Don't Look Behind You (7 page)

The man in the topcoat was likely heading toward the exit/entrance at Fifth Avenue at Sixtieth. I felt confident this was my would-be assassin, but maybe not confident enough to shoot him.

That kind of mistake was hard to live down.

And anyway, I needed him alive for a conversation. That friendly cabbie deserved better, but I needed not to shoot this prick.
Somebody had hired him and I would find out who.
Gun in hand, upright, I ran hard now, cutting the distance quickly.

When I was within fifty feet of him, I yelled, “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

He kept moving, glancing back at me. He wore sunglasses, the orange tactical variety, on a bland oval face.
He was the shooter, all right.
White guy, medium height, in that gray topcoat, hatless, short black hair, another face in the crowd like my late pal Woodcock.

I fired a shot into the ground—fire it in the air and a slug might come down and clip somebody—and the roar of it was like a lion was loose from the park zoo.

“
I changed my mind!
” I yelled. And I stopped running. I aimed the .45 in a two-handed grip, my feet apart, firing-range style. “
Please
don’t
stop!
”

But he did stop, swinging around and dropping to one knee—he, too, was in a firing-range stance—bringing the rifle out and up from under the topcoat and aiming.

That was as far as he got.

My .45 slug hit him at the bridge of his nose and split his skull like an ax and he toppled onto his side with blood and brains leaking out like he’d done a Humpty Dumpty off the nearby wall. And all the king’s horses couldn’t do a goddamn thing for this bastard. King’s men, either.

People were yelling now, and I heard a police whistle as I approached the corpse.

Something told me conversation with this guy was out.

I got to the office at eight the next morning and found Velda already there, with the coffee going and some Danish waiting. She was in a pale yellow silk blouse and a brown skirt whose above-the-knee length was her only concession to changing fashions. She didn’t work in heels—she was damn near as tall as me without them.

I’d never made it to my meeting with Hy Gardner and Velda at the Blue Ribbon yesterday afternoon, and had to phone there to call it off from the lobby of Gwen Foster’s apartment building. The doorman had let me use the lobby restroom as well, to wash the cabbie’s blood off my face.

Wordlessly Velda and I got ourselves cups of coffee and paper napkins for our pastry and went to her desk, where she got behind and sat, and I sat opposite, like a client.

“You’ve seen the papers,” she said.

“Yup.”

“They’re onto you.”

“Yup.”

She picked up the
News
from her blotter. “‘PRIVATE EYE IS PUBLIC TARGET.’ ‘Who’s out to get the infamous Mike Hammer?’”

I was half-way through my Danish. “What’s the difference between ‘infamous’ and ‘famous,’ anyway?”

“You are.” She folded the tabloid in half and dumped it with a thunk into the wastebasket by her desk. “And that’s the
friendly
paper. The rest dredged up your every kill and self-defense plea going back to the Jack Williams case.”

“What can we do about it?” I sipped coffee. I may be tough but I take it with milk and sugar. “Anyway, it might drum up business.”

Her eyelids were at half-mast. “Sure. Who doesn’t want to do business with a guy with a bull’s-eye on his back?”

I shrugged. “Borensen didn’t take us off that bridal shower. Did I tell you on the phone last night about both him and Gwen coming over to the park, after they heard what was going on?”

“No, you left that out.”

“Well, they did, and backed up my story that I’d had a business meeting with them before taking my innocent leave.”

She almost choked on her coffee. She takes it black. “I hope you didn’t use the word ‘innocent’ when Pat showed up. He’d laugh your tail into jail.”

“Very poetic, but I told you already. Captain Chambers was fine at the scene. He’s concerned about his old pal. Even called me at home last night, after you and I talked.”

“Oh?”

I nodded. “It was going on midnight. He’d had a busy evening. Him and maybe twenty other plainclothes cops—looking for witnesses in the park, and talking to tenants in that fancy apartment house with its expensive view on the park.”

“What did they get?”

“Bupkus.”

“Any evidence in the park?”

“Just the son of a bitch I shot, his rifle and a couple spent shells, one of them mine. I was in the clear from the starting gun.”

“Which you fired, of course.” The phone on Velda’s desk rang and she answered: “Michael Hammer Investigations… Yeah, he just got here.” She covered the receiver and said, “Pat. His ears must’ve been burning.”

I got up, tossing my empty coffee cup and wadded napkin down the funnel the
News
made in her wastebasket. “I’ll take it in there.”

She nodded as I headed into my inner sanctum. I left the door open, though—no secrets between Velda and me. No office secrets, anyway.

“Morning, Pat,” I said into the phone, getting behind my desk. “Anything on our dead shooter?”

“That’s why I’m calling,” his voice said. “Charles Maxwell, thirty-eight, unmarried, former military, and until about three months ago he had a little insurance agency in Baltimore. Sound familiar?”

“It does if the Baltimore PD suspects his agency was a front for a professional killer, though he’d never been charged. Seems to me I’ve heard that song before.”

“Yeah, I thought it was real damn familiar tune, too. I’m having a screwy thought, Mike, and I’m guessing you’re having it, too.”

“Like someone local recruited Woodcock and Maxwell, bringing them in from cities where their cover was all but blown, offering a fresh start in the same field? And I don’t mean insurance.”

Pat’s sigh spoke volumes. “Yeah. And the question is, how many more imported Woodcocks and Maxwells are out there? Maybe this is a syndicate of hired guns, a new Murder Incorporated, and these relocated hitmen weren’t tapped to kill you… their
boss
got the contract.”

I grunted a laugh. “I was just an assignment that both assholes blew.”

“Elegantly put. Mike, why don’t you be reasonable for a change, and keep a low profile until my office can clear this thing up.”

“Maybe leave town, you think? Or you could provide me with police protection?”

“Right!”

I hung up on him.

Velda made her liquid way into my office, her pretty mouth twitching with amusement. “You just hung up on the Captain of Homicide.”

“Yeah, I’m out of control.”

She sat opposite me, no amusement on her face now. “That cabbie’s name, according to the papers, was Ernie Jackson. He has a wife and three kids in Harlem. A deacon of his church. A man who welcomed fares into his cab like old friends.”

My fists balled of their own volition. “I know. Somebody’s going to die for that.”

“That’s swell, but his family has to live.” Her face was smooth, no wrinkles at all, and yet she was frowning at me. “Ernie Jackson got it because he was unlucky enough to have you as a potential passenger.”

I frowned back at her, but with every wrinkle my face had to offer. “Think I don’t know that? Send them five grand out of our off-the-books stash.”

Now the smooth face was somehow smiling. “You want to write a note to go with it? Or I can.”

I shook my head. “No. Anonymous. And flowers to the funeral parlor. Nice and big, like he was a horse that won a race.
That
you can sign.”

She nodded. “By the way, you look like something the cat dragged in. All those nicks on your face.”

“Gives me character.”

“I was thinking maybe we should dump the Borensen bridal shower, even if they aren’t smart enough to cancel us themselves. We know people who could handle that, and even get a referral fee of our own. I mean, how can you manage it? Your best suit got ruined.”

“Good idea.” I reached for the phone.

She was really smiling now and rose to go out when she heard me talking with my tailor at Brooks Brothers, telling him I needed another suit with the same specs as last time, and a rush job. Not all Brooks Brothers jobs are cut to conceal a .45 in a shoulder sling.

And when she went out, she wasn’t smiling at all.

* * *

The next afternoon, at a quarter till three, I was crossing the mosaic-tiled floor of the mile-long lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, on my way to the tower elevators and the twenty-seventh of the hotel’s forty-seven floors. The place had more marble, stone and bronze than Green-Wood Cemetery, and enough eighteenth-century paintings to stock a decent-size museum. And if the Early American furnishings clashed with the Art Moderne touches, nobody seemed to mind. I was skirting over-stuffed chairs and potted plants, making for the bank of elevators, when a bland stocky guy, hatless in a business suit as nice as my new Brooks Brothers, approached and gave a slight head bob. Without a word, we moved in that direction to a nearby couch and sat.

In those pricey threads, Merle Allison might have been a refugee from an executive suite, but he wasn’t. He was the chief house dick at the Waldorf with a staff of twenty-five, all of whom dressed as well as their well-off guests, the better to blend in.

Merle had the round, deceptively pleasant face of a top sergeant. He folded his arms and gave me a sideways look. “How dangerous are you making it for my guests, Mike, hanging around my hotel?”

“Congratulations on buying the joint, Merle, and I hope they gave you an employee discount. I don’t think anybody’s going to take a potshot at me in this lobby, but thanks for your concern.”

His smile was warm, his eyes cold. “Well, you never know. If some unknown miscreant is tracking you, there’s only so much we can do about it. We have a good security team here, but this facility is open to the public. We’re able to discourage dangerous-looking characters and outright riff-raff, but it’s an imperfect science. For example, nobody tried to stop you when you came in, did they?”

“No.”

“And
you’re
armed.”

“Does it show?”

“Not particularly. But I’m a detective.”

“I heard that rumor. You seem touchy today, Merle.”

He lifted an upright finger. “It’s this bridal shower on the twenty-seventh floor at four p.m. You’re handling security, I understand.”

“That’s right. Could be that’s why I’m armed.”

Teeth blossomed in the smile but his eyes remained ice. “You’re always armed, Mike. I just don’t understand why Mr. Borensen and his fiancée needed to bring you in. We offered to provide security ourselves. Aren’t we good enough?”

“You know, Merle, when I got the call, I probably should have said, ‘Never mind paying me a grand and a half, Mr. Borensen. You’ll do just fine with hotel security.’”

His face fell, and the smile went with it. “You’re getting fifteen hundred for a couple of hours work? That’s highway robbery.”

“It’s the indoor variety Borensen is concerned about.”

I explained my client’s thinking, but also admitted that I was a kind of celebrity attraction. Part of the entertainment.

Allison had cooled down. “Well, you always were more entertaining than me, Mike. I guess I don’t begrudge you turning a dollar. Even fifteen hundred of ’em.”

“Big of you.” I put on a friendly face. “Listen, buddy, I could use a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“This affair today is being catered by the hotel. Will there be any help brought in, or will it be strictly staff?”

“Staff.”

“You know them all?”

“Enough to recognize. This hotel has more employees than guest capacity, you know.” He shrugged in false modesty. “But I stay on top of hirings and firings.”

“Good. I’m going up to brief them right now. Would you tag along, and make sure there are no unfamiliar faces?”

Merle agreed to that, and as we went up in the west tower elevator, he asked me how I’d managed to get shot at twice in one week. He didn’t mean to pry.

“It’d be prying,” I said, “if you asked how it felt to kill two guys in one week.”

“How
does
it feel, Mike?”

“A hell of a lot better than being dead.”

In the suite, we moved across a light-green marble floor through an entryway bordered by Grecian busts on white pillars, a faux antiquity touch at odds with the otherwise modern furnishings.

By the side wall to my right, two facing coral-leather couches were perpendicular to a white marble fireplace over which hung a big room-doubling mirror. A low-slung glass-topped table perched between the couches, all positioned on a white throw rug as fluffy as egg whites on their way to being meringue. At the far end of this high-ceilinged living room, a triptych of windows presented a panoramic Manhattan skyline. Nearby, on the right wall, a door would lead to a bedroom, assuming this was set up like similar Waldorf suites I’d been in.

But all of this was somewhat lost in the flowers, so many flowers, roses, lilies, tulips, some yellow, some white—the bride-to-be’s colors—on tabletops, on the mantel, elaborate arrangements on virtually every surface except cushions designed for backsides.

Velda was already there. She’d wanted to be on hand as the help arrived. Right now she was in the dining room, where—off to the left, filling much of the space—chairs were arranged in groups of four or five at small linen-covered tables, enough to accommodate the fifty guests who’d soon be arriving. The tables and chairs faced a white baby grand in front of another Cinerama window onto the city. I viewed all this from just inside the open French doors.

The dining room table, draped in linen and arrayed with presents, had been moved closer to the facing wall. A fair number of gifts bore the light blue, white-ribboned boxes that whisper-screamed Tiffany’s. The rest were mostly wrapped in yellow and white, to go with the floral arrangements much in evidence here, as well.

Velda, in a black cocktail dress with bare sleeves and a rather full short skirt, had positioned herself near the gift table. Meanwhile, scattered on chairs at the little tables, primed by Velda, the party’s staff sat waiting to get a pep talk from me. On the young side, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, they seemed to be college kids needing a part-time job or former college kids who needed a job period.