“Need to see you now,” the Captain of Homicide said. Nothing friendly in his voice, but nothing unfriendly either. Strictly business.
“At your office?”
“No,” he said, and gave me an address that I recognized at once. A chill worse than the one waiting outside for me crawled up my back like a stampede of spiders.
“Tell me,” I said.
“No. You come see for yourself. I want you here ASAP, Mike.”
“Okay,” I said.
Well, now I was here. In front of the white-washed building with the green shutters and black ironwork. The two cops on the sidewalk were in rain slickers, ready for what was coming. I was in my trenchcoat and hat, but not ready for what waited for me up a flight of stairs. The cops were expecting me and waved me inside, and I went up.
The kid across the shared landing, Shack, in T-shirt and jeans, was sitting against the closed door of his own apartment with his legs hugged to himself, his head with its nest of curls angled down. He was sobbing, the tears making melting-wax trails on his bony face. He was curled up, as if trying to retreat inside himself, his position nearly fetal. He didn’t seem to notice me.
A veteran harness bull stood guard next to the door opposite. He nodded and jerked his head for me to go on in. The door was ajar.
Pat met me, but left room to see past him. When I’d had a look, he held up the MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS business card and said, “Tell me why she had this, Mike.”
I brushed by him and went over to the little work area on the braided rug. The lab boys weren’t here yet, so she was all alone, just her and all those books surrounding her. In an oversize man’s T-shirt turned into a petite girl’s mini-length sleep apparel, she was seated Indian-style on the pillow and slumped onto the sawed-off table, head next to the typewriter, a small black powder-burned entry wound in her right temple. No exit wound visible, her head obviously resting on it.
Pat materialized next to me. “Bullet went in one temple and out the other. Ninety-degree angle again.”
By the open fingers of her right hand, its palm up, was a .22 Smith and Wesson Escort.
Bitterly, Pat said, “Does he get a discount, you think, buying so many of the goddamn things?”
I wanted to drop down there and take her into my arms and stroke her hair and soothe her, there there, there there, but it wouldn’t do her any good, would it? The only thing I could do for her now was to stop the madman who’d done this evil thing, and much as I would have liked him to suffer the months of agony of the disease that was eating him and turning him ever more insane, I knew that his end had to come soon, very soon, before he took any more lives in what was clearly a psycho’s game, now.
But silently I promised this girl something, this sweet smart kid with brains deserving of so much more than a bullet, who’d had all of her life ahead of her when I last saw her, only neither of us knew that span could be measured in hours. Marcy Bloom would never get the chance to really bloom, would she? So I promised her he would suffer, and that it wouldn’t be quick.
We looked down at the girl, so young, so dead.
My lips were back over my teeth but it wasn’t really a smile. “He’s sticking it in our ass, Pat. Telling us to go screw ourselves royal. The Borensen kill might have passed for somebody really blotting himself out, the similarities between his death and Foster’s just coincidental, or maybe an admission of guilt by Leif that he murdered his future father-in-law. But this time, the killer’s staged a suicide for no reason other than to tell us it isn’t a suicide.”
“What this is,” Pat said, “is a signature.”
“Oh yeah. He signed this one all right, autographed the goddamn thing, and he’s somewhere laughing himself silly at us. The kind of laughter you don’t hear outside a madhouse.”
Pat was nodding. “So he’s gone way over the edge, our hitman’s hitman. Gone from professional to amateur.”
“That’s one way to look at it. But he’s a kill-crazy amateur with cool professional skills. That makes him all kinds of dangerous.”
“No argument, chum.” He held up the little white card with the little black letters again. “Now, what was Marcy Bloom doing with your business card?”
“I was here yesterday evening.”
“Kind of young for you.”
I gave him a look. “I wasn’t her type, Pat. She was Richard Blazen’s co-author on that tell-all memoir he was writing. I spent several hours with her going over reams of transcripts and notes, looking for the name of Borensen’s mob connection.”
His eyes briefly flared. “And did you find it?”
I told him I had, and that I’d confronted Joey Pep at the Peppermint Lounge after leaving here last night. I said that Pepitone admitted that Borensen had been in the Bonetti family’s pocket since the then-actor was peddling drugs among the Broadway crowd. I kept the talk about the family’s contract-killer “specialist” to myself. Not ready to show Pat all my cards just yet.
“The Borensen/Bonetti connection could be useful,” Pat said, “in a tangential way.”
“You mean, in taking down the Bonettis.”
“Yeah. And Joey has problems of his own. That famous club of his is on the verge of getting shuttered — losing its liquor license. They had an incident that won’t help last night.”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “Somebody driving by called it in. Nasty brouhaha between some guys out in front of the place. Two Peppermint Lounge bouncers got bounced to the hospital. They’re still there, but they aren’t talking.” He gave me a sly smile. “That must have gone down after you left, huh, Mike?”
“Must have.”
He pushed his hat back on his head. “The Bonettis catching flak is all well and good, but it doesn’t get us any closer to your middle-of-the-night caller.”
That gave me an opening to reveal some other cards to Pat. Putting him on a slow but worthwhile track while I was taking a faster one was a solid way to hedge my bets in the hunt for the Specialist. Yeah, capital “S” — I had something to call the son of a bitch now, at least.
So I told Pat about Dr. Beech and the disease that was taking down our killer in its own good time.
“Phasger’s Syndrome?” he said, frowning. “Never heard of it... but it sure sounds like hell on earth.”
“Even that’s too good for this prick. But with a court order, you can get that list out of Dr. Beech, of the others who’ve made twenty-five-grand ‘contributions.’ They’re all pay-offs for contract killings, of course. You can clear a slew of cases out of your unsolved homicides file, and maybe get a line on our psychotic hitman.”
Head cocked, Pat was giving me a narrow-eyed look I knew too well. “How long have you been sitting on this information, Mike?”
“Since yesterday is all. I wasn’t holding it back, buddy. Just hadn’t got around to telling you yet.”
His hands were on his hips. “Well, that’s swell, Mike. ’Cause I would hate to have to haul you in on obstruction of justice charges.”
“If you think I don’t want this bastard found, Pat, you’re crazier than he is.”
“Well, one of us is. I’ve seen that look on your face before, Mike. Too many times. You want him for yourself. You want him in front of your .45, primed for one of your fancy self-defense pleas. Not this time. You can help us, and we’ll be glad to have you — I for one appreciate your skills and acumen. But we’re talking about a killer that could potentially lead us to taking down one of this city’s five major crime families. If that happens, the death of this girl can maybe mean something, that something good will come of it. No, Mike, this time it’s got to be by the book.”