MY EYES OPENED of their own accord to a morning that was purely New York, a shadowed city whose light strained to get in the hotel room. The digital clock read 6:15 A.M. in Frankenstein green, but twenty stories below, Forty-second Street was already snapping and growling at anybody stupid enough to be down there.
I never should have told Pat my attitude was fine. Hell, I had one great big fat attitude problem right now. Three hours from here the sun was a lively hot thing bouncing off waters so blue it took your breath away, shimmering off white sand soft as flour. From here, even the sand spurs didn't seem so bad.
If I could have woken from the nightmare that was New York into the sunshine reality of Florida, I'd have gladly done so. What was keeping me here? Why not get back on a plane today? This morning?
Doolan had been dead before I arrived, and I didn't even know the name of that dead blonde last night. An old copper with cancer ends it all; a cute dumb kid with a nice shape walks into the wrong neighborhood and becomes a mugging fatality.
What were they to me?
Something. I wasn't sure what exactly. Not yet. But something....
A year's habit was too much to break and I rolled out of bed, brushed my teeth, then went into the exercise routine. It wasn't a vanity kick, rather a medically ordered series that got injured muscle tissue back into working order. But I felt like I needed to be doing more, and would do something about that. When I had a good sweat going, I broke it, jumped in the shower, and when I got out, threw on a robe.
The room-service waiter brought the morning edition of the News up with my coffee, and I thumbed through it page by page, reading every damn line of every damn item like some suburbanite about to go off to work. But I couldn't fool myself too long, and finally just flipped the pages until I caught the squib almost buried among minor items about the night before.
SLAIN GIRL FOUND ON STREET
Apparent victim of mugging. Unidentified at present. Caucasian, age about 25, five feet four inches tall. Investigation continuing.
Relieved the News reporter hadn't recognized me at the scene—I was in no mood to be a sidebar—I tossed the paper and stared out the window, the old juices stirring.
This is a load of crap, I thought, and I had to cut it out. The old days had come to an end a year ago on that pier. There was no profit in getting shot up, and no glory in being made the fall guy.
But at least I got out of it alive. That young girl on the sidewalk was dead. And nobody even knew who she was.
What was it Doolan had said?
"There are some things you just can't walk away from, kid."
I climbed into sweatshirt and slacks, packed a duffel bag of fresh clothes, went down to the street, and grabbed a cab to Bing's Gym.
Nothing had changed. It was still a nondescript old building with dirty windows, and I wondered why health-conscious athletes would want to train there anyway. The interior had that sweaty jock-strap smell of all locker rooms and floating dust mites kept up a perpetual haze in the main gym.
Bing spotted me before I reached the door of his office and came out and wrapped his arms around me.
"Damn, Mike, it sure is good to see you."
He pushed back and grinned up at me, all fat and happy with his hair a monklike white semicircle. It would be hard to guess he'd been a flyweight champ in the thirties.
"Mike, where the hell you been? Look at you, like a nut, brown like a nut. You don't get that in New York."
"I'm kind of out of season for the city, kid. This is Florida gold you're looking at."
"Whatever it is, you look great, Mike."
"Quit lying."
He shrugged. "So you lost weight, so you look run-down. What's important is, how do you feel?"
"I feel lousy."
"It's a start. This stems from when you got shot?"
I nodded.
Bing looked at me carefully. "You want to work out?"
"The easy stuff," I told him.
"Like easy for who? I remember what you used to handle...."
I let out a short laugh. "Not the big boy weights, pal. Make it a routine for a middle-aged beginner."
"That bad?"
"It's getting better." I glanced around the room. "You got new equipment."
"Sure. Everybody's into bodybuilding now. Don't let it bother you. Tension and weights you can adjust for a kindergartner to a Schwarzenegger. I'll check you out personally on the apparatus."
"Apparatus," I said. "Where did you hear that word?"
"It was in the manual."
"Never too old to learn."
For a full hour I went through the prescribed exercises. My body ached, the sweat poured off me, but there was the satisfying feeling of knowing that I was coming back together again. The one thing I couldn't do was overexert myself. Inside me a lot of healing still needed doing. I put in fifteen minutes of light jogging on the treadmill, then soaked in the shower room a full half hour before I got dressed.
On my way out, Bing asked, "You gonna be a regular again?"
"Long as I'm in town."
"What does that mean? A vacation's one thing, Mike, but you belong in the city."
"Not anymore."
A knowing grin creased his face. "Balls. Guy like you can't escape the city. Hell, you got a blood contract with this place. You're married to the old girl."
I grunted. "I'm about ready to kiss her goodbye."
He just shook his head. "Never happen."
"Think not?"
"Naw, Mike, never. You forgot to sign a prenup."
I laughed, let him have the exit line, went back down to the street, and started walking.
It was a different Forty-second Street at that time of morning, still dirty and noisy, but busy with a freshness that would last until after lunch. I took my time and just before nine reached the official building I wanted. The person I was after had a listing on the directory, and I caught the elevator to the fifth floor.
In an office suite paneled in what we used to call a masculine fashion, the severe young woman behind the desk regarded me with no apparent curiosity whatever. She had dark-rimmed glasses and light brown hair pinned back, but it didn't do any good—she was still attractive.
In a neutral tone that made me long for the day when the girls guarding the gates had flirted with me, she asked, "May I help you?"
I worked on whether to ask for Ms. Marshall or Angela, and settled for the latter.
The familiarity of that shot her eyebrows straight up. "Do you have an appointment with the assistant D.A.?"
"More like a date." I slipped a hip on the edge of her desk and relished the astonished reaction. "I'm surprised, too. It's been a long time since a classy doll like Ms. Marshall wanted to date me this early in the day. But, hell, she was the one who made it."
This was all a little too much for the receptionist, whose eyes behind the lenses were doing a cartoon pop. She punched a button on her intercom and said, "Ms. Marshall, I think you had better come out here right away."
The strained tone of her voice—which implied her next step was to buzz security—got an immediate response.
There Angela Marshall was, in another power suit (charcoal gray today, skirt not slacks), with a cold, chiseled beauty Rodin might have envied, if he'd worked in synthetics.
At first her expression displayed that open challenge that seemed to be her standard setting, then she recognized me and the dark eyes flared.
"Hi, beautiful," I said. "What's shaking?"
Well, she was. And it wasn't bad to see. She had all gears going, and held the door open so I could step inside her private office.
Maybe she had seen too many movies. The way she strode around the desk, the regal manner she assumed in sitting down, her posture as she leaned on an elbow to study this walking-talking exhibit from the Male Chauvinist Museum—it all seemed too deliberately scripted, a scene carefully broken down into shots and angles, and she was director and star.
"What is your name, detective." It wasn't even a question.
"Hammer. Michael."
"Your grade?"
"I made it halfway through the twelfth." Before I enlisted in the army.
"If you made the force, then you must have a G.E.D." She didn't even look up from her notes. "You are a detective?"
"Right. And I have a junior college degree, too. Took some night classes."
"Well, good for you. And now as to your rank—what is your grade, Detective Hammer?"
This time I gave it a long double beat, and when she finally raised her eyes, I stopped screwing with her and said, "Private detective, kid. A plain old-fashioned private eye, licensed in the state of New York with a ticket to carry a gun, and free to buddy around with all sorts of people, including Captain Chambers. I'm even allowed to call a public servant an asshole if he—or she—decides to behave like one."
She may have been a whiz in the courtroom and a political star on the rise, but she'd never make it as a poker player. From her expression, I knew exactly what her next line would be, and beat her to the punch again.
"And don't give me any garbage," I said, pawing the air, "about having my license revoked. That takes cause, not clout, and anyway, I can go a hell of a lot higher up than you can. I've taken more bad guys off the street, one way or another, than any ten plain-clothes coppers in this sorry-ass city."
"Mike Hammer ... you're Mike Hammer."
"Right. You start hassling me, little girl, and I'll call in some favors that'll get you squashed right down to handling juvie beefs."
This time she took the long beat. "Michael Hammer. Yes, I remember you now."
"What do you remember?"
"What I've read. What I've heard. I feel I know you already."
Everybody was saying that lately.
"So what do you know about me, Ms. Marshall?"
"That you're nasty. Most unpleasant. And very tough."
"That's a pretty good summary. Anything else?"
"Yes. I understand for a long time there was an office pool about which of us on the D.A.'s staff would break one of your fancy self-defense pleas."
"You in on that pool?"
"Oh, no, Mr. Hammer. They stopped doing that. It's before my time."
"Ouch. Now that we've got insulting each other out of the way, how about some breakfast? All I've had is coffee."
From the way the receptionist looked at me on the way out, I knew she had kept the intercom key down all the while. I winked at her, put my hand under her boss's arm, and steered the great lady into the hall.
On the elevator, Ms. Marshall gave me a sharp look and said, "You are such an unregenerate macho bastard."
But she squeezed my hand when she said it.
A taxi took us over to Cohen's Deli, not as famous as the Stage but cheaper, plus they had a Mike Hammer mile-high sandwich on the menu board—pastrami, corned beef, Swiss cheese, American cheese, cole slaw, and Russian dressing. If anybody asked why it was named after Mike Hammer, the waiter would say, "It'll kill you just as fast."
Unaware of my sandwich fame, she went in ahead of me like she owned the joint, but her eyes went back to mine when squat, mustached Herman—in white shirt, black bow tie, and black trousers—said, "Ah, Mr. Mike! You're back in town!"
"Hi, Herm."
"And who is your beautiful young lady?"
"This is Angela Marshall."
"Ah, yes. Our lovely assistant district attorney."
He guided us to a window booth.
Watching him go, she muttered, "Was he putting me down?"
"Never," I told her. "Your beauty simply overwhelms him."
"Bullshit."
"He knew who you are, didn't he?" I said. We were across from each other in the booth.
"Did you hear him say your beautiful young lady? And that slight emphasis on assistant?"
"Don't worry, kid, you're such a pain in the ass, you're bound to be top dog someday."
"Damn, I hate men," she said.
Looking at the menu, I asked, "Do you?"
She looked at her menu, too. "Not really."
Breakfast with a real doll can be damn exciting. They're awake, showered, and manicured, and all the weapons are pointed right at whatever chump is dumb enough to be sitting across from them. To such dolls, the guy on the other end of the fork is a big, ripe plum ready for the plucking, because that world of economic dominance he dwells in, and whatever male aggression he possesses, are overshadowed by the two most basic hungers.
Just to annoy her, I ordered an enormous breakfast—lox, onion and eggs omelet, hash browns, and pancakes on the side—saying nothing while she daintily dined on a single cream-cheese bagel and coffee. I cleaned my plate with the last of the kind of great buttered hard roll you can only get in New York, burped politely, and sat back waiting like Henry the Eighth to be served my second cup of coffee.
"You're disgusting," she said with her big brown eyes cold and unblinking, her arms folded on the impressive shelf of her breasts.
"And you dig it, don't you?"
She tried not to smile. "Love it."
"Then how come everybody thinks you're such a queen bitch?"
"Because I am." For a brief second I got one of those eye flashes again, that dare that was such a great part of her.
"Balls," I said.
Her smile curled into another challenge. "That's the opening line of a famous poem," she said.
"Oh, I know. One of my favorites."
"Really? Then finish it."
"It's blank verse and loses a little off the page."
"Does it now?"
"It does. 'Balls!' cried the queen. 'If I had to, I could be king.' 'Balls!' cried the prince. 'I have two, but I'm still not king!' And the king only laughed, not because he wanted to ... but because he had two." I took a sip of the coffee. "It's all semantics, baby."
"Naw. I got nothing against the gays."
She chuckled at that, then leaned back, arms still folded. Then she opened her purse, took out a pack of Virginia Slims, and with a quick flip, popped one out at me.
"No thanks," I said.
"Not secure enough to smoke a woman's brand?"
"I don't smoke any brand."
"What happened to Luckies?"
"I stopped about a year ago."
"What happened about a year ago?"
"I shot a bunch of the Bonettis and the Bonettis shot me back. I've been away from the big bad city for a year or so, recuperating."
From all the expression that got out of her, I might have just given her a weather report. "Are you better now?"
"Much better. Kicking the nicotine habit is a nice side benefit of my general recuperation. I don't gasp for breath and I don't burn holes in my pants."
Some motions are exquisitely casual, but this one was so damn deliberate, it didn't belong to a woman at all. Her fingers simply tightened around the pack of butts, squashed them into a little congested mess, and dropped it on her plate.
"Satisfied?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Nice gesture. How long will it last?"
"Remember the old song, Mr. Hammer? Anything you can do...?"
"Good luck," I told her. I reached over and picked up her pretty gold lighter with the engraved A.M. on it and thumbed back the top. A little pressure and I popped the piece askew so it couldn't be used again.
"You don't mind, do you?" I grinned. "I mean, you won't need that anymore. Just trying to help."
There was a deadliness in the way she studied me. Her very manner had a leveling effect—she rather liked the man/woman game play, but only when she could put herself on the same plane as me. In her professional life, she had reached a plateau that few of either sex achieved, and there was no room for anything of the loser in her.
Whoever in the past had challenged this one had only been a neophyte—he'd lost because he was a boy. But surely there had also been real men who'd gotten mired in her charm, only to buckle under the weight of her inherent confidence and educational superiority.
"No," she said, with a glance at the ruined lighter, "I won't be needing that anymore." Very slowly she dropped it in her purse.
Outside the window of the corner deli, the late risers of New York were drifting by. Most of them were the nothing people. Someplace they got money, but they didn't work. The better-dressed were husbands with rich wives, or kids with parents who paid the freight. The shabby ones were sheltered by the city or a church who kept them overnight but didn't let them back in till the evening. They were drifting now, all of them, walking and looking and wondering.
"What makes you such a bastard, Mr. Hammer?"
My mind had to refocus, and when it did, I said, "Maybe it's because I hate this place."
"New York?"
I nodded. "You weren't born here, were you?"
"No. I grew up in Albany."
"You should have stayed there." I was getting an edge in my voice.
"Unfortunately."
"Did you always hate it?"
"There was a time when it was love/hate, I suppose. But just about everything I loved about it is gone. From the Brooklyn Dodgers to the real Madison Square Garden."
The prosecutor across from me considered that, then asked, "What's her name?"
Velda.
"That's a little personal," I said, "for a first date."
"Is that what this is?" She picked up her coffee cup and smiled at me over the rim of it. "Why do you think I'm sitting here with you now, Mr. Hammer? Why did I accept your invitation?"
"You really want to know?"
She nodded, still watching me.
"I laid it on you last night and I laid it on you today," I said, "and you still want to know?"
"Certainly."
It was my turn to sit back and do the looking. I let it all ooze up into me, settle there until I was ready to say it, then I grinned like that day a year ago had never happened.
"To you," I said, "I'm an exercise. A far-out, way-out exercise to test your inherent abilities and your well-honed skills. Until now, everything has gone your way, because you have that glossiness beautiful girls get on their way to being women—that smooth surface that makes guys slide right off them. But someplace, way back, somebody smart warned you to watch out for a guy who had sandpaper on his hands, and who wouldn't slide off at all. You never thought you'd need that kind of guy, but, baby, you do now."
She sipped at her coffee again.
I said, "So why did you accept my invitation? Well, I'd say it has something to do with that crime scene last night—doesn't it, Angela?"
When I used her first name, her eyes tightened.
"You should have let your assistant call security," I said, "when I walked into your office."
Another raised eyebrow accompanied a very pretty smirk. "Would that have done any good?"
"Nope. But now think of the reputation you'll have."
"Maybe I'll just tell people I'm thinking of starting up that office pool again."
"Maybe." My eyes were tightening now and I let her see the edge of my teeth again. "What took you to that crime scene last night, Angela?"
Her face became a pale mask. Lovely, but a mask. "What took you there, Mike?"
"Coincidence, I think. I'm the rare cop who does believe in coincidence. Who thinks fate likes to move things around sometimes, like a chess master with a sick sense of humor."
"Not very scientific."
"Not scientific at all. But I do have my inquisitive side. For example—why would a powerful woman like you rush to the scene of such an insignificant kill?"
She shifted in her seat. "It wasn't so insignificant to Virginia Mathes."
"That was her name, huh?"
She nodded.
"What else do you know about her?"
"Nothing. She was a mugging victim. I was out driving and heard the call on the scanner. Murder is serious where I come from, Mike."
"Serious enough to accept a breakfast offer from an obnoxious bastard like me?"
"Just that serious," she said. Then she checked her watch and gave me a look that said it was time to go.
I left a three-buck tip, grabbed the check, and we slid out of the booth. I tried to pay but Herman wouldn't take my money.
Outside, I asked, "Want a cab?"
"No, I'll walk back." She reached in her purse and took out the ruined lighter. Looked at it. "Somebody I respect gave this to me."
"Right. You bought it for yourself."
Her smile was automatic, uncontrolled, unaffected. "You're a bastard, all right."
"I don't make a secret of it," I said.
She paused, looked at me very directly for a moment. "Will you tell me one thing?"
"Ask."
"Was I an exercise for you?"
A truck roared by and a taxi squealed into the curb beside us. A guy with a briefcase got out, paid the driver, and walked away. The driver looked at us and I lifted my finger to claim the ride.
But before I climbed in back, I said, "I already got my exercise today, honey."
Over at the chief medical examiner's office on First Avenue, I managed to get hold of Dr. Adam MacCaffrey, the assistant medical examiner who had been called in when Doolan died.
He was a type I had seen before, a man who had been edged into something he could do well, but didn't like at all. He was about fifty with a perpetual expression of puzzlement, as if he were wondering what he was doing there.
Slender, mustached, and about as pale as his customers, he said from behind his desk, "I really don't see how you can question all the facts, Mr. Hammer."
I shook my head. "I'm not questioning anything, doctor. I'm just looking for a little more information."
"Well," he said, his eyes appraising me over his wire-rimmed glasses, "if I can help, I'll be glad to. Frankly, it's a pleasure to be asked to do anything around here that doesn't involve a scalpel." He found the loose-leaf pad he was looking for, fingered it open, and spread it out in front of him on the desk. "I may not be fast, Mr. Hammer, but I am thorough. Now, what is it you want?"
"Doolan's right arm, principally, the wrist."
He turned a page, then looked up at me again. "Yes?"
"Any abrasions, marks of struggle?"
"None," he said, without referring to the pad. "The victim was quite old, and any sign of a struggle would have been most evident. The skin would have shown even mildly rough treatment." He saw me frown and added, "I know what you're thinking. Could somebody have grabbed his hand and twisted it around on him, then fired the shot."
"Something like that."
"Not this time. The pressure of the trigger guard and the trigger itself would have marked him. Somebody's grasp like that would have left definite imprints. The skin of an eighty-five-year-old man is fairly fragile."
"You're certain, doctor?"
"Absolutely. One reason is that in apparently self-inflicted wounds, there is always that possibility, and I check that out immediately. The victim knew what he was doing. There was no unusual angle about the way he fired the gun. The entry was through the sternum and into the heart. Death was instantaneous." He stopped a moment, his pencil tapping on the desktop. "Tell me, Mr. Hammer, what prompts this inquiry?"
"Suicide wasn't Doolan's game, doctor."
He made a noncommittal gesture with his hands, then said, "That could have been true in his younger years, but this was not a younger man. He was old, desperately ill, and the fact he'd been going over his will, and buying up a burial plot that very afternoon, indicates no doubt as to his intentions."
"You have no reservations at all?" I asked him.
"Not from a medical viewpoint. No."
"From any other angle then?"
"I have no expertise other than medical."
I raised an eyebrow. "Checking his wrist was a little more than medical."
The doctor smiled gently. "That was something I picked up from Dr. Milton Helpern, New York's great forensic medical examiner." The smile broadened a little. "Besides, I'm a bit of a police detective buff. Which is why you're not having any trouble getting information out of me, Mr. Hammer."
"Really?"
"Oh yes. You're a famous character in this city. But you know that."
"Some would say 'infamous.' Did you handle that girl who died in a mugging last night? Virginia Mathes?"
He frowned. "As a matter of fact, yes. Why, does that have something to do with Inspector Doolan's death?"
"Not that I know of. Took place less than two blocks from the funeral home where we were sending him off. But that's a pretty thin connection."
"And it's a pretty routine killing, Mr. Hammer. She was stabbed in the heart—she bled out very quickly, was dead in seconds."
"Her body was twisted when she was stabbed, right?"
"Correct. Her assailant came up from behind, apparently cut her purse straps with his knife, and then she turned and he used the knife again. Tragic, but hardly unusual. Not in this city."
"No," I said, getting up, "not in this city."
I was heading south on Third Avenue, on foot, aware of the graduated flow from one neighborhood into the next. Here, money would swell out like a pouter pigeon's chest, next a block might get skinny with the dust of an excavated building only to erupt into noisy ethnics before getting back into the blender of lower Manhattan, where you were no better than what you could hang on to.
A halter-top/hot-pants girl in a doorway, pretty despite her drug habit, said, "Hey, handsome—you want to party?"
That was New York again, anytime, anyplace. At night in the dirty Forties, or before noon in lower Manhattan, sex was always for sale.
I looked at my watch, pretending to consider it, then shook my head. "Too early, sweetheart."
She let out a little laugh and shrugged. "Your loss."
Actually, my gain. What was funny, after all these years, was how few tourists knew the halter-top honey was only bait. Day or night, upstairs some punk would lay open your head with a sap, grab your loot, and drop you off a block away.
Better off with a pickup in a bar. If you knew the ropes, all you got was a possible VD. Hell, sometimes it was for real too, maybe you found a chickie who really did want some company; but you damn well had better use some finely tuned professional judgment.
I met Pat outside the baroque old building on Centre Street where TV cameras were filming a documentary on the early years of the city. There was no show-business hype on this one, no stars, no press agents—just a second-unit camera crew doing MOS filming of exteriors, a standard union bunch making a routine buck.
When I spotted Pat on the sidewalk, I walked over and said, "Looking for a part?"
He didn't even turn his head. He had a battered manila envelope under his arm. "Yeah, as the fall guy in your life story."
"Ms. Marshall called, huh?"
Now he looked at me like I'd asked to borrow a C-note. "She was not thrilled with me, passing you off as an NYPD cop last night."
"But you got off with a spanking, right? Worse dames to get a spanking from."
He picked out a stick of chewing gum, unwrapped it, and shoved it in his mouth; he'd stopped smoking, too. "You've been back one day."
"Almost."
"Uh-huh." He chewed on the gum, dragging out the flavor, then asked, "Why'd you have to pick La Marshall to move in on, for Christsakes?"
"It was at her invitation, remember?"
"Hey—she invited you through yours truly. You accepting that invite involved me. And I have to work in this department, you know."
I shrugged. "I think she enjoyed herself. Women love me, Pat. Remember?"
It was as if no year had passed. It was like those days when we were a little younger and still breathing hard.
He frowned at me, but his eyes weren't angry at all. "Mike—what the hell is going on?"
"Nothing's going on, Pat. I just asked what brought an important gal like her to the scene of some unimportant mugging."
His frown tightened until his eyes were almost shut. "Goddamn you, Mike. Why do you have to be such a fucking catalyst? You come back, and everything gets activated."
"Bullshit."
"No. Not bullshit. The guys at Doolan's funeral knew it, seeing you materialize like a goddamn apparition. Those goombahs sure as hell knew it. Les Graves knew it, seeing you at that crime scene last night. Now finally I know it. Finally it gets through my thick skull that Mike Hammer has decided an open-and-shut suicide is a murder, and so is a mugging fatality so routine it barely made the papers. One lousy goddamn day, and you've turned it all upside down again."
"It's a gift, Pat."
But there was no way to tell him that coming up on the plane, I'd had the same feeling—vague, but there. Not that I was going to do something, but that something was going to be done to me. Done to me good—real good. It wasn't a nice feeling at all.
"So what was Marshall doing at that crime scene?"
His turn to shrug. "Far as I know, just checking out a murder."
"And that's it?"
"She wanted to know whether Homicide was looking into that girl's murder."
"Virginia Mathes, you mean."
His eyes widened. "How the hell do you know her name? It wasn't in the papers."
"Maybe I'm psychic."
"Mike ... Mike. I'm getting too near retirement to play your kind of games."
A little laugh rumbled out of me. I took a look around, saw every crack in the masonry, and smelled the garbage in the gutter. Where I came from, the ocean would be warm, the sand squeaky-crunching under bare feet, and the boat ready to nose out into the Gulf Stream.
He made one of those little noncommittal gestures. "You said it yourself—Virginia Mathes."
"Pat..."
"She was nobody."
"Nobody's nobody."
"She was," he told me. "Six years ago, she made a stab at entertaining in a club and got printed as part of our licensing requirement. We ran her through Social Security, got her address and where she worked. She was a waitress at Ollie Joe's Steak House for two years, was well liked, had nothing against her in our files, just walked out of Ollie Joe's last night and got herself killed."
"Just like that."
"You were there, Mike."
"Ollie Joe's sure as hell isn't in that neighborhood. But you've already been to Ollie Joe's, haven't you, Pat? And found out something else, too?"
Ten seconds dragged by; we were just two gawkers on the street watching a film crew. Finally he looked at me.
"Mike, I didn't find out a damned thing."
"What didn't you find out?"
I knew he was going to tell me. He ran it around his brain a couple of times, but we had been together too many times on too many things for too goddamn long.
"Before she left," he said with a sigh, "a guy came in and—according to the cashier—seemed to know her. He had a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. She was a little more attentive to this patron than usual, but since there weren't many customers there, the cashier didn't think anything about it. The girl liked to gab, I guess."
"Just before she punched out. She signed her paycheck at the desk, picked up her cash, and left."
"How much cash?"
"Thirty-five bucks. Her big money was in tips. The cashier said something seemed to be on her mind when she left."
"What about the patron she got friendly with?"
He pitched his gum in the gutter. "He waited maybe two minutes, then he went out too."
"Like maybe she was about to date this customer...?"
"Maybe. And according to the cashier, that was unusual. Ginnie—that's what they called her—never did that."
I gave him the slow grin. "You haven't scratched on Ginnie Mathes's door yet, have you?"
Pat rubbed his hand over his hair, then took a deep breath of polluted air. "I didn't want to spoil your fun, buddy. Here."
He slid the manila envelope out from under his arm.
"What's this?"
"Doolan stuff. All copies, and you can keep 'em—and keep 'em confidential."
"Sure."
His gray eyes studied me like I was a fingerprint under a microscope. "You going to his apartment now?"
I nodded. "Right from here."
"Thought maybe you'd hit the Mathes girl's pad first. You're a busy guy for a retired detective—two suspicious deaths to look into, and not back a day."
"You said that before."
"Did I?" He slipped a hand into his suitcoat pocket and brought out a key paper-clipped to one of his cards. "This is for the police padlock on Doolan's door. We have a light cover on the place, so if anybody tries to stop you, give them my card. If I'm not in the office, my guys will confirm things."
I nodded my thanks. "Pat, you're welcome to come along. That'd make it official."
"Since when did you want anything official? Anyway, Mike—what's to see? I told you we picked that place apart. No, this is all yours, my friend. I want you to be totally satisfied with the answers. What I don't want is for you to get a bug up your ass, and go prowling for something that's not there."
I looked at the key like I was imagining things. "You're fine with this?"
"I'm fine with this. For once we have a commissioner who likes your style. Why, I'll never know, but he okayed this bit of action. At least I got my ass covered this time."
"If Doolan's suicide is so open-and-shut, why bother?"
His grin was an odd mingling of amusement, frustration, and maybe affection. "Mike, you're one of those weird Irishers, the kind they say carries little people in his pocket. You've always had a nose for murder, and you've always been able to smell out the bizarre posing as the routine."
"Thanks."
"On the other hand? Sometimes I think when something's going down, and you're riding along, white becomes black, wrong becomes right, and the whole works gets turned upside the hell down."
"My track record isn't all bad, kiddo."
"I know, and that's what shakes me up. This Doolan deal is suicide, all right. But I want there to be no doubts. I figure if you're satisfied, anybody would be satisfied."
"I hope I am, Pat." I meant it, too. "I'm not looking for trouble."
"Not looking for trouble—do you expect me to believe that? Do you really have yourself believing that?"
I said nothing.
He put a hand on my shoulder. "Listen, Mike—on this Mathes thing? I do need to come along. I'll be free in a couple of hours. You call me before you go over there."
"If Doolan is a straight-up suicide," I said, "and the Mathes kid is a run-of-the-mill mugging turned fatal ... why sweat letting me look into it, Pat? What have you got to lose?"
"With you around, Mike? Just my badge. Or maybe my sanity."
I didn't argue the point, just assured Pat I'd call him before I checked the Mathes girl's pad, then grabbed a cab, and gave the driver Doolan's address.