She was slowly shaking her head. “You’re getting jaded, Mike.”
“No. Just a seasoned professional, sugar.”
“You don’t fool me.”
“What do you mean?”
She grinned at me. “You don’t give much of a damn, huh? You aren’t going to find out who hired this? You’re not going to settle the score? What great man was it that said, ‘Balls?’” She shook her head some more and the sleek black locks danced. “You and that damn .45 of yours.”
“Pat said something like that, too.”
“When are you going to grow up,” she asked, just a little cross, “and stop playing cops and robbers?”
“I thought it was cowboys and Indians.”
“Either way, what will you be when you finally grow up?”
“The master. And you can be the mistress.”
“I’m that already.”
“Then why do you blush when I see those legs of yours climbing all the way to heaven?”
Her chin came up. “Because ‘mistress’ is a thankless role. Because a marriage license isn’t expensive.”
“Why buy a cow when milk’s so cheap?”
“Sweet talker. If you knew what I was saving for you, for the really big night? You wouldn’t be so damn vulgar.”
“Tell me. Maybe I’ll spring for that license.”
She rose from the chair and came up into my arms, that big, lovely woman with the startling pageboy hair that shimmered in crazy black-chestnut colors, and let me feel all of her against me and then she whispered in my ear what she had in mind for me, some day.
Some night.
I cocked my head back. “Now who’s being vulgar?”
“I am,” she said. “But it takes real bait to land a big fish.”
Then she did that thing with her mouth when she kissed me, like she was slowly, sensuously trying to twist my lips off my puss, that left me feeling turned inside out.
“Let’s go in my office,” I said.
“Dictation?”
“Something like that.”
“This time I’ll lock that door...”
Marion Coulter Smith was an ex-arson squad cop who would likely belt you in the mouth if you called him by his first name.
Fifteen years ago he retired and teamed up with Jules Torrence, a lawyer with a C.P.A. certificate, and formed an investigative firm specializing in industrial accounts with offices in one of the high-end steel-and-glass mausoleums on Sixth Avenue in the heart of the computer district.
It had taken age and business demands to tie Smitty to a desk, and pour him into a three-hundred-dollar suit; but any excuse was good enough to get him in a bull session about the old days or fire up his eyes when the topic got around to crime.
The balding bulldog kept popping open cans of beer from a little fridge in the corner and passing them across his desk to keep me placated if not plastered while I detailed the shoot-out in my office, and the squirming dance the politicians wound up doing, to keep me cooled down enough not to throw any heat back at them.
When I finished, he said, “Damn, you young guys have all the luck. I haven’t had that kind of fun in I can’t remember when.”
I about snorted Blue Ribbon out my nose. “Fun? Come off it, Smitty — when the bad guys zero in that close, it’s no fun at all.”
“Bullshit, Mike. You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it.”
“Killing a guy.”
“That’s what I said.”
“What makes you think so?”
Broad shoulders on a hard body gone somewhat flabby shrugged elaborately. “It’s just that you have no conscience... anyway, not that the rest of us could notice.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “I got a conscience like anybody else.”
“Maybe you got a conscience,” he said, with a tilt of his head, “but not like anybody else. How many people have you shot, anyway?”
“Shot and killed, or just shot?”
“Just the fatalities, man.”
I waved that off. “Enough.”
“See? A man with a conscience would know the number. How many women have you been with?”
I grinned at him. “Not enough.”
We both laughed at that.
Then I put my smile away and said, “Anybody I took down had it coming, Smitty. People think I’m some kind of vigilante or executioner or some damn thing. But it’s always been a matter of survival with me.”
Smitty’s eyes glinted. “Your style of survival, Mike, isn’t the usual kind. Maybe that’s what makes cops tick — them and firemen and other people in high-risk professions. Anybody can survive if they want to hide out in a cave all the time, never stick their nose out, let alone their neck. It takes a different breed to jump into an occupation that deliberately lowers the survival rate.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe hell.” His finger pointed at me past the beer can in his mitt. “When a guy goes looking for trouble, he can always find it. Put yourself in the trouble spots, and it will find you.”
“Is that right.”
“It’s right. Not just anybody can pull the trigger, even when the gun’s loaded and their life is in danger. But with you, it’s instinctive. And you even get a kick out of it. A real charge.”
I took a long pull of the beer. “Quit psychoanalyzing me, Marion. It’s not your specialty.”
Me razzing him with his name only made him grin broader.
“Maybe I’m just envying you from behind this desk.” He swigged at his beer. “Anyway, society needs your type around. I’d just like to know why, when you seem well past your... youthful indiscretions, shall we say? Why somebody ups and puts out a contract on you.”
“You got me, brother.”
He was studying me through eyes set in pouches of fat. “Well, if you don’t know why, then there’s something awfully off-kilter about the notion. If getting you out of the way were a necessity, I could see it. But if somebody is playing a game, even if it’s a game of some old grudge, they’re taking a long chance... You sure you don’t have anything big shaking?”
I finished the beer, put the empty on the desk and waved off another he was trying to force on me. “Maybe it was just mistaken identity.”
“Guy stakes your office out for weeks and... oh. You’re just rattling my chain.”
“Something like that. You don’t have to look so damn pleased that somebody tried to knock me off.”
The bulldog puss split in a smile. “Why not? You make interesting entertainment for us put-out-to-pasture types. Anyway, as far as psychology goes, I’ve often wondered about you guys with no consciences.”
“How about entertaining me?” I asked. “With this referral?” I tossed the letter he had sent me on the blotter in front of him. “And you can skip the fishing trip.”
Smitty leaned back in his chair, grinned, shrugged, and said, “Good pay, easy work. We’re just not set up for it. Play watchdog for an afternoon and get a grand for your trouble.”
“For a grand,” I said, sitting forward, “you can’t cover the place yourself?”
He gave me a humorless grunt. “Ha. With the dough we make, that’d be a tax liability. Anyway, I could have shoved it off on one of our own legmen, but we don’t like ’em moonlighting when we pay their salaries... and besides, I thought it would be a hoot having you drop around for a briefing. A live one like you perks things up, once in a while.” He paused and fingered a cigar out of the silver humidor on the window sill behind him. “So, Mike? Want the job?”
“Not particularly, but I could use the grand. What’s the pitch?”
Smitty bit off the end of the cigar, lit it and coughed on the fumes he sucked in. “Leif Borensen. Ever hear of him?”
I frowned in thought. “It’s a familiar name somehow. Did I see it on the end credits of a TV show as a producer or something?”