by Black Alley
“Why didn’t the military get into it then?”
“Mike . . . there won’t be any military in the next war.”
I waited. My mind kept bringing back episodes from the war I was in. Bud seemed to know what I was thinking and shook his head.
“Those old wars were too expensive. They didn’t solve anything. The bad guys and the good guys just swapped sides, that’s all. The wall came down, Russia fell, Africa came apart and the military industrial complex is simply getting rid of its surplus hardware. What happens next is going to be biological and chemical with no noise and no blood. Just death. Ugly, destructive death.”
“Who gets what’s left?” I asked him.
“Who belongs to the big country clubs?” he fired back.
“And that’s the plan?”
Bud said, “I think it’s their plan.”
“You think it’ll work?”
“Hell, no. There are a lot of people smarter than big governments. But what’s all this have to do with body armor?”
“Who invented it, Bud?”
“A young chemistry whiz two years out of some university. His name is Dan Coulter. He manufactured enough product to demonstrate to the government, but everybody balked at the price and he peddled it somewhere else.”
“He patent it?”
“No way. He kept his process strictly secret, and now nobody is ever going to find out how he did it.”
“Why not?”
“Because his whole place blew up with him in it. Dan Coulter is dead.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Before you ask, there was nothing suspicious about the blast. He was using some very critical materials. It’s a wonder he got as far as he did.”
“One more question, Bud.”
“Sure.”
“Could you duplicate his work?”
“Certainly,” he said amicably, “but not right now. Living is still a pleasant way to be.”
“What are you hinting at, Bud?”
“Two of his suppliers are both dead too. They were involved with his work.”
“How?”
“Separate car accidents three weeks apart. Suspiciously accidental.”
I eased myself into a standing position. “You knew this Coulter guy, didn’t you?”
“Both of us belonged to diving clubs.”
“You said you could duplicate his work.”
“There’s no reason to.”
“Supposing I’d like to see what the stuff looks like.”
“In that case then I’ll get a sample and show it to you.”
“Why do I have to drag everything out of you, Bud?”
“I’m just giving you back some of your own medicine, kiddo. Stop by in about a week and I’ll put on a show for you.”
5
THERE ARE THINGS some people can get done on a telephone that seem incredible, but when you analyze it, the whole affair is simple, direct and logi-cal. It had taken an hour for Velda to locate Marvin Dooley’s latest address on the outskirts of New Brunswick and find out it was a single-room apartment in a run-down section of the city. He had been there for three months, coming from Trenton, was self-employed, had a driver’s license, but no car was registered in his name. I left a call on her answering machine to be ready at four so I could pick her up and beat the rush out of Manhattan.
And she was ready, all right, but just as ready to start up all over again about us not carrying beepers so we could have a more immediate contact. I closed the car door on her, went around to the driver’s side and climbed in. I slid the key into the slot and was about to turn the ignition on when I looked down the hood line and stopped.
Velda caught my reaction right away and drew in her breath. “What is it, Mike?”
After a moment I asked, “What is it you don’t like about my vehicle, kitten?”
“You’re a slob. It’s always dirty.”
“Uh-huh.”
I picked the keys back out, put the gear lever in neutral and told her to get out of the car and stand around the corner.
“Why?”
“Because somebody squeezed in between the car and the wall to open the hood and left a big clean spot on the metal.”
“You think you have a bomb under there?”
“Somebody did something.”
“Then call Pat and let him get the squad over here.”
“If I’m wrong I’ll be using up brownie points. If I’m right I’ll have the DA’s office under my feet again.”
“Mike . . . are you looking to get dead?”
“No. Now get around the corner like I told you.”
“Up yours, boss. You die, I die. They’ll have to give us a double funeral. After all this time I’m not letting you off the hook so easy.”
“Swell. Then start pushing the car back a couple of feet.”
I had unlocked the hood latch from inside the car, the same way they did. I slid the lever over, pulled the hood up and shone a flashlight down into the engine compartment. There was no attempt to hide the unit, a simple arrangement hooked to the ignition for a power source, but this time there wasn’t a bundle of dynamite sticks, but a one-inch-by-four-inch foil-wrapped charge carefully selected for its destructive capabilities. Whoever installed it seemed very sure of himself. There was no booby trap device, no motion igniting mechanism, just that little packet of death waiting for the turn of a key to turn us into red splashes and pieces of flesh.
I unhooked the ignition contact and lifted out the charge. Velda looked around the parking area and said, “What would that have done . . . to all this, Mike?”
I knew she was thinking about the bombing of the Towers downtown. “It wouldn’t be like that, kitten. This would have wiped us out along with the cars on both sides and left a lot of soot on this level.” I grinned at her. “We’d be like red graffiti.”
“You’re disgusting, Mike.”
“Watch it, doll, we’re not married yet.”
I wrapped the wires around the foil package and slid it under the driver’s seat. Velda gave me an incredulous look. “You’re not taking that thing with you . . . are you?”
“It isn’t the kind of explosive that goes off with normal impact. You can squeeze it, hit it, stomp on it . . . but just don’t toss it in the fireplace or jolt it with an electrical spark.”
She finally asked, “Who did it, Mike?”
“The orders probably came from Ponti the Younger. The old man’s too smart to be this obvious. Lorenzo doesn’t play the emotion game. There’s more at stake than that. He’ll want to know what he thinks I know before he makes any move on me.”
“And what would that be?”
“Whatever Dooley told me.” I looked over at her, my eyes narrowing in a frown. “And that is relatively nothing,” I added.
I turned the key and the engine purred into life. It was a heck of a way to find out, but there were no slimy seconds under the hood to cover for a misfire. I backed out of the slot and cranked the wheel over and went up the ramp to the street. If anybody was watching, they’d most likely swear under their breath and take it out on their supplier of military goodies.
Velda had charted the run to New Brunswick right on the nose. There were no wrong turns, no stopping to ask directions, just a straight, easy drive. When I stopped in front of the decrepit old building where Marvin Dooley lived, she said, “You like my navigation?”
I grinned. “Beautiful, kitten. I hope you can cook like that.”
The place had a common vestibule that housed eight mailboxes, a single overhead bulb and the smell of multiracial cooking. The slots beneath the mailboxes held names, except for one, and since Dooley wasn’t in any of the others, that blank one had to be Marvin’s. I pushed the button and tried the door. It swung open with no trouble. Muted TV voices overlapped in the area and somewhere a radio was tuned in to a rock station that thumped out a monotonous beat. Behind me, Velda closed the door.
To our left was a wooden stairc
ase leading to the second level. A door creaked open, feet clicked across the floorboards and a male voice yelled over the banister, “Yeah, whatta ya want?”
“Marvin?”
There was a moment’s hesitation before he answered, “Who wants him?”
But by then I was up the stairs and his head jerked around, not knowing whether to hold his ground or duck back into his room. “I’m Mike Hammer, Marvin. I was in the army with your father.”
“He’s dead.”
“We know.”
“Who’s we?”
Just then Velda came up the stairs and took his breath away long enough for him to lose his antagonistic attitude. “We are more people than you could imagine,” I said quietly. “You mind inviting us inside?”
He glanced at me a few seconds, frowned, then stared at Velda long enough to change his mind and nodded toward the door. I waited for him to go in first, followed him in closely, then waved to Velda to come and close the door.
As I expected it was a nothing place. One room with a cot that doubled as a sofa, a two-burner stove, small sink and a narrow old-fashioned refrigerator that took up a corner. The kitchen table had two wooden chairs and an old canvas beach chair was right in front of a fairly new TV that was set on the floor. But at least it was clean. There were no dirty dishes, no dust accumulation, no pile of clothes and the only lingering smell was that of an antiseptic soap.
He caught my thoughts right away and said, “I’m poor but neat, Mr. Hammer.” His eyes shifted to Velda and he added, “No woman’s here, lady. It was something I picked up in the navy.”
“The lady is my associate,” I told him. “Her name is Velda.”
No surprise showed in his expression. He nodded toward her and said, “The piece in the paper mentioned her. At the funeral.”
“Why weren’t you there, Marvin?”
He shrugged eloquently. “What good would that have done?”
I knew what he meant. “You didn’t miss anything. He was just ashes in a metal vase.”
“Who came to see him off ?”
“Just people who knew him in the old days. Some others he worked for. Not too many.”
“That mob bunch, huh?”
“Somebody had to cut their grass,” I said.
“Baloney. If my old man did that he was playing a game.”
“Marvin . . . how would you know? When was the last time you saw your father?”
“Before I went in the navy. We hardly kept in touch. A couple of letters and a card that gave me his new address.” A touch of shrewdness seemed to touch his eyes and he looked directly at me. “What did the old man leave me, Mr. Hammer?”
“An urn full of ashes, kiddo. What did you expect?”
“Don’t give me that crap, buster. You didn’t come all the way down here to tell me that. He left me something and you need me to get it.”
“I need you like a hole in the head,” I said. I took out my notepad and wrote down a name and address, then handed it to him. “All your father wanted was for me to get in touch with you. I took his ashes and put them in a repository. This is where they are. Do what you want with them.”
The shrewdness seemed to seep out of his eyes. He fingered the paper, mouthing the address silently. He finally looked up at me. “That’s all?”
“That is all.”
He studied me again, his teeth grating at his lips. “You said you were in the army with my father.”
“That’s right.”
“He was in the navy,” he challenged.
I nodded. “We found that out when Velda contacted the Veterans Bureau in Washington.”
“How the hell did he get in the army? Damn, that doesn’t make sense. All the old man ever wanted was to get out on the ocean.”
“He ever do that?”
“Not before he joined the navy. All he ever did was run that old boat of his up and down the Hudson River.”
That was something Dooley had never mentioned to us at all. In all the tight pockets we had been in, when going over details of your lifetime with your buddies in the same foxhole kept the tension down and the awareness high, never had Dooley told us about a boat. His old Rollfast bicycle, the Flexible Flier sled, the Union Hardware roller skates, those things we knew. But nothing about a boat.
“What kind of a boat?” I asked him.
He ran it through his head trying to determine its importance, then figuring it had none, said, “A Woolsey.”
The name didn’t mean anything to me. “What did it look like?”
“Hey, boats aren’t my thing, Hammer. It was pretty old. He was always repairing the wood, kind of like it was his hobby.”
“He ever take it out?”
“Sure. Like when the weather was right. He didn’t trust the boat enough to get into any rough water. Most of the time he went up and down the river.”
“You ever go with him?”
“When I was a kid, sure. I didn’t like it though. That was his bag, not mine.”
I had to keep probing into this little side venture of Dooley’s. “He have any special places to tie up?”
“Nah. He’d just cruise around and tell me how he always wanted to get out to sea. If we stopped it was to gas up or grab a sandwich.”
“Then where did you go to?”
Marvin gave me an annoyed smirk. “Where can you go on the Hudson? Twice we got as far as Albany. Big deal. Most of the time we’d go north to Poughkeepsie or south below Bear Mountain. If I started to get sick he’d head for home.”
“Where was that?”
“A little old marina a few miles north of Newburgh. Nothing much there now, but back in the old days there were about a dozen yachts docked.”
“You know who owns it?”
“Come on, I was a kid then. Some old man had it. He must have been eighty, so he’s probably dead now.” He paused and his head jerked around so he could look straight at me. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Your old man wasn’t a deserter, Marvin. He just traded in being a lousy sailor for a damn good soldier. Either way, he volunteered. All he did was beat the paperwork.”
Again, I got a hard stare. “And you came all the way down here to tell me where his ashes are?”
“Only because your father left those instructions.”
Knowingly, he asked, “What else?”
“To find out if you could tell me any details that could have gotten him shot.”
“You should do better than that, Mr. Hammer.” I waited and let him add the rest himself. “He was killed for a reason. He was a nobody. There wasn’t any property except his house, he didn’t have a big job, he didn’t get into any trouble, but something got him murdered. He didn’t get killed accidental-like.”
“I think this was an accident waiting a long time to happen,” I said. “You know any of his friends at all?”
“Nah. I never knew he had any. The only one I ever saw him around was old Harris.”
“Who?”
“Some old swampie they called Slipped Disk Harris.”
“Who?”
Velda answered me from across the room. “He was a bootlegger back in the prohibition days. They say he got his name from tossing too many cases of illegal whiskey into trucks.”
“Now how would you know that?” I demanded.
“I read a lot,” she told me. “Want more?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I want more.”
“Fine. He was very successful, always a great supplier, never got caught and became very rich. He was alleged to have been a made man, but that was never proven. However, he did have a great deal of influence with known big-time racketeers.”
I looked at Marvin. “That sound like him?”
Velda’s recitation had left him with a surprised expression. “Yeah,” he agreed, “that was him, all right. He holed up with the old man a couple of times when some of the guys were after his tail.”
“Why?”
Marvin gave a casual
shrug. “What it sounded like to me was that Slipped Disk was still selling booze down in the big city, but his prices knocked the regular retailers to hell and gone.”
“Look, you’re talking about a time long after prohibition. Hijacking went out of style when they brought the U.S. government down on them.”
I got another shrug. “So who knows. I was only a little kid. I just remember them laughing about it.”
“You think your father was in on it?”
“My old man? Get outa here. He couldn’t be bothered getting into big business. All he wanted was to play it day by day. Now look what happens. He’s a handyman for mobsters and he gets gunned down like an informer. For what? Nothing, that’s what.” Marvin rubbed his hands over his face, then ran his fingers through his hair. “You want anything else?” he asked.
“Would you give it to me if I did?”
“Depends.”
I handed him one of my old cards Velda had put in my pocket. “Just one thing, Marvin.”
“Oh?”
“Your father was killed for a reason. Whoever did it might think he entrusted information to you and—”
“He didn’t tell me nothing! He—”
“I know that and you know that, but the killer is up in the air so there’s a possibility that the quicker we get that guy the longer you’ll have to live. Give it a thought, Marvin.”
I took Velda’s arm and steered her toward the door. When she reached the downstairs entrance she stopped and her hand slid under her coat. I knew she had her hand on the butt of the .38 she carried and reached out and grabbed her wrist. Darkness had settled in and we were in a strange area where security was null and patrol cars rarely cruised by.
“Nobody followed us,” I told her.
“Mike, you’ve been in bad shape . . .”
“Nothing’s happened to my instincts, doll. After that bomb bit I kept my eyes open.” I stepped out onto the stoop, checked both ways and waved for Velda to come on. The car was still there, nobody had scratched it, kicked it or dented it. And the tiny bit of paper was still in the door hinge as a telltale.