Kiss Her Goodbye (12 page)

And it wasn't Pat Chambers.

It had gotten dark faster than I expected. There was none of the quiet ease of evening, the way it was at my Florida place, no soft smells and faraway sounds. It was all New York hardness, and the sounds were brazen with impatience, the odors sharp, pungent. Sidewalk traffic had the same hostility the roadway had, everybody in a damned hurry and coming straight at you. Some of the younger wiseass punks even played the chicken game but when they got up close and saw my face, they didn't do any shoulder jousting.

Damn, had it always been like this? What had happened in the one year I had been away?

When I reached the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, I stopped and stared around me. I had been walking for a good half hour without realizing it, letting the city get back into my pores again. Now I was hoping the place wasn't going to poison me. If I had been thinking, I couldn't remember what it was about.

The girl said, "Were you looking for someone?"

She was still pretty, like a college postgrad, with a pert smile, brown hair highlighted blonde, and a cute shape in a floral-print minidress. There was even a quizzical expression in her eyes as if she really meant what she said.

But the dress was too short and too tight and her makeup was heavier than back when she was trying to date guys her own age in Bumfuck, Utah, or Arsehole, West Virginia. Before she became a runaway. And a hooker.

A year ago she never would have come near me.

I had paused, so she repeated, "I said, are you looking for someone?"

"Why?"

"You look lost."

I smiled a little. "Maybe I am."

"Then..." A smile flashed, and life pretended to come into dark blue eyes. "...
I
may be the one you're looking for." She moved, a silken little gesture, and her eyes locked on mine. The headlights of a car turning the corner swept over her face and the little-girl look went hard for a moment.

"You have supper yet?" I asked her.

"What?" She seemed surprised, then: "No."

"Good. Let's get some. And you'll get paid for your time. Is it still a dollar a minute?"

She smirked but it was friendly. "Mister, are
you
out of touch..."

"Okay, I'll settle for the going rate."

Her head cocked, like the RCA Victor dog. "You're not
kidding
about supper, are you?"

"No, I'm hungry, and I want to talk."

I picked out the place, since if she'd chosen it, I might still wind up sapped by her boyfriend for my wallet. It was a small Italian restaurant east of Sixth Avenue and she had veal Parmesan and I had sausage and peppers, and for an hour I talked about New York and Velda, and she told me all about three abortions, a bad marriage, and I don't think either of us always knew exactly what the other was saying, the Generation Gap being what it is.

But somehow we both enjoyed the talk.

Going out the door into the evening, she asked, "Are you a tourist?"

"Sort of. I used to live here."

I slipped her two hundred bucks that she didn't want to take until I stuck it in her purse.

On the way out, she said, "I never did
that
before."

"Now that you mention it, neither have I." I glanced at my watch. "Are you done for the night or are you going back to your corner?"

She threw me a quick, impish grin. "I think I'll go home. Why spoil a nice evening. Listen, I could still go somewhere with you—no charge. I
like
you. I can make you happy."

"You could make me ecstatic, kitten."

She laughed. "'Kitten'—that's a funny thing to call a person. How about it?"

I thought about that double bed back at the Commodore, but I said, "Another time."

"Sure." There was something sad in it, which from a realist like this kid was remarkable. "You could walk me back to Fifth. I'll get a cab there."

"Pleasure."

She hooked her arm in mine and we headed east. Halfway up the street, we were crossing over so she could pick up a cab by the stoplight, and we almost made it.

Neither of us saw the car coming. There was no warning blast of a horn or flash of lights, just the roar of an accelerating engine that was right behind us and I heard the dull, sickening sound of the car smashing into a body just as the edge of the fender caught me under my thigh and spun me toward the sidewalk.

For a minute I lay there, dazed, waiting for the sudden flood of pain to come on, trying to figure out what the hell had happened. I moved, sat up, and knew that nothing was broken. The breath was still out of me and inside of me I could feel that everything was still in place.

Up ahead, people were milling about and somebody was screaming hysterically. The crowd seemed to flow in as though drawn by a magnet and blue lights were making psychedelic patterns on the walls of the buildings.

Then the disorientation passed and I remembered the car. Remembered getting the
sense
of a car, its engine roar and the flash of metal and headlights passing as we'd been struck.

But no recall, no sense, of the vehicle's make or color much less a goddamn license plate. Only that it had been big, a Caddy or Lincoln maybe. Or maybe any car that knocks you on your ass seems big in your fragmented memory....

My hat was lying right beside me and so was her purse. Swearing under my breath, I picked them both up and walked unsteadily toward the crowd. They were three thick, but I edged my way through as a lady in front got sick to her stomach, grabbed at her mouth, and forced herself away.

What was there was enough to make anybody sick. The impact had crushed my dining companion's body into odd angles and the force of her head hitting the pavement left nothing recognizable. She didn't look young and she didn't look old.

She just looked dead.

I realized I had her purse in my hand, then edged back out of the crowd. I had seen enough. A uniformed officer was standing beside a prowl car and I eased over to him.

"This was lying in the street back there," I said. I handed him the pocketbook.

He looked at me sharply. "You see the accident?"

I told him the truth. "No, I sure didn't."

Being in the accident didn't mean I had to see it.

"You open this purse?"

"No, but maybe you'd better. Some legalities involved, aren't there?"

That got me a frosty look, then he said, "I'll go get the sergeant."

I didn't wait for him to come back.

Two blocks away I looked down at myself. There was a small tear in my pants leg and street dirt on the sleeve of my coat. With all that jostling, I checked to see if the pebble was still in my pocket.

It was.

My hat needed straightening out, but I wouldn't have been taken for an accident victim, not as long as I was up and walking. Not that that mattered—a guy unconscious on the sidewalk would just be a drunk to anyone running where the action was. If there was no blood, there was no hurt, so who needed to stop, in this town?

My side was hurting again, a dull ache that had all the promise of building into a boiling agony if I didn't get back to my medication fast.

But first I had to make sure of something. I found where the car had made the initial contact and I kept on walking. About two hundred feet down, I found the skid marks that curved out from the curb where the driver burned rubber pulling away. Any squeal noise he made would have been buried in the traffic clatter from Sixth Avenue.

It had to be a big car with a big engine that could pick up momentum fast, but the driver was lousy and never took his foot off the pedal long enough to counteract the centrifugal force of the curve.

He had wanted me, but all he got was her.

And I didn't even know her name.

I got up at six-thirty, showered, brushed my teeth, and shaved. I began to come alive when room service got there with my coffee and the
News. "I
have the
Times
if you'd like, sir..."

"
News
is fine," I said.

I signed the bill, fixed my coffee, and opened the paper.

In the photo her body was covered on the stretcher but I wasn't interested in that. The story was brief because she was a nobody who had gotten splattered publicly, a twenty-nine-year-old named Dulcie Thorpe who lived alone in a small East Side apartment. She apparently maintained a nice lifestyle with no visible means of support, no family, and apparently few friends. Her purse had been recovered and had contained a little over six hundred dollars in cash.

So there were still honest cops in New York.

It was strictly a hit-and-run accident and from the damage it did, the car must have been well above the speed limit. No one saw the accident, although several saw a car race by, turn against the light of Fifth, and fly away. One said a headlight was out.

Pat was in when I called, told somebody in his office to close the door, and said, "Well, how are things going, pal?"

"Could be better."

"Yeah?"

"Last night there was a hit-and-run on Forty-seventh right off Fifth."

"Right, a young girl."

"Since when do hit-and-runs hit your desk?"

"It's in the papers this morning. Why?"

"They locate the car, Pat?"

"Beats me."

"Think you can find out?"

"Why?"

"This is where I remind you I'm a taxpayer, and you tell me to go fuck myself and do what I ask anyway."

I heard him breathing hard, then, irritably, he said, "Hang on," and put me on hold.

My coffee was gone and I had finished the paper when he came back on. "Mike...?"

"I'm here."

"It was four blocks away, double-parked outside a bar. The lights and grille were smashed, blood, pieces of flesh, and bits of clothing were in the wreckage. A cabbie parked down the street saw it pull in, a man get out and apparently walk toward the bar. That was all. It was a stolen late-model Caddy and the driver probably wore gloves."

"When was it reported stolen?"

"At eleven
P.M.
when the police tow-away truck saw what had happened to the front end. They pulled the owner's name from the computer and got him out of bed."

"Who was he?"

"A young doctor who had spent the whole day in surgery at Bellevue."

"And no prints," I said.

"Actually, plenty of 'em, but they all belong to two people—the doctor and his wife." He paused, then added, "It was a real pro job—the entry, hot-wiring, the whole bit. Does this have something to do with you, Mike?"

I let out a little laugh. I could feel Pat stiffen on the other end of the line. My voice sounded strained when I said, "How long have I been back, Pat?"

"Two days."

"Two D.O.A.s."

"Okay, Mike, say it."

"That guy in the car was trying to take me out. He got the girl instead."

"You're not in the report," he said quietly.

"Right, and there's no sense getting me in it either." I took a deep breath, sat in a different position, and told Pat how it had gone down.

When he had mulled it over, he said, "How do you see it?"

"Somebody doesn't appreciate me snooping around. Whether it's Doolan or the Mathes girl that has made me popular, I can't say yet."

"Mike, you were already popular."

"Like with Alberto Bonetti?"

"Hell, man, that makes zero sense. Like old Alberto so cleverly put it to you the other night, he could have had you pickled or fried anytime he wanted to."

"He didn't say it that cleverly, but you have a point.... Shit."

"What?"

"Nothing. These damn pills are still working on me. Give me a while and I'll think this thing through."

"And the answer will come out just the same," he told me. "You were inside a hit-and-run, and came out lucky. Try looking at it that way. You're the one always saying coincidences
do
happen."

We said so long and hung up.

Suppose,
I thought.

Suppose somebody had picked me up coming out of the hotel, tailed me all day trying to figure a way to nail me, watched when the little hooker and I went to that restaurant for supper, and—knowing we'd be there at least an hour—snagged a car, parked, and waited, hoping he'd get a crack at us.

The possibility was limited, but it
was
a possibility. And if it happened that way, the killer was in a real bind. That "accident" was a murder with the wrong one down, and whoever pulled it would know damn well I'd figure it out.

I felt a grin grow and blossom teeth. Whoever tried to hit me—whether for Doolan or the Mathes kid or both—would have to start all over again.

Only this time I'd be expecting it.

I
WALKED TO BING'S
Gym to work out the body ache from the love tap that Caddy gave me the night before. Bing's top trainer, Clarence, knew something had happened when he saw the bruises across my back and on my leg.

"Mixing it up already, Mr. Hammer?" Clarence asked. He was a black guy about thirty-five who'd long since retired from the ring. "You ain't been back in the city that long."

"Maybe somebody mistook me for an out-of-towner."

"Well, they gonna learn a lesson, I bet. You better work an easy routine today, on the apparatus."

Bing had taught everybody that word.

But I still worked up a good sweat, and even with the new aches and pains, I was feeling more myself. Clarence made sure I had a good rubdown and a shower before turning me loose. I was still sore, but clean as a whistle, and feeling better than I could remember. I hoofed it back to the hotel to change from my sweatshirt and slacks into a suit and tie, and to dump my gym bag.

I had made some changes. You would think I'd have doubled up on the meds last night, after that hit-and-run scrape. You would be wrong. I stopped taking the pills. I didn't flush them—I just put them away. They were mostly for pain and sleep and something that I suspected was an antidepressant meant to cool me out.

Well, a long time ago I had gone to sleep fine in foxholes in the kind of tropical rainstorms that could turn your safe haven into a drowning bath and had artillery for thunder, and if I could deal with those pains and pressures as a kid, I could sure as hell manage without medication as a man.