Hard-core Murder

by Paul Kenyon

  Penelope backed away from the door. She found her evening bag in the living room and signaled Inga with the microminiaturized transmitter built into its clasp and metal spine. There was a woman's coat in the hall closet to hide her bloodied back and disheveled costume. She scrubbed at her face with a wet tissue from her bag.

  The elevator was out of order. She walked down fifteen flights. The Syn's clean-up squad was going to have to do something about the bodies the elevator contained and the corpses on the third-floor landing. And something about silencing the doorman, the security guard and the elderly man with the Scottie.

  By the time she walked out the lobby door, Inga was parked at the curb. She climbed into the front passenger seat of the silver Rolls Royce, and Inga pulled smoothly away into traffic.

  "Drive once around the block and park where we can see the entrance of the building," the Baroness said.

  She brushed her hair while she waited, and cleaned most of the blood off with a wet towel from the bar in the back seat. It wasn't a long wait. Before a half hour passed, the trucks and the workmen had started to arrive. They marched into the lobby of the apartment building, short wide men in painters' coveralls carrying buckets, two uniformed men from an elevator repair service, a quartet of moving men who began to carry large theatrical trunks inside from a van.

  "I've seen enough," the Baroness said. "Get going."

  "Where?" Inga said.

  "The office. Get a signal off to Key. I want him there when we arrive."

  The Rolls Royce surged into motion. Inga inclined her head, her eyes on traffic. "What's going on, Baroness?"

  "War," the Baroness said.

  * * *

  John Farnsworth said: "The hoods who raided your party are from The Organization. Familiarly known as the Org. They've been competing with the Syn for control of the pornographic film racket. Up until now there's been only minor bloodshed. But it looks as if they couldn't resist the chance to hijack some of the choicer merchandise."

  They were sitting in Farnsworth's office at the New York headquarters of International Models, Inc. The big computer CRT display that was disguised to look like a built-in television screen was aglow with a closely spaced readout.

  "Can we be sure, John?" the Baroness said. She sat cross-legged on a leather couch, wearing nothing but a white terrycloth robe. She'd scrubbed off the blood and gunpowder in the little shower in her private office. She felt tingling and alive, despite a night with no sleep.

  He gestured toward the screen. "That's what the IBM 7090 at Fort Meade says. I fed it everything you remembered — the names of the button men you overheard, descriptions, M.O., everything."

  "Why would the Org go to such lengths to steal one print of a film?" Inga said. She was wearing a gay wraparound skirt over a body-stocking.

  Farnsworth said: "Because they can make copies from it."

  "Things are a little out of control, aren't they, John?" the Baroness said. "The Syn still has the original negative. And now the Org has a print that they can duplicate."

  Farnsworth nodded grimly. "The Org is a younger outfit than the Syn. They're less conservative. They'll have prints of that film in every grind house in the country if we don't stop them fast."

  "John." The Baroness leaned forward. "What does the computer say about the odds on Mitchell Lloyd being a finger man for the Org?"

  "You think he was the one who informed them where and when this… special showing was going to be held?"

  "He's the likeliest suspect. He was there. When he saw just how special the film was, he suddenly excused himself to make a phone call. And he certainly seemed to know a lot about how the various mobs operate. He got the clean-up squad over there in double time."

  Farnsworth took out a gold pocket knife on the end of a key chain. One of the blades looked like a Phillips screwdriver, except that there were five tiny flanges instead of four. He used it to turn a screw on the base of his telephone. No one fooling around with a standard or Phillips screwdriver would have turned the screw. The telephone no longer functioned as a telephone. It was now a remote terminal for the IBM 7090 computer at Fort Meade.

  Deftly he punched a query into the phone's buttons. He had barely finished when the television screen flickered. Mitchell Lloyd's features appeared on the screen in both profile and full face. It was an old police record. The white letters of a computer printout began to move across the screen beneath the picture.

  "It's certainly possible," Farnsworth said slowly. "Lloyd grew up in a tough neighborhood. He's been in trouble with the law more than once. There are rumors that the Syn gave his early career a push or two. Never proved, of course. He's had some questionable friends and associates. Still has. And in the last few years, he seems to have moved away from some of those connections. That could mean that he's gone over to the Org. A man like Lloyd could be very valuable to them."

  The Baroness laughed bitterly. "Valuable? I suppose so. If giving them a line on that film was valuable."

  Farnsworth looked at her shrewdly. "Penny, if you're developing any personal feelings about this…"

  "Terence is dead," she said flatly. "I don't know for certain who's responsible. But I intend to find out."

  "Your first priority is to get that print back from the Org."

  "I know that!" she said sharply. Her voice became bland again. "We're going to recover it tonight."

  He looked startled. "Tonight?"

  She laughed. "What's left of it. Only a couple of hours until dawn. John, do you still have the city map programmed into your little computer?"

  "Of course."

  The Baroness got off the couch and walked around behind Farnsworth's chair. She leaned over him and punched a code into the telephone. A map of the five boroughs was suddenly etched on the television screen.

  "Inga," she said without turning her head, "I tagged the film case with the bug that had an alternating frequency of fifty-six, two hundred, and seventy megacycles, in that order. A quarter-second beep on each, fifteen seconds apart. Will you tell our own computer, back at the apartment?"

  A look of delight came over Farnsworth's face. "That's Channels Two, Eleven and Four."

  "We won't interfere with anyone's television-watching, John. Not with a quarter-second blip every forty-five seconds."

  Inga picked up the telephone extension by her chair. She dialed the Baroness' number. The recording device informed whoever it was who was calling that they had fifteen seconds to leave a message. Inga put a little silver whistle to her lips and blew a series of dots and dashes. It wasn't Morse. It was a digital code.

  It took the computer in the Baroness' apartment a couple of minutes to sort out the random noise on the three frequencies, do the necessary averaging and get a reading. A yellow dot appeared on the map on Farnsworth's tube. It was on Central Park, at the apartment location. A yellow line grew in a southwesterly direction from the dot.

  "Now we'll triangulate," the Baroness said. "John, will you feed the information into the loop on your roof?"

  Farnsworth wiped his terminal clean of everything except the map and punched a digital code into the "O" button. After a few minutes another yellow line grew on the screen. The two lines intersected at midtown on the West Side.

  "The film district," the Baroness said. "Let's bring that up."

  She leaned over him again, the touch of her breast making him look uncomfortable. She punched the telephone buttons. The screen zoomed in on Manhattan, then an enlargement of the midtown district where the yellow lines crossed. The computer fished a street address out of its memory and flashed it on the screen. An approximate altitude reading followed.

  "Seventh or eighth floor," the Baroness said. "That's close enough."

  Inga said, "Skytop and Eric are in California. And we can't ask Paul and Yvette to break their cover. But if we can wait one more night we could have Dan fly up from Washington."

  "We can't wait," the Baroness said. "By tomorrow night there might be ano
ther internegative of the film. It'll have to be the two of us, Tommy Sumo and Fiona — if you can get her out of bed."

  Farnsworth got up. He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his face. "Four of you. That's not much manpower for a commando raid."

  "We'll do our best, John."

  "How about me?"

  A slow grin spread over her face. "You don't have to. In fact, you're not supposed to."

  He reached into his desk drawer and took out an automatic. He pulled back the slide and pushed a cartridge into the chamber. He stuck the gun through the waistband of his trousers and buttoned his expensive jacket over it.

  "If you won't tell the director, I certainly won't," he said.

  She took his hands. "Thanks, John," she said.

  "Nonsense!" he said brusquely. "My head's on the chopping block as well as yours. Besides, it'll be good to get on the operations side again. I was beginning to feel rusty."

  Inga was busy with the little matchbox-size transceiver. It fed through Farnsworth's big loop. "Tommy acknowledges," she said. "I'm still trying to raise Fiona."

  "Keep trying," the Baroness said. She moved to the door, lithe as a cheetah. The terrycloth robe was askew, showing the smooth ripple of abdominal muscles, the bunched power of her calves. Her eyes burned with green fire. "I'll be in my office, changing. We hit them in an hour."

  Chapter 7

  It was one of the dank streets sloping down to the Hudson, smelling of garbage and diesel fumes. Here and there, taller buildings of brick or granite rose like tombstones out of the tenements. The sidewalk was wet and deserted, except for the starved cats at the garbage cans and a bum sleeping it off in a doorway.

  "That's the one," the Baroness said.

  They crouched in the darkness of the panel truck, studying the entrance through the tinted side window. The sign on the truck said they were a twenty-four-hour plumbing service.

  It was a ten-story building of yellow brick with hardly any windows. You went down four steps to a lobby door that was deeply set between concrete piers. The door itself was narrow for a commercial building, with smoky glass and iron bars. The letters chiseled into the concrete overhang said: The ProFilm Building.

  "That's a bad place to get into," Farnsworth said, crouching beside her. "Like a German bunker. Blind entrance. Probably corners to turn before you can reach the stairs and elevators. Lord knows what in the way of closed circuit television, photoelectric alarms and the rest of it. Get past the door and you're in a trap."

  Penelope nodded. Farnsworth ought to know. He'd penetrated any number of high-security Nazi installations during his years with the OSS.

  "The front is out, then," she said.

  She was wearing a black body-stocking with a cotton print wraparound skirt that could pass, in the dark, for a street costume if it had to. Under the body-stocking was a Spandex bra that held her comfortably without hindering freedom of movement. The Bernardelli VB was in a thigh holster under the skirt. Her long black hair was bound in a tight chignon. The equipment and plastique were in a leather shoulder bag with a big clasp.

  Inga and Fiona, kneeling beside her on the metal truck bed, were dressed similarly. Inga's hair was braided and coiled into two loops. Fiona's red tresses were pinned up under a kerchief. The three of them might have been dance students on their way home after a late night.

  Farnsworth's elegant tailoring had been replaced by a black ribbed turtleneck, black chinos, combat boots. His well-bred fiftyish face wore an expression of stern concentration. He looked hard and fit, and moved like a man twenty years younger. The lightweight .30 caliber automatic carbine with the telescoping wire stock was hidden in the New York Times folded under his arm.

  Sumo was in the driver's seat up front. His slim body was enveloped in baggy coveralls. What looked like plumber's tools protruded from the various pockets. Without turning his head, he said: "Someone coming out."

  The door opened. A sallow youth in a leather jacket emerged, dangling a stick of fiberboard boxes tied together by twine.

  "A messenger," Farnsworth said. "This place probably does a lot of legitimate work as a blind. They work twenty-four hours a day, like any other film lab."

  "Follow him, Tommy," Penelope said.

  The van crept forward. "What are you going to do?" Fiona asked.

  Penelope said, "Mug him."

  She waited until the messenger turned the corner, then vaulted through the rear door while the van was still moving. At four in the morning, vehicle traffic was light, and there were no pedestrians in the immediate vicinity. She came up behind the youth in the leather jacket and slipped an arm around him. His body stiffened in alarm, but when he turned his head and saw that it was a beautiful girl, he smiled. "Quanto, muchacha?" he said.

  She smiled back at him. "No deseo alguno dinero," she said. She slid her hand up his ribs to his neck and stroked his hairy nape. Two strong fingers pressed firmly into the carotid artery. His legs went rubbery. She walked him over to the nearest doorway, his weight on her arm and hip. Two passing sailors looked at them jealously. She took the film boxes from him and eased him down to a sitting position. "Sorry, muchacho," she said. She put a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill into his limp hand.

  A dazed awareness had started to return to him. He stared at the hundred-dollar bill. "Man!" he said in English. "That's the first time I ever was mugged, they gave money to me!"

  She caught up with the van at the next corner and got back inside. She handed the film boxes to Farnsworth.

  "We'll need a diversion, John," she said.

  He unstrapped the top box and took out the can of film. He pulled out a foot of leader and squinted at it with the help of a penlight. "Television commercials," he said. "We can send it over to the agency in the morning — if we're still alive." He filled the empty can with plastic explosive and planted a radio-triggered detonator in the doughy substance. A smoke bomb, also with a radio fuse, went into the second can. Thermite went into the third. "Choice of options," he grunted.

  "Wait for my signal," she said.

  He nodded. "Let me off at the next corner, Tommy," he said. He got out of the van and walked away with the stack of film boxes under one arm, the New York Times under the other.

  Sumo turned the corner and parked the van in front of a deteriorating row of brownstones. A yellow brick tower rose behind them — the back side of the ProFilm Building.

  The three girls got out and waited on the sidewalk while Sumo locked the van. A couple of neighborhood punks sitting on a stoop across the street made obscene sucking sounds at them, then sank back into lethargy. The four of them climbed the stairs of the nearest tenement, pushing past an addict who lolled, nodding, on the top step.

  The hallway was lit by a dim yellow bulb. It smelled of urine. A used condom lay limply on the floor. Penelope led the way up the rickety stairs.

  At the first landing, a dog barked at them from behind a closed door. There was the sound of someone at the peephole. A lock clicked, and there was the rattle of a chain being fastened. The stairs creaked as they continued to climb.

  They heard moans before they got to the third floor. It was a girl's voice, sounding in pain. Penelope motioned the others back and crept upward, her hand on the hard shape of the automatic under her skirt. At the third floor landing, a girl was bent backward against the bannister, her legs braced apart and a boy standing between them, his hips moving. The girl was holding the bottom of her skirt up under her chin. There was a look of dewy ecstasy on her face. The boy looked around and gave Penelope an annoyed glance, then turned back to continue his pumping. Penelope walked past them, the others following.

  The door to the roof was locked. Penelope took a step backward and delivered a sharp kick. The door flew open.

  They moved out onto the roof. The girls removed their skirts and left them on the tarpaper. Sumo took off the coveralls and dropped them with a clank. He was wearing tight black trousers and top in a stretch fabric and black sneakers.

/>   Penelope ran crouching to the edge of the roof and surveyed the situation. They were separated from the yellow brick building by an empty, rubble-filled lot that gave a clear field of fire. There was a heavily barred back door opening onto the lot. Just above it, on either side, were two narrow slits that probably functioned as observation posts and gun ports. She hoped that whoever was stationed there was looking down, not up.

  Otherwise there was nothing. The brick cliff rose a hundred feet, bare and windowless.

  "Stay behind the chimneys, children," she said. "We'll do it one at a time."

  She delved into the leather shoulder bag and drew out the Spyder. It resembled a flat, oversized pistol made of shiny aluminum. The hand grip had a textured rubber covering to prevent slipping.

  She took aim at the brick coping at the top of the wall. It was about fifty feet higher than the roof she was standing on and about sixty feet across the way. The geometry was about right for what she was going to have to do.

  Just barely right.

  She pressed the trigger. The Spyder spat out eighty feet of its gossamer line. The explosive piton at the tip bit into the brick coping and spread its metal petals. She tugged on the Spyder to make sure the line was secure.

  The line was utterly invisible in the darkness. It was as fine as sewing thread, but the synthetic polymer it was made of gave it a tensile strength of over a thousand pounds.

  Hanging onto the pistol grip with two hands, she stepped off the roof. She swooped in a great arc over the rubble-strewn lot, as black as the night around her. The soles of her sneakers thudded into the brick wall. She hung there, listening. She was about twenty feet above the ground, directly over the barred door.

  "Hey, Vinnie, you hear something?" a voice said below her.

  "I'll take a look," said a second voice.

  Something metallic glinted below her. Someone was resting a gun barrel on the observation slit's sill as he peered outside.