must have been somebody I bucked once, because the intimation was that it involved me personally. Coincidence was something not acceptable to him. At least, not with my background.

I tossed the paper down and pulled a chair up with my foot. "Here we go again."

Velda shrugged off her coat and hung it up. I recited the incident all over again and let her digest it. When I finished she said, "Maybe it'll be good for business."

"Nuts."

"Then stop worrying about it."

"I'm not."

She turned and smiled, the even white edges of her teeth showing beneath that full, rich mouth. "No?"

"Come on, sugar."

"Get it out of your system. At least call Pat and find out what it's about."

"Dames," I said, and picked up the phone.

His hello was cool and he didn't repeat my name, so I knew he had company in the office. He said, "Just a minute," and I heard him get up, walk to the filing cabinet and slide a drawer open.

"What is it, Mike?"

"Just my curiosity. You get anything on that kill?"

"No I.D. yet. We're still checking the prints."

"Any dental work?"

"Hell, she didn't even have a filling in her mouth. She looked like a showgirl type so she might have a police registration someplace. You talk to any reporters yet?"

"I've been ducking them, They'll probably dig me out here, but there's nothing I can tell them you don't know. What's the matter, you don't sound happy."

"Mitch Temple from The News spotted the similarity in those flimsy robes that were on the bodies. He got lucky in checking out the labels and beat us to the punch. They were purchased in different spots--those shops that specialize in erotic clothes for dames. No tieup, but enough to hang a story on."

"So what can he say?"

"Enough to stir up some of these sex-happy nuts we have running loose around here. You know what happens when that kind of stuff hits the papers."

"Anything I can do?"

"Yeah...if you know Mitch well enough, tell him to lay off."

I grinned into the phone. "Well now, this can be a fun afternoon."

Pat grunted and said, "I suggested you speak to him, buddy."

"Sure, buddy. The point is loud and clear. When do you want my official statement?"

"Right now if you can get the lead out."

When I hung up I gave Velda the rundown and reached for my hat. She gave me that funny quizzical look and said, "Mike..."

"Yeah?"

"Did Pat notice the color relationship of those negligees?"

"Like what?"

"Black on a blonde and green on a redhead."

"He didn't mention it."

"They aren't exactly conservative. They're show-off things to stimulate the male."

"Pat thinks the last one was a showgirl."

"The other was a schoolteacher though."

"You're thinking funny thoughts, girl," I said.

"Maybe you ought to think about it too," she told me.