I went on upstairs to two floors above Velda’s, pushed the down button and reached in to punch the floor before the doors closed, then took the stairs. In the lobby, they’d be watching the floor pointer above the elevator doors and wondering what the hell that was all about. It’d break the monotony for them a little bit.
My coded knock didn’t get a response right away, and I was just getting worried when she answered the door in a short baby-blue terrycloth robe, in the process of towel-drying all that raven’s wing hair. She grinned at me as I stood there taking all of her in, then said, “Stop breathing through your mouth, Mike, and come on in.”
I did, and she shut the door and bolted it. There was no fear in her—we were in a hopeless situation, but we’d been in those before. Any concern in her now would be for me. And the same was true of me for her.
When she took my hand and squeezed it, I knew she knew about the attempt to abduct her.
“Who told you, Velda?”
“Pat called me. Come over and sit with me on the couch.”
Her apartment was small and homey, inviting in its soft colors and comfortable furnishings. Nothing about it indicated the remarkable woman who lived here, not unless you started opening drawers and looking in this decorative box and that apparent humidor and saw the four .32s salted around the little living room.
She curled up on the couch with her legs under her. I sat beside her with my arm along the back cushions.
“Pat didn’t get any official confirmation,” she said. “The NYPD just had an accident fatality report come in, and those get run past Homicide. Pat noticed the address and put two and two together. But he really added it up after he saw the names on the sheet of those men working out of Washington.”
“Okay, Rickerby’s crew had your back, and good for them. But from here on out you stay put.”
“No way,” she said fiercely. “I’m in this as deep as you are.”
“I’m still your boss.”
“I’m your partner. There’s a difference.” She shifted her bottom a little and leaned my way, some edge in her voice. “I knew damn well I was being tailed by our people, and it didn’t bother me. If I’d wanted to shake them. well, you taught me some pretty fancy tricks and I’ve picked up a few on my own.”
“No dice. You’re grounded.”
“Damnit! What happened today shows that they have me covered just fine! You are one stubborn. damn you, sometimes!”
When she got mad, she got even more beautiful. Her dark eyes danced with a peculiar sparkle and those lovely breasts heaved with the heat of her anger. I grinned at her and before she could protest, I moved in, my arms around her, my mouth on hers, tasting all that loveliness until she was just a breathless bundle of female who could only say, “You may know how to shut me up, Mike. but you still lost the argument.”
“This is losing?”
She kissed me. It wasn’t just a kiss, not when her tongue went searching for the back of my throat. Then she asked, “Am I still grounded, Daddy?”
“...No.”
“Turns out Mike Hammer can be bribed.”
“Not with money.” I eased away from her. “Now, can we talk a little business?”
She leaned toward me. “Why don’t you finish what you started first...”
“Turn off your switch.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t find it. Why don’t you look for it...”
I backed away. “Later, baby. Business, first.”
“Okay. Your loss.”
“Be useful, why don’t you? Get us a couple of beers.”
She gave me a Sieg Heil salute and got off the couch, flashing some skin under that terrycloth robe, making me want to reconsider or maybe kick myself. All those months were still racked up inside me and I wanted her so bad that the hurt was as physical as it was emotional.
She brought back two Blue Ribbons and I drained half of mine with a single gulp and set the can down. For ten minutes I brought her up to date, then said, “How about your end?”
“How about my end?”
“Be good.”
Her handbag was on the nearby coffee table and she snapped it open and got out several folded sheets of paper. She passed them to me.
“Here’s what I found on the senator’s partygoers,” she said. “I didn’t come up with anything suspicious much less dirty. Jasper’s friends have everything from A-1 credit ratings to security clearances. The only one I had trouble with was the Contreaux woman.”
I glanced from the sheets. “Why?”
“For one thing, when I spoke to her briefly at her apartment today, she was polite but not terribly forthcoming.”
“There’s something else?”
Velda nodded. “She’s Dr. Giles’ assistant and personal secretary, and they are both engaged in classified work on various space projects.”
“But he’s retired.”
“Yes, but he’s still doing liaison work when necessary, and has a top security rating. Still doing research at Manheim University, too, who don’t like inquiries into their staff. Or at least not into their government-funded projects.”
“So you came up empty on the Contreaux doll?”
“No, I got everything,” she said, “it just wasn’t that easy.” She was gesturing to the papers in my hands. “Keep looking, you’ll see. With the senator backing you up, they finally gave me everything I asked for.”
“Maybe I need to dig a little deeper.”
“No!”
She said it so fast and hard that it knocked me off balance. Then she smiled and laughed a little.
“Okay, so you caught me,” she said. “You called her a ‘doll,’ and you’re not wrong. She’s a little too beautiful for me to send you out there investigating her, uh... background.”
“She’s too beautiful? Ever look in the mirror, kid?”
“Even if the mirror says I’m still the fairest in the land, that girl’s got something, Mike, and you damn well know it.”
“I’m just trying to be thorough.”
“You be thorough with me,” she said, with a minxy little smile. “Anyway, you met her at the party, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but just briefly. I was there to do a job, not mingle with the guests.”
“But she accompanied you with Dr. Giles to his office, to patch you up.”
“Did she? After I caught that slug, I wasn’t too interested in ‘dolls.’ What can you tell me about Lisa Contreaux?”
“That I hate her.”
“Quit kidding.”
“Who’s kidding?” She sighed and folded her arms over her bosom. “All right. She’s twenty-nine, has a doctorate in physics and has been with Harmon Giles two years. Apparently she has an important position, is well-liked, well-respected, and attends to Dr. Giles’ needs.”
“All of them?”
“Keeping in mind the age difference of twenty-some years, I doubt that.”
“Some of us old guys still got some spunk left, kitten.”
“I know all about your spunk, big boy.” She dug her elbow in my ribs. “To be fair, when I said she wasn’t forthcoming, I should have cut her some slack. She is, after all, in mourning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, her fiancé died, recently—apparently a nice innocuous young scientist. It’s in my notes. Dennis Dorfman. He worked with Dr. Perry Gleason in Organic Science Studies at Manheim.”
I was sitting up now “How did the Dorfman boy die? He was just a kid, so don’t tell me natural causes.”
“Well, it’s natural to die when you get run over by a Buick.”
“Don’t tell me—hit-and-run driver.”
“Yeah. Just about a week ago. And before you bite my head off, I checked with Pat. It went down near the campus. Witnesses saw a college-age kid behind the wheel of what turned out to be a stolen car. Appears to be a joy ride that turned tragic.”
“And the driver has never
been found.”
“No, Mike. Pat said there was one little odd thing about it.”
“Yeah?”
“The kid’s last words. Young Dorfman was unconscious at the scene, badly injured, but he came around when they were loading him in the ambulance. He died on the way to the hospital.”
“What did he say, Vel?”
“He said... ‘Complex 90.’ He said it several times, apparently. The ambulance attendants said he was grabbing one of their shirts when he said it for the last time, right before he passed out again. In minutes he was gone.”
“Complex 90.”
“Does that mean anything to you, Mike?”
“No. How about you?”
“No. Not a thing. Now, that might be worth asking Lisa Contreaux about, at that. I can do it for you, Mike, tomorrow.”
“I’ll handle it. I’m capable of talking to a beautiful woman without becoming a crazed sex fiend, you know.”
“Yeah, well the jury’s out on that one. Oh, speaking of Pat and stolen cars, he said the vehicle with those plates you called in— the one you sent on a wild goose chase? It was found abandoned on the East Side.”
“Did they dust it for prints?”
“They hadn’t yet when I talked to him. He said the car was being towed over to the city garage, where a forensics team would be waiting.”
I was sitting there brooding, so she got up, got me another Blue Ribbon, and sat back down to patiently wait for me to process everything she’d told me.
“What else?” I said finally.
“I didn’t talk to this Harmon Giles in person,” Velda said, picking right up. “I think maybe you should check in with him.”
“Right, if nothing more than to ask him for some painkillers. He may be a hot shit with N.A.S.A., but he did a lousy job on my leg.”
“So complain to him in person. You were lucky he was there. He has a reputation for being one of the best surgeons in the country.”
“You could have fooled me. Anything interesting on the other guests?”
She gave that a little thought, then said, “Well, apparently this Wall Street whiz, who was to have been Irene Carroll’s date that night... Warren Bentley? Word is an engagement is imminent.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Why?”
“Call it a hunch.” I decided not to tell her about earlier, when Irene Carroll pressed herself to me like a suction cup on glass.
“Velda, could any of that crowd, besides the senator himself, have been important enough to rate an assassination attempt?”
“Maybe Dr. Giles.” She touched the tip of my nose with a forefinger. “Or you, Mike. You do have a few enemies left alive. Not all of them are behind the Iron Curtain, either.”
I sipped the beer, shook my head. “It all begins with that party at Jasper’s penthouse pad. The cops figured it a botched jewelry heist, but it was something else.”
“How odd,” she said, frowning, but also laughing a strange little laugh.
“What is?”
“That that’s what led to you winding up on the run in Russia. When the same damn thing happened to me.”
* * *
During the war, when she was an agent with the O.S.S., Velda had been part of the effort to break up Butterfly Two, a freelance espionage ring that dated back to the early twenties, headed up by one Gerald Erlich. Butterfly Two had offered its services to the highest bidder, and Hitler’s Germany had won. No Nazi himself, just a hard-bitten, cold-eyed pro, Erlich disappeared post-war with all his accumulated wealth, and the Reds swallowed up the spy ring.
Less than a decade later, in New York, independently wealthy Rudolph Civic became known as a generous donor to charity and the arts as well as a prominent contributor to local political campaigns. His wife made frequent appearances on the society pages, but Civic himself was known to be camera-shy. Not surprising, given that Civic was Gerald Erlich, hiding behind a new, respectable identity.
Knowing nothing of this, I got hired on a routine security job for a society event of Civic’s that I sent Velda to handle. Dressed to the nines like just another jet setter, Velda could mingle more effectively than me and even follow Mrs. Civic and her fabulous gems into the powder room.
A routine enough job... until the host made a late arrival at his own party, and the two former spies, Velda and Civic, recognized each other at once. They had a tense confab in the midst of clinking cocktails glasses and brittle laughter, the former Erlich assuming Velda had tracked him down, Velda assuming Civic had lured her there. Either might have mistakenly shot the other had fate not intervened. In the bedroom where Civic and his wife had gone to freshen up, with bodyguard Velda in attendance, a gang of Red agents posing as jewel thieves broke in and abducted all three, emptying the safe of its valuable stones.
The next day, Civic’s wife, a pudgy dame, was found in the river with her fat fingers severed to allow the removal of the precious gems she wore. This convinced the cops—and me, at the time—that this was a heist gone horribly wrong, the work of uncommonly vicious thieves.
In reality, Civic and Velda were smuggled out of the country and wound up prisoners in central Europe. Civic, actually Gerald Erlich, was considered a very dangerous loose end by the Kremlin, since every major agent he’d employed was now working for the Soviets—the names, the identities, even the places inside his head made him valuable... and dangerous. Somehow Civic and Velda slipped their captors and made their own inside-Russia escape, and the chase was on. The two pooled their resources and information, and were on the run for an incredible seven years. Civic they killed. Velda made it back.
A lot of the details I didn’t know As close as Velda and I were, two factors had kept me from asking her a thousand questions— first, this had been a government mission, an ex-agent called back into service by unforeseen events, and much of what happened was simply not my business. Second, she had a right to her privacy. She would tell me what she wanted to, and hold back what she wanted to. I understood. I was fine with it. All I had ever wanted was her back in my life. I had spent seven years inside a bottle because she was dead. When she turned up alive, I wasn’t interested in the fine print.
* * *
“Now,” she said with a shudder, cuddled close to me on the couch, my arm around her terrycloth-covered shoulders, “after all these years. the damn Soviets again.”
“But we have a ticket out of this mess.”
She nodded. “Turn over one live K.G.B. agent, and your friend Rickerby has the bargaining power with the Kremlin to get you taken off the big hit list.”
“And to swap some of our guys out of East Berlin stir.”
“We’ve both been in prison over there now, Mike. We both know what it means to get out.”
“Well, my stay wasn’t very long, sugar.”
“Nor mine. I never told you, but. I’m sure they let us escape.”
“You and Rudy Civic, you mean?”
“Yes. We all but waltzed out of there, nothing like what you had to pull off. They thought Civic would lead them to agents of theirs, former agents of his, that they couldn’t trust.”
“But you shook them. You shook them off.”
She nodded. She was trembling. “Mike. Mike, I love you.”
“Well, I love you, baby.”
“There’s something. something I never told you. About what happened over there. To me.”
“You don’t have to.”
“You should know. There’s something... important.”
“The past isn’t important.”
“This part of it is... Mike, don’t you ever wonder why I’ve never insisted you marry me? Why I’ve stood by and let you... just... you know... with other women?”
The hurt in her voice made me feel like the heel that I was. “I guess I’ve wondered. I’ll marry you tomorrow, kitten. I’ll marry you tonight. Say the word. Hell, I’ll move us down to Florida and buy a fishing boat and we’ll raise a passel of little Mikes and V
eldas.”
She flew out of my arms.
“What? Baby?”
Then she was standing in the middle of her little kitchen, her arms clutching herself in a desperate self-hug, sobbing, sobbing, from the tip of her toes to the top of her head. Such a tall woman, now she looked small, petite. Tiny in her sorrow
I went up behind her and stood close, my hands on her shoulders.
“Kitten... what is it?”
“They tortured us, Mike. When they first had us. They tortured Civic and he told them everything he knew. They thought the two of us were partners, the way you and I are partners, and... but I didn’t know the secrets that Civic did. I had nothing to tell them. They... they brought in a man that we later learned was the K.G.B.’s top expert in torture. He... he did terrible things to me, Mike. He did things to me with tools, with knives, with red-hot instruments of. of torture, Mike. Inside me, Mike. He.”
She was sobbing again, her body wracked with shuddering sobs.
“Baby. baby. don’t put yourself through it.”
I heard her swallow She turned to me. She looked so small without her heels, in bare feet, just a frightened little girl.
“Okay, Mike. I’ll say nothing more about that. Well, there’s one other thing to say, but.”
“Honey. Please don’t.”
Her smile was a terrible crooked thing. “Mike, when we first met. when I was on that undercover assignment with the Vice Squad, that horrible man I was working to put away. I. I had to get close to him. Surely you knew that.”
Why was she jumping to this subject?
“Sure,” I said, “of course, you’d have to get close to him.”
I hadn’t known she was working Vice back them—I thought she was just a poor kid victimized by a sadist. Which was why I killed the slob
“And later, Mike, you knew I’d been in the O.S.S., and. well, from the first time I met you, you had this thing about wanting the woman you married to be a virgin. It was. so cute. So sweet. So old-fashioned. So. unrealistic. Mike, I lied to you. All those years. Why you believed me, I’ll never know”
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