We sat quietly for a few seconds, both mulling what I’d just revealed.
Then she said, “So you think some high-school buddy of Dooley’s may also be his mysterious missing helper? Mike, some nerd he used to play chess with doesn’t exactly compare to you or Pat.”
“The war was over, doll. The bond between guys like us is something that will always be there… but while Pat and I stayed close, Dooley stayed the loner.”
Her eyes were narrow with thought. “Well, why would Dooley go to a chess buddy for something that was more like a military expedition? If not you or Pat, why not his son? Marvin was in the service.”
“Remember, Marvin and his father weren’t close. And Dooley knew Pat and me well enough to figure neither one would get involved with mob money, even if what he had in mind was a gigantic sting with Don Ponti as the mark. No, Velda—he had to go to somebody else.”
She shook her head, still not buying it. “He was in combat with you and Pat, but he calls on a chess buddy from high school. Right.”
“You don’t get it, doll. Men with a common interest bond together. They become the tightest buddies there is, this side of a foxhole. Guys who collect stamps or funny books, guys who go to every Rangers hockey game together. They may not know anything about each other’s background, they can have totally different desires, economically they can be worlds apart, but if they have a common interest… I guess it’s just a man thing.”
She shook her head and water droplets flicked me. “You are a relic, mister.”
“But I’m not in the museum yet. Look, men have their goals. Winning a war. Catching a fish. Knocking a little ball into a cup. Pursuits they share with other men.”
Her eyebrows were high but her eyes were half-lidded. “Israeli women fight wars. I bet I’ve caught more fish than you ever have. And a golf course is the last place you’d ever be seen, Mike Hammer… but if you were, plenty of lady golfers would be there to make you look sick.”
“Honey, I’m just saying you’d be surprised who a guy might call on to help him out.”
“Like a chess buddy.”
“Like a chess buddy.”
She drew in some breath and let it out. Her hair was almost dry now and nicely tousled, and her eyes had an impish look. “I know something that beats a chess buddy every time.”
“Tell me.”
“A chest buddy.”
She slipped the robe to her waist and, with a wicked little grin, put her shoulders back to emphasize the thrust of her bosom, defeating time and gravity, the perfect conical breasts even larger now than when she’d been a sleek young thing, her well-toned muscular shape with that narrow waist as impossibly, agelessly beautiful as a Vargas girl on the nosecone of a B-17.
Then she did the woman thing and let her arms slide around me and her mouth went soft and wet against mine. It was like falling from a high place, hoping you were never going to land and dreading it when it happened, and I didn’t realize I was squeezing her so hard until her head lolled back and she gasped for air.
For many months, it had been doctor’s orders that I stay celibate (“One round under the sheets with that lovely lady of yours, Mike, and you’ll be on a slab”) and we had made a game of it. That we were engaged and would wait till we were married. But business and circumstance had pushed the wedding date forward, and when my side was healed, we picked up where we left off.
She was clutching me now with clawing desperation; death had been on our doorstep, and it was time to feel alive. “Mike… Mike… are you sure you’re up to it?”
I was up to it, all right.
* * *
Velda had never been a smoker, but someone like me who smoked for decades, this was one of those rare times where the old nicotine urge would come up and boot me in the butt, more gently now than years ago, but still there. Call it a cliché, but a post-coital coffin nail was always a sleepy, dreamy delight.
She saw me drifting off and nudged me awake. “No way, buddy boy. No sleepytime for you or cuddling for me. You got my brain buzzing and you’re going to pay.”
So soon she was back in her little white robe and I was in my boxers and T-shirt and we were sitting at her kitchen table sipping coffee.
“Okay, Mike… chess?”
“Kitten, that damn game is turning up too often to suit me. Brogan and Olaf played chess on those weekly visits, remember? And Dooley grew up on the Lower East Side himself.”
Her eyes widened. “And you think Brogan and Olaf might’ve been members of your old pal’s high school chess club?” She laughed and shook her head. “Is that what got you going? Mike, a whole lot of people play that game, even on the Bowery. And the population of the area has to be over a hundred thousand.”
“Call it a hunch.”
“You and your hunches. These aren’t even the same cases! The Bowery Bum slayings of forty years ago have zilch to do with your mob billions.”
“I grant it’s a long shot that Brogan is the chess buddy who got recruited to help Dooley move all that dough. But whoever the chess buddy is, he’s a real candidate. And we should find him.”
She smirked. “You think, after the war, Marcus Dooley went back to playing chess with a high-school buddy?”
“High-school buddy or somebody else in the neighborhood, yeah. In or out of war, Dooley was still a chess player.”
“And a very good one,” she reminded me. “So why go back to the Lower East Side to find a regular opponent? There must be plenty of chess clubs in Brooklyn, and there are probably hundreds in Manhattan.”
“Possible, but Dooley was a working-class guy on his best days, and a rummy bum on his worst. Those clubs are usually on the exclusive side, hardly the kind of atmosphere he’d feel comfortable in, much less be welcome at. No, his chess pal would have to be the same kind of unwashed genius as Dooley.”
The dark eyes were half-lidded again. “So we go looking for chess clubs on the Bowery.”
I sipped, shrugged. “If there is such an animal. More likely parks or other public places where low-class chess buffs like Dooley go to get their fix.”
“And this is whose job to track down?”
I sipped and shrugged again, stirring in a grin.
Her chin was tight but there was humor in her dark eyes. “There’s going to be a reorganization of this company, buddy boy, after the ceremony. Payback is a bitch.”
“Don’t threaten me, doll, I’m bigger.”
Very seductively, with that soft, deep voice, she said, “You’re not bigger, Mike. You’re just taller.”
* * *
The next morning at the office, around nine, the intercom blipped and Velda’s voice told me, “A young-sounding woman for you, Mr. Hammer. Very musical, very nice. Anything you’d like to tell me?”
“What’s her name?”
“She said to tell you it’s Alma.”
“Ha. Honey, you got nothing to worry about. She’s just a bag lady I ran into the other day.”
“I bet.”
“Put her through, kitten, put her through.”
Undercover policewoman Rita Callaghan said, “Don’t tell my captain that I’m moonlighting for you now.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“Well, I’m reporting in, aren’t I? Listen, friend, you have attracted some high-end attention. Surveillance of a most impressive kind. Not your local Crown Vics—very nice cars, Chrysler New Yorker, Buick Regal, Pontiac Grand Am. But then these are federal boys, and they have the budget for it. Also the right suits and haircuts.”
“I’m not surprised I’m popular. The government called on me yesterday.”
“Well, you’re being baby-sat and baby-sat hard. They’re pretty good at it—they move the cars as often as the parking in this town allows. Two teams, one watching the front, the other around the corner where your parking garage empties out. They were here when I went to work, and I went on at five.”
“Much appreciated. Anybody else interested in me?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Rita, there may be some mob talent, equally high-end. The guy who tried to kill me a few days ago was from overseas, I’ve learned. French Mafia.”
“Classy killers they send after you, Mike.”
“Nothing’s too good for Mrs. Hammer’s little boy.”
“And you killed his French ass yesterday, I understand.”
“I did. Well, his Corsican ass.”
“His point of origin didn’t make the little write-up I saw in the News. The reporter played it up like a robbery gone wrong. Somebody picked the wrong victim, that kind of thing. Any TV coverage? Plenty in your past to rate it.”
“Naw, nobody remembers who I am any more. Not that I mind. Listen, ‘Alma’—stay alert in your travels and keep me posted. Maybe I can do you a favor sometime.”
“Judging by the liquid smoke of your secretary’s voice, I doubt there’s much else I can do for you.”
“Not just my secretary. My partner. Also fiancée.”
Some warm laughter came over the line. “You heartbreaker. And I do so love older men.”
“And I dig older gals like you, Alma. Where are you calling from? Can’t imagine bag ladies are welcome to use the phone anywhere around here, even a public one.”
“I’m in the alley across the way. On my cellphone.”
“A shopping cart hag with a cellular phone. Times are changing.”
Then, in her Alma voice, she said, “You don’t know what you’re missin’, ya big dumb bastard. This is one hag who could take you to all kinds of new places.”
I bet she could, and she wouldn’t even need the shopping cart.
I’d barely hung up when the intercom blipped again and Velda had Tim Darcy on the line. Pat and I had given him the exclusive on the parking-garage shooting, and he’d been good enough to keep his article low-key, as Rita had indicated. But right now he sounded high-energy.
“Mike, can you meet me over at the Cavern this morning? Around ten?”
“They don’t even open till eleven.”
“They’ll let you in. I arranged it. Gives us some privacy. I got something good for you. Also, something bad, too, I’m afraid.”
“And I get neither bad nor good over the phone, I suppose?”
“No. You gotta make the trip to get the skinny. Can you make it by ten?”
I was a minute early, the bartender unlocking the door to let me in with Tim just behind him, directing him. The bulky, florid-faced redheaded reporter was in shirtsleeves, loose tie, and jeans. He walked me to a rear booth, as if we needed the privacy in the bar area of a restaurant that was empty of everybody but that bartender and a waitress vacuuming the adjacent room. The lights were on, which was always disconcerting in a joint like this. It was like waking up in daylight next to the pick-up you settled on at last call the night before.
Cups of coffee were waiting for us in the booth, and also a rail-thin, pale character with short but shaggy blond hair that would one day turn white without anybody noticing, and the kind of red-edged, dark-circled eyes that spoke of lack of sleep or too many drugs. Hollow-cheeked, he had sharp, bird-like features and the jerky mannerisms to go with them. He was maybe forty and he wore a long-sleeve pale yellow shirt and tan chinos, both of which he swam in.
Tim slid in beside this creature and I got in across from them. My skepticism must have shown because Tim hurriedly said, “Mike, this is Danny Dixon. He’s a recent Sing Sing grad.”
“I heard of you, Mr. Hammer,” he said in a fairly high-pitched, breathy, ragged voice. “You’re a topic of conversation up there, sometimes.”
“Should I be complimented?”
He smiled. His teeth were gray. “In a way. Anybody you put in there needed to be jugged. It’s guys like me who coulda used a break.” He shook his bony head. “These Rockefeller drug laws have ruined a lot of lives.”
I thought it would be ungracious to comment that those breaking the laws had played their own role in that process.
Tim said, “Danny just did a dime and a half for selling a pound of cocaine in a police sting. He was twenty-two, just out of college, and it was his first conviction.”
“I wasn’t even a big user,” Dixon said. “I was just helping a friend out who was trying to get out of a gambling debt with a one-time score. One mistake, Mr. Hammer, and my life went down the shitter.”
“No offense, Danny, but it looks like you’re using now.”
His shrug was accompanied by a gash of a smile. “Let’s just say I’m still in the state’s care where my health is concerned. They owe me that much, don’t you think?”
I figured he meant rehab.
He was saying, “Anyway, I got my real habit inside, and it wasn’t coke.”
“Horse?”
He nodded. “Easier to get inside than on the street.”
“I thought Warden Ladd was pretty tough.”
“He can be, but mostly he just wants to keep the lid on the pressure cooker. Anyway, Vlad the Impaler doesn’t run that place. Or anyway, he didn’t up until lately. I don’t know who took over from the King.”
“The King?”
Tim had been smiling almost maniacally through all this. He said to me, “Listen to this, Mike. This is why I called you… Danny, tell Mike who ran that place while you were inside.”
He shrugged bony shoulders. “Like I said, the King. Ol’ King of the Weeds.”
I frowned. “Who?”
That gray smile was ghastly. Christ, this guy looked like he would float off in a high wind. “The con artist who just wormed his way out of stir after half a lifetime—Mr. Darcy says you’re acquainted with him. You know who I mean.”
“Rudy Olaf,” I said.
Tim was grinning and nodding, but Danny’s nod was sad-eyed and somber.
I frowned at the junkie. My gut feeling was that this was a load of bullshit. “How the hell does a guy running the library run a prison?”
His smile went from somber to jubilant. “Are you kidding? What better place for it? They do inter-library loans out of there, not just with other prisons but straight libraries, and it’s a system infiltrated like a fucking spy network. As long as I was in there, Olaf was bringing in messages for all the mob boys, a regular underground mail service.”
“Okay,” I admitted, “I can see how that would work.”
“But that’s nothing compared to the smuggling. Olaf brought in every kind of contraband you can think of, from booze to H, but mostly cigarettes. Prisons run on cigarettes. That’s why they call him the King of the Weeds, besides being King Shit of the bunch of losers we all were. Weeds is an old slang term for smokes, but I guess you’re old enough to know that, aren’t you, Mr. Hammer?”
“I guess I am.”
His sigh had a rasp in it. “Rudy sure lived like a king in there. A king with a queen—there was this campy girlish guy who shared a cell with him for lots of years. Died not so long ago, of lung cancer. Not surprising considering how much smoking went on in that cell. If I sound prejudiced against homosexuals, Mr. Hammer, I’m really not. Most of the male-on-male sex in prisons is homosexual only by definition—it’s just like… if you’re a vegetarian but there’s only meat to eat, you learn to settle.”
“You say this went on with the blessing of the warden? And his guards, too, I suppose?”
“Blessing is the wrong word. What’s the term? Benign neglect. That’s it. Benign neglect. You see, Mr. Hammer, not every guard in that place is bent. Most aren’t. But Rudy had every bad one in his pocket. Cash flowed through that library, too, you know. He could do what he wanted. He fucking ruled. I learned that from day one.”
“How so?”
“First week I got there, I was assigned to help out in the library. It was easy work. Olaf was there. Smooth, nice, easy-going. Friendly on the surface. But the way he looked at you was like… like a snake studying you. A cobra looking for just the right second to strike.”
“And he struc
k at you, Danny?”
He frowned. “Yes, but not how you might think. He was sizing me up. See, he sold me as a cellmate to one of the worst mob ice men in the joint. Well, ‘sold,’ that’s not right—more like, rented out. I believe I went for ten cartons of smokes a month. I was young and I was pretty. I was also straight, but that didn’t matter. I was the bitch of Bruno Garsi till somebody cut his throat in the prison yard.”
“Was it you, Danny?”
His smile was razor thin. “Must not have been, ’cause nobody got caught, and the ruling was ‘person or persons unknown.’ I was sold or rented or what-have-you to five other inmates over the years, but then I got hooked and got older and less pretty and finally Rudy left me alone. But back while I was a valuable commodity, Mr. Hammer, that was when I got my H habit, which Rudy gladly supplied. When I became disposable, and couldn’t get the stuff anymore, I got sick. I kicked it, though, in the infirmary. Old Vlad made sure I got weaned off—it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t cold turkey.”
“Why the compassion from the warden?”
“Do you think Vlad would like it getting out just how much he puts up with in that place, for the sake of keeping that place chilled?” He nodded toward Tim. “I came to Mr. Darcy here with my story, and he thought there was some value in it. Yes, he’s paying me for it, but I currently got no other source of income, Mr. Hammer, I’m not exactly an employer’s dream hire, you know… so I hope you will keep that part of this to yourself. Some people might think Mr. Darcy is compromising his journalistic integrity, but people like that aren’t schooled in what the world is really like.”
“Danny,” I said, “you said you kicked inside. What got you back on the needle?”
“Oh, I’m not back on the needle, Mr. Hammer. I can see how you might think that. No, no, it’s nothing like that.” He gave me that awful gray smile. “I’ve got AIDS. That’s something else I can thank the King of the Weeds for.”
We spoke another five minutes and Tim slipped him a handful of twenties. I caught the guy’s arm as he was leaving; it felt like a twig. I passed him a C-note and he gave me a nod and one last gray smile.
Tim’s smile was yellowish and he reminded me of a greedy kid. “What do you think of that, Mike?”
Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Page 14
