So Long, Chief

by Max Allan Collins

  “I don’t have an answer yet.”

  “Yeah, and that Milroy character will get the answer right after you find Judge Crater. Maybe I should take an interest.”

  “No, Mike…no…”

  I got to my feet. “Who would want to kill the Chief at this late date, Pat? What did he ever do in any of his yesterdays to buy what he got today?”

  Pat sighed blue smoke. “He was a crusader, the Chief. Before you came along with your one-man war on the Evello outfit, he was the only guy who ever stood up against the mobsters. Put a shitload of ’em away. And before the Knapp Commission, he was the only official in the city to make a real effort at cleaning up the department. He fired and jailed dozens of bent cops, back before the war.”

  “So he made enemies.” I slapped my hat on. “Enemies enough to kill him?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  I was almost out the door when I said, “What took them so long?”

  And I took it easy on the glass, shutting it nice and gentle on the puzzled puss of Captain Patrick Chambers.

  In the old Hackard Building, in the outer office of the door labeled MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS, my secretary Velda sat behind her desk studying the little key like it unlocked the secrets of life. In this case, the secret of a death was more likely.

  She’s a big girl, my Velda, all curves and raven-wing hair in a pageboy that went out of style a long time ago, and to hell with style. She wore a simple pale pink blouse and a short navy skirt that with her in it put to shame anything Frederick’s of Hollywood ever came up with. And she’s my secretary like Watson is Holmes’ family practitioner—she has a PI license and packs a flat little automatic in her purse between her compact and her lipstick.

  “Not a safe deposit box,” she said, turning it in tapering fingers with blood-red nails. “No numbers.”

  “It’s old,” I said. “Something’s been locked away for a long time. So it’s not a bus station locker. They check those daily.”

  “Did he maintain a membership at the police gym? Those lockers would be old enough.”

  “Vel, he was eighty-nine. I don’t think he played intramural basketball anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s to another metal box. Buried or hidden somewhere.”

  “Maybe.”

  She hefted it in her palm, up and down, up and down. “A little big to unlock a desk drawer. A little small to unlock a shed.”

  “Doesn’t look like a padlock key.”

  “No, or a file cabinet key, either. To me, it’s a locker key, but where? Boat club maybe?”

  “You got me. He’s been living at a nursing home. Long Island Care Center. We should go out there.”

  Velda nodded and got the Long Island book out of a drawer. I stood and perched myself on the edge of her desk. She had the book open and was about to dial when she asked, “But what did the Chief have locked away? Money?”

  “Naw. He had something on somebody.”

  She frowned. “Evidence? Of a crime? Would he withhold that? You said he was a straight arrow.”

  “Straight arrows have been known to make deals with the devil.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors, Mike.”

  “Maybe so, but the Chief made a lot of enemies, like Pat said. Why did one of ’em wait so long to take revenge? Whoever it was didn’t cheat the Grim Reaper out of much.”

  She nodded, started to dial, then hung up abruptly, her dark eyes flaring.

  “Mike, that’s it.”

  “What is?”

  “It’s evidence. He did have something on somebody. And he must have told that somebody that if anything ever happened to him, this evidence would come out.”

  I slipped off the desk. “And for years and years that evidence…a gun, a ledger book, a signed statement…was safely tucked away where it could do no harm.”

  She shook a lecturing finger at me. “But then the Chief was marked for death, not by some hit man, but by time and tide.”

  I was nodding. “And on his death bed, the Chief would have been fine with that evidence finally catching up with whatever devil he’d made a deal with.”

  She was shaking her head, the dark locks bouncing off her shoulders. “But what kind of deal would that be? What kind of crime would a straight shooter like the Chief conceal? Maybe you need to face it, Mike. Maybe he wasn’t the god you thought he was. Maybe he had feet of clay like the rest of us.”

  “Clay is what I’ll have on the bottom of my shoes,” I said, “when I walk over the grave of the bastard who knifed him.”

  “I can’t top that one,” Velda said with a smirk, and finally dialed that goddamn phone.

  Leaving the steel-stone-and-glass tombstones of Manhattan behind, we had a pleasant drive in light traffic out to Long Island. The spring afternoon was so nice that when I spoke to retired Police Sergeant Carl Spooner, he and I sat outside on a cement patio, facing bushes and trees whose leaves shimmered with sunshine. I was in a kind of lawn chair, and the old sarge was in a wheelchair.

  We knew each other just a little. He’d been the desk sergeant for a while at the precinct house Pat worked out of maybe twenty years ago. A nod-and-a-wave kind of friendship, not enough to justify a visit to a nursing home in the sticks.

  “I bet this is about the Chief,” the sarge said.

  He had been big once, but he’d shrunk, swimming in a white shirt and tan slacks, his big shoulders now just massive hunched bookends for a sunken chest. His cheeks were sunken, too, and his nose was like an Indian arrowhead stuck on there. His blue eyes were rheumy but still sharp.

  “You should’ve gone for detective,” I said.

  “Naw, not me. I was a born desk sergeant. It’s an art, you know. You got to deal with all kinds. Mostly not the cream of the crop, if you get my drift. You know what we used to say? We used to say, it ain’t the heat, it’s the humanity.”

  “Yeah, but not a bad gig. Get to rule the roost.”

  “Got that right. Where’d that big doll of yours go? The one that reminds me what it was I used to like about women. I saw her come in with you.”

  “She’s talking to your head administrator.”

  “About the Chief?”

  “About the Chief. You and I have something in common, Sarge.”

  “What would that be?”

  “We were the last two people to see him alive.”

  Not counting his killer.

  “Is that right?” he said.

  I nodded toward the wheelchair. “You went to a lot of trouble to visit him.”

  “They got people here to help out. They got a van they drive you around in for doctor appointments and shit.” The big shoulders on the frail body lifted and dropped. “Anyway, the Chief, he was a buddy. You have to say so long to a buddy.”

  “You two go back a long way?”

  “Naw, not at all. Hell, he was the Chief. We never even met when I was on the job. I mean, I saw him on the stage at functions, handing out medals and such. Shook his hand in a receiving line once. It was out here we got to be buds. Two old coppers stuck in stir together.” He cackled.

  “You got close, these last few years?”

  “Damn straight. Look around you, Mike. You’ll learn an important lesson.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man can live too long. The Chief outlived his two kids and a wife he adored. One of the most important men in the city, reduced to sittin’ around jawin’ with a lowly desk sergeant.”

  “Nobody came out to see him?”

  “Now and again, a few coppers who served under him. That inspector that worked for him. That captain you used to stop around the precinct house to visit.”

  “Chambers?”

  “Yeah. Pat Chambers! Man, I haven’t heard that name in years. You guys were asshole buddies, weren’t you?”

  “Still are. Anybody else?”

  “No. Like I said, he outlived his family. You know, the Chief was retired for over thirty years. He and his wife moved out here somewhe
re. Besides his family, the only thing he said he missed was playing golf. Him and some other retired department bigwigs used to go to the Oakland Golf Club in Queens. But they’re all dead, too.”

  On the ride back, Velda shared what she’d learned from the nursing home’s top administrator.

  “There’s something that Pat held back from you,” Velda said, green countryside gliding by behind her in the passenger window.

  “Maybe you better give me a second to get over the shock of that.”

  “Two big men, not young, maybe in their fifties or even sixties, were seen in the nursing home hallways yesterday. One asked where the Chief’s room was, but otherwise they had no contact with staff. They were in suit and tie, and the assumption was they were visitors or were scoping the place out for an elderly parent. The Long Island cops already gathered that info and passed it along to Pat.”

  “So they searched the Chief’s room, came up empty…and tried again this morning, at the hospital?”

  She nodded. “Where they found his metal box that he’d taken along with him…but not his gun and that key.”

  Now I was nodding. “Only that sheaf of papers representing a career of dedication. Which was worthless to them.”

  She hadn’t learned much else from the administrator. The Chief had been a resident for eight years. His income had been reduced to his pension and Social Security, and his meager possessions, mostly clothing, had been left to the facility for anybody who could use them. The scraps were all that remained of a great man and a fine life. The sarge was right—a man could live too long.

  Then I filled Velda in on what the old desk sergeant had told me.

  “A golf club,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “Damn. That could be it. There’s your locker! Where is the place? Let’s go over there.”

  “We’re driving over it. It was knocked down to make room for the expressway.”

  She frowned. “Mike—that means you might have a key to a locker that doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Maybe. But the Chief surely knew that Oakland was a victim of progress, and that was fifteen years ago. There’s a possibility he and his golfing buddies from the department found another course.”

  She nodded. “We can only hope…What now?”

  “Now I need to get back to the office. I’ll drop you at your apartment.”

  Her frown was deep. “The office? Why? It’s not like you handle the paperwork.”

  “Your Mike has his reasons.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  But she didn’t push it. She knew I was up to something, but she also knew that if I wanted her in on it, I’d tell her. Still, her lovely dark eyes were on me the rest of the way back.

  I stretched out in my shirtsleeves on the black leather couch in my inner office. When I’d got back around dusk, I left the lights off, took the carryout paper bag to my desk, and sat there making a corned beef sandwich and a cup of coffee disappear.

  Soon I was on the couch in the near dark, the city outside the window behind my desk fighting the night with a million lights. I could have shut that out by adjusting the blinds, but I wasn’t anxious to go to sleep. Now, on my back with my suit coat and shoes off, I lay there staring at a ceiling I could barely see with my .45 on the floor next to me.

  Was the key to the mystery the key in my pocket? Was the only way to figure out who killed the Chief to find out what that little scrap of ancient metal unlocked?

  Were the two men who had searched the Chief’s nursing home room looking for that key, or did they even know of its existence? Did they seek instead whatever evidence the Chief had hidden away, for the key to unlock?

  One thing I did know was why someone had bothered murdering a man who was already inches from death—they needed to silence the Chief while looking for the key or what the key represented. The contents of that metal box had been strewn around, that inspector said, indicating the Chief’s only slightly premature death had bought his killer or killers time to toss his hospital room.

  Where there had been nothing to find.

  Because I had that key, didn’t I?

  But whatever it unlocked seemed out of reach—in an old locker somewhere, at a golf club maybe…if it wasn’t under tons of concrete. Possibly at some other locker or storage facility—who the hell knew?

  That’s for you to find out, the Chief had told me.

  Which meant Velda and I should be able to track it down. The Chief had lived a lot of life, and lives could always be sifted through—we did it all the time. Of course, most of the people the Chief had shared that life with were gone.

  So we were facing a long investigation both exhaustive and exhausting, with no guarantee we’d come up with a damn thing. But what other option was there?

  There was one.

  I could camp out here in my office and wait for the answer to walk through my door. That I had been the last to see the Chief alive before his killer—or killers—was no secret. The hospital knew. The cops knew. The press would probably know by now.

  I would almost certainly have after-hours visitors.

  Despite my best intentions, I did drift off, but nothing deep, nothing with dreams in it, and I sure as hell wasn’t dreaming when a click announced somebody picking the lock on my office door.

  I reached down for the .45, its cold rough grip comforting in my grasp.

  They were talking out there, too muffled for me to make out, but they weren’t bothering to whisper. A glance at my wristwatch said it was almost ten o’clock. Nobody in the building at this hour but cleaning staff, their routine an hour away from the eighth floor, anyway.

  The couch was against the side wall, so I would have a perfect view of my callers when they came through my inner office door. But they were tossing the outer area first. Bold bastards—another click sent glow crawling under my inner-office door, meaning they had switched the lights on out there. I heard file cabinet and desk drawers opening. Some occasional talk. Not working at making no noise, but not making a racket, either.

  I could have waited for them to finish out there, but it just wasn’t my way. Who the hell knew what kind of mess they’d make if I didn’t put a stop to this? I slipped off the couch, padded over in my socks to the door connecting the inner and outer office.

  I opened it, fast.

  “Nobody has to die,” I said.

  Velda’s desk was just a few feet forward, and one guy was behind it, with a drawer open. He looked back at me with the expression of an adulterer caught by a cuckold. He was maybe four feet away to my immediate right, his pal across the room at the row of file cabinets to my left, still working on the top drawer, its contents spilled on the floor.

  In that split second I knew them—they were old-time thugs, Mafia boys with plenty of years on me, and unlikely soldiers to be sent on any mission. Their suits were baggy and their ties were wide, their clothes as out of date as they were. I hadn’t seen them around in years—one’s last name was Rossi, the other’s first name Salvo, which was the best my brain could come up with on short notice.

  They were frozen, almost comically so, Rossi nearby at Velda’s desk, half-turned to me, a once handsome guy gone badly to seed, his eyebrows black but his hair gray against dark skin tanned deep brown. Over at the file cabinet, Salvo stood sideways, as pale as his partner was dark, a string bean with a healthy head of curly black hair, though the pouchy face looking at me had the kind of miles on it that got you replaced if you were a Firestone.

  My voice was calm and my gun hand was steady. “There are two chairs over by the wall. Go over there slow and sit. We’re gonna talk. I might not even call the cops if you cooperate.”

  This was much better treatment than they deserved, breaking into my fucking office at ten o’clock at night, but I wanted information not satisfaction.

  Too bad Salvo thought he had the advantage on me. He thought I hadn’t noticed he’d set a revolver down on the file cabinet top, and when he went for it, I put one
in his head and bloody brain matter glopped onto the far wall. Goddamnit, there went the information I wanted, dripping down the plaster.

  Ears ringing from the rattling roar of the gunshot, I swung the .45 over toward Rossi, to see if he was smart enough to hold up his hands. But he was going for a rod in a holster under his shoulder, figuring that me killing his partner would give him time. I wondered when he’d last been sent out on a real job, because if he’d been any slower, I could have just slapped the thing out of his hand. Instead, he was just fast enough to get himself killed. The bullet in his forehead shut his life off like a switch and he thudded sideways into Velda’s desk, knocking over and shattering her favorite vase.

  There would be hell to pay for that.

  When he slid down, he accidentally shut the drawer he’d opened, then sat there, legs straight out in front of him, staring into nothing, his right hand still open and reaching for the gun he never even touched.

  “OK, then,” I said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  Salvo was similarly situated by the file cabinet, and I got one piece of information out of him, anyway—that black curly hair had shifted, revealing itself as a wig.

  I shook my head, holstered the .45, and walked back to Velda’s desk, stepping around the bloody array of brains that had showered our new carpet. So much for preventing a mess in the outer office.

  I reached for the phone, to call Pat at home.

  “Leonardo Rossi,” Pat said, “and Salvatore Ferraro.”

  I was sitting behind my desk, the big rangy homicide captain in the client chair opposite, while in the outer office his elves were scurrying—a crime lab team, a photographer, and a plainclothes dick, with a couple of uniformed men in the hall. The bodies hadn’t been hauled away yet.

  “I better call Velda,” I said absently. “If she comes into work tomorrow and finds crime scene tape blocking the way, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  Pat leaned forward and the gray-blue eyes narrowed. “Don’t duck me, buddy. What brought these two long-in-the-tooth goombahs away from the bocce ball court and into your little trap?”

  “My what?”