Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love

by Max Allan Collins

  “Not by me!”

  “By Tony, then.”

  Her chin quivered. “Not… not exactly. I don’t think I should say anything else. I think you should go.”

  “Not just yet. We have a few questions to get through, first. Let’s start with, have you ever been involved with the senator? I can get the truth out of him, if you don’t want to give it to me.”

  Her eyes were very wide now. “Involved… you mean involved? No! I’ve only spoken to him a few times. He doesn’t know I exist.”

  “Oh, he does now. So tell me if I’m mistaken about any of this. The senator and Ms. Long were playing hide the salami in his inner office and either the intercom had been left on, or you knew how to utilize it to record their fun and games. You replaced the cassette with a blank one from one of the secretary’s desk drawers and tucked the little audio love-fest in your pocket. But not, you say, for blackmail reasons?”

  She was looking at her lap, where her hands were folded now. She was shaking her head. “You’ll never believe me.”

  “Take a swing.”

  “I did it as a joke. A… a lark.”

  “Explain.”

  Her smile was a wrinkled thing. “Tony, he’s a… he’s a real character. He likes a good laugh. He’s… really into sex stuff.” She shook her head and smiled. “Hey, we’re into each other, okay? You got a problem with that?”

  “None. Sounds very healthy to me.”

  She sighed. Very big. “Well, I thought Tony would get a kick out of the tape. A charge out of it. I thought he’d think it was a real riot, hearing a big shot like Senator Winters getting it on with his secretary. I thought… oh hell. I could see us listening to that and getting all hot and… I can’t talk about this.”

  “So it was Tony who had the idea.”

  She nodded. “He listened to it and he didn’t react like I figured. Instead, he… he just started to pace around. He said, think how if we could get some real money, we could move into a decent place and finally get married. We’d really have something to build on.”

  Blackmail. Something to build on.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I… I went along. But it wasn’t about blackmailing the senator.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No! Tony said he knew just who to sell it to. Don’t ask me who that is, because I don’t know. I really don’t. But Tony, he’s a bartender, you know?”

  “A noble profession.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s good at it, and he’s had some really good jobs—it’s not just joints like Snooky’s and Moody’s. Worked some of the big hotels, when they needed additional help for parties or whatever. Some of those parties have important people at them. Businessmen. What do you call it, captains of industry? And big shot politicians.”

  “Like Senator Winters.”

  “Yeah, but not Senator Winters, too. Other people in that area, that field. Listen, Mr. Hammer—that’s really all I know.”

  I studied her. “Are you saying that Tony sold that tape already? Not to the senator, but to someone else?”

  “Yes! And that someone else must be the blackmailer you’re after!”

  I sat forward. “Listen, Erin—I’m in a position to protect you on this. I can even protect Tony. He doesn’t deserve it, but I can. All the senator wants is to stop this—to stop the blackmailer, and get that tape deep-sixed….”

  Somebody worked a key in the door.

  A big good-looking guy in a bomber jacket with a fur collar and jeans and motorcycle boots let himself in. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes were half-lidded, and his mouth had that Stallone looseness. Maybe twenty-five, he looked like he could bench-press a Buick.

  Erin flew to her feet.

  “Baby!” she said. “This is Mike Hammer! He’s here to help us out of this mess.”

  He shrugged, stepped inside, but left the door standing open. His voice was a thick baritone, like Elvis if he had no sense of humor. “What mess?”

  “Somebody’s blackmailing Senator Winters with that tape,” she said. “Mr. Hammer says if we’re honest with him, he’ll get us out of this thing.”

  He looked at me, dark eyes tight. “We wouldn’t have to pay the money back?”

  “If you sold that tape, and didn’t keep any copies,” I said, “you can swim in that money as far as I’m concerned. All we want is the name of who you sold it to.”

  He came slowly over to me. “You could keep the law off of us?”

  “Very good chance of that.”

  His frown was confused, no threat in it at all. “That doesn’t sound like ‘yes’.”

  I held one palm up. “I can see a situation where, if the cops got onto this, you might have to testify. But you’d likely get immunity.”

  “And you’ll pave the way for that?”

  “I will.”

  He nodded, then extended his hand for me to shake and, as I extended mine and leaned toward him, he brought that hand quickly back and turned it into a fist and slammed it into the side of my face.

  I didn’t go down, didn’t lose my balance, but my head swam— he was as big as me but much younger, and if he had kept at it, he might have got enough good ones in to put me down and out.

  Instead, he used those few seconds while I was stunned to bolt for the open door. He was halfway down the stairs before I made my way after him, and a guy my age should not have done what I did.

  But I did.

  I threw myself at him, threw myself down those stairs and tackled him, taking his ass down. Then I rode the bastard like a sled down those steps, each one banging him in the head and face. We wound up in a pile on the little landing, with only a few stairs left to go, and I got up and stepped over him and dragged him down a few more of those stairs, face-first, hauled him like a bag of laundry and tossed him in the entry way.

  The crone of a landlady in her torn, faded housedress was standing nearby now, screaming her head off. It sounded like an old-time siren, the kind you had to crank. Somehow I got the front door open and I dragged him some more, but by his fur collar now—going down those cement steps face-first might have killed him, and I wanted him alive.

  I tossed him onto the sidewalk and, catching my breath, I’ll be damned but if he didn’t tackle me and knock me back onto the sidewalk. He got on top of me, flailing at me with hard fists though without much power behind them, after the ride he’d taken.

  So I kneed him in the nuts and he crawled off of me and curled up in a fetal ball and yelled bloody murder and started crying. A bawling ball of flesh.

  Up on the front stoop, the old lady was screaming and now, next to her, the pretty Irish lass in a green satin robe was screaming, too.

  The only one not making noise was me.

  I was waiting till things quieted down so I could ask this son of a bitch a question.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was anything but a regular at 21, Midtown’s notoriously high-priced, celebrity-teeming bar/restaurant on West 52nd between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. On the other side of that famous iron gate, past the uniformed doorman and through the double entryway overseen by a row of white lawn jockeys, you could get duck-fat-fried hamburgers that cost as much as the club’s name and king-size drinks no stronger than a mule kicking you in the stomach.

  I’d been to the onetime speakeasy maybe four times in a lot of New York years. Apparently I still had enough local fame clinging to me to get into the bar without being shown back out the door. Or maybe the ex-governor of the state of New York who had said to meet him here for a late lunch had put in a good word.

  Former governor Harrison “Harry” Hughes had seemed as surprised by my call as I had been to hear his name uttered through the bloodied lips of Tony Licata.

  “Are you accusing me of blackmail, Mike?” the deep voice, sandpapered by age, had asked over the phone. I’d been calling from a booth on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, and he’d answered the call himself, not a secretary.

  “I don’t know if I’m accusing
you of anything, Governor,” I said. “Maybe you’re just a good citizen who learned of compromising material about a fellow Democrat, and paid the freight to get it off the market.”

  The pause may have seemed longer because of the three black young men who, in the midst of some kind of business transaction, were watching me suspiciously outside a nearby bar. People tell me I still look like a cop, even when I’m not flashing my P.I. badge to encourage that false assumption.

  Finally, the deep voice on the phone said, “I would prefer to discuss this with you in person.”

  Phone calls could be recorded, after all.

  “Fine,” I said. “Name the time and place.”

  Lunch and supper hours, 21 would be packed, bar and upstairs alike, but at around three p.m., the front section with its curved sixty-foot bar was decidedly underpopulated, a few well-dressed wheeler-dealers doing business there standing up (no stools provided). Most of the tables with their red-and-white checkered cloths, including those at the vast curving red leather button-tufted banquette, were empty, too. A couple of couples and a few tourists, who’d tipped their way in, were about it.

  Framed New Yorker cartoon originals spotted the walls in the richly masculine place with its dark walls and low lighting. The ceiling hung with toys—airplane and auto models, foot- and basket- and baseballs, mini-soda pop trucks and oil derricks and you name it, contributions from various executives of the firms the playthings represented. On display above and around the bar itself were flags, pistols, street signs, golden horseshoes and a hangman’s noose.

  The ex-governor sat at a table for two snugged by the bar, in the corner. He was waiting patiently, his right elbow on the table but not with his weight on it. The drink at his reach appeared, judging by its amber shade and orange peel, to be an Old-Fashioned.

  I paused at the bar. The white-haired, white-jacketed, black-bow-tied bartender smiled faintly and said, “The usual, Mr. Hammer?”

  I had last been here perhaps ten years ago.

  “Please,” I said, curious to see how good his memory was.

  The governor half-stood and smiled—not a big smile, but a smile all right—and offered his hand for me to take and shake. The result was a firm clasp, not at all clammy. I hadn’t expected it to be.

  Harry Hughes was a few years older than me. I had won a battlefield commission up to lieutenant by the time I mustered out, thanks to my Bronze Star. The governor had a Bronze Star, too, and a Silver Star. He came out a colonel. I had perhaps an inch on him, but he was still a big, broad-shouldered man, his black hair streaked silver, his well-grooved square face dominated by sharp dark eyes and a shovel jaw. The suit was charcoal and likely Brooks Brothers, his tie gray and black and crisply knotted.

  “Would you like lunch, Mike? My treat.”

  We had met only a few times over the years, never had any business together, or major problems either, for that matter. Still, it didn’t feel wrong for him to call me by my first name.

  “I could go for one of those twenty-one-buck burgers,” I said. Lunch had eluded me so far today.

  “My choice as well,” he said, gesturing for me to sit, and we both did.

  The guy was a politician, so I didn’t put anything past him. But that the search for a blackmailer had ended here was a shock and even a disappointment. Hughes had been a damn good governor. He was a tax-cutter and a builder, a tricky damn combination. He took office with the city near bankrupt, and worked with business and labor to deal with the fiscal crisis NYC suffered in the mid-’70s, and did all this while working with a divided statehouse. Though a Democrat, his middle-of-the-road style recalled another governor, Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s favorite moderate Republican.

  Hughes, a Catholic, hadn’t been active on the political scene since a scandal a few years ago, involving his wife having concealed a previous marriage, which had embarrassed him in the media. She’d died of cancer a few years ago. In the meantime, he’d published an autobiography and a book extolling “reaching across the partisan divide.” Lately he had begun making the rounds of the Sunday morning political talk-fests as a Grand Old Man speaking from experience and not ambition.

  A white-jacketed waiter brought my drink. I sipped it. Rye and ginger. I turned and nodded at the bartender and he nodded back. Meanwhile, Hughes ordered us two burgers, medium rare.

  “Governor,” I said, when we were alone again, “I’m almost as surprised that you wanted to meet in a public place as I am to find myself talking to you on this particular subject.”

  His smile was a rumpled thing, like folds in fabric. He had a tan that said Florida, or maybe tropical vacations were a part of his retirement.

  He said, “I figured I was safer meeting in public with a roughneck like Mike Hammer. A man my age doesn’t like to get slapped around.”

  “Now, Governor…”

  The dark eyes damn near twinkled. “Back when I was in office, your… exploits were often called to my attention.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe everything you read in the papers.”

  One side of the smile dug a hole in his cheek. “Some of your doings in those days didn’t make it into the papers. Some I never got straight answers on. That warehouse on the Hudson, where all those supposed Soviet agents and fellow travelers wound up very dead… something like one hundred of them… that caught my attention. A tommy gun, yet.”

  “That’s not really accurate, Governor.”

  One eyebrow arched. “In what way?”

  “It was an abandoned paint factory.”

  The other eyebrow joined it. The mouth was still smiling, but those dark eyes weren’t. “Perhaps I was right to be cautious, Mike.”

  I smiled at him, probably in just as rumpled a way. “We’re both a couple of old soldiers, Governor.”

  “Getting older all the time.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to absent friends. The ones we left behind. Mine in Europe, yours in the Pacific.”

  I raised my glass. “To absent friends.”

  We clinked the drinks. Sipped.

  I said, “You have nothing to worry from me, Governor. I was a young buck back then. I’ve mellowed.”

  Only half a smile now. “After I received your call, Mike, I made several calls of my own. Seems a certain young Anthony Licata is in serious condition in Brooklyn Medical.”

  “See? Time was he’d be in intensive care.”

  He chuckled at that, but his eyes were still hard. “Let’s start with an essential fact—I did not put this thing into motion. I did not seek out this cleaning staff person—the Dunn woman—to ensnare Jamie Winters by way of a secret recording of one of his hanky-panky sessions.”

  “What did happen, Governor?”

  His shrug was slow. “Licata is a young man I met at a few gatherings at various hotels in town where he was a pick-up bartender. He was affable enough, not unintelligent—we were friendly in that limited way one does with such people.”

  I sipped rye and ginger again. Said, “You’re saying he knew you just well enough to seek you out, when he came into possession of the sex tape.”

  He winced. “Let’s just call it a recording and leave it at that. I find this whole thing distasteful. I hope you understand that.”

  “I might understand it better,” I said, “if you had acquired the ‘recording’ for disposal, rather than to profit from it. How much do you want for the wretched thing, Governor?”

  He wasn’t looking at me now. He was staring at nothing, or perhaps into himself. I had a hunch he really did find this affair distasteful.

  The waiter brought us both another drink.

  When Hughes didn’t answer my question, I said, “Aren’t you retired from the political racket, Governor? Why the interest in Jamie Winters at all? It’s not like you’re a political rival at this point.”

  His reaction was another smile, but a very different one—small, sad, and even… embarrassed?

  His sigh seemed endless. “Mike, I am an old soldier. Som
ewhat older than you. But I think I have one more battle left in me, at least. And I am arrogant enough to imagine that I can still do something good in government—in national government.”

  Now I got it.

  I said, “You’re considering your own presidential run.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes back on mine. “Many a former governor has become president. Most recently Jimmy Carter, with admittedly mixed results, accomplished it. And now this young Arkansas character is making noises for next time—word is his morals aren’t any better than Winters’.”

  Hughes had apparently been overheard chatting about a possible presidential try at one or more of the parties where Tony Licata was bartending. That was how Erin Dunn’s muscle-bound boyfriend knew where to peddle the sex tape.

  Hughes was saying, “A popular, multi-term governor from an important state, like myself—if I might be so bold—could make a most attractive candidate.” He pulled in a deep breath, raised his eyebrows, let the breath out. “Since Evelyn’s death, I gradually came to feel that perhaps I had one more bridge worth crossing.”

  “A last hurrah,” I said.

  “I admit I did not relish a primary where I’d be facing an attractive candidate—attractive in the sense of being young and handsome, that is—in Jamie Winters. But as a resident of this city and of this state, I have had ample opportunity to view the callow, amoral nature of that man, as is demonstrated by his reckless philandering… and then, of course, there’s his reprehensible disco queen of a wife.”

  “Nicole Winters comes from money,” I said, “and is clearly a spoiled brat. But she’s also been active in social causes for years, particularly those that you Democrats seem to espouse.” I shrugged. “You could argue that she’s done a lot of good.”

  He batted that away like a pesky insect. “It’s all for show, Mike. To paint herself a caring human being. She supports ecological causes, quite vocally… but do you think her lavish lifestyle isn’t still underwritten by the oil money that the Vankemp empire was, and continues to be, built upon?”