Mike Hammer--Masquerade for Murder, page 8
* * *
Lower Manhattan was home to plenty of desolate, half-dead business districts like this, rife with crumbling, neglected buildings waiting for gentrification to catch up with them, the street-level storefronts housing dingy shops dealing in junk, out-of-date crap or surplus goods.
I’d been to this particular stretch of small business purgatory before, just a few months ago. The tire-recapping place continued to ooze its bouquet of Butyl rubber into the atmosphere, an open-back truck piled with used casings parked out front, unattended. The tool-and-die shop still wore a CLOSED sign that could mean for the moment but more likely forever, the plate-glass shop had somehow managed to stay above water, and that tune-up and auto repair garage that had just opened for business on my last visit remained a beacon of optimism among a graveyard of empty storefronts.
What the hell would a Ferrari F40 be doing down here?
The wind fluttered the bottom of my trenchcoat and my hat needed to be well-snugged or it would fly away on me. I’d parked half a block down from the address I was checking out—I didn’t care to leave my heap too far away, not being as trusting as the tire-recapping boys.
The building on the corner had once been a gas station, probably dating back to the days when the term “service station” was still in use and guys in crisp uniforms and caps came running out to clean your windshields and check your tires, water, battery, oil. That was in the days when the idea of filling your own tank seemed absurd. What were we, farmers? Now the structure was a ghost of that curved ’50s architecture that said the future was here—well, it was…a future with its windows painted out, black, giving no view onto the space where once you paid for your gas with cash more often than credit card, and bought candy bars and chewing gum before helping yourself to free road maps.
One of those blacked-out windows had white lettering saying KRAFT AUTOMOTIVE—APPT. ONLY with a phone number. I tried the door and found it unlocked. Just barely ajar. Cracked it further, hollered, “Hello!” and got no response. I pushed it open and stepped inside.
No counter remained in a gutted sales area that was now an office with a metal desk, several filing cabinets and old shelves used to stack automotive catalogues and instruction manuals where cans of oil and other supplies had once lined up like military. Closed doors at left and right still said MEN and WOMEN.
I moved into what had once been the service area, and still was to some degree, with two car lifts, workbenches along the walls, tools on pegboards and the smell of oil. But the garage was clean, almost surgically so, cement floor included. Behind the lifts, and in front of the back workbench, a black full-car cover shrouded a shape that, with the distinctive half-showing star-shaped hubcaps, told a story.
I pulled off the car cover and the red Ferrari said hello. My mouth dropped. I was looking at the fastest, most powerful, and for that matter most expensive car Ferrari ever made.
I checked the passenger side of the vehicle for signs of exterior damage, but there were none. I’d driven stock cars in my reckless youth, but sports cars were out of my league, and that midget with the newsstand knew a hell of a lot more about them than I did. Still, my eyes told me that maybe—maybe—some bodywork had been done around the front right headlight.
Back in the office, I did what any self-respecting private detective would do in a place of interest whose front door was left unlocked. I snooped, starting with the filing cabinets, which held old invoices in their upper drawers and nothing in the lower ones.
On to the desk.
There, the usual business junk shared space with a few surprises, like the .38 Police Special in the right-hand drawer, and a box of ammo in the drawer beneath. Well, a small businessman had the right to protect himself, didn’t he? Of more interest, and much more suggestive, were three items in the bottom left drawer—the only items in that drawer.
A false dark-brown beard. A small bottle of yellow liquid labeled “Spirit Gum.” A dark long-haired wig with a pony tail.
I shut the drawer, glanced around. Only two places left to check. The MEN was unoccupied. The same couldn’t be said for the WOMEN.
A male figure, slumped, hunched over with head hanging, was seated on the toilet, its lid down, his pants up. Even sitting, he was obviously a big man, easily as big as me, burly not fat. His head was shaved. Arms hung limp. Feet, in rubber-soled work boots, were askew. He wore the navy-blue coveralls of the mechanic he was. Or had been.
Carefully, using his ears, I used both hands to lift his head back. His eyes were open and rolled back and filmed-over, dull with death; his tongue-lolling mouth was open, as if seeking breath or sustenance or perhaps an ability to speak, all of which would be forever denied to him. His face was blue with need of a shave, which would be up to his mortician now.
None of that was what was the most disturbing thing. That distinction was left to his upper torso, which was caved in so deep that the top half of his jumpsuit was puckered. He might have taken a cannonball to his chest cavity.
I took a look at the floor leading into the WOMEN and could see the trail of dark rubber from his heels as he’d been dragged, already dead, into the cubicle. In this black-windowed room, next to this desk, someone had somehow shoved this man’s chest in.
* * *
A squad car preceded Pat Chambers only by a few minutes. I gave the pair of blues the basics, but waited for Pat to give out chapter and verse. He went around taking it all in, from the dead mechanic in the WOMEN’s room to the Ferrari, the black cover to which I had not replaced.
“Sorry about my prints,” I said.
We were standing outside now. The crime scene guys were in there shooting their pictures and collecting their evidence. We were just two guys who had both quit cigarettes a long time ago whose breath was smoking in the cold nonetheless.
He shrugged. “You had no way to know.”
His unmarked Chevy Caprice was parked on the cement apron of the place where three gas pumps had once sprouted. His radio on the dash squawked for his attention. He went over to it, climbed in, grabbed the mike and, sitting there with the car door open, listened and talked a while. I rocked on my heels and waited. Pat had called R & I to run Roger Kraft through and this appeared to be the callback.
He strolled over. Like me, he was in a trenchcoat and hat. Mine cost more. We taxpayers are stingy bastards, except where we’re concerned.
“Roger Kraft has a record,” Pat said. “Armed robbery down south. Series of smash-and-grabs at…you’ll love this…gas stations. Long time ago. After that he was in the service, motor pool guy.”
“Working for Ernie Bilko probably,” I said.
“He owned this shop,” Pat said, nodding behind us. “But I don’t think he went straight. Robbery Division suspects him of being the driver for a crew that’s been hitting small banks upstate.”
“And now he’s gone,” I said, “and mankind will just have to bear up.”
“You ever see anything like that?”
“The Ferrari F40? Just when it clipped Vincent Colby.”
“No. I mean the way that guy died. His fucking chest is sunk in like Popeye punched him.”
“A fist didn’t do that, even with spinach. Two fists didn’t do it, either. I got no idea what did, unless the killer had a battering ram in his pocket.”
I’d already filled Pat in about Owens at the Colby brokerage. He’d said nothing then but the back of his mind must’ve been working on it.
He said, “You think this Owens character hired Kraft to kill his friend?”
“I think Owens hired Kraft to fine-tune his car. And I think if somebody did hire this guy to kill the Colby kid, they took advantage of how little Owens used the vehicle to borrow it for the job. Unless Kraft was just out joy-riding.”
“Just a coincidence that the Owens vehicle was what he was working on.”
“I didn’t say that. Come on, Pat—you know how us detectives hate coincidence. There could be a connection. Somebody might have recommended Kraft to Owens. I mean, this isn’t a part of the city Yuppies generally hang out in. How would William J. Owens stumble onto this place?”
“The Yellow Pages maybe?”
“I doubt Kraft was even in the Yellow Pages. This looks like a sub rosa operation.”
“Not big enough to be a chop shop.”
I frowned. “No, but if Kraft had a reputation for doing good work on high-end rides like the F40, he might get access to machines that could really go, for use with that bank-heist crew you mentioned. You need to talk to your contacts in Robbery and see if the M.O. includes getaway cars with impressive pedigrees.”
Pat was nodding. “Sometimes you think like a detective.”
“You cops ought to try it.”
Pat’s radio squawked again. More talk, more listening. When he clicked off and returned the handset to its slot, he made a note in his pad and then came over, his expression grim.
He planted himself in front of me and said, “You’re not going to like this.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Seems something didn’t smell good inside Casey Shannon’s apartment. The super called it in and our guys broke in and found Shannon there.”
“Not in Florida,” I said. “Not shacked up with an old honey.”
“No. Dead on the floor for a week, anyway. And here’s the part you really won’t like.”
“I already don’t like it.”
“I know. But get this—somebody caved his chest in.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tudor City, between Grand Central and the United Nations, was an island of apartment buildings within the island of Manhattan. In the heart of midtown, the cluster of apartments had everything—two lovely parks, great shopping, swell dining. Also the rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment where Lt. Casey Shannon had lived for twenty years, ever since his wife divorced him and he’d moved here from Queens.
The apartment had everything, too—hardwood floors, a separate foyer, a good-size living room, a full kitchen, a bathroom with windows (on the quiet north side of the building) and its one bedroom was damn near as big as the living room. One of a hundred-and-fifty apartments in a building built in 1929 (before the Crash), with a doorman and a laundry room, these digs had it all.
Everything but a living occupant.
Shannon was sitting on the floor with his head slumped, his back against the couch that had stopped his fall. He was in white blue-flecked pajamas under a maroon robe and wearing slippers; his chest looked sunken, a terrible blow of some kind having created a crater that sucked in the fabric of its garments, twisting the cloth like the striations of a spent bullet.
A big damn spent bullet.
But there was no firearm involved in this homicide. And for that ghastly indentation to have been the work of a fist, or even two fists, it would require an Andre-the-Giant-size killer.
When Pat, hat in hand, looming over the grisly corpse, said quietly, “Shit,” it was more like a prayer than a curse.
The windows were already up, to air out the smell of death, the job not yet done.
I said, “I didn’t know Casey as well as you, buddy. I mostly go back to when he was working with you ten, fifteen years ago. But I knew him enough to know he was a hell of a cop.”
“The best.” Pat gave me a hard look. “This one’s mine, Mike.”
“The case you mean? Or the kill?”
“Both.”
I shook my head. “No promises, pal. If I get my hands on who did this, I’ll take him out. You know I will.”
The gray-blue eyes were ice cold. “I’m asking you a favor on this one, Mike. This time it’s my friend some son of a bitch slaughtered. This is my Jack Williams.”
Jack had stepped in front of a Jap bayonet and it cost him an arm but saved my ass. Back here at home in the glorious post-war world, a cold-blooded murderer cut Jack down. And I had taken my revenge by way of delivering a slug in the killer’s belly, just the way Jack got it. It hadn’t been pretty and I still revisited it in my nightmares, but I could do it again. Easily.
“I’ll try, Pat. If I get there before you, I’ll save the bastard for you. But you’re not me. You don’t have the stomach for it that I do.”
“Oh, I won’t kill who did this,” he said. “With the death penalty gone, what I want is to watch him squirm in court, suffer public shame and humiliation, his every evil act dragged out and shoved in his face, then spend the rest of his sorry life behind bars, being some animal’s bitch.”
I shrugged. “To each his own.”
We had the place to ourselves for the moment. Two uniforms were in the hall on the door and the forensics team wasn’t there yet. I prowled the place, like I was walking point in the jungle.
It was in some ways a typical bachelor pad. Lots of guys are slobs and live in a mess of a place where a woman’s touch would have made it habitable. Casey was a thorough and meticulous cop and that had been the way he lived. This pad was neat as the proverbial pin, and whether he vacuumed and dusted himself or had a cleaning woman in, the result was a glimpse into the orderly mind of a top-notch investigator.
A Yuppie with a little dough would have salivated at the very thought of getting this place at twice the rent Shannon had been paying. Their interior decoration would have been far different, however—Casey had clearly furnished the place when he moved in a couple decades ago, raiding the showroom at J.C. Penney or Sears. The pictures on the walls were infrequent and were either hunting scenes or photos of his two grown children and four grandchildren. President Reagan’s picture beamed over a vintage wooden file cabinet.
This was a living room that got lived in, or it had been before the murder—TV with lounger opposite, a bookcase with bestsellers (The Fountainhead, Something of Value, Anatomy of a Murder), an old scarred-up desk consuming one corner. His phone was on it and a blotter, and a row of reference books; but no stacked papers or files or anything. I knelt for a look at the three desk drawers. No sign that any one of them had been pried open.
Pat was checking out the kitchen and I was tempted to go through that desk and those drawers, using a handkerchief so as not to leave prints; but that search was rightly Pat’s bailiwick—him and the lab boys.
He returned and I met him at the corpse.
“So,” I said, “how do you read this?”
His hat was on now, pushed back. “No sign of a struggle. No sign anything’s been gone through. Somebody wanted Casey dead. Simple as that.”
“Simple,” I said. “Some fucker just rolled his civil war cannon in and lit the fuse and aimed at your friend’s chest.”
He ignored that. “Casey knew the killer. A friend, maybe. Or at least an acquaintance.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Oh?”
“You can rule out a stranger, because Shannon let the person in, obviously at night, and they ended up across the room. So they spoke a while. I don’t think the killer was here long—no coffee cups or beer bottles in the kitchen?”
“None.”
I shrugged. “But that doesn’t rule out somebody he knew from a case he was working. Somebody who stopped by and said he had some info for Casey and got invited in.”
Pat twitched a frown. “And did that to him, somehow.”
“Yeah.”
“But Casey was retired.”
“Casey was still looking into something having to do with Vincent Colby. For some reason, that was the case that was eating at him enough that he couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t hang it up till he resolved the damn thing to his investigative mind’s satisfaction.”
Almost to himself, Pat said, “Every cop has one of those cases.”
I walked in a small circle, my hands in the air. “But what was it? Vincent Colby’s the common denominator, but appears to just have been on the periphery of those things.”
“‘Those things,’ Mike, are called homicide investigations. And, judging by what little I know, both of those deaths are tied to Colby, Daltree & Levine.” He waggled a finger at me. “I don’t know the details, but I will very damn soon, my friend, that I promise you.”
Right on cue, Chris Peters burst in, tramping through the entryway, the badge he’d used to get past the two cops at the door still in hand.
“I heard the call in my car,” he said, breathless. The slim blond detective, who’d been Shannon’s last partner, reminded me of the young Patrick Chambers. His eyes went white all around. “Jesus! Will you look at him.”
He almost ran to his fallen colleague, then stopped short, the cop in him not wanting to disturb anything. Then he dropped to his knees, as if at a shrine.
Swallowing hard, he said, “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” Pat admitted, putting a hand on the detective’s shoulder. “Somehow someone crushed his chest in. The M.E. can tell us more, after the autopsy.”
Then the young man hung his head, mirroring the corpse nearby. They might have been praying together, but only one of them was crying, the other way past that.
Pat let this go on a while, then helped the boy to his feet. “We’ll find who did this. He’ll pay.”
“He or she,” I reminded them. “There’s always those two possibilities.”
I knew that too well.
Pat walked Shannon’s heartsick partner away from the body and positioned the young man and himself so that their backs were to the grim tableau. I came along.
Pat told him, “Mike is working the Colby hit-and-run.”
I said, “I’m working for the father’s client. Old man Vance Colby.”
Of course, Chris had been there that night.
“Well,” Peters said, “that whole hit-run thing threw Casey for a curve.”
“How so?”
His expression grew thoughtful. “He was at least a little suspicious of Colby’s role in those two other homicides. One was a low-level broker at the Colby firm, the other a secretary there.”
“Vincent Colby’s secretary?”
“No, not exactly. He doesn’t have a secretary, even though he’s all but running the place. They have a secretarial pool. But the young woman had been in frequent contact with him, taking dictation and such.”
