Rick flipped a file. “Thirty-two. One behind the ear, one through the neck.”
Another nail in my wishes—a .32 was the last gun I saw Kimbra waving at my groin. Things weren’t looking good for her. Maybe she didn’t arrive in Bermuda with Bergman but flew down later. Someone must have seen her around the island—you don’t miss a face like hers. I had a couple of photos of Kimbra from my first week of peeping on Ambler. I’d have to take them on my trip.
Rick tried to fire his cantankerous pipe. The damned thing was always quitting on him. “Run across Ambler yet in your back alley cases?” From the look in his eyes I suspected he knew something was fishy about Ambler, something I knew, too.
The mention of Ambler took me off balance, but I recovered quickly. “Ricky, you’d be the first to know.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re a rather unconvincing prevaricator, Mike.”
“Translated?”
“You don’t lie well.”
“Don’t I? I’ll have to drop by and practice a bit more.”
Rick frowned and flipped through the old clippings. I could see his interest grow, and soon he was absorbed.
“I’ll leave the scrapbook for your reading pleasure, Rick. Some of it’ll give you the willies. Think it’s possible the Purples might have resurrected themselves after ’35 and were directing Carty? Doak was part of some ring. Next generation? Both mugs were mum about any connection after their arrest. They talked plenty when I was spraying loose lead, but didn’t give me any Chicago or Detroit names.”
“Well, we obtained sufficient proof to incarcerate Carty permanently. Mister Doak added more than a few calendars to his marathon stretch, and will die in prison. Maybe that’s all we can hope for. Governor Driscoll won’t let them be executed. Politically inconvenient. It’s the 1960s, you know.”
“Check that clipping about an old Purple ganger counterfeiting in Hoboken. If they had boys in Hoboken before Carty took over as warden, its pretty clear they had ties here all along. Seems they were some kind of hellish octopus. A few tentacles might still be wiggling.”
“Their slate was nothing short of astounding. At one time they were even implicated in the Lindberg kidnapping. Even more amazing, nothing stuck. I did some checking with archives—the Purples did in fact melt away after their two bigshots were mowed down in ’35, and the others went up the river. Whoever got out of Detroit from that gang merged into other mobs or went straight. They were Russian Jews, you know, immigrants—called them the ‘little Jewish Navy’ for the bootlegging they did across from Canada in the old days—as tough as they come. Still, if you come across anything suggesting organized crime in all this, or connectivity to the Reds, you’d best call us in. I can get the FBI on it within an hour. Just bring me something concrete, none of your PI metaphysical obscurities.”
I went to the door and turned. “You mean concrete, not like your ten-dollar words?” Poking fun at Rick’s verbal gymnastics was our ongoing game. “Commies, eh? That stiff looking to lease the White House, Tricky Dick? He’s a crook if I ever saw one. Lousy on television, but likes to make noise about commies. Funny—every small town has a committee now to fight Reds. Only thing—they don’t have any Reds in those burgs. Maybe they should advertise.”
***
The phone rang at 2 a.m. I stuffed a pillow over my head but the ringing went on and on and on. After thirty or forty jabs, the rings stopped. For a minute. Then more rings. Too persistent for a wrong number. I reached across to the nightstand and flipped the receiver off the hook, dropping it on the mattress two feet from my pulsating ear.
“Mike,” came a distant female voice from the end of the world. “Mike, wake up. It’s Kimbra. I’m in trouble.”
Chapter 16 – Meeting with Kimbra
The Blue Bonnet Diner sat back from the highway halfway to Passaic. The twenty minutes it took me to get there didn’t still the kamikaze bees inside my brain. Unless Kimbra took me for a real sap, her call meant she hadn’t killed Ed. It was one thing I was grateful for. I still wanted to see her as a victim. If a dame’s going to mesmerize me, I prefer her not to have killed more than one man. One body stashed per luscious babe was my limit. What sort of other trouble she might be in, I had no inkling.
Somewhere on the horizon of my stupidity a white sail of hope luffed against an agitated sky—I clutched onto one small sliver of hope that I might still rescue Kimbra, even rehabilitate her. She’d planted a seed desire in me—those roots had spread. I was a pimply-faced kid again on the way to his first score. More than that, I was a brave knight rescuing a fair damsel from evil forces. Sir Sap, First Class.
I brushed the thought aside, pushed away the memory of our good times in the car that first night, the way she’d turned me around until up was down. I was bollixed up good, didn’t care for the feel of it, and even though I knew one look at Kimbra would make it worse, I wanted that look. That’s the way destructive addictions are—even as you dive in to the riptide, you know it won’t let you go. Maybe Kimbra really did take me for a sap. Maybe I really didn’t give a damn.
I wondered why Dad’s voice never helped me sort out woman troubles, but only came at me in or next to dangerous spots. I figured that the powers above the clouds let him steer me away from death, but also let me make my bed messy while they laughed. It wasn’t like I could carry on a full conversation with Dad, though there had been times he did answer simple questions. It was like he had a word quota, and so saved them up to save my hide. Anyway, if he were watching, I couldn’t plan on lovelorn advice—it wasn’t his long suit. He blamed himself too much for Mom leaving us, though I never did.
My nerves were shot by the time I drove into the parking lot of the diner. When in doubt, play it straight, tough, and no-nonsense. Sure.
The joint was empty. I sat there with acid coffee fouling my mood, watching eighteen-wheelers fly past. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour; longer than I wait for any dame, on principle. Kimbra must have lost her nerve. I tossed a buck at the gravel-granny who ran the place and went through the door.
I lit a Lucky and flipped the match, then yanked open my car door.
I got in and put the key in the ignition when a cold gun barrel pushed against my neck. I’ve had it happen enough times to know what one feels like. It wasn’t a pencil.
“Don’t look around. Just start the motor, easy like. Drive north.” Kimbra’s smoky voice sent a small thrill down my neck. Though the gun barrel checked my pulse, there was something else besides smoke in her voice. Fear. This wasn’t the cool seductive Kimbra at the quarry. This was the Kimbra in red undies with tremors.
“No need for artillery, sugar. I came of my own free will.”
Oncoming headlights sliced glare through the car. In the mirror I caught a peek. She looked thinner. Her body was taut, matching jitters in her voice.
We drove for about ten minutes. She directed me to turn on a gravel side road. Crossing railroad tracks we took the left side of a Y in the road and came to a viewpoint overlooking a lake. She told me to pull the Buick up under some trees, and I did it nicely.
“Douse the lights and cut the engine, but don’t turn around and don’t say anything. I have to make sure we weren’t followed.”
I did and the cold thing left my neck. There was no moon. The first crickets of summer were doing light ensemble work. I heard her lean back against the cushions. Her lighter gave me a brief view of the cold round thing, cozy against her chest but still pointed at my head. There was something unmistakably off about her, something curious. I’d find out when she was ready.
I kept an eye on the rear view mirror. No car lights. Nothing. We sat there for at least five minutes. Finally she leaned up and reached around my face and slid the lit cigarette in between my lips. Then she lit another. The damp taste of her lipstick touched my memory.
“I didn’t kill Ed. That’s number one.”
“It wasn’t number one on my question list. I didn’t think you had.”
&n
bsp; “But you had to ask right? That’s funny. You’re the one man who knows I’m capable of killing—so why wouldn’t you suspect me?”
I wanted her to be in the front seat with me, or better still, for both of us to be in the back. I answered cool and even: “Six reasons, maybe seven.”
“So recite me a few.”
“I figure Ambler wasn’t planned. Plus, six slugs in Bergman isn’t your style, even if they were .32’s—you killed Joe with one lucky, angry, revenge slug—a real oopsie, even if the bird deserved it. You might have been careless and angry, but you aren’t mean. Not in that way.” I had no idea how many bullets had killed Bergman. She didn’t argue about it, which was good, and showed she didn’t know either.
I took a long pull off the butt and let the smoke mingle around the headliner with hers. Funny but even that turned me on. I was pretty itchy for the Kimbra I remembered, or maybe the one I imagined, but she was neither—she was changed. Guess I was still delusional, still had fairy tale endings in mind.
“That’s six. What about seven?”
“Seven’s personal.”
“Then—get out slowly—and come back here and whisper it to me.”
She’d read my mind. I did what the lady with the gun asked. I always do.
“Stay over on your side and give me reason number seven.”
I searched her face in the dim light of the back seat. I couldn’t see her clearly. “It’s like this—I get a feeling about a person—a dame, a mug, no difference. Just a feeling like a peek into their insides. I can be wrong, but rarely, and not in your case. You’ve been mistreated, and that’s tough, so it’s sprayed a hard shell over all that beauty. What’s inside is what I see, what I felt, why I ran in and rolled Joe in that carpet. I did it even though guys like me don’t do things like that. What I saw in you was number seven. It was why I risked my livelihood.”
Her eyes fixed beyond the car. I didn’t blame her for being skeptical. She’d heard a lot of lines, no doubt. She stayed against the far door. “Is that so?” was all she could say.
“There’s more. I didn’t know it right away. It came to me in pieces, and that’s my career choice—putting pieces together for some very nasty puzzles. I get paid for that sort of thing.”
“So, you knew it little by little then? Even after I pleased you that night? You didn’t know it then?”
“Don’t kid yourself. I get a lot of offers in my line of work. If I took them all I’d never get anything done and my dick would fall off. No, it wasn’t that, although I confess it started me thinking. It was the night you came to my room and I knocked you around some.”
“You’re one of those perverts then.”
“Maybe your kind of pervert. That look you gave me when you stood there in the hall and told me you didn’t know why you shot Joe. It was that look. I wanted you then, after you left, and I haven’t stopped—oh, hell, this isn’t getting us anywhere.” I reached out and slid my hand up her leg until she made this sort of hum I thought invited me to keep going, but before I got there she flinched like she’d been stung.
“Baby don’t tease after all this time,” I said.
“No, it’s not like that. I’m damaged goods now, Mister Mike Angel. What a name—Angel. Where were you when I needed an angel? Where were you when I got these?”
She made a motion with her hand and flamed the lighter again. The purple scars went from her temples down each side of her face to her jaw. They were jagged, ugly and deep. I caught my breath instinctively, hating myself for doing so.
“You poor kid. You poor, poor kid.”
“See? It creeps you out. Would creep any man out.”
I started to argue, to say it didn’t matter, but she cut me off. “Forget the sympathy stuff, just listen. I’m going after someone and I want you to have the envelope in my purse. I won’t be coming back. Either I’ll kill them or they’ll kill me—either way I’m better off.”
“Who, Kimbra, who?”
“The rat that pulls the strings. I don’t even know her name. Yes, a woman. All I know is the gang’s nationalities—Russian and Cuban. I know the hick town and the spread where the main rats meet every year, but I won’t tell you that. If I get the job done I’ll drop you a short post card from there. Maybe we can meet up again someday. In a dark bar, or a masquerade ball. I’ll be the Lone Rangerette.”
“Listen, kid—they do a lot these days with plastic surgery—you don’t need to worry, I can help. No need getting yourself killed over this.”
She shifted her shoulders and looked out the rear window. It was still dark. Nothing out there was moving. “Not enough money to rub these out—they cut on some other things too, Mike. I’m not much of a woman anymore.”
“Then tell me who, where—I’ll help you find the slime and make them pay. Was it in Bermuda?”
“I never got there. They collared me before I got to the airport and made me send Ed a note that I’d meet him down there later. They holed me up in a cell and had their fun with me, about a dozen of them over a lot of days and nights. I lost track of things, of time, of even the love I had for Ed. You’re the only one left I can trust. They killed Ed, too, because I heard them laughing about it. He was carrying bearer bonds, a quarter of a million.”
“Kimbra, please—just give me a name—who?”
“You want a name? Harry, Joe, Solly, he was the big guy with the breath like puke and the penchant for—” Kimbra stifled a sob and shook her head. “A hophead set me free when they were out trolling for another victim, when they’d had their fun with me and wanted to see some girl-girl torture.”
“Come back to my place. You can stay as long as you like. I know a fine doctor who can look at your wounds and get you a specialist. I have a few bucks saved up. It’s yours.”
She didn’t answer right away, like she was chewing it over.
“Sorry. You’re an up-front guy, but no. Maybe if I’d met you five or six years ago, who knows? But no. I’m not what you think I am. I’ve gone bad, Mike, like spoiled meat. From the time I was forced into prostitution until I got these souvenirs on my face, I’ve been letting hate build inside until now it has to come out. There’s no room for love or caring or even the kind of fun we shared.” She touched my leg then pulled away. “It was tender fun, but fun is all—let’s not kid each other.”
She choked up some then took another drag. I waited. “When Ed was murdered, what was left of my hope died. In this envelope is everything I have on the animals that pulled this—I took a file from their place when I escaped. Maybe you can connect it, if I don’t come through. Some of it’s in code but some is like a picture directory of top crooks. Promise you won’t open it for two weeks. I have a plan and it’s already in motion.”
I nodded and we sat in silence, sharing another cigarette. A cold gust came off the lake, spilling through the open window. I couldn’t convince her to give up revenge, but at least I might wade into things on my own. She started to get out.
“Listen, kid. That mob will chew you up and laugh doing it. Why not give me a week to see if I can bust the kingpin? Tell me who and where. I don’t want to have your murder on my conscience. Let me fight this with you.”
“I’m doing it alone. It’s my face they messed up, my body they cut on. I know when and where the rats will be in their hole, and I’ll be waiting for them. Don’t take my hate away—it’s all I have left. It’s what keeps me breathing.”
The shivering Kimbra that was pushed to the brink and shot Joe Ambler was not the woman I was looking at now. She was hard, steeled to kill. Hate did that to her. There was nothing I could say or do to take the hate away or bring the old Kimbra back.
“Alright, I’ll play this your way. But in two weeks I’m coming after you. I don’t give a damn what you’ve been, what they did—we can start over. I knew you weren’t like them when I peeped in your windows. Maybe that’s why I got so interested. Then, when you shot Joe I wanted to fix it all up. So I did, don’t forget
that. When I heard about Ed I knew it wasn’t you who killed him. I know how you felt about the guy. No matter how many cops and judges these slimes have bought, I won’t let them get away with this.”
Kimbra reached out and put her fingertips on my face. Even in the darkness I could see her lip tremble. Then she said it was too late, she couldn’t want me. She got out and walked back down the road and was swallowed by darkness.
Chapter 17 – High Rise Murder
I was tempted to rip open the envelope in two minutes, instead of two weeks. The hardest thing I ever did was wait two days. So much for patience, never my long suit. The thought of Kimbra in the claws of the underground tore at me like betrayal, and I broke my promise in the middle of the second night. Instead of a map to the crime nest, the envelope contained some kind of a roster, with snapshots of thick-necked hoods, complete with vitals and codes, which I took to be regions and histories. Outside of one mention of Chicago, there was no location given or kingpin marked. Kimbra had kept the vital information to herself.
I copied the documents and then let Rick in on my midnight visit with Kimbra. He was pretty sore I hadn’t let him know, but he got over it when I swore I didn’t know her whereabouts and told him about her disfigurement. He said the roster she’d given me contained two escaped cons wanted for murder in New York. He notified the Detroit and Chicago departments about the cons and Kimbra’s disappearance, with her current description, which I supplied. With those scars, she’d be easy to spot.
Rick always knew more than he let on and I figured he could read my face about Kimbra, so he didn’t push me for more answers than I offered. Still, he filed a report of my meeting and backdated it so the other detectives familiar with the case wouldn’t kick up a fuss. Rick often called on me to get information he couldn’t get by being a good cop. He was under a microscope by the shadier members of New York’s finest, who would have paid bigtime to get something on him to offset the dirt they were dealing—payoffs, numbers racket skims, prostitution cuts, mostly small time stuff, but 23rd precinct addictions. I appreciated him taking the risk and cutting one small corner for me.
Dark Quarry: A Mike Angel Private Eye Mystery Page 9