One of the loungers spotted me and yelled, “Here he is!”
A half dozen guys came running, dragging scratch pads from their pockets. Finally the reporters had caught up to me, shouting questions.
“What have you got, Mike?”
“How about the lowdown?”
“Michael, these city hicks are clammed up tight!”
I spoke to the knot of men around me. “Nothing much, fellers. Sorry, but I haven’t really gone to work yet. Still in the prelim phase.”
“Cut it, Mike, it’s all over town that somebody took a shot at you!”
That stopped me cold.
“Where did you get that from?” I asked them.
A little chunky guy from the Chronicle spoke up. “It’s just a rumor around town, but I got in to see the local doctor...”
Had Doc Moody sold me out?
“...and he told me about that potshot, Mike, and I told the boys, but how the town folk found out, hell, that’s no fault of mine. That good-looking secretary of yours told us to pipe down until you came back, and we did. So what’s the story?”
I thought it over.
Dr. Moody had not sold me out—instead, he’d pulled a smart one. Let the reporters get an idea of what had happened and there would be no tricks played on Poochie by the local bully boys. A swell move on the doc’s part, gaining my full approval after the fact.
I cooperated with the bunch of newshounds by telling them what happened.
“Mike Hammer,” somebody said, laughing, “saved by a beachcomber! We should stop the presses.”
Another asked, “Any idea who shot at you? Was it the same guy who murdered Sharron?”
“Well, as it happens,” I said, “I do know who tried to gun me down.”
Anyway, I figured I did, and saying this might smoke Dekkert out. He’d either make another try for me or jump down my throat. He still was the law in this town, after all. Either way, I’d have some real fun.
With their rapt attention, I continued: “It’s very possible that Sharron Wesley’s killer did try to take me out. Perhaps even probable. This is a small town, where there hasn’t been a killing in years. How likely is it that two murderers would be at large?”
“So it’s one perpetrator?”
“I’m not sure... yet.”
I let the significance of that linger. The reporters exchanged glances.
“Can we quote you on this, Mike?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
I went on and told them of Sharron Wesley’s gambling setup and the way the town was operated, without mentioning the mayor by name. They could fill that in themselves. I also omitted Poochie getting beaten by Dekkert and his goon squad. I didn’t have to mention Dekkert’s checkered past with the New York PD because every one of these newsmen had covered that story years ago.
What I gave them seemed to satisfy them, and they closed their pads.
A little guy from the News piped up: “Hey, Mike. Think there’s any use us sticking around any longer?”
“Why not? Before I’m through someone’s sure to get shot up.”
Several of them laughed at that. Several others didn’t—they knew I meant it.
“Guess you’re right,” the little guy said, sticking his pad in his sportcoat pocket. “Always could depend on getting a good story out of your exploits. Can’t print all the details sometimes, but every damn time a darn good story. Okay, I’m sticking. What about you guys?”
The others grinned and nodded. They were happy as long as there was a bar handy and an expense sheet to pad. If a story panned out, great. If not, so what? They still had a paid vacation far enough away from town that the city editor couldn’t ride their tails.
When they drifted away, I picked up the house phone and asked for Velda’s room. The operator rang a few times, but no one answered. I thanked her, hung up and took the stairs to my room. There was no note under the door for me, so I took the chance that she was off eating or still snooping around.
I laid out a suit for tomorrow and was switching my junk to the other pockets when I pulled out that feminine handkerchief from the side coat pocket. It still smelled of the musky perfume. I sniffed it and put it with the rest of my stuff. I had almost forgotten that little item.
The phone rang and it was Velda. “Mike, when did you get back?”
“Little while ago. I gave an impromptu press conference for the boys in the lobby, then tried your number but got no answer.”
“I was down the hall taking a shower. Come on over.”
I did, and she answered the door in a white terrycloth robe that came almost to the floor. Her hair was damp and she toweled it as she sat on the edge of the bed and I pulled up a chair so we could talk.
I filled her in on my day, and when I got to the part where I’d got into it at the office with the two intruders, she came over and checked the back of my head. She smelled great. It was just soap, but, man...
“You’ll live,” she said, and sat back down on the edge of her bed. “What then?”
I told her about my visit to Louie’s, and decided the better part of valor would be to omit going to Marion’s crib. Moving the gist of that conversation to Louie’s place wouldn’t hurt anything, and there was no need to get Velda’s nose out of joint. The Ruston girl parading herself for me, and yours truly pretending not to be interested, would not seem the harmless fun it had been. Not to a secretary who gave me hell for two weeks after spotting one lousy lipstick smear on my shirt collar.
“So Sharron’s silent partner,” Velda said, “is some big gambler from the city. It wouldn’t be this Miami Bull character you mentioned, or...?”
“Bill Evans. No—wrong city. They’re Chicago boys.”
“I hear there’s crime in Chicago.”
“Yeah, I heard that rumor, too, but this will be some big boy from New York, and I may try to track down Evans and Miami Bull to lead me to him. They won’t have anything to lose.”
“Our friend Dekkert has ties in the city.”
“That fact is not lost on me, honey. How was your day?”
She put her hands on the terrycloth over her knees and rocked like a little girl. “Quiet. You’d almost think I was on vacation.”
“Ouch.”
“I had a few conversations with locals, but most of the stores weren’t open. Either closed on Sunday or not open for the season yet.”
“No surprise.”
She went back to toweling her hair. “I spoke to several reporters, but I knew more than they did. They got wind of Doc Moody, but I handled that.”
“So that was your fine hand at work? Good job all around. What about Poochie? Did you see him today?”
She smiled tightly. There was frustration in it.
“I did,” she said. “But the doc is mostly keeping him sedated. I finally spoke with the little guy this evening, but you’re not going to like what I found.”
“He didn’t finger Dekkert as the shooter in the window?”
She shook her head. “At first he said he didn’t remember. Then when I pressed, he said he just saw the gun and that a man was holding it. But it was too dark outside for him to see who was aiming the gun.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you can get more out of him. I pressed as hard and as long as the doctor would allow. Obviously, the poor soul may just be scared, Mike. Dekkert almost killed him the other night. And getting beaten to death is a hard way to go.”
I nodded. “Say, you look tan. Don’t tell me you actually got some sun?”
“I did!” She hopped off the bed. “Want to see?”
“Easy there, kitten...”
“Oh, don’t be a prude. You’re a big boy.”
Getting bigger all the time.
“I have a bra and panties on,” she said, “you coward. My bikini is skimpier, you know.”
She opened the terrycloth robe. It was like curtains parting on a masterpiece of sculpture devoted to the fem
ale form. She had a nice tan going, all right, nicely dark against the underthings. And I had seen her in a two-piece suit before, but the psychology of seeing her that way, presenting herself to me with a proud smile, letting me admire the jut of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the hint of dark curls behind the whiteness of panty, the long, long legs, not the pipe cleaner legs of a model but the fully fleshed, muscular legs of a vibrant woman.
“What do you think?” she said, as she closed the robe and cinched the terrycloth belt.
“I think,” I said, managing to get to my feet, “that it’s been a long day, and I could use a shower myself. A cold one.”
She laughed and showed me to the door.
“See you in the morning,” she said.
“See you, kitten.”
You’re here to find a killer, buster, a voice in my head said.
“If these dames don’t kill me first,” I muttered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The two naked bodies were strung by their heels from a rafter in the barn, their fingertips almost brushing the warped planked flooring. Dried blood in frightful trails from countless wounds made vertical stripes down twin flesh in horrible design. The smears of blood beneath had clotted, merging into each other like an obscene Rorschach test ink-blot pattern peppered with blow flies trying to feast there.
The dignity of death was missing. The skillful surgery that had been performed on each, slowly and intricately, had wiped all that out. It was more like taking a look inside a slaughterhouse on a hot day.
Or maybe that was just my opinion because I had seen this kind of horror before and could be almost objective about it now. Not quite, but almost. The one thing that stood out was that, at one time, those two girls had been pretty.
I handed the grisly photograph back to Dave Miles.
“I remember reading about it,” I said. “Early this spring, right? But this doesn’t really resemble the Sharron Wesley killing.”
Dave had called me early at the Sidon Arms—seven o’clock. He had seen the write-ups in both the local and New York papers, saw my name, and called me. He said to come right out to his Quonset hut office at the brick manufacturing works near Wilcox. I pushed a note under Velda’s door, grabbed a napkin-wrapped cruller and paper cup of coffee at Big Steve’s, and took the heap for a thirty-mile spin.
“The common thread,” Dave said, “is beautiful nude women. Dead ones.”
“That’s typical fare on a sex killer’s menu.”
“Mike, my gut tells me it’s the same sick bastard. And there’s another kill, one none of the police authorities have ever connected up.”
One time Dave had been a big man, physically and professionally, an inspector in the New York PD, and Pat’s immediate superior.
But even as an inspector, Dave couldn’t stay off the street and two years ago he had gone in an apartment after a killer and a blast from the punk’s shotgun had taken off his lower leg, and he’d had to retire. He wound up as head of security at the brick-making plant that was Wilcox’s only industry besides tourism.
Now he sat behind his desk, looking slightly shrunken in an old suit, his plastic leg a disembodied thing propped against the windowsill behind him. A frown creased his face into a caricature of weariness and he shook his head.
“Oh, hell, Mike. Maybe you’re right to be skeptical. I just saw the write-ups in the papers this morning, and your name in the middle of it, and...”
I jammed a butt in my face and lit up. “Okay. So what’s this other kill?”
Some life came into his eyes and he leaned forward. “Six months ago a girl was strangled with her own nylon stocking out on a stretch of beach. Her clothes were gone. Never found. She lay there with the stocking that killed her still knotted around her throat.”
“Where was this?”
“Down a side road, about halfway between here and Sidon.”
He had my attention. Two strangulations. Two dead naked females, pretty ones.
“Whose case?” I asked.
“The Suffolk County Sheriff’s department.”
“What do you know about them?”
“They’re closer to real cops than the Sidon crowd, or our bunch here in Wilcox either. But it was months ago, and they weren’t able to run anything down.”
“Months ago when?”
“The strangled girl was early last fall, right after the season ended. You probably remember from the papers that the girls strung up in the barn were found on the other side of Wilcox. Just outside town but within the city limits.”
“Making it a Wilcox PD matter.”
“Yeah. Why, is that significant?”
I shrugged, blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “Maybe. If you have a sex fiend at large, you may just have a smart one. For the sake of argument, say he did kill the Wesley dame, too. That means in a fairly small area, he has managed to spread the killings out among three different jurisdictions—two small-town police forces and the sheriff’s department.”
“Can a maniac be that organized?”
“They never caught Jack the Ripper, did they? Look, what makes you tie it in? You’re not a cop, anymore. This has nothing to do with guarding a brick-making factory on the Island.”
Those hard pale blue eyes stared into my own and a grimace touched his mouth. “Because once you’re a cop, Mike, you never stop. Do I have to tell you? And I can smell it. These murders are connected.”
“Smells don’t hold up in court,” I said.
“But they sure can lead you to the rotten source though, can’t they?”
I chuckled dryly and had another drag on the Lucky. “I came to listen, Dave, and I’m almost interested. Make it fit. I don’t know the details.”
“They were women, they were young, they were pretty, now they’re dead. There’s a sex angle to each of them.”
“Sharron Wesley wasn’t all that young—she was in her late thirties. And she wasn’t molested.” Doc Moody’s autopsy had said as much.
“None of these victims were molested, and that’s a telling link. Stripping them and killing them, that’s the sex angle.”
Which meant it didn’t have to be a “he”—they made killers in both male and female models.
“There’s one difference,” I reminded him. I thumped the crime-scene photo on his desk. “These kids were tortured to death.”
Dave Miles grinned at me, a hard, nasty grin. “I’m disappointed in you, Mike. Don’t you see the similarity in the crime scenes?”
“Are you kidding? A barn? The beach? A body found draped on a stone horse in a park, a week after the killing? There’s no similarity at all.”
“Sure there is. Maybe you just haven’t rubbed the sleep out of your eyes.”
I had another look at the photo.
And it came to me: the murderer had arranged each crime scene with a dramatic flair designed to turn his victims into a sort of grotesque tableau.
“Those crime scenes,” Dave said, “are staged for effect. For maximum impact. Like they were posed for a shot in a sleazy true-crime magazine.”
I tossed the photo back on the desk. “Okay. You have a point. But this isn’t New York, Dave. Who did the autopsies on the Wilcox barn girls?”
“We have a competent coroner in Wilcox. He says the girls were slowly slashed to death. Death by a thousand cuts. Hung up for slaughter, with their ankles bound above them and the wrists roped, and the fiend took his sweet time. The dirt floor was caked with blood an inch thick.”
He was trying to get me going. Pushing every button he could. Why?
I stayed professional. “The two strangulations make a similar modus operandi, but this torture kill, it’s different. You’re throwing me a curve, buddy. What did the Wilcox police have to say?”
His grin seemed to tighten down. “That’s the kicker, Mike. We don’t really have any. The city force has nine men who are only employees and don’t do much more than tag cars or arrest an occasional drunk. Yes, there’s th
is factory here, but otherwise we’re as much a tourist town as Sidon.”
“So who makes up this lackluster force?”
“They’re all local men who get hired when there’s an opening, given a briefing, then issued a uniform, badge and gun and assigned a beat. Most of them are military returnees using it as a between-jobs bridge. Out here we have an elected constabulary system with three men patrolling for speeders.”
Could a thrill killer have selected this little part of the world to take advantage of the kind of half-assed policing that Sidon and Wilcox had to offer? If so, that was damn shrewd—here we were, in Manhattan’s backyard, but well away from the jurisdiction of the kind of trained scientific professionals represented by Captain Pat Chambers.
I muttered, “Big fish in a little pond...”
“What, Mike?”
I stabbed out the spent Lucky and got another one going. “How about the Suffolk sheriff’s office?”
“That’s the other kicker. Last November John Harris didn’t run for re-election. He was a damn good man... made Deputy Chief Inspector in New York before he came up here, but he was diabetic and couldn’t take it after two terms in office.”
“Yeah, I know John. You’re right. Good man.”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe he could have taken care of this thing, but he died a month back.”
“Hell. I hadn’t heard.”
“His deputy was the only other trained person around, but when Harris quit, so did the deputy—took a job someplace out west.”
“So who’s in now?”
“Oh, Fred Jackson, a nice enough guy, all right, real nice guy. He was elected by popular acclaim just because he was a real nice guy.”
“Great,” I said. “Just fine.”
“He was born here, went to college upstate, taught six-graders for a year, got drafted and picked up some shrapnel in the Pacific, became something of a local hero and inherited his old man’s dairy farm. Now he’s sheriff.”
“No good, huh?”
“A nice guy, but no cop, Mike. No cop at all.”
“And you smell something.”
“That’s right. The county sheriff’s office is right here in Wilcox. You could talk to Sheriff Jackson, if you think it’ll do any good.”
Lady, Go Die! Page 11