A long time later she said, "Thank you. You're nice. Now you can take me home."
Chapter Eight
TO EVERYTHING THERE is a season, and in every season there is rain. Spring downpours that hit hard, then leave the sky blue and sunny and rainbow-streaked. Light summer showers you can walk in with your best girl, and fall storms that drone steady and turn the leaves soggy. The winter kind that can turn on you, raindrops freezing to pellets, or switching to snow with thunder and lightning making a crazy mix.
Then there's a New York rain, a rain that is apart from seasons. It settles like a big gray blanket over the city and grumbles a while and just when you figure the threat is an empty one, the stuff sheets down, slicking the streets, fogging the windows, and promising nothing but a slate-gray sky when it's done.
I managed to beat both the rain and Velda to the office—the latter a rare feat. She arrived four minutes after me, with her hooded black raincoat dripping, and she shook it out in the hall before she hung it in the closet—no coat tree in these modern digs.
I was seated at her desk, with coffee in plastic cups waiting, plus an unfrosted doughnut for calorie-counting her and two frosted ones for who-gives-a-shit me.
She frowned, immediately suspicious. "Who did you kill this time?"
Close, I thought, but no cigar.
"Can't a guy just be nice?" I asked innocently.
She shook her head. A little water had gotten on the dark tresses despite her best efforts, and droplets flicked me in the face.
I got out of her chair and she took it. She started in on the coffee and doughnut, and I sat on the edge of her desk, munching my second frosted. The sky rumbled and the blinds rattled.
"I tried to call you last night," she said. "You must have got home late."
"I was working," I said.
"At what?"
"Talking to this Shirley Vought, who works at the Village Ceramics Shoppe."
Her eyes narrowed. She swallowed a bite of doughnut politely, then impolitely asked, "What color is her hair, how old is she, and how much does she weigh?"
"You think I had the chance to weigh her?"
"Did you just develop a speech impediment?"
I shrugged it off, casual. "She's blonde. Mid-twenties. You know I prefer brunettes, kitten."
Thunder rattled the windows and she said, "Any port in a storm."
I slid off the desk, took my coffee and the Daily News with me—the doughnuts were gone—and said, "You're impossible before you've had your first cup of coffee."
"This is my second."
"Fine. Take your time drinking it, then bring your pad in, when you're in the mood to work."
I was halfway through the funnies when she came in with her pad and no attitude, and took the client's chair. "You want me to check up on her?"
I put the paper aside. "The Vought girl?"
She nodded.
"That's a good idea," I said. "She claims to be a rich kid, but it doesn't hurt to be sure. Says she works in that ceramics shop for therapy. And based on the French restaurant she made me take her to—and the looks she got from everybody from the doorman on up—she may well have a Park Avenue pedigree."
Velda was jotting that down. "Anything else?"
"Yeah, she mentioned a little neighborhood tabloid, the Weekly Home News —familiar with it?"
She nodded again. "Just what you'd think—local squibs, lots of want ads and personals. Kind of like the Village Voice without the sex ads and politics. Why?"
"I want you to go over there, after this weather clears up, and see if they have a morgue or maybe microfilm files. I want you to go back several years, checking for stories about Davy Harrin."
"You mean Dr. David Harrin?"
"No—his kid. David, Jr. Davy."
Her mouth made an O. "The one who died? Young and tragic, the athlete?"
"Right. Miss Vought says that tabloid covers the area high school scene. Anything that strikes you as interesting, either make notes or if it's one of those microfilm machines that print copies out, do that."
She frowned. "Okay, Mike ... but why the interest in the doctor's dead son?"
"Not sure. Call it a hunch."
The frown became a smile. "All right. I can't claim that your hunches don't occasionally pay off. That it?"
"No. Pull in Bud Tiller again, or somebody else at another agency that we can trust." She arched an eyebrow at me and I added: "It's part of the same hunch. Both Junior Evello and Jay Wren, the Snowbird himself, wound up at Saxony Hospital under Doc Harrin's care."
"Is that suspicious?"
"It's got me thinking. Both were minor automobile accident victims—one got clipped by a lady driver, the other by a truck. Two big-shot crooks involved in the dope trade, and each winds up in the hospital under similar circumstances? That doesn't pass the smell test."
"I've heard you say it," she said, head cocked. "Coincidences do happen."
"Yeah. But so do fake insurance claims. Do I have to tell you that there are guys out there who know how to walk in front of a car or a truck, and get hurt just bad enough to make a claim?"
She was ahead of me. "Just like there are guys who can drive a car or a truck, and are expert at making non-fatal accidents happen for the same purpose."
Nodding, I said, "Bud does lots of insurance-claim work. He might know who we should be talking to."
She was taking that down as she asked, "We're obviously not talking about insurance scams here. We're talking about somebody hiring drivers to put somebody else in the hospital, non-fatally ... but out of commission for a while."
"Roger that."
She sat forward, the lovely face taut with thought. "But, Mike—why would somebody take Evello and Wren out of the action, temporarily?"
"Maybe somebody new on the stage. Somebody trying to cut into the Lower Manhattan drug scene, or possibly bigger, with citywide ambitions. Hell, the Evello mob is a conduit for the whole damn country."
The dark eyes stared unblinkingly at me. "Somebody out there's trying to take over from Wren and Evello? Who?"
I waved her off. "No, sugar, it's too crazy to share. Some hunches you don't take out and show around like something you're proud of. Some hunches you have to let play out."
She didn't press me. But she did say, "Well, maybe I have another piece of the puzzle for you. A little piece of information came in yesterday afternoon—that's why I was trying to get ahold of you last night."
"Yeah?"
"Remember Edwin Brooke? The guy who supposedly came along and took advantage of you incapacitating Russell Frazer ... and conveniently mugged and killed him? Pat called to say those two did know each other—in fact, they were booked on mugging charges on three occasions. Four or five years ago, when they were kids, but—"
"Booked on mugging charges," I said, blinking at her. "Together?"
"Yeah." She shrugged. "They were a team."
This was the kind of rainy day where you don't bother getting your car out of the building's parking garage. This was a day for taking cabs, and I slid in the back seat of one and asked the driver to take me to Bellevue.
He grinned at me in the mirror, a wiseass with a Brooklyn accent: "The mental ward?"
"Yeah, I'm fighting my urge to strangle cabbies."
That took the funny out of him, and I sat looking out at cars whooshing by with their lights on in the daytime and rain coming down so damn straight, you had to admire God's aim if not His sense of humor.
Bellevue is the oldest hospital in New York, maybe in the country. It's a free hospital and the city won't let anybody be turned away, which is probably why the cops often stick their sick or wounded suspects there. Anyway, that's where the county morgue is, so sometimes it saves a trip.