Mike Hammer--Murder, My Love Read online

  I settled behind my desk. Nicole had already taken the client’s chair. Velda sat behind Nicole and to one side, her legs crossed and reminding me how damn lucky I was.

  Right now Velda was watching me close to see if I’d slip my hand under the desk to work the switch that starts the tape recorder in my bottom desk drawer. I shook my head just a little to signal I wouldn’t be. Our clients had specifically asked for discretion and we’d give it to them.

  Nicole got right to it. She handed me one of the three folders and hung onto the other two. She watched as I flipped it open.

  An attractive brunette looked back at me, her hair short and permed, her features pretty if not distinctive; in business attire, she sat at a desk, posing for a photo suitable for an employee publication or company roster.

  “That’s Helen Wayne,” Nicole said. “Jamie’s secretary.”

  I frowned, photo in hand. “I thought Lisa Long was your husband’s secretary.”

  “Lisa is his current secretary. The Wayne woman worked for him for two years and a few months. She left in March and the Long woman took over the position.”

  Probably multiple positions.

  I asked, “Has that been a habit with Mr. Winters? Affairs with secretaries?”

  “No,” she said. Nothing defensive in her tone. If she cared about him cheating, she didn’t show it.

  I looked over what had been written up. It was a dispassionate report—material culled from employment records.

  I asked, “You wrote and typed this yourself?”

  “I did. Well, I use a word processor.”

  “This information came from your husband’s files? The job application she filled out, annual employee evaluations and so on?”

  She nodded, the red hair bouncing. “And I asked Jamie what he knew about her.”

  Her attitude seemed damn near clinical.

  I returned my attention to the folder.

  Helen Wayne was from Granville, Ohio. She attended Antioch College. Took business. Went to New York and got a job as secretary to Senator Winters in the office he maintained in Manhattan when he wasn’t in Washington, D.C. It had been her first job. Her work record, in the senator’s employ, was stellar.

  Since leaving, she was taking graduate courses at NYU, studying to be a legal secretary, working part-time as a clerk in a bookstore in the East Village, where she lived. She and the senator had broken their relationship off amicably and had not been in touch since.

  I handed the folder out for Velda. She got up, took it, and returned to her chair.

  As Velda perused the pages, I said to Nicole, “You consider yours an open marriage.”

  It wasn’t exactly a question.

  Nicole flicked a look at Velda, engrossed in the folder, then her eyes went to me with unspoken worry.

  I answered it: “Miss Sterling… that’s Velda… has been briefed on everything you and your husband shared with me last night. We are a two-person firm and have no secrets from each other. My apologies if I should have made that clear.”

  She raised a palm. “No, no… that’s fine. You were saying?”

  “This open marriage of yours and your husband’s. That implies… really, more than implies… that you are not faithful to Jamie in the traditional sense.”

  She took that just fine. “We are faithful,” Nicole said, “in that we too have no secrets.” She threw a little smile in Velda’s direction, without turning to her, Velda still absorbed in her reading.

  I said, “Your list of extracurricular encounters… is it similar to Jamie’s? Counting Lisa Long, we’re talking four playmates. What is your…” I searched for a word.

  “Box score?” Nicole asked, impishly.

  Velda caught that, looking up with an open-mouthed smile.

  “Considerably higher,” Nicole said. “I go clubbing on my own. I have many friends. No stranger at cocktail parties and fund-raisers, attend Broadway openings.” She shrugged elaborately. “Jamie isn’t any more jealous than I am. We just follow different paths.”

  “In what sense?”

  She shrugged, the red mane bouncing once. “He has his little flings. Affairs. Relationships. I’m more a… one-night stand kind of girl. My man is my man. That’s the relationship in my life. The rest are just…” Now she looked for a word.

  Velda offered, “The spice of life.”

  Nicole smiled back at her. “Yes. Precisely.” She spoke to us both, looking back and forth. “I am not careless. In the current climate, I take precautions. Safe sex only.”

  Velda asked, “Does that go for the senator as well?”

  “Very much so. We tell each other about our various adventures. Laugh. Excite each other with our… reports back to the home front.”

  Velda gave me a wide-eyed look.

  “You mentioned clubbing,” I said to Nicole. “Those are notorious venues for illegal narcotics.”

  Nicole shook her head; every time she did that, the red hair got more tousled and sexy, as if somebody like Vidal Sassoon had just touched her up.

  She said, “Never my thing, the consciousness-expanding bit. Not even grass. Recreational drugs are of no interest to me. I like to feel in control. And before you ask… I have put all that behind me. The discos, that is. The parties. As we discussed last night, Jamie and I are a married couple and our sexual activities will henceforth be confined to ye olde marital bed.”

  I nodded. “Good to hear. But what about blackmail from that side of your life? That side of your night life?”

  “It could happen,” she admitted. “But I am a known quantity. In my modest way, I am famous. My sins will be forgiven where my husband’s would not. Particularly if I become a one-man gal.”

  Velda smiled at that, then asked, “Were any of your casual liaisons with individuals who might have deeper feelings for you than you intended to, uh… stir?”

  The red mane shook again. “Very doubtful… if by that you mean the blackmailer plaguing Jamie and me might be some bitter ex-lover. As I said, I was never into prolonged affairs.”

  “Just the same,” I said, “you should give us a rundown on your sexual partners, specifically those since you became the wife of a senator.”

  She nodded. “Understood. Something like what I’ve given you today on Jamie’s playthings?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If that doesn’t require writing War and Peace.”

  She smirked. “How are you spelling that?”

  Everyone laughed a little.

  Then we went over the other two folders.

  Judith McGuire—Judy—had been a campaign worker of the senator’s. That was a relationship that began before Nicole and Jamie got married, and continued for several months thereafter.

  A pretty little blonde, caught in a snapshot at campaign HQ, Judy was an admirer of the senator and never had any stated designs on him beyond the fun and excitement of being desired by such an important man. (Whose words those were—Judy’s or Jamie’s or Nicole’s—I didn’t know and didn’t ask.)

  She was from upstate New York, had gone to a community college for two years, and was now at NYU. She too was living in Greenwich Village, and worked as a waitress.

  The third young woman on the senator’s to-do list was Nora Kent, who also lived in the Village. Was that a coincidence or something significant? I filed that thought away. For now, I knew she was an old-fashioned cabaret singer who had a regular gig at a piano bar on Grove Street. She was from the Bronx and had taken jazz studies at Julliard.

  The folders provided current addresses and phone numbers for all three women.

  Velda, finishing up her look at the third folder, asked, “Should I phone them?”

  I thought for a moment, then said, “No. Make in-person cold calls. Start out saying you’re an investigator working with a Daily News reporter on rumors of extramarital affairs involving the senator.”

  “What?” Nicole blurted.

  I held up a hand. Continued giving Velda her instructions.
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  “Get their reactions. Get your own read on each. Then tell them the truth—that we’re really working for the senator, and he’s being blackmailed over his sexual indiscretions. Nothing about the tape with the Long woman, though.”

  Velda, sitting forward on her chair, the folders in her lap, said to Nicole, “Lisa Long still works for your husband, as his secretary?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t work up a folder on her?”

  Nicole shook her head and all that red hair came along for a ride. “No—I can if you like, but you should be able to get anything you need directly from her.”

  I said, “She doesn’t know about the blackmail threat?”

  Nicole shrugged. “I wasn’t sure we’d want to involve her.”

  Velda goggled at me, and I said to our client, “I’d say she’s already involved.”

  The redhead didn’t seem concerned. “Whatever you think is best.”

  Velda sat forward. “Mike, should I talk to her?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll handle that.”

  Velda nodded, stood, and tucked the folders under her arm. “I think I should get started.”

  I said I thought so, too.

  The two women exchanged their nice-to-meet-yous and goodbyes, and then Velda was gone and I was alone with my client. Or anyway one of my two clients on this job.

  “Quite a woman,” Nicole said, raising an eyebrow in much the same fashion Velda was prone to.

  “No argument.”

  She was slowly nodding. “Now it’s clear to me.”

  “What is?”

  Nicole rose and shut the inner office door, then came over and perched on a corner of my desk. Like I had perched on Velda’s desk, earlier. She looked down at me with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

  She said, “I understand why you took Jamie and me on. Part of why, anyhow. Why you didn’t disapprove of our ways. I mean, you have your own code of morality, and not everybody fits it.”

  “You lost me.”

  “I don’t think so.” She touched the tip of my nose with an orange-red-nailed finger, very lightly. “I’ll be honest with you. I did hear about you two. Velda something and Mike Hammer.”

  “You did, huh? Not on the society page.”

  Nicole shrugged, worked up an impish smile. “Another part of the paper. Cindy Adams. Liz Smith.”

  She slipped off the desk and came around and sat in my lap and put her arms around my neck. “You could identify with us. Because you two have an open relationship, too.”

  I started to say something, but she leaned in and kissed my mouth, a lipsticky kiss, warm, almost hot; it lasted a while, as she tasted me, then she flicked her tongue into my mouth, just a snake’s flick.

  “If I have to behave, from now on,” she said, “I’m going to have to cultivate a few good friends I can trust.”

  “I’m a little old for you, aren’t I, doll?”

  “Doll! Such ancient words come out of you, Mike. No, I like the idea of an older man. A man who’s experienced things I haven’t. Who’s killed. Who’s loved. Who knows how to be… discreet.” She ground herself into my lap. “And I can tell you’re interested.”

  “Hell, baby, I’m old. I’m not dead.”

  She kissed me again. Not a big deal this time. Just a friendly follow-up. A period on the end of a very sexy sentence.

  “You got the tense wrong,” I said. “Earlier?”

  “What tense?”

  “It’s ‘had’ an open relationship. Velda and me. We had one for a lot of years.”

  “Did you now?”

  “Yeah. But it was one-sided.”

  The green eyes flared. “Ah! You were a tomcat while she was a faithful feline.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what closed it? Your open relationship.”

  I shrugged. “I got tired of being an asshole.”

  She ground her rump some more. “How’s that working out?”

  Without leaving my chair, I picked her up by the waist and stood her on the floor.

  “It’s working out fine,” I said.

  Running fingers through some of that red mane, she nodded toward my lap and the contrary evidence. “Are you sure, Mike?”

  “Damn sure.”

  Nicole shrugged and headed for the door. “Your loss.”

  She was halfway out when I gave her the kicker.

  “See, I’m still an asshole,” I said. “Just a one-woman asshole now.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Until he made the move into his new digs elsewhere on Park Avenue, Senator Jamie Winters would be maintaining his office on the nineteenth floor of the Flatiron Building.

  And the Flatiron is where I headed, mid-afternoon, catching a cab outside the Hackard Building. When traffic got tight, I paid the hackie, climbed out and walked the last few blocks. No trenchcoat today, just a gray Perry Ellis suit Velda steered me toward, with a gray-and-black striped tie I selected myself; but for all those efforts, the porkpie fedora still branded me a relic.

  The day was cool and crisp but sunny, and up ahead I could see Madison Square Park, moms and kids here for the playground and people walking their dogs amid the mix of evergreens and fiery fall browns, reds, yellows and oranges. Nobody looked like they had blackmail in their life, or a private detective on retainer, either.

  In Thadeous Vankemp’s heyday, the Flatiron Building—that triangular structure on its triangular lot bordered by Broadway, Fifth Avenue and East 22nd Street—had been one of the tallest buildings in Manhattan. Now it was officially an historic landmark, twenty-two stories dwarfed by towering neighbors, its distinctive Beaux-Arts design, in a shape reminiscent of an old-fashioned cast-iron clothes iron, still setting it apart.

  The Flatiron lobby was, not surprisingly, narrow—a beige, artdeco, marble-floored space with framed pictures detailing the building’s history. Tourists couldn’t get past the guard at his desk, but I was expected. I took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, to the office where the senator met with everybody from lowly constituents to NYC power brokers.

  I already knew Jamie Winters wasn’t in—but I wasn’t calling on him.

  In the senator’s outer office, blandly modern walls at left and right slanted inward as if presenting the young woman behind the reception desk—tah dah! You’d think she was something special.

  You’d be right.

  Lisa Long was the only one of Jamie’s paramours whose picture and background I had not been given. Yet I had no doubt I was standing before the most recent object of the senator’s affections.

  She wore a white no-nonsense blouse under a black suit with shoulder pads and a white pocket hanky, plus minimal but well-chosen jewelry by way of hoop earrings and oversized bracelets. Her big brunette mane, not unlike the red one her lover’s wife sported, was offset by heavy dark-framed oversize eyeglasses that tried to overwhelm the lovely face, but couldn’t. From behind them, big brown eyes with dark thick eyebrows courtesy of Brooke Shields looked at me coolly, her high cheekbones rouged, her sensuous mouth home to coral gloss lipstick and a slight, business-like smile.

  Still, I asked, from the doorway: “Miss Long? Mike Hammer. I believe you’re expecting me.”

  Her smile warmed up a little. “Yes, Mr. Hammer,” she said in a nice second soprano, waving me in gently. “Mrs. Winters called and said you’d be stopping by with a few questions.”

  As I approached, she gestured to the black metal chair in front of her L-shaped desk; to her right loomed a workstation with massive computer set-up—terminal, monitor, keyboard and printer. I took off my hat, which I set on the uncluttered half of the desk, where a phone with combination intercom and answer machine, a pen and pencil holder, a notepad and a stapler were about it.

  “I understand you’re a private investigator,” she said.

  In her mid-twenties, she was unlikely to have encountered the wilder exploits of my younger days, even if her folks read the tabloids.

  �
��Yes, I am,” I admitted. “Working for both Mrs. Winters and the senator.”

  The secretary tented her fingers; her nails were coral too, well manicured and not long—with that computer keyboard, long nails wouldn’t have been practical.

  She said, “I was told to give you full cooperation, and access to the senator’s office, including his files if necessary. But nothing of what this is about.”

  “The subject is a delicate one,” I said, “but the senator himself assured me of your discretion.”

  She nodded, the eyes behind the big lenses half-closing, as she tried to process that. “Of course. How can I be of help?”

  I grinned, not too big, crossed my legs, gestured around us. “Doesn’t exactly seem to be hopping around here.”

  She smiled, not big at all. “There are days. Right now, there’s nothing major on the senator’s political agenda.”

  “If something big is pending, voters drop by in person?”

  She nodded, still smiling a little.

  “And lobbyists and so on.”

  She shrugged, the shoulder pads making it seem bigger than it was. “Most of that happens in D.C. We do hear from all sorts of constituents, from locals with their special problems to… well, giants of business and industry, who want the senator’s ear, personally.”

  “You must meet some very important people.”

  The smile grew a bit. “Yes. In passing.”

  I folded my arms and leaned back in a chair not designed to encourage long visits. “The senator is lucky to have such a pleasant presence guarding the gate. What’s your story, Miss Long?”

  That question surprised her and she batted long lashes that seemed to be real, if heavy with mascara. “Excuse me?”

  “Part of what I’m doing is gathering background material. Where you’re from, where you went to school, and so on.”

  She thought that over, and then gave me a just-the-facts recital. She was from Bayonne, New Jersey. Her father was a fireman there, her mother a housewife; she had a younger sister and older brother. She had gone to Middlesex County College in Edison, where she studied to be an administrative assistant and took “secretarial science.”

  I asked, “That’s a two-year degree?”