We didn’t talk much on the way home. I could tell Pat was troubled and going over in his mind everything we’d heard and seen.
Me, I just kept hearing that asshole Wake asking…
…Did somebody get murdered?
CHAPTER THREE
The snow was rain now, making the city a messy morning thing that wasn’t winter any more but sure as hell wasn’t spring. Wetness trailed down the office windows in ghostly fingers, shimmering and shifting and writing messages no one could read.
Velda was already at her desk when I shut the door behind me and hung the drenched Dobbs porkpie hat and the soaked Burberry raincoat in the closet. Back at the old Hackard Building, our coat tree would’ve had to do, spilling a puddle onto where the floor had long since been ruined. But these were our new, nicer (though probably temporary) digs, while the old girl called Hackard got a facelift.
The set-up here was much the same, although the outer office was bigger and more inviting, with lots of dark wood paneling and a leather couch and matching chairs. The reception area walls were arrayed with framed newspaper and magazine stories about Velda’s boss, as well as some sharpshooting plaques and civic awards. Her desk was centered, her back to the door to my inner office. All we’d brought with us from the Hackard were two metal file cabinets and the little scarred wooden table with the coffee maker and room for goodies, like the Danish she had waiting for me.
I hadn’t said hello and neither had she, studying an inside page of the Daily News. She was frowning, but that took nothing away from her dark-eyed beauty framed by a shoulder-brushing, raven-wing black, fashion-be-damned pageboy.
Even seated, her stature was obvious; but she had fuller, higher breasts than most tall girls, and with her narrow waist and those endless long legs, she could make a white blouse and black skirt look worthy of Lily St. Cyr.
And yet somehow I got work done in this place.
Thinking about how professional of me that was, I helped myself to a cardboard cup of coffee, gave it sugar and milk, and wrapped my Danish in a paper napkin and nibbled and sipped as I strolled over to the client chair facing her.
“I hope,” I said, sitting, “you greet prospective customers more warmly.”
“Have you seen this?” she asked, lowering the tabloid enough to peer over it at me. That voice of hers was as liquid as the coffee, and right now just as hot.
“Just the funnies,” I said.
“You made Page Three.”
“I only pay attention when I make Page One.”
She put the paper down. She was irritated, a condition she could convey without wrinkling her face. Remarkable. “You found a body yesterday, and you didn’t even call me about it?”
I shrugged. Sipped. “It was just half a body.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different. That’s something else entirely.” She gestured to the News. “Did you tell this reporter that you planned to find the killer and go off on one of your murder hunts?”
“Let me see that,” I said, and put the coffee and Danish down, then grabbed the paper.
A grim picture of the half a body covered with a blanket, on a stretcher, getting hauled up into the ambulance by orderlies, was accompanied by a smaller shot of Pat and me talking at the scene.
“Notice I’m not quoted,” I said. “I didn’t talk to any of the newshounds. Seemed like when they found out I just happened onto this partial stiff, they lost interest.”
“Well, this guy,” she said, “thought about it a while, then figured different.”
I was glancing at the piece. “He’s dredged up all the old cases. This is just a rehash of every self-defense plea I pulled in the last twenty years.”
She was looking at me carefully. “So are you taking this on?”
“Taking what on? It’s probably going to be ruled accidental.”
“Give me a break. Somebody sapped the guy and pushed him in the river! Just because you were off on one of your insomniac night prowls and stumbled onto this poor half a bird, that doesn’t mean you have to find the killer. You didn’t know this, this… Jamison Elder, right? So why get involved?”
“Exactly,” I said, tossing the News back on her desk and retrieving my coffee and Danish.
She was giving me a look as wide-eyed as some hick in a swamp spotting a flying saucer. Finally she managed, “Say what?”
“I didn’t know the guy, Vel. It’s none of my business, none of my concern. Let the cops earn some of my tax dollars for a change.”
A tapering red-nailed finger tapped the tabloid. “Looks like you and Pat were talking up a storm at the scene. You don’t come off very unconcerned in that photo.”
“Well, Pat has a connection to this. I was just being a sounding board.”
“Explain.”
I leaned forward. “Remember I told you I had to skip lunch with you at the Blue Ribbon yesterday? That Pat wanted me to accompany him on business upstate?”
“Yes, of course. But that’s all you told me.”
I told her the rest, filled her in on our visit to the Dunbar estate, including the charming family members we’d encountered. Well, Dorena hadn’t been so bad. Or Chickie.
“So you have no stake in this,” she said.
“None. Like I said, Pat does, and it’s his case. That partial corpse beached itself here in Manhattan, didn’t it?”
She looked thoughtful. “Might not be his jurisdiction, if they determine this Elder character died upstate and just floated into your lap later.”
I shrugged. “Pat has friends in the state cops. If that’s the case, he’ll lean on them to do right. You don’t seem anxious for me to get involved.”
“No kidding. This thing literally drifts into your lap, right when we’ve been getting back on our feet financially, and it’s actually looking like Michael Hammer Investigations might be a going concern again. After our… absence.”
She was referring to a small matter of seven years spent by her behind the Iron Curtain, spying for Uncle Whiskers, during which time I’d crawled into a bottle, thinking she was dead and I’d caused it. Every couple has the occasional misunderstanding.
The lovely features softened. “I don’t mean to get in your personal business, Mike. I know if somebody needs help, or… well, you feel you need to get even… that you’re going to wade right in. But we don’t need to borrow trouble with something like this. Where your presence is strictly coincidental.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
She was studying me the way a scientist does a slide under a microscope lens. “You mean that.”
“I do. I have absolutely no reason, no motivation, to get involved in this. I mean, come on, doll—you know I need a whole corpse to get interested. A half a one just doesn’t cut it.”
That made her smile. Even made her chuckle a little.
“Okay,” she said. “All that insurance paperwork is waiting on your desk, and there are six phone calls for you to return from clients, current and potential. Have a blast.”
I chewed the last bite of the Danish, swallowed it, got up and said, “It’s nice being a going concern. Just no damn fun.”
She didn’t disagree with me.
* * *
Velda and I were seated at our favorite table in the bar at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant on West Forty-fourth Street, tucked in a corner overseen by two walls of autographed celebrity pictures. I was working on the knockwurst platter and Velda on a shrimp salad when somebody came over who wasn’t a waiter.
“I hoped I might find you here,” Pat Chambers said.
He had his rain-dripping hat off but his trenchcoat, still on, looked like it was crying.
“Sit down, buddy,” I said. “Pull up a chair. Take off your coat and stay a while.”
He did and the bartender, George, materialized with a pilsner of Pabst for him. Did Captain Chambers want anything to eat? He did not.
In fact, he looked too preoccupied to eat or maybe even breathe. His eyes were red and his complexion was g
ray. He did not bother to acknowledge Velda, which said something, since he was half-crazy about her.
“Pat,” I said, pushing my plate aside. “What is it?”
“I don’t have jurisdiction in the Elder case.”
I glanced at Velda, whose eyes widened momentarily as if to say, I told you so.
“The NYPD and the state cops,” he said, “have agreed that the matter should be kept upstate. Even the inquest will be there.”
“But you didn’t agree.”
“I wasn’t asked. The determination was that the cause of death is linked to the apparent accident on the Sullivan County end. The only saving grace here is that Corporal Jim Sheridan will be in charge of the investigation.”
“Friend of yours?”
Pat nodded. “A good man. But all this talk of an ‘accident’ doesn’t encourage me. Mike, I know from time to time I’ve encouraged you to stay out of ongoing police investigations—”
“Yeah, once or twice.”
Velda had her eyes closed. She knew what was coming.
“But this time,” Pat said, leaning forward, “I need your help. I can’t get involved without really getting my tail in a sling. Could you do the job I can’t?”
“Not without a client, I can’t.”
“You’ll have a client.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Velda opened her eyes.
I said, “What exactly do you want me to do, old buddy?”
“I want you to look into both of these ‘accidental’ deaths—Chet Dunbar, three years ago, and Jamison Elder, just the other day. It’s possible they are accidental, and if that’s the conclusion you reach, I’ll live with it. If Mike Hammer can’t sniff out murder, nobody can.”
“Pat, I don’t want your money. I’ll do this as a favor, but—”
“I’m your client. Treat me no differently. I’ll pay your $150 a day.”
“No you won’t. I’ll have Velda draw up a contract, as usual through our lawyer. It’ll be legal as hell. I’ll require a one-dollar retainer.”
His frown was a mixture of embarrassment and frustration. “Mike… Mike, that’s not what I’m after.”
“What you’re after is the truth of this thing, right?”
“…Right.” He sighed, shook his head. “I won’t be there, man. I won’t be at your side in this, despite what it means to me. I have to butt out.”
“Since when do you help me, anyway? You know I do all your work for you, and you just step in at the end and get the credit.”
He smiled, shook his head again, and spoke two words he normally didn’t use in front of Velda.
“So you’re in,” Pat said.
“I’m in. Velda—any thoughts?”
She smiled at Pat and squeezed his hand; I thought he’d blush. “We can always use a dollar,” she said.
Pat suddenly decided he was hungry after all and ordered a Reuben and fries. I went back to my knockwurst, but Velda had set what was left of her salad aside.
“Pat,” she said, “Mike filled me in this morning, and there’s a couple of things I don’t understand.”
Pat sipped his Pabst and nodded. “Go on.”
“What’s the motive in killing Chester Dunbar if all the kids stood to inherit equal shares?”
I answered for him. “Well, nobody inherits anything till you die, honey.”
“But wasn’t Chet Dunbar already quite elderly? Now, if one of the kids urgently needed money, maybe that would explain jump-starting the will. Otherwise, why not just let nature take its course?”
Pat said, “That’s a good question, Velda. But I don’t know the details of the will. I just know that Chet told me, long before he died, that he’d arranged for each of his heirs to receive equal shares.”
Velda, thinking, said, “Is there some reason that all of them still live together in that house?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. Living there is free, maybe?”
I said, “Maybe the will says that if you leave, you lose your interest in the house. That the last person living there inherits it. Just a guess.”
“Maybe not a bad one,” Pat said. “After all, there’s no sign that their familial love is so strong they crave each other’s constant companionship.”
“Something else,” Velda said, lifting a finger. “Let’s say Chester Dunbar was murdered, possibly by one of his family to get a share of the will sooner than later. How would killing the butler figure in?”
I finished my Pabst and said, “This case is seriously screwed up. Whatever happened to ‘the butler did it?’ This time they did the butler.”
Ignoring that, Pat said to Velda, “I think I can answer your question. This morning—before I had this matter yanked away from me—I spoke on the phone to Clarence Hines, of Hines & Carroll…”
“The family’s law firm,” I said.
Pat nodded. “Hines is the estate’s executor. If you’ll remember, Mike, the family attorneys were going to call on the Dunbars last evening. Why do you suppose that was?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t give it a thought at the time, but come to think of it—why would the death of the family butler, accidental or otherwise, require the executor of the estate to drop by?”
“Because,” Pat said, “Jamison Elder was to receive $250,000 upon his retirement at age seventy.”
I gave a long low whistle. “That’s a hell of a going-away present,” I said. “Why seventy? That’s well past retirement age.”
“I don’t know,” Pat admitted. “I was able to get quite a bit out of Hines, who couldn’t claim client confidentiality with his client dead and a possible homicide. But he did provide a possible murder motive for any one of the ‘kids.’”
“What?” I asked.
Pat leaned in. “If Jamison died prior to age seventy, the money went back into the estate, or rather never left it. The Dunbars would get equal shares of that quarter million.”
“That’s over sixty grand a piece,” I said.
“Sixty-two thousand five hundred,” Velda said.
“That’s a tempting figure.”
“Thank you,” she said.
* * *
Pat had said he’d call Dorena Dunbar and do his best to get the family’s cooperation, though even without it, he still wanted me to proceed with the investigation. I was in the office at my desk waiting for Pat’s call when Velda came in. She had a letter from the afternoon mail.
She had already opened it and took one last look before holding out the folded sheet to me, saying, “No return address. Monticello postmark.”
“So it relates to Pat’s case.”
“Does it?”
I read the typed copy aloud. “‘Coincidences are few and far between. I, too, have often wondered.’”
A small frown creased Velda’s forehead as she sat sideways on the edge of my desk. “What do you make of it?”
“It’s a letter designed to intrigue somebody who can think.”
“Oh brother,” she said. She gave me a gentle smirk and added, “So, Big Brain—enlighten me.”
I ran my fingers over the letter deliberately, feeling the structure of the paper. After I’d done it twice, and her smirk was still there, I said, “Expensive stuff.”
She nodded, waiting for a fuller explanation.
I gave her one: “You don’t waste paper of this quality on a pointless mailing.”
“What’s it supposed to mean, then?”
“I’m thinking, kitten. Let’s start with this—it isn’t office stationery.”
Her head went to one side as she shrugged, an arc of sleek black hair swinging. “Could be, if it came from a doctor. Or maybe a lawyer, or some sort of professional.”
I grinned. “You’re good, kiddo.”
“So we’re talking somebody important.”
“And/or wealthy.”
She nodded again. “And/or wealthy.”
“Now, how about the contents?”
Her eyes
widened, then narrowed. “Well, the writer is right. Coincidences are few and far between.”
“What coincidence are we talking about, doll?”
“Writer’s assuming you’d know.”
“Should I?”
Her tongue ran over her lips while she thought about that. “Well, as I pointed out earlier, it was a coincidence that half a body washed up at your feet. But a bigger, more significant coincidence is that Chester Dunbar died accidentally, and now so has his butler.”
I rustled the letter and asked her, “How about that last sentence?”
“What about it?”
“You like the commas?”
She took the thing back. “Somebody remembered his English usage. Now, who would that be?”
“How about somebody who teaches it?”
“Or studied it. Any other ideas, Mike?”
“Not yet. But Jamie Elder was British, and this letter has that sound.”
“Well, he didn’t write it from beyond the grave.”
“So maybe his killer wrote it.”
She frowned, no wrinkles. “Why, Mike?”
“To warn me, maybe.”
“To warn you. Or… maybe to encourage you.”
“To do what?”
“Somebody’s telling you that Dunbar and Elder were murdered and it’s no coincidence. And you should get involved.”
“But it’s ambiguous, doll. Could just as easily be warning me not to get involved.”
“Or maybe… daring you to.”
The phone rang and it was Pat. I held the phone so Velda could lean over and listen in.
“Dorena Dunbar will see you tonight,” Pat said.
“Fine.”
“At the house or mansion or whatever you want to call it. Eight o’clock. I figure you’re going to stay in the area a while, so I made a reservation for you at Kutsher’s.”
That was one of the big Catskills resorts, just outside Monticello. With the rain beating at my window, I knew skiing was out and so was golf. Of course, neither one interested me.
I asked, “Who’s in the showroom?”
“Henny Youngman.”
We exchanged quick goodbyes and hung up.
Velda said, “So what does Dorena look like?”
“Oh, about sixty. Stubby gal. Thinning hair. Facial moles.”
The Will to Kill Page 4
