Kiss Her Goodbye (20 page)

"Did you know Bill Doolan?"

Her head reared back and the big brown almond eyes locked on to me. "Yes. I did. Not well. So sad that he die. He was very nice."

"How nice?"

"What do you mean, Mike?"

"Nice, like ... this?"

And I put my hands on her breasts and just squeezed gently, like I was checking the freshness of fruit at a market. They were ripe and firm, all right.

"No," she said. She kissed me again, warm, sticky with lipstick, full of promise. Then her tongue was flicking and licking at my ear, darting like a snake's, as she whispered, "He was just a nice old man. He come stand and watch. Never dance. Just watch."

"Some people
like
to watch...."

"Some do not."

She slipped off my lap and onto the floor where a shag carpet was waiting for her knees and her hand found my zipper and tugged it down. She had me out and in her grasp and her mouth was about to descend when I held her back, the heel of a hand at a shoulder.

"I don't like sex in public places," I said.

"There is no one here but us."

I nodded toward the guard beyond the grating.

She shrugged. "Like I said ... there is no one here, Mike."

"I thought you were Little Tony's girl."

"I'm nobody's girl."

Her head bobbed down, but I pulled her up.

"No," I said. "Not now. Not like this."

Her full lips teased me with a smile. "And here I think they say that you are the wild man."

"Wild, yes. Not kinky."

She rose, sat on the arm of the easy chair, slipped an arm around my shoulder; her other hand still grasped me and gently, gently stroked. "We could go to your place."

"I don't have a place."

"We could go to mine."

"We could. But not tonight. Not now. This place ... your precious 52 ... Chrome, doll, this is not my scene."

The aftermath was expectedly awkward. My fly got zipped, her makeup got unsmeared, and so on. But she gave me her address written in mascara on a Club 52 cocktail napkin.

"
Where
do you live?" I asked her.

"Rio de Janeiro. Why?"

"This is a Park Avenue address. You staying with somebody?"

"No. I have a Manhattan apartment now. I will be spending much time here. Much time in America. You see, Mike ... you have not escaped me. You will
never
escape me."

"Is that a promise? In the meantime, where's the nearest exit? I got a feeling after Little Tony hears about this, he may take me off the list."

B
Y TEN THE NEXT
morning—after an early swim in the Commodore pool, another Bing's workout, and a deli breakfast—I settled in for a day of the kind of detective work that doesn't make it onto the TV shows.

I had to delve into those ancient filing cabinets in that ancient corner building where two old men had shared an office but kept their secrets to themselves. Pete Cummings, on his job in Philly, had left me a tidy desktop and a comfortable swivel chair and an icebox full of Miller. He was my idea of a good host.

But I was glad I'd got limbered up with a swim and a workout, because you have to have good knees to go through every drawer of two five-drawer files. And with an information pack rat like Doolan, those drawers contained plenty of chaff to go through trying to find a few kernels of wheat.

I paid special attention to any clippings that dated within the last year. Doolan put together a fat file of the press he and Alex had got for cleaning up the neighborhood, but I couldn't find anything that wasn't laudatory fluff—
RETIRED POLICE OFFICER LEADS NEIGHBORHOOD REFORM.
Nothing with specifics about the criminal element he'd helped run out. No other names at all except some of the merchants I'd met when I canvassed the neighborhood.

So I went back and started at the beginning of the newspaper stuff—right around Doolan's retirement twenty years ago. It was a lot of loose, yellowed clippings—two full file drawers—and started with puff pieces about the brave officer stepping down, and included clips on any hood, thief, or rapist that Doolan had put away who'd got out and made the papers again.

At first I thought I'd struck pay dirt, but virtually every series of clippings wound up with the bad guy returned to the slammer. Had Doolan's fine hand worked behind the scenes on any of these arrests? Did that mean a family member of some sorry incarcerated son of a bitch might have settled a grudge with the old warhorse?

But that didn't cut it. Doolan hadn't been chopped down on the street in a drive-by shooting—it was a staged suicide in his own damn apartment. That required a kind of sophistication and access unlikely to be found in the loved ones of some recently re-jugged recidivist.

I made a list of the names anyway, on a yellow pad. It was the kind of thing I could hand over to Pat if everything else was a dead end.

One file drawer seemed to be nothing but crimes from all over the world that had, for whatever reason, piqued Doolan's interest. These went back many years, well before his retirement, some brittle with age, a number from true detective magazines. At times he would underline in pen some nice piece of detective work, sometimes deductive, other times forensic.

I would walk a stack of file folders to Cummings's desk and sit and flip through the contents, and occasionally I'd get distracted by the interesting stories he'd clipped, everything from Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden to Kid Twist taking that flying leap out a six-story window at a Coney Island hotel (there'd only been six cops to keep track of him). So it sucker punched me when I found myself holding a crumbling clipping from an old
Saga
mag headed
THE MARK OF BASIL.

There, in details echoing what diamond merchant David Gross had told me, was the tale of the tsar's favorite stonecutter, with blurry photos and hand-drawn re-creations, winding up with the questions, "Whatever happened to the great Basil? And what became of his precious stones? Has a glittering trail of death continued on through the years?"

My hands were trembling. It might have been a coincidence. After all, it wasn't like Doolan worked the Lizzie Borden case. These clippings seemed random, just material that got his juices going enough to honor them with a place in an already fat file folder of nothing special.

But for the first time I had a connection between Bill Doolan and the pebble I'd absentmindedly plucked from a pile of bloody sawdust used to soak up the life that had spilled too soon from young Ginnie Mathes.

It was almost one
P.M.,
so I had a beer and unwrapped the ham and cheese on rye my host had bequeathed me. The "Mark of Basil" clipping stared at me from the desk as I ate and drank, and dared me to make something out of it.

Beyond its existence, I couldn't. It remained nothing but a glimmer of a place where three murders connected—Doolan's staged suicide, the fatal mugging of Ginnie Mathes, and the hit-and-run of Dulcie Thorpe—and it provided nothing more than the hope that maybe my efforts were worth the trouble.

Nothing else presented itself in the folders of clippings, though I lost an hour plowing through a full drawer of mob material, with plenty on the Bonettis and a full file on the Tretriano family, right up to recent stories on Anthony and Club 52. Nothing underlined in these.

I moved on to the drawers of photos. I skipped the folder on myself and went right to the folder stuffed with shots of beautiful women, sometimes with Doolan posing with them, often indifferently composed, indicating he'd elicited help from some bystander to snap these visual keepsakes. The final dozen or so were from Club 52, including the sexy onstage shots of Chrome that I'd seen before.

This time I noticed another blonde, up by the stage, but her back was to the camera—tall, shapely, her sleek ash blonde hair curling under just before it hit her shoulders. Wearing tight jeans and a white blouse, she was in all of the performance shots. Never more than a sliver of her face was revealed, yet something about the way she stood jogged my mind....

Laying the photos out like panels of a comic book, I got the overall picture—the blonde was running point for Doolan! Obviously she would carve herself a place out near the stage, and when Doolan was ready to snap his camera, she would move to one side, taking the patron or two next to her along for the ride, giving him a path for a clear shot.

In addition, there were three photos of Doolan posing with Chrome, the singer's arm around him in one, another where she was kissing him on the cheek, and a final one where they were hugging, the old boy looking happy as hell. Couldn't blame him.

But the other blonde, the ash blonde, her presence was felt in those three pics as well. They were the work of somebody who knew her way around a camera—better than just a recruited bystander, superior to Doolan's own amateur-night photography.

Who was she?
Was this the younger woman who had smudged her makeup dancing with Doolan that Cummings had told me about? Who Doolan had bought a gift for? Trying to make Chrome into Doolan's girlfriend was a stretch. Maybe the ash blonde was the real woman in his life.
Who was she?

One of the photos was still in my hand when the office door opened, as if in answer to that question. And it was an attractive woman, all right, but not a very good candidate for Doolan's late-in-life lover—since this was his granddaughter.

"Mike," Anna Marina said, and forced a smile. "I'm glad you're here. Pat said you might be."

She was probably thirty-five and had a nice shape on her, well served by an orange paisley silk blouse and a short rust-color skirt with matching pumps. Good colors for a redhead like her, with her pug nose lightly dusted by freckles and her big dark blue wide-set eyes; even her lipstick was an orange-tinged red on thin but nicely formed lips. Her hair was in a shag that had been out of style for a while, but I didn't mind. I'd been out of style longer than that.

"Hi, kid," I said. "Come in and stay a while."

She shut the door carefully, as if afraid she might break the glass, and crossed the creaky floor to the client's chair. This was Cummings's office but I was feeling like a private detective again. And something about her manner told me this was business.

"Pat said you're looking into my grandfather's death." Anna had a nice voice, breathy, high-pitched but not squeaky. She sat on the edge of the chair, knees together. No purse.

"Yeah," I said. "I have my suspicions."

"Frankly ... so have I."

"Really?"

"Not about his suicide. I think he took his life. I mean, who wouldn't, facing that kind of death sentence?"

I frowned at her. "I can share my thoughts, Anna, if you want to know why I—"

"You've been in and out of his apartment, right? Looking into things, I mean."

I shifted in Pete's chair. What was this about?

"Yeah, Anna, I have. Why?"

"Did you notice something missing?"

"No."

"From the walls, I mean."

"No. Everything looked like it was where it belonged. Always did in your grandfather's apartment."

She nodded, then shrugged. "It's true that other things had been hung in their place."

"What things? In whose place?"

She sat forward, wide-eyed, and an urgency that had been bubbling under her surface made itself known. "The two paintings. By George Wilson? The famous abstract painter?"

"Never heard of the guy. Are these the two paintings Pat told me about? The valuable paintings that were left to you in your grandfather's will?"

She nodded. "Mike, they're worth a lot of money. Twenty-five thousand as a pair. They are just a bunch of colors and shapes, but the artist died recently and the value has skyrocketed."

I nodded. "And these paintings should have been in Doolan's apartment?"

"Yes. But they're gone. And I'd like you to find them—no questions asked."

"I could look for them, I guess. But there was no sign of a break-in."

She winced. "Mike ... are you going to make this hard? We are willing to give you a ... a twenty percent finder's fee. No questions asked."

"What's this 'no questions asked' stuff?"

She rose. She smoothed her skirt out. Tugged at her blouse as she thrust out her breasts, which were nice full high handfuls that went well with her narrow waist. Her face was pretty enough but with an odd blankness that hid calculation, or anyway tried to.

Then she was sitting on the edge of my desk, bracing herself with the heels of her hands pushed against the edge, which gave her a breasts-forward posture. Her crossed legs were bare, her knees white. Nice calves on her. She was a natural redhead, and I always get a kick out of that, when it comes time to compare the drapes and the carpet.

Anna Doolan, now Marina, had always been able to work guys into a lather without trying, which was how she'd won her high-school-football-hero husband. Who had gone on to further glory as an hourly worker at an upstate dog food factory

"You never liked me," she said, chin up a little. "But you always liked to look at me."

"I never disliked you. I just saw through you."

"We could have a weekend together, Mike. Just you and me. Harry goes to Vegas with some friends of his in June. We could go someplace else. Any place you like."

She started to unbutton her blouse. I was going to stop her, but what the hell—no charge for looking. The blouse hung open and then she helped it a little, letting her twins out for some air.

She didn't have a bra on. She didn't need one. Her breasts were creamy white and dusted with freckles, just like her face. Her areolae were barely darker than the smooth flesh around them and the nipples just a little darker than that, pert eraser tips that could rub a man's face until he'd forgotten any mistakes he ever made, or might ever make....

"Twenty-five percent," she said, and I got it.

"Get the hell off my desk, Anna," I growled, "and button up. I didn't steal your damn paintings."

She frowned, and slid down off the desk with her shoes hitting the floor like two little gunshots. The blouse hung open and the view was fine, but all I could think was
How could this little tramp be related to Doolan?