Don't Look Behind You (3 page)

She heard me, glanced around and stood up quickly, almost having the decency to blush. Almost.

I said, “Didn’t anybody ever warn you about picking up the soap in the shower, doll?”

“A guy could knock,” she said.

“And then a guy would miss the sweetest surprises.” I pushed the door shut. “Besides, I’m a true connoisseur of the female form.”

“I noticed.”

“I think of it as living erotic art.”

Her mouth pursed into an amused kiss. “Do you now?”

I tossed my hat on her desk, slung my hip on the edge and picked up my mail. “Anything come in?”

Velda tugged her skirt down, got back behind her desk and said, “A couple of bills, two checks and a referral from the Smith-Torrence Agency.”

“Referral, huh?”

“It’s in that stack there.”

I sorted the envelopes and fingered out the agency one. “What’s with Smitty, anyway, calling me in? He knows I don’t handle auditing cases.”

“Well, read it and see.”

I yanked out the letter and glanced at it. “Hell, it’s six pages long and starts with his latest fishing trip. I wouldn’t want to read about my own fishing trip. Brief me.”

Velda reached out, took the letter and selected the last page. “Smith-Torrence has a request for the kind of thing
they
don’t handle. Seems one Leif Borensen has security needs.”

Sitting perched where I’d been when Woodcock came in yesterday, I glanced back at her and asked, “Where do I know that name from?”

“You got me,” she said with a shrug. “I never heard it before, and haven’t had time to run a check.”

“Don’t bother. If I decide to take this, Smitty will fill me in. Just give me the basics, baby.”

She shrugged again. “Borensen’s somebody with money who’s getting married. He wants security in attendance at his fiancée’s bridal shower. It’s at the Waldorf.”

I made a face. “If it’s a female shindig, you should take the gig.”

Velda shrugged again. “Smitty says he needs a security man. I’d never pass the physical.”

“Truer words.”

She flipped a hand. “Anyway, if we’re talking high society, the gifts could be worth a small fortune and the gals in attendance might be swimming in jewelry, and not the paste variety. My guess is that we should both be working it.”

Like I said, Velda was no mere secretary. She was a full partner in this firm. Some day I’d make her a full partner period.

I swiftly scanned the paragraphs she indicated and let out a snort of disgust. “Why pass this on to me? If this guy Borensen wants to make a show of it, he’ll want uniformed guards. Burns or Pinkerton make those scenes. I’ll look like a damn clown in that circle.”

She shook her head and grinned at me. “Quit being touchy about your obvious lack of class. If you’d read the letter, you’d see that the client doesn’t want to be ostentatious. He just wants somebody handy to avoid pilfering by the hotel staff and in the unlikely event of a robbery. Nothing you haven’t done before.”

I said, “Back when I was scratching out a living, maybe.”

“You’re not all that rich yet.”

“Balls.”

“See what I mean about your lack of class? Anyway, Smitty’s doing you a favor.” She nodded toward the bullet hole in the wall behind her, and gestured toward the faint red smear across the way, made by Woodcock’s insides. “Your recent surge of publicity gives you a stigma that may be off-putting to a certain breed of client.”

“Where would I be,” I said, “without you to cut me down to size.”

Her smile had something impish in it. “I’m the only person in town who would have taken a bet that you could have wiped that Woodcock character out the way you did—a guy with a gun in his hand, facing you down like that.” Her eyes grew grave. “Listen, Mike, I’m sorry about…”

I swung around so I was sitting on the side edge of the desk now and rested my left hand against the top so I could lean in and face her. “Forget it, kitten.”

“I put you in that spot. I can’t
believe
I left that door unlocked when I left.”

“Your girl friend had a doctor’s appointment and needed your support. You were distracted, and you’re human. I said forget it and I mean forget it.”

She touched my hand. “I appreciate that, Mike. I’m supposed to be as professional as you are, and—”

“Honey, stop. How did that come out, anyway? With your friend, Karen?”

Her big brown eyes were pearled with tears; her lush, red-lipsticked mouth went crinkly with a smile. “It was benign. She’s all in the clear.”

“That’s great. That’s fantastic to hear.”

The emotional moment over, Velda smirked up at me. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me how this played out.”

“I should be dead,” I admitted. “He was a contract man with a long list of kills. Somebody paid him to lay me out, but he got chatty and gave me a window.”

I told her the rest of the story, including what Pat had come up with on Mr. Woodcock, formerly of Chicago, formerly not shot to shit.

When I finished, her brow creased with suspicion and she said, “Mike—are you into something I don’t know about?”

I shook my head.

Her eyes narrowed. “Then… any ideas what this could be?”

“Not a one.”

“You wouldn’t kid a girl.”

“Sure I would. But I’m not.”

She gave me a humorless smile. “Well, you don’t seem very damn worked up about it.”

“That’s close to what Pat said.” I picked a loose cigarette from my coat pocket and held a match to it.

“I wish you hadn’t started that up again,” she said with a mild frown.

“What, smoking? You think
this
is what’s gonna kill Mike Hammer? You shouldn’t have told me I was getting a paunch. These coffin nails are my diet pills.”

“It does seem like it helped fake out that hitman. A glass ashtray in the head can daze a person.”

“Damn straight.” I blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling, then said, “A lot of guys would pay to have me dead sooner than cigs can make me that way, kiddo. Some I helped send up might be out by now and getting the loot together to pay for the job. A relative of somebody I knocked off could feel it’s his duty to take care of me before he kicked his own pail over. Maybe it’s a longtime grudge deal. Hell, I don’t know and I don’t give much of a damn. I’m no kid any more, and if there’s any survival pattern needed here, I picked up on it a long time ago. This is a pretty stinking goddamn world when you consider our end of the business, but if somebody wants to pay to bump me, then he’d better have one piss-pot of money to put on the line.”

She was slowly shaking her head. “You’re getting jaded, Mike.”

“No. Just a seasoned professional, sugar.”

“You don’t fool me.”

“What do you mean?”

She grinned at me. “You don’t give much of a damn, huh? You aren’t going to find out who hired this? You’re not going to settle the score? What great man was it that said, ‘Balls?’” She shook her head some more and the sleek black locks danced. “You and that damn .45 of yours.”

“Pat said something like that, too.”

“When are you going to grow up,” she asked, just a little cross, “and stop playing cops and robbers?”

“I thought it was cowboys and Indians.”

“Either way, what will you be when you finally grow up?”

“The master. And you can be the mistress.”

“I’m that already.”

“Then why do you blush when I see those legs of yours climbing all the way to heaven?”

Her chin came up. “Because ‘mistress’ is a thankless role. Because a marriage license isn’t expensive.”

“Why buy a cow when milk’s so cheap?”

“Sweet talker. If you knew what I was saving for you, for the really
big
night? You wouldn’t be so damn vulgar.”

“Tell me. Maybe I’ll spring for that license.”

She rose from the chair and came up into my arms, that big, lovely woman with the startling pageboy hair that shimmered in crazy black-chestnut colors, and let me feel all of her against me and then she whispered in my ear what she had in mind for me, some day.

Some night.

I cocked my head back. “Now who’s being vulgar?”

“I am,” she said. “But it takes real bait to land a big fish.”

Then she did that thing with her mouth when she kissed me, like she was slowly, sensuously trying to twist my lips off my puss, that left me feeling turned inside out.

“Let’s go in my office,” I said.

“Dictation?”

“Something like that.”

“This time I’ll lock that door.…”

* * *

Marion Coulter Smith was an ex-arson squad cop who would likely belt you in the mouth if you called him by his first name.

Fifteen years ago he retired and teamed up with Jules Torrence, a lawyer with a C.P.A. certificate, and formed an investigative firm specializing in industrial accounts with offices in one of the high-end steel-and-glass mausoleums on Sixth Avenue in the heart of the computer district.

It had taken age and business demands to tie Smitty to a desk, and pour him into a three-hundred-dollar suit; but any excuse was good enough to get him in a bull session about the old days or fire up his eyes when the topic got around to crime.

The balding bulldog kept popping open cans of beer from a little fridge in the corner and passing them across his desk to keep me placated if not plastered while I detailed the shoot-out in my office, and the squirming dance the politicians wound up doing, to keep me cooled down enough not to throw any heat back at them.

When I finished, he said, “Damn, you young guys have all the luck. I haven’t had
that
kind of fun in I can’t remember when.”

I about snorted Blue Ribbon out my nose. “Fun? Come off it, Smitty—when the bad guys zero in that close, it’s no fun at all.”

“Bullshit, Mike. You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it.”

“Killing a guy.”

“That’s what I said.”

“What makes you think so?”

Broad shoulders on a hard body gone somewhat flabby shrugged elaborately. “It’s just that you have no conscience… anyway, not that the rest of us could notice.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “I got a conscience like anybody else.”

“Maybe you got a conscience,” he said, with a tilt of his head, “but not like anybody else. How many people have you shot, anyway?”

“Shot and killed, or just shot?”

“Just the fatalities, man.”

I waved that off. “Enough.”

“See? A man with a conscience would know the number. How many women have you been with?”

I grinned at him. “
Not
enough.”

We both laughed at that.

Then I put my smile away and said, “Anybody I took down had it coming, Smitty. People think I’m some kind of vigilante or executioner or some damn thing. But it’s always been a matter of survival with me.”

Smitty’s eyes glinted. “Your style of survival, Mike, isn’t the usual kind. Maybe that’s what makes cops tick—them and firemen and other people in high-risk professions. Anybody can survive if they want to hide out in a cave all the time, never stick their nose out, let alone their neck. It takes a different breed to jump into an occupation that deliberately lowers the survival rate.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe hell.” His finger pointed at me past the beer can in his mitt. “When a guy goes looking for trouble, he can always find it. Put yourself in the trouble spots, and it will find you.”

“Is that right.”

“It’s right. Not just anybody can pull the trigger, even when the gun’s loaded and their life is in danger. But with you, it’s instinctive. And you even get a kick out of it. A real charge.”

I took a long pull of the beer. “Quit psychoanalyzing me, Marion. It’s not your specialty.”

Me razzing him with his name only made him grin broader.

“Maybe I’m just envying you from behind this desk.” He swigged at his beer. “Anyway, society needs your type around. I’d just like to know why, when you seem well past your… youthful indiscretions, shall we say? Why somebody ups and puts out a contract on you.”

“You got me, brother.”

He was studying me through eyes set in pouches of fat. “Well, if
you
don’t know why, then there’s something awfully off-kilter about the notion. If getting you out of the way were a necessity, I could see it. But if somebody is playing a game, even if it’s a game of some old grudge, they’re taking a long chance… You sure you don’t have anything big shaking?”

I finished the beer, put the empty on the desk and waved off another he was trying to force on me. “Maybe it was just mistaken identity.”

“Guy stakes your office out for weeks and… oh. You’re just rattling my chain.”

“Something like that. You don’t have to look so damn pleased that somebody tried to knock me off.”

The bulldog puss split in a smile. “Why not? You make interesting entertainment for us put-out-to-pasture types. Anyway, as far as psychology goes, I’ve often wondered about you guys with no consciences.”

“How about entertaining
me
?” I asked. “With this referral?” I tossed the letter he had sent me on the blotter in front of him. “And you can skip the fishing trip.”

Smitty leaned back in his chair, grinned, shrugged, and said, “Good pay, easy work. We’re just not set up for it. Play watchdog for an afternoon and get a grand for your trouble.”

“For a grand,” I said, sitting forward, “you can’t cover the place yourself?”

He gave me a humorless grunt. “Ha. With the dough we make, that’d be a tax liability. Anyway, I could have shoved it off on one of our own legmen, but we don’t like ’em moonlighting when we pay their salaries… and besides, I thought it would be a hoot having you drop around for a briefing. A live one like you perks things up, once in a while.” He paused and fingered a cigar out of the silver humidor on the window sill behind him. “So, Mike? Want the job?”

“Not particularly, but I could use the grand. What’s the pitch?”

Smitty bit off the end of the cigar, lit it and coughed on the fumes he sucked in. “Leif Borensen. Ever hear of him?”

I frowned in thought. “It’s a familiar name somehow. Did I see it on the end credits of a TV show as a producer or something?”

“Bingo. He’s a local boy who went to L.A. and made good, twenty years or so ago. He was a lucky land speculator out there, picked up shares in several corporations on trading deals and one of them was a supposedly defunct production company. He got hold of some sharp production people who put it back on its feet and started making some cheap pictures—you know, monsters, juvies, sci-fi—and then made half-hour syndicated series for TV. He’s not exactly a Zanuck, more a one-man studio, but he’s successful enough… and most important, he pays his bills.”