The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  It was a cabin, all right, logs and all, but probably bigger than what Old Abe grew up in – a single floor with maybe four or five rooms. Out front a lanky state trooper was having a smoke. Maybe I was reading in, but he seemed disgusted, whether with himself or his lot in life, who knows?

  I spent half an hour making sure that trooper was alone. It seemed possible another trooper or two might be walking the perimeter, but security was limited to that one bored trooper. And that cruiser of his was the only vehicle. I had expected the Governor to have his own wheels, but I’d been wrong.

  Positioned behind a nice big rock with trees at my back, I watched for maybe fifteen minutes – close enough that no binoculars were needed – before the Governor himself, in a purple smoking jacket and silk pajamas right out of Hefner’s closet, exited with a petite young woman on his arm. He was tall and white-haired and handsome in a country club way. She was blonde and very curvy, in a blue halter top and matching hot pants. If she was eighteen, I was thirty.

  At first I thought she had on a lot of garish make-up, then I got a better look and realized she had a bloody mouth and one of her eyes was puffy and black.

  The bastard had been beating her!

  She was carrying not a purse but a wallet – clutched in one hand like the lifeline it was, a pro doing business with rough trade like the Gov – and her gracious host gave her a little peck on the check. Then he took her by the arm and passed her to the trooper like a beer they were sharing.

  I could hear most of what LaSalle said to his trooper/pimp. “Take Miss So-and-So home, and come pick me up. I want to be back at the mansion by midnight.”

  The trooper nodded dutifully, opened the rear of the cruiser like the prostie was a suspect not a colleague, and then they were off in a crunch of gravel and puff of dust.

  There was a back door and opening it with burglar picks took all of twenty seconds. The Gov wasn’t much on security. I came in through a small kitchen, where you could hear a shower on in a nearby bathroom.

  That gave me the luxury of getting the lay of the land, but there wasn’t much to see. The front room had a fireplace with a mounted fish over it and a couch and an area to watch TV and a little dining area. I spent most of my time poking around in his office, which had a desk and a few file cabinets, and a comfortable wood-and-cushions chair off by a window. That’s where I was sitting, .45 in hand, when he came in only in his boxer shorts, toweling his white hair.

  He looked pudgy and vaguely dissipated, and he didn’t see me at first.

  In fact, I had to chime in with, “Good evening, Governor. Got a moment for a taxpayer?”

  He dropped the towel like it had turned to flame. He wheeled toward me, his ice-blue eyes wide, though his brow was furrowed.

  “What the hell . . . who the hell . . .?”

  “I’m Mike Hammer,” I said. “Maybe you heard of me.”

  Now he recognized me.

  “Good God, man,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. Go ahead. Sit at your desk. Make yourself comfortable. We need to talk.”

  His shower must have been hot, because his doughy flesh had a red cast. But the red in his face had nothing to do with needles of water.

  “There’s a trooper on his way back here right now,” the Governor said.

  “Yeah, but he has to drop your date off first. Tell me, was that shiner and bloody mouth all of it? Or would I find whip marks under that halter top?”

  He had gone from startled to indignant in about a second. Now he made a similar trip from indignant to scared. I waved the gun, and he padded over to the desk and got settled in his leather chair.

  “What is this,” he said, “a shakedown?”

  “You mean, lowlife PI stakes out sex-addict governor and tries for a quick kill? Maybe. Your family has money. Your wife’s family has more.”

  He sighed. The ice-blue eyes were more ice than blue. “You have a reputation as a hard-ass, Hammer. But I don’t see you as a blackmailer. Who hired you? One of these little chippies? Some little tramp get a little more than she bargained for? Then she should’ve picked another trade.”

  “You know, they been talking about you running for president. You really think you can keep a lid on garbage like this?”

  He gestured vaguely. “I can reach in my desk drawer and get a check book, and write you out a nice settlement for your client, and another for you, and we’ll forget this happened. I just want your guarantee there will be no . . . future payments.”

  I shifted a little. The .45 was more casual in my hand now. “I have a client, all right, Gov. His name is Dopey Dilldocks.”

  He frowned. “Your client is a murderer.”

  “No, Gov. You are. My client is an imbecile who thought you might be amused by what he thought was a gag photo taken years ago, involving either you or more likely some college kid with a resemblance to you. But that was no gag – you really strangled that girl. You hadn’t quite got a grip, let’s say, on your habit, your sick little sex hobby.”

  The big bare-chested white-haired man leaned forward. “Hammer, that’s nonsense. If this is true, where are these supposed photos?”

  “Oh, hell. Your boys cleaned up on that front right after you framed Dopey. You’ve got underworld connections, like so many law-and-order frauds. You can’t maintain a sadistic habit like yours without high friends in low places – you’re tied in with the call girl racket on its uppermost levels, right?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Hammer.”

  I stood. I was smiling. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of that smile, but it was a smile.

  “Look, Gov – I’m not after blackmail money. All I want is a phone call from the governor.”

  He frowned up at me. “What?”

  “You’ve seen the old movies.” I pointed at the fat phone on his desk. “You’re going to call the warden over at Sing Sing, and you are going to tell him that you have reason to believe Donald Dilbert aka Dilldocks is innocent, and you are issuing the prisoner a full pardon.”

  “Isn’t that easy, Hammer . . .”

  “It’s just that easy. Then you’re calling the Attorney General and inform her that you’ve made that call, and that the pardon is official.”

  And that’s what he did. Under the barrel of my .45, but he did it. And he was a good actor, like so many politicians. He didn’t tip it – sounded sincere as hell.

  When he’d hung up after his conversation with the Attorney General, he said, “What now?”

  I came around behind the desk and stood next to the seated LaSalle. “Now you get a piece of paper out of your desk drawer. I want this in writing.”

  His face seemed to relax. “All right, Hammer. If I pardon Dilldocks, this ends here?”

  “It will end here.”

  He nodded, the ice-blues hooded, his silver hair catching moonlight through the window behind him. He reached in his bottom-right hand drawer and came back with the .22 revolver and he fired it right at me.

  The click on the empty cylinder made him blink.

  Then my .45 was in his face. “I took the liberty of removing that cartridge, when I had a look around in here. Lot of firearms accidents at home, you know.”

  My left hand came around, gripped his right hand clutching the .22, and swung the barrel around until he was looking cross-eyed at it.

  “But there’s another slug waiting, Gov,” I said, “should the need arise.”

  And my hand over his hand, my finger over his finger, squeezed the trigger. A bullet went in through his open mouth and the inside of his head splattered the window behind him, blotting out the moon.

  “Some sons of bitches,” I said to the suicide, “just don’t deserve a reprieve.”

  [Co-author’s note: I expanded a fragment in Mickey’s files of what might have been intended as a first chapter into this short story, utilizing his plot notes. M.A.C.]

  Hitching in the Lodosr />
  Feryal Tilmaç

  Perhaps all of this still would have happened, even if the city hadn’t been caught up in the tempestuous lodos that night. But the truth is, that frantic wind, spinner of its own mysteries, provided justifiable motive for transgression. Strange, droning, lukewarm, the lodos keeps in its thrall not only the city, but the souls of its people as well. And Cavidan Altan was one of those people. Perhaps what would occur later hadn’t even remotely crossed her mind when she left home that day. I say “perhaps,” because we can never know for sure what’s on a woman’s mind. Now, I could pretend that I knew, but I don’t want to taint the authenticity of the story by adding to it something I’m not sure about. We can safely assume the same about Tolga Güçel, and say that he, too, never would have guessed that he would experience the things he did that evening, or any other evening, for that matter.

  Tolga is a computer engineer in his thirties. A few years ago, he left the company he had been working for to start his own business with a friend. They install data processing systems for companies and provide support services and solutions. Of course, he is an intelligent man – he must be, right? He’s a person of high moral standards and principles, a man who likes to do things by the book. He’s not married, but he has a girlfriend, a woman he met at his last job. They share a home, though theirs is a constant rollercoaster of break-up and make-up. Yes, that’s right, yet another case of passion’s demise and habitual routine on the rise! He works in Gayrettepe, lives in Etiler. On the evening in question, in spite of the heavy end-of-the-year workload, he had managed to leave early, thinking he might stop by Akmerkez on his way home and buy a New Year’s gift for his girlfriend. A white cashmere sweater, an elegant laptop bag, or a bottle of perfume – he was still undecided. But then, what difference does it make anyway? Considering that, ultimately, he would buy none of these.

  That evening on his way home from work, as he passed Zincirlikuyu and made a right onto the road to Levent, he was listening to the radio program Women Sing Jazz. “Dear listeners, we continue with Ethel Waters’‘Stormy Weather’ . . .” There couldn’t have been a more fitting selection. He tapped along on the steering wheel. The invasive wind whistled and shook the colored lights on the trees. Who knows, maybe everything would have panned out in another way if the weather had been different; say, if it had been snowing. After all, the New Year spirit calls for snow; and for love, hope, new beginnings, packages of presents, angels hanging on trees, the cinnamon-spiced scent of mulled wine. But it didn’t happen, it didn’t snow. Instead, a crazy, wayward wind kept the area convulsing for days on end, making the city slave to its whim. Though the majority suffered only mild headaches and a little shortness of breath in its aftermath, at the time, melancholy ran like a viscous liquid through the streets.

  Tolga, for his part, did something he never would have done otherwise: Compelled by the sorrowful music and the feeling of benevolence that the New Year’s spirit aroused, he pulled up to the curb, where a woman with shopping bags was trying to flag down a taxi. The woman, Cavidan Hanm, had just finished her shopping at the mall in Levent. On the window behind her, 2007 was written in cotton balls, and adorned with wreaths of mistletoe, yellow, green, and red lights, gold-lacquered pine-cones, and red stars. She was a woman of a certain maturity; she held her hand in front of her face as she tried to protect herself from the wind. Perhaps hitching a ride wasn’t her intention at all. Still, when she stooped and saw Tolga, she opened the back door, dropped her bags in the car, and settled onto the passenger seat without hesitation. Obviously she was cold, otherwise why on earth would she have plunged headlong into a stranger’s car, especially at that hour?

  While we were in Tolga’s car, making our way from Levent to Gayrettepe, Cavidan Hanm was checking off items on her shopping list. She had bought a different washing detergent, something other than her usual brand, because it came with a free bottle of fabric softener. The thin peel of the tangerines had not been to her taste, and so she picked up some oranges and a few green apples instead. A bag of sliced whole-wheat bread, tahini halva, and petit beurre biscuits. Aged kaar cheese, napkins, and ginger for the New Year’s cookies she was planning to bake. In a last-minute dash, she had added olive oil, clotted cream, and fresh walnuts to her cart at the checkout. She realized that she couldn’t possibly carry those heavy bags all the way home, and so she had decided to wait for a cab. It should therefore come as no surprise that she jumped into the car as soon as Tolga stopped. He’s young enough to be my son, she might have thought as she got into the car. I’m not sure if I told you: Tolga has the kind of face that puts even the most jittery of people at ease.

  As soon as she was in the car, Cavidan Hanm removed her beret and scarf. She swung her hips left and then right, settling into the seat and making herself comfortable. She also made sure to turn and take a good look at Tolga. He was a young man with a fair complexion, clean shaven, with longish brown hair and glasses perched on an arched nose. Cavidan Hanm didn’t know much about automobiles, but still, judging from the smell of fresh leather rising from the black seats and the wooden details of the dashboard, this had to be a luxury car. Her savior, she guessed, was probably a successful young businessman. He must have been at least twenty years younger than her; Cavidan wondered if he was married. She glanced to see if he had a ring on his left hand, but her view was blocked. Tolga’s fingers had stopped tapping and now clung to the steering wheel. If it hadn’t been so dark inside, she could have seen how white his knuckles were. Wishing she were at least ten years younger, Cavidan Hanm let out a sigh. Fortunately, it was drowned out by the sound of the radio. “Dear jazz fans, our program continues with Billie Holiday: ‘Long Gone Blues’ . . .”

  Tolga’s fingers relaxed and started tapping again. “So you’re a jazz fan,” Cavidan Hanm said, in an attempt to make conversation. Tolga looked at her for the first time, smiled, nodded, and then turned his attention back to the road. “If you drop me off in front of Akmerkez, I can walk from there.” A sudden gush of wind rattled the windshield, and shook the car even, or so it seemed to them.

  “With all those bags? Out of the question! I’ll drive you to your door.”

  The young man’s polite, soft-spoken manner emboldened the woman. “I love going to the shore and watching the sea during the lodos. How about you?”

  Oh no! thought Tolga to himself, wishing to rein the conversation back in. But he didn’t let on. “I don’t know, I never have.”

  As a veteran school teacher, Cavidan Hanm knew a thing or two about human psychology. This young man was clearly a victim of politeness, one of those poor souls incapable of saying no. “I’m an English teacher,” she continued. “Could I possibly have had you in my class? You look familiar.” She didn’t mention that she was retired. She had read somewhere that the word “retired” immediately killed any spark. It reminded one of the smell of dust, wool underwear, weatherproof socks, dentures leisurely soaking in a glass at night . . .

  “Oh please, I really don’t think you’re old enough to have been my teacher!” So she was a teacher; he should be more respectful.

  Cavidan Hanm’s tiny giggle drowned out the sorrowful notes coming from the radio. “Thank you, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.”

  They were in front of Akmerkez now. Tolga slowed down. A brass band was playing a merry dance tune. Post Brass Band was written on their red jackets. Was that what encouraged Cavidan Hanm? “How about going to the seaside? If you have time, that is.”

  The young man thought he must have misheard her. Cymbals were clashing, countless sticks were banging on drums, and a trumpet blared proudly, as the band battled the bellowing of the lodos. Is that what confused Tolga? “Do you have a certain place in mind?”

  Cavidan Hanm gladly shut the door she had been reluctantly holding ajar. “Yes, drive straight ahead; let’s go down the Bebek Slope.” The jolly tunes of the brass band gradually faded away. “Cavidan,” she said. It was a str
ange meeting, but she didn’t care; she extended her hand.

  “Tolga,” he responded. It would be rude not to shake her hand; he realized his palms were sweaty and felt embarrassed.

  The car jerked and jolted, making slow progress in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Etiler, with its colorful, bright cafés, restaurants, and stores lining the avenue, was drowning out even the noise of the lodos.

  “Would you stop at that corner?” Cavidan Hanm hopped out with the agility of a young girl, ducked into a liquor store, and returned with a black plastic bag full of beer cans.

  Surprised, the young man remained optimistic. Maybe she’s planning on drinking them at home tonight, he thought. Maybe she’s expecting guests. He made a left turn and drove down the slope. If he hadn’t turned, he could have seen his girlfriend buying flowers from a stand by the corner one street down; after all, their place was just a stone’s throw away. The slope was completely dark, except for the headlights of passing cars and the blinking New Year’s ornaments on the walls of the houses.

  Cavidan Hanm took the sights in with a happy smile on her face. All kinds of fantasies played out in her head as she watched the dark retaining walls flow by. All things considered, she thought, I’m lucky to live in this city.

  Tolga was uneasy. He had gone beyond the call of courtesy, and besides, what would he say if his girlfriend called? He could turn off his phone and tell her something like, I was in Akmerkez, the reception was bad, but that was hardly believable. His inner voice nagged away at him. (He was right, his girlfriend was worried. She had called his office, and they’d told her he’d already left. She’d thought about calling his cell a few times, and she almost did, and in the end, she would certainly call. Where would a grown man disappear to for so many hours?) And as if all that weren’t enough already, Ella Fitzgerald had launched into another song: “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home?”