I wondered how much crow I’d have to eat for them to let me stagger out of there with all my teeth.
My mind ran on Andy Duffy. Had he been having any better luck than me? Had he gotten those photos I asked him to, snooping around on his own? He’d been in the paparazzi game 40 years, so his snooping skills were on point. I’d worked with him before, quite a few times. He always got something from a sensational point of view that really shone light on the assignment we were working on. He had a good work ethic—get out, get dirty, get his hands in where they shouldn’t be, get his lens right up close. And get the photo he’d been sent to get.
His photo on the big Madonna story I’d done had been incredible, unprecedented. Nobody had gotten anything that juicy before, not without her permission. And decades before I’d even gotten into the game, he’d made his name with a single shot of Diana, wow; let’s just say the royals paid enough to cover that photo up.
But the phone in my pocket had been silent all night. I knew he wouldn’t have ditched me in the casino. He wasn’t that kind of asshole. So, where was he?
We crossed the lobby. My escorts still danced at my sides. This bullshit was getting on my nerves. “Where’re we going, Pavel?”
“You know exactly where, Mr. Hammer. Every establishment like this has a place we take people who cheat—remind them of the rules, remind them of the etiquette. If there isn’t any etiquette, if the place gets overrun with cheaters, then the Admiral Casino ceases to exist. You need to learn about good manners. How to conduct yourself amongst decent people.”
The absurdity of that grandiose speech, so solemnly delivered, made me laugh. Then some deeply buried warrior’s instinct made the laugh dry up in my throat.
I looked up at the blackness of the night through the glass skylight. The heavens above us were still and silent, pierced only occasionally by the flash of a glittering marquee from a neighboring establishment. I glanced down at the huge fountain. Bubbling gold water resounded in my ears, a soft splashing, and light flickered through the droplets as they rose from the pool and splashed down again.
There was a queasiness in my gut that I couldn’t put down to my liquid diet. Something . . . something wasn’t right. But what?
The crash from above made everyone jump. My sluggish pulse tripped into double time. Suddenly, it wasn’t just droplets of water sparkling in the light. Shards of glass were raining down, tinkling on the ground around my feet, spraying my head. I looked up instinctively, then realized that I’d get splinters in my eyes. I shielded them with my hands, just as something thumped to the ground in front of me with a sickening crunch.
Blood spattered and spread out from the source of the thump, a body, its head smushed by the impact, the face a bloody pulp. Like an over-ripe pumpkin launched by a catapult. Its shoulders were twisted back at an unusual angle, legs folded in underneath. The only distinguishing feature was the camera, a Minolta, straps wound taut around his neck—Andy Duffy’s camera. Holy shit.
I stepped closer. But Pavel held me back. “Don’t.”
I wrenched myself free of his grip and crouched down awkwardly and double-checked the camera. It was definitely Andy’s. How many camera-toting corpses could there be lying about? Around his neck, the strap was curled three times, as tight as a virgin’s knees. There were ligature marks. I’d seen them before in a few cases I’d prefer not to remember.
You don’t come crashing in through an old skylight by accident with a camera wrapped around your neck three times. He’d been beaten to death and tossed down at my feet for good measure.
I nudged the camera with my toe, flipping it over, looking at the slot on the side to see if the SD card was still in there. No such luck, and the lens was smashed in on itself.
I had to get out of here. I reached down and grabbed up the camera and decided to make a run for it. I stepped over the body, skidding in the blood and falling to my knees. Pavel pounced, lifted me up, and held me fast. I dropped the Minolta.
Before I knew it, flashing blue lights were everywhere. Black-clad Royal Gibraltar Police swarmed in, looked at the blood, looked at the body, looked at my footprints in the blood and the slide mark where I’d fallen, looked at the blood all over me. “He did this?” asked the one who was obviously the top banana.
Pavel shook his head. “No, but he pissed off Michael Connelly.”
“Oh, shit,” said the attending detective, nodding wisely. “What did he go and do that for?”
“I don’t know,” said Pavel, “but it was a dumb fucking idea.”
Chapter 3
Survivor’s Guilt
I hit the bottle after seeing Andy Duffy’s body crunched, broken, battered, bloody, on the floor of the Admiral Casino, and I hit it hard. I drank until I forgot and then I passed out and when I woke up again I did the same thing.
I was doing just that in my divey hotel room—not in the Admiral Hotel, of course, but in the seedy downtown motel on the side of the road that said: “Vacancy every day of the year. Rooms from 60 pounds.” The best my editor was prepared to pay for, the bastard.
The wallpaper was peeling off, which was an improvement, because it had been hideous to begin with. The pockmarked ceiling threatened to bear down on me every time I fell into the bed that felt like a tray of bricks, its horrible quilt colored with the yellowing evidence of many nights of cheap passion and one-hour hotel bookings.
I slugged back shots of whiskey until it was getting harder and harder to reach the point where I passed out. If I spent more than a few hours without a drink, my hands shook like a pair of bobble-head dolls. But still Andy’s pulverized face remained in my mind.
I’d taken up smoking again, too, something I’d given up years ago. It made me feel better, kept me regular, and helped stop my hands shaking so much.
I stood up and walked over to the minibar fridge. Again, nothing like the fridge you’d expect in swanky joints like the Admiral, with their expensive chocolates and Fiji water. This one had a terminal case of asthma and had been filled with a motley assortment of overpriced tiny bottles of booze, which I’d ignored for a day and then finished in three minutes, knocking them down like green bottles standing on a wall. I had to go out and get some more whiskey. The bottle I was currently strangling wouldn’t last long.
That’s when the knock on the door came. I ignored it, poured the last remaining dribble into my glass and sat back, my head lolling, wondering whether I should get out of here and go do some more investigating, or whether I should just go back home and tell my editor that there’d be no story. He called the other day, told me that calling it in wasn’t an option, that I had to stay on, and that Andy’s funeral was going to take place on the Rock, since his widow couldn’t afford to have his body repatriated. Of course, the newspaper—meaning my editor himself—was too much of a tightwad to do so. He made it clear that they wouldn’t fly me back until the story was published and printed. Just great.
I finished my dram. I should be going out, should be getting more whiskey. There was another knock on the door, this time a rapped pattern of noises. It sounded like the rats that scurried in the walls during the night. I’d grown used to those rats. I’m sure they scurried over me when I was asleep, passed out, too numb to feel the pain of remembrance.
It had been my fault that Andy was out looking for info, my fault that he’d been killed. I didn’t know what he’d discovered, but I had a good suspicion that it was something to do with Michael Connelly. The murder happened in his casino, of course. I’d been forced to pay—well, the magazine had been forced to pay—for the skylight. The police said it was an accident. He’d fallen, tripped off the balcony of one of the hotel rooms up higher, come crashing through the lobby skylight. It was nobody’s fault, nobody to blame. They let me go a couple of hours later. Not a lot of time to come up with that conclusion, but Connelly was a powerful man.
Right now, the only place I wanted to go was out of my head, and that knock was really starting to annoy me
. If I ignored it, surely it would just go away. Surely it would disappear; whoever it was would fuck off and leave me alone, leave me to my misery, to my whiskey.
What the fuck. I remembered I didn’t have any whiskey left. I needed to go get some more, needed to walk down to the shops, go to the liquor store and find some.
I lay there for another ten minutes until the knocking stopped, and then I waited another five. I stood up and pulled on some smelly jeans over the top of my grimy old boxer shorts. I was lucky even to be wearing any. Who had time for underwear in this world?
I searched around in the pile of clothes at the bottom of the bed. Nothing looked like a clean shirt. All of it had spittles of upchuck etching their smell into the fabric. I pulled on the one with the least amount of vomit on it, slid it over my head, dropped it down, poked around on the nightstand for my wallet, my keys, found them, and opened the door.
I nearly tripped over her. She was sat in the doorway, back to the door. She fell backwards as I opened the door inwards and looked up at me from the floor. Her eyes were a bright green. Her hair, pale blond, fell out from behind her ear in smooth flowing waves. That body, well, I’d only ever dreamed of a body like that. She smiled and rolled over, getting to her feet.
“Are you Ray Hammer, the journalist?”
I nodded.
“May I come in, Mr. Hammer?”
I thought about it for a moment, remembered the vomit on my shirt and the smell of my pants as I pulled them on. “Uh, can you give me a minute?”
She stood there, waiting. “Sure.”
I closed the door again.
I walked into the bathroom and splashed some water on my face, and then some more. It didn’t get the lines out of my eyes or the bags from under them in order to take out the red marks that popped, that stretched out across the whites, and the protruding capillaries on the sides of my nose, but it made me feel a little bit more alive, a little bit more awake.
I took off the shirt, splashed some water over the parts that were covered with sick. It didn’t take me too long to get them out. I put some soap into them as well. And then, I tried to wave the shirt around in the air to get rid of the wet marks, but nothing happened. Now it was just a wet shirt.
I looked in the cupboard for anything that hadn’t been used or worn or vomited on. There was only my coat, my suit jacket. I slid it on, buttoned it up over my bare chest. I stepped back towards the door and kicked the pile of clothes under the bed.
I looked around the empty bottles in the bin. There was nothing I could do to hide them. They were everywhere. I slid them together, put them on the mantelpiece, and then threw a shirt over the top of them, like a decorative art installment in a hipster magazine. That would have to do.
I opened the door. “Come in, miss.”
“Mrs. Gemma Jones,” she corrected.
“Pleased to meet you, Gemma. Come on in.”
She came in and we sat on my bed, which I hastily made as she approached it. She was somewhere in her late thirties but she looked younger, her wrinkles seemed dignified and she held herself with an effort.
“Please, please, excuse the mess in here.”
She looked around and her nose turned up. Silently judging. Wondering if she’d made a mistake coming here, no doubt. “Are you okay, Mr. Hammer?”
“Yes, of course. Of course.” I came straight to the point. “What can I do for you? Why are you here?”
“I need your help.”
“You need my help? For what? How did you get my number? How do you know who I am?
“I read about it in the paper when that . . . when the . . . when your friend, the photographer, passed away. A terrible business. A terrible, terrible business. And, they ran a, um, a story about what you were doing here and your credentials and what you’d done in the past, and I just knew. I knew I had to come and see you.” Her face was earnest now. Her eyes sought something in mine.
“I don’t know what I can do for you.”
“I think my husband’s trying to get our little girl. I think he’s going to have her. He’s going to win her in the custody battle and . . . and I need someone to find out, find some dirt on him and . . . and . . . and . . ..” She stuttered and stalled like a cold car engine.
“And what, Mrs. Jones? You think I’m going to run around and find out what your husband’s doing, who he’s cheating with, what he’s been up to? That’s not my business. I’m a journalist. I don’t do divorces and affairs and those kinds of things.”
“But you’re an investigative journalist, no?”
“Yes, but the key word is journalist.” I felt myself shaking. I needed that whiskey.
Her bright eyes were on me. Still judging. “Are you sure you’re okay, Mr. Hammer? You seem to be . . . “
“I’m fine. Thank you,” I snapped. This was my room; couldn’t a man bum around in his own crappy hotel and feel like shit in peace? I answered sharply, “No, I . . . I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m afraid he’ll kill her. I’m afraid he’ll take her and . . . and kill her just to . . . just to spite me.” The tears welled up on her cheeks now and started to flow. She moved in close to me. I could feel her breath on my neck and soft arm against mine.
“Christ!” she exclaimed and lay back on the bed, her breasts falling down, filling her armpits under her light silken dress.
I felt myself stirring—both due to her soft body and her cry for help. Maybe this is what I needed, a way to get back onto the horse, maybe something that would make me think and get my mind off Andy’s death, maybe something I could enjoy.
“What am I to do? There’s no one here. Gibraltar has no private eyes, has no . . . no . . . no detectives that give a shit. The police don’t want anything to do with it. It’s not their business; divorces, affairs, concerns like that, just as it’s not yours. I shouldn’t have come here.”
She stood up, whirled. “I . . . I made a mistake.” Almost blindly, she stepped out of the room—then spun back around to grab her bag from where she’d put it down on the bed. “I’m . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. Thank you for your time.”
I nodded, dumbstruck, and then she swept out of the room again. I called after her. “Wait! Just wait a minute. Tell me about your husband.”
“Adrian!” she exclaimed. “He’s a monster. If he ever finds out I came here, that I came to see you or came to . . . came to find someone to help, I don’t know what he’d do, what he’d do to you, to . . . to . . . ”
She stepped back inside the room and fell into my arms. I wrapped them around her. She was as warm as I thought she’d be.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Mrs. Jones. Tell me in your own time.”
“And . . . and poor Sarah, I can’t live without her! I’ve been trying to get a divorce from him for months and it’s . . . it’s getting so bad at home. He has so much money, so much . . . so much sway. He’s . . . anytime something happens, he just makes it disappear. Anytime there seems to be any progress on the . . . on the . . . the lawyers, my . . . my lawyer just disappears. I . . . I . . . I don’t know what to do.”
Chapter 4
Day Trip
That’s how I found myself at the tiny zoo ensconced in the Alameda Wildlife Conservation Park at the Botanic Gardens on a Sunday morning, a flask of whiskey in my pocket and a cigarette in my mouth, looking into the eyes of a peacock, who was spreading his magnificent tail, either trying to impress me or warn me away from his females. I spent several seconds taking in the indescribable shades of blue, green, and purple that washed into each other as he turned this way and that, wondering whether I’d ever be as admirable and majestic as that creature.
Beyond the peacocks, I could see the father and his daughter, Adrian and Sarah Jones, as they made their way past the marmosets and tamarins, which lolled around on trees and swung lazily from ropes and vines that dropped down from the trees like careless serpents. The duo were headed toward the dark enclosures where they kept snake
s and frogs and all manner of slithering, slimy, swimming things. I tailed them throughout the day, looking for anything, trying to find out what might happen.
Gemma was so worried that her daughter would come to harm, that her husband would kill her, that he would do something, but from what I could see, he’d been the perfect, loving father. He’d bought her an ice cream. He’d shown her the show-offy otters, who loved attention, and the morbidly obese pot-bellied pigs. He’d held her up high so she could see into the enclosures or behind trees that blocked her view. So far, there was nothing to indicate that this man was dangerous or that he was anything other than a guy with too much money and not enough sense, someone who appreciated beauty even when she wasn’t good for him. But then, Gemma was gorgeous, and maybe he was as bad as she made out and maybe he just didn’t act that way in public.
I’d been following him for a few days now, though. There’d been nothing so far, nothing of interest, just tailing, just trying to find out as much as I could from observation before I confronted him, before I went to talk to him. We moved on past the monkeys again. I kept my distance, stood back, had my LA Dodgers cap pulled down over my eyes, and no one could see who I was.
There wasn’t much to this, really. I’d found out the names of a few of his friends and accomplices—not accomplices—business colleagues. I decided I would pay a few of them a visit later that afternoon. Sarah was supposed to go back to her mother after the zoo trip. That would give me time to go and investigate some of the leads that I’d pulled up from following him. Some of the people that I’d found out knew enough to help get some dirt, to help make this divorce stick, to make sure it got through quickly enough that Sarah would be safe and that Gemma would have what she wanted. She was paying me handsomely, of course; too much.
The Spill: The Beach Never Looked So Deadly (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 1) Page 2