Kiss Her Goodbye (7 page)

"What makes you such a bastard, Mr. Hammer?"

My mind had to refocus, and when it did, I said, "Maybe it's because I hate this place."

"New York?"

I nodded. "You weren't born here, were you?"

"No. I grew up in Albany."

"You should have stayed there." I was getting an edge in my voice.

"But
you
were born here."

"Unfortunately."

"Did you always hate it?"

"There was a time when it was love/hate, I suppose. But just about everything I loved about it is gone. From the Brooklyn Dodgers to the real Madison Square Garden."

The prosecutor across from me considered that, then asked, "What's her name?"

Velda.

"That's a little personal," I said, "for a first date."

"Is that what this is?" She picked up her coffee cup and smiled at me over the rim of it. "Why do you think I'm sitting here with you now, Mr. Hammer? Why did I accept your invitation?"

"You really want to know?"

She nodded, still watching me.

"I laid it on you last night and I laid it on you today," I said, "and you
still
want to know?"

"Certainly."

It was my turn to sit back and do the looking. I let it all ooze up into me, settle there until I was ready to say it, then I grinned like that day a year ago had never happened.

"To you," I said, "I'm an exercise. A far-out, way-out exercise to test your inherent abilities and your well-honed skills. Until now, everything has gone your way, because you have that glossiness beautiful girls get on their way to being women—that smooth surface that makes guys slide right off them. But someplace, way back, somebody smart warned you to watch out for a guy who had sandpaper on his hands, and who wouldn't slide off at all. You never thought you'd need that kind of guy, but, baby, you do now."

She sipped at her coffee again.

I said, "So why did you accept my invitation? Well, I'd say it has something to do with that crime scene last night—doesn't it, Angela?"

When I used her first name, her eyes tightened.

"You should have let your assistant call security," I said, "when I walked into your office."

Another raised eyebrow accompanied a very pretty smirk. "Would that have done any good?"

"Nope. But now think of the reputation you'll have."

"Maybe I'll just tell people I'm thinking of starting up that office pool again."

"Maybe." My eyes were tightening now and I let her see the edge of my teeth again. "What took you to that crime scene last night, Angela?"

Her face became a pale mask. Lovely, but a mask. "What took
you
there, Mike?"

"Coincidence, I think. I'm the rare cop who does believe in coincidence. Who thinks fate likes to move things around sometimes, like a chess master with a sick sense of humor."

"Not very scientific."

"Not scientific at all. But I do have my inquisitive side. For example—why would a powerful woman like you rush to the scene of such an insignificant kill?"

She shifted in her seat. "It wasn't so insignificant to Virginia Mathes."

"That was her name, huh?"

She nodded.

"What else do you know about her?"

"Nothing. She was a mugging victim. I was out driving and heard the call on the scanner. Murder is serious where I come from, Mike."

"Serious enough to accept a breakfast offer from an obnoxious bastard like me?"

"
Just
that serious," she said. Then she checked her watch and gave me a look that said it was time to go.

I left a three-buck tip, grabbed the check, and we slid out of the booth. I tried to pay but Herman wouldn't take my money.

Outside, I asked, "Want a cab?"

"No, I'll walk back." She reached in her purse and took out the ruined lighter. Looked at it. "Somebody I respect gave this to me."

"Right. You bought it for yourself."

Her smile was automatic, uncontrolled, unaffected. "You're a bastard, all right."

"I don't make a secret of it," I said.

She paused, looked at me very directly for a moment. "Will you tell me one thing?"

"Ask."

"Was
I
an exercise for
you?
"

A truck roared by and a taxi squealed into the curb beside us. A guy with a briefcase got out, paid the driver, and walked away. The driver looked at us and I lifted my finger to claim the ride.

But before I climbed in back, I said, "I already got my exercise today, honey."

Over at the chief medical examiner's office on First Avenue, I managed to get hold of Dr. Adam MacCaffrey, the assistant medical examiner who had been called in when Doolan died.

He was a type I had seen before, a man who had been edged into something he could do well, but didn't like at all. He was about fifty with a perpetual expression of puzzlement, as if he were wondering what he was doing there.

Slender, mustached, and about as pale as his customers, he said from behind his desk, "I really don't see how you can question all the facts, Mr. Hammer."

I shook my head. "I'm not questioning anything, doctor. I'm just looking for a little more information."

"Well," he said, his eyes appraising me over his wire-rimmed glasses, "if I can help, I'll be glad to. Frankly, it's a pleasure to be asked to do anything around here that doesn't involve a scalpel." He found the loose-leaf pad he was looking for, fingered it open, and spread it out in front of him on the desk. "I may not be fast, Mr. Hammer, but I am thorough. Now, what is it you want?"

"Doolan's right arm, principally, the wrist."

He turned a page, then looked up at me again. "Yes?"

"Any abrasions, marks of struggle?"

"None," he said, without referring to the pad. "The victim was quite old, and any sign of a struggle would have been most evident. The skin would have shown even mildly rough treatment." He saw me frown and added, "I know what you're thinking. Could somebody have grabbed his hand and twisted it around on him, then fired the shot."

"Something like that."

"Not this time. The pressure of the trigger guard and the trigger itself would have marked him. Somebody's grasp like that would have left definite imprints. The skin of an eighty-five-year-old man is fairly fragile."

"You're certain, doctor?"

"Absolutely. One reason is that in apparently self-inflicted wounds, there is always that possibility, and I check that out immediately. The victim knew what he was doing. There was no unusual angle about the way he fired the gun. The entry was through the sternum and into the heart. Death was instantaneous." He stopped a moment, his pencil tapping on the desktop. "Tell me, Mr. Hammer, what prompts this inquiry?"

"Suicide wasn't Doolan's game, doctor."

He made a noncommittal gesture with his hands, then said, "That could have been true in his younger years, but this was not a younger man. He was old, desperately ill, and the fact he'd been going over his will, and buying up a burial plot that very afternoon, indicates no doubt as to his intentions."

"You have no reservations at all?" I asked him.

"Not from a medical viewpoint. No."

"From any other angle then?"

"I have no expertise other than medical."

I raised an eyebrow. "Checking his wrist was a little more than medical."

The doctor smiled gently. "That was something I picked up from Dr. Milton Helpern, New York's great forensic medical examiner." The smile broadened a little. "Besides, I'm a bit of a police detective buff. Which is why you're not having any trouble getting information out of me, Mr. Hammer."

"Really?"

"Oh yes. You're a famous character in this city. But you know that."

"Some would say 'infamous.' Did you handle that girl who died in a mugging last night? Virginia Mathes?"

He frowned. "As a matter of fact, yes. Why, does that have something to do with Inspector Doolan's death?"

"Not that I know of. Took place less than two blocks from the funeral home where we were sending him off. But that's a pretty thin connection."

"And it's a pretty routine killing, Mr. Hammer. She was stabbed in the heart—she bled out very quickly, was dead in seconds."

"Her body was twisted when she was stabbed, right?"

"Correct. Her assailant came up from behind, apparently cut her purse straps with his knife, and then she turned and he used the knife again. Tragic, but hardly unusual. Not in this city."

"No," I said, getting up, "not in this city."

I was heading south on Third Avenue, on foot, aware of the graduated flow from one neighborhood into the next. Here, money would swell out like a pouter pigeon's chest, next a block might get skinny with the dust of an excavated building only to erupt into noisy ethnics before getting back into the blender of lower Manhattan, where you were no better than what you could hang on to.

A halter-top/hot-pants girl in a doorway, pretty despite her drug habit, said, "Hey, handsome—you want to party?"

That was New York again, anytime, anyplace. At night in the dirty Forties, or before noon in lower Manhattan, sex was always for sale.

I looked at my watch, pretending to consider it, then shook my head. "Too early, sweetheart."

She let out a little laugh and shrugged. "Your loss."

Actually, my gain. What was funny, after all these years, was how few tourists knew the halter-top honey was only bait. Day or night, upstairs some punk would lay open your head with a sap, grab your loot, and drop you off a block away.

Better off with a pickup in a bar. If you knew the ropes, all you got was a possible VD. Hell, sometimes it was for real too, maybe you found a chickie who really did want some company; but you damn well had better use some finely tuned professional judgment.

I met Pat outside the baroque old building on Centre Street where TV cameras were filming a documentary on the early years of the city. There was no show-business hype on this one, no stars, no press agents—just a second-unit camera crew doing MOS filming of exteriors, a standard union bunch making a routine buck.

When I spotted Pat on the sidewalk, I walked over and said, "Looking for a part?"

He didn't even turn his head. He had a battered manila envelope under his arm. "Yeah, as the fall guy in your life story."

"Ms. Marshall called, huh?"

Now he looked at me like I'd asked to borrow a C-note. "She was not thrilled with me, passing you off as an NYPD cop last night."

"But you got off with a spanking, right? Worse dames to get a spanking from."

He picked out a stick of chewing gum, unwrapped it, and shoved it in his mouth; he'd stopped smoking, too. "You've been back one day."

"Almost."

"Uh-huh." He chewed on the gum, dragging out the flavor, then asked, "Why'd you have to pick La
Marshall
to move in on, for Christsakes?"

"It was at her invitation, remember?"

"Hey—she invited you through yours truly. You accepting that invite involved
me.
And I have to work in this department, you know."

I shrugged. "I think she enjoyed herself. Women love me, Pat. Remember?"

It was as if no year had passed. It was like those days when we were a little younger and still breathing hard.

He frowned at me, but his eyes weren't angry at all. "Mike—what the hell is going on?"

"Nothing's going on, Pat. I just asked what brought an important gal like her to the scene of some unimportant mugging."

His frown tightened until his eyes were almost shut. "Goddamn you, Mike. Why do you have to be such a fucking catalyst? You come back, and
everything
gets activated."

"Bullshit."

"No. Not bullshit. The guys at Doolan's funeral knew it, seeing you materialize like a goddamn apparition. Those goombahs sure as hell knew it.
Les Graves
knew it, seeing you at that crime scene last night. Now finally
I
know it. Finally it gets through my thick skull that Mike Hammer has decided an open-and-shut suicide is a murder, and so is a mugging fatality so routine it barely made the papers. One lousy goddamn day, and you've turned it all upside down again."

"It's a gift, Pat."

But there was no way to tell him that coming up on the plane, I'd had the same feeling—vague, but there. Not that I was going to do something, but that something was going to be done
to
me. Done to me good—real good. It wasn't a nice feeling at all.

"So what was Marshall doing at that crime scene?"

His turn to shrug. "Far as I know, just checking out a murder."

"And that's it?"

"She wanted to know whether Homicide was looking into that girl's murder."

"Virginia Mathes, you mean."

His eyes widened. "How the hell do you know her name? It wasn't in the papers."

"Maybe I'm psychic."

"Mike ... Mike. I'm getting too near retirement to play your kind of games."

A little laugh rumbled out of me. I took a look around, saw every crack in the masonry, and smelled the garbage in the gutter. Where I came from, the ocean would be warm, the sand squeaky-crunching under bare feet, and the boat ready to nose out into the Gulf Stream.

I said, "Who was she, Pat?"

He made one of those little noncommittal gestures. "You said it yourself—Virginia Mathes."

"Pat..."

"She was nobody."

"
Nobody's
nobody."

"
She
was," he told me. "Six years ago, she made a stab at entertaining in a club and got printed as part of our licensing requirement. We ran her through Social Security, got her address and where she worked. She was a waitress at Ollie Joe's Steak House for two years, was well liked, had nothing against her in our files, just walked out of Ollie Joe's last night and got herself killed."

"Just like that."

"You were there, Mike."

"Ollie Joe's sure as hell isn't in that neighborhood. But you've already been to Ollie Joe's, haven't you, Pat? And found out something else, too?"

Ten seconds dragged by; we were just two gawkers on the street watching a film crew. Finally he looked at me.