Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  More Mike Hammer from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Co-Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tip of the Fedora

  About the Authors

  Mike Hammer Novels

  Also Available from Titan Books

  MURDER, MY LOVE

  A MIKE HAMMER NOVEL

  MORE MIKE HAMMER FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Lady, Go Die!

  Complex 90 King of the Weeds

  Kill Me, Darling

  Murder Never Knocks

  The Will to Kill

  Killing Town

  The Goliath Bone

  The Big Bang (February 2020)

  Masquerade for Murder (March 2020)

  Kiss Her Goodbye (February 2021)

  Murder, My Love: A Mike Hammer Novel

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785655548

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785655555

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2019

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Copyright © 2019 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  FOR ANDREW SUMNER –

  Mike’s man in the UK

  CO-AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Being chosen by Mickey Spillane to complete the surprising number of unfinished manuscripts he left behind is, for me, practically the definition of bittersweet. And it is definitely my greatest honor.

  When I discovered Mickey’s work I was around twelve—by way of the Darren McGavin TV series—and just starting to read the great hardboiled mystery writers. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were first, followed soon by James M. Cain. I was able to start buying Mickey’s Mike Hammer novels when I was thirteen, though I usually had to lie and pass myself off as sixteen. Spillane was thought of as writing “dirty books” back then, though many other storytellers have gone through the door he opened in a more explicit if less explosive fashion.

  What remains shocking, in Spillane’s work from the ’40s through the ’90s, is the extreme, convincing and often visceral scenes of violence. Sam Peckinpah, the great and notorious director of The Wild Bunch, had white hair, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mickey turned it that way for him, maybe with One Lonely Night, in which Mike Hammer, wielding a tommy gun, dispatches one hundred or so Commie spies.

  Hammer was a character who grew and changed, as his creator sporadically recorded the detective’s cases. The iconic private eye began as brash, excitable, randy as hell and not just a little psychotic. As the character aged, he mellowed; but a mellowed Mike Hammer can still appreciate a beautiful woman licking her lips and can dispatch a villain with chilling coldness.

  The unfinished work Mickey bequeathed me (and his wife Jane) shows the author’s own mellowing and the changes in his life. He was, at various times in his long career, a follower of the conservative Jehovah’s Witness faith. Criticism from some in his church hampered Mickey’s ability to tell the kind of tales expected of him. Often, during these periods, Mickey would begin a novel and then put it aside, when he decided someone high in his church might object.

  His 1989 Hammer novel, The Killing Man, got him in dutch with the church elders because he used the words “shit” and “fucking” (sparingly) in the text. There wouldn’t be another Mike Hammer novel published (one minus those offensive words) until Black Alley in 1996 (I completed his sequel, King of the Weeds, for Titan in 2014).

  Jane Spillane reminded Mickey, a few days before his passing, that “Max isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness,” and that I would almost certainly complete these novels in grand Spillane style—sex, violence, occasional “f” words and all. Mickey had no problem with that. He understood that we would be collaborating, and my sins would be my own.

  In expanding Mickey’s partial manuscripts into finished books, I first turned to material that was usually a hundred pages or more, often with plot and character notes. A dozen books or so later, I am now dealing with shorter fragments, and this time I am working only from a synopsis. As usual, I have done my best to determine when Mickey wrote the material, so that I might set each novel in continuity, to give each entry its rightful place in the canon.

  The nature of the plot synopsis suggests it may have been designed for one of the Stacy Keach-starring Mike Hammer TV episodes or telefilms, which wrapped up in 1989 (revived in 1997). I know that Mickey developed several ideas for TV producer Jay Bernstein, and in fact The Killing Man began that way, until the story idea inspired Mike Hammer’s creator to write a novel instead (“It was too good to waste on television,” he told me). Mickey also devised the ending of the otherwise terrible, Bernstein-produced, non-Keach Hammer telefilm, Come Die with Me (1994), a production Spillane disavowed.

  Part of my reasoning regarding the origin of the synopsis is that Mickey includes scenes in which Mike Hammer is not present, inappropriate for the first-person approach of the books, while the TV episodes sometimes featured such scenes. I have, of course, kept the point of view consistently Hammer’s own in these pages.

  The probable origin of the story makes this novel something of a departure, more typical of the TV series in that Hammer has a client, which he rarely does in the largely vengeance-oriented books. But as the plot here is predominantly the work of Hammer’s creator, I trust readers will enjoy what might be viewed as a partial change of pace.

  All of this suggests the intended time frame of the tale was the late ’80s to the very early ’90s. The political subject matter reflects Mickey’s own distrust and even contempt for certain real-life figures of that era. Mickey and I did not entirely share political beliefs, which bothered neither of us a whit. We were friends, and we were pros—such a thing was irrelevant.

  Besides, Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t vote.

  Max Allan Collins

  October 2018

  CHAPTER ONE

  The gray sky hanging over the city didn’t promise rain. You couldn’t make out any clouds in that
slate dome, and only the sodden feel of humidity said that ashen sky might ever let loose. Was that the rumble of thunder getting itself in the mood, or the dissonant song of a distant train yard? Maybe all that gray would just turn into night; it had been this way since mid-afternoon and, in late fall, darkness came sudden.

  The new Vankemp Building at sixty stories held up its shimmering middle finger to that gray sky and the gloom it threatened, or maybe to the ghosts of those who’d dwelled in the tenements such new buildings displaced, the sweatshop workers and their progeny who had made the original Vankemp richer than sin. Such staggering wealth Thadeous Vankemp’s great-great-grandchildren still shared, including the famous socialite Nicole Vankemp, even as the causes she championed may have made the old boy spin in his fancy marble mausoleum.

  Fighting for women’s rights, campaigning against land mines and throwing AIDS fund-raisers? How could she?

  And beautiful Nicole’s brand of sin was nothing old Thadeous would have recognized—free love, Park Avenue style, including one lover who she told Vanity Fair was “a Nijinsky of cunnilingus.”

  Nor would the original Vankemp likely appreciate this new glass-and-steel monolith on Fifth Avenue bearing the family name. He and others with the famous surname had seen very different buildings go up in the 1900s into the 1930s, buildings that still dominated Manhattan today—edifices with architectural dignity, reflecting the stature of the men they’d been named for. Not a giant glass tombstone.

  No question about it. Once you die, you really start losing control of things.

  The sky rumbled again and the vast gray ceiling bore darker patches now. I shrugged the collars of my trenchcoat up and tugged my porkpie fedora down. I looked like a refugee from some old private-eye paperback cover, which is what I was. You had to have an image to make it, and maintain it, in New York, New York, the city so nice they got redundant about it. The shamus schtick was mine, my coat and hat like the dirty talk and public service characterizing that Nicole dame.

  I might be meeting her tonight. Cunnilingus wasn’t on the menu, but you never knew what might get served up in this town. Of course, her husband was who I was meeting, in his office on the top floor of this not-open-to-the-public-yet building. Hell, right now it was just this shiny slab rising out of a work site, no landscaping yet, just rough, clod-flung earth decorated with everything a worker might need from a wheelbarrow to a crane, from a pile of sheetrock to a Caterpillar tractor.

  I found my way to the gate in the chain-link fence. I was expected, but I still had to yell at the security guy in a uniform as gray as the sky. I showed him the badge and the operator’s ticket in the leather fold. He had the look of a cop who retired and then boredom set in, or maybe a pension just wasn’t cutting it. Which had put him back on the job. Sort of.

  “Michael Hammer,” he said, reading. He had a face like an old catcher’s mitt that had caught a couple eyeballs. “You wouldn’t be Mike Hammer, would you?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Winters is expecting me.”

  “He said a Mr. Hammer would be around.”

  “Well, I’m Mr. Hammer.”

  “I didn’t know Mike Hammer was still alive!”

  “Think of my surprise.”

  Grinning, he let me in, locked the gate behind us, and led me down a gravel path through the construction site to the building. He was chatty but wasn’t asking questions, so I didn’t have to listen.

  He unlocked one of the half dozen glass doors fronting the place. He was smiling as he opened it for me, shaking his head. “Mike Hammer, still above ground. Who’d have thunk it? You used to be in the papers.”

  “So was Happy Hooligan.”

  “I remember that comic!”

  I was almost inside when he blurted, “Hey! You still pals with Captain Chambers? He still on the job?”

  “Yeah,” I said, figuring it covered both questions.

  “Tell him Murphy said hello. He’ll remember!”

  “Sure.” After all, how many cops named Murphy could there be on the NYPD?

  All the fresh building odors were waiting, as unmistakable as new car smell. Glue and paint and putty and grout, all mixed up in an olfactory cocktail. What would soon be a gleaming tiled lobby looked even larger minus any furnishings, dirtied up by occasional footprints and areas where finishing touches were yet to be made.

  The bank of elevators, with shiny steel doors bearing occasional dirt smears and handprints, maintained the same almost complete but untidied status. I pushed the button, the door slid immediately open and I stepped on. To gain access to the sixtieth floor required a key. I’d been sent one. Jamie Winters himself had called me and I asked why we were meeting in a building not yet open to the public.

  “It’s a secure location,” the smooth, familiar baritone stated, over the phone.

  I asked, “Don’t you have your office swept for bugs, regularly?”

  “I do.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’m sure that’s so, Mr. Hammer. But not for your own devices.”

  The senator was no dummy. I had the capacity to record client meetings, all right, and I almost always did. Velda, my secretary who is the other licensed P.I. of MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS, keeps the current tapes in the office wall safe and the rest in a safe deposit box.

  I considered wearing a wire to this meet, just to have a record of it, and say a silent “screw you” to my celebrated client. But I skipped it. He wanted privacy and I’d go along.

  I stepped off the elevator on the sixtieth floor. The unfinished nature of the building was even more obvious here, the floor lacking carpet, the ceiling unfinished with wiring hanging like the veins and arteries of a body opened up in an autopsy. Windows at either end of the hall were minus glass and instead covered in heavy plastic sheeting that pulsed with wind. The open space I’d entered appeared to be set aside for a reception area.

  A mahogany door, center stage, had a nameplate that read SENATOR JAMIE B. WINTERS, a firm declaration in the midst of incomplete surroundings.

  I knocked and said, “Mike Hammer, Senator!”

  “Come in, Mike!”

  That was a typical politician’s phony familiarity—we’d never met and on the phone had addressed each other as “Mister.”

  I went in and the coldness of the night was waiting. The sidewalls would be windows onto the city, but right now were just rectangles of duct-taped plastic, trembling and crackling in the wind. The office, like the hallway, was unfinished, the ceiling tile uninstalled, more innards-like wiring lurking above, and a few bare temporary light bulbs hanging, more suited for a flophouse hallway. Like a parody of the fancy desk that would be installed before long, a chunk of plywood rode two sawhorses with Senator Winters seated behind it on a metal stool.

  Two more such stools waited, facing him like clients’ chairs. On the makeshift desk sat an ashtray with a cigarette burning, and next to that a bottle of Canadian Club and another of Canada Dry. Three glasses, in hotel-style wrappers, were on the plywood, too.

  “I understand,” the senator said, “Canadian Club and ginger is your drink.”

  “That or Miller Lite.”

  Jamie Winters got up and came around and extended a hand as if pointing to where a tree should be planted. He was boyishly handsome and looked about thirty-five, though I knew him to be eight years past that. His dark brown hair was medium on top and short on the sides, a cut that would’ve cost him a C-note at least. His olive shoulder-padded blazer was unbuttoned over a black silk t-shirt, and his blousy, pleated chinos were a matching olive—an ensemble as casual as it was expensive.

  His shake was firm, not sweaty at all, and he had the kind of white smile and perfect teeth that cost real money.

  While he got back behind his plywood desk, I tore off the wrapper on a glass and poured myself a drink. “You don’t need me,” I told him.

  “Why is that?”

  I shook my head, got myself perched on the stool. “Sounds like you already have
an investigator on staff, if you know what I drink.”

  His smile really was a dazzler, but I could already see the troubled man behind it—the eyes, as olive as the suit, gave it away.

  His padded shoulders shrugged. “I just called my clipping service and they put something together on you. You were really something, back when.”

  “Yeah. In my impetuous youth, I racked up what they call these days a substantial body count.”

  He worked to make his reply sound off-hand. “Mobsters, mostly, right? But sometimes just plain killers.”

  I shook my head again. “No such thing. Killers come in all shapes, sizes and sexes.”

  “Is that so, Mr. Hammer?”

  The voice decidedly female, though it was almost low enough to be male.

  I hadn’t heard her come in, but don’t figure me for losing my edge—it was the flap of plastic non-windows and the wind whistling behind them that covered for her.

  So I took a chance and showed off a little. With my back still to her, I said, “That’s right, Mrs. Winters.”

  Then I turned to get a look at her, where she stood just inside the office.

  I said to her, “I’ve killed men and I’ve killed women. One man was even dressed as a woman. There was a kid once, and a ‘special needs’ case, you’d call him. No ‘just plain killers’ in the bunch.”

  She moved like sex on springs, a tall, lithe woman in a black leather catsuit that zipped up in front and lacked only a whip for the S & M crowd to go all giggly. The size of those thrusting breasts was wrong for the otherwise fashion model frame, but what the hell—nobody’s perfect.

  But her face was. Perfect. Big green eyes, dark eyebrows that were full and real and arching, high cheekbones, and blazing red hair that was a damn mane of the stuff, tumbling to her shoulders, brushing her forehead, as if it just happened that way and wasn’t the work of a hairdresser whose hourly rate was probably twice mine.

  Oh, and her lips. A wide mouth, probably too wide, but my God so full and moist. Was that dark red, almost black lipstick in fashion? Not that I gave a damn.