Kiss Her Goodbye (27 page)

The blinds behind Cummings's desk, a vague blobby shape over to my far right, were shut, but there was no daylight out there to get in. On my walk here, I'd seen the afternoon give way to night, hours early, thanks to the thunderstorm and black clouds that rolled and roiled like a black tidal wave in the sky, shot through with crackling veins of white.

After reclining in slow motion, I settled on the couch, on my right side, the plump armrest my pillow. Soon I got to like the driving sound of the storm. The thunder had let up, mostly, its roar reduced to an occasional halfhearted murmur. Now there was just downpour, cleansing the gray collection of steel and glass and concrete that New York had become, or giving it a good goddamn try.

I didn't dare go back to the Commodore, not right now. Too many people knew I was staying there. And too much temptation for me to return to those pill bottles, the magic vials that quelled the hurt and beat my subconscious into submission and mellowed me out when that was the last damn thing I needed.

But the temptation remained, as the pains in my side and my midsection throbbed and burned and traded spasms like they were in competition for my attention. They had it, all right.

The saving grace was how tired I was, the energy I'd burned in the jungle of that three-story brownstone, followed by a wind-whipped, rain-lashed twelve-block walk, had left me spent, empty, and it didn't take long for sleep to roll in like fog and fill me up.

***

The sound of the key in the door lock was small and scratchy and subtle, and if the rain hadn't reduced itself to drizzle that merely pattered at the windows, I might not have heard it.

I came awake at once, but moved not at all. The dream I'd been lost in had been intense and dramatic and was gone now, a tiny vivid life snuffed out by the reality of someone entering the office.

A woman.

Framed there in the doorway, enough light making its way from the street to the little landing two floors up to give me the shape of her, tall, with a shoulder-length helmet of hair, blonde, a raincoat, the hand holding the key going into a purse and coming back with something small and flat.

A gun.

A little automatic.

I held my breath. She hadn't gone for the light switch, either. She was moving toward Cummings's desk, and my hand was snaking silently through the darkness to the floor by the couch where the .45 lay.

The shape of her against the windows was indistinct but again I knew she was tall, and well built, and it might have been Angela Marshall.

Had she come looking for me?

Her head was lowered when she clicked on the little desk lamp and all I could see was the top of her head, the blonde hair.

Was it Chrome?
How had
she
known to come here?

As she went through papers on the desk, the file folders I'd been going through still there, the little automatic remained clutched in her right hand. Meantime, my fingers touched the cold oily metal of the .45, and then found the familiar walnut grips, and the weapon was in my hand when I said, "You want to lay that little automatic down gently, doll. Nice and easy."

The blonde looked up at me, startled, but the hand with the gun neither released nor pointed it. The ash blonde hair curled around a lovely face whose deep brown eyes searched through the darkness, a lush, red, moist mouth open in surprise but not dismay.

"Mike...?"

"...
Velda?
"

She let the nasty little hammerless .32 drop to the desk and came around quickly, and I was off the couch, the .45 plopping on a sofa cushion as she rushed over and I took her in my arms, every aching muscle and bone in my body not giving a damn about discomfort, because the wonder and joy and delight of seeing her again, of having her in my arms once more, overrode all else.

She was a woman in a sopping raincoat and I was a mess in damp underwear with a mouth full of thick sleep and neither of us cared, the kiss of hello making up for the goodbye kiss that never happened, any recriminations, any frustrations, any irritations gone in one fast embrace.

Her face was buried in my neck, where she murmured my name again and again.

"Velda," I said. I felt like a man who'd been crawling across a desert and had seen an oasis and crawled and crawled some more and
thank you God
it was no mirage, it was real, so very real. "Velda."

"Oh Mike ... oh
Mike
...coming in from the airport, I heard about that slaughter at the social club." She brought her eyes around to meet mine. "Was that you, Mike? Did you do that?"

"What do you think?"

"The cops are speculating it was two mob factions mixing it up. The only survivor is a bartender who said he didn't see anything. They say twenty-four are dead."

"Sounds about right, kitten." My legs went rubbery, and I groaned.

Alarm colored her voice: "Were you wounded?"

"I had a vest on. I took a couple in the midsection."

She was shaking her head, the ash blonde arcs swinging like scythes. "Jesus, Mike, you can die, getting shot up in a vest. You might have internal bleeding."

"I'm ... I'm all right, baby. Now that I see you, I'm all right."

But she wasn't hearing any of it. She put me back on the couch, switched on a standing lamp nearby, and headed for the little john in the rear corner. She came back with a cool cloth and sat beside me and soothed my brow and cleaned my face. And my hands.

"Blood all over you, Mike."

"But not mine."

"You need something for the pain?"

"I'm off the meds."

"Aspirin at least. I have some in my purse."

She fed me half a dozen that I washed down with a Miller from Cummings's little fridge. Then I was stretched out on my back again. She perched beside me and looked down at me with so much love I could hardly take it.

"I'm sorry, baby," I said. I felt my eyes fill up. Goddamn sissy.

She shook her head. "We were both fools. That's all the discussion we need."

"Okay. So..." I gave her my slyest grin. "...You been in Colombia, huh?"

Her eyes widened, like a pinup girl whose skirt blew up in a convenient gust of wind. "How much do you know?"

"I know that Doolan didn't kill himself."

She frowned, shook her head. "He would never do that. Never. I wanted to come back right away, as soon as I heard, but I had things to do first. You made it for the funeral?"

I nodded. "Saw to it that that gun he gave Pat got buried with him."

"Good." She swallowed. "That's good."

"You were the mystery woman everybody thought was Doolan's girl."

"Is that what they thought? Well, I guess we wanted them to. All he ever talked about was how I should stop being so goddamn stubborn and go find you and get back with you. He said without me in your life, you would be lost. And without you in my life, I'd never be whole again."

"Doolan wasn't wrong. What
was
your relationship?"

She sighed, smiled a little. Hard to get used to her as a blonde. "He came to me for help, Mike. You weren't around, and I had a P.I. ticket. And anyway, I could go undercover better than somebody as well known as you."

"When was this?"

"Four, five months ago." She cocked her head and her eyes narrowed as she regarded me. "We need to tell each other our stories, Mike. You want to go first?"

I did.

I told her how Doolan had been found in his apartment with the night latches undone. How whoever killed him was close to him, a girlfriend maybe. How a young would-be dancer got herself mugged and killed in a war zone near McCormick's Funeral Home the night we gave Doolan his send-off. How the dancer's apartment had been searched, and how a boyfriend of hers had been killed. And when I mentioned Basil's pebble, her eyes flared and her nostrils, too.

"You know something about that, baby?"

"I do. But go on, Mike."

I told her about Dulcie Thorpe getting run down because some amateur got sloppy making a try for me. I told her about Assistant D.A. Angela Marshall's interest in the case, but did leave a few details out—why spoil a great homecoming? I explained how Anthony Tretriano wasn't really deserving of his reputation for going straight, and how his Club 52 was a degenerate's Disneyland that was about to go the big-time franchise route, like McDonald's. Cocaine with that?

I told her everything. Almost.

"Okay, doll. Tell me about
your
spring break vacation."

There was something wistful in her half smile. "I have to give you credit, Mike. You came back to the city and in a few days gathered enough information to come to the same conclusions that Doolan and I had worked for over many months. But we had gone the second step—we had a strong lead on who and where Little Tony's coke connection was."

"In Colombia."

She nodded. "Let me dispense with one false assumption you made—those fabled stones of Basil, that unpolished pebble of yours? There are no others. It's the last one."

"The last? Why?"

"Because despite the legend, Basil did not escape the Holocaust, not really. He was betrayed by a high-level Nazi who had agreed to help smuggle Basil into Switzerland in exchange for the stones as well as a handful of precious gems already cut and set in rings and other jewelry. The exchange was made, all right, and the Nazi got the pouch of pebbles ... but Basil escaped the gas chamber only in the sense that he died under a gun."

"Why has a stone turned up now?"

"After the war, a small cadre of Nazis hiding out in South America used the gems to build their new lives. This included the predictable cover stories and lavish estates, not to mention top-notch tutors to teach them a new language and culture ... but eventually the need to create a new, ongoing income became imperative. This group of Nazis—three of them, two ranked just below Goebbels, the other was two notches under Himmler—used the stones and cut gems over the years ... parceling them out to discreet, wealthy, very private collectors ... to become the masters of the Colombian drug cartel."

"Gems were a perfect way to fund their activities," I said.

"Yes—your theory about the mob using them for money laundering was essentially correct, only it wasn't the mob. It was the cartel."

I was nodding. "And Doolan sold two valuable paintings, which he neglected to remove from his will, to fund your South American trip. What the hell did you do down there, doll?"

Her chin went up, proud of herself. "I landed a job as the executive secretary to one of the three masters of the cartel. They have also built up legitimate businesses over the years, in part for cover and money laundering, but some are very successful in their own right."

"How did you and Doolan swing getting you in that close to the top guys?"

Her smile had an impish quality, which in such a big sleek cat of a woman should have been silly, but wasn't. "I have contacts that even Doolan doesn't have ... that even
you
don't have, Mike. You know I worked for Military Intelligence during the war."

"And did a C.I.A. stint in the Cold War. Which I could hardly forget. So they helped you with a cover story?"

"They call it a 'legend' these days, Mike. See? You're not the
only
legend in this partnership." She stroked my cheek. "Through those contacts, I got tight with some D.E.A. agents. They are anxious for this information."

"Bet they are. So your federal friends paved the way?"

"Yes."

"So what did you learn?"

"Plenty. I have microfilm of financial records and extensive photographs of all three former Third Reich bigwigs—they have been discreet over the years about having their pictures taken, as you might imagine. And I have confirmed their relationship with Anthony Tretriano. He'll be taken down by the D.E.A. and I.R.S. within days."

Old Alberto had been right—he'd had contacts, too.

"Doll, what was the photography bit? Why did Doolan want those pictures of Chrome, and where does she fit in? He wasn't
really
shooting photos for some L.A.-based reporter, was he?"

She laughed lightly. "Doolan was no photographer, Mike. You knew that."

"That was
you
taking the shots of him posing with Chrome, right?"

"Right. And as for Chrome, I don't know where or even
if
she fits in, Mike. She's an entertainer, and a very rich, successful one, and apparently Tony Tret really is crazy about her. Which surprises me, because I always thought he leaned the other way. But these days, you never know. The pictures weren't of her, anyway."

"Sure they were—I
saw
them. They were in Doolan's files."

"Well, she's
in
the photos. But we were after shots of the three guys in her band."

"Her band?"

"Yeah. So-called band. They're phonies. My friends in the D.E.A. suspected those three might be connected to the Colombian bunch, and they are. They're not musicians, not really—they're bodyguards with a long association with the cartel."

I snapped my fingers. "I
knew
they weren't playing those instruments on stage. Chrome was singing to a prerecorded track—they were just faking it, miming it."

Velda shrugged. "It may be as simple as Chrome needs protection. She's a big star in South America, and the word is that she's primed for superstardom here as well. Those three bodyguards are the only direct connection between her and the cartel."

"So who was the pebble for?"

She frowned. "What do you mean, Mike?"

"I mean that kid Ginnie Mathes—she was an innocent, manipulated into being a delivery girl. Somebody mugged and killed her before the handoff was made. Who was supposed to get that last stone of Basil's?"

Velda shook her head. "No clue. But it sounds like you think the mugging really
was
a mugging...."

"I can't prove it, but I can tell you what makes sense to me. I think Ginnie Mathes got back together with Joseph Fidello, maybe not steady again but just saw him a few times when he was between cruise-ship gigs. And I think sailor-boy Fidello, who had been around, saw that unpolished gemstone and knew what it was. Knew that his dumb little ex-girlfriend had temporary possession of an object of untold value."