This was generous but not a total lie.
The brunette with the pretty, green-stockinged legs flashed me a smile. Either I was a native straight who knew the dodge, or a cop skipping the entrapment angle—making the first overture louses up the case for a cop when there's a witness around.
"Sometimes," she said, "I think I shoulda hung on to my fuckin' pimp."
I shook my head. "But that cuts the pie in half, cutie."
"Half a pie beats hell out of a whole cookie."
Wisdom is where you find it.
She took a risk. "You looking for some company?"
"Thanks. Not tonight."
She nodded, then indicated her friend. "The two of us, honey, we could turn this dull conversation into a real lively party...."
"I imagine you could."
The light changed to green and I winked and started across the street. On the opposite corner, another pair who'd gathered that I'd turned down the other gals didn't bother chasing this foul ball, and let me go by with barely a glance.
On Sixth Avenue I walked north, remembering the way the street used to look and trying to picture it after the city planners and developers would finally get through. The decay had taken hold twenty years ago, but instead of treating the rot and restoring the originality, they had decided to extract each structure, replacing the street's aging smile with architectural dentures that seemed to be trying to take a jagged bite out of the sky. In between, where the holes were, the decay still showed, the infection deadly—right down to the gums of the sidewalk.
When I reached Forty-ninth Street, I cut east again, threading my way through another parade of faded fun girls looking for the tourist dollar, and almost made the middle of the block without having to deal with any wilted flower's offer.
An ancient rose of thirty in a too-tight dress split up the middle to where her wares showed was about to fall in step with me; her unlit cigarette in its long, slender holder was the opening gambit for the "got a light" come-on.
But her eyes, which had seen too much already, suddenly reached behind me and widened just enough to touch off all those old reflexes and I twisted out of the way of the knife that was supposed to have gone into me, hit the guy on the shoulder to spin him my way, and smashed a fast right to his face that splintered his nose into fragments of bone and flesh, then got him twice more before he lifted off his feet and plopped into the gutter between parked cars.
I kicked the six-inch open switchblade knife over beside him and looked down at the mashed face bubbling with blood. My mugger was damn well-dressed—that was no off-the-rack suit he was wearing. But he was too slippery and red for me to walk away with a decent description, so I knelt and patted him down until I found his wallet, took out his driver's license and social security card, shoved the wallet back, and stood up to grin at the ancient rose.
She was wondering whether to puke and I was in no mood to help her decide, so I left her standing there, unable to take her eyes off the smeary human fingerpainting in the gutter.
No crowd had collected, nothing seemed to have upset the ecology or the decorum of the street. A few eyes looked and a few mouths spoke, but there was no change in the tempo. It was simply a moment of waiting to see what would happen next.
When I crossed the street, I didn't even bother to pick up the pace. I was in no hurry.
But I knew that what I'd told Pat was wrong—this wasn't over, not when a "mugger" in a tailored suit had tried to knife me. Billy might not need my help anymore, but somebody did.
A guy named Hammer, who person or persons unknown had decided needed killing.
Chapter Three
UNDER THE PAGE FIVE photograph, the mini-headline read MIDTOWN MURDER, and beneath that the caption: Unidentified Man Knifed in Mugging Attack.
I was behind my desk and Velda was draping the Daily News across my blotter with narrow-eyed accusation. I had called her last night and filled her in on the day's events, including the attempted mugging.
I shrugged, flipped the paper closed, and handed it back to her. "Doll, he wasn't like that when I left him. Scout's honor."
She gave me a long, slow look and I saw the tension creeping across her shoulders. That same old worry was back in her voice, tight, low, and a little breathless, as she said, "Then this is the guy who came at you?"
"Yeah." I gestured with open hands and gave her as innocent a look as I could muster. "The bastard tried to knife me and I splashed him—what do you want from me?"
"Mike..."
"Hey, he was flat on his back when I left the scene—out cold, plenty the worse for wear, but breathing, baby. Breathing."
She opened the paper again, held it out in front of her. I couldn't see the page she was perusing—the front page faced me, full of Casey Stengel, recently retired as Mets manager—but I knew she was studying the face-down corpse in the crime-scene photo.
"If this isn't your handiwork..."
"It isn't."
The dark eyes flared. "Then whose is it?"
I shrugged again. "Plenty of easy answers, kid. Either there was a backup man, to pay the guy off the hard way, if he bungled the job—which he did, remember—or maybe one of those faded flowers started frisking him for his loot and the guy started coming around and the gal had to kill the son of a bitch, to keep him quiet. I mean, that knife was right there beside him, kitten, when I took off. It was only later the thing got stuck in his back."
She pulled up the client's chair and sat, her expression empty of accusation, full of thought.
"You had just left Pat," she stated, "and were on your way home. The guy really could have been just trying to mug you, you know."
I shook my head. "No dice, honey. Open street muggings are usually strong-arm attempts and involve two people, one to latch on to the mark and the other to beat and bash him. This was a solo kill, carefully set up to be enough like a mugging to be written off as one."
"You just said yourself there may have been a second person...."
"Yeah, but not in the mugging-team sense. Hit men often have a backup, you know, running interference, waiting with wheels." I batted the air. "And even from that newspaper photo, couldn't you catch how wrong that bozo's threads were?"
"Not exactly typical mugger attire."
"Naw. That was one sharp suit. Tailored, British kind of cut."
She was shaking her head, the dark tresses dancing. "But, Mike—you weren't working on anything."
My eyebrows went up. "I'm beginning to wonder. Anyway, that isn't the point, whether I was working on something."
"What is?"
"Whether somebody might have thought I was."
I pulled the license and social security card out of my coat pocket. The name was the same on both: Russell Frazer—address, the Avondale Hotel on upper Broadway.
I reached for the phone and dialed Pat's number. They located him in a police cruiser, gave him my message, and told me to stay put until he got there.
Fifteen minutes later, Pat brushed by Velda at her desk with a polite nod and locked himself in with me in my private office, obviously trying to decide whether to haul my ass downtown to the cooler or listen to me try to worm my way out of the bind. He tossed his hat on my desk, deposited himself in the client's chair, and his eyes dared me to win him over. It took me all of three minutes to give him the details, and he was good enough not to interrupt. Then I let him check Russell Frazer's ID cards.
When he was finished looking those over, he gave me the long-suffering face and said, "I'm supposed to ignore you walking away from an attempted mugging? A mugging where you beat the hell out of the guy? The day after you send two other guys to the morgue and another to the critical ward?"