Instinct’s a funny thing. You can be strolling down the street with the sun shining, birds gargling—you can feel like a hundred grand, yet when a certain kind of face comes around the corner or a mug in a doorway leers at you just so, an electric circuit snaps. Dad’s voice came into my head—it usually did so when I was about to face danger.
Pull your weapon. Stay alert.
I slipped out my .38 I keep spring-hinged under the desk and held it under the newspaper on the desk, with my finger snug on the trigger.
Two thuds at the door. Not subtle.
In the middle of Rick’s sentence I cradled the receiver and told the shadow to enter my inner sanctum.
Five foot eight but as stout as a barrel. Camelhair coat and homburg, fancy silk suit. He had enough nose to fill two faces. Not particularly long, but flat and wide like his girth, the kind of snout with a history of punches taken. It spread out under flat gray eyes. Even with the duds, a tough loogan. His knuckles were calloused, like he regularly went a few rounds with the heavy bag. A few years past his prime, but formidable.
There was something else too, something indefinable that made my nerves sit up and lean forward. The guy looked like he enjoyed hurting people. He had that slackmouthed, slightly sarcastic expression stamped on his face that said sadist. I didn’t have to work up dislike.
“D’Angelo,” he said in a ragged bass voice that reminded me of a nasty guard dog, “I’m asking about—”
“This isn’t free question week, bub. I’m working here.” I wanted to see how the guy would react to a kiss off. He just smiled and went on steady like I’d kissed his hand. I wanted to smack him with a big lead flyswatter.
“I’m hunting up Joe Ambler. Tell me what youse know.”
“Ambler? Sure. Small time blackmailer, scammer, weasel moustache. Punches dames. You’d probably tag him a flyweight.”
The cat took off his hat and mopped the inside band with a wadded handkerchief. He pulled a chair up close to the desk, and my waiting loaded newspaper. His dull eyes didn’t blink. His eyebrows pulled together and tilted slightly. He was ugly.
My index finger got a peculiar itch, like it wanted to splatter the funny papers all over his puss. I was hoping he’d do something stupid. One jerky movement with those ham hands and the last thing he’d ever read would be Dick Tracy. Up close.
“We know youse been tailin’ him.”
“Yeah? And who’s we, mister I-didn’t-ask-you-to-sit?”
“We’s people youse don’t wish to cross D’Angelo.”
“It’s Angel, Mike Angel. It contrasts nicely with my nature. I revamped the name when my father got laid out by some thugs. How many times you change yours?”
The mug put a fist on the desk and opened and closed it again, slow, like I was supposed to be inspired by his knuckles. I could tell by the further slant of his eyebrows that he’d just run out of polite talk. He wore cheap cologne that didn’t match his duds. I made a small motion with the gun under the newspaper that mocked the action of his fist while scrunching my eyebrows to mimic his. My stare was flatter than his stare.
He noticed the newspaper waggle connected to my arm. I don’t think he’d seen it before. He slid his chair back and leaned away. His eyes narrowed. He smirked stupidly, like he needed practice doing it. His hand slowly went to the front of his suit and stopped there.
“Can I smoke?”
“I don’t give a damn if you burn—just reach in slow.”
He fished out a gold cigarette case and tapped a smoke on the lid, then slid it between his thick lips. Extending the case at me he kept smirking.
I shook my head. “Don’t like sissy brands.”
“I can pay for your trouble,” he said, trying to ignore my remark and keeping his eyes on the newspaper bulge. “A cheap dump like this. You ain’t flush.”
“Funny thing. I’m full up with business right now. I do insurance cases, mostly, and in this unsafe world insurance is quite the thing. It’s probably hard to get in your line, Mister, uh?”
“I done prizefighting years back. Maybe you hearda me. Frank Hovard.”
We didn’t shake hands.
“Sorry, don’t follow the manly art much around here.”
“Outta Dee-troit.”
Detroit. Asking after Joe—those connections moved pretty fast. Somebody had dressed this pug up—he didn’t have enough sense to pick out those duds by himself. If he was the messenger for what was left of the old Purple Gang, he might make things rough, so I figured I’d show a little cooperation, now that I had the upper hand.
He was itching to get the jump on me, and steaming to figure out a way. It was so plain in his thoughts I could almost read it like tickertape across his big nose.
“Detroit. They make Studebakers up there, don’t they? The ones with the wide noses?”
It went over his head. He went on. “Ambler. What were you on him for?”
“Routine stuff. Insurance payoff on some jewelry stolen from him and some dame. Taken right under his big—nose! The company thought it had a bad—smell! Never caught the dame’s last name. Maybe you—nose?”
Hovard’s eyes stayed dead. He didn’t nod or even breathe funny. Punchy, was my guess; no sense of humor. The Cyrano game flew by his head—the one with the big schnoz on it.
I pressed on: “I was to sniff around and see if the rocks conveniently showed up. See if Joe would blow it. They didn’t. He might have. Guess the police report was pretty spare on details. Forced entry not apparent. You know how those cases are. That’s my life, dull cases—snot easy.”
“Last time you seen him?”
“I followed Joe for two weeks to run up my bill, and then told the company that his claim was square. Haven’t seen him for 3 days. Case closed.”
The big nose flared, stood and the rest of his face followed. He smiled at the part where I said I’d ran up my bill. It was the only time he smiled for real. I left my .38 under the newspaper and stood to see him out. It was a mistake.
Hovard turned like he was headed for the door then lurched across the desk and grabbed my wrist. The .38 was swept aside to the wall. His other big fist cocked and aimed at my eyes. I was able to twist to the side and yank away just as the big ham crashed past my face. Hovard was powerful but slow. As he struggled to regain his balance my fist thumped into his nose, making it wider. He grabbed a paperweight from my desk and hurled it at my chin. I ducked again and it went crashing through the window.
With the desk between us, the big man waltzed back and forth to get at me. His footwork was slow, too. I dropped to the floor and dove for my .38, which was lying just right for me to whip back up in his face.
“Come on! It would give me the greatest possible pleasure for you to try to take this away from me again.”
He stepped back.
Steps came rapidly down the hall. The big man straightened his duds and slicked back his hair. I managed to reach behind me and slip the .38 into my belt just as a patrolman rushed in. He was hollering that he’d almost been hit by something thrown out my window. Some luck. I’d had this office for well over a year and had never seen a patrolman pounding a beat in the area.
The janitor leaned in from the hallway, and gawked at our powwow. If you want a crowd, just throw a punch. What had been a deserted building was starting to teem with nosy visitors.
The look in Hovard’s eyes cooled again, and his thick lips twisted smug with fake humor. “Sorry. Very sorry,” I said. “My out of shape ex-pugilist uncle here was just showing me some boxing moves and we got a bit carried away.”
“You hurl stuff out the window when you box?” the cop said gruffly.
“Lucky for us you weren’t hurt officer,” I said. “God knows it’s tough enough for you blues without paper weights getting knocked out of windows. Just some friendly horseplay. My uncle here used to stick his nose in the ring. A middleweight—a few pounds ago.” I looked at Hovard and copied his fake smile. I was getting pretty good at imit
ating the big palooka and I could see now it tweaked him. “I wanted to prove a theory—that quickness can always beat brute force. What do you think, officer?”
“I think I’ll let you boys off with a warning. Keep your fisticuffs in the gym.”
Chapter 6 – Return to the Murder Scene
Hovard left after growling how lucky I was that the “flatfoot” saved my ass. I figured he was the lucky one. He scrawled a number to call if I ran into Joe. Not much chance of that unless I figured out where to move the body. If Hovard’s bosses thought I knew what happened to Joe, they wouldn’t have sent a palooka like Frank Hovard to politely inquire—if they’d wanted to muscle me, they would have sent two palookas. Plus, Hovard didn’t ask about Kimbra, didn’t act like he knew about her, so I figured maybe they barely had Joe on their Christmas card list.
I straightened up the desk and taped cardboard over the missing windowpane. Now that I was a few bucks up, I’d see about getting an office girl to keep up with the paperwork I hated doing. She’d have to be a bright gal, someone who could keep her mouth shut. Someone loyal as hell. Rick might know someone like that—seems my dealings with dames always came up on the negative side of the ledger, at least the love life didn’t need to stumble over an office cookie.
I’d always had a weakness for a good leg or a nice breast, and liked them best in pairs, but tried to avoid the cheap broads since I went private. I didn’t always succeed. Anyway, let’s just say my work schedule didn’t make me a reliable date. Plus, I didn’t rate a nice girl. Wouldn’t know what to do with one, except maybe drag her down. Bad for business, anyway.
It wasn’t noon, but remembering how Kimbra had played me set my mouth tingling for a drink. There was half a shot left of my old friend Jack. Mr. Daniels and I must have gone overboard at our last solo party, because leaving that dribble for a future thirst was a cruel joke.
I drained what there was and let the splash make suggestions in the back of my throat. When the suggestions got demanding I hoofed it down the block, picked up a full Jack and brought him back to the office for reflection and a nap.
When I woke, the office was dark and I was in a sweat. Harsh streetlamp blades filtered through the blinds. I’d been dreaming about Kimbra and woke when she fired the .32 into my gut. It was a car backfiring down the block. I grabbed my .45 and sat there sweating in the darkness. Shadowed bars across my desk haunted of jail cells. Kimbra’s eyes were still vivid red, so I took another shot of JD to flush out the nightmare before I left.
The ice was now mushy goo. Driving through it with the windows down jerked me up alert. Even though I’d slept the day away, my bones were weak and achy. Sleeping at my desk isn’t a night at the Plaza.
I drove to Joe and Kimbra’s old place, hoping the street would be empty. It was. I parked around the corner and lit up, surveying everything. No sense in being spotted going in, even if the murder was never discovered. I hoped there’d be a clue inside about Kimbra and Ed’s destination, or something that would tie Joe to the Detroit Geritol boys. I wasn’t sure what to look for. I’d been pretty careful about cleaning up the place the night I’d dumped the body, but might have missed something. A thorough going through wouldn’t hurt.
The side window where I used to breathe hard over Kimbra was still unlocked. I’d left it that way on the fateful night. I couldn’t take the chance of turning on the lights, so I stood in the shrubs and let my eyes adjust to the shadows. A dog barked down the street when a police cruiser slowly rolled past the house. I waited ten minutes more.
Inside nothing looked disturbed. I scoured the floor with my penlight. An empty matchbook cover with Ed’s phone number in pencil was jammed between the back of the davenport and the wall. Lucky find. Ed’s number could lead back to me and I didn’t want any connection to the murder scene, if it ever was discovered to be one.
Moving into the back rooms confirmed that Kimbra’s interior decorating would never make Better Homes & Gardens. Clothes and shoes were strewn about, down the hallway and into the only bedroom. A pair of red lace panties hung on the bedpost. Sentimental me had to pocket those. Stupid me. I doubted I’d ever have the chance to fit them to the owner, but I thought about it. I sure did. The idea kept coming at me in weak moments. That’s what addiction is, weak moments continually overruling strong intentions.
A quick check of the medicine cabinet told me Joe was addicted to antacids and hemorrhoid medicine. It figured. The guy’s puss was always a toothache.
From the top shelf of the bedroom closet I pulled down a thick scrapbook, yellow with age. Page after page of pasted news clippings from the Detroit Press. Old stuff, from the 20’s and 30’s. There was one headline about a kingpin named Bernard Doak getting the chair, and a follow up about a commutation to life at Trenton. It was the closest thing to a family album that hoodlums like Joe ever get. It would make good late-night reading. Maybe it would answer some questions about Hovard and any other boys Joe might have known.
I had a boiling gut from the idea that Hovard wasn’t the last Purple descendant who might drop by to chat.
In the nightstand I found one of those midget address books the size of a Tom Thumb book. The few listings were from a female hand. All the names and numbers were for dames around New York and Jersey. They had stars and numbers in front of the names. Prices likely. Most were too rich for my budget. Probably from Kimbra’s professional past. I didn’t recognize any names, but thought it’d be interesting to dial up a few and pretend I was Kimbra’s long lost brother in from a sales trip.
After a careful search I took the scrapbook and made my way back to my car. I headed to the Bergman mansion. By now Haley would know about Ed, and I wasn’t looking forward to having to babysit. Normally I don’t handle grief well, but with Haley I knew grief would be tangled with obligation. I’m more suited to the daily grind of larger grief and the knowledge that I’m just one private dick trying to set a few things straight in the world—a world mostly run by crooked judges and cops, by rats and palookas like Hovard, who do their dirty work. Hovard and whoever sent him.
Haley had been pure at one point back when, and in times of great loss we all revert to our true nature. Or so Dad always said, which is why when he was killed I spent three months in the bottle. I reverted. Still, visiting Haley now would be awkward. I couldn’t risk telling her what I knew about Kimbra. When I first heard Ed had been murdered, I confess I felt relief at getting paid, and then denial that Kimbra could have done it. What answers for those sort of impulses when we hear someone we know is dead? Impulses you wouldn’t confess to anyone, even a priest. I have a feeling even men of the cloth have such thoughts zip through their brain on the way to something better. Maybe the reality of Ed’s death hadn’t sunk in for me. My old college buddy. Denial injects strange ideas into the brain.
Ed was a sucker for Kimbra, so we had that in common, and I didn’t blame him for leaving Haley either, but all I could think of as I drove up to Cliffside was the waste, the waste of a talented man who could have been so much more. Ed didn’t deserve a bullet behind the ear. Haley deserved something better, too. I wasn’t Santa Claus, but wished I were more for her.
I realized right before I got to Cliffside, that it wasn’t boredom alone that led me to pry Kimbra out of a jam. It was anger. I was still angry about having my career in the force submarined by corrupt cops. I was angry about Dad, who gave his life to the department and in the end got a gold watch and one good case as a PI. I was angry at Joe for roughing up Kimbra. Mostly, I was angry at myself for letting booze and the wrong sort of dames play me for a wasted, washed up sap. At 30, the youngest washed up private eye in history.
I pulled up behind a black Ford sedan and switched off the motor. Plain clothes cops, probably poking around for the Bermuda authorities, hoping to win a field trip down there to bring evidence. I announced myself to the maid and was ushered into the cavernous parlor. Haley looked small and frightened, curled in a fetal position at one end of the l
eather sofa. The look in her eyes as she saw me was a mixture of pain and hope.
“Why did I know you’d be around?” lieutenant Anthony said, looking up from his pad. “At least I don’t have to come looking for you.”
Chapter 7 – A Chicago Meeting
Orange glare from the streetlamps reflects off the face of the gray haired portly man in a tailored suit, lending his expression severity. He stands staring down from the dim conference room at the sparse traffic, twenty floors over downtown Chicago, his back to two men who wait nervously at the end of the table. 2 a.m. The room is quiet, with only a faint hissing of traffic from the street.
“Serious mistakes have been made. Serious.”
The men at the table shift in their seats. One man rubs his fingers together and looks at the ceiling; the other clears his throat and says, “We can still rectify the situation. The investigator doesn’t know anything yet. I doubt if he’ll find out much. And if he does, Frank will be right there.”
The man at the window turns and faces them, arms folded, tapping one foot. “You mean we can just wait until he pokes around and finds the links that bring him to our door?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”
“No, boss, Frank could just take him out.”
“You idiot—that would bring even more heat, what with his ally on the force. No, tell Frank to back off. He’s getting sloppy anyway, if you recall the little matter in Bermuda. Letting the woman run was a very big and messy loose end. No, I think I know another way to handle D’Angelo’s kid.”
“What about the rest of the Jersey operation?”
“Cut it loose. We have enough on our plates here in the new setup. Without the smart boys, those hoodlums are no longer cost effective. It’s taken us twenty years to set this triangle up. It’s a multimillion operation and I won’t have it jeopardized by no-brain Pollocks. The rest of the Tri-State stiffs are small timers with no loyalty, no understanding of our history. No, cut them loose. Call the junior varsity and tell them they’re on their own. From now on we base out of that Podunkville down south. She has it all ready. As you know, I’m retiring. I’m handing things over to her after Friday.”
Dark Quarry: A Mike Angel Private Eye Mystery Page 4
