Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love

by Max Allan Collins

  She was facedown in a kitchen that smelled of corned beef and cabbage again, a pot of the stuff simmering on a Depression-era green-and-white stove that was about a decade away from an antique shop. The boarders were getting leftovers today, but they would have to serve themselves. Their landlady was dead.

  So now it was murder.

  Blackmail got my business, but murder made me mad.

  A phone on the kitchen wall had a posted list of emergency numbers and I considered using the one for the cops. But the old landlady was in no hurry, and it occurred to me to check a certain apartment first. I went up the stairs, as quietly as possible, which wasn’t very damn quiet, gum soles doing little to fight the creaking. When I got to the top, tragic faces peeked out of cracked doors and I waved them back and the doors closed reflexively.

  The door to 2A was shut but not locked and I opened it slowly, then went in fast and low, the .45 moving right to left and back again.

  Silence greeted me and an all-too-familiar scent—acrid-edged copper, the scorched aftermath of gunfire mingled with the odor of spilled blood. With my left hand I shut the door softly behind me, already mesmerized by the sight of the woman on the floor, right there in front of me. Maybe she’d been running for it.

  She didn’t make it.

  What a good-looking woman the Flatiron cleaning gal had been not long ago, a redhead like Nicole Winters, her pale flesh lightly freckled, and a lot of it showing. She was in that same green satin robe as the day before, sprawled on the floor in the midst of all that mismatched secondhand-looking furniture, the garment flung wide open with a cream-colored bra and sheer panties all that separated her nudity from prying eyes.

  Erin Dunn was done, all right, a corpse on her back in a position a living person couldn’t assume for long, a twisted prone posture, legs going left, upper torso twisting right, one arm reaching for nothing, the other’s angle like a broken hinge, while sightless sky-blue eyes stared at a ceiling she could not see, not with the top of her head blown off, mid-forehead up, in a scattering of bone chunks and brain lumps painted as red by blood as the pool of the stuff they waded in, her hair fanned out in the crimson mini-lake like ghastly seaweed.

  I kept low as I moved across the sitting area into the bedroom, its door open, thinking whoever did this might still be here. The corpse was fresh enough, the blood out there wet and shimmering, and maybe the cops were on the way already. A big gun had done this, probably as big as my .45, and even in the hailstorm some resident must have heard its mechanical thunder. But no tenant in this place had a phone, and the landlady hadn’t made a call, that was for damn sure.

  Nor had any of those frightened faces come out of their hidey holes, not even to flee.

  The sky roared, laughing at me, but no rain or hail followed, nothing battering the windows but wind-driven branches. So the silence wasn’t silence at all, not when you really listened, and that was when I heard the moaning.

  He was on the other side of the bed, on the floor, on his back where I couldn’t see him from the doorway. The room didn’t have much in it—a double bed that looked like something a motel had thrown out, a couple of dressers that didn’t have anything to do with each other, this one maple and modern, that one walnut and Victorian.

  And, also, a man named Tony Licata, down there on his back in his wife-beater t-shirt and jockey shorts and black socks, like in the smoker flicks. He was home from the hospital, but he looked pretty damn sick with that red-bubbling mouth and that belly wound and his bloody hands gripping himself, trying to hold the pain and his intestines in. His darkly handsome face wasn’t dark at all now—it was as white as a fresh pair of gym togs, but the only exercise Tony was getting was dying slowly.

  I knelt and asked, “Who did this to you, Tony?”

  But he couldn’t answer through the bubbling froth. His eyes beseeched me but there was nothing I could do for him. Oh, I could have told him I’d get him an ambulance, and one would come for him, all right, but he’d be making his exit in a body bag. Or I could have put one between his eyes, but I didn’t care to answer for that. I shook my head. My expression told him to make his peace while he had time.

  The only other room in the excuse for an apartment was that half a kitchen. The counter was clean and the sink was empty— Erin Dunn ran a tidy ship. A back way out had an open door onto old weather-beaten stairs that were covered in melting hailstones. The hailstones didn’t show signs of anyone going down those stairs recently enough to turn them into crushed ice. That probably meant the killer had gone out this way before the sky spewed hail, a storm that hadn’t lasted more than five minutes.

  Whoever did this was gone.

  Maybe a neighbor saw the killer exit, either out the front or probably this back way, with the door standing open like it was. I’d tell the cops when they came and they could canvass the neighborhood. Of course what I should really do now was go down and step over the landlady’s corpse and use that list of emergency numbers on the wall to make the phone call to the Brooklyn PD.

  What I did instead was start searching the place. I got my gloves on and started with the bedroom. Neither of the dressers had anything but clothes in them, one her stuff, the other his. A scuffed-up bedside table had a drawer with nothing special in, the usual junk, tissues, smokes, fingernail clippers, a romance paperback. Certainly not a Maxwell cassette tape, much less a box of duplicate tapes.

  But I was sure that the soon-to-be-late Licata had the original, that selling a copy to the governor had only been one of the ways he had in mind to get rich off that sex tape, or anyway buy that dream saloon of his. The killer had come in, knocked out the old lady and headed upstairs and somehow got into the apartment. Maybe just knocked and the door opened a crack and he forced himself the rest of the way in. Or maybe talked his way in.

  What a sloppy, reckless endeavor, though!

  If the killer knew anything about this situation, he or she could have at least waited till Erin Dunn was at work. If it had been me after the tape, I’d have done this in the middle of the night and either beaten the thing out of Licata, or taken him down in his sleep, knocked him out or chloroformed him or some damn thing.

  And searched the place at my leisure. Found the tapes, and if I didn’t find them, go back to Licata and get it out of him any way I could.

  Or ideally, if there was a time when Licata was at his bartending job while the Dunn woman was in the city at her job, nobody at all would have to be rousted, let alone killed. You could sneak in that back way and not even deal with the landlady. Search the place and, if you didn’t find anything, wait for Licata to come home and only then beat it out of him.

  That’s how I’d have done it.

  But this fool had blundered in while they both were here, and wound up shooting them both… then what? Skedaddled without making a search? I didn’t see any sign that the place had been tossed. What the hell was going on?

  There was another nightstand, mismatching of course, and it too had plenty of junk, Kleenex pack, pencils, a pack of Trojans, books of matches, half a pack of Camels. But tucked in back was a little Saturday Night Special, a .38 snub, which might’ve turned things around if Tony had got to it. Just ask Tony. Only you couldn’t. He was down there on the floor, unconscious, his mouth not bubbling anymore. Dead now. Lucky to be. Getting gut-shot is one of the worst ways to buy it.

  I went over to the closet, opened the door, and from the darkness somebody jumped out at me.

  Somebody who had just shot these two, and had heard me come in, probably already in the bedroom, and ducked in the closet and waited for me to run out and call for help.

  But instead I’d poked around. Later it would amuse me to think of the guy stuck in that closet, not knowing what the hell to do, while I rustled through the place. It would also occur to me later that I was lucky a guy who’d just killed two unarmed people hadn’t gone ahead and burst out and put a round or two into me. Gut-shot me, maybe.

  Right now, though,
I was dealing with taking a hard straight-arm to my chest, knocking me back, then two hands—one clutching a big automatic with a bulky noise-suppressor on its snout— shoving me on the floor onto my back. I was clawing at my coat for the .45 when he kicked me in the head and leapt over me like the obstruction I’d become.

  I should have been unconscious, but I wasn’t. The pain consumed my brain the way an auditorium gets filled by a philharmonic orchestra, but this was a discordant symphony and all my motor skills weren’t playing any song at all. Yet somehow my eyes managed to see. He was in black, all in black, including a balaclava that made a nonentity of him. He scurried awkwardly for the door, then turned and pointed the bulky-looking automatic at me, eye holes in the black woolen mask showing wide dark eyes, with white all around, that stared at me unblinking.

  Even with my head a ringing, screaming thing, I knew this was the end. Finally all of it was catching up to me. I saw Velda’s face and she was beautiful and smiling and then in an instant she was gone, replaced by the faces of men I’d killed, laughing at me, this one merging into the next, and every laugh made the pain in my skull throb and then the bastard’s gun jammed and he was gone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The roiling clouds had smoothed themselves out into a vast gray ceiling, but the threat of rain still made itself felt in air you could have swum through.

  The bodies had been carted off, the morgue wagon gone, while inside the brownstone, lab techs were still dusting and photographing. I was out front behind the wheel of my parked Ford with the engine going and the motor running, the heat on. Another kind of heat was seated beside me in the passenger seat: Detective Earl Brice of the Brooklyn Borough Homicide Squad.

  Brice, black, maybe thirty-five, had a tamed Afro and a trimmed Shaft mustache to go with a handsomely carved face. He was in a tan raincoat over a sharp charcoal suit with a black-and-white striped tie. He’d been pro all the way, so far, but he stopped short of being friendly.

  “You could have a serious concussion,” he said, his tone thick but his articulation crisp.

  “I’ve had concussions before,” I said. “I can tell a bad one.” I shrugged. “I carry aspirin and I took four. There’s a doctor in my building back in the city. He’ll check me. Let’s get this over with.”

  His eyes took me in quickly, then looked straight ahead. “We’ve never met, have we?”

  “No.”

  “Does it surprise you I’ve heard of you?”

  “A little. You’re young. And I keep a low profile these days.”

  Another quick look. “Three dead bodies is a low profile?”

  I shrugged again. “I didn’t make them dead. Look, I get along with most of you guys. I’m tight with Captain Chambers at One Police Plaza. Check with him.”

  He was staring out the windshield at a squad car. Uniform officers were milling on the sidewalk nearby. They were joking and laughing, nothing really inappropriate—just evidence that violent death was nothing new around here.

  “You waited over half an hour to call this in,” Brice reminded me.

  “I got kicked in the head. I sat down and gathered myself and when my noggin felt up to it, I went down and used the phone.”

  “But you don’t need a trip to the ER.”

  “No. I told you. I—”

  “Right. You took four aspirin. Okay. Let’s take another run at this.”

  My smile was as pleasant as it was insincere. “Sure. I came out here to your sunny borough to talk to the Dunn woman and this Tony Licata, her live-in boyfriend. She worked in the city at the Flatiron Building, nights, part of the cleaning service that handles the place. My client has an office there. Something was taken from that office—stolen—and so Dunn needed an interview. I gave it to her.”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Right. And I came back today with some follow-up.”

  “Follow-up about what, Mr. Hammer?”

  “We can get into that if it becomes necessary. And, no, the robbery wasn’t reported. As I explained, I work for an attorney. The client is technically his, which takes us into areas of attorney/client privilege.”

  The look he gave me wasn’t so quick this time. “That doesn’t cover the identity of the client.”

  “You’ll have to talk to the attorney in question. I’ve already provided his contact information.”

  The detective sighed. “What’s your take on this, Mr. Hammer? You’ve worked an unusual number of homicides for a private investigator.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a specialty.” I smiled at him some more, trying to make him stop looking out the windshield and make some eye contact. “Do you have a low opinion of people in my trade?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Wouldn’t blame you if you did, Detective Brice. It can be a filthy way to make a buck, if it’s about divorce or skip tracing and such. But for all the homicides I’ve been involved with… all of the self-defense pleas, which is probably why you’ve heard about me… I still have my license. I’m still in demand with the top insurance companies. No other private inquiry agency in New York as small as mine does as much big business.”

  That got a dryly amused smile going under that Richard Roundtree mustache. “Fame is the name of the game, huh, Hammer?”

  The “Mister” had disappeared suddenly.

  “I’m fine with giving you my take on this thing,” I said. “But you go first.”

  He was still looking straight out the windshield. We hadn’t yet made much eye contact. I couldn’t tell if what he was holding in was contempt or respect or maybe just a general weariness that came with working the homicide beat.

  “I can tell you how my boss is going to read it,” he said, “without him ever setting foot at the crime scene. He’s going to say it’s a typical case of some junkie looking for money or swag.”

  “But that’s not what you think.”

  Now he looked at me. Really looked. The eyes were as black as his hair and his mustache, and those eyes knew how to convey cool and heat all at once. “No. And it’s probably not what you think went down either, Hammer. And I’ll tell you why.”

  “Please.”

  Eyes on the brownstone now. “This was premeditated. Somebody came to the door, the old landlady answered, that somebody forced his way in… or maybe her way in, probably his, though… and the old girl got scared and ran down the hall and got chased and whacked on the head in the kitchen. Whacked, period, hard as she got hit.”

  I nodded.

  “Then he or she, but probably he—”

  I raised a palm. “A ‘he’ jumped me. You can stop hedging.”

  Brice nodded. “He went upstairs to a specific apartment. There are three floors of apartments to choose from, and four apartments per floor. Each floor only has one of the ‘larger’ apartments, which is two rooms and a kitchenette. The others are single-room affairs. And the intruder knew which room on what floor to hit.”

  “Could have been luck.”

  A rare grin flashed under the black mustache. “Could be I’ll win the lottery, but I don’t think so. You said he had a silencer on that piece.”

  “He did. That’s illegal in this state.”

  “So is killing three people, Hammer. Junkies on the prowl, lookin’ to feed their habit, don’t use noise suppressors. If they had one of those—”

  “They’d hock it,” I said with a smile.

  He smiled a little at that. Nodded again. “This was somebody prepared to kill. Possibly intending to kill. If he was searching for something, he likely did it after the kills. The place wasn’t torn apart like a druggie on a wild-ass hunt for cash or valuables.”

  Silence. For maybe a minute that silence was broken only by a distant siren and the chatting and laughing of the two uniformed cops at their post.

  I said, “I could offer a scenario.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “The old lady was a real piece of work. He probably figured he could talk his way past her, but
that didn’t pan out. So he ended up pushing his way in and chasing her into the kitchen and cracking her head like an egg.”

  Brice nodded, real slow.

  I said, “She was fixing lunch for the boarders. The killer knew this was a boarding house and the pot on the stove with enough to feed everybody in the place would tell him that the old broad would be discovered soon enough. Probably within half an hour, an hour at the outside.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Well, a junkie might have panicked and split. But the killer goes on up and takes care of business. I don’t think he expected the boyfriend to be home. Licata would likely have been at work. But he was in the hospital the day before, maybe overnight and just got home, and was taking it easy today.”

  Brice’s eyes narrowed. “Go on. I’m with you.”

  “So the killer waves the gun at the Dunn woman and says, ‘Where is it?’ and she tells him it’s in the bedroom, whatever it is he’s after. When the killer goes in the bedroom, she makes a break for it and he hears and sees and shoots her. Licata in the bedroom maybe tries to hide or go for that little gun in the nightstand, but he doesn’t get it. Instead he gets shot, too. Two in the belly.”

  “Yeah.” Brice shuddered a little. “Slow fuckin’ death.”

  “Not my choice of an exit, either. For me, I mean. For certain people, I’m fine with it. Where was I?”

  “The killer is alone in an apartment with two corpses and a ticking clock by way of a dead landlady downstairs.”

  “Right,” I said. “So what does he do? Split the hell out of there, ’cause everything has gone tits up? No. He calmly searches the place. Doesn’t toss it, but methodically looks for a specific item or items. It’s not a tough place to search, but since he’s in the bedroom, he starts with the two dressers. He finds jack shit. So he starts on the closet, and then some damn fool comes in.”

  “You.”

  “Me. Possibly he glimpses me, and sees I have a gun in my mitt. He ducks in the closet. I come in and have a look around and he waits. If I look in the closet, he’s ready for me.”