Kiss Her Goodbye (6 page)

But at least I got out of it alive. That young girl on the sidewalk was dead. And nobody even knew who she was.

What was it Doolan had said?

"
There are some things you just can't walk away from, kid.
"

I climbed into sweatshirt and slacks, packed a duffel bag of fresh clothes, went down to the street, and grabbed a cab to Bing's Gym.

Nothing had changed. It was still a nondescript old building with dirty windows, and I wondered why health-conscious athletes would want to train there anyway. The interior had that sweaty jock-strap smell of all locker rooms and floating dust mites kept up a perpetual haze in the main gym.

Bing spotted me before I reached the door of his office and came out and wrapped his arms around me.

"Damn, Mike, it sure is good to see you."

He pushed back and grinned up at me, all fat and happy with his hair a monklike white semicircle. It would be hard to guess he'd been a flyweight champ in the thirties.

"Mike, where the hell you been? Look at you, like a nut, brown like a nut. You don't get
that
in New York."

"I'm kind of out of season for the city, kid. This is Florida gold you're looking at."

"Whatever it is, you look great, Mike."

"Quit lying."

He shrugged. "So you lost weight, so you look run-down. What's important is, how do you feel?"

"I feel lousy."

"It's a start. This stems from when you got shot?"

I nodded.

Bing looked at me carefully. "You want to work out?"

"The easy stuff," I told him.

"Like easy for who? I remember what you
used
to handle...."

I let out a short laugh. "Not the big boy weights, pal. Make it a routine for a middle-aged beginner."

"That bad?"

"It's getting better." I glanced around the room. "You got new equipment."

"Sure. Everybody's into bodybuilding now. Don't let it bother you. Tension and weights you can adjust for a kindergartner to a Schwarzenegger. I'll check you out personally on the apparatus."

"Apparatus," I said. "Where did you hear that word?"

"It was in the manual."

"Never too old to learn."

For a full hour I went through the prescribed exercises. My body ached, the sweat poured off me, but there was the satisfying feeling of knowing that I was coming back together again. The one thing I couldn't do was overexert myself. Inside me a lot of healing still needed doing. I put in fifteen minutes of light jogging on the treadmill, then soaked in the shower room a full half hour before I got dressed.

On my way out, Bing asked, "You gonna be a regular again?"

"Long as I'm in town."

"What does that mean? A vacation's one thing, Mike, but you belong in the city."

"Not anymore."

A knowing grin creased his face. "Balls. Guy like you can't escape the city. Hell, you got a blood contract with this place. You're married to the old girl."

I grunted. "I'm about ready to kiss her goodbye."

He just shook his head. "Never happen."

"Think not?"

"Naw, Mike, never. You forgot to sign a prenup."

I laughed, let him have the exit line, went back down to the street, and started walking.

It was a different Forty-second Street at that time of morning, still dirty and noisy, but busy with a freshness that would last until after lunch. I took my time and just before nine reached the official building I wanted. The person I was after had a listing on the directory, and I caught the elevator to the fifth floor.

In an office suite paneled in what we used to call a masculine fashion, the severe young woman behind the desk regarded me with no apparent curiosity whatever. She had dark-rimmed glasses and light brown hair pinned back, but it didn't do any good—she was still attractive.

In a neutral tone that made me long for the day when the girls guarding the gates had flirted with me, she asked, "May I help you?"

I worked on whether to ask for Ms. Marshall or Angela, and settled for the latter.

The familiarity of that shot her eyebrows straight up. "Do you have an appointment with the assistant D.A.?"

"More like a date." I slipped a hip on the edge of her desk and relished the astonished reaction. "I'm surprised, too. It's been a long time since a classy doll like Ms. Marshall wanted to date me this early in the day. But, hell, she was the one who made it."

This was all a little too much for the receptionist, whose eyes behind the lenses were doing a cartoon pop. She punched a button on her intercom and said, "Ms. Marshall, I think you had better come out here right away."

The strained tone of her voice—which implied her next step was to buzz security—got an immediate response.

There Angela Marshall was, in another power suit (charcoal gray today, skirt not slacks), with a cold, chiseled beauty Rodin might have envied, if he'd worked in synthetics.

At first her expression displayed that open challenge that seemed to be her standard setting, then she recognized me and the dark eyes flared.

"Hi, beautiful," I said. "What's shaking?"

Well, she was. And it wasn't bad to see. She had all gears going, and held the door open so I could step inside her private office.

Maybe she had seen too many movies. The way she strode around the desk, the regal manner she assumed in sitting down, her posture as she leaned on an elbow to study this walking-talking exhibit from the Male Chauvinist Museum—it all seemed too deliberately scripted, a scene carefully broken down into shots and angles, and she was director
and
star.

"What is your name, detective." It wasn't even a question.

"Hammer. Michael."

"Your grade?"

"I made it halfway through the twelfth." Before I enlisted in the army.

"If you made the force, then you must have a G.E.D." She didn't even look up from her notes. "You
are
a detective?"

"Right. And I have a junior college degree, too. Took some night classes."

"Well, good for you. And now as to your rank—what
is
your grade, Detective Hammer?"

This time I gave it a long double beat, and when she finally raised her eyes, I stopped screwing with her and said, "
Private
detective, kid. A plain old-fashioned private eye, licensed in the state of New York with a ticket to carry a gun, and free to buddy around with all sorts of people, including Captain Chambers. I'm even allowed to call a public servant an asshole if he—or she—decides to behave like one."

She may have been a whiz in the courtroom and a political star on the rise, but she'd never make it as a poker player. From her expression, I knew exactly what her next line would be, and beat her to the punch again.

"And don't give me any garbage," I said, pawing the air, "about having my license revoked. That takes cause, not clout, and anyway, I can go a hell of a lot higher up than you can. I've taken more bad guys off the street, one way or another, than any ten plain-clothes coppers in this sorry-ass city."

"
Mike
Hammer ... you're Mike Hammer."

"Right. You start hassling me, little girl, and I'll call in some favors that'll get you squashed right down to handling juvie beefs."

This time
she
took the long beat. "Michael Hammer. Yes, I remember you now."

"What do you remember?"

"What I've read. What I've heard. I feel I know you already."

Everybody was saying that lately.

"So what do you know about me, Ms. Marshall?"

"That you're nasty. Most unpleasant. And very tough."

"That's a pretty good summary. Anything else?"

"Yes. I understand for a long time there was an office pool about which of us on the D.A.'s staff would break one of your fancy self-defense pleas."

"You in on that pool?"

"Oh, no, Mr. Hammer. They stopped doing that. It's before my time."

"Ouch. Now that we've got insulting each other out of the way, how about some breakfast? All I've had is coffee."

From the way the receptionist looked at me on the way out, I knew she had kept the intercom key down all the while. I winked at her, put my hand under her boss's arm, and steered the great lady into the hall.

On the elevator, Ms. Marshall gave me a sharp look and said, "You are such an unregenerate macho bastard."

But she squeezed my hand when she said it.

A taxi took us over to Cohen's Deli, not as famous as the Stage but cheaper, plus they had a Mike Hammer mile-high sandwich on the menu board—pastrami, corned beef, Swiss cheese, American cheese, cole slaw, and Russian dressing. If anybody asked why it was named after Mike Hammer, the waiter would say, "It'll kill you just as fast."

Unaware of my sandwich fame, she went in ahead of me like she owned the joint, but her eyes went back to mine when squat, mustached Herman—in white shirt, black bow tie, and black trousers—said, "Ah, Mr. Mike! You're back in town!"

"Hi, Herm."

"And who is your beautiful young lady?"

"This is Angela Marshall."

"Ah, yes. Our lovely assistant district attorney."

He guided us to a window booth.

Watching him go, she muttered, "Was he putting me down?"

"Never," I told her. "Your beauty simply overwhelms him."

"Bullshit."

"He knew who you are, didn't he?" I said. We were across from each other in the booth.

"Did you hear him say
your
beautiful young lady? And that slight emphasis on
assistant?
"

"Don't worry, kid, you're such a pain in the ass, you're bound to be top dog someday."

"Damn, I hate men," she said.

Looking at the menu, I asked, "Do you?"

She looked at her menu, too. "Not really."

Breakfast with a real doll can be damn exciting. They're awake, showered, and manicured, and all the weapons are pointed right at whatever chump is dumb enough to be sitting across from them. To such dolls, the guy on the other end of the fork is a big, ripe plum ready for the plucking, because that world of economic dominance he dwells in, and whatever male aggression he possesses, are overshadowed by the two most basic hungers.

Just to annoy her, I ordered an enormous breakfast—lox, onion and eggs omelet, hash browns, and pancakes on the side—saying nothing while she daintily dined on a single cream-cheese bagel and coffee. I cleaned my plate with the last of the kind of great buttered hard roll you can only get in New York, burped politely, and sat back waiting like Henry the Eighth to be served my second cup of coffee.

"You're disgusting," she said with her big brown eyes cold and unblinking, her arms folded on the impressive shelf of her breasts.

"And you dig it, don't you?"

She tried not to smile. "Love it."

"Then how come everybody thinks you're such a queen bitch?"

"Because I am." For a brief second I got one of those eye flashes again, that dare that was such a great part of her.

"Balls," I said.

Her smile curled into another challenge. "That's the opening line of a famous poem," she said.

"Oh, I know. One of my favorites."

"Really? Then finish it."

"It's blank verse and loses a little off the page."

"Does it now?"

"It does.
'Balls!' cried the queen. 'If I had to, I could be king.' 'Balls!' cried the prince. 'I have two, but I'm still not king!' And the king only laughed, not because he wanted to ... but because he had two.
" I took a sip of the coffee. "It's all semantics, baby."

"Actually, it's homophones."

"Naw. I got nothing against the gays."

She chuckled at that, then leaned back, arms still folded. Then she opened her purse, took out a pack of Virginia Slims, and with a quick flip, popped one out at me.

"No thanks," I said.

"Not secure enough to smoke a woman's brand?"

"I don't smoke any brand."

"What happened to Luckies?"

"I stopped about a year ago."

"What happened about a year ago?"

"I shot a bunch of the Bonettis and the Bonettis shot me back. I've been away from the big bad city for a year or so, recuperating."

From all the expression that got out of her, I might have just given her a weather report. "Are you better now?"

"Much better. Kicking the nicotine habit is a nice side benefit of my general recuperation. I don't gasp for breath and I don't burn holes in my pants."

Some motions are exquisitely casual, but this one was so damn deliberate, it didn't belong to a woman at all. Her fingers simply tightened around the pack of butts, squashed them into a little congested mess, and dropped it on her plate.

"Satisfied?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Nice gesture. How long will it last?"

"Remember the old song, Mr. Hammer? Anything you can do...?"

"Good luck," I told her. I reached over and picked up her pretty gold lighter with the engraved
A.M.
on it and thumbed back the top. A little pressure and I popped the piece askew so it couldn't be used again.

"You don't mind, do you?" I grinned. "I mean, you won't need that anymore. Just trying to help."

There was a deadliness in the way she studied me. Her very manner had a leveling effect—she rather liked the man/woman game play, but only when she could put herself on the same plane as me. In her professional life, she had reached a plateau that few of either sex achieved, and there was no room for anything of the loser in her.

Whoever in the past had challenged this one had only been a neophyte—he'd lost because he was a boy. But surely there had also been real men who'd gotten mired in her charm, only to buckle under the weight of her inherent confidence and educational superiority.

"No," she said, with a glance at the ruined lighter, "I won't be needing that anymore." Very slowly she dropped it in her purse.

Outside the window of the corner deli, the late risers of New York were drifting by. Most of them were the nothing people. Someplace they got money, but they didn't work. The better-dressed were husbands with rich wives, or kids with parents who paid the freight. The shabby ones were sheltered by the city or a church who kept them overnight but didn't let them back in till the evening. They were drifting now, all of them, walking and looking and wondering.