There was a brief moment of thoughtful hesitancy before he said, “My name is Lewison, Bruce Lewison ... and my business is extremely urgent.”
Velda persisted with: “Who recommended this agency, sir?”
Politely, the other voice said, “I’m afraid my business is a little too confidential to discuss. However, if you would relay to Mr. Hammer the urgency I’m sure he would understand. And I can pay for his services in advance if need be.”
I could almost hear Velda’s mind working. “In that case, sir, I’m sure he’d be glad to see you. I’ll have him here at noon.”
“I appreciate that, madam. Thank you.”
The conversation ended. The voice was nobody I could recognize, nor could anybody else, most likely, but in this age of electronic technology the experts could pull a voiceprint off that tape that would make identification as exact as if he had left his fingerprints behind. I rewound the tape, took it from the case, put it in a plastic holder and dropped it in my pocket. I got a fresh reel from the drawer and put it on the machine.
When I closed the top my fingers froze to the plastic. There was no way Velda would have left the answering machine without a tape in it. A fresh one would go on before she even filed the old one.
The son of a bitch had come back. He had figured out the remote possibility of having been recorded, did a highly skilled job of opening the door locks and searching the place, the way a
real
enterprising reporter might. But he had already gotten what he came for ... the tape from the recorder.
Too bad, sucker, I thought, too bad.
He wasn’t up on efficient office procedure at all. He never figured Velda would file his taped message and insert a new reel before he got there. But then, he didn’t know Velda’s sensitivity level at all. Bruce Lewison my ass. She knew it was a phony name and red-flagged it for me in an off-file.
I got out of the cab at the rear of my apartment building and went down the garage ramp. I took the service elevator up to my floor, stepped out at the far end of the corridor where I had a good view of the whole area, then went to my door. The splinter I had inserted between the door and the jamb was still there, so nobody had tried to bust in.
The late news was on. I built a drink and sat in front of the TV watching everybody go through the motions of laying the city naked. Local politics was still a mess, but the mayor did his funny bit and made a joke of it. There was a street killing, a multicar accident on the East Side Highway and a tenement fire on One Hundred Twelfth Street. Almost the same as the news last night.
When I was putting some more ice in my drink the phone rang and I picked it up and said hello. A voice in an echo chamber with a British accent said, “Mr. Hammer, is that you?”
“Russell?”
“Yes, right. This is he. I have some news for you.”
“Great.”
“I must say, it was a bit of a go, y‘know. Very difficult to get any information from the authorities except that the case was still under investigation. The people here knew that an American was killed, but didn’t know why. The thing that was gruesome was the way he died. A knife in his throat was the murder weapon, but his fingers had been cut off his right hand.”
“Did the press carry that?”
“Afraid not, old boy. The only one here who knew about it was the man who discovered the body. Getting him to talk wasn’t easy at all. The constabulary had explicitly forbidden him to mention it to anyone.”
“Then how’d you manage it?”
“Very simply, Mr. Hammer. I offered him twenty-five pounds and my vow of silence.”
“Russell,” I told him, “you did fine. I’ll send you a check at the going rate of exchange.”
“Don’t forget my football tickets and the story.”
“You got it, friend.”
I hung up and sat back with my drink. Now Penta had an MO. He liked to chop off fingers. He took five off the agent in England and ten off the poor slob in my office. The numbers seemed to have a significance. And the chances were, Penta had left his trademark in other places as well. There was always a pattern to mutilations, always a reason for them. The big ones that hit the news generally had sexual overtones, breasts and bellies being targets for a deviate’s knife, or male castration and on into animal and sometimes human sacrifices. Crazy. They were all crazy ... but every one of them had a reason for happening.
Penta.
Was there a reference to
five?
Five fingers? But there were ten cut from DiCica’s hands.
It was crazy, all right, but that was what was going to trip up Penta. I finished my drink, took a shower and went to bed. I set the alarm for six and set the switch.
At seven thirty I parked two blocks away from Smiley’s Automotive and walked back on the opposite side of the street. Outside the tire-recapping place a lone truck loaded with used casings was parked, the driver asleep behind the wheel. An old van rattled by and turned the corner up ahead, and that was the end of the traffic. Nobody seemed to be anxious enough about business to open early.
Smiley’s Automotive was just another place on the block. It was
there.
Nothing was happening. Behind the dirty windows in the door was the dull glow of a night bulb. After ten minutes nothing had changed and I walked across the street, and only when I got up close I saw the quarter-inch gap in the personnel door where it hadn’t been closed all the way.
When I nudged it with the tip of my toe it swung open, and I went in fast, the .45 in my hand, and flattened out against the wall long enough to get my bearings, then took four steps to the steel lift and crouched down behind it.
Nothing moved.
I inched my way to the other end of the lift and paused there, listening. The tiny scratching noises I heard were coming from the small office in the rear off to my left, minute hurried noises that stopped and started, then were joined by others, and when I heard the brief whistle sound I realized what I was hearing.
I got up, moved to the door quietly and the rats that were running all over the place saw me and dashed across the desk. When I flicked the light switch on with my elbow I saw all the tiny paw prints and tail streaks from the blood they had been gorging themselves on, a thickening deep red pool that oozed out of the balding head that had been smashed open with a two-foot-long Stilson wrench.
The body was still in the swivel chair, the head and arms flopped forward on the desk. Apparently that single blow had taken him out so fast he hadn’t moved a muscle afterward. The eyes were still open, half a dead cigar was in the corner of his mouth, extinguished by the blood that puddled around it.
Under the right arm were two bills from a Las Vegas hotel and a used airline ticket. I could see the name on one bill and the ticket. It was Richard Smiley.
I draped a tissue around the phone, dialed 0, and when the operator came on told her I couldn’t see without my glasses and gave her Pat’s office number. He had just gotten in and I was about to ruin his whole day for him.
“Yeah, Mike. Now what’s happened at this time of day?”
“Somebody’s polished off Smiley.”
“What?”
“I’m at the garage now.”
“Shit. You stay right there and damn it, don’t touch anything.”
“Come off it, pal. All I’ve done was dial 0 on the phone.”
“You alone?”
“Totally. Whoever did this had time to get away. The blood is congealing enough to make him dead for at least an hour. Consider that an unofficial opinion.”
“You sure it’s Smiley?”
“His papers indicate it.” Before he could ask I said, “They were lying on the desk.”
“Okay,” he told me, “hang in there. We’ll be right down.”
I cradled the phone and looked around. I had probably five minutes before a squad car got there, and if there was anything to know I wanted it firsthand.
For a few seconds I studied the way the body was positioned, as if he had been doing something on the desk. The blow had come down at an angle, carefully placed and forcefully delivered. The killer had been in close, standing there until the right moment, then he came down with the weapon on Smiley’s bald skull and demolished him with one terrible whack. The Stilson wrench was simply dropped beside the body and the killer walked out. He didn’t even have to bring his own bludgeon. There were enough wrenches, crowbars and lengths of pipe in the office to handle the matter.
Whoever the killer was, Smiley had known him. Had a predawn meeting been set for a payoff? It sure looked that way. Smiley could have had the money in his hands, counting it, probably the way he had before. No reason to be apprehensive. It was a regular business deal and he was just making sure he got what was coming to him. And he got that, for sure. The killer simply retrieved the money and walked out into a lonely night that didn’t even have street people to watch him go.
As professional kills go, it was a nice clean one. Just a big bang on the head and it was over. No fancy work, no revenge or bloody messages like the one in my office. Smiley still had all his fingers.
The first squad car got there in four minutes. I held up my ID for the two uniforms to see, but the driver recognized me and nodded. “You call this in?”
“Yeah. The body’s in the back office. I left everything clean. All I touched was the phone under a Kleenex and the light switch with my elbow.”
The officer took out his pad while the other one went inside. “Let’s get the paperwork done first.”
“Sure.” I gave him all the personal information he needed, detailed my entry, the discovery of the body and subsequent events. As I was finishing, two more squad cars pulled in with an unmarked sedan right behind them. Pat was at the wheel, his face tight and drawn, and when Candace Amory and her boss got out, I could see why.
Pat told them to stay right there until the investigation was completed inside, spotted me and came right over. “Mike, what is this penchant you have for being around dead bodies? To hear the DA sound off you’re a walking menace.”
“I didn’t kill anybody. Not yet, anyway.”
“Given time, you will, you will. And that’s from the mouth of our eminent district attorney. Now what happened?”
I gave it to him the same way I did to the first cop on the scene.
“And you came down here on a hunch?”
I shrugged.
“We had a surveillance unit on Smiley’s house last night. He never went home.”
“If he came in on the red-eye he could have come right here.”
“Why?”
“Because he was one of those greedy bastards who wanted his money as fast as he could get it. The office was as good a place as any for a payoff and the time was right.”
The police photographers arrived and went inside. Pat looked at his watch and said, “You stay put.”
“Where can I go?”
“Go talk to the wheels over there,” he said.
“Pat ... how come the DA isn’t giving you a hassle right now? He usually likes to be right underfoot.”
“I think the Iceberg Lady has a leash on him,” Pat said sourly.
No introductions were necessary. The district attorney and I had met before, and if ever there was an adversarial situation, it was the one between us. He had come up out of the ranks and was in his first term of office, and to him, people like me were legislative errors in licensing who had no business in police work. He was the type who disapproved of using informers or sting techniques or anything that might open a legal case to any type of defense.
I said, “Hell of a way to start the day.”
“You seem to have a knack for this sort of thing,” he told me. “Care to recite the details again?”
I said no and went through the routine.
He took it all in, filing away every detail mentally. “You have a strange position here.”
“You’d better believe it, counselor. I’m a principal, a finder of bodies, an authorized investigator and if the reporters get here soon, source material for a good story.”
Another car drove up and parked in the middle of the street. The medical examiner got out and walked past me. With an amused smile he said, “You again, eh?”
I nodded. “Some people have all the luck.”
Candace was watching the exchange closely and waited until the ME had gone inside. “I think we have things to talk about, Mr. Hammer.” She didn’t use my first name this time.
“I’m sure we have.”
Pat called to the pair of them and waved them inside. He pushed his hat back and wiped his face with his hand. “I guess you got the picture,” he said to me.
“Unless your guys turn up something else.”
“Smiley wouldn’t keep records of anything like this going down, but someplace there’s a paper trail.”
I made sure nobody could overhear me and said, “There might be something better than that.”
He watched me out of the corner of his eye. “Like what?”
“If the first killer, Penta, was the one who made the appointment to make sure I was in the office, then I may have his voice on tape.”
“Where is it?”
I took the cassette out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“Who else knows about it?”
“Just Velda.”
He stuck the tape in his jacket pocket. “I’m going to keep this in my own department for a while.”
The way he said it, I knew something was irritating him. Before I could ask him what it was, I saw Jason McIntyre sidling past on the other side of the street, his eyes wide with curiosity, but his actions reflecting the nervousness he couldn’t hide. I said, “There’s a guy who can identify the body, Pat.”
“Where?”
I pointed Jason out and Pat called a patrolman over and told him to pick him up. The old guy almost fainted with fright when the cop took his arm, but he went along, was taken inside and came out a minute later shaking, his face a ghastly white. But he had made the ID. It was Richard Smiley, all right. Jason went to the curb and puked.