Then Tony’s grip was gone, too-he was busy dealing with twin streams of blood from flared nostrils. Thanks to his hurting knee, Joe was kneeling like he was about to receive communion, but what he got was a roundhouse right hand that turned his mouth into a red foamy thing spitting teeth like seeds and he went down all the way, his hands covering his face with more red squirting between his fingers. Tony was trying to recover, still on his feet but wobbly, his lower face a mask of scarlet. I figured he needed some rest, too, like his pal, and sunk a fist into his gut so deep that puking was his only option. That, and tottering till he fell, doing a nasty belly-flop on the bricks. Joe was holding up red-smeared palms, begging for mercy, or anyway I think he was-you couldn’t make out much from the bubbling froth.
I might consider mercy for Joe, but at the moment I was busy bringing back a foot to kick Tony in the face when the door opened and Johnny C stepped out, his easy smile turning to horror-struck alarm as he saw the bloody mess his fallen angels were making.
“ Don’t, Hammer! You’ll kill him! Please! ”
I didn’t figure a kick in the head would kill the punk, but it might have, and Johnny had said please.
The too-handsome gambling czar rushed over, his eyes white all the way round, making a stark contrast with his head of black Roman curls. He was gesturing with both hands, pleading.
“Ye gods, Hammer! I really just wanted to talk in private! There was no need for this.”
“You should have been more clear,” I said with a shrug, digging out a ruined deck of Luckies and fingering out a semblance of a cigarette. “Anyway, those two shook down my office yesterday. And they handed me my tail. So I handed theirs back.”
“They’re just doing their job!”
“Yeah, that’s what the Nazis said.” I stuffed the rumpled cigarette in my mouth and got it going somehow. “Why have my office tossed, Johnny? What did I ever do to you?”
He sighed. His boys were providing background music with their whimpering. Actually, Joe was weeping. Their boss glanced at them with concern. Maybe he did sleep with them.
Then he turned to me, calm as the spring breeze that was playing with refuse in the alley. “Hammer, I have friends in Sidon… in official circles.”
“No kidding.”
“I heard you were poking around into the Sharron Wesley killing. I have my own interests in that matter.”
I blew smoke at him. “There wasn’t a murder case when I went out there. The dead woman didn’t even turn up till the day after I arrived. Of course, she was dead a week already. Maybe you knew that.”
He shook his head. “No. I had nothing to do with her murder-she was the last person I wanted to see dead. I had reason to believe she’d been holding out on me. That she had a great deal of my money hidden away somewhere.”
I frowned at that. “Didn’t you own the casino together?”
He shook his head. He dug a silver cigarette case and got out his own cigarette. It wasn’t rumpled, but I gave him a light, anyway.
“Sidon was strictly my operation,” he said.
“But it was her place! Her mansion! What happened to the cool million she inherited?”
He drew smoke in through his sly smile. “Oh, a lot of that money went into the set-up, all right. She just didn’t have a piece of it.”
“What the hell did you have on her, Johnny? Evidence that she killed old E.J. Wesley? Or maybe you bought the jurors. Is that it, jury-rigging? Maybe it wasn’t Sharron’s long legs that got her acquitted, but your long green.”
That sly smile turned downright decadent. “Does it matter, Mike? May I call you Mike? I’d like us to be friends.”
He put a bejeweled hand on my shoulder and I picked it off like a gaudy insect that had lit there.
“We’ll keep it friendly,” I allowed. “But I’m particular about choosing my friends. What’s on your mind, Johnny? What the hell was going on out there that has you and Dekkert and the entire Sidon city government doing handstands?”
He thought about those questions for a while. Clearly he was making a decision. He’d said he wanted me to be his friend. But what I thought he really wanted was me as an ally.
I was right.
“Mike,” he said, “you’re probably aware Sharron delivered our weekend take to me, in cash, regularly. We did it discreetly, playing into her reputation as a sort of party girl, and mine as a Romeo.”
And both had been a facade.
“She was never really my ‘moll,’” he said, quietly amused. “She was strictly a bag man, or bag woman, if you prefer. I paid her well. I wasn’t a cruel partner.”
“You weren’t a partner at all. You were her boss.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re right, and that was the problem, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?”
He nodded, and his smile turned into a sour twitch. “She was skimming from me. For how long, I have no damn idea, but she was skimming. I believe she was building a sort of stake that would be enough for her to leave the country, and live comfortably, starting anew, under another name.”
“And out from under your thumb, huh? That makes sense. She wasn’t keeping all the money then-she was giving you enough to fool you, for a while, anyway-but the skim over a period of months, or even a year, that could really add up.”
“Yes. Yes, it could. We’re both lucky, you and I, that Sidon has the corrupt police force it does. A real murder investigation, conducted by the state police, would mean that mansion and those grounds would be turned upside down. My money would be found, and confiscated.”
“Do you think the Sidon cops are wise to Sharron’s money stash?”
He quickly shook his head. “I don’t see how they could be… but they could blunder onto it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “If Dekkert doesn’t know there was a hoard of cash stashed out there, why was he so hot to find out what became of Sharron Wesley? He damn near beat a little beachcomber to death, just because the guy lived close enough to the Wesley place to have seen something.”
Johnny sucked in deep on the cigarette holder, and when he finally exhaled, smoke floated skyward like a new Pope had been picked. “You may be right, Mike. Dekkert may have gotten wise. All the more reason for me to enlist your help.”
“What do you have in mind?”
He leaned closer. He smelled like that hanky. “If you can find the stashed skim money, you can have yourself a fat finder’s fee. Twenty-five percent.”
“You wouldn’t be trying to distract me now, would you, Johnny?”
He scowled. “You know damn well I didn’t kill the Wesley woman! I wanted her alive, to find out where she hid what she stole from me. So your search for her killer will not lead to me.”
Damn. I believed him.
“If you don’t find the money,” he went on, with a casual shrug, “or if someone beats you to it, I will still pay your daily rate.”
“All right,” I said. “Fifty a day. I cover my own expenses.”
“Very generous of you, Mike. We’ll start that rate as of yesterday, as a gesture to make up for what happened at your office. Mea culpa.”
“Yeah. Your culpa, all right.”
That pretty boy mug of his dealt me a seductive, hood-eyed gaze. “Could you help with one other item, Mr. Hammer?”
“Uh, what’s that?”
He nodded toward his two boys, who had managed to get themselves into sitting positions against the side of the building, their legs sticking straight out.
“I’d like to get Joe and Tony to a hospital. Could you help me convey them to my car?”
What the hell-why not?
That took only five minutes, and then I was on my way back to Sidon.
The pieces were coming together now. I didn’t know if I could lay hands on Johnny C’s skim money. But I would soon have a killer in my grasp, or on the end of my rod.
Either way, I’d be squeezing.