Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love

by Max Allan Collins

  “If you are blackmailing the senator,” I said, “tell me right now. And we’ll settle up.”

  “Are you wearing a wire?”

  “No. Search me if you like.”

  Her eyes were half-lidded. “You wish. I’m a lot of things, Mr. Hammer, Ms. Sterling… but I am not a blackmailer. And I doubt this is about money, anyway, at least not directly so. This is probably the usual dirty politics. Even today, a guy on his way to the White House can be taken down by sexual indiscretions. He should be satisfied with being senator and having that rich, sexy wife of his. Is there anything else?”

  I said, “Blackmail can lead to some very dark places, Ms. Kent. If you are approached by someone who wants to involve you in this scheme, I’d advise you to get in touch.”

  I handed her a card and she took it. Studied it like a check that might have been added up wrong.

  I went on: “If anything out of the ordinary occurs, anything disturbing, anything in particular related to the senator and/or your time with him… let us know. I like your way with a song. I wouldn’t care to see you behind bars or get hurt.”

  Her voice small, suddenly, she said, “That’s not a threat, is it?”

  I raised a palm. “Not at all. It’s an offer of help, if you need it. But if you’re part of this blackmailer’s business, it won’t be help you get from me. That’s a promise, not a threat.”

  She thought about that. Nodded. Tucked the card in the breast pocket behind the pack of Virginia Slims. Put the current cigarette out in the glass tray and said, “Thanks for the compliment. About my singing.” She nodded to Velda, said, “Ms. Sterling,” then threaded off through the tables.

  “Well?” Velda asked.

  I was watching the young woman go. “She’s capable of being on the wrong side of this.”

  “I agree. But every one of these three women is smart enough to play us, and the senator.”

  “Four women,” I said, holding up that many fingers. “Lisa Long is smart, too.”

  Velda shook her head. “No. The current secretary’s a victim. I think you were on the right track with that intercom set-up. That’s where the sex tape came from. If not from the security guy, then the cleaning woman.”

  “One more woman to talk to,” I said sourly. “It’ll wait till tomorrow.”

  Velda finished her wine, leaned back, folded her arms, and gave me a smug smile. “You’re just awash in babes on this job, aren’t you, Mr. Hammer? Just one young doll after another. Sounds like your dream case to me.”

  I held up a surrendering palm. “No, it’s a nightmare. They’re all too young and I’m too damn old.”

  “Not too old for me, Mike.” She wiggled the hand with the engagement rock on it. “Maybe it’s time to settle down.”

  I shrugged. “Let’s see what the cleaning lady looks like first.”

  She grinned and slapped me on the arm.

  Then we paid the check and got the hell out of there. I might have stayed to listen to another of Nora Kent’s sets, but I’d heard enough of her singing already.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Fifth Avenue of the Flatiron Building was one thing—the Fifth Avenue across the river in Brooklyn was something else again. This grim stretch—wide-open drug deals, bodega cashiers in Plexiglas cages and SMACK KILLS graffiti, Salvation Army storefronts operating like frontier forts—cut through the Park Slope neighborhood like a junkie’s ravaged, ragged arm.

  Park Slope was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, with gentrification under way even as a crack house popped up near venerable Prospect Park, baseball on offer but coke 8-balls too, a nice area where shootings and muggings were becoming commonplace. The neighborhood was “in transition,” the Realtors would say. This was the kind of area, after all, where educated middle-class couples lived alongside working-class Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican immigrants in an area once known as the Borough of Churches.

  Erin Dunn’s Park Slope address on Seventh Avenue was an apartment in a somewhat renovated brownstone, a once-proud four-story that was a ripe prospect for either gentrification or arson, but right now was just another shabby structure that took in boarders.

  It was a quarter to noon. I’d figured to allow the cleaning lady to get in a few hours of sleep before dropping by on her. Getting her phone number and calling her up first would be courteous, but a bad idea in this situation.

  The day was cold and crisp and overcast again, so the hat and trenchcoat were required. Whether the .45 was or not, who could say? But I always packed heat on criminal matters. I’d considered taking the subway, but I hadn’t had the heap out of the parking garage for maybe a month and figured to take my nondescript black Ford with its souped-up motor out for a ride. Shake the rust off. The drive in steady but unclogged traffic gave me a chance to think.

  While I wasn’t ruling Myron Henry out, the ex-cop didn’t seem like a good bet for the blackmail route. And none of the four women that either Velda or I or both of us had talked to seemed likely accomplices in an extortion scheme, either. Still, you never knew. And how would a working-class woman like Erin Dunn get caught up in a blackmail scheme involving a United States senator?

  Plenty of options here, just no good ones.

  Parking on the street was no problem. But it took repeated knocking to get me a haggard, rheumy-eyed woman in her late seventies with smudged scarlet lipstick and white hair whose perm was a dim memory. Her blue-and-green floral housedress was faded and torn, her thick stockings saggy, her shoes brown and clunky.

  “Not buying,” she rasped through the cracked door.

  “Not selling,” I said, and showed her the P.I. badge in the leather fold. That almost always works. It did now.

  “You got the wrong house, officer,” she said, chin going up proudly. “We’re respectable here. I don’t take in druggies and Mr. Davis is my only alkie, and he come straight from rehab.”

  She started to close the door on me. That’s what a detective’s gum-sole shoe is for.

  I shouldered in with a smile.

  “Good to hear,” I said. “But I’m not looking for a drug addict or an alcoholic that I know of. Unless one of those categories applies to Erin Dunn.”

  The entryway announced corned beef and cabbage from a kitchen visible down the hall, bordered by an open stairway. To my left I saw a mahogany-edged parlor where furnishings with faded upholstery were arranged on worn oriental rugs on oak parquet floors. A struggle had been going on for years here, between respectability and atrophy. Respectability was losing.

  “Miss Dunn is no druggie or alkie or nothin’. A good girl, as far as it goes.”

  “Is she in?”

  The crone nodded. “Works nights in the city.”

  “Yes, she’s a cleaning woman at the Flatiron Building. Is she married?”

  “No. But she lives with a dago fella. People used to have morals.”

  “Why, is Erin an immoral type, do you think?”

  She shook her head. “No more or less than anybody these days, I suppose. She works a respectable job, anyway. Her man just tends bar over at Snooky’s up the street.”

  I took a little offense. “Bartender’s a respectable job. My old man was a bartender.”

  “Be that as it may, Snooky’s ain’t no respectable joint, that’s for ding dang sure. You’re not Brooklyn PD, are ya?”

  “No. My beat’s in Manhattan.” Not claiming to represent the police, you’ll note. And I was an officer of the court, remember. “What’s the, uh, dago’s name?”

  “Tony Something. They’re all Tony Somethings, ain’t they?”

  “Well, I’ve known a Mario or two. Is Tony up there?”

  She shrugged. “Ain’t my day to look after him. But the Dunn girl’s up and around. Come down for the mail. Are you going up there?”

  “Her room’s upstairs?”

  She nodded. “Top right. 2A. Tell her if she wants lunch, I ain’t serving past 1:30.”

  So it was a rooming house, not apartmen
ts.

  “You want some lunch, officer?”

  “That’s nice of you, ma’am, but—”

  “Cost a buck. Bargain at twice the price. You know what corned beef is a pound these days?”

  I admitted I didn’t, and headed up the stairs. She trundled back toward the kitchen. She’d have some non-druggies and ex-alkies to serve soon.

  The stairs had remnants of carpeting where you stepped, but that didn’t stop the creaking. A general musty odor danced with the corned beef and cabbage. I would have blackmailed somebody gladly, to get out of that place.

  I knocked at 2A.

  The face that appeared was a narrow, lightly freckled oval offset by apple cheeks. Her eyes were sky blue but bore a red filigree— either she’d been crying or she was just plain tired. Her hair was red, but not the Nicole Winters variety—this shade didn’t come from a beauty shop but strictly from genes. She wore it short and curly. No perm, either. No make-up at all, not that she needed it.

  “Yes?” she said, cracking the door suspiciously, much as her landlady had. A pleasant enough voice but no Irish lilt, that was for sure.

  “Need a word, Ms. Dunn,” I said, and flashed the badge.

  It worked on her, too.

  The door opened and I stepped in and she closed it behind me, looking at me warily.

  Then she led me into a very neat room—her cleaning skills on display here, as well—of furnishings that were either secondhand or had haphazardly assembled themselves over the decades in this house, the kind of things you relegated to a guest room when you really didn’t like having guests. Chairs from the 1950s joined tables from the ’30s, and an overstuffed sofa from the ’40s with springs trying to escape had blond end tables with an early ’60s atomic style.

  Erin Dunn was something else again.

  She wore a green satin robe—her red hair went well with emerald, just as Nicole’s had—sashed at the waist. The sleek fabric clung enough to show off a busty figure with nice gams showing at the knee. Her feet were bare. This was another small, curvy female, like the others in this case, with Nicole and of course Velda the only leggy exceptions.

  “Won’t you sit down, officer?” she asked, gesturing to a well-worn easy chair positioned across from the sofa, where she settled herself. She crossed her legs, revealing some creamy inner thigh. She wasn’t showing off, but then she didn’t have to.

  Before I sat, I draped my trenchcoat over the back of the chair and tossed my hat on the coffee table between us. Maybe it was that term—“cleaning lady”—that had made me expect something dowdy, or a woman heavy-set, or anything but another foxy addition to the chorus line this case was turning into.

  But Erin Dunn was a beauty, all right. Maybe not a raving one, but certainly a little doll who might well have earned the attentions of a certain United States senator. Had my client withheld the identity of one of his conquests? It would hardly be the first time a client lied to me.

  She sat forward, hands clasped, her eyes wide now. “Uh, officer, I don’t have any coffee going, but I can get us some downstairs, if you like.”

  “No, that’s fine. Thank you, though. Get yourself a cup, if you want. This may take a while.”

  She shook her head, the tight red curls hardly moving. She reached for a pack of cigarettes, Kools, on the nearby end table and lighted up from a book of matches. She waved out the flame, got the smoke going, and only then said, “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled a little. “I’m an ex-smoker and relish any secondhand smoke that comes along.”

  She smiled a little, too. “So. What’s this about?”

  “I have a few questions about your job at the Flatiron Building.”

  Her pause was brief, but it nonetheless registered on me.

  She said, “Go right ahead. I have nothing to hide.”

  It’s been my experience that the only people who say they have nothing to hide usually have something to hide. But not always.

  I said, “How long have you worked at the Flatiron?”

  Her smile was quick and gone. “Well, I should straighten you out on that.”

  “Please do.”

  She gestured with the Kool in hand. “I don’t actually work for the Flatiron. Not itself. I work for a cleaning service that contracts with the building. There are five of us girls. One strictly cleans the men’s and ladies’ rooms. I clean the upper floors—seventeen up. It’s a lot of work in a short period of time.”

  “An eight-hour ‘day’?”

  She nodded, drew in smoke, let it out. “Eight-hour shift, yes.”

  “That includes the nineteenth floor.”

  “Of course.”

  “So Senator Winters’ office is on your list.”

  “It is. He’s not there all the time, only certain days, certain times of the year. So that’s one of the easy ones. I can skip it, frequently. Why? Is there a concern about the senator’s office?”

  “Yes. Something was taken.”

  Her eyes widened. But there was something artificial about her reaction. “Really? That surprises me.”

  “Why is that?”

  She shrugged. “Well, nothing terribly valuable’s in that particular office. Some others have paintings and sculptures that I would imagine are worth money. I’m not an expert on such things. Oh! The computer and so on—was that what was taken?”

  “No.”

  “Then maybe you should tell me what was.”

  I sat back, sighed big, as if the day had already worn me out. “You know, I think I will have that coffee.”

  She got up quickly, her expression pleasant, lips pursed in a smile. “Certainly. Sugar? Cream?”

  “Both, please.”

  She put her cigarette out in a tray, said, “I won’t be long,” and went out.

  I could hear her padding down the creaky stairs.

  I got up and poked around, but something told me she’d expected that. As if she wanted to prove to me she hadn’t taken anything from the senator’s office. Whether she was specifically thinking of a cassette tape, I had no idea.

  In this outer room, a little writing desk and some odd pieces with drawers all proved unhelpful. Adjacent was a cubbyhole kitchenette. The only other room was the bedroom, where the neat little female had already made the bed, and where nothing in the dresser or nightstand drawers gave up anything of note. I didn’t check the closet, other than to just peek in quickly, before going back out and resuming my chair.

  No bathroom in the place. This was a rooming house with shared facilities. Nothing fancy here, and what made it barely livable was the fastidiousness of a woman who made her living cleaning for others, and brought that bent home.

  She came in with a little tray and cups of coffee for both of us. My coffee had already been sugared and creamed. She was having hers black. Resuming her seat, she placed the coffee cup on its saucer on the atomic end table and sat close to that arm of the sofa. Crossed her legs again. Very pretty legs, but still she wasn’t showing off. Just getting comfortable, and she seemed at ease, though I had a hunch she was neither of those things.

  So I pretended to just be making conversation, between sips of the coffee. If that old gal downstairs had made this stuff, she had at least one talent.

  “Your landlady’s quite a character,” I said.

  “She is at that,” Erin said, laughing a little. “You should hear her talk about her clientele in ‘better days.’ It was all respectable bachelors and older women who had known finer times. She claims she served them tea on silver trays.”

  I smiled. “I’m happy with just the coffee. She’s a talky one. Mentioned to me that you live with someone who’s not just a roommate, I take it.”

  Her eyebrows went up and she made herself keep smiling. “Tony? Tony Licata, yes, we’re, uh… engaged.”

  I gave her another smile. “Trial run never hurt anybody. Of course, if you ever have kids, you’ll need bigger, better digs than this.”

 
She nodded. Sighed. “True enough. This is a terrible place, officer. Most of the other boarders are old people, really old people—men and women on government assistance.” She shivered. “Would you like to share a bathroom with the likes of them? Poor souls, but…” She shivered again. “No, not a place to have kids… we’d have to live better than this.”

  “Park Slope’s improving, they say.”

  The big blue eyes widened. “Not fast enough! Any nights I’m not working, I almost always hear car windows getting shattered, by a baseball bat or whatever. Kids can’t walk home from school without a parent playing escort. Do you know how many times I’ve been held up at gunpoint on my way home from the subway station?”

  “Is that why you did it?”

  “Did what?”

  “Recorded the senator and his secretary going at it in the next room.”

  She swallowed. Her face turned whiter than a blister. She said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about…. Let me see that badge again. Let me see your I.D.!”

  I got out the leather fold and reached it out to her across the coffee table. She snatched it from me.

  “Michael Hammer,” she read. “I know that name. Private investigations!… Did I read about you in the paper? Are you who they wrote that story about?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of stories written about me. Maybe you’re thinking of the nostalgia piece in the Post last year. ‘Remember that trigger-happy private eye? He’s still around!’”

  She stood. She was shaking. Really trembling.

  “You should leave,” she said. “Right now.”

  I patted the air with my palms. “I’ll leave. But hear me out, first.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because otherwise you might go to jail. At the very least you’ll lose your job and never be employable again in your trade. And you are a lovely young woman obviously adept at cleaning up for others. You should try cleaning up for yourself… while you still can.”

  She narrowed her eyes about halfway through that, really thinking, thinking. She sat, her knees together now. Her hands on her thighs.

  “First,” I said, “I need you to be straight with me about something, and remember—I can check it, easy enough. You see, the senator and his wife are my clients. The senator, as you know, is being blackmailed.”