“So are you going on the warpath like Milroy? Will I have two Mike Hammers to deal with this time around?”
“Naw. But I am curious about why anybody on his death bed is worth a knife in the ribs.”
“I don’t have an answer yet.”
“Yeah, and that Milroy character will get the answer right after you find Judge Crater. Maybe I should take an interest.”
“No, Mike... no...”
I got to my feet. “Who would want to kill the Chief at this late date, Pat? What did he ever do in any of his yesterdays to buy what he got today?”
Pat sighed blue smoke. “He was a crusader, the Chief. Before you came along with your one-man war on the Evello outfit, he was the only guy who ever stood up against the mobsters. Put a shitload of ’em away. And before the Knapp Commission, he was the only official in the city to make a real effort at cleaning up the department. He fired and jailed dozens of bent cops, back before the war.”
“So he made enemies.” I slapped my hat on. “Enemies enough to kill him?”
“Oh yeah.”
I was almost out the door when I said, “What took them so long?”
And I took it easy on the glass, shutting it nice and gentle on the puzzled puss of Captain Patrick Chambers.
In the old Hackard Building, in the outer office of the door labeled MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS, my secretary Velda sat behind her desk studying the little key like it unlocked the secrets of life. In this case, the secret of a death was more likely.
She’s a big girl, my Velda, all curves and raven-wing hair in a pageboy that went out of style a long time ago, and to hell with style. She wore a simple pale pink blouse and a short navy skirt that with her in it put to shame anything Frederick’s of Hollywood ever came up with. And she’s my secretary like Watson is Holmes’ family practitioner — she has a PI license and packs a flat little automatic in her purse between her compact and her lipstick.
“Not a safe deposit box,” she said, turning it in tapering fingers with blood-red nails. “No numbers.”
“It’s old,” I said. “Something’s been locked away for a long time. So it’s not a bus station locker. They check those daily.”
“Did he maintain a membership at the police gym? Those lockers would be old enough.”
“Vel, he was eighty-nine. I don’t think he played intramural basketball anymore.”
“Maybe it’s to another metal box. Buried or hidden somewhere.”
“Maybe.”
She hefted it in her palm, up and down, up and down. “A little big to unlock a desk drawer. A little small to unlock a shed.”
“Doesn’t look like a padlock key.”
“No, or a file cabinet key, either. To me, it’s a locker key, but where? Boat club maybe?”
“You got me. He’s been living at a nursing home. Long Island Care Center. We should go out there.”
Velda nodded and got the Long Island book out of a drawer. I stood and perched myself on the edge of her desk. She had the book open and was about to dial when she asked, “But what did the Chief have locked away? Money?”
“Naw. He had something on somebody.”
She frowned. “Evidence? Of a crime? Would he withhold that? You said he was a straight arrow.”
“Straight arrows have been known to make deals with the devil.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors, Mike.”
“Maybe so, but the Chief made a lot of enemies, like Pat said. Why did one of ’em wait so long to take revenge? Whoever it was didn’t cheat the Grim Reaper out of much.”
She nodded, started to dial, then hung up abruptly, her dark eyes flaring.
“Mike, that’s it.”
“What is?”
“It’s evidence. He did have something on somebody. And he must have told that somebody that if anything ever happened to him, this evidence would come out.”
I slipped off the desk. “And for years and years that evidence... a gun, a ledger book, a signed statement... was safely tucked away where it could do no harm.”
She shook a lecturing finger at me. “But then the Chief was marked for death, not by some hit man, but by time and tide.”
I was nodding. “And on his death bed, the Chief would have been fine with that evidence finally catching up with whatever devil he’d made a deal with.”
She was shaking her head, the dark locks bouncing off her shoulders. “But what kind of deal would that be? What kind of crime would a straight shooter like the Chief conceal? Maybe you need to face it, Mike. Maybe he wasn’t the god you thought he was. Maybe he had feet of clay like the rest of us.”
“Clay is what I’ll have on the bottom of my shoes,” I said, “when I walk over the grave of the bastard who knifed him.”
“I can’t top that one,” Velda said with a smirk, and finally dialed that goddamn phone.
Leaving the steel-stone-and-glass tombstones of Manhattan behind, we had a pleasant drive in light traffic out to Long Island. The spring afternoon was so nice that when I spoke to retired Police Sergeant Carl Spooner, he and I sat outside on a cement patio, facing bushes and trees whose leaves shimmered with sunshine. I was in a kind of lawn chair, and the old sarge was in a wheelchair.
We knew each other just a little. He’d been the desk sergeant for a while at the precinct house Pat worked out of maybe twenty years ago. A nod-and-a-wave kind of friendship, not enough to justify a visit to a nursing home in the sticks.
“I bet this is about the Chief,” the sarge said.
He had been big once, but he’d shrunk, swimming in a white shirt and tan slacks, his big shoulders now just massive hunched bookends for a sunken chest. His cheeks were sunken, too, and his nose was like an Indian arrowhead stuck on there. His blue eyes were rheumy but still sharp.
“You should’ve gone for detective,” I said.
“Naw, not me. I was a born desk sergeant. It’s an art, you know. You got to deal with all kinds. Mostly not the cream of the crop, if you get my drift. You know what we used to say? We used to say, it ain’t the heat, it’s the humanity.”
“Yeah, but not a bad gig. Get to rule the roost.”
“Got that right. Where’d that big doll of yours go? The one that reminds me what it was I used to like about women. I saw her come in with you.”
“She’s talking to your head administrator.”
“About the Chief?”
“About the Chief. You and I have something in common, Sarge.”
“What would that be?”
“We were the last two people to see him alive.”
Not counting his killer.
“Is that right?” he said.
I nodded toward the wheelchair. “You went to a lot of trouble to visit him.”
“They got people here to help out. They got a van they drive you around in for doctor appointments and shit.” The big shoulders on the frail body lifted and dropped. “Anyway, the Chief, he was a buddy. You have to say so long to a buddy.”
“You two go back a long way?”
“Naw, not at all. Hell, he was the Chief. We never even met when I was on the job. I mean, I saw him on the stage at functions, handing out medals and such. Shook his hand in a receiving line once. It was out here we got to be buds. Two old coppers stuck in stir together.” He cackled.
“You got close, these last few years?”
“Damn straight. Look around you, Mike. You’ll learn an important lesson.”
“What’s that?”
“A man can live too long. The Chief outlived his two kids and a wife he adored. One of the most important men in the city, reduced to sittin’ around jawin’ with a lowly desk sergeant.”
“Nobody came out to see him?”
“Now and again, a few coppers who served under him. That inspector that worked for him. That captain you used to stop around the precinct house to visit.”