“Listen, kid, if this is a set-up… if you’re trying to lead me into a trap, I swear I will break you apart and nobody will ever be able to put the pieces together.”
Her eyes widened in fright and her own tiny fists rose to her face and she started to gasp, sucking in air, dread gripping her and starting its funhouse ride into hysteria.
“Kid… baby… I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”
She was shaking her head again. “I’m not lying, I swear I’m not lying, she’s in trouble, Mike, you’ve got to help her, we’ve got to help her.”
“Tell me, kid. Tell me!”
But all she could do was throw herself into my arms and I clutched her to me, only I was tight with rage, crazy with fear myself as I tried to console her, tried to keep everything I was feeling out of my voice as I said, “I need your help, Erin. Will you please help me?”
Her head was against my chest. She nodded. Swallowed twice and said, “Yes, yes… that’s why I’m here…”
Then she sucked in air, grabbed her stomach, and flew from my arms to run into the bathroom, and slammed the door. I got up and went over and put on the shoulder sling and checked the clip and stuffed the gun back into its nest. I heard her wretching in there. A flush. Water running. Then for a while nothing.
My God, was she killing herself? Jesus, had I scared her into…
But then she came quickly out, and she had fixed her eyes where she’d been crying. I hadn’t even noticed she’d hauled her little purse along, but now she was holding it up, saying, “I have keys to his place from when I stayed there.”
“He might have changed the locks.”
She shook her head. “No. I used the front door key today when I went over. He came to meet me there and was very upset. He said he was sorry for dumping me, and for hitting me, and that he wished he had never, ever let me go… that the Sterling woman was a bitch and betrayer and… and that he was going to get it out of her, get it all out of her, and then he was going to… going to…”
“Kill her.”
She swallowed and nodded. “I pretended to think he was doing the right thing, the only thing he could, and he said he didn’t want me seeing this, it wasn’t for… tender eyes… and he sent me away, and… and I came here to you, Mike. I called first, but there was no answer, and—”
“Never mind that. Will you come with me? Now?”
She looked at me aghast, like Lot’s wife taking it all in. “I would never go back inside there, I won’t! I don’t want to see it, any of it!”
I took her by the arms and held her, doing my best to keep it gentle. “Honey, I need the layout of that place. I’ve never been inside. I’m going to drive over there and you’re going to talk. You’re going to fill me in, and then you’ll just stay out in the car while I go in there and…”
Her eyes got as big as their almond settings would allow and the words rattled out of her like somebody falling down the stairs: “And rescue her. Get your girl out of there and leave, just get her and get away from here. Right? Right? And you won’t hurt him? Will you? You won’t hurt him, Mike?”
“I won’t hurt him,” I said.
And we went.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Only the moonlight-muted tones of the red-tiled roof of the pink stucco near-mansion could be seen rising over the black wrought-iron gate. Those gates were slightly ajar, thanks to Erin leaving them that way, anticipating a return visit with me in tow.
I left her sitting in the Ford just down the street, as nervous as a mother with a missing child. On the short ride here she had given me the layout of the house, which was fairly simple: a single floor with an attic but no basement, not in this high water table. The walls were thick, she said, and anyone within could make all kinds of “awful noises” and no one would hear.
The wild card in her rundown was Quinn’s two-man security staff—Harry and Joe, who by description just had to be the pair I tangled with at the Winter Harbor apartment where Velda had stayed till recently.
“When I left,” she’d told me in the car on the way here, “they were… helping Nolly.”
“Helping him how?”
A pink tongue flicked out nervously over thin red-rouged lips. “I only got a glimpse, through a half-open door. Mike, I don’t want to say. Don’t make me say. You promised you wouldn’t hurt Nolly, and if I tell you, you might…”
“Spill or I will hurt him.”
She swallowed. Looked at her lap. “Harry had some… some pliers and was threatening to do things… with them… to her. She already looked all… all beat up.”
Words seeped through my teeth: “Which one is Harry?”
“He’s got a neck brace on. Got hurt earlier this week somehow. Black hair, kind of… stupid-looking.”
The caveman.
“That leaves Joe,” I said. “What was he doing to her?”
“He had a… a lighted cigarette. She was on her back with her legs apart, tied by the ankles to the posts at the foot of the bed, her hands tied to the headboard, arms spread, too. Joe was… he was touching the cigarette to the insides of her thighs. Made a terrible sizzling sound but she didn’t scream or… or anything. She just sucked in breath. That’s what I saw him do. I don’t know what else he did.”
“Joe. Light blond hair? Pretty light blue eyes?”
“That’s him.”
The albino.
“You don’t mind,” I said, my jaw muscles working, “if I hurt Harry and Joe a little, do you?”
Her chin was firm as she looked out at light wee-hours traffic. “No, Mike. Not at all. Do what you want to those two. They’re creeps.”
Then she folded her arms to herself and shivered, though the night was not nearly cool enough for that.
“What was Nolly doing in that room, Erin, before he came out to talk to you?”
She shrugged. “Asking the questions, I guess… you know—supervising.” She shook her head, gave me an earnest look. “Mike, I didn’t really see much. Just enough to know I had to come find you and tell you, so you could stop it. If we’re in time.”
My head was throbbing in rhythm with the crazy music in my head that kept picking up tempo and spurring me on. No, I wouldn’t hurt Nolly. Hurt didn’t cover it.
“Mike… are you okay? You look… funny. Your eyes…”
“Don’t look at them.”
She clutched my right arm as I steered. “Mike! You have to get a hold of yourself. If you go in there like a wild man, you’ll get killed and so will your girl. You just take it easy, okay? Just go in with a gun and bring her out.”
I nodded. Managed to flick something like a tight smile at her.
Because she was right.
The white heat boiling my brain could make a fool out of me. I needed to go in cold and alert and ready. Getting even was secondary. Saving Velda was everything.
When we pulled over and parked down from Quinn’s, I touched her face and said, “Thanks, kid. I don’t know if I ever had better advice.”
“Does that mean you’ll take it?”
“No guarantees. Listen, the keys are in the dash. If I’m not out of there in fifteen minutes, or if you hear a lot of gunfire and I’m not out within a minute or so of that, you need to beat it out of here. Just scram and find a phone. Call the Miami Beach cops. Got that?”
She nodded. “You really won’t hurt him?”
“No,” I assured her.
That much I would do for her. Nolly Quinn deserved any agony I could lay on him, and eternity in Hell after that, but I would keep my promise and skip the fun stuff and just kill the bastard.
Now I was slipping inside the grounds through the slightly ajar gate with a revolver in hand, the long-barreled .38 I’d taken off the Cuban captain on the powerboat. The .45 was under my left arm as a back-up, but using a gun not traceable to me seemed prudent under these circumstances. Also, the .38 would make a crack in the night where the .45 would boom. The neighbors could only be expec
ted to sleep through so much. That six-foot hedge on either side would keep eyes out, but not sound.
The landscaped front yard gave way to where the brick driveway opened out into an area with a central lion-themed fountain that three cars were parked around. The black Caddie and the white Jag I knew to be Quinn’s, the former still with a mud-smeared license plate. The white-topped red Hudson Hornet would be bodyguard transportation. That the help was still here was a kind of relief—it meant they hadn’t finished with Velda.
Or anyway hadn’t disposed of the body yet.
But knowing Velda, it would take them a good long time to make her talk. With fists and lit cigarettes and pliers for openers, though, she would eventually talk. Everybody talks eventually, unless they die first.
And that was the heart of it. They weren’t trying to get where the loot was buried or where the atomic secrets were stashed or the names of her confederates. No, this was about making her admit she was a cop, that she’d gone undercover to get Quinn. After that they would want to know what information she’d already passed and to whom, but that was all frosting.
Once she told them she was a cop, she was dead. Not immediately. Not till the cake got frosted. But after that, she’d be as dead as it gets. A useless carcass to dump somewhere.
My gum-soles did themselves proud going silently across the brick to the looming house, its pinkness taking on a jaundiced cast due to sporadic yellow spots placed under the roof’s overhang. Not many lights were on in there, and the feel was decidedly after hours. At close to three a.m. it should be.
A short flight of wide steps took me up to the glass-and-wrought-iron front door. Erin’s key opened that and then I was in a landing-strip hallway of closets and shallow tables that led me to a big high-ceilinged front room. The decor was a bigger-budget version of the Winter Harbor pad, a white-walled world of cold wealth and pale marble floors with modern furnishings in yellows and golds. There was more framed abstract art, including what seemed to be a real Pollock this time, with a fireplace and several bookcases built into the walls. With just a handful of lights on in here, I felt like the late-night intruder I was.
With revolver in hand, I explored the house, quickly but carefully, since Harry or Joe or Nolly himself could pop up anywhere. I hit no switches, letting hallway lighting show me the way.
Every door seemed to open onto emptiness, with only two of any limited interest. One was a feminine bedroom with clothing of a smaller size than Velda’s—had this been Erin’s? The other was a TV room. Elsewhere Quinn had an elaborate entertainment center with a 24-inch television and fancy stereo set-up with a wall of LPs. But this modest space had a small portable TV, a squat refrigerator, and a card table with a game of solitaire going, scattered sports and girlie magazines, and overflowing ashtrays.
Here was where the bodyguards hung out, though only the memory of their cigarette smoke lingered.
In the master bedroom I found a round bed with black satin sheets, sleek ebony furnishings, and framed paintings that were not at all abstract—stylish nudes of slender nymph-like women and muscular men, explicit in their unashamed, unabashed naked sexuality, startling in their sybaritic effect.
Velda may not have slept with this creature, but that didn’t stop something terrible from crawling up my spine.
And yet the bedroom across the hall proved even more disturbing, though the furnishings and even wall art were nothing you wouldn’t see in a mid-range hotel. But what else I saw made my stomach clench and mouth go dry and the crazy music in my brain start up again, distant, but there, pianissimo wanting desperately to build.
The covers had been pulled off a double bed in what had to be Velda’s room—her things were in the closet, including those distinctive suitcases, and in and on the dresser. Only the bottom sheet remained, its cloth twisted as if itself in agony. Around where she had lain and forming a kind of irregular outline of her were spatters and splashes of blood, Pollock working in only white and red this time. At the bed posts were the lengths of rope that had held her, untied and hanging limp now.
At the rear of the house I entered an ultramodern white kitchen that seemed to gleam even in the dark, with glass doors onto the swimming pool area. Sounds came from out there. Somebody talking.
I moved to the glass and looked out onto the flagstone expanse with the big kidney-shaped pool, which was lighted underneath and bordered by glowing blooms of hidden lighting in palms along the high hedge. From above the tall gated wooden fence between the patio and the dock could be seen the sparkling geometric skyline of Miami across the bay.
She was naked and kneeling, down at the far end of the swimming pool, the deep end, right at the edge of the diving board. Even from here and in limited illumination you could see the horrible things they had done to her. Her beautiful body, the high thrust of the full breasts, the sharpness of her rib cage, the sudden curve into the narrowness of her waist and then sweeping back out again, the flesh of her thighs, that beautiful tanned flesh freshly bruised in random ways, with a pattern-less array of terrible reddish welts and sharp slashes and dotted cigarette burns. Her face battered, bruised, her eyes puffy, the loveliness fighting to come through, her chin high, her expression defiant. Her arms were drawn back, meaning her hands were tied behind her.
Nolly Quinn, in a cream-color untucked sport shirt and tan chinos, a .22 auto in his waistband, was standing just behind her, and bouncing on the board just a little, with a hunk of her hair in his hands, like she was a dog he was walking, grinning down at her, the sophisticated face turned savage, showing its real self.
Off to Quinn’s right and my left, smoking, observing, smiling, chuckling, stood his two bully boys, in Hawaiian-style sport shirts and baggy slacks and sandals. The caveman had a neck brace on, courtesy of yours truly. The albino at his side was grinning in delight, laughing and making wisecracks to his pal that I couldn’t quite make out.
Nobody heard me slide the glass door open.
Down at the diving board, Quinn was bending over her saying, as silky smooth as ever, words echoing off the water, “It’s nine feet deep, my love. Once you go in, it’s over. I’ve seen you swim, sweetheart mine, and it’s a beautiful sight. So sleek, so graceful. You’re really an athlete at heart. But I don’t think with your hands and ankles tied you’ll be so graceful. Or sleek. Now, to avoid that embarrassment, you need to talk to me. Just talk to me, baby.”
She spat two blood-flecked words and he yanked her head back by the hair. I could see the white of his eyes and his bared teeth.
“You stupid bitch. I know you were working for that son of a bitch Manley! Don’t bother telling me. I should have known sooner! But you got ratted out, baby, somebody squealed on you.”
So he did know she was working as a cop!
That meant her death warrant had already been served, that all of this slow misery would lead up to a quick kill. This process now was about information gathering. Well, that had slowed things down at least…
Still yanking her head back by a fistful of hair, Quinn snarled, “Who did you tell, you dumb tramp! What did you tell them?”
No one saw me slip out of the house. No one saw me at all till I was half-way around the pool on their right. And it was Nolly who glimpsed me first, his eyes going so wide, his eyebrows climbing so high, it made a cartoon of the handsome features.
“Hammer!” he yelped.
Velda smiled. It was bloody but at least she had her teeth. It was a smile that said somebody was in trouble and it wasn’t her any longer.
Harry and Joe whirled my way and they were clawing for the guns under their arms when I shot each of them in the head, dropping them to the patio floor, leaving behind little clouds of blood mist, without giving them time enough to wipe the surprise off their damn faces. I wished I could have made them suffer but knew I shouldn’t screw around, and now my revolver was trained in Nolly’s direction, up there behind Velda…
…only the bastard had dropped to his knees! He wa
sn’t begging for his life, like he should have been, he was putting his captive between him and me. He still had her by the hair, yanking back, pulling her head at a harsher angle, exposing her throat to the night. He’d pulled the automatic from his waistband with his free hand, and was pointing it around her at me. Using his left hand, meaning he wouldn’t be able to shoot worth crap with it, unless he had an ambidextrous surprise up his sleeve.
“Drop the gun, Hammer!”
I moved closer, keeping the revolver aimed right at him. If I could get close enough to make a fast move and get to the side of him, I’d have him. But for now Velda was between us. I was almost to the end of the pool, with maybe twelve feet still separating me from the two of them. Velda was a big enough girl that he could hide back there. If I could maneuver into position for a decent head shot, I would take it without a qualm, because that would cut off his motor skills. Would turn him off like a goddamn switch.
But all I could see was a slice of his face and the .22 in his fist and Velda blocking him from me, that prematurely triumphant smile gone from her lips.
“Drop it,” he said, a coolness about it now, the surprise of me showing up something he’d adjusted to, “or I’ll shove her in. Maybe you heard me tell her—it’s nine feet, and she’s bound by the hands and the ankles. She’s a good swimmer, Hammer, but that would be a real challenge, don’t you think?”
“I got a better idea,” I said, nothing threatening in my voice. “You drop the gun and give me the girl. I don’t need to shoot you.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Not at all. You see, Nolly, I exposed your silent partner to Bonetti and the boys tonight. Well, one of them.”
His smile disappeared. Blood drained from his face.
“You’re bluffing,” he said.
“No.”
I was edging forward. Step by step, just like the old burlesque sketch at the Five O’Clock Club. Inch by inch.
I said, “The whole Miami Mafia social club knows that you and Mandy Meyers have set up a Cuban drug racket in violation of their edict. Meyers is almost certainly dead by now. Probably floating by just beyond your fence.”
Kill Me, Darling Page 18