“Chambers?”
“Yeah. Pat Chambers! Man, I haven’t heard that name in years. You guys were asshole buddies, weren’t you?”
“Still are. Anybody else?”
“No. Like I said, he outlived his family. You know, the Chief was retired for over thirty years. He and his wife moved out here somewhere. Besides his family, the only thing he said he missed was playing golf. Him and some other retired department bigwigs used to go to the Oakland Golf Club in Queens. But they’re all dead, too.”
On the ride back, Velda shared what she’d learned from the nursing home’s top administrator.
“There’s something that Pat held back from you,” Velda said, green countryside gliding by behind her in the passenger window.
“Maybe you better give me a second to get over the shock of that.”
“Two big men, not young, maybe in their fifties or even sixties, were seen in the nursing home hallways yesterday. One asked where the Chief’s room was, but otherwise they had no contact with staff. They were in suit and tie, and the assumption was they were visitors or were scoping the place out for an elderly parent. The Long Island cops already gathered that info and passed it along to Pat.”
“So they searched the Chief’s room, came up empty... and tried again this morning, at the hospital?”
She nodded. “Where they found his metal box that he’d taken along with him... but not his gun and that key.”
Now I was nodding. “Only that sheaf of papers representing a career of dedication. Which was worthless to them.”
She hadn’t learned much else from the administrator. The Chief had been a resident for eight years. His income had been reduced to his pension and Social Security, and his meager possessions, mostly clothing, had been left to the facility for anybody who could use them. The scraps were all that remained of a great man and a fine life. The sarge was right — a man could live too long.
Then I filled Velda in on what the old desk sergeant had told me.
“A golf club,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “Damn. That could be it. There’s your locker! Where is the place? Let’s go over there.”
“We’re driving over it. It was knocked down to make room for the expressway.”
She frowned. “Mike — that means you might have a key to a locker that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Maybe. But the Chief surely knew that Oakland was a victim of progress, and that was fifteen years ago. There’s a possibility he and his golfing buddies from the department found another course.”
She nodded. “We can only hope... What now?”
“Now I need to get back to the office. I’ll drop you at your apartment.”
Her frown was deep. “The office? Why? It’s not like you handle the paperwork.”
“Your Mike has his reasons.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
But she didn’t push it. She knew I was up to something, but she also knew that if I wanted her in on it, I’d tell her. Still, her lovely dark eyes were on me the rest of the way back.
I stretched out in my shirtsleeves on the black leather couch in my inner office. When I’d got back around dusk, I left the lights off, took the carryout paper bag to my desk, and sat there making a corned beef sandwich and a cup of coffee disappear.
Soon I was on the couch in the near dark, the city outside the window behind my desk fighting the night with a million lights. I could have shut that out by adjusting the blinds, but I wasn’t anxious to go to sleep. Now, on my back with my suit coat and shoes off, I lay there staring at a ceiling I could barely see with my.45 on the floor next to me.
Was the key to the mystery the key in my pocket? Was the only way to figure out who killed the Chief to find out what that little scrap of ancient metal unlocked?
Were the two men who had searched the Chief’s nursing home room looking for that key, or did they even know of its existence? Did they seek instead whatever evidence the Chief had hidden away, for the key to unlock?
One thing I did know was why someone had bothered murdering a man who was already inches from death — they needed to silence the Chief while looking for the key or what the key represented. The contents of that metal box had been strewn around, that inspector said, indicating the Chief’s only slightly premature death had bought his killer or killers time to toss his hospital room.
Where there had been nothing to find.
Because I had that key, didn’t I?
But whatever it unlocked seemed out of reach — in an old locker somewhere, at a golf club maybe... if it wasn’t under tons of concrete. Possibly at some other locker or storage facility — who the hell knew?
That’s for you to find out, the Chief had told me.
Which meant Velda and I should be able to track it down. The Chief had lived a lot of life, and lives could always be sifted through — we did it all the time. Of course, most of the people the Chief had shared that life with were gone.
So we were facing a long investigation both exhaustive and exhausting, with no guarantee we’d come up with a damn thing. But what other option was there?
There was one.
I could camp out here in my office and wait for the answer to walk through my door. That I had been the last to see the Chief alive before his killer — or killers — was no secret. The hospital knew. The cops knew. The press would probably know by now.
I would almost certainly have after-hours visitors.
Despite my best intentions, I did drift off, but nothing deep, nothing with dreams in it, and I sure as hell wasn’t dreaming when a click announced somebody picking the lock on my office door.
I reached down for the.45, its cold rough grip comforting in my grasp.
They were talking out there, too muffled for me to make out, but they weren’t bothering to whisper. A glance at my wristwatch said it was almost ten o’clock. Nobody in the building at this hour but cleaning staff, their routine an hour away from the eighth floor, anyway.
The couch was against the side wall, so I would have a perfect view of my callers when they came through my inner office door. But they were tossing the outer area first. Bold bastards — another click sent glow crawling under my inner-office door, meaning they had switched the lights on out there. I heard file cabinet and desk drawers opening. Some occasional talk. Not working at making no noise, but not making a racket, either.
I could have waited for them to finish out there, but it just wasn’t my way. Who the hell knew what kind of mess they’d make if I didn’t put a stop to this? I slipped off the couch, padded over in my socks to the door connecting the inner and outer office.
I opened it, fast.
“Nobody has to die,” I said.
Velda’s desk was just a few feet forward, and one guy was behind it, with a drawer open. He looked back at me with the expression of an adulterer caught by a cuckold. He was maybe four feet away to my immediate right, his pal across the room at the row of file cabinets to my left, still working on the top drawer, its contents spilled on the floor.
In that split second I knew them — they were old-time thugs, Mafia boys with plenty of years on me, and unlikely soldiers to be sent on any mission. Their suits were baggy and their ties were wide, their clothes as out of date as they were. I hadn’t seen them around in years — one’s last name was Rossi, the other’s first name Salvo, which was the best my brain could come up with on short notice.
They were frozen, almost comically so, Rossi nearby at Velda’s desk, half-turned to me, a once handsome guy gone badly to seed, his eyebrows black but his hair gray against dark skin tanned deep brown. Over at the file cabinet, Salvo stood sideways, as pale as his partner was dark, a string bean with a healthy head of curly black hair, though the pouchy face looking at me had the kind of miles on it that got you replaced if you were a Firestone.