“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.”