Don't Look Behind You (22 page)

I let him have half a grin. “Come on, buddy, you know I’m a solo act.”

“Yeah? Tell that to Velda.”

“Okay, so I sometimes work with a beautiful doll. You couldn’t pass the physical. Hey, I gave you the Dr. Beech lead, which you and your army of brilliant scientific types can handle much quicker and faster than an old-time flatfoot like me ever could. You’re welcome, by the way, for all the cases you’ll close.”

His gaze dripped of suspicion. “What are you going to be doing?”

“Trying another route. A shorter one.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “But if I don’t make it, buddy—if our killer turns out to be a badder ass than yours truly—promise me you’ll find this bastard. But it’ll take a hell of a lot of digging.”

“That’s our specialty,” Pat said. His smile wasn’t big, but it had plenty of friendship in it. “But don’t die on me just yet, you big slob.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I started heading down the stairs.

He called after me: “What
are
you going to do, Mike? What have you got in mind, to beat me and the NYPD to this guy?”

“Nothing much,” I said up to him. “Just giving the bastard some bait.”

“What kind of bait?”

“Me.”

* * *

At the office, I called Velda from the phone on her own desk.

I said, “Have you cheated on me with Billy Batson yet?”

“You’d deserve that, you louse. If you don’t give me the go-ahead to get out of this place, they’ll be locking me up next door in their Laughing Academy.”

“Now, easy, kitten. This thing is really heating up. I need you to stay put and keep an eye on our little pal.”

“Damnit, Mike, don’t squeeze me out like this!”

“You have to give me room on this one, doll.”

“You mean, like, I have to give you enough rope?”

I removed anything light from my voice; nothing was left but a deadly edge. “Listen to me, Velda. This guy is on the rampage, and he may be the craziest, smartest son of a bitch we’ve ever taken on.”

Her voice went hushed. “Why, what’s happened now, Mike?”

I brought her quickly up to speed on everything that had gone down since she and I last spoke.

“That poor kid,” she said about Marcy, the sadness in her voice revealing her depth of feeling despite never having met the girl. “Oh, Mike. Somebody’s got to die for that. And die very hard.”

“I’m on it. But you need to stay right where you are. Both you and Billy could be in danger. The killer is tying off loose ends, so you need to stay on your guard. I would give decent odds that he may try to strike at me through you.”

“Mike, that’s not going to happen. Not with me here in this damn fortress…”

“The Alamo was a fortress, too, kid.”

“Actually it was a church. And I wish you’d let me do more in this, Mike, than just pray for you.”

But she told me she’d do as I asked, and that she loved me. I echoed the last, then hung up, hoping I’d live through this to see her again.

I figured my next move was to corner Joey Pep again, and tell him his high-priced hitman had knocked off an innocent girl last night. Make him see that his so-called Specialist had gone off the rails and needed stopping, right now. Maybe Pepitone would see the wisdom of that and lead me to the bastard. Or maybe I’d have to give Joey a taste of what his bouncers got.

So what if the Bonettis got pissed at me over it? I’d had mob trash pissed at me before. Sure, they knew where to find me. But I knew where to find them.

If memory served, the Peppermint Lounge opened at eleven a.m., typical for a Manhattan bar, but also to accommodate the tourist crowd who hadn’t heard the twist craze was over. Pepitone still had his office in the backroom, so from my desk phone I called over there and asked for him. He wasn’t in yet. Usually showed around one. You wanna leave a message? I said no thanks, and I didn’t leave a name, either.

I’d barely hung up when the phone rang. I answered and heard Pat’s voice, hushed yet anxious.

“Mike, can you get over here?”

There was nothing official in his tone.

“What is it now?” I asked. “Did that kid find somebody in a mug book?”

“Just get over here, Mike. Please.”

Please
, yet!

“Okay,” I said, hung up, grabbed my hat and trenchcoat and headed out into an afternoon where the sky had deepened from gray to black, like God was in a bad mood. Maybe He was hungry, too, because it sure as hell sounded like His stomach was growling.

Pat’s office door was open. He was in his shirtsleeves and a loosened tie behind his desk, and he looked haggard. He waved me in and said, “Shut it.”

I did, then went over, tossed my hat on his desk, and slung myself into the chair opposite him. He already had coffee waiting. I sipped mine. Milk and sugar. Perfect.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”

“I’d like your help.”

“Any time, buddy.”

He sat forward, his voice soft yet with an underlying edge. “I need you to back me up on something. Something that’s a little… dicey. Something more along, you know—
your
lines.”

I was interested, but couldn’t resist needling him a little. “What happened to ‘by the book?’”

His smile was rumpled and maybe a shade embarrassed. “We’ll leave it open on my desk. Face down.”

I nodded. “So spill.”

His eyes narrowed. “We had that kid in here for an hour. Looking at mug books. He came up with nothing. I was grasping at straws, I admit. So I showed him a wire photo the LAPD sent me just two hours ago.”

“Why did the LAPD do that?”

He leaned back in his swivel chair, the gray-blue eyes troubled but steady. “You know, Mike, you’re not the only detective in this town.”

“Well, it’s a big town.” I was lighting up a Lucky. “Bound to be a few. Maybe even some on this department.”

“Generous of you to admit.”

I waved out the match. “Let me guess. You’ve been contacting big city police departments, chatting up friends working homicide, guys you met at police conventions maybe. And you ran the profile past them.”

Something flashed in his eyes. “What profile would that be?”

I blew a smoke ring, feeling cocky. “Guys who had small, seemingly legit businesses, like one-man insurance agencies or travel agent set-ups or maybe accountants, who got pulled in on suspicion of a killing, but walked. Guys whose businesses were legit but barely making it, and that just might be fronts for contract killers to hide behind between jobs. Guys who, finally, booked it out of town when the cops were getting on to them.”

He gave me half a smile and a whole laugh. “Okay, so I’m not the only detective in town, either. You’re right, Mike. I wanted to see who else our hitman’s hitman might have brought in to join his stable of hired guns.”

“And you found a possible. Or rather the LAPD did.”

He nodded emphatically. “But we may have caught a bigger fish than I figured.”

The wire photo he handed over to me showed, in typical front and side views, a blank-eyed, square-faced guy with short dark hair and regular features. Name: Dennis Clark, thirty-five, six one, two hundred pounds. He had the bland, clean-cut good looks of a Madison Avenue ad man. Native of Southern California.

“This goes back five years,” I said.

Pat nodded again. “The profile is the same, but Dennis Clark has been in Manhattan, running a small insurance agency, for just that long.”

“Not a recent import.”

“Not at all. And if he’s hiding, it’s in plain sight. Took me about three minutes to get his home address.”

I sat forward. “So maybe this is our man. The top of the food chain.”

An eyebrow went up. “I think he is. And there’s more than just theory behind that.”

I tossed him back the wire photo. “You mean, that kid Shack identified him?”

“Well… yes and no.”

“You might want to break that down.”

Pat sipped some coffee, shrugged. “It was ‘yes’ at first. Kid made the guy. He had to study it a while, and of course that wire photo like all wire photos is crappy quality. But then he started nodding and tapped it with his finger and said it was the man he saw go into the girl’s apartment. He was sure it was him.”

“So why aren’t you out there picking Dennis Clark up?”

His smile had a bitter twist. “Because when I told that kid that we’d be bringing Clark in for a show-up, he got nervous. Started asking questions, like, ‘Will he know that I identified him?’ And I had to tell him, yes, eventually, if this made it to trial, he would have to testify. He’d have to point Clark out in the courtroom as the man he saw go into Marcy Bloom’s last night. That is, if Clark indeed was who the kid saw. We hadn’t even had a show-up yet.”

I was ahead of him. “And that’s where the ‘no’ half of ‘yes and no’ comes in. The kid suddenly didn’t recognize the suspect. Got unsure of himself, then finally said, ‘I don’t think that’s the guy,’ or words to that effect. And hustled his skinny scared ass out of here.”

“Like they say in the Village,” Pat commented bitterly, “it’s a bummer.”

“It’s a bummer, all right. The kid was nuts about that girl, but it’s not hard to rationalize saving your own skin. Helping haul her killer to justice doesn’t bring the girl back.”

Pat pounded a fist on his desk. “If that hippie hadn’t retracted his ID, I’d be over at Clark’s apartment house right now, with men on the street and all over that building. And I’d be going in there heavy and taking him down. Personally.”

“Arresting him, you mean.”

Pat frowned at me. “If he cooperates. If he doesn’t… he goes down all the way. He goes down hard.”

“Now you’re talking.”

He sat forward, frustration tightening his face. “Only, Mike—I can’t do that. I don’t even have enough to bring the S.O.B. in for questioning. All I have is a wire photo from L.A. that
might
back up a theory I have that could just be a wild hair up my ass. I have a witness ID that’s been withdrawn, worthless. What if I go there, and bring Dennis Clark in, and I’m wrong? Well, I’m getting a little old to pound a beat on Staten Island, and too young for early retirement.”

My grin must have been horrible; I was glad I didn’t have to look at it. “Old buddy, you are screwed sideways. You really don’t have enough to bring him in. You don’t even have enough to
talk
to him. Anything that came of it would get tossed out by some holier-than-thou judge.”

“You’re wrong, Mike.”

“I am?”

“It would never make it past the D.A.” He leaned both elbows on his desk and looked right at me. “But what if I told
you
about all this? Off-duty. Over beers, maybe. Since we’re old friends and you’re involved in the case.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“And you tell me you’re going over there to shake the truth out of this new suspect. I of course would tell you not to, try to stop you, and finally insist if you’re determined to talk to Mr. Clark—as a part of your private investigation into the case—that I have to come along.”

I considered it, then said, “You might get in a little hot water over that. But not boiling.”

“What do you think, Mike?”

“I think… what are we waiting for?”

* * *

The somewhat pricey neighborhood in Upper Manhattan called Washington Heights was home to seemingly countless apartment buildings, Dennis Clark’s among them. The nine stories of rust-brick on the corner of West 187th Street and Cabrini bore a stark prewar modernity, though the inset twin front doors with their brass-trim and geometric designs, surrounded by panels of pink marble and two square windows above, formed the mouth of a startled Art-Deco face that gaped at your approach.

We took my car, since Pat was supposedly tagging along with me, though it was actually vice versa. It wouldn’t seem like he was trying to keep me out of trouble if he drove me here. We snagged a nice close parking place, which was a small miracle and a relief, as the sky looked as if it were made of billowing black smoke from a terrible fire, though rain was what it promised.

There was no doorman outside and no sign-in post inside, just a small lobby with a marble floor and more ’30s-modern trimmings. We walked to a bank of two elevators where Pat punched UP. In our trenchcoats and hats, we looked no more like cops than guys in ten-gallon numbers and chaps did cowboys. Behind us, through the closed doors, came a sudden machine-gun downpour.

“We just made it,” I said.

Pat barely noticed. He had the expression of a father driving his thirteen-year-old sheltered son to a dance with a fifteen-year-old girl wearing too much lipstick.

“I want him alive,” Pat said, staring me down. “Understand, Mike? Alive.”

“Yeah, yeah, breathing and everything. Christ, Pat, we don’t even know for sure he’s the guy and you’ve got me shooting him already.”

“Since when were you fussy?”

Despite this, on the self-service elevator, Pat got out his .38 service revolver and shoved it in his right raincoat pocket. I did the same with my .45.

Clark’s apartment was on the eighth floor, a few doors to the left of where the elevator deposited us. Pat took the lead. He was poised to knock when I whispered, “Take no chances, buddy.”

Pat nodded, and put his back to the wall nearest the knob and I did the same to the other, each of us with a hand in our right pockets gripping a gun. He reached his left fist over and knocked.

We heard movement within.

“Mr. Clark,” Pat said, loud but in an even, unthreatening manner. “NYPD Homicide. We’d like to speak to you, sir.”

A few seconds passed, and Pat seemed about to say something else when the flurry of bullets punched through the wood of the door, accompanied by mini-bursts of thunder that the sky might have envied.

Though our backs were to the wall, literally and maybe figuratively, we both ducked down anyway.

“Next time,” I said tightly, “skip the ‘Homicide.’”

“Point well-taken.”

We both heard something in there.

A window was being forced up and open, confirmed by the abrupt loudness of a raging storm that had been muffled till now.

“He’s going out,” I said to Pat, across the bullet-puckered doorway.