He was squinting at me again, or maybe that was a wince. “What got you curious? It was an accident, wasn’t it? Not that I wouldn’t like to get a hold of that son of a bitch!”
He demonstrated with clawed hands. And the eyes weren’t squinting now.
“Yeah,” I said with a grin, “I been there. You may have heard that I’m kind of known for settling grudges in my own way.”
He smiled. “Are they exaggerating?”
“Understating. Look, I’m told I have a nose for certain things — murder, for example.”
“I don’t seem to be dead, Mike.”
“Well, this snout of mine can also sniff out attempted murder. Do you have anybody in your life who might like to see you turned into a stain on the pavement?”
He risked a small shrug. “I suppose I have enemies. Work and private life alike. But not that kind of enemy. No. Not at all.”
“Well. You think about it. Just don’t think yourself into an even worse headache. But if there’s something I can do for you, say the word. I can leave a card if you like.”
He grinned; even in this lighting, it was dazzling. “Are you sure you aren’t ambulance chasing?”
I grinned back. “Pretty sure. You mind if I ask you something?”
“Won’t know till you do.”
“Out in the hall, I ran into the hostess from Pete’s — Sheila Ryan. Are you two... anything?”
He started to shake his head and then the pain of that stopped him. “No. We’re just pals. I’m a regular and she’s a cute kid. Joke around. Flirt. You know how it is.”
I worked up a lascivious grin. “I just figured, guy like you, good-looking, with all that bread, and here she’s just working at a mid-range restaurant...”
He frowned. “Figured what?”
“I don’t know. That she might be on the make. I know I wouldn’t be immune to that.”
“To what?”
“That ripe a piece of tail.”
Colby jerked upright and both of his hands made fists out of themselves. “Watch what you say, Hammer! Or I’ll feed you that tough-guy reputation one tooth at a time!” He grabbed my card off the nightstand and flipped it at me. “Stick that up your ass, you fucking prick!”
I raised both hands. “No offense meant.”
I slipped out into the hall, shutting the door behind me, grinning to myself.
“Thought so,” I said.
Chapter Three
The offices of Colby, Daltree & Levine, near Wall Street, took up the thirty-seventh floor of a glass and concrete tower, just another giant tombstone marking, some would say, the graveyard that was Manhattan’s Financial District — a place where at times it seemed that integrity had gone to die.
Just two years ago the Wall Street boom had gone bust, thanks to corporate raiders, leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, and especially insider trading, where high finance had become street corner deals where cash-filled suitcases were passed from one dirty white-collar hand to another.
Though several weeks had passed, I’d been summoned to the Colby firm, retaining enough curiosity about that hit-and-run I’d witnessed to accept the invitation with neither hesitation nor query.
After taking a cab from the Hackard Building, I signed in at the Liberty Exchange lobby with a uniformed guy about my age who seemed even more surprised than I did to find my name on the approved list.
I went on up.
Soon I was strolling down one of several aisles that separated rows of jammed-together desks, making my way through this many-windowed Yuppie warren as unnoticed as a towel attendant at a Turkish bath. Computer monitors cast their aquarium-green glow on at least one hundred brokers and sales assistants (almost exclusively male, in phone headsets and suspenders and no jacket), nobody ever seeming to pause to take in a panoramic harbor view that started at the Brooklyn Bridge and extended to Governors Island.
They were working the phones, making cold call after cold call, colder than the gray sky they were ignoring out all those windows as they projected confidence and success in this vast, soulless, drop-ceilinged boiler room, worker bees basking in the same kind of fluorescent lighting that Bellevue dispensed to its patients.
On the west side of the floor was a row of glassed-in offices penning up slightly older individuals with designer suspenders and two-hundred-buck haircuts.
These offices had Danish modern furniture and a couple of green-glow monitors on separate low-slung tables behind desks the size of knocked-over refrigerators with surfaces that somehow managed to be cluttered and orderly at the same time. I wandered in that direction, all the phone chatter around me like the buzzing of stirred-up hornets.
As I neared the row of window-walled workstations, a familiar face behind the glass of the larger central office landed on mine. Vincent (for heaven’s sake, don’t call him Vince) was on the phone, not surprisingly, and — in addition to the two behind him — he had an extra computer monitor right on his desk. Like his minions, he was in shirt sleeves and suspenders, but his probably cost plenty more.
That was the world we lived in now. Designer suspenders.
Young Colby frowned at me. It was damn near a scowl.
I smiled a little, put a touch of smirk in it. Gave him a tiny tickle-the-air wave, like I’d spotted a child I knew playing in a park. Well, hadn’t I?
I took a right to go down a short hallway tucked behind a wall of photocopy machines. Here were offices you couldn’t see into, with various executive vice presidents in them, assuming their doors weren’t lying — the older breed of execs like those who’d accompanied young Colby to Pete’s Chophouse. The hall led to a receptionist — a forty-something, severe but beautiful brunette in a gray tailored suit, cream-color silk blouse, and black-framed mannish glasses. She had cheekbones that could cut glass.
Despite Velda’s attempts to make a respectable-looking man of business out of me, my non-cashmere Burberry, Dobbs hat-in-hand, and Today’s Man threads failed to impress.
She asked, “May I help you?” like a floorwalker to a shoplifter. Her nameplate said Ms. Stern. Really.
“Your boss is expecting me. Mike Hammer.”
Her manner shifted. She’d been given that name, it was on her list too; but the moniker itself had meant nothing to her. There was a time...
“May I take your coat and hat?” she asked, butter wouldn’t melt.
I nodded, she rose, and I gave them to her.
“Now, if you’ll take a seat,” she said, squeezing out a smile, gesturing to the little row of chairs, “it will be just a few moments.”
In the weeks that had passed since my visit to Vincent Colby at Bellevue, my life — and business — had gone on. The peculiarities of the hit-and-run at Pete’s, and what I was now taking for a love triangle between Colby, Sheila Ryan and whatever that bartender’s name was, continued to linger. And linger for no good reason, as Velda would remind me (ever more impatient) whenever I brought it up.
Then this morning Vincent Colby’s father had called the offices of Michael Hammer Investigations — not this secretary or receptionist, whichever Ms. Stern was, but Vance Colby himself, the president of the firm. Velda had been suitably impressed, so my ice queen here wasn’t the first female today to underestimate me.
And, as promised, in a manner of moments, I was ushered in to a world apart from that bustling boiler room out there. This chamber, with not a computer monitor in sight, might have been a Financial District office fifty years ago. The walls were dark lush wood with gleaming parquet flooring and an occasional Oriental carpet under a high, elaborately-molded ceiling — no acoustic tiles here.