“So could you. You’re still around.”
“That’s about the extent of it,” he told me. “Around. Nothing more. Every so often they take off another hunk of my leg to try and stop happening whatever’s happening to it. Pretty soon there won’t be much left to take off. I can make it back and forth to the office, do my job well enough to hold it down, because I can still yell loud enough to scare people. And I have a few guys at the plant here back me up.”
A scowl pulled at my eyes. “What do they need security for in a place that digs up clay and makes bricks out of it?”
“Because our big contract is with the government. There’s a rare element in this ground that makes our bricks ideal for use in government facilities attached to atomic testing.”
“So you’re keeping the Commies away.”
He grinned. “No Ruskies have made it past Staten Island on my watch.”
I laughed at that, but I was getting itchy to get back to Sidon and my real case.
I said, “Listen, Dave, I can see why you think the Sharron Wesley killing might tie in to these others. It strikes me as kind of thin frankly, but... I can see it. What you don’t know is she was likely killed because of that casino she ran outside of Sidon. She appears to have stashed substantial cash on the grounds, just begging for a treasure hunt, and she has ties to big-time gambling in the city. Unless syndicate guys have suddenly started hiring kill-happy lunatics to carry out contract work, I can’t see how this ties in.”
He didn’t reply at once. Then he said, very softly, “You and I have been friends too damn long for you to just shrug me off, Mike. You backed me up in a shoot-out twice and I damn well saved your ass when Gorcey had a gun in your neck and was going to blow your damn head off.”
There was something hanging in the air I couldn’t quite make out.
Finally I said, “Okay. So I owe you. You probably owe me, too, but forget that. I know you have good instincts. Hell, great instincts. But so do I. There’s more to this.”
“There is.”
“Then spit it out.”
Dave nodded slowly, then pushed his chair around with his good leg and stared out the window at the complex of buildings that sprawled out to the west.
His voice was distant as he said, “Remember that little teenage girl whose family got killed when Thaxton burned down his building to collect the insurance?”
“Sure. She was a sweet kid. Doris something, right? Doris Wilson? You had me enlist Velda to put her up for a month before you found somebody to take her in. Nobody back in those days on the department ever knew how much of a soft-hearted slob you really are.”
His head half-turned, then he looked back out the window. “Nobody else ever took her in, Mike. I gave her a place to stay, saw to it she stuck out school and made sure she had whatever she needed. Helen and I, we never had any kids, you know. We couldn’t.”
I let him talk. My gut told me where this going, though I prayed I was wrong.
“When Doris graduated, she went to business college and wound up with a job right here in Wilcox. Here at the plant.”
“Damn,” I said.
“We stayed close. And if your dirty mind is thinking I was anything more than a father figure to her, then screw you, Mr. Hammer. After Helen died, I never wanted another woman. Maybe I was still doing things for the kid we never had. It wasn’t any trouble. More like a pleasure. Taking this job here was sort of like coming home for Doris and me, you know what I mean?”
I nodded, but he didn’t see me.
“That’s why I called you,” he said.
I still didn’t say anything. Slowly, he swung around in his chair and got another photo from his desk. Something had happened to his face—it looked gaunt and tired now. He handed me the photo.
It was another crime-scene shot, this one of the girl on the beach with the nylon stocking around her neck and her eyes popping and her tongue bulged out and her body arranged in an obscene spread-eagle that made a mockery of her beauty.
I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid, but it was Doris, all right.
I stabbed my Lucky out. “It’s a damn shame,” I said. “But I barely knew this girl. I’m not saying this doesn’t make me sick to my soul, but I’m already on that other Sidon killing.”
“This is another Sidon killing, Mike. And I’m telling you with every fiber of cop instinct left in this fouled-up body of mine, it ties in. And you’re the one to settle the score.”
Softly, I said, “Me?”
Those pale blue eyes were as hard and cold as ball bearings, but with a flaming rage at their core so intense I could hardly meet them.
“You. You’ll do it because we’re friends. And you’ll do it because you’re as professional a cop as any could hope to be, but you aren’t hampered by rules and regulations.”
That wasn’t fair—he’d heard me say that often enough and now he was feeding it back to me.
“And, Mike—you’re the goddamnedest, most cold-blooded killer I have ever seen in my life. And... you’re good at it.”
I looked down at my hands and suddenly the weight of the .45 under my left shoulder seemed a little too heavy. When I looked up my face felt tight.
“I’ve had judges tell me that more than once. I can’t say I liked it.”
He didn’t back off an inch. “Well, tough shinola, sport! Because it happens to be true. I know you. Any time you pull the trigger, you are in the right. The bleeding hearts will never understand people like us. So feel flattered instead of getting touchy about it. I’ve killed people too and never lost sleep over it.”
That was more than I could say.
“Anyway,” he said with an awful casualness, “you’re a killer, not a murderer... and murderers need killing. Somebody has to do it. And I am electing you.”
“If you didn’t have one leg I’d knock you on your ass,” I said, halfway meaning it. “Even you being an old man wouldn’t bother me any.”
“You’re the one going soft, Mike,” he said with a grin. “You should’ve done it already.”
“Soft my ass. You pull me in here by the short hairs and expect me to like it?” I slammed a fist on the beach photo. “I was around that nice kid for a month before you got her squared away, and I can remember back. You’re a bastard, Dave. Laying this crap on me.”
Those pale blue eyes watched mine again and he said, “Okay. Blow the whistle and cry foul. All I ask is, play your hand out in Sidon. If it ties in, it ties in. If it doesn’t, we’ll talk again, and maybe get you to look into these kills. Because if somebody doesn’t step in, there will be others, Mike.”
He was right—whoever had been behind that torture kill in the barn was not going to stop. The hunger of whatever sick sexual satisfaction he felt in expressing his power and savagery over these innocents would want feeding again, and again...
Outside, the sun was heading higher, throwing an orange glow on the tops of the buildings, sparkling off the trees behind them. I stood up and shoved on my hat.
“Okay, Dave.” I stopped halfway to the door. “But lay off on the cold-blooded killer stuff, okay?”
He leaned back in his chair and nodded solemnly. “Sure, Mike. We’ll let some sick bastard find it out for himself.”
* * *
Like Sidon, Wilcox counted on the tourist trade, but unlike its neighboring community, it had the look of a real, quietly prosperous town. A block of storefronts had attractive display windows with apartments above, all the buildings uniformly white brickwork with bright, shiny metal trim. And on the corner at the end of the business district was a two-story white-brick building with a fresh, post-war look and, over the entrance, big metal letters that spelled out SUFFOLK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.
I parked the heap at the curb, went in, and walked up to a counter that kept civilians away from a busy bullpen of tan-uniformed officers. Despite Dave’s misgivings, this place had a professionalism that underscored the joke that the Sidon PD had become.
<
br /> Behind the counter, a tall, slender but curvaceous policewoman rose from a desk to greet me. With her short dark hair and black-framed glasses, she seemed to be working at not looking attractive but not making it. Even the lack of lipstick and the disinterest in her eyes couldn’t dull her appeal. There was just something about a girl in uniform...
“My name is Mike Hammer. I’m a detective from New York City. Private operator working on a case. Is Sheriff Jackson in?”
“Well, Mr. Hammer, you obviously don’t have an appointment with the sheriff. I can check his book. He might be available this afternoon.”
“What time do you get off for lunch?”
That flustered her. “Uh, what do you mean?”
“I mean what time do you get off for lunch. If I have to kill a few hours in your lovely burg, I might as well pass them pleasantly. A nice long lunch with you would make the time just fly. You know the town and I don’t. Where shall we go?”
“Let me check with the sheriff,” she said, and she didn’t mean about her lunch hour. Her cheeks were flushed as she reached for the phone. Somebody needed to tell her she could be a professional without trading in her charms.
She said, “Chief, there’s a Mr. Hammer from New York to see you. He’s a detective working—oh... Certainly, I’ll send him right in.”
The fact that I was important enough to rate immediate entry to the sheriff’s inner sanctum thawed out the policewoman just a little. She gave me a nice smile as she knocked on the wood-and-glass door just off the bullpen.
“Come in!” a male voice called.
She nodded and said, “Eleven.”
“What?”
“I take an early lunch. Eleven.”
She winked, went off, and I was thinking, Well, I’ll be damned, and strolled on in.
The sheriff wore a business suit with a dark-blue tie, not a uniform, and might have been a banker. He had a rugged, broad-shouldered look that had probably served him well as a political candidate, though his blond hair was thin and ineffectively combed over. Better stick to local elections.
He half-rose and extended his hand. I took it and his grip was firm. His smile was as business-like as his suit as he gestured to the visitor’s chair opposite his big mahogany desk.
They had some money to spend in Suffolk County, thanks to the tourist trade—this office was richly wood paneled with wooden filing cabinets, and my brogans were resting on carpet, not wood or tile. There was a big fancy county seal on the wall behind the chief, as well as some framed diplomas and photos, several of them color shots of him grinning with buddies in the Pacific. Navy guys in a tropical clime.
“I’ve heard of you, of course, Mr. Hammer. We do get the city papers all the way out here in the sticks.”
“I wouldn’t call Wilcox the sticks, Sheriff Jackson. You’ve got a handsome little town here. Population’s around, what? Twenty-five thousand?”
“Just twenty, but it swells to fifty during the season. Your notoriety in a number of cases isn’t the only reason I had no trouble recognizing your name, Mr. Hammer. Just this morning, in the press, you were mentioned in relation to the Sharron Wesley murder in Sidon.”
“Yeah, I’m looking into that.”
“In cooperation with the police department there?”
“What police department?”
His smile was immediate. “If I remember right, from one particular profile the News did of you and your colorful career, you served in the Pacific, too.”
“I did.”
“I’m glad that’s behind us.”
“Yeah. Listen, I was just talking to my friend Dave Miles out at his plant—”
“Terrific guy, Dave. How the hell is he?”
“Well, he’s fine as long as he doesn’t try to run a marathon. He pointed out some similarities between the murders of Doris Wilson and Sharron Wesley.”
He frowned. With his high forehead, that was a lot of frown. “Boy, I’ve read about the Wesley thing in the papers, but I can’t say I see any connection.”
“I didn’t say connection. I said similarity. The victims were both strangled, the bodies were unclothed, and the crime scenes were staged. As if for effect. Also, one body was on the beach and another in a park off the beach.”
“Well, not the same beach.”
“Not the same stretch of it, no. My understanding is you haven’t turned anything up on the Wilson case.”
He shook his head glumly. “Very little.”
“The similarities are there. I agree they are inexact, but Dave seems to think it may be the same killer as whoever tortured and killed those girls in that barn outside town, a few months ago.”
“That isn’t our case. That took place within Wilcox city limits.” He reached for the phone. “I can arrange for you to talk to Chief Chasen, if you like...”
“No. Not just yet, anyway. I have to say, I’m not convinced these murders are connected myself. It’s even possible someone killed Sharron Wesley and tried to make it look vaguely similar to this other killing, to muddy the waters.”
“That kind of thing has happened.”
“But I want to be up on this case. Two strangulations, two naked female corpses, there’s enough there that I want to carry any information available into my inquiry into the Wesley killing.”
He had started nodding halfway through that. “I’m afraid we have very little.”
“What do you have? Maybe if I could see the file—”
“There’s really not enough to bother getting it out. Doris’ car was found outside a roadhouse where she’d been seen dancing.”
“Was she there with a date?”
“No. Not even a girl friend. Some of her gang from work hung out there, and it was typical of that crowd to show up alone or in pairs or even in groups. She was a little tipsy—the autopsy showed a fairly high alcohol content in her bloodstream—and left about eleven, by herself.”
“This is that roadhouse between here and Sidon?”
“Right. The Hideaway. We questioned everybody there, from Doris’ co-worker friends to every waitress and both bartenders. Even the darn cooks, we talked to, and they never stuck their heads out of the kitchen.”
“Somebody grabbed her in that parking lot.”
“That is our theory. But we checked it. I even borrowed some lab boys from New York to go over that parking lot, and you know what they came up with? Gravel.”
“Anything else in that file?”
“Nothing pertinent.”
“Okay.” I rose and shook his hand again. I nodded toward the framed photos. “That’s the Philippines, right?”
“Uh, yeah.” He gave me an embarrassed grin. “We were on this island, handling supply lines. The Japs were hiding in these caves in the hills, and it got a little hairy. You know, they’d come out at night, looking for food. Grenade went off and I took some shrapnel. And you know, there were these native girls, but you could catch eight kinds of clap if you weren’t careful. Where were you?”
“In a fox hole,” I said, standing at his door. “Call Chief Chasen and tell him I’m stopping by, would you?”
* * *
Chief Chasen’s office was spare, but then so was the chief, a lanky Ichabod Crane kind of guy in a blue uniform. He was about forty and had an Adam’s apple that bobbed as he spoke and fought with his words for your attention.
“You know, there might be a tie-up at that,” he said, his voice a mellow baritone that might attract the ladies if he wasn’t otherwise a scarecrow. Of course, it had worked for Sinatra.
I said, “With the Wesley killing, you mean?”
“Yeah. Let me make a call.” He got on his phone and asked for “the paper evidence from the March 27 killing.”
Then he returned his attention to me. “The night of their murders, those two girls were seen in a bar in Sidon.”
“Sidon, huh? They were of drinking age?”
“Yeah, they were college girls from the city, but they were both twe
nty-one. Anyway, they took a booth at this bar. They weren’t with anybody, they were just laughing and talking. We questioned several local guys who went over and talked to them, just flirting, not getting anywhere. The girls said they were meeting some fellas somewhere, and that’s as much as we got.”
“Okay. So how did they wind up in that barn back in Wilcox?”
“Their car was found just outside Sidon. They’d had a flat. We had a witness come forward who was driving by when the two girls were getting into a fancy car.”
“What kind of fancy car?”
He shrugged. “That’s all the witness had to say. He just noticed these good-looking girls piling into a fancy car of some kind, leaving another vehicle along the side of the road with a flat tire.”
“Which way was the ‘fancy car’ headed?”
“Toward Wilcox, all right.”
“You checked thoroughly into the witness?”
“Yes. He had his wife with him and we talked to her, too. Nothing there. Just a good citizen coming forward... Ah, Officer Winch, let’s have that evidence.”
A fresh-faced young cop had come in carrying a clear evidence envelope, which he handed to the chief, who handed it to me as the young cop went out.
“Where did you find this?” I asked, looking at the clear little bag and its contents.
“In that car with the flat tire. It certainly wasn’t on the victims—they were strung up naked as jaybirds in that barn, poor things. We never did find their clothes.”
Her clothes were gone, Dave Miles had said of the girl left strangled to death, naked and spread-eagled on the beach. Never found.
Did that detail bind these killings together as surely as the nylon around Doris Wilson’s pale young throat?
I pondered that as I sat there staring at the contents of the clear evidence envelope: a matchbook with a festive New Year’s motif emblazoned with the words SIDON ARMS COCKTAIL LOUNGE.
* * *
By late morning I was back in Sidon, sitting in a booth across from Velda in the hotel bar where that matchbook had come from.
“I’m starting to think Dave is right,” I said. “Maybe these killings are the work of one maniac on the loose.”
Lady, Go Die! Page 12
