“You’re sure?”
I nodded. “Just stay with Velda, will you?”
“As soon as the doctor calls I’ll check in with you.”
When she left I walked over to the miniature bar by the window and picked up a glass. Hell, this was no time to take a drink. I put the glass back and went into my office.
The dead guy was still looking at his mutilated hands, seemingly ignoring the spike driven into his skull until the ornamental base of it indented his skin. The glaze over his eyes seemed thicker.
For the first time I looked at the note on my desk, the large capital letters printed almost triumphantly across a sheet of my letterhead under the logo. It read, YOU DIE FOR KILLING ME. Beneath it, in deliberately fine handwriting, was the signature,
Penta.
I heard the front door open and Pat shouted my name. I called back, “In here, Pat.”
Pat was a cop who had seen it all. This one was just another on his list. But the kill wasn’t what disturbed him. It was where it happened. He turned to the uniform at the door. “Anybody outside?”
“Only our people. They’re shortstopping everybody at the elevators.”
“Good. Keep everybody out for five minutes,” he told a cop who stood in the doorway. “Our guys too.”
“Got it,” the cop said and turned away.
“Let’s talk,” Pat said.
It didn’t take long. “I was to meet a prospective client named Bruce Lewison at noon in my office. Velda went ahead to open up and get some other work out of the way. I walked in a few minutes before twelve and found her on the floor and the guy dead.”
“And you touched nothing?”
“Not in here, Pat. I wasn’t about to wait for you to show before I got a doctor for Velda.”
Pat looked at me with that same old look.
I could feel a twist in my grin. There was nothing funny about it. “Oh, I’ll get to the bastard, Pat. Sooner or later.”
“Cut that shit, will you?”
“Sure.”
“You know this guy?”
I shook my head. “He’s new to me.”
“Somebody thought he was killing you, pal.”
“We don’t look alike at all.”
“He was in your chair.”
“Yeah, that he was.”
He was looking at the note and said, “Who did you kill, Mike?”
I said, “Come on Pat. Don’t play games.”
“This note mean anything to you?”
“No. I don’t know why, but somebody sure was serious about it.”
“Okay,” he said. His eyes looked tired. “Let’s get our guys in here.”
While the photographer shot the corpse from all angles and did closeups on the mutilation, Pat and I went into Velda’s office where the plainclothes officers dusted for prints and vacuumed the area for any incidental evidence. Pat had already jotted down what I had told him. Now he said, “Give me the entire itinerary of your day, Mike. Start from when you got up this morning and I’ll check everything out while it’s fresh.”
“Look ... when Velda comes around ...” I saw the look on Pat’s face and nodded. My stomach was all knotted up and all I wanted was to breathe some fresh, cold air.
“I got up at seven. I showered, dressed and went down to the deli for some rolls, picked up the paper, went back to the apartment, ate, read the news and took off for the gym.”
“Which one?”
“Bing’s Gym. You know where it is. I got there at nine thirty, put in a little better than an hour in the exercise room, showered and checked out at eleven thirty. Bing can verify that himself. It was a twenty-minute walk to the office and on the way I saw two people I knew. One was Bill Sheen, the beat cop, the other was Manuel Florio who owns the Pompeii Bar on Sixth Avenue. We walked together for a block, then split. I got to the office a few minutes before twelve and walked into ... this.” I waved my hand at the room. “Burke Reedey will give you his medical report on Velda and the ME will be able to pinpoint a time of death pretty well, so don’t get me mixed up in suspect status.”
Pat finished writing, tore a leaf out of the pad and closed the book. He called one of the detectives over and handed him the slip, telling him to check out all the details of my story. “Let’s just keep straight with the system, buddy. Face it, you’re not one of its favorite people.”
The assistant medical examiner was a tubby little guy with light blue eyes that bristled with curiosity. Every detail was a major item and when he was finished with the physical aspect of the examination, he stepped back, walked around the body slowly, seeming to do a psychological analysis of the crime. Pat didn’t try to interrupt him. This was the ME’s moment and whatever he could garner from his inspection now would be valuable because the body would never be seen in this position again. Twice he went back to do a close scrutiny of the desk spike in the dead man’s forehead, then made a satisfied grimace and snapped his bag shut.
Pat asked, “What do you think?”
“About the time?”
“Yes, for one thing.”
The ME looked at his watch. “I would say that he was killed between ten and eleven o‘clock. Certainly not after eleven. I will be more specific after the postmortem. Has he been identified?”
“Not yet,” Pat said.
“An interesting death. Those facial and chest cuts seem to have been made with an extremely sharp, short-bladed instrument.”
“Penknife?” I asked him.
“Yes, possibly. Some people carry things like that.”
“Any medical reasons for the slashings?”
“Want me to speculate?”
“Certainly,” Pat said.
“Those were made to terrorize the victim. It’s amazing what the sight of a blade opening up his own body can do to a person’s psyche. Those wounds are too deep to be superficial, yet not deep enough to be fatal.”
“And that brings us to the hands.”
“A very unusual disfiguration.” His bright blue eyes looked at both of us, then settled on Pat. “Have you ever seen this before?” Pat shook his head. “Someplace I recall hearing of this happening. I’ll do a little research on it when I get back to the office. Frankly, I think it’s a signature stratagem.”
“A what?”
“Something a killer leaves to remember him by.”
I said, “That’s a pretty complicated way of writing your name.”
“Agreed,” the ME nodded, “but you’ll never forget it. But the one he was impressing it on was the victim himself. Look, let me show you how he did this.” He took the dead man’s arm, stiff with rigor mortis, forcing the hand with the forefinger out and the other knuckles bent down, against the desk. Where the finger ended you could see the cut of the blade in the wood. “Imagine having to watch as each finger was cut off at the knuckle and not even being able to scream for relief? The pain must have been incredible, but even then, it could not have been as bad as the final act of hammering that spike into his head.”
“What are you saving for last, Doctor?”
The ME gave Pat a sage little smile. “You’re wondering how a grown man would let himself be totally immobilized like that?”
“Right on,” Pat told him.
Swinging the swivel chair around so the back of the corpse’s head faced us, the ME lifted up the shaggy hair and fingered a small lump over the ear. “A tap with the usual blunt instrument, hard enough to render the victim unconscious for ten minutes or so.”
My mouth went dry and something felt like it was crawling up my back. The one he had laid on Velda wasn’t to knock her out. That one was a killing blow, one swung with deliberate, murderous intent. I looked at the phone again. Meg still hadn’t called.
Pat bent over and examined the body carefully. His arm brushed the dead man’s coat and pushed it open. Sticking up out of the shirt pocket was a Con Edison bill folded in half. When Pat straightened it out he looked at the name and said, “Anthony Cica.” He held it out for me to look at. “You know him, Mike?”
“Never saw him before.” His address was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“You’re lucky you had a stand-in.”
“Too bad Velda didn’t have one.” The tightness ran up me again and I began to breathe hard without knowing it.
Pat was shaking my arm. “Come off it, Mike.”
I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and nodded.
The ME was pointing toward the note. “And that’s his ego trip, wouldn’t you say? The dead man can’t read, so who will? And who is Penta?”
“You’re leaving all the fun stuff for us, Doc.”
“Keep me informed. I’m very interested. You’ll get my report tomorrow.” As he went to pass me he stopped and gave me those blue eyes again. “Do I know you, sir?”
“Mike Hammer,” I told him.
“I’ve heard mention of you.”
“This is my office,” I said.
“Yes.” He looked around, curiously critical. “Who is your decorator?”
“That’s his sense of humor,” Pat said when the ME left. Then he went over and called in two of his people to go over the corpse itself.
I went to the phone and called Meg. The answering service said she would be back at six. I called the hospital directly, but there was no report on Velda’s condition so far. Nobody would speculate.
It was another hour before the specialists finished and the body was carted out in its rubberized shroud. Pat was on the phone and when he hung up he turned to me and said tiredly, “The papers just got wind of it. They still on your side?”
“Hell, most of the old guys are buddies, but some of those young ones are weirdos.”
“Wait till they read that note.”
“Yeah, great.”
“You still haven’t told me who you killed, Mike.” This time there was a quiet seriousness in his tone. It was a question direct and simple.
I turned and faced him, meeting his eyes square on. “Anybody I ever took down you know about. The last one was Julius Marco, the son of a bitch who was about to kill that kid when I nailed him, and that was four years ago.”
“How many have you shot since?”
“A few. None died.”
“You testified in a couple of Murder One cases, didn’t you?”
“Sure. So did a few other people.”
“Recently?”
“Hell, no. The last one was a few years back.”
“Then who would want you dead?”
“Nobody I can think of.”
“Hell, somebody wants you even better than dead. They want you all chopped up and with a spike through your head. Somebody had a business engagement with you at noon, got here early, took out Velda and didn’t have to wait for you because there was a guy in your office he thought was you and he nailed that poor bastard instead.”
“I’ve thought of that,” I said.
“And we’re stuck until we get IDs on everybody and a statement from Velda.”
“Looks like that,” I told him. “You through here?”
“Yeah.”
“Sealing the place up?”
Pat shrugged. “No need to.”
I picked up the phone again and called the building super. I told him what had happened and that I needed the place cleaned up. He said he’d do it personally. I thanked him and hung up.
Pat said, “Let’s go get something to eat. You’ll feel better. Then we’ll go to the hospital.”
“No sense in that. Velda was unconscious and in critical condition. No visitors. I’ll tell you what you can do though.”
“What’s that?”
“Station a cop at her door. That Penta character missed two of us and he just might want another go at somebody when he finds out what happened.”
Pat picked up the phone in Velda’s office and relayed the message. When he hung up he said to me, “What are your plans?”
“Hell, I’m going to Anthony Cica’s apartment with you.”
“Listen, Mike ...”
“You don’t want me to go alone, do you?”
“Man, you’re a real pisser,” Pat said.
Outside it was barely raining. It was more like the sky was spitting at us. It was ending up the way it had started. Bad, real bad.
Pat had an unmarked car at the curb and we drove across town and headed south on Second Avenue. The pavements were slick, brightly alive with neon reflections and the broad streaks of dimmed headlights. The weather meant nothing to the people who lived here. They never were out in it long enough to annoy them. Pat didn’t bother with his red light, simply moving in and out of the stream of yellow cabs and occasional cars with automatic precision.
Both of us stayed pretty deep in our thoughts until I mentioned, “You could have had one of the detectives do this.”
“Don’t get hairy on me, pal. I’m not letting you alone on any primary investigation.”
“You’re investigating a corpse, not a murder suspect: What the hell could I do?”
The car in front of us hit the brakes and Pat swore at the driver and cut to the left. “I don’t know what you could do, Mike. There’s no telling what’s ever going to happen with you. There’s something that hangs over you like a magnet that pulls all the crazies right to your door.”
“No crazy did this.”
“Any killer is crazy,” he stated.
“Maybe, but some are more deliberate than others.”
Pat slowed and turned left, checked the numbers on the buildings when he could find one, then counted down to the tenement he was looking for. Hardly anybody in this area owned a car and whoever did wouldn’t park it on the street. We parked behind a stripped wreck of an old Buick and got out of the car.
A lot of years ago they talked of condemning areas like this but never got around to it. One by one the buildings lost any rental benefits and were abandoned by their owners. Here and there were a few that somebody had renovated enough to warrant having paying tenants as long as they didn’t mind sharing the space with roaches and rats.
We went up the sandstone stoop and pushed through the scarred wooden doors. The vestibule light in the ceiling was protected by a wire cage, a forty-watter that turned everything a sickly yellow. As usual, the brass mailbox doors were all sprung open, each one with a cheap paper circular stuck in it. Scrawled on the top of the brass frame were names in black marker ink. The middle two were half rubbed out. Anthony Cica was the one who had the top floor.