Don't Look Behind You (21 page)

“Need to see you now,” the Captain of Homicide said. Nothing friendly in his voice, but nothing unfriendly either. Strictly business.

“At your office?”

“No,” he said, and gave me an address that I recognized at once. A chill worse than the one waiting outside for me crawled up my back like a stampede of spiders.

“Tell me,” I said.

“No. You come see for yourself. I want you here ASAP, Mike.”

“Okay,” I said.

Well, now I was here. In front of the white-washed building with the green shutters and black ironwork. The two cops on the sidewalk were in rain slickers, ready for what was coming. I was in my trenchcoat and hat, but not ready for what waited for me up a flight of stairs. The cops were expecting me and waved me inside, and I went up.

The kid across the shared landing, Shack, in T-shirt and jeans, was sitting against the closed door of his own apartment with his legs hugged to himself, his head with its nest of curls angled down. He was sobbing, the tears making melting-wax trails on his bony face. He was curled up, as if trying to retreat inside himself, his position nearly fetal. He didn’t seem to notice me.

A veteran harness bull stood guard next to the door opposite. He nodded and jerked his head for me to go on in. The door was ajar.

Pat met me, but left room to see past him. When I’d had a look, he held up the
MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS
business card and said, “Tell me why she had this, Mike.”

I brushed by him and went over to the little work area on the braided rug. The lab boys weren’t here yet, so she was all alone, just her and all those books surrounding her. In an oversize man’s T-shirt turned into a petite girl’s mini-length sleep apparel, she was seated Indian-style on the pillow and slumped onto the sawed-off table, head next to the typewriter, a small black powder-burned entry wound in her right temple. No exit wound visible, her head obviously resting on it.

Pat materialized next to me. “Bullet went in one temple and out the other. Ninety-degree angle again.”

By the open fingers of her right hand, its palm up, was a .22 Smith and Wesson Escort.

Bitterly, Pat said, “Does he get a discount, you think, buying so many of the goddamn things?”

I wanted to drop down there and take her into my arms and stroke her hair and soothe her, there there, there there, but it wouldn’t do her any good, would it? The only thing I could do for her now was to stop the madman who’d done this evil thing, and much as I would have liked him to suffer the months of agony of the disease that was eating him and turning him ever more insane, I knew that his end had to come soon, very soon, before he took any more lives in what was clearly a psycho’s game, now.

But silently I promised this girl something, this sweet smart kid with brains deserving of so much more than a bullet, who’d had all of her life ahead of her when I last saw her, only neither of us knew that span could be measured in hours. Marcy Bloom would never get the chance to really bloom, would she? So I promised her he would suffer, and that it wouldn’t be quick.

We looked down at the girl, so young, so dead.

My lips were back over my teeth but it wasn’t really a smile. “He’s sticking it in our ass, Pat. Telling us to go screw ourselves royal. The Borensen kill might have passed for somebody really blotting himself out, the similarities between his death and Foster’s just coincidental, or maybe an admission of guilt by Leif that he murdered his future father-in-law. But this time, the killer’s staged a suicide for no reason other than to tell us it
isn’t
a suicide.”

“What this is,” Pat said, “is a signature.”

“Oh yeah. He signed this one all right, autographed the goddamn thing, and he’s somewhere laughing himself silly at us. The kind of laughter you don’t hear outside a madhouse.”

Pat was nodding. “So he’s gone way over the edge, our hitman’s hitman. Gone from professional to amateur.”

“That’s one way to look at it. But he’s a
kill-crazy
amateur with cool professional skills. That makes him all kinds of dangerous.”

“No argument, chum.” He held up the little white card with the little black letters again. “Now, what was Marcy Bloom doing with your business card?”

“I was here yesterday evening.”

“Kind of young for you.”

I gave him a look. “I wasn’t her type, Pat. She was Richard Blazen’s co-author on that tell-all memoir he was writing. I spent several hours with her going over reams of transcripts and notes, looking for the name of Borensen’s mob connection.”

His eyes briefly flared. “And did you find it?”

I told him I had, and that I’d confronted Joey Pep at the Peppermint Lounge after leaving here last night. I said that Pepitone admitted that Borensen had been in the Bonetti family’s pocket since the then-actor was peddling drugs among the Broadway crowd. I kept the talk about the family’s contract-killer “specialist” to myself. Not ready to show Pat
all
my cards just yet.

“The Borensen/Bonetti connection could be useful,” Pat said, “in a tangential way.”

“You mean, in taking down the Bonettis.”

“Yeah. And Joey has problems of his own. That famous club of his is on the verge of getting shuttered—losing its liquor license. They had an incident that won’t help last night.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “Somebody driving by called it in. Nasty brouhaha between some guys out in front of the place. Two Peppermint Lounge bouncers got bounced to the hospital. They’re still there, but they aren’t talking.” He gave me a sly smile. “That must have gone down after you left, huh, Mike?”

“Must have.”

He pushed his hat back on his head. “The Bonettis catching flak is all well and good, but it doesn’t get us any closer to your middle-of-the-night caller.”

That gave me an opening to reveal some other cards to Pat. Putting him on a slow but worthwhile track while I was taking a faster one was a solid way to hedge my bets in the hunt for the Specialist. Yeah, capital “S”—I had something to call the son of a bitch now, at least.

So I told Pat about Dr. Beech and the disease that was taking down our killer in its own good time.

“Phasger’s Syndrome?” he said, frowning. “Never heard of it… but it sure sounds like hell on earth.”

“Even that’s too good for this prick. But with a court order, you can get that list out of Dr. Beech, of the others who’ve made twenty-five-grand ‘contributions.’ They’re all pay-offs for contract killings, of course. You can clear a slew of cases out of your unsolved homicides file, and maybe get a line on our psychotic hitman.”

Head cocked, Pat was giving me a narrow-eyed look I knew too well. “How long have you been sitting on this information, Mike?”

“Since yesterday is all. I wasn’t holding it back, buddy. Just hadn’t got around to telling you yet.”

His hands were on his hips. “Well, that’s swell, Mike. ’Cause I would hate to have to haul you in on obstruction of justice charges.”

“If you think I don’t want this bastard found, Pat, you’re crazier than he is.”

“Well, one of us is. I’ve seen that look on your face before, Mike. Too many times. You want him for yourself. You want him in front of your .45, primed for one of your fancy self-defense pleas. Not this time. You can help us, and we’ll be glad to have you—I for one appreciate your skills and acumen. But we’re talking about a killer that could potentially lead us to taking down one of this city’s five major crime families. If that happens, the death of this girl can maybe mean something, that something
good
will come of it. No, Mike, this time it’s got to be by the book.”

“No problems, old buddy. Strictly by the book.”

The Old Testament.

“Listen, Pat,” I said, “I don’t see any of the Bloom girl’s boxes of research materials. You want to build a case against the killer and/or the Bonettis, you’ll want those. They turned out to be Marcy Bloom’s life’s work. Were they in the bedroom?”

He shook his head; this was all news to him. “No. The only materials are those few scattered things on that makeshift desk of hers.”

I thumped his chest with a forefinger, just hard enough for some emphasis. “You need to canvass this building and at least the adjacent two, and the ones right across the street. When you have a time of death from the M.E., that’ll help narrow it. But there were nine full boxes of those transcripts, and somebody had to carry them out of here, and down two flights out to the street. Load them in a car or whatever. By now those boxes and their contents will be destroyed, but you
may
get yourself a description of the killer.”

“We already have that.”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“I
will
put that canvass in motion, Mike, that makes a lot of sense. But that kid across the way saw the guy.”

The lab boys and photographer were coming in, and we headed past them, to talk to Shack.

“This boy found the body,” Pat said, just before we moved onto the landing, “shortly before seven. He often went in early and made coffee and sometimes breakfast for the girl. She’d leave the door unlocked for him.”

The young man wasn’t crying now, but he looked as dejected as a dog left along a roadside by a family moving on without him. The little landing was getting crowded, so Pat sent the uniformed man inside for now.

“Stand up, son,” Pat said.

The kid struggled to his feet, each limb of his bony frame moving a little slower than the last. He was still in the peace symbol T-shirt and ancient jeans, his feet bare.

“This is Michael Hammer,” Pat said, gesturing my way. “He’s an investigator helping us—”

I said, “We’ve met. Shack helped Miss Bloom and me go through all those research materials.”

“Ah,” Pat said.

A sudden thought gripped me and I leaned near my friend, whispering, “Shack here might be able to testify to what we discovered in those transcripts.”

Pat gave me a knowing nod, then turned back to the kid.

“Son, would you tell Mr. Hammer what you saw last night?”

“Can I
trust
him?” the kid blurted, flashing me a wary look.

What was that about?

“You can,” Pat assured him. “Just go over it again, please.”

“Sure.” He turned his narrow, angular face toward me; his eyes were bloodshot. “Around one a.m. last night, I heard knocking.
Loud
knocking. I, uh, cracked the door to see what was going on.”

I said to Pat, “He does that.” Then to Shack, I said, “Stop for a moment and describe him.”

He nodded. “Okay. About five ten, eleven. Big but no giant. Kind of a Mr. Businessman type—dark suit, tie, hat. Hardly anybody wears a hat any more.”

He was saying this to two guys in hats.

Pat asked, “Can you give me any more of a description than that?”

“Yes, sir. I got a real good look at him. Oval face, kind of a pug nose, wide-set dark eyes, small mouth. Short dark hair. Glasses, heavy plastic frames. Pale. Definitely not a guy who gets much sun, y’know?”

“All right,” I said. “Get back to your story.”

“Right. So, the guy was knocking for the umpteenth time, and I was about to go out there and tell him he’d better leave before he got himself in trouble… but then Marcy was there, in the doorway. She was trusting like that. Very open girl. Of course, that’s the vibe down here. It’s not like anywhere else in the city, the Village, you know?”

“We know,” Pat said. “Go on.”

“Well, this guy says to her, ‘I’m sorry to bother you so late, Miss Bloom, but Mr. Hammer asked me to pick up some materials that you and he worked with this evening.’ There was some more talk that I didn’t get, but finally she nodded and let him in. Shut the door, and I shut mine.”

So that was why the kid didn’t know whether or not to trust me—the killer had posed as my representative.

I asked, “Did you hear anything else last night? Like the guy leaving? Or maybe going up and down the stairs? Or most importantly—something that might have been a
gunshot
?”

He shook his head through all of that.

“You hear a lot of noises in the city,” Shack said, shrugging. “Even in the Village. I guess… I guess not all the vibes down here are good.”

“I guess not,” I said.

“Son,” Pat said, “would you be willing to come to my office and take a look through some mug books? We can start with individuals who we already suspect may be working as professional killers.”

The bloodshot eyes grew wide. “Is
that
who killed Marcy? Some kind of… hitman?”

“It’s too early for speculation,” Pat said, which was a lie obviously. “We can give you a ride to and from. Could you be ready in half an hour?”

“Sure.
Anything
to get the freak that did this.”

“If need be,” Pat offered, “I can talk to your boss where you work, so you don’t get in trouble.”

“Oh, I don’t work anywhere. I’m a painter. Like Jackson Pollock. I’ll have a gallery show one of these days. Till then Mom and Dad kind of… underwrite me.”

“It’s an investment,” I said.

“I think so,” Shack said, a little defensively.

Then he disappeared into his apartment.

“What’s going to become of these hippie kids?” Pat wondered aloud.

“Well, it’s official.”

“What is?”

“You’re an old fart.”

We grinned at each other. We could use it.

“Did that boy love her, Mike?”

“He had a terrible crush on her, even though it was misplaced.”

“She wouldn’t have anything to do with him?”

“Oh, no, she was friendly with him. Took advantage a little, knowing he was sweet on her.”

“
Now
who sounds like an old fart?”

I laughed. “Thing is, she was gay. Or did you know that already?”

His eyes flared momentarily. “No. We should probably ask around and look into her girl friends or girl friend. They might know something.”

I gave a fatalistic shrug. “I doubt it. Marcy didn’t know her killer. But there’ll be some sad gals in the Village tonight.” I tugged my hat brim down for the coming rain. “You need me any longer, Pat?”

He shook his head. “No. But I would like to know, Mike—are you going to work with me on this? How about it? Can we do this one together? Or does it have to be a damn race again?”