Last Chance for Glory (6 page)

“Look, you’re makin’ a big mistake here.” Blake continued to back away. “What happened before? You could claim self-defense. After all, the man hit you with a pipe and you’ve got the wound to prove it. But me, I’m unarmed.” He raised his hands again. “And I’m running away, You hear the sirens? The cops’ll arrive any minute. Don’t you have enough problems without having to explain a second assault? Think about it.”

Blake saw a flicker of awareness float through the Russian’s eyes. He decided that while it wasn’t exactly intelligence, it did indicate a certain shrewdness. A memory, perhaps, of his own native land and what the authorities in that native land could do to you.

“Why you no mind own business?”

“I should have. I admit it. But there’s no sense in going any further. What we oughta do is let it drop and wait for the police.”

“You are dirty coward.”

“Okay, I can accept that.”

“You are dirty
American
coward.”

The Russian turned to face the oncoming police, and Blake, acting entirely on impulse, stepped forward to drive his fist into the fat man’s lower back. While his blow (like that of the little man with the pipe) was not a killing blow, it was entirely disabling. The Russian fell to the ground and howled like a castrated pig.

Blake shook his head in disgust. “Check it out,
putz.
The first rule of American street life is never turn your back on a man you’ve just humiliated.”

“Sarge, my whole family was on the job,” Blake explained. “Two uncles, my old man, a bunch of cousins. Since 1883 when my great-great-grandfather was appointed to the cops by a Tammany boss named Kilpatrick.”

“So what happened to
you?”

They were sitting, Blake and Detective-Sergeant Paul O’Dowd, in a mercifully air-conditioned blue-and-white on Tenth Avenue, happily blocking the already snarled evening traffic while they chatted away.

“What happened, Sarge, was that my Irish father married a nice Jewish girl from Forest Hills. And what I did was become a computer freak with a bad attitude.”

It was true, as far as it went. Blake had come out of CCNY in 1983 with a BS in computer science and a job worth thirty-five grand a year. Not bad, for a twenty-one-year-old kid. The only problem was that he’d hated his work. Customizing software for investment bankers had seemed interesting enough, especially from the prospective of an undergraduate with no money to attempt a master’s degree. In fact, it’d turned deadly dull in a hurry.

“So, how come you’re drivin’ a cab?”

“It’s a long story. You sure you wanna hear it?”

“That coon’s in a bad way, Blake. If he should happen to expire, it’ll go down as a homicide. You’re a witness. Good or bad is what I’m trying to find out. So, how come you’re drivin’ a cab?”

“You ever have a job you hated, Sergeant?”

“I hate the one I’m doing now.”

“Well, pretend that somebody you just happened to meet at a party offered you a job that was a thousand times more interesting and paid better than being a cop. Would you think you stepped in shit?”

“Keep goin’, Blake. There’s gotta be a punch line here; I can feel it coming.”

“The someone I met is named Joanna Bardo, president and sole shareholder of Manhattan Executive Investigations, Incorporated. When I told her I was a computer programmer, she offered me a job on the spot.”

“Doing exactly what?”

Blake smiled. “Sarge, you know about knocking on doors? Burning shoe leather? Well, at Manhattan Executive, we don’t knock on doors until after we knock on the computer. Motor-vehicle records, accident reports, criminal records, insurance records, property sales, births, deaths, marriages—it’s all there, all legal. All just a phone call away.”

“I take it the computer makes the phone call.”

“That’s right. Give the computer a social security number and it’ll find you anywhere. Manhattan Executive was one of the first companies to use the computer for skip-tracing. There was a time, about five years ago, when every bail bondsman in the city was sending us business. There’s a lot more competition, now, but we still get to pick and choose.”

“It sounds okay, Blake. Probably good money in it, too.”

“It would have been better if I’d stayed with the computer, but I wanted to do field work, so I got my license. I’m a full-fledged private eye. Or, I will be in about six hours. Right now, I’m on suspension. What happened was I set up an illegal surveillance and
almost
got caught. The case against me was pretty weak, but I didn’t have the heart to take a chance at trial, so what I did was plead nolo contendere before the board and accept a year’s unpaid vacation. Today’s my last day off.”

I
T WAS WAY TOO
early, just a little before six, but Marty Blake was already in the bathroom, soaping his dark, heavy beard. Though he’d been hoping against hope for another hour and a half’s sleep, he hadn’t even bothered to set the clock. What was the point? On an ordinary day, he’d already be cruising Manhattan, timing the lights as he methodically worked the avenues, from Ninety-sixth Street down to Houston Street. Looking for the last of the night people, the first of the office workers.

That nightmare was now officially over (though the memory lingered on). He’d done his time, served his sentence; he was going home. Maybe.

When he’d called Joanna Bardo, he’d expected a lot more enthusiasm. In fact, he’d expected a hero’s welcome, because he
was
a hero. Even during the worst of it, when the prosecutors were talking fifteen years, when his own lawyer wouldn’t meet his eyes, when the prosecutors were offering to let him walk away with his license if he gave up Joanna Bardo, he’d stood fast. He’d taken the heat like a good soldier.

The case had been simple enough. A small brokerage firm, Hattmann Brothers, suspected one of their executives, an accountant named Porcek, of insider trading. Namely, Porcek was feeding information on new issues to his brother-in-law who was passing it on to a cousin who was buying shares in his wife’s name. The firm wanted to dump the accountant before the feds caught on, but they needed more than a paper trail. They needed enough hard evidence to convince Porcek to leave without a fuss. Or a scandal.

Hattmann Brothers had given the job to Joanna Bardo who’d given it to Marty Blake, her number-one investigator. Especially when it came to black-bag operations.

“They don’t want to know what we’re going to do, Marty,” she’d said matter-of-factly. “They just want it done.”

He’d taken the hint, entered Porcek’s apartment while he was at work, bugged the rooms, and tapped the phones. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. Despite the high-tech image cultivated by modern private investigators, the business was still as corrupt as it had been when private investigation meant catching errant spouses with their pants down. Clients expected results, but they weren’t prepared to pay for six months of by-the-book investigation. If you wouldn’t cut through the red tape, your competition would. It was that simple.

By the time Blake had realized that Porcek’s extra-legal pursuits involved more than insider trading, the IRS had busted into Porcek’s apartment, seized two million dollars in counterfeit currency, and discovered the various taps and bugs. The feds had kept the bogus fifties, but passed on the hardware to the New York State Attorney General. The AG had gone to Hattmann Brother’s who’d implicated Manhattan Executive and Joanna Bardo. Joanna (with no real choice in the matter) had named Marty Blake.

In the end, it was the AG who’d blinked. Despite their blustering, the prosecutors hadn’t had enough to go to trial. They’d offered Blake a dismissal of the criminal charges in exchange for a year’s unpaid vacation. He’d taken it because he didn’t have the courage to put a decade of his life in the hands of a jury.

Marty Blake rinsed off the last of the shaving cream, toweled dry, then took a moment to appraise the face in the mirror. He would have preferred something a little more dignified. Something just a bit aristocratic. The clients with the big bucks were mostly corporations, now, and they expected the investigators who served them to maintain a certain corporate image. Cigars, rumpled suits, and hip flasks were definitely out.

But Marty Blake’s face would never be dignified, and he knew it. His hair was too curly, his nose too long, his lips a bit too full. The dark blue eyes would have been all right but they were slightly off-line, as was his nose. Ten years ago, an overeager sophomore had slammed the left side of Marty Blake’s face into the floor of a CCNY gym. There’d been no malice in it. The sophomore had been trying to take him down and he’d been trying to get off the mat. Both had succeeded and the end result, after the fractures had healed, was a somewhat goofy expression, especially when he smiled.

The goofiness didn’t bother Marty Blake. In fact, he considered it an asset, reasoning that when you’re five-nine and weigh a hundred and eighty-five pounds, when you sport an eighteen-inch neck and a forty-six-inch chest, it’s real easy to look like a refrigerator with arms. It’s real easy to look like you spend your weekends collecting for a loan shark.

It was the smile that changed that inevitable first impression. When Marty Blake smiled, when he opened those dimples and crinkled those lopsided blue eyes, corporate clients forgot to be intimidated. He seemed eager, boyish, and (best of all) subservient. When he began to speak about computer searches and surveillance techniques, he added quiet competence to the equation. The end result (the result he strived for) was,
I can do your shitwork without challenging your macho self-image.

“Hey, baby, what are you doing up so early? Your appointment isn’t until ten o’clock.”

Blake, as was his habit when dealing with Rebecca Webber, responded to the tone of her voice, rather than to what she actually said. That husky, sleepy quality didn’t mean she wanted to go back to bed. It meant she was horny. Which was exactly why she’d come to him in the first place.

“What I’m doing is preparing my cheeks so they won’t scratch
your
cheeks.”

“How considerate.”

Blake put the razor back in the medicine chest, then turned around. Rebecca Webber, sleep-rumpled, devoid of makeup, was still in-your-face beautiful. Her eyes were huge and dark, knowledgeable and arrogant. They dominated her face, proclaiming the fact that she knew exactly what she was doing, asking a simple question:
Do you?

Her body asked the same question. In an hour, she’d be at the Sutton Athletic Club. Her personal trainer, Carolyn Tannowitz, would be in attendance. Together, they’d evaluate Rebecca’s body the way judges evaluate a show dog. Face, neck, shoulders and arms, breasts, upper and lower abdomen, waist, butt, hips, thighs, and calves. The results never seemed to satisfy Rebecca Webber, but they were perfectly acceptable to Marty Blake.

“Lift that up.”

She was wearing a gold camisole over nothing.

“Untie that.” She flicked a long elegant finger at the towel around his waist.

Blake tugged at the knot that held the towel, watched Rebecca lift the camisole. She did it slowly, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Blake stared at the dark patch of hair, the soft, pink flesh, the carefully toned and tanned belly. The camisole caught on the tips of her breasts, pulled them up, let them drop to bounce softly.

“Amazing, just amazing,” he admitted.

He took her into his arms, felt her nipples against the wiry hairs on his chest, her thighs encircling his right leg, the impossibly hot, wet flesh against his skin.

“Come into the shower,” she said.

Her voice was little more than a hiss, but Marty Blake understood. He allowed himself to be pulled into the shower stall without protest, having long ago realized that Rebecca’s powers had their roots in her own desire. When she wanted him this badly, he followed her like a puppy following its master.

In the shower, with the hot water flowing down between their joined bodies, Blake lost all concern for his economic future. When the bar of soap in Rebecca’s hand bumped along the ridges of his spine, when it plunged between his buttocks, his conscious mind shattered. It left his brain to imbed itself in the outermost nerves of his flesh. He dropped to his knees, forced his head between her thighs, accepted her grudging orgasm as his own peculiar triumph.

He wanted this emptiness, yearned for it when he heard her voice on the telephone, when she rang his bell. It helped him forget that he wouldn’t be seeing her for another week, that she’d go home, if not exactly to her husband, then to her husband’s life, the life of a man born to such wealth that his profession was no more than a hobby.

Blake knew that even if William Webber should somehow disappear, he, Marty Blake, son of a cop, could never be part of that life. He also knew that Rebecca would never leave it. That this was all it would ever be about—the feel of his cock inside her, the round balls of her ass beneath his fingers, the smell of her flesh driving him toward oblivion.

M
ANHATTAN EXECUTIVE SECURITY, INC.
hadn’t changed much in a year. The same gray, top-of-the-line, Karastan carpeting covered the floor. Cynthia Barret still sat behind her free-form, glass-topped desk, answering phones, greeting clients. Black-and-white photographs, all cityscapes, all signed, hung in their accustomed places on the wall. Only the stiff, leather couch was new. The old one, as Blake understood it, had been cut to pieces by what cops like to call a “disgruntled” employee.

The employee’s name was Vincent Cappolino and his very existence demonstrated the dual nature of Manhattan Executive. On one level, there was Cynthia Barret with her smooth smile, discount designer dresses, cinnamon skin, flashing white teeth. The offices directly behind her desk housed investigators, computer technicians, electronics experts, a forensic accountant, a part-time attorney. Joanna Bardo’s office was at the end of the hallway. Furnished with nineteenth-century American antiques, it was, as she liked to say, fit for a CEO.

As far as Manhattan Executive’s clientele was concerned (the ones who used the front door, anyway), Joanna was the end of the line. They knew nothing of the back offices. Or of the investigators who hunted bail jumpers for a percentage of the bond. The industry liked to call these detectives
skip tracers,
but Marty Blake preferred the traditional term, “bounty hunter.”