The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Henze only jumped when the bells of the town church and the Katharinen church began to ring and made the pigeons flap excitedly around the towers. Then, all at once, the lights went out: light bulbs, street lamps, illuminations, even the Fibonacci Sequence on the chimney. At first Henze felt almost blinded by the sudden blackout, through which the after-effects of the lights still seemed to flicker. It was as if the retina of his eyes couldn’t quite believe that everything was out. However, a deep black slowly began creeping from every corner, flooding the streets, drenching the roofs, rising higher and higher. Unna had got the night back.

  Henze imagined what the view of the glittering lights of towns on the horizon would be like from the top of the chimney. With their yellow glow they maybe looked like far off coast lines. Before them a black ocean in which every spark of light had been extinguished and created an almost biblical darkness, like at the beginning of all times, when the stars were born, which now emerged one after the other from obscurity.

  Amidst all this darkness, somewhere on the square in front of the Linden Brewery, a bass voice began to sing. Right on cue the church choir joined in and drew the rest of the crowd with them. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people from Unna sang a chorale, a chorale which had been written here in the year 1597 during the great plague: “How beautiful the morning star shines/ full of the mercy and truth of Our Lord . . .”

  They sang for a dead child.

  They sang for a woman on a chimney, fifty-two metres up.

  They sang the first verse of the chorale and then started from the beginning again, since hardly anyone knew any of the following verses off by heart. And when they praised the morning star for the third time, the shadowy figure on the chimney moved, turned, felt for the topmost of the iron rungs that were fixed to the brickwork, and climbed down. The people of Unna didn’t stop singing until she was on the ground.

  Henze switched on a torch. Together with Frieling he pushed through the crowd. Without protest Daniela Trochowski handed over the blanket in which the dead boy was wrapped. The crowd stood in silence. Henze asked, “Why did you do this, Mrs Trochowski?”

  “I didn’t want them to find us,” she said, “they were following us, everywhere, they searched the cemetery all night only to take away my son. I don’t know if they were people or ghosts, but we had to be terribly quiet, but you know Marc is still so small, and so he cried, and didn’t want to stop crying. Perhaps he’s cold, I thought, because it got really chilly in the morning, so I covered him with the blanket. I wrapped him from head to toe, tighter and tighter, until he wasn’t cold anymore. Then he fell asleep. Maybe he understood that they were after us, because all of a sudden he was really quiet. He even stopped breathing so that no one would hear us.”

  “Come, Mrs Trochowski,” said Frieling.

  Henze gave her the torch. Then he looked up once more. He would have liked to know, whether from the chimney he could have seen the morning star on the eastern horizon.

  Translation by Ann-Kathrin Ehlers.

  The Big Switch

  A Mike Hammer story

  Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

  They were going to kill Dopey Dilldocks at midnight the day after tomorrow.

  He had shot and wiped out a local narcotics pusher because the guy had passed Dopey a packet of heroin that had been stepped on so many times, it wouldn’t take the pain out of a pinprick. The pusher deserved it. Society said Dopey Dilldocks deserved it, too. The jury agreed and the judge laid on the death sentence. All the usual delays had been exhausted, and the law-and-order governor sure as hell wouldn’t reprieve a lowlife druggie like Dopey, so the little schmoe’s time to fly out of this earthly coop was now.

  Nobody was ever going to notice his passing. He was just another jailhouse number – five feet seven inches tall with seven digits stamped on his shirt. On the records his name was Donald Dilbert, but along the path laid out by snorting lines of the happy white stuff, it had gotten shortened and twisted into Dopey Dilldocks.

  A week ago his lawyer, a court-assigned one, had written me to say that Mister Dilbert had requested that I be a witness to his execution. And it seemed Dopey also wondered if I might stop in, ASAP, and have a final chat with him before the big switch got thrown.

  In the inner office of my P I agency in downtown Manhattan, I handed the letter to Velda, my secretary and right-hand man, if a doll with all that raven hair and a mountain road’s worth of curves, could be so described. I was sitting there playing with the envelope absently while she read its contents. When she was done, she frowned and passed the sheet back to me. “Donald Dilbert. . . . You mean that funny little guy who—”

  “The same,” I said. “The one they called Mr Nobody, and worse.”

  She frowned in mild confusion. “Mike – he was only a messenger boy. He didn’t even work for anybody important, did he?”

  “Probably the biggest was Billy Whistler, that photographer over on Sixth Avenue. Hell, I got Dopey that job because the little guy didn’t mind running errands at night.”

  “You know what he did over there?”

  “Sure. Took proofs of the late-night photo shoots over to the magazine office.”

  Velda gave me an inquistive glance.

  I shook my head. “No dirty Gertie stuff – Whistler deals with advertising agencies handling big-ticket household items – freezers, stoves, air conditioners, that sort of thing. Not paparazzi crap.”

  “Big agencies – so little Dopey was getting large pay?”

  “Hardly. You said it yourself. He’s been around for decades and started a messenger boy and that’s how he wound up.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Not really, Mike.”

  “Huh?”

  “He wound up a killer. He’ll wind up sitting down at midnight.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “And not getting up.”

  She was frowning again. “Messenger boy isn’t exactly big bucks, Mike. How could he afford a narcotics habit?”

  “They say if you’re hooked,” I said, “you’ll find a way.”

  “Maybe by dealing yourself?”

  “Naw. Dopey doesn’t have the brains for it.”

  “What kind of pusher would give a guy like that credit?”

  “Nobody I know,” I admitted. “Something stinks about this.”

  “Coming off in waves. You going to the execution? You thinking of paying him a visit first?” Her voice had a strange tone to it.

  My eyes drifted up from the envelope I was fidgeting with and met hers. We both stared and neither of us blinked. I started to say something and stopped. I reached out and took the letter from her fingertips and read it again.

  Very simple legalese. The lawyer was simply passing along a request. It was only a job to him. The state would reimburse him for his professional time, which couldn’t have been very much.

  Before I could say anything, Velda told me, “You haven’t done a freebie in a long time.”

  “Kitten . . .”

  “You could make it a tax deduction, Mike.”

  “Going to an execution?”

  “Giving this thing a quick look. Just a couple of days to you, but to Dopey Dilldocks, it’s the rest of his life.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t need a deduction. What’s gotten into you? The poor slob has been through a trial, he was declared guilty of first-degree murder and now he’s paying the penalty.”

  Very quietly Velda asked, “How do you know it really was first-degree?”

  I shook my head again, this time in exasperation. “There was a squib in the paper.”

  “No,” she said insistently. “Dopey didn’t even rate a ‘squib’. There was an article on narcotics and what strata of society uses them. It gave a range from high-priced movie stars to little nothings like Donald Dilbert, who’d just been found guilty in his murder trial.”

  “Wasn’t a big article,” I said lamely.

  “No. And Dopey was just a footnote. Still. . . you recog
nized his name, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “And what did you think?”

  “That Dopey had finally come up in the world.”

  “Baloney. You were thinking, how the hell could Dopey Dilldocks plan and execute a first-degree murder – weren’t you?”

  She had me and she knew it. For the few times I had used the schlub to run messages, I had gotten to know him just enough to recognize his limitations. He knew the red light that meant stop was on the top and he wouldn’t cross the street until the bottom one turned green, and that type of mentality didn’t lay out a first-degree kill.

  “So?” she asked.

  The semblance of a grin was starting to twitch at her lips and she took a deep breath. The way she was built, deep breathing should have had a law against it.

  I said, “Just tell me something, doll. You barely know Dopey. You haven’t got the first idea of what this is all about. How come you’re on his side suddenly?”

  “Because I’d give him a couple of bucks to buy me a sandwich for lunch and he’d always bring the change back in the bag. He never stole a cent from me.”

  “What a recommendation,” I said sourly.

  “The best,” she came back at me. “Besides, we need to get out of this office for a while. It’s a beautiful Spring day, the bills are paid, there’s money in the bank, nothing’s on the platter at the moment and—”

  “And we might pass one of those ‘Medical Examination, Wedding Ceremony, One Day’ places, right?”

  “Could be,” she said. “Anyway, we could use a day-trip.”

  “A day-trip where?”

  “Some place quiet upstate.”

  “A little hotel on the river, you mean?”

  “That’s right.”

  Sing Sing.

  A looker like Velda could have caused a riot in places that didn’t consist of concrete and cells, and anyway the court-appointed lawyer could only arrange for one visitor. So she sat in the car in a lot outside the massive stone facility, while I sat in a gray-brick room in one of several cubicles with phones and wire-reinforced glass.

  Dopey was a forty-something character who might have been sixty. He had a gray pallor that had been his before he entered the big house, and his runny nose and rheumy eyes spoke of the weed and coke he’d consumed for decades. Smack was never his scene, as his fairly plump frame indicated. His hair, once blond and thick, was white and wispy now, and his face was a chinless, puffy thing.

  “I think they musta framed me, Mike,” he said. He had a mid-range voice with a hurt tone like a teenage boy who just got the car keys taken away.

  My hat was on the little counter. I spoke into the phone, looking at his pitiful puss. “And you want me to pry if off of you, Dopey? You might have given me more notice.”

  “I know. I know.” Phone to his ear, shaking his head, he had the demeanor of a guy in a confessional. Too bad I wasn’t in the sin-forgiving game.

  “So why now, Dopey?”

  “I just been thinking, Mike. I been going back through my whole life. They say it flashes through your brain, right before you die? But I been going through my life, one crummy photo at a time.”

  I sat forward. “Is that a figure of speech, Dopey? Or are you getting at something?”

  Dopey swallowed thickly. “I never gave nobody no trouble, Mike. I never did crime, not even for my habit. I worked hard. Double shifts. Never made no enemies. I’m a nobody like they used to call me, just a damn inanity.”

  He meant nonentity, but I let it go.

  “So you been thinking,” I said. “What have you been thinking?”

  “I think it all goes back to me sending that photo to LaSalle.”

  “LaSalle? You don’t mean Governor LaSalle?”

  The chinless head bobbed. “About six months ago, I ran across this undeveloped roll of film. It was in a yellow envelope marked Phi U ‘April Fool’s Party’.”

  Where the hell was this going?

  “I remembered that night. Up at Solby College? It was wild. Lots of kids partying – girls with their tops off. Crazy.”

  “When was this?”

  “Twenty years ago – April first, like I said. I was taking pictures all over the frat house. They was staging stuff – lots of fake murders and suicides and crazy stuff right out of a horror movie.”

  “And you got shots of some of that?”

  Dopey’s head bobbed again. “I was going around campus taking oddball pictures. I even got some ‘peeper’ type shots through a sorority house window, where this girl was undressing – then this guy pretends to strangle her. It was very real-looking. Frankly, it scared me silly, it was so real-looking.”

  “Is that why you didn’t develop the film?”

  “No, the frat guys never paid me, so I said screw it. But when I ran across that roll of film, I don’t know why, I just remembered how pretty that girl was – the one that played at getting strangled? She had her top off and . . . well, I can develop my own pics, you know.”

  “And you did?”

  “I did, Mike. And the guy doing the pretend strangling? He looked just like a young version of Governor LaSalle! So I sent it to him.”

  I thought my eyes would pop out of my skull. “You what?”

  “Just as a joke. I thought he might get a kick out of it, the resemblance.”

  I squinted at the goofy little guy. “Be straight with me, Dopey – you didn’t try to blackmail him with that, did you?”

  “No! I didn’t think it was really him – just looked like him.”

  My stomach was tight. “What if it really was him, Dopey? And what if that wasn’t an April Fool’s stunt you snapped?”

  Dopey swallowed again and nodded. “That was what started me thinking, Mike. That’s why I hoped you might come see me.”

  “You told your lawyer about this?”

  “No! How do I know I could trust him? He works for the state, too, don’t he?”

  But he trusted me. This pathetic little doper trusted me to get him out of a jam only an idiot could get into.

  Well, maybe I was an idiot, too. Because I told him I’d look into it, and to keep his trap shut till he heard from me next.

  “When will that be, Mike?”

  “It won’t be next week,” I said, and got my hat and went.

  Our jaunt upstate didn’t last long. I called Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide from the road and he was waiting at our favorite little deli restaurant, down the block from the Hackard Building. Pat was in a back booth working on a soft drink and some fries. We slid in opposite him.

  The NYPD’s most decorated officer wore a lightweight gray suit that went with the gray eyes that had seen way too much – probably too much of me, if you asked him.

  “Okay,” he said, with no hellos, just a nod to Velda, “what are you getting me into now?”

  “Nothing. You found something?”

  Those weary eyes slitted, and this time his nod was for me. “Twenty years ago, April second, a coed from Solby College was found strangled, dumped on a country road.”

  “And nobody got tagged for it?”

  “No. There were some stranglings on college campuses back then – mostly in the midwest – and this one got lumped in as one of the likely unsolved murders that went along with the rest.”

  “Didn’t they catch that guy?”

  “Yeah. He rode Old Sparky in Nebraska. But the Solby College murder, he never copped to.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it?” Pat sat forward. “Mike, do I have to tell you there’s no statute of limitations on murder? That no murder case is truly ever closed till somebody falls? If you have something . . .”

  “I do have something.”

  “What, man?”

  “A hunch.”

  The gray eyes closed. He loved me like a brother, but he could hate me the same way. “Mike . . . do I have to give you the speech again?”

  “No. I got it memorized. Tell me about Govern
or LaSalle.”

  The eyes snapped open. Pat looked at Velda for help and didn’t get any. “You start with a twenty-year-old murder, chum, and then you ask about. . . . What do you mean, tell me about Governor LaSalle?”

  “He got elected as a law-and-order guy. How’s he doing?”

  Pat waved that off. “I stay out of politics.”

  “Which is why you been on the force since Jesus was a baby and still aren’t an inspector. What’s the skinny on the Gov?”

  His voice grew hushed. “You’ve heard the stories.”

  “Have I?”

  “I can’t say anything more.”

  “Then you can’t confirm that an Internal Affairs investigation into the Governor’s relationship with a high-end prostitution ring got shut down because of political pressure?”

  “No.”

  “Can you deny it?”

  “No.”

  “What can you tell me, buddy?”

  He stared at the soft drink like he was trying to will it into a beer. Then, very quietly, he said, “The word is, our esteemed governor is a sex addict. He uses State Patrol Officers as pimps. It’s a lousy stinking disgrace, Mike, but it’s not my bailiwick. Or yours.”

  “What about the rumors that he has a little sex shack upstate? A little cabin in the mountains where he meets with female constituents?”

  Pat’s grin was pretty sick. “That’s impossible, Mike. Our governor’s a happily married man.”

  Then Pat stopped a waitress and asked for a napkin. She gave him one, and Pat scribbled something on it, something fairly detailed. Then he folded the napkin, gave it to me, and slipped out of the booth.

  “Get the check, Mike,” he said, and was gone.

  Velda frowned over at me curiously. “What is it?”

  “Directions.”

  This time I took the drive upstate alone, much to Velda’s displeasure. But she knew not to argue, when I said I had something to do that I didn’t want her part of.

  The shade-topped drive dead-ended at a gate, but I pulled over into the woods half a mile before I got there. I was in a black t-shirt and black jeans with the .45 on my hip, not in its usual shoulder sling. The night was cool, the moon was full and high, and ivory touched the leaves with a picture-book beauty. An idyllic Spring night, if you weren’t sitting on Death Row waiting for your last tomorrow.