I shook my head. “You shouldn’t work such long hours, buddy. It’s softening your skull. Borensen was guilty of all those things, and Foster’s rigged suicide. There’s some question as to whether he did the latter himself or hired it done, but otherwise… Pat, I can’t do any more of your thinking for you on this unless you’re prepared to put me on the city payroll.”
He put an elbow on a knee and ran a hand over his face. The poor bastard was exhausted. He was caught up in a case so confusing and convoluted, it was getting to him. All the way.
Then his hand dropped away and his expression said he got the drift. Belatedly, but I knew that detective’s mind of his was in there somewhere.
“This is your late-night caller,” he said, eyes wide, a fist chest high. “This is the work of the hitman Borensen hired, only now that we’re really digging into the case, he’s tying off loose ends.”
“Give the man a cigar,” I said. “Of course, it’s tough to go after a contract killer when the brains of the guy who hired him are splattered on a desk.”
“It’s more than tying off loose ends, though.” Pat’s eyes may have been bloodshot, but they were alive with thought now. “This is part of his crazy desire to pit himself against you, Mike. It’s his sick game, a contest, killer against killer. And going to the trouble of handling Borensen’s ‘suicide’ in a way that shouts that it’s been staged is… man, it’s crazy.”
“But with method in the madness,” I said.
Pat sat forward and the eyes were cold now, hard. “And you’re right, Mike, he’s telling us both to go screw ourselves. I’m sure you’ll deal with it in some colorful and quasi-legal fashion, but me? I’m treating this as a homicide scene. Our big shot assassin will have screwed up somewhere, and we’ll nail him.”
I got to my feet. Shortly I would not be wanted here.
“I’m not so sure he screwed up anywhere, old buddy,” I told him. “This one is a pro among pros—a bat-shit crazy one, maybe, but a pro.”
And as for nailing him, that was Hammer’s job.
* * *
I joined Gwen in the kitchen, which was white with black touches, modern as tomorrow, and predictably spacious. She sat at a Formica gray-topped table for four, which I figured she and her father (and later her fiancé) had rarely if ever used. An informal dining room adjacent was surely where rich people in an apartment like this would take their meals.
The policewoman, with the build of a prison guard but a pleasant face that conveyed sympathy, was seated next to Gwen. In front of both were coffee cups, their dark liquid untouched.
I sat down, giving the policewoman a look and head toss that said I wanted some privacy with the girl. The policewoman, who knew I was Captain Chambers’ crony, merely nodded back and stepped outside the kitchen.
Gwen’s hands were folded, clutching the latest tissue from a box the policewoman had provided, and she was staring at them with eyes raccooned with runny mascara. Otherwise she remained a lovely young woman in sweater and slacks, blonde hair touching her shoulders, a young beauty perfect enough for a Breck ad.
I touched those hands and, after a few beats, she looked up at me.
“Why?” she asked.
That was the first question, the only question, for a loved one to ask after an unexpected suicide. But the “why” here was a complicated and nasty one. This kid was dazed, staggered by the shock. She would have to know what this was about. She deserved that much and more.
But was now the time?
Pat and the lab boys would be here for hours. It didn’t matter that it was Sunday. Soldiers do battle every day of the week. Borensen’s body would be gone before the cops were, and because Pat viewed this as a homicide, that body was evidence and morgue-bound, with no pressing need for her to deal with funeral arrangements.
Of course, that hadn’t occurred to her, not yet.
She looked at me with the blue eyes large and ringed with black, and hurt and rage shimmered there and she gripped my hands now, and shouted, “Why, goddamnit? Why?”
So I told her.
I warned her first that she would not like what I had to say. And she found a ghastly little smile as she told me she could not imagine things could get any worse.
She was wrong.
But I told her anyway. I put it together like a story, the worst once-upon-a-time ever, starting with Borensen’s criminal background, from drug dealing to money laundering. I figured if she couldn’t grasp that, or refused to, I wouldn’t have to go on with my story.
When I’d completed that portion, however, she said quietly, “I’ve heard this before.”
That surprised me. “You have?”
She nodded. “My father told me he’d learned all of that about Leif. He didn’t say where he’d got it, but I assumed he’d hired detectives to… he didn’t hire you to do that, did he, Mike? You did say you knew my father.”
“No, he didn’t hire me. I believe your father learned about your fiancé’s criminal history from an old-time publicity agent who was writing his memoirs. Did you believe what your dad told you?”
She swallowed, shook her head. “No. Or, anyway, I thought he was exaggerating things. Mike, it may sound terrible, but a lot of people in theater, in show business, do use drugs. I see it all the time. It’s not my thing, but… that a struggling actor like Leif would have to have some way to make money on the side, that didn’t surprise me. And as far as what you call ‘money laundering,’ a lot of funds from shady circles back plays and movies. I’m young, Mike, but I’m not a child.”
“Understood. Did you ever talk to Leif about this?”
She shook her head again. “No. I thought it was a kind of… invasion of privacy. And after my father was gone, I didn’t feel like getting into it.”
That was a hell of a thing, wasn’t it? Borensen had been afraid Foster would poison his daughter against her fiancé with the lurid tale of a sordid past, and so the prospective son-in-law either murdered his prospective father-in-law by way of a faked suicide, or hired it done.
And it had been completely unnecessary.
“I’m not an innocent, Mr. Hammer,” she said, chin up, her smile a wrinkled little thing. “Working as an actress, a singer, even with the kind of pedigree I had thanks to Daddy, well… you meet a lot of different kinds of people in that world. You encounter a lot of different kinds of things.”
So I pressed on, telling her how her fiancé had used his car as a murder weapon, running down that publicity agent.
That turned her white as a blister.
“I thought the car had been stolen,” she said.
“So did the police,” I said.
I continued, telling her there had been a witness to the hit-and-run, a harmless Munchkin who ran a newsstand, but Leif needed him dead, too… only this witness was a friend of mine, and Leif feared my involvement. I had a reputation of settling scores where my friends were concerned. So the man she’d loved had taken steps to have me killed, as a preventative measure.
Gwen had seen the papers, of course, and knew all about the killer who’d confronted me in my office. She knew, too, that after I’d conferred with Leif about the bridal shower gig, I’d been shot at down on the street, and an innocent cab driver had been killed.
She said, “If you’re right, that means Leif used my bridal… my bridal shower to set up a bogus robbery, all for another attempt on your life? Endangering me and every one of my guests?”
“Yes,” I said.
She folded her arms to herself and shivered, though it wasn’t cold. “I wish… I wish I could argue against that. I really do. But you are very convincing, Mike.”
I touched her sleeve. “You okay, kid?”
“Feeling a little sick, that’s all.”
But it wasn’t till I told her about the recent attempt on Billy’s life that she finally lurched over to the sink and threw up.
So much for the Sunday brunch.
* * *
The cops cl
eared out around eight p.m. In the big echoing marble-floored entryway, Pat told me that the entrance to the library had been sealed and I wasn’t to go in there nosing around. I nodded like that meant anything.
“How’s Miss Foster taking it?” he asked.
“All right, considering I let her in on everything.”
He frowned. “You think that’s wise?”
“She has a right to know. She wanted to know.” I nodded toward the nearby stairway. “She took a sleeping pill and’s resting in a guest room upstairs. I’ll check in with her before I go.”
He was frowning, worried for the girl. “No relatives locally to sit with her?”
“She says not.”
“A place like this surely has household staff.”
“Not live-in, she says, and anyway today’s their day off.”
He sighed. “You better get the name of some friends of hers you can try, to see if anybody can come be with her. She’s been through the damn mill.”
“Yes she has,” I said. “You’ll be back tomorrow, with a fresh team?”
He nodded. “Everybody in the building has to be questioned, from residents to personnel. There’s a super with a staff of two, although only he was working today. My guess is our guy slipped in the building when the door was open while the super was taking out trash or some such.”
“The assassin had probably been here before, to meet with his client, and knew his way around. Gwen doesn’t know how lucky she is.”
“How’s that?”
“Think about it, Pat. If she’d been here, he might have taken her out, too. On the other hand, she regularly has Sunday brunch with friends, and a pro killer would do his due diligence, and know that. Killer came in, caught a freshly showered Borensen in his bathrobe and walked him down to the study, either at gunpoint or on a pretense of urgent business. Have your forensics experts look for traces of soapy water on the carpet in there, and the upstairs hallway and stairs.”
He grinned a little. “I’d almost think you were a detective, Mike.”
Then he patted me on the shoulder, and was the last of the cop crew to leave.
Upstairs in that darkened guest room, I went over and sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, the sunny day was over and the sky was rumbling with the threat of some real rain.
I whispered, “Are you sleeping?”
She sat up, the blonde hair finally mussed. “I was napping… I just woke up. Did I hear those police people leaving?”
“You did. Can you give me the name and number of a girl friend or two, who I can call so you can have some company tonight?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll be fine. I don’t want to have to talk to anybody.”
“Understood. Look, I’ll be glad to camp out here. I just might be able to find a spare room someplace.”
She actually smiled a little, and touched my arm. “No, I’ll be fine, Mike. I’m a big girl.”
“Not really. You’re a slip of thing, and I’ve got ties older than you. I’ll be glad to stand guard.”
“You think I need guarding?”
“Truthfully… no. And since I’m somebody’s favorite target right now, maybe I’m putting you in danger just being here. Maybe I should go.”
She nodded, touched my face, then rolled over, her back to me as I went out. I was out by the waterfall waiting for the elevator when that electrically controlled door hissed open and she was standing poised in the doorway, hair every which way, her face washed of all make-up, in just a T-shirt and sheer panties, the former poked by the tips of pert breasts, the latter revealing a shade of blonde only slightly darker than her head of askew hair.
“Mike! Please stay! I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
She’s young, Hammer, a voice said in my head. And it would be a shitty thing to do to Velda. And this kid’s vulnerable right now, really hurting. You’d be taking advantage, you lowlife prick.
Silently I told the voice, Who says I’m going to do anything but comfort the kid? You have a dirty damn mind.
The elevator came and I ignored it. She held out her hand and I took it. We went up the stairs to the guest room. She’d said she couldn’t stand to be in her own bed, where she’d been with Borensen many times, or the master bedroom, where the couple had moved after her father’s death.
The room was dark. She got under the covers. I got out of my suit coat, tie, and shoes, but left everything else on, and lay down on top of the covers. Outside the sky laughed deep in its throat at me and then a downpour came, so loud we had to really talk to communicate. Whispering wouldn’t quite cut it.
“Someone came in this place today,” she said, dread in her voice, “and killed Leif—that really happened? Someone warped enough to mimic my daddy’s death? Just to send you a kind of… a kind of sick message?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I know a lot of bad people, Mike. The theater has a lot of good, generous people in it, but also jealous ones, back-biters, producers and directors who want sex before giving you a part, liars, cheats, thieves, and you run into what you think is bad behavior, all the time, when you’re an actor. But this man is really bad, isn’t he? Not just awful, but evil.”
“Yes.”
“Will you stop him?”
“Yes.”
“Everything wrong that Leif did, I still… it’s horrible, Mike, but I still haven’t stopped loving him. My head knows he was terrible, but my heart can’t accept it. He killed my father, you say.”
“Or hired it done.”
“That’s… unspeakable. A betrayal that you can’t even imagine.”
I could imagine it. A woman once said she loved me, and accepted my proposal of marriage, and offered herself to me naked and lovely while reaching behind me for a gun in a potted plant.
In the darkness, nearby but a hundred miles away, her voice came: “Did he ever love me, do you think? Really love me? Or was I just someone he used… like he used my father?”
“Hard to know, honey. He may have loved you in his way.”
“His way?”
“Some people, the really evil ones, go through life as actors. Not your kind of actor, no, but actors who don’t have certain human feelings, so they watch and learn and imitate those feelings. They’re aliens moving among us, these people.”
“…Would you do me a favor, Mike?”
“Anything, honey.”
“Just… get undressed and get under the covers with me. I need to be held. Would you do that? And just hold me? Just make me feel not… alone.”
I stripped down to my skivvies and got in bed with the kid. She nestled under my arm and slipped an arm across my middle, her head against my chest.
“I wouldn’t be so hard to love, would I, Mike? I mean, really love?”
“No. It’d be easy.”
She lifted her head up and kissed me. It was tender, soft, yet electric. As if confirming that, the room strobed with lightning through the sheer curtains. The sky roared like a roused beast, and the rain kept drumming down, relentless but rhythmic.
She slipped out of bed and went to the window and looked out. I turned away from her. I couldn’t do this. It was wrong. She was a kid who had a thing for father figures and I wasn’t going to take advantage. She was wounded and I would not, goddamnit, take advantage.
I turned back over to tell her I thought I should go. Somewhere between the bed and the window, she’d lost her T-shirt and panties. At least I thought so—the room was very dark.
Then lightning strobed and there she was, every bit of her there in the stark white light the sky provided between roars, so slender yet shapely, her back to me, the globes of her bottom high and firm and round, the dimples so deep their dark hollows survived through the flash of light. When the strobing was over, she was just a lovely shape, barely distinct when she turned to me.
“I need this, Mike,” she said. “It’ll be just this once.”
“No,” I said. “Take a couple more sleeping pi
lls and get some rest. This thing has you ragged.”
The sky strobed again and for an instant she was an ivory statue, a goddess with high superbly shaped breasts, not large, just perfect, and a sleek body, her belly flat but gently muscular, her sleek, supple legs apart just enough for the curly triangle to offer a glimpse of delights I knew I should not sample.
I got out of bed, intending to get into my clothes, but my interest in her obvious.
Her eyes widened appreciatively and then she did something I didn’t expect her to be able to, under the circumstances—she laughed. She came quickly over and shoved me on the bed. Then I heard her fumbling in a nightstand drawer and moments later I felt the rubber sliding down and I thought, No, she isn’t an innocent.
Then she rode me, slow and sweet and finally building to something not sweet at all, but just as wonderful as the sight of her when the lightning strobes showed her to me, little snapshots of youthful female perfection, and a head of blonde hair that swung like a mane, and a face so beautiful and so blissful, as the act cancelled out anything else in her mind, sadness, betrayal, it was all gone, for those minutes.
As for the voices in my head, nobody bitched.
* * *
She’d told me the help arrived at six-thirty a.m., so I got up around five, and had a shower, while she continued to sleep. Though Pat had the study sealed, I thought there might be a door from the second floor onto the upper level of the book stacks, where I could get in without tipping my hand. I was right.
Within moments I made my way to the desk where Borensen had died. On the desktop, a pool of crusty dried blood, black with hardly any red highlights, bore the imprint of where his head had fallen. No attempt at a chalk outline had been made, though an X in a circle indicated where the gun had been, and the chair was circled in chalk to show its position. Still, I felt free to seat myself in that chair of honor, and—fingerprints having already been taken—began looking through the desk drawers.
As I suspected, Borensen had made the desk his own, and the only sign that Martin Foster had once sat and worked here were letters that had “cc:” to Borensen, correspondence relating to the musical production they were planning to mount together. This included a number of letters from Johnny Mercer himself and the Maxwell Anderson estate, for the rights to the Star Wagon play.
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