Lady, Go Die! (15 page)

“So who’s in now?”

“Oh, Fred Jackson, a nice enough guy, all right, real nice guy. He was elected by popular acclaim just
because
he was a real nice guy.”

“Great,” I said. “Just fine.”

“He was born here, went to college upstate, taught six-graders for a year, got drafted and picked up some shrapnel in the Pacific, became something of a local hero and inherited his old man’s dairy farm. Now he’s sheriff.”

“No good, huh?”

“A nice guy, but no cop, Mike. No cop at all.”

“And you smell something.”

“That’s right. The county sheriff’s office is right here in Wilcox. You could talk to Sheriff Jackson, if you think it’ll do any good.”

“So could you. You’re still around.”

“That’s about the extent of it,” he told me. “
Around.
Nothing more. Every so often they take off another hunk of my leg to try and stop happening whatever’s happening to it. Pretty soon there won’t be much left to take off. I can make it back and forth to the office, do my job well enough to hold it down, because I can still yell loud enough to scare people. And I have a few guys at the plant here back me up.”

A scowl pulled at my eyes. “What do they need security for in a place that digs up clay and makes bricks out of it?”

“Because our big contract is with the government. There’s a rare element in this ground that makes our bricks ideal for use in government facilities attached to atomic testing.”

“So you’re keeping the Commies away.”

He grinned. “No Ruskies have made it past Staten Island on my watch.”

I laughed at that, but I was getting itchy to get back to Sidon and my real case.

I said, “Listen, Dave, I can see why you think the Sharron Wesley
killing might tie in to these others. It strikes me as kind of thin frankly, but... I can see it. What you don’t know is she was likely killed because of that casino she ran outside of Sidon. She appears to have stashed substantial cash on the grounds, just begging for a treasure hunt, and she has ties to big-time gambling in the city. Unless syndicate guys have suddenly started hiring kill-happy lunatics to carry out contract work, I can’t see how this ties in.”

He didn’t reply at once. Then he said, very softly, “You and I have been friends too damn long for you to just shrug me off, Mike. You backed me up in a shoot-out twice and I damn well saved your ass when Gorcey had a gun in your neck and was going to blow your damn head off.”

There was something hanging in the air I couldn’t quite make out.

Finally I said, “Okay. So I owe you. You probably owe me, too, but forget that. I know you have good instincts. Hell, great instincts. But so do I. There’s more to this.”

“There is.”

“Then spit it out.”

Dave nodded slowly, then pushed his chair around with his good leg and stared out the window at the complex of buildings that sprawled out to the west.

His voice was distant as he said, “Remember that little teenage girl whose family got killed when Thaxton burned down his building to collect the insurance?”

“Sure. She was a sweet kid. Doris something, right? Doris Wilson? You had me enlist Velda to put her up for a month before you found somebody to take her in. Nobody back in those days
on the department ever knew how much of a soft-hearted slob you really are.”

His head half-turned, then he looked back out the window. “Nobody else ever took her in, Mike.
I
gave her a place to stay, saw to it she stuck out school and made sure she had whatever she needed. Helen and I, we never had any kids, you know. We couldn’t.”

I let him talk. My gut told me where this going, though I prayed I was wrong.

“When Doris graduated, she went to business college and wound up with a job right here in Wilcox. Here at the plant.”

“Damn,” I said.

“We stayed close. And if your dirty mind is thinking I was anything more than a father figure to her, then screw you, Mr. Hammer. After Helen died, I never wanted another woman. Maybe I was still doing things for the kid we never had. It wasn’t any trouble. More like a pleasure. Taking this job here was sort of like coming home for Doris and me, you know what I mean?”

I nodded, but he didn’t see me.

“That’s why I called you,” he said.

I still didn’t say anything. Slowly, he swung around in his chair and got another photo from his desk. Something had happened to his face—it looked gaunt and tired now. He handed me the photo.

It was another crime-scene shot, this one of the girl on the beach with the nylon stocking around her neck and her eyes popping and her tongue bulged out and her body arranged in an obscene spread-eagle that made a mockery of her beauty.

I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid, but it was Doris, all right.

I stabbed my Lucky out. “It’s a damn shame,” I said. “But I barely knew this girl. I’m not saying this doesn’t make me sick to my soul, but I’m already on that other Sidon killing.”

“This is
another
Sidon killing, Mike. And I’m telling you with every fiber of cop instinct left in this fouled-up body of mine, it ties in. And you’re the one to settle the score.”

Softly, I said, “Me?”

Those pale blue eyes were as hard and cold as ball bearings, but with a flaming rage at their core so intense I could hardly meet them.

“You. You’ll do it because we’re friends. And you’ll do it because you’re as professional a cop as any could hope to be, but you aren’t hampered by rules and regulations.”

That wasn’t fair—he’d heard me say that often enough and now he was feeding it back to me.

“And, Mike—you’re the goddamnedest, most cold-blooded killer I have ever seen in my life. And... you’re good at it.”

I looked down at my hands and suddenly the weight of the .45 under my left shoulder seemed a little too heavy. When I looked up my face felt tight.

“I’ve had judges tell me that more than once. I can’t say I liked it.”

He didn’t back off an inch. “Well, tough shinola, sport! Because it happens to be true. I
know
you. Any time you pull the trigger, you are in the right. The bleeding hearts will never understand people like us. So feel flattered instead of getting touchy about it. I’ve killed people too and never lost sleep over it.”

That was more than I could say.

“Anyway,” he said with an awful casualness, “you’re a killer, not
a murderer... and murderers
need
killing. Somebody has to do it. And I am electing you.”

“If you didn’t have one leg I’d knock you on your ass,” I said, halfway meaning it. “Even you being an old man wouldn’t bother me any.”

“You’re the one going soft, Mike,” he said with a grin. “You should’ve done it already.”

“Soft my ass. You pull me in here by the short hairs and expect me to like it?” I slammed a fist on the beach photo. “I was around that nice kid for a month before you got her squared away, and I can remember back. You’re a bastard, Dave. Laying this crap on me.”

Those pale blue eyes watched mine again and he said, “Okay. Blow the whistle and cry foul. All I ask is, play your hand out in Sidon. If it ties in, it ties in. If it doesn’t, we’ll talk again, and maybe get you to look into these kills. Because if somebody doesn’t step in, there will be others, Mike.”

He was right—whoever had been behind that torture kill in the barn was not going to stop. The hunger of whatever sick sexual satisfaction he felt in expressing his power and savagery over these innocents would want feeding again, and again...

Outside, the sun was heading higher, throwing an orange glow on the tops of the buildings, sparkling off the trees behind them. I stood up and shoved on my hat.

“Okay, Dave.” I stopped halfway to the door. “But lay off on the cold-blooded killer stuff, okay?”

He leaned back in his chair and nodded solemnly. “Sure, Mike. We’ll let some sick bastard find it out for himself.”

* * *

Like Sidon, Wilcox counted on the tourist trade, but unlike its neighboring community, it had the look of a real, quietly prosperous town. A block of storefronts had attractive display windows with apartments above, all the buildings uniformly white brickwork with bright, shiny metal trim. And on the corner at the end of the business district was a two-story white-brick building with a fresh, post-war look and, over the entrance, big metal letters that spelled out SUFFOLK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.

I parked the heap at the curb, went in, and walked up to a counter that kept civilians away from a busy bullpen of tan-uniformed officers. Despite Dave’s misgivings, this place had a professionalism that underscored the joke that the Sidon PD had become.

Behind the counter, a tall, slender but curvaceous policewoman rose from a desk to greet me. With her short dark hair and black-framed glasses, she seemed to be working at not looking attractive but not making it. Even the lack of lipstick and the disinterest in her eyes couldn’t dull her appeal. There was just something about a girl in uniform...

“My name is Mike Hammer. I’m a detective from New York City. Private operator working on a case. Is Sheriff Jackson in?”

“Well, Mr. Hammer, you obviously don’t have an appointment with the sheriff. I can check his book. He might be available this afternoon.”

“What time do you get off for lunch?”

That flustered her. “Uh, what do you mean?”

“I mean what time do you get off for lunch. If I have to kill a few hours in your lovely burg, I might as well pass them pleasantly. A nice long lunch with you would make the time just fly. You know the town and I don’t. Where shall we go?”

“Let me check with the sheriff,” she said, and she didn’t mean about her lunch hour. Her cheeks were flushed as she reached for the phone. Somebody needed to tell her she could be a professional without trading in her charms.

She said, “Chief, there’s a Mr. Hammer from New York to see you. He’s a detective working—oh... Certainly, I’ll send him right in.”

The fact that I was important enough to rate immediate entry to the sheriff’s inner sanctum thawed out the policewoman just a little. She gave me a nice smile as she knocked on the wood-and-glass door just off the bullpen.

“Come in!” a male voice called.

She nodded and said, “Eleven.”

“What?”

“I take an early lunch. Eleven.”

She winked, went off, and I was thinking,
Well, I’ll be damned
, and strolled on in.

The sheriff wore a business suit with a dark-blue tie, not a uniform, and might have been a banker. He had a rugged, broad-shouldered look that had probably served him well as a political candidate, though his blond hair was thin and ineffectively combed over. Better stick to local elections.

He half-rose and extended his hand. I took it and his grip was firm. His smile was as business-like as his suit as he gestured to
the visitor’s chair opposite his big mahogany desk.

They had some money to spend in Suffolk County, thanks to the tourist trade—this office was richly wood paneled with wooden filing cabinets, and my brogans were resting on carpet, not wood or tile. There was a big fancy county seal on the wall behind the chief, as well as some framed diplomas and photos, several of them color shots of him grinning with buddies in the Pacific. Navy guys in a tropical clime.

“I’ve heard of you, of course, Mr. Hammer. We do get the city papers all the way out here in the sticks.”

“I wouldn’t call Wilcox the sticks, Sheriff Jackson. You’ve got a handsome little town here. Population’s around, what? Twenty-five thousand?”

“Just twenty, but it swells to fifty during the season. Your notoriety in a number of cases isn’t the only reason I had no trouble recognizing your name, Mr. Hammer. Just this morning, in the press, you were mentioned in relation to the Sharron Wesley murder in Sidon.”

“Yeah, I’m looking into that.”

“In cooperation with the police department there?”

“What police department?”

His smile was immediate. “If I remember right, from one particular profile the
News
did of you and your colorful career, you served in the Pacific, too.”

“I did.”

“I’m glad that’s behind us.”

“Yeah. Listen, I was just talking to my friend Dave Miles out at his plant—”

“Terrific guy, Dave. How the hell is he?”

“Well, he’s fine as long as he doesn’t try to run a marathon. He pointed out some similarities between the murders of Doris Wilson and Sharron Wesley.”

He frowned. With his high forehead, that was a lot of frown. “Boy, I’ve read about the Wesley thing in the papers, but I can’t say I see any connection.”

“I didn’t say connection. I said similarity. The victims were both strangled, the bodies were unclothed, and the crime scenes were staged. As if for effect. Also, one body was on the beach and another in a park off the beach.”

“Well, not the same beach.”

“Not the same stretch of it, no. My understanding is you haven’t turned anything up on the Wilson case.”

He shook his head glumly. “Very little.”

“The similarities are there. I agree they are inexact, but Dave seems to think it may be the same killer as whoever tortured and killed those girls in that barn outside town, a few months ago.”

“That isn’t our case. That took place within Wilcox city limits.” He reached for the phone. “I can arrange for you to talk to Chief Chasen, if you like...”

“No. Not just yet, anyway. I have to say, I’m not convinced these murders are connected myself. It’s even possible someone killed Sharron Wesley and tried to make it look vaguely similar to this other killing, to muddy the waters.”

“That kind of thing has happened.”

“But I want to be up on this case. Two strangulations, two naked female corpses, there’s enough there that I want to carry
any information available into my inquiry into the Wesley killing.”

He had started nodding halfway through that. “I’m afraid we have very little.”

“What
do
you have? Maybe if I could see the file—”

“There’s really not enough to bother getting it out. Doris’ car was found outside a roadhouse where she’d been seen dancing.”