The bartender showed up behind her. His expression was hard to read, but not impossible. Amusement flicked on his lips. That was a hint of a smile, all right. And reacting with even a hint of satisfaction at the sight of somebody who’s just been hit by a car, that isn’t normal. That isn’t typical. That sucked even more than usual for human behavior.
The bartender put a hand on her shoulder, supportive or pretending to be, and she patted the hand.
Was that redheaded hostess in the middle of two men? Such triangles can have their violent aspects. Women far less good-looking than Sheila Who’s-it have stirred up a shitload of harm without meaning to.
Pat came up to the little group supporting Colby, falling in next to me, and held up his badge in its leather fold, saying, “I’m a police officer. Captain Chambers.” He quickly took their names and jotted them in the notebook. Then he handed both Wall Street gents a card and asked for theirs. He would be in touch soon.
“I’ll take care of reporting this,” he told them. “Can anyone here say what make that vehicle was?”
The two gents shook their heads and Colby ignored the question, busy with his headache.
“Just a foreign job,” I said. “Ferrari maybe.”
One of the Wall Street guys, thinking it over, said, “Ferrari, yes — definitely.”
The other one was flagging a cab, and then they were piling Colby carefully in back and they took off.
Pat, hands on his hips, watched the cab drive away. “That guy is lucky to be alive.”
“Yeah.”
“Five’ll get you ten he’s a concussion case.”
“Yeah.”
He frowned at me. “Something bugging you, Mike?”
“Don’t know. Not sure.”
“Come on, buddy. Spill.”
I sighed. It was colder now and I snugged the trenchcoat collars up. “Just seemed a little... off to me.”
Pat’s grin was a scoffing thing. “Right. The guy intentionally stepped out in front of a speeding Jaguar, why? To get his jollies?”
“I don’t know why. And don’t know that he did. And that was a Ferrari.”
He shook his head. “You have to be the most suspicious son of a bitch I ever knew.”
“Really? How often am I wrong when I am?”
He didn’t have an answer to that. He asked me if I needed a lift and I said yes. On the way to my place, I said damn near nothing. My mind was busy replaying what I’d seen, and wondering why it felt wrong somehow.
Chapter Two
Velda and I lived in the same apartment building, but in separate digs on separate floors. We were a couple in every way except a diamond ring and a marriage certificate, but part of me was set in my bachelor ways with my own quirky mode of doing things.
For instance, I usually only spent the night with her on weekends. That was our wacko way of keeping work and play separate. And even then I would go down to my own pad to shower and shave, then make a breakfast for both of us, and she’d come down and join me.
Weekdays, she had her own schedule, heading to the office early, catching a bus. I would sometimes walk, sometimes run the ten blocks to the Hackard Building, changing out of sweats into fresh clothes I kept at the office. Certain mornings I worked out at Bing’s Gym, taking a cab there and, later, to the office. It all had a rhythm, a regularity to it, that seemed random unless you were keeping track.
What never (or anyway rarely) changed was Velda getting in at the office on the eighth floor of the Hackard before me. She would get the coffee going (Dunkin’ Donuts brand, the only way to fly) and organize any materials or matters that needed going over by either or both of us — client phone calls, insurance reports, letters, invoicing, bill-paying, appointments that took me out of the office, the routine stuff that doesn’t make it into these write-ups.
My job was to pick up fresh Danish at the little restaurant around the corner. I would bring two, eat one and a half, and Velda would gorge herself on the remaining half. Like I told that redheaded hostess at Pete’s the night before, my secretary/partner was watching her figure.
And what a figure.
This morning, like so many mornings when I came in through the pebbled glass door that said MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS, I was suspicious that Velda had heard my footfall in the hall and assumed the position, bending over to access a lower drawer of her file cabinet, presenting that world class fanny of hers for my inspection and delight. Her attire this morning was typical — a black pencil skirt and a pale blue silk blouse.
“Good morning, Mike,” she said, without even looking.
“How do you know I’m not that guy who came in and crowned you not long ago,” I said, depositing the bag of Danish on the little table under the window at left where the coffee maker bubbled. “He put you in the hospital, remember?”
She stood and, a file folder in hand, smiled at me as I climbed out of the Burberry (but not cashmere) coat and walked back toward the door to hang it and my Dobbs hat in the closet.
“Don’t you remember, boss?” she replied smoothly. “You killed that son of a bitch.”
She rarely used terms of endearment at work. Separating business and pleasure, like I said.
“I remember, doll,” I said, “and it was a fucking pleasure.”
I did use terms of endearment at the office.
I went over, got myself some coffee — she had a cup already poured — and doctored mine with milk and sugar. Then I put my Danish and a half on one paper plate and her half on the other, and delivered both to her desk, where she was heading with the folder.
Velda had come to work for me within a few months of my opening this office — in this very space; it had been remodeled but still looked like it was 1952. You could almost say the same about Velda. She was near my age but looked fifteen years younger. Maybe twenty. Guys half her years goggled at her in the street, and it didn’t make me jealous, just proud.
She was tall, even in the flats she wore at work. Her raven hair was cut in a style-defying, shoulder-brushing pageboy that had auburn highlights in it now, her big brown eyes set off by light brown eye shadow, the dark long eyelashes needing no help from Maybelline, her lush lips glossed a sultry burgundy. That classical hourglass shape was supported by long legs, muscular in the dancer’s sense, and full high breasts on loan from the young Jane Russell.
“You know what I love?” she asked.
“Me?”
She was gliding behind her desk, opposite the entry of an outer office just big enough to accommodate some reception chairs on either side and our little coffee and snacks table under the left-hand window. Behind her desk and to the left a little was the door to my inner sanctum.
“What I love,” she said, nodding to the client’s chair opposite her, “is reading something fresh and new and exciting about you in the paper. Something you haven’t shared with me. You know how I adore surprises.”
She was pushing this morning’s Daily News at me, open to page three, already turned so that I could read it. After all, she already had.
The headline across the top of the tabloid page, the copy taking up a third of the page, was WALL STREET UP-AND-COMER STRUCK DOWN. Two photos of Vincent Colby — a close-up portrait shot and a candid of him and some society gal at a gala event — accompanied the article.
I set my coffee cup on Colby’s puss. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
She wiggled a finger with a burgundy-painted nail at the paper. “You’re an eyewitness, quoted and identified.”
“Right. I’m that fabled innocent bystander you hear so much about.”