There was something of the past about her that could take your breath away, the soft pageboy curl that heightened the width of her shoulders, the fullness of her stature, the lush wet redness of her mouth.
When you've worked with a doll like Velda as long as I have, you'd think a woman, no matter how luxuriantly beautiful, would be just another attractive fixture in a wood-paneled office. She downplayed that beauty in tailored suits, which also concealed the short-barreled .38.
But the boy who hugged that wrapped package almost dropped it when he got a load of this statuesque, dark-haired beauty who was old enough to be his mother, though I doubted he was thinking of her that way.
When she smiled, the boy's arm seemed to loosen around the package he was holding. Velda knew what she was doing, all right. She had been jarred out of bed, but had made a showgirl's quick change and had gotten to the office in record time, ready to cope with any emergency that had popped up.
Velda beamed at our clients in a kind, reassuring fashion, took their coats and hung them up in the closet, saying, "Pat called. Fit to be tied. You seem to have left a crime scene again."
The two kids exchanged glances, the girl mouthing, Again?
"It's a bad habit," I admitted.
Velda said, "He said he'll be over here in half an hour."
"Gives us some time," I said, nodding.
She got up and opened the door to my inner office and waited until the two kids had gone in, then brought up the chairs for them in front of my desk. She brought her own chair up around beside my desk, halfway between me and our young new clients, and crossed her legs. The boy's eyes couldn't help themselves, and the girl gave him a look.
So they were a couple, then...
Couldn't blame him—she was an attractive girl, with short dark-blonde hair, lovely brown eyes, and little or no makeup, one of those young women who make no effort to attract a guy's attention and give you whiplash, anyway.
When everybody had settled, I said, "Crazy night, huh?"
There was no answer. But their eyes asked questions.
I leaned forward on the desktop. "Mind if I record this conversation?"
The boy, that brown-paper mystery in his lap with his hands on it protectively, said very quietly, "Why?"
"Because we left a dead man back at the bottom of those subway steps. We want an accurate account of what happened. The best time to get it is right now."
This time the boy's eyes narrowed slightly. "You shot him."
I shook my head slowly. "No, I didn't. I shot the gun out of his hand, and the clumsy fool tripped and fell down the steps."
The pair gave each other a fast glance.
I said, "You know who I am, don't you?"
There was a slight change of expression as he told me very warily, "I saw the name on your door."
"Isn't that where it should be?"
"I don't like ... coincidences."
"Like how?"
"You're ... a private investigator, right?"
I nodded. "You hired me, remember?"
"But you're ... Mike Hammer—the guy who makes the papers?"
"Sometimes," I agreed. I let my eyes drift to the wall where all my legal documents were framed. One plaque was for winning a small-arms competition with some pretty big shooters. A few headline stories were on display, too.
"Are you already taping?" he asked suddenly.
"Sure," I told him. "Why not?"
"We didn't give you permission yet!"
"Tough," I said. "Listen, hiring me doesn't make what happened tonight go away—or mean I don't need to know what's wrapped up in that package. I can only help you if you level with me."
"Help us how?" the girl asked.
"Help you with the cops. Help you not get killed. That kind of thing."
The boy frowned, then sighed. "What do you need to know?"
I said, "Look, this isn't official. You don't have to tell me anything, but right now I'm one big part of your story, and we'd better get everything straight before a cop comes walking through that door. Then it will be official."
"Okay," he said. "So ask."
Behind them, Velda said, "Let's start with names."
All business, my Velda. You'd never know these kids threatened to spoil our plans. We'd been engaged for longer than most people are married.
And we were set to fly to Vegas this weekend so she could finally make an honest man out of me.
"My name is Matthew Hurley," the boy said, "and this is my stepsister, Jenna Sheffield. But our names aren't as important as his ..."
Matthew Hurley placed the big brown package on my desk. "His?" I asked. "What's his name?"
"Goliath," Jenna Sheffield said. "That's Goliath...or anyway, what's left of him."
Chapter 2
"Let's hear the story," I said, peering across the bulky butcher-paper-wrapped package. "We don't have much time."
Matthew sat forward, blurting, "My father ... and her mother ... are professors at NYU."
The way he separated his father from the girl's mother caught my attention.
Jenna noticed it, too. "Be nice, Matt," she scolded. Then, her eyes moving from me to Velda and back again, she said, "My mother was Matt's father's assistant. She still is; they've worked together for many years."
"What's their specialty?"
"Dead languages," Matthew said. "After studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for over six years, they finally decided to go to Israel for some on-site research."
Velda's brow was tight with thought.
I said, "Aren't your folks in with some pretty fast company there? Most of the religious world looks upon those scrolls as if they're community property. I understand there's a lot of red tape to go through to even get close to the originals."
Jenna nodded. "But the university provides impeccable credentials, and finances. Plus, our parents managed to ... well, grease the way somehow." She caught me frowning a little and added, "Not bribery. It's just that the brains of the world seem to have a peculiar relationship—one day they'll ask for a favor back."
Hoping to cut out the nonessentials, I said, " Where do you two fit in? Just along for the ride?"
"Sort of," Matthew said evasively.
"Do you like Israel?"
His boyish grin was disarming. "It's not exactly Aspen or Vail, or spring break in Florida. But Jenna and I have a healthy respect for history ourselves—our majors are both in that area, and we assist our parents, as grad students—so the Israeli kind of sun and sand was just fine with us. Anyway, somebody had to look out for Jenna."
She gave him a kidding poke with her elbow—yeah, they were a couple, all right.
I tried tearing a few pages out of the script. "So you both got bored and took off on a trip somewhere, a little getaway. Someplace not too hairy with bandits and buzzards, but a spot on the map you could tell stories about when you got home. That it?"
They both nodded.
"So," I said, "where did you go?"
Jenna leaned forward in her chair. "We had a Land Rover and all sorts of equipment, including GPS."
Things sure had changed. Global-positioning instruments on vehicles now could tell you within inches where you were on the surface of the earth. What the hell, kept a guy from having to ask directions, didn't it?
"We had plenty of gas and food and water," Jenna was saying.
"How about a gun?"
She shook her head. " We aren't political or militaristic or anything. Not us, or our parents."
"Go on."
Her expression grew thoughtful. "You know anything about the Scriptures, Mr. Hammer?"
"I got the 'eye for an eye' part down," I said. "I'm kind of fuzzy after that."
"Does the phrase 'low plain of Elah' mean anything to you?" she asked.
"Not unless it's a stop on the Long Island Rail Road."
Her big brown eyes stared me down, unblinkingly. "One of the greatest military battles in the history of the world was fought there in
the Valley of Elah."
I could see Velda's tiny expression of puzzlement, and since I wasn't following this, either, I kept my questions to myself and let the girl talk.
"A huge battle line was drawn up, armed warriors at the ready. The generals were right there at the front, surveying the enemy, and the enemy had something really special to look at—a weapon so huge nothing like it had been seen before and the very sight of it terrified the whole army. That enemy stood behind that weapon absolutely convinced they'd be the victors in the battle about to take place. That their weapon would lead them into a wild and bloody victory over the opposing force."
Quietly I said, "That weapon couldn't have been explosive. Both sides would have lost."
"Oh," Matthew said, "it wasn't explosive."
"Yeah?" I waited a moment and asked, "Who was fighting this battle, anyway?"
"The Israelites were on one side," Matthew said, "and the Philistines on the other."
Nothing in the Six-Day War covered this, I thought.
"And what was this weapon?" I asked.
And both kids looked toward the brown-paper-wrapped package sitting in front of me like a great big sack lunch I hadn't gotten around to unwrapping.
Velda, as usual, was way ahead of me.
"Goliath?" she asked, knowing.
They nodded in sync.
"Goliath wasn't a weapon," I said. "He was just a man."
Velda said softly, "I know a man who some have considered to be a deadly weapon."
"That was before I got my AARP card," I said. "Listen, I know this can't be some stupid college prank, not with bullets flying, but convince me I'm not wasting my time here on some idiot—"
"Goliath," Matthew said firmly, sitting up straighter, "was a man, all right—a man who stood ten and a half feet tall."
"He'd do great in the NBA," I allowed. "Head above the basket. So I assume there's a point to all this?"
But Matthew answered with his own question: "What happened to Goliath, Mr. Hammer?"
I remembered the story, all right. I didn't get kicked out of Sunday school till I was ten. "David nailed him with a rock out of a sling. Close enough?"
"Dead on," Matthew said, smiling a little. "Then what happened, Mr. Hammer?"
"Beats me."
"Then David took Goliath's sword and lopped off the giant's head and held it up for both sides to see." Matthew had his hand up in the air as though he was holding Goliath's head up by its hair himself. "What do you think happened next, Mr. Hammer?"
"You're doing fine, son."
"Seeing their supposedly invincible giant defeated by a little brat with no armor, and just a slingshot, well, it threw the Philistines into one hell of a panic. They turned and ran like crazy, because the whole Israelite army was coming after them in a wild charge that was going to wipe them off the face of the land."
He painted the picture well; and it was some picture to imagine. Matthew's enthusiasm made it seem as real as live video coverage, and even Velda's head bobbed with satisfaction.
But he was holding something back.
I said, "Finish it, kiddo."
"What do you suppose happened to Goliath then?" he asked.
"Not much, I'd guess. Not much going on in your head when a kid like David has it in his hands."
"But what happened after that, Mr. Hammer? What happened to the body?"
"Well ... I guess the whole goddamn army ran over him in the charge. Trampled the son of a bitch."
Matthew gave me a satisfied grin; he was coming out of his shell—he did have a taste for history. "You guessed right, Mr. Hammer. They tripped right over that monstrous 'weapon'; they stepped on it, stomped on it, with enough feet to drive the remains right into the soil. When the rout was over, just the head was left, and the remains of the big guy were only a muddy puddle in the dirt. Vultures and insects took care of the edible bits. Goliath was dead. Goliath was gone. Goliath was only a memory."
Jenna wasn't squeamish. She'd been taking Matthew's story in with not just interest, but pride.
Now I was leaning forward on my desk, cradling my chin with my fingers. He had a punch line left, and I wanted to hear it.
"Apparently, everything got eaten or taken away by scavengers," he said. He paused and his eyes partially closed. "But they didn't get all of Goliath."
"Yeah?"
Jenna, her hand in Matt's, nodded toward the lumpy brown package between us on my desk. "Matt found the rest."
"The bone," I said. I gazed at Matt over his find. "And how did you manage that, Matt?" The answer had to be a beaut.
It was.
Jenna went on: "We were camping on the plain. It was night and Matthew had to put out the campfire, so he took our small shovel to cover it up, but do you know what he did first?"
"Peed on it?" I asked. I'd put out my share of campfires myself when I was a kid.
Velda smirked at me, but Jenna had a startled look.
Then the little blonde turned to Matthew. "You finish the story. You found the thing."
Matthew said, "I dug the shovel in, hit something hard, started to dig around it and, when I turned the flashlight on it, saw it was really big, incredibly big ... and a sort of dirty white color. It was long and round, and when I had it uncovered, and lifted it up, I saw what it was. A bone. One great big bone that had knobs on both ends and must have weighed forty pounds. For a moment there, I thought I'd found a fossil bed with the remains of a T-Rex."
"What changed your mind?"
"The size. It was about three feet long, too short for a T-Rex femur. It was a mature specimen, so it wasn't an adolescent critter, either."
"How did you know?"
"Well, I didn't right then ... but when we had cleaned it up, the evidence was clear."
I nodded. "You show it to anybody?"
"No."
"Then how did you know?"
He shrugged. "Advanced biology in college."
I was studying him. "But something happened out there at your encampment, didn't it? Something that made you pretty jittery?"
The two kids gave me the smallest look of astonishment and nodded hesitatingly. I didn't question them. I let them spill it out themselves.
Jenna's tongue flicked out and wet her lips. One hand gripped the other and she pressed both against her stomach. She didn't like what was about to be said.
But it was Matthew who said it: "Our parents knew we were in a part of the world filled with animosity toward Western Civilization. Doing historical and archeological research in the Middle East, post-September eleventh, is inherently risky. When I called my father on my cell and said I'd found an oversize human femur in the plain of Elah, he didn't have to have the significance spelled out. He wanted us out of there."
"And you headed right back?"
"No. Dad wanted us to have protection, so he sent another Land Rover after us, and the driver followed our GPS right to us."
"How long did that take?"
"Maybe an hour. The driver was an Arab native. He was the only one they knew who was familiar enough with the route we took, and the terrain. Bryan, one of Dad's colleagues, an old student of Jenna's mother, came along."
"What happened?"
"They helped us pack the thing. We were wrapping the bone in some burlap when the Arab saw it, and his face lit up like a lamp. He began chattering in his own tongue. I kept saying that this was a T-Rex bone, but he kept shaking his head and jabbering."
"Later we figured out," Jenna said, "that he'd figured something out."
Matthew nodded gravely. "Suddenly our Arab driver quieted right down. Twice he looked at a map in their Land Rover and I could just tell something was going through his mind."
"And now you know," I said.
"Now I know," he said. "That guy may have been working as a driver, but he was an educated man—a history major at his country's only university, I found out later. A lot of them have educations over there, but no place to use them—doctors, lawyers, t
eachers, rocket scientists, and no place to earn a buck."
I nodded. "And your history-major driver figured out you had latched onto Goliath's bone right away?"
"That I can't be sure. But at least he'd spotted a fossil find, a find that could make a fortune for somebody."
"End of story?"
"No. Before we left the country, our educated Arab driver was found dead on the city's edge. He'd been tortured, then murdered. Robbery was the official motive. My father had paid him handsomely enough to make that vaguely credible."
"When did somebody first try to steal the bone from you?"
The two kids shot glances at each other, then gave me that creepy look that said they wondered if I was a mind reader.
Jenna told me, "Somebody broke into my room while we were at supper, the night before we left Israel."
"But you didn't have the bone there, did you?"
"No. We'd already packed it and had a friend ship it out for us. It was labeled ANIMAL REMAINS FROM ANCIENT TRADE ROUTE—FOR UNIVERSITY STUDY."
"Nobody challenged that?"
Jenna shook her head. "In that part of the world, education is a big thing. That word 'University' can be a magic pass."
I nodded toward the massive wrapped package. "If you sent the bone to your folks at NYU, what's it doing on my desk right now?"
"We didn't dare have it shipped from or to our parents. Anything and everything that people like my parents take out of the Middle East is gone over thoroughly. The argument would have been made that the artifact we found was the property of the Israeli government."
Velda said dryly, "That argument could be made, yes."
Ignoring that, Matthew said, "So we sent it to a friend of ours, another graduate student at the college who's also a teaching assistant at the university. She took it home with her—that's why we were in that area where you spotted us, Mr. Hammer. We met our friend at that Chinese restaurant in Sugartown. We'd just picked the package up from her before you came to our aid."
Jenna said, "Mr. Hammer—should we be scared?"
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 2
