That amused her, too, but then she leaned toward me and said, “So… do you have it with you?”
“Yup.”
Her eyes glittered like a kid on Christmas morning contemplating a real haul. “Do I need to round up a cassette player?”
“No. I stopped by my office and picked up one of ours, in case you wanted to check it.” I dug in my pocket for the small metal tape player, the cassette already in it. “Would you like me to leave this for you?”
She was looking at the little metal-case tape player that filled the palm of my hand. “No. I want to hear.”
I held up the gadget between my thumb and middle finger. “I haven’t listened to it myself. I didn’t think that was my place. So if this turns out to be the ex-governor’s voice telling us all to take a flying leap, I can’t be held responsible.”
“Understood. I want to hear.” Her eyes still had a strange sparkle and she was smiling. Anticipating.
That struck me as damn odd, but I put the tape player on the glass table-top and punched PLAY. It began in the middle of things.
“There,” Lisa Long’s voice said. “Right there! Oh! Oh!… Ooooooh!… That’s so good… You’re so good…”
A rustle of clothing. A zipper. More cloth rustle.
Now came the senator’s voice: “My God… oh my God… baby, that is sooooo sweet… deeper…deeper!”
I said to Nicole, “Why don’t I fast-forward, and make sure that—”
“No!” She gripped my wrist as my hand reached out. “No, Mike… Let it play.”
She was listening intently, her breath coming fast.
So I just sat there, as the sounds of foreplay melded into lovemaking, interrupted only by further rustles of clothing being removed. The screak of flesh rubbing rhythmically against leather and the squeak of cushions defined the co-starring presence of the couch in that inner office. Moans of delight and ever-heavier breathing, male and female, built into the expected grunts and gasps, and finally the female cry of, “You’re going to make me… you’re going to make me! Give it to me! Yes! Yes!”
I admit it. I was embarrassed. You might think it would have been exciting, but I was only ill at ease, sitting next to a woman whose husband was making passionate love to another woman. Even if they did have an open marriage, it unsettled me. Something like guilt… no, not something like guilt, but guilt itself… flooded through me as I thought of how often in our own “open” days I had taken advantage of Velda’s willingness to put up with my randy damn nature and wild-oats-sowing ways and wait until I was ready to commit to her entirely.
Then something happened that challenged all those noble yet shabby thoughts.
The tape shut itself off after perhaps a minute of nothing at all. The beautiful woman next to me was sitting with her head back, her eyes lidded, her breath slow and heavy now.
“That’s the original,” I said, in a business-like way, “if the governor is to be believed. And I do believe him.”
She just looked at me. It was the look a lioness gives a cornered wild hog. She walked around the sofa, slow, graceful, almost purring, and planted herself a few yards away. I craned to look at her. What the hell…?
She stood with her legs apart, like the statue of an Amazon goddess. The emerald jumpsuit had a zipper from the throat to the waist. She used it. Slowly. The sound of the zipper inching its way down was like a growl. Then her hands simultaneously found the shoulders of the garment and she let it down to bunch around her waist. Her full breasts had large pale, pink nipples, the aureoles blending in with her lightly freckled flesh. No tanning bed for her. No sunning on vacation. She reached behind her, her breasts staying full as they rose, and undid her ponytail and let her hair loose, like a horse shaking its mane. Then she stood straight, legs together now, as her hands tugged down the rest of the garment and she stepped out of the emerald pile of cloth, kicked it away with an orange-red-nailed foot, then resumed her legs-apart stance as a goddess of Everything Woman.
She was a real redhead all right.
That was as fiery a bush as anything autumn in Central Park had to offer. The mirrored wall behind her revealed a bottom full and rounded and dimpled, as creamy as the cream in my coffee.
Her arms reached out, her smile a summoning sneer, her fingers of both her hands curling toward me in invitation.
In command.
I got up and came around the couch to her. She smiled as she saw what she had done to me.
I went to her and she pressed herself to me. My right hand found the slope of her back and followed it down as it dipped then rose into full supple smoothness. My other hand cupped one full breast, the nipple taut now. Then her face moved toward mine, lips wet and parted.
I kissed the tip of her nose and backed away.
“You’re about ten years too late, honey,” I said.
She came forward fast and her arms hugged me and one leg came around and locked me to her. “You heard what he was doing to her on that tape. I want to get even! Isn’t that what Mike Hammer does? Get even?”
“Doll, nobody ever said Mike Hammer screwed a client. And I don’t intend to start now.”
She shoved me away, disgusted, and walked around the couch to the coffee table, naked and not giving a damn.
“Don’t forget your tape player,” she said. “My next listen is going to be on a high-end stereo system.”
I went over there to collect my property just as she ejected the tape from it. She took the cassette out and frowned at it.
“This is an Ampex tape,” she said, studying it, still frowning.
“So?”
“So it’s not the brand they use at my husband’s office. That’s Maxell.”
We looked at each other. My erection was history and her nakedness a non-issue.
“So it’s a copy,” I said.
Her sneering smile wasn’t sexy this time. “So much for your honest ex-governor.”
“I’m not so sure. It might be somebody else.”
She frowned. “Somebody else… who what?”
“Somebody else,” I said, “who has the original.”
CHAPTER NINE
The next day found gray massing clouds hovering over the city like giant wads of soggy dirty cotton, just waiting to wring themselves out. You could smell the rain wanting to happen, but the temperature was chill enough now that maybe it would be the icy variety or perhaps one of those crazy storms where it sleets and snows and thunders and lightnings all at once.
Velda and I had spent yesterday evening in her apartment, comparing notes over take-out Chinese and later in front of a fire by her couch. If you think I didn’t tell her about the distaff half of our client couple stripping down and baring her burning bush, you don’t know me very well. Or Velda either. She got mad. And I got even.
Hadn’t Nicole said that was what I was famous for?
But this morning I hadn’t gone right into the office. Velda did, to watch the phone and keep things humming. Me, I was calling on ex-governor Harry Hughes and not at 21, either, though the digs today would be fancy enough. I had called ahead, first thing, and Governor Hughes was expecting me at his apartment on one of the upper, residential floors of the Waldorf Astoria.
A light bagels-and-cream-cheese breakfast was awaiting me in the formal dining room of the suite, which also included a long marble-floored living room with matching marble fireplace (a portrait of the governor’s late wife over it, no Warhol or pop-art piece here), several bedrooms and a small but complete kitchen. The governor lived alone—no majordomo for errands or protection, either—and answered the door himself. He enjoyed cooking, he said, but often availed himself of room service, particularly for breakfast, like today.
The governor was in a maroon silk robe with black velvet lapels, seated at the head of the table, slathering cream cheese on his lightly toasted bagel. I was buttering mine. We’d had orange juice and were on to coffee.
“Mike,” he said, after chewing and swallowing a bite, “I give you my wo
rd that I did not make any copies of that tape. I didn’t even listen to much of it, just ascertained it was what I’d been told. It… well, this kind of thing is not what I generally traffic in.” He shuddered. “I’m not proud of myself for stooping so low.”
I shrugged, nibbled buttered bagel. “Governor, I can only tell you that I have it on solid authority that the tape is a copy.”
He frowned. “Was there some electronic way you could determine as much?”
“No. It has to do with the brand of tape. It’s not what’s regularly used at the senator’s office.”
My distinguished host shook his head of silver-streaked black hair, but not a strand came loose. “All I can say, Mike, is that the Licata boy came around a few days ago, and told me how his ‘woman,’ as he put it, had come to have the damned thing. That she was on the cleaning staff at the Flatiron, and happened upon it quite accidentally.”
That was almost true.
I said, “Licata just dropped by? Didn’t phone you first?”
“No. He wouldn’t have my number.”
Actually, Licata had the governor’s number, all right.
“But,” Hughes continued, “he knew where I lived because he was a bartender at a get-together I threw here earlier this year. That was how we came to converse, since he was here early and stayed late, and I was his employer for the event.”
“Who provided him?”
“It was done through the hotel here.” He turned over a hand. “I chatted with Licata at some length, before and after that event, as he was setting up and tearing down. I’m interested in what the real people are doing, you know, what it takes for them to make their way in this modern world. Meaning no condescension, what I’m talking about here is the common man.”
“Well, Licata seems to be trying to make his way by blackmailing the uncommon man.”
The square face with all that character carved in it turned somber, the flesh as gray now as the morning out there. He put down the bagel, as if he’d suddenly lost his appetite.
“And that’s what we have in common, Mr. Licata and I,” he said, “isn’t it? We’re both blackmailers. Isn’t that what you’re implying, Mike?”
I chewed bagel, swallowed the bite, shrugged. “I’m not implying anything. It’s a fact. What did he tell you, when you two connected before and after your cocktail party? How he hopes to get married? And better himself? Live someplace where the can isn’t down the hall and he and his honey don’t have to share it with recovering addicts and welfare cases?”
My host said nothing. His face looked cold, even coldly angry, but I could see the regret, even the shame, swimming in the dark eyes. Maybe that anger was turned inward.
Finally he said, quietly, “The young man’s stated ambition was a shabby little thing, by most standards. How he hopes to own a bar of his own there in Brooklyn.” He laughed humorlessly. “How very small the American dream can sometimes manifest itself.”
“And what big nightmares can follow, when you’re willing to do anything to pursue it. How much did you pay him?”
“…Five thousand dollars. In cash.”
“Small is right. That was a bargain rate. Or it would have been, if that really had been the original of the tape.”
Hughes gestured around him. He’d brought some of his own furniture in, apparently—a cabinet filled with china and silver looked heirloom.
“We’re alone here, Mike. If you think I’m lying… if you think somewhere I have a box of duplicates of that foul recording… take a look around. Or if I have it squirreled away in a safe deposit box or one of my homes, you’d be free right here and now to try to beat the truth out of me. There was a time when you couldn’t have, but you’re ten years younger than me and look to be quite physically fit for your age. Isn’t that what Mike Hammer is known for? Slapping people around?”
I shook my head. Slapped some more butter on my bagel. “No, I believe you, Governor. But you have a problem. With that tape an obvious copy, there’s no reason for Jamie Winters to cooperate with you. Don’t expect him to announce he’s decided not to pursue the Oval Office. Not with the original and other copies running around out there, impossible to contain.”
He sat forward. “In that case, Mike, wouldn’t he be ruined eventually, anyway? Wouldn’t his presidential hopes be dashed? Leaving him to serve out his senate term in disgrace?”
“Possibly. He might pay Licata and any other blackmailers off—he and his wife could certainly afford it. But your hopes may be dashed as well.”
“And why would that be?”
“If the senator is disgraced by the sex scandal, nothing would stop him from going to the police and ruining what’s left of your reputation. Ending your career in prison would make a hell of a last chapter for the next volume of your autobiography, Governor. You’d just have to work hard at not dying behind bars, or else you wouldn’t get to enjoy the royalties.”
Suddenly that famous face smiled at me. The only sound was the bite of bagel I was working on.
“Do you have a suggestion, Mike? Or are you just sitting in judgment? I remember that notorious newspaper headline, all those years ago—‘I, the Jury,’ Says Mike Hammer. You avenged a fellow soldier. Now you want to humiliate another.”
I used a napkin on my mouth and hands. “Yeah, how the mighty have fallen and all that shit. Look, I do have a suggestion.”
“I’m listening.”
“Hire me to get your money back from Mr. Tony Licata. I can tell him that you are prepared to go public about the tape he sold you, unless he returns your money and hands over the original— and any copies—to me. That just might make him cooperate. And satisfy my clients.”
His eyes tightened with consideration. “But it couldn’t be a bluff.”
“No. You couldn’t be bluffing. Of course, if Licata calls what he thinks is your bluff, and you have to come clean? We could maybe spin it a little—isn’t that what you political types are expert at? Spin?”
A trace of amusement flickered on thin lips. “How would you spin this, Mike?”
I shrugged. “I would get my clients to say you didn’t try to blackmail them. That in fact you tried to help them. You would say your intent was not to blackmail anybody, but to acquire this damning tape to prevent just such a thing.”
He frowned in doubt. “Your clients would go along with this?”
“I think so.”
“But that would mean exposing the tape…”
I shrugged. “Not if I really do lay hands on the original and the duplicates first. And destroy them. Also, I still have a few media contacts of my own who remember my name. Who would spread the rumor that the tape was a phony, something Licata and his girlfriend cooked up.”
He gave me a sideways look that emphasized that shovel jaw of his. “It’s dangerous.”
“It got dangerous the moment you thought blackmail was an option you could justify. What do you say, Governor? Shall we give it a try?”
He held the thought in like a deep breath underwater. Then he exploded: “Yes! Yes!” He banged a fist on the table and rattled the breakfast dishes. “Let’s see if we can clean up after my own foolish mistake. You need a retainer, I trust?”
I pushed away from the table and stood. “If I pull this off, you can send five thousand bucks to the Nicole Vankemp Foundation. She’s got the morals of an alley cat, but it’d be fitting if some good cause she helps gets a boost out of this.”
The dark eyes narrowed as he gazed up at me. “What do you get out of it, Mike? Or are you just a good citizen?”
“I’m on a $10,000 retainer, Governor. I can afford to be generous.”
* * *
The gray sky escorted me on my second excursion to Brooklyn in two days. The clouds were tumbling, somersaulting, nasty billowing stuff that might have been pouring out of a burning building. Occasionally came a rumbling, like God was hungry and looking to make a meal of the pitiful creatures moving on their pointless way below. The cold
that went with that grumble was a clammy thing, like a dead man’s handshake, but when I turned the heat on in the Ford, it got hot too quick, and when I turned it back off, the cold came back right away. No “just right” for Goldilocks or the rest of humanity.
Traffic was in a bad mood, too, and the Ford seemed to make every car and driver around us mad, horns honking at us for just being alive. Any urge to give the other guy an “Up yours!” went away when you saw the foul dark glares and knew maybe you’d get shot for expressing your opinion.
Finally, on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, where the graffiti couldn’t agree whether smack was heaven or hell, the sky exploded and what came down were pellets of hail, a furious sky wielding its machine gun with a madman’s indiscretion.
When I pulled over in front of the once-proud four-story brownstone on Seventh Avenue, I had to sit there for five minutes before the hail let up, watching little balls bounce off the hood of the Ford, hoping they wouldn’t leave dents, listening to their tuneless tap-dancing on the roof. The coldness did not stop my breath from fogging up the windshield and my turned-up trenchcoat collars didn’t provide enough warmth to stop my teeth from chattering.
Then the attack was over, and I climbed out, the brown grass of adjacent front yards littered with little white pellets, like a truck hauling mothballs had backed up and dumped its load. My feet crunched as I went up the walk and climbed the steps to the modest stoop and banged my fist on the door.
It jarred open.
I pushed it the rest of the way and was about to call out to the landlady when I saw her fallen form on the kitchen floor down at the end of the hallway that hugged the second-floor stairway. I shrugged out of the damp trenchcoat and shed it like a snake from its skin and moved quietly and quickly toward the kitchen, my hand filling itself with the .45 from under my unbuttoned suit coat, the weapon with its walnut grips completing my fist.
The old gal had been clobbered a good one, from behind, her white perm smudged scarlet in back. I knelt and checked her pulse at her wrist.
Nothing.
At her throat.
Nothing.
Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love Page 10