Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love

by Max Allan Collins

  He thought about that, or anyway pretended to. Then he nodded and said, “Fair enough.”

  “Before we get into that, I have sad news. Senator, I’m sorry to have to tell you… but your wife has been killed.”

  There was no pretending in his reaction. He was genuinely astonished. Quickly, eyes flaring, he said, “Who did it?”

  I hadn’t said she’d been murdered. I might have meant it was an automobile accident—like the one Lisa Long died in, only not a contrived one. Or maybe she slipped in the tub and cracked her skull—a bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house, you know.

  But he went right to murder.

  “In a way it was accidental,” I said. “Her accomplice, Andrew Morrow, came at me with a gun. We struggled, and he fired the thing and a stray bullet took Nicole down. I’m sorry. It was quick. You need a minute?”

  Senator Winters took a few seconds, then shook his head. His jaw muscles were flexing; it took the boyishness away. He reached for the cigarette and sucked on it, let smoke out, then returned the cig to the tray.

  He said, “I am going to ask a question, Hammer—fuck your ground rules.”

  “Okay.”

  “What do you mean, Morrow was her ‘accomplice’?”

  “Earlier this evening, Nicole confessed to me that she was attempting to protect you by getting rid of Erin Dunn and Anthony Licata. An innocent bystander, their landlady, was also killed by Morrow. What you heard about on the radio, our ex-governor’s ‘suicide’? That was Morrow’s work, too. The police are well aware he faked that. They will soon know, if they don’t already, that Nicole was involved.”

  Winters had started shaking his head halfway through that. “Foolish damn woman. Goddamn her.” He swallowed, held back tears, or gave that impression. “God love her…”

  “Question is, did you love her?”

  Choking back what might have been a sob, he said, “Very much. I’m sure the… unconventional nature of our relationship is something… something you can’t grasp. But yes, I loved her.”

  “Well, she loved you, all right. She really did. Oh, she loved the idea of being a ’90s version of Jackie Kennedy, too. But she truly believed in you. Believed in the social issues and concerns you espouse.”

  He was nodding somberly. “I’m sure she did.”

  “And I believe—I really believe—that if the terrible things she undertook for your benefit would’ve been exposed, she would have fallen on her sword for you. Right up to its emerald-studded hilt.”

  His head went back and his eyelids went up. “What do you mean, ‘my benefit’?”

  “As much as the role of First Lady was something she hoped to inhabit, and even to redefine, she wanted most for you to be president. Even if she couldn’t be at your side. She’d take the blame. The fall. For everything you did.”

  “What did I do?”

  I gestured to him. “Only everything. You’re the chess master. She was your queen, all right, but ultimately the queen is just another game piece on the board.”

  His eyes were narrow now and he spoke through a slit of a mouth. “What exactly happened tonight? At the penthouse. Do you still work for me or not?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Then tell me. In as much detail as you like. I won’t interrupt. Your ground rules, Hammer.”

  So I told him. Writing up my cases as I have over the years has developed in me a fairly remarkable recall, and I was able to repeat what both of us said, more or less. Just as I’ve given it to you.

  “I fail to see,” Jamie Winters said, after another drag on that cigarette, “how anything Nicole said incriminates me. She did, as you say, take the blame for all of these foolish actions.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s one ‘foolish action’ she denied doing that most incriminates you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is. She denied having anything to do with the Lisa Long hit-and-run kill. She even seemed to think it might really have been an accident.”

  “And how is that damning to me?”

  I shrugged. “Why should Nicole deny that one murder? She took responsibility for all the others. That would seem to indicate you hired the ‘accident’ done.”

  That rated a sneer. “‘Seems’ is hardly proof.”

  “You were right there at the scene, Jamie, outside the Flatiron. Chatting with the woman on the sidewalk. Were your eyes on that car, parked down along the curb? Its driver waiting for the traffic to thin enough for you to signal it to pull out? Or were you just waiting for that speeding car to come into sight and then distract Lisa and send her on her way… to her death.”

  Winters shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “Not proof. What do you want from me, Hammer? What are you after?”

  I beamed at him. “Money would be a start. This began with blackmail. Let’s end it that way. With Nicole gone, you’re going to be a very rich man. You could keep me on retainer. Say $100,000 a year? I could be your damage control guy. I have a feeling you have a lot of damage that could use controlling.”

  The senator studied me. Studied me for a very long time— probably thirty seconds, which is an eternity. Try it and see. Time it on your watch.

  Then, slowly nodding, he said, “All right. All right, Hammer. I think you may just be the man I could use, long-term. Could I hire you through that attorney you work for? To keep the client confidentiality intact?”

  “You bet. But tell me something.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Why keep Nicole in the dark about Lisa Long?”

  He shrugged. “It came up rather spontaneously. When the blackmail scheme seemed on the verge of exposure, removing Lisa from the scene… in an accident… made sense. I don’t relish having that done. I was fond of the girl. But in a larger sense, she was expendable.”

  I waved a hand, like a diner at 21 summoning the check. “I thought you were a romantic, Jamie. That you loved these women… as long as the affairs lasted, anyway.”

  His smile was a mildly self-mocking thing. “I am a romantic, actually. I do love them, usually. Lisa… well, she was convenient. How can a man resist a beautiful secretary like that, particularly one as interested in you as you are in her?”

  “Tell me about it,” I said with a smirk. “One thing. What about the other girls? The ones you and Nicole gave me to check into? I hope I haven’t been… well, the phrase ‘stalking horse’ has come up. I wouldn’t like to see wholesale slaughter become the policy where all your former girlfriends are concerned.”

  He raised a “perish the thought” hand. “Certainly not! Am I some kind of monster? No, Lisa had to go because she’d become intertwined with this blackmail business—a victim, like myself, but caught up. The other girls whose names Nicole gave you, well, that was before we knew whether any of them might be involved in this blackmail scheme. No, they’re quite safe.”

  “What if any of them came forward at some future date?”

  He batted that away. “I don’t believe any of those three would dream of embarrassing me or themselves. I can’t imagine it from them.” He shrugged. “Of course, if any of them should… misbehave… accidents do happen. And I’d have Mike Hammer on staff to deal with it, wouldn’t I?”

  We exchanged smug smiles. Two men who wouldn’t murder a woman unless they really had to.

  “Since you’ve made a confession of sorts,” I said, with an embarrassed shrug, “perhaps I should do the same.”

  He was stubbing out his cigarette in the tray. “Oh?”

  I reached in my right-hand suit coat pocket and withdrew the object Velda had passed me on my way out of the safe house: the same little metal-case cassette recorder that, at the Dakota the other day, I’d used to play the sex tape for Nicole’s entertainment and edification. Or I should say, a dupe of the sex tape.

  I said, “For the record… and this recording… I hereby state I have no intention of taking a yearly retainer from Senator Winters, and my offer to do his dirt
y work was simply a method of getting him to own up to what he’s done.”

  “Goddamnit!” he blurted, halfway off the stool.

  The .45 came out from under my left arm so fast even I was impressed. With my free hand, I stopped the cassette recorder and popped the little gizmo with the tape still in it in my suit coat pocket.

  “Thank you, Senator,” I said.

  The wind outside was such that I hadn’t heard the elevator ding and the doors slide open. Of course, I hadn’t been listening for it. But somebody had been listening for a while—at the door to the senator’s office.

  Somebody named Nora Kent.

  “Put down the gun, Mr. Hammer!”

  Very carefully, slowly, I craned to look back at her.

  She was in jeans and an untucked pink-and-white plaid flannel shirt open over a gray t-shirt, both hanging over her jeans. She wore no make-up and her black hair was so short, she might have been a boy. Had she tucked it under a stocking cap, and with no make-up, she’d have looked even more like a boy.

  A teenage boy.

  The kind who might go out joyriding in a stolen car.

  She had a gun in her hand. It wasn’t as big as my gun, just a Baby Glock, but it could shoot nine-mil slugs and if we’ve learned anything here, it’s that a nine-mil slug can kill you very damn dead.

  She was twirling the forefinger of her left hand as she gave me orders: “Hold the butt by two fingers! Put it down! Don’t throw it!”

  She was smart. She knew that if I dropped the .45, particularly dropped it hard, the thing might go off. So I knelt. And put it down, gently, by two fingers. Then stood again, slowly.

  “Jamie,” she said, in her breathy Julie London voice, “what should I do with him?”

  Winters was holding his hands up, palms out, almost like he was the one being threatened by a woman with a gun.

  “Don’t kill him here,” he said. “We’ll take him down and get him out and away somehow. We’ll have to get past the security guard.”

  She shook her head. “I already took care of the geezer.”

  Winters frowned. “How hard did you hit him?”

  “I didn’t hit him, I shot him. The wind covered it. He’s dead.” She shrugged. “He had a nice long life.”

  Winters frowned, but any regret was a momentary thing.

  I was facing her now. “So what’s this about, honey? Getting a recording contract through Jamie’s show biz contacts? Or maybe you want to be First Lady, too?”

  Her teeth were small white feral things. I hadn’t noticed that before. And her eyes—those oh-so-blue eyes… Christ, they were crazier than mine!

  “I want it all, Mike!” she said, her smile shining with greed. “But there’s something I want that you would never understand…”

  “What’s that, baby?”

  She grunted a laugh as her little automatic stared at me with its black noncommittal eye. “‘Baby,’ ‘honey,’ ‘doll’… what a cornball old creep you are. Do you even know what love is? Or is it all just rutting to you? What do I want? I want Jamie Winters, you fool. Because I love him, and he loves me. Have you even heard of that?”

  I had, but I also heard something she hadn’t, because this time I’d been listening for it. The elevator. I’d told Velda not to fall asleep till I got back. I’d told her that if one of the girls ducked out, she had to follow that girl. Because one of those dolls might have been eavesdropping when I filled Velda in and mentioned the meeting with Winters at the Vankemp Building. Because I may be dumb, but I’m smart enough to know a young woman with no makeup and a stocking cap pulled down can pass for a teenage boy, particularly in a car speeding by. And I figured one of those cute hens in our charge really might be a fox….

  Winters came around the makeshift desk. He stood next to me, at my left, taking me by the arm. Said to her, “Go get that big gun of his and hand it to me. He’s a tricky mother. Both of us need to cover him when we go down.”

  Nora nodded and was keeping her Baby Glock trained on me as she came over to my right to lower herself and reach for the .45, where I’d dropped it a few feet away.

  “Put the gun down, Nora!”

  Velda, a goddess in gray sweats, was standing just inside the unfinished office, that little hammerless .32 of hers in one sweet hand, its barrel pointing like a scolding finger at the petite crouching singer, who had not yet retrieved the .45.

  “Do it, Nora! A gentle toss!”

  Nora, her cute face ugly with hate, pitched her Baby Glock off to one side, nice and easy.

  “Good girl,” Velda said, holding her position.

  That was when Nora went for the .45, coming up with it in her two hands, springing to her feet and charging at Velda, firing wildly. The thunder of it rivaled anything the sky had produced on this terrible night, but the rounds only chewed up the senator’s mahogany door, because Velda had already hit the deck.

  And when my raven-haired partner’s .32 barked a bullet up into the songbird’s chest, spinning her around to face Winters, my gun fumbling from her uncaring fingers, Nora Kent looked at Jamie Winters in desperate love and sudden pain, reaching her arms out to brace herself or perhaps embrace him.

  Horrified, the senator tried to back away only to bump into the bulging plastic covering a window where glass wasn’t yet, popping it like a blister, and they both tumbled through, letting screaming banshee wind in, her limp form chasing him as he windmilled face-up, all the way down, the bloody stain on her back a ragged valentine, his scream not dying until he did.

  Then Velda was there hugging my arm, looking at the tiny torn figures in the construction rubble below, the plastic they’d taken with them providing no cushion at all, just flapping around them in the wind that whipped Velda’s hair and my suit coat, as well.

  “Don’t say it,” Velda said.

  “What, that they really fell for each other?” I grinned at her. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  TIP OF THE FEDORA

  Although the intent here has not been to create an historical mystery novel, my approach does attempt to place each of these collaborations in the context of when Mickey Spillane wrote the material I worked from, and where in Mike Hammer’s life the tale occurs.

  (By the way, do not be tempted to do the math about how old Mike Hammer, Velda and Pat Chambers are in the novels set from the 1980s through the early twenty-first century. Mike Hammer ages, but not in the same way as the rest of us. He has more wiggle room than we do.)

  To provide a background at least somewhat consistent with reality, I leaned upon research, most of it on the Internet. The major articles I used for this purpose in Murder, My Love are: “How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back” by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal, Autumn 2011; “Singing a Sad Song for Their Piano Bar” by Anthony Ramirez, New York Times, July 19 2007; “The Old Duplex” in Vanishing New York (Dey Street Books, 2017) by Jeremiah Moss; “Roberta Flack Price Chops Co-Op at the Legendary Dakota Building in New York City,” Variety, January 19, 2017; “Visiting Caffe Reggio” by Jen Carlson, December 8, 2014, Gothamist website; and “Secrets of the Flatiron Building” by Michelle Young, November 24, 1918, New York News. Additionally, I referred to the book “21: the Life and Times of New York’s Favorite Club (1975) by Marilyn Kaytor.

  My thanks to publisher Nick Landau and his editorial staff at Titan Books, including Ella Chappell and Davi Lancett, for continuing to pursue what has been termed the Mickey Spillane Legacy Project. The wide and warm response to the Spillane Centenary publications in 2018 and ’19 has been gratifying to those of us who consider the writer (he abhorred the term “author”) one of the major figures of tough crime and mystery fiction.

  Toward that end, Jane Spillane—Mrs. Mickey Spillane—has made all of this possible. And Mrs. Max Allan Collins—writer Barbara Collins—has served as my in-house editor, cheerleader, and critic, making several plot suggestions along the way.

  Finally, my longtime friend and agent Dominick Abel continues to be indispensable where his
clients Mickey and Max are concerned.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  MICKEY SPILLANE and MAX ALLAN COLLINS collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the Mike Danger comic book series.

  SPILLANE was the bestselling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. His controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and several television series, starring Darren McGavin in the 1950s and Stacy Keach in the ’80s and ’90s. Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), in which the writer played his own famous hero.

  COLLINS has earned an unprecedented twenty-three Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for the novels True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, and in 2013 for “So Long, Chief,” a Mike Hammer short story begun by Spillane and completed by Collins. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks/Sam Mendes film. As a filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his innovative Quarry novels, also the basis of Quarry, a Cinemax TV series. As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (recently Antiques Wanted).

  The Grand Master “Edgar” Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America, was presented to Spillane in 1995 and Collins in 2017. Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins also received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.

  MIKE HAMMER NOVELS

  In response to reader request, I have assembled this chronology to indicate where the Hammer novels I’ve completed from Mickey Spillane’s unfinished manuscripts and other materials fit into the canon. An asterisk indicates the collaborative works (thus far). J. Kingston Pierce of the fine website The Rap Sheet pointed out an inconsistency in this list (as it appeared with Murder Never Knocks) that I’ve corrected.