He smiled back, but of course the sneer was in it. “Well, thanks for stopping by, Hammer. Always good to renew an acquaintance. You need a cab? I’ll have one called for you.”
“Joey, I just got here. I’m trying to show the little lady a good time.”
“Is that what you’re doing.” He picked up the cigarette, drew in smoke, then sent it my way. “Blow, why don’t you? You’re very old news.”
I looked around us. “Then I’d seem to be in the right place. Why don’t we keep it friendly, Joey? I just stopped by to see how you’re doing, after your tragic loss.”
“What tragic loss would that be?”
I nodded toward Gwen, sipping her schnapps. “The loss of a longtime, valued business associate.”
“Maybe you know what you’re talking about, Hammer, but I don’t.”
I uncrossed my arms and met his sneer with my own. “Don’t be coy, Joey—Leif Borensen goes way back with the Bonettis, and I hear you were his contact man. He was a kind of one-man Peppermint Lounge himself, wasn’t he? A guy who could provide a front and be a cash laundry when needed, and other times a cash cow, pulling down some real Hollywood bucks.”
He looked past me and nodded. I glanced back and saw two big men in skinny ties coming my way. Their dark suits looked sewn on. But their bulges seemed to be muscle and some occasional fat, so at least they weren’t packing.
“Lenny, Turk,” he said to them.
One was on either side of me. They were tall and they were wide, and the fists hanging at their side were like hams.
Pepitone looked up and gave them the sneer-smile. “You remember Mike Hammer, don’t you, fellas? He used to be a big deal, a long, long time ago.” He lowered his eyes to meet mine and gave me the same nasty smile. “Lenny and Turk here, they were big deals, too, not so long ago. Pro wrestlers. All my bouncers are ex-wrestlers, Hammer. One look at them and most smart-asses piss themselves.”
“I don’t have to go,” I said.
“Oh yes you do… Put Mr. Hammer in a cab.”
A big hand latched onto my left elbow, and another one latched onto my right.
“Don’t worry about Miss Foster,” Pepitone said as I was hauled up and out of the chair. “I’ll see she gets home safely.”
Right now she was on the dance floor with a college kid, doing the frug. She didn’t notice the bum’s rush I was getting, and that was all right. I wanted her kept out of it.
The boys lifted me up and walked me, if walked is the right word when your feet aren’t touching the ground, through the tables and chairs and out into the bar and through the front door, where we paused under the canopy. Turk, shaved bald with dark eyebrows on a shelf of forehead, a handlebar mustache over thick lips, slipped behind me, took both my arms and yanked my elbows behind my back, making the upper half of me lean forward, while Beatle-haired Lenny, with beady black eyes crowding what must once have been a nose, lumbered to the curb to flag a cab that was a good half-block down.
Lenny was doing that when I rammed my head up under Turk’s chin and as his neck snapped back and his grip loosened on my arms, I pulled away and swung around behind him and kicked him with the flat of a gum-soled foot behind the knee, one of the few places he wasn’t muscle-bound. Turk went down on the other knee, like he was waiting for a king to knight him, but I crowned him instead, with two fists coming down like sledges on the back of his bald skull. He belly-flopped onto the cement, by which time Lenny, wide-eyed, wild-eyed, was charging at me like a bull. When he was almost on me, I swung my leg around and let his ugly face taste the gum sole. He staggered back, spitting teeth like bloody Chiclets, and then I shoved my left forearm into what little neck he had and he started coughing and gargling the foamy blood in his mouth. To one side, Turk was getting up, and I grabbed onto him by the tie and a fistful of too-tight suit and flung him into Lenny, sending them both down in a pile. I let them wrestle for a few seconds, catching my breath, then went over and started kicking the shit out of them. Muscles or not, they had ribs and they hadn’t been in the ring for a while, so their stomachs had some flab going, and I kicked them there, too, just till they puked all over each other. Somehow they managed to get to their feet, so I got out the .45 and let them see where bullets blossom. That froze them, and I slapped them with the side of the barrel, in one swift hard continuous move, like Moe slapping Larry and Curly in one hilarious swing, only seeing those guys tumble to the cement unconscious was a hell of a lot funnier.
The cab had pulled up by now, and the cabbie was looking out at the two fallen, bleeding, vomit-spattered human wrecks like he was having an hallucination. He was a mick who’d been around, probably in his fifties, and looked like he was about to take off, when I waved at him with the .45, not meaning to threaten him exactly. The gun just happened to be there.
“Give me a hand with these clowns,” I said.
Leaving the cab running, he came around and helped me lug the two bouncers, one at a time, into his backseat. It was like hauling beef carcasses at a slaughter house. They filled that back nicely, sprawled on top of each other like teenagers at Lover’s Lane.
The cabbie was breathing hard. “God, they smell.”
“Well, they’re covered in puke.”
“What do you want me to do with them?”
I got in my pocket and fished out some dough. “What do you think? Take ’em to the nearest emergency room.”
He had the expression of a guy who couldn’t decide whether to shit or go blind, but when I gave him the fifty, he saw that just fine.
As he rolled off, I smoothed myself out—neither one of the slobs had laid a glove on me—and then I went back inside the lounge and wove through the tables and chairs over to Joey Pep’s table. He was goggling at me with his tongue showing, like I was a naked babe in a window.
I sat down. “Where were we?”
A guy like Joey Pep has seen a lot of things. Such people don’t impress easily at all. But right now he seemed to be.
“Damnit, Hammer—where are Turk and Lenny?”
“On their way to the hospital. That cab came in handy.”
He didn’t know what to say. His hands were shaking and the cigarette had fallen out of his mouth onto the floor.
I patted his shoulder and grinned in his face. “Joey, ease up. Don’t you know those wrestlers need a script to pull anything off? Me, I like to improvise.”
“What… what kind of shape are they in?”
“Serious but stable, I’d say.” I shifted in my chair. “Joey, here’s the thing. Don’t go hiring ex-wrestlers. Get guys who are wrestling now, and haven’t gone to fat yet.”
The redheaded waitress came over to see if we needed anything. I asked for another Four Roses and ginger, and Pepitone another bourbon.
“So, anyway, Leif Borensen,” I said, sitting back.
He was lighting up a cigarette, hands steadier but not entirely recovered. “Yeah, he was ours, for a long time. What about it?”
“Had Leif broken loose from you boys, to pursue his Broadway producer ambition? Was he going straight, I mean?”
The little mobster shook his head, sighing smoke. “No, that was strictly an ego deal. But he was staying in the movie business, maybe expanding if he got a Broadway hit he could get a film out of. Come on, Hammer, you know we don’t let people out till they hit retirement age.”
Retirement age tended to be however old you were when you wound up in the trunk of a stolen car with your throat slashed and your nuts in your mouth. Gold watch not included.
I said, “So Borensen was still your guy?”
“Still our guy.”
“Which is why he came to you, a few months ago, to get put in touch with a professional who could remove a problem he had. A problem called Martin Foster. His prospective father-in-law, no less.”
Pepitone took smoke in and let it out. Quietly he said, “When you’re in business with somebody, you do them favors. We had nothing against Foster and had nothing to do wit
h his removal, either. Sometimes these business associates ask for a… referral. You know, like a doctor.”
“And Borensen wanted a specialist.”
He nodded, once. “He wanted a specialist.”
“This is somebody you’ve used.”
“I don’t see that that’s pertinent to your line of inquiry.”
“Maybe not.”
The redhead brought our drinks. I sipped mine. Pepitone sipped his.
I asked, “If Borensen had access to a ‘specialist,’ why did he pull that hit-and-run kill himself?”
He laughed and smoke came out of his nose, like a dragon. “For a stupid reason. A very stupid damn reason.”
“Which was?”
He sighed. No smoke this time. “The specialist I refer to is very expensive. You don’t go to a specialist for just any operation, right? When it’s something really serious, you go to the best. And the best is who I sent Borensen to. And that was pricey.”
“Twenty-five grand.”
That I knew this surprised him, and his nostrils flared, like a horse rearing. “You do get around, Hammer. You’ve always had a goddamn nose. Yes. You have the figure exactly right.”
I sat forward. “Are you saying Borensen ran down Dick Blazen himself because he was too cheap to have it done?”
He gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “Draw your own conclusions. Certainly he could have afforded another twenty-five. But some of the richest people on the planet are the tightest damn wads around. After the fact, I told him so. Said when you’re dealing in matters like this, you can’t treat it like one of your goddamn B-movies where you pinch every goddamn penny.” He shrugged. “Of course, our friend learned his lesson, when he came to the rather obvious conclusion that running some prick down can leave witnesses.”
“You mean, when he decided to have me killed, he gave up do-it-yourself, and went back to the specialist, and paid the freight.”
He gave me a slow-motion shrug. “I wouldn’t know, Hammer. I wasn’t part of it. I just made the original referral.”
I grinned at him. “You must be wishing you hadn’t, about now. Because your specialist is getting way out of hand, Joey. He killed Borensen and—what you may not know since it was withheld from the papers—he staged it as a suicide that exactly mirrored the Foster one, right down to the specific type of rod.”
“What? Why the hell would he do that?”
“Because your specialist has a screw loose. He wanted to tell me and the cops to go screw ourselves. He wanted to have a big old belly laugh on us.”
He reached for the glass of bourbon and finished it.
Then he said: “To be honest with you, Hammer… we decided to drop our… specialist… when we saw that he was going after you, in such a reckless, foolhardy manner. Sending second-raters to take you on, instead of tending to business himself. No, we’re done with him.”
“Would you like to know why he did that?”
“Why, do you?”
“Oh yeah.”
I told the Bonetti capo about the late-night phone call, and the killer’s desire to challenge me, to take me on. To see which of us was the real killer among killers.
“He’s gone off the deep end,” Pepitone said, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch is screwier than an outhouse rat.”
“Doesn’t that worry you, Joey? This loose cannon knows where the bodies are buried, because he buried them… for you.”
Pepitone waved that off with a gold-ring-laden hand. “Oh, he won’t talk. That’s not a problem. Anyway, he’ll be out of the picture soon.”
“Because you’re removing his ass from Planet Earth?”
His smile was sly. “No. Something’s doing it for us.”
Not somebody—something.
I lighted up a smoke and smiled around it, as I got it going. “You wouldn’t be referring to Phasger’s Syndrome, would you?”
He grunted a laugh. “Damnit, Hammer. You have a nose. You do have a nose. Where… how… did you…? Hell with it. I don’t care. As I get it, the specialist’s maybe two weeks away from that disease kicking in and blotting him out, nice and slow. He thinks he’s a killer? That shit has it all over him.”
“He wants to shoot it out with me first.”
“Some advice, Hammer? Don’t do it. Don’t go looking for him. If you kill him, you’ll be doing him a favor. Wouldn’t you rather have the bastard suffer? I would.”
“So if I asked you for his name, or his address, you wouldn’t give it?”
“You’d have to haul me off and beat it out of me. And you could do that. We both know you could. But then you’d have a real problem, bigger than this asshole. You’d have to take on the Bonetti family, all their soldiers, all their guns. Is it worth it, just to have the pleasure of shooting this killer in the guts? You need to weigh the thing in your mind, Hammer. A sadistic prick like you should want to let that foul disease have him.”
He had a point.
“Or maybe he’ll track you down,” he said with a shrug. “If so, maybe you’ll kill his ass.”
“Or he’ll kill mine.”
He sneer-grinned, blew out smoke. “Either way, it’s a winner from where I’m sitting… Stay as long as you like, Hammer. Run a tab on the house. Take that pretty girl out on the dance floor. I’ll have those long-haired dipshits play a slow tune, so an old warrior like you can keep up.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Indian summer had been replaced by a damp chill under a sky gone as gray as wet newspaper. A squad car was parked in the cobblestone street, half on the sidewalk, but still leaving barely enough room for the cab to pass after it dropped me. I saw Pat’s unmarked car just down the block. Took a real detective to find a parking space on this street before nine a.m.
His call had come in just after eight. I was already up and showered and shaved, sitting in the kitchenette in my underwear, eating the eggs and bacon I’d cooked up, drinking the coffee I’d brewed, as I read the News. Slow news day—neither the killer nor myself had killed anybody.
“Need to see you now,” the Captain of Homicide said. Nothing friendly in his voice, but nothing unfriendly either. Strictly business.
“At your office?”
“No,” he said, and gave me an address that I recognized at once. A chill worse than the one waiting outside for me crawled up my back like a stampede of spiders.
“Tell me,” I said.
“No. You come see for yourself. I want you here ASAP, Mike.”
“Okay,” I said.
Well, now I was here. In front of the white-washed building with the green shutters and black ironwork. The two cops on the sidewalk were in rain slickers, ready for what was coming. I was in my trenchcoat and hat, but not ready for what waited for me up a flight of stairs. The cops were expecting me and waved me inside, and I went up.
The kid across the shared landing, Shack, in T-shirt and jeans, was sitting against the closed door of his own apartment with his legs hugged to himself, his head with its nest of curls angled down. He was sobbing, the tears making melting-wax trails on his bony face. He was curled up, as if trying to retreat inside himself, his position nearly fetal. He didn’t seem to notice me.
A veteran harness bull stood guard next to the door opposite. He nodded and jerked his head for me to go on in. The door was ajar.
Pat met me, but left room to see past him. When I’d had a look, he held up the MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS business card and said, “Tell me why she had this, Mike.”
I brushed by him and went over to the little work area on the braided rug. The lab boys weren’t here yet, so she was all alone, just her and all those books surrounding her. In an oversize man’s T-shirt turned into a petite girl’s mini-length sleep apparel, she was seated Indian-style on the pillow and slumped onto the sawed-off table, head next to the typewriter, a small black powder-burned entry wound in her right temple. No exit wound visible, her head obviously resting on it.
Pat materialized next to me. “Bul
let went in one temple and out the other. Ninety-degree angle again.”
By the open fingers of her right hand, its palm up, was a .22 Smith and Wesson Escort.
Bitterly, Pat said, “Does he get a discount, you think, buying so many of the goddamn things?”
I wanted to drop down there and take her into my arms and stroke her hair and soothe her, there there, there there, but it wouldn’t do her any good, would it? The only thing I could do for her now was to stop the madman who’d done this evil thing, and much as I would have liked him to suffer the months of agony of the disease that was eating him and turning him ever more insane, I knew that his end had to come soon, very soon, before he took any more lives in what was clearly a psycho’s game, now.
But silently I promised this girl something, this sweet smart kid with brains deserving of so much more than a bullet, who’d had all of her life ahead of her when I last saw her, only neither of us knew that span could be measured in hours. Marcy Bloom would never get the chance to really bloom, would she? So I promised her he would suffer, and that it wouldn’t be quick.
We looked down at the girl, so young, so dead.
My lips were back over my teeth but it wasn’t really a smile. “He’s sticking it in our ass, Pat. Telling us to go screw ourselves royal. The Borensen kill might have passed for somebody really blotting himself out, the similarities between his death and Foster’s just coincidental, or maybe an admission of guilt by Leif that he murdered his future father-in-law. But this time, the killer’s staged a suicide for no reason other than to tell us it isn’t a suicide.”
“What this is,” Pat said, “is a signature.”
“Oh yeah. He signed this one all right, autographed the goddamn thing, and he’s somewhere laughing himself silly at us. The kind of laughter you don’t hear outside a madhouse.”
Pat was nodding. “So he’s gone way over the edge, our hitman’s hitman. Gone from professional to amateur.”
“That’s one way to look at it. But he’s a kill-crazy amateur with cool professional skills. That makes him all kinds of dangerous.”
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