The sky still had its gray lid over the pressure cooker of New York, holding in not heat but cold, a clammy cold, unsure of whether it wanted to rain or snow. The sidewalk crowds moved in hunched-over lockstep, raincoats clutched at throats, men’s trouser legs flapping like flags, women holding down their skirts, even those in minis.
I liked this weather. The chill helped me think. It kept me alert, thanks in part to various old wounds including the shot in my leg that had started this all. Old wounds could help you prevent new ones, if you paid attention and weren’t reckless. Of course, sometimes the latter could be a problem for me.
The Trib Building was old-fashioned enough to still use elevator operators. I got off on the familiar floor and didn’t bother knocking at the door with the gold letters that said HY GARDNER. There was no reception area, the office big enough to accommodate both Hy at his big desk across the room and the bouffant blonde he used as a secretary at her desk where you came in.
She was very efficient and not there for her considerable good looks, since Hy’s wife Marilyn, a former secretary of his herself, wouldn’t have put up with that. Still, the peroxide had apparently damaged certain brain cells, as when I told her to go out for a smoke, she just showed me the big blue eyes and said, “You know I don’t smoke, Mr. Hammer.”
I jerked a thumb at the door. “Start.”
When she was gone, I pulled up the visitor’s chair and tossed my hat on Hy’s desk, while he swung around from his typewriter on its stand.
“You always have had a way with the ladies, Mike.” He was smiling that knowing little grin.
“Knowing” was right—a top columnist like Hy knew where just about every body was buried. If you saw this modest-sized man with his unremarkable pan, just a pair of glasses and a receding hairline and a born snooper’s droopy nose, you would never know the power he wielded.
I watched him light up one of his ever-present cigars. It smelled like Havana in there, but in a good way.
He waved out his match and said, “That M.P. you got assigned to you seems like a bright fella. Also looks like he could bench-press a Cadillac.”
“He’s the real goods, Hy. You know why I’m here. You may have thought Des was bright, but there were still things you didn’t want to tell him. You wanted me here in person. Here I am.”
“Lucky me.” His glasses had slid down his nose and he was looking over them. “Mike, you do understand there’s a kind of unwritten agreement between the press and the politicians.”
“Do I?”
“We had a president a while back who couldn’t keep it in his pants.”
“That was the rumor.”
“But it didn’t get in the papers, or on the radio, or on the TV.”
“Oh. That unwritten agreement.”
Hy nodded, rocking back in his leather desk chair. Behind him were metal filing cabinets. On the side walls were enough pictures of him with famous celebrities and politicians to rival those in Senator Jasper’s office.
“So you are or aren’t going to tell me?” I asked. “Or do I have to read between the lines?”
“They wouldn’t be that hard to read between, kid.”
“Spare me the trouble anyway, Hy. Or do you think I’m a security risk?”
His smile was small but it was the guardian of big secrets. “Mike, I like Allen Jasper. We need more like him. I like his brand of politics. He sits on powerful committees, and he doesn’t try the grandstanding bull that brought McCarthy down. And he can’t be bought.”
“Can he be blackmailed?”
Hy put his cigar in a tray, leaving him wreathed with smoke. “I didn’t say that.”
“There’s something in his private life that may be a weak spot. How’s that for reading between the lines?”
Hy put his glasses back in place and leaned forward. He folded his hands on top of the news copy he’d been checking.
“Mike, the senator has a lovely wife. Wonderful wife, and children, really just the kind of ideal American family that helps keep a politico in office. Allen Jasper could have a shot at the White House one of these days, if he plays his cards right.”
“But is he? Playing his cards right?”
Hy shrugged, retrieved his cigar and puffed at it, sending up smoke signals I could just about read.
“I met Emily Jasper myself,” I said. “When you say she’s lovely and she’s wonderful, I agree. But she’s also overweight, thanks to bearing the senator his lovely, wonderful children and because middle age is an unforgiving bastard.”
“You’re getting warmer, Mike.”
“I spent enough time with Allen to know he has an eye for a well-turned calf. He never did anything out of line on that trip— too much of a pro for that—but he made remarks. And when I got friendly with the little gal the Russians provided to translate for us, he could have rightly had a shit fit. Man, was that a breech of protocol.”
“So if I told you,” Hy said, “way off the record, that he has a history of extra-marital activities, you wouldn’t fall off that chair and sue me.”
“No. I think he should be punched in the face for cheating on that great wife of his, but no.”
“Mike, people who screw in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.”
I batted the air. “Last time I looked, I wasn’t married and I wasn’t a United States senator. If he’s playing around, he’s an idiot a bunch of ways.”
“I can’t argue with you,” Hy said with a shrug. “And things are changing. Look at the Profumo affair and how the British press blew it wide open.”
“This is why I hate politics,” I said. “Even the good ones are sons of bitches. Listen, Des showed you the list of guests at Jasper’s party. Anybody there I should be talking to?”
Hy shook his head. “The only one involved in top-secret projects is Dr. Giles, and he’s at least semi-retired. Maybe that Contreaux chick who works for him is worth a chat. Yeah, Mike, definitely you should talk to her. Tell her your theories about how a guy should be faithful to his best gal. How is Velda, by the way?”
I grinned at him. “Screw you, buddy. You know anything about those top-secret projects?”
“No. Just that Giles has been tied in with N.A.S.A. since the start. Other than that, it’s outside my area. N.A.S.A. scientists almost never star in Broadway plays.”
“Suppose not.” I shifted in the chair. “You ever hear of something called Complex 90?”
“No. What is it, a new vitamin pill?”
“Maybe one of those top-secret projects you mentioned.” I told him about the death of Lisa Contreaux’s science-nerd boyfriend.
“Maybe you really should talk to that doll,” Hy said.
“Anybody else on that list I should check up on? What about that Wall Street whiz, Warren Bentley?”
Hy shook his head. “Don’t bother. Strictly high finance stuff. Nothing government-related.”
“Well, if it’s not breeching the security of the Trib’s top columnist, is this Bentley character really going to marry Irene Carroll?”
Hy laughed and choked on a bushel of cigar smoke doing it. I waited for him not to die, and finally he said, “Are you kidding? Have you met the guy?”
“I saw him at Jasper’s party. I only talked to a handful of the guests and he wasn’t one of them. I was just doing my security job.”
Still chuckling, Hy shook his hand sideways. “The guy’s a fly ball, Mike. Irene Carroll’s strictly his beard.”
“No kidding. So that’s a secret, too. You must have an unwritten agreement with that crowd, too.”
“Actually, we do. That, as we say, is showbiz. Don’t be a prude, Mike. Irene Carroll helping out a nice guy like Bentley doesn’t hurt anybody.”
“I didn’t say it did. But it does raise an interesting question.”
“Yeah?”
I got up, stuffed on my hat. “What’s in it for Irene Carroll?”
* * *
I had been to this townhouse before, on the night of the party when Lisa Contreaux, Dr. Giles, and I had grabbed a cab that brought us here, for the doc to patch me up. Just off Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park, it was a newly restored three-story brownstone that on the first floor housed the doctor’s exclusive practice. I vaguely remembered him mentioning that night that he lived in an apartment above.
From a booth in the Trib Building’s lobby, I had called Lisa Contreaux and found her at home, and willing to talk. She’d given me an address.
This address.
I walked up the stairs to the landing where her apartment took up the entire third floor. I buzzed, and she answered, smiling in a very friendly way, immediately rekindling the rapport we’d had months ago at that ill-fated party.
Liz Taylor’s imaginary sister had been under-dressed at that cocktail party, wearing a light blue satin blouse and a navy pencil skirt. Now months later, by odd coincidence, she’d selected the same outfit, making her over-dressed in this context. And she had on something else that she’d worn that night, too: Evening in Paris perfume.
“I was just about to give up on you,” she said, holding the door open.
She was a doll, all right. Her heavily lashed big brown eyes with those dark, unplucked eyebrows and that bright red-lipsticked mouth provided a stark contrast with her ghostly pale complexion. The beauty mark near her mouth gave her glamour, and the black Carmen-like curls reminded me of the way Velda’s hair had not long ago dried into a gypsy tousle.
The thought of Velda, and the pact we’d made last night, would have to guide me through the questioning of this beauty.
People in glass houses, as Hy had said...
After moving through a small entryway, we were in a large living room with a nice window onto the park, but the furnishings were unremarkable in an anonymously contemporary way, the colors muted, pastel. A few nice framed prints were spotted here and there, including a large one over the white-plaster fireplace, impressionistic Parisian scenes, maybe to go with the perfume.
She took my trenchcoat and hat and laid them carefully on a chair. Then she closed the curtains over the picture window on the park, as if she thought the trees might eavesdrop. Only one light was on, a subdued yellow-glow lamp by the couch. On this overcast morning, no light in particular found its way in, and it might have been midnight.
Taking my arm at the elbow, she led me to the couch. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee, perhaps? A soft drink? Beer?”
“It’s a little early, but. beer would be fine.”
“I’ll join you.”
She returned with two poured Pilsner glasses of dark liquid.
“I hope you like Guinness,” she said, sitting on the couch beside me.
“Being of good Irish stock,” I said, and sipped and savored, “it’s a requirement.”
I set the glass on a coaster on the blond coffee table before us.
“What did you want to see me about, Mike?”
Apparently we were on a first-name basis after our brief meeting at the Jasper party.
“A couple of things,” I said. “By the way, my condolences. I understand your fiancé—Dennis? Was in a tragic accident recently.”
She nodded, her expression turning somber. “Yes. He was a sweet boy, a brilliant boy.”
“Did the cops ever track down the hit-and-run driver?”
“No. But I just know it was some callow undergraduate. I’m afraid Manheim University has a deserved reputation as a party school. Lots of drinking among the frat crowd. Reprehensible.”
She said this as she sipped at her pre-noon glass of Guinness.
“We don’t know each other very well, Lisa, but maybe you’ve heard I have a reputation for being blunt. Meaning no disrespect to the dead, I just can’t see a beautiful woman like you getting next to a gawky kid like that.”
She bristled. “Mike—there are women who are looking for more out of a man than just a nice set of broad shoulders. Dennis was a genius, or nearly so. He worked closely with Dr. Giles, and was on his way to the top of his field. His... social graces may have been lacking, but he was a fine young man.”
“Hey, I’ve been told my social graces are lacking.”
That got a smile out of her, and there was nothing bristling in her tone when she said, “I have no prejudice against muscles, Mike. But I have a feeling you’re more than just brawn yourself. A detective of your... caliber? Could hardly have achieved that status without considerable mental prowess.”
“Maybe. But my caliber is .45, and hanging around with a gal who’s got a PhD in physics could give a guy an inferiority complex.”
She smiled and her tongue darted over the red lips, making them glisten wetly. She squeezed my shoulder, with a nice familiarity before withdrawing it. “Mike, you have nothing to worry about.”
“Speaking of complexes, what do you make of Dennis’s last words? ‘Complex 90’? Does that mean anything to you?”
The unplucked eyebrows traveled higher. “Actually, it does. It’s the project that he and Dr. Giles were working on together. But I’m afraid the nature of it is strictly classified by the government.”
Having official credentials has its benefits. I got out the fancy blue-and-gold I.D. card with the embossed seal of Rickerby’s group and let her take a gander.
“I’m not here strictly as a private eye,” I said, putting the I.D. away, “or a private citizen. I’m investigating the circumstances of the party Senator Jasper threw.”
She frowned in confusion. “Why would that event need investigating, Mike?”
“We think it started a spiral of events the culmination of which hasn’t yet been reached. Possibly I interrupted an assassination attempt on the senator.”
“You really think so? As I understood it, that Carroll’s woman’s jewelry is what that creature was after.”
“The Carroll dame wasn’t even there yet, but of course maybe our party-crasher didn’t know that. I saw him, no doubt about it, make a beeline for the senator. Also, this ‘creature’—his name was Pietro Romanos—was a championship shooter. A crack shot. That’s the makings of an assassin, doll.”
She didn’t seem to mind being called “doll” by me. I admit I was testing the waters.
When she shrugged, the full breasts under the rather tight satin bobbed distractingly. “All right, Mike. Granted that party, and possibly those attending, are worthy of investigation. But what does that have to do with Dennis’s tragedy?”
“Dennis was one of the partygoers. And now he’s dead. Hit-and-run is a longstanding, time-honored method of covering up a murder even as it’s being committed.”
Those great big brown eyes got even bigger. “Dennis... murdered? Why?”
“I have no idea. But his last words may point us in the right direction. Which brings us back to ‘Complex 90,’ Lisa. What is it?”
She thought for a while, hands folded in her lap like a wallflower clutching a corsage, hoping to get a dance. I leaned back and sipped Guinness and waited for her decision.
Finally, she said, “Complex 90, putting it simply, is an organic formula that protects astronauts from space viruses.”
Giles had said something on the subject at the party. It had, of course, gone over my head. Right into Outer Space.
“I didn’t even know viruses could exist beyond the atmosphere,” I said.
“Bacteria can travel, but that is only part of the problem. A latent virus can reactivate on a space flight, something as minor as a cold sore erupting into a life-threatening problem for an astronaut. There is also a theory that assorted influenzas that have hit hard in various countries have entered our atmosphere via cosmic dust and micro-meteorites.”
“And this Complex 90 is a kind of. inoculation against space viruses?”
“It would be or could be, if Dr. Giles is successful in developing it. From everything I understand, despite several breakthroughs, he’s years away.”
“But tell me this, Lisa. Suppose he’d found it, the answer, the cure. Or even just had research pointing in the right direction. Is that something the Soviets might want?”
She laughed and the red smile was wide and lush. “Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. Whoever has this formula will be way, way ahead in the space race. We would vault into a first position the Russians could only dream of attaining.”
I thought about that. Then I asked, “But why would ‘Complex 90’ be the Dorfman kid’s last words?”
She shrugged and her expression was weary and frustrated. “At first, I spent hours thinking about that very thing, wondering if perhaps he’d made a breakthrough and wanted to make sure we knew.”
“Had he?”
“No, not according to Dr. Giles. But I finally came to understand, or at least I came to hold a belief that I find. comforting.”
“Okay. What is it?”
“Dennis was unconscious at the accident scene, the ambulance attendants said, but then came around when they were loading him in, but was in a delirious state. The project had been so important to him, those words were a natural thing to come to his lips. I think, I really believe, that he knew he was in trouble, even knew he was dying, and the importance of the project he was being forced to abandon sprang to his consciousness.”
That was a pretty long-winded way of saying, “Because it was important to him,” but maybe when you were under thirty and had a doctorate in physics you had a right to be windy.
“Mike. do you really think Dennis was murdered?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Are you looking into it? Would you look into it? For me? If it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of this government investigation you’re conducting, I could hire you as a private investigator. That’s what you are, isn’t it?”
“It’s what I am.”
“I make a decent salary. What kind of retainer would you need?”
“Nothing. I’ve already decided to look into Dorfman’s death, whether it’s part of the federal inquiry or not.”
She closed her eyes and her smile was one of relief, but there was sorrow in it, too. When she opened those eyes again, they were glistening. “Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Dennis didn’t deserve to die like that. So young. So brilliant.”
Everything she said about him screamed respect, but nothing murmured passion.
I gestured around the place. “I didn’t know you lived above Dr. Giles. Does he own this townhouse?”
She nodded. “I’m very lucky. It’s a little extra that comes with my job. He likes having me handy. Really facilitates the work, whether it’s here or when we ride together out to the university.”
“Can I be blunt again?”
“Certainly, Mike.”
“Is your arrangement strictly business?”
“What do you mean... oh!” She laughed. “No, Mike, no, there’s no personal relationship between the doctor and myself. We’ve become good friends, but it’s, as you say, strictly business. Or in our case, strictly science. Why do you ask?”
“I’m a snoop.”
She cocked her head, regarding me like something on a slide under her microscope. That lush, red mouth angled in a sly smile. “You certainly have a lot of questions about my personal life, don’t you? Wondering about me and Dennis. Now about me and Dr. Giles. How does this factor into your investigation, Mike?”
“No reason. Just gathering information.”
“Are you sure?”
She leaned in and that mouth melted over mine, and she found my hand and guided it to a satin-covered breast where I could feel the hardening of her nipple as it tried to burst through the smooth cloth. Then she found my other hand and guided it up under the skirt, moving it up to where her panties should be but instead I felt the pleasant harshness of forbidden curls. The kiss continued, and her tongue probed my mouth, like another scientific experiment she was conducting, and under my hands in those two intimate places, her body tightened and moved spasmodically, an invitation that became a demand.
Her hand was on me, too, and as her fingers scrambled like playful kittens after my zipper, and her mouth drew away for a breath, I said, “Lisa. sweetheart. no. Not right now.”
She reared back, damn near startled. Her voice became husky, nothing of the no-nonsense scientist in it.
“No? Don’t you want me? I wanted you the moment I saw you at Jasper’s, Mike.” Those big brown eyes got sleepy. “You were right about me. I need a man. A real man. Sweet as Dennis was, he was a boy. Show me what I’ve been missing, Mike. show me.”
“Not the right time, baby,” I said, and I gave her a quick kiss, and got to my feet. She looked up at me, a beautiful mess. The Carmen hair was a mad tumble framing a face where that mouth was a sensuous smear of lipstick, and her skirt was hiked high enough to offer a glimpse of paradise. Her top two buttons had popped undone, and the braless breasts were heaving.
“You don’t want to go, do you, Mike?” she laughed, and a hand of hers gripped me through my trousers, grabbing the part of me that wanted to stay.
“Lisa,” I said, “that’s the best retainer I’ve been offered in ages, but we’ll have to take this up later.”
I jammed my hat on and grabbed my trenchcoat, and she did not show me to the door. She stayed there on the couch, laughing at me in a way that seemed not at all intellectual.
On the way down the stairs, I used a handkerchief to wipe off the lipstick. I would have to remember to toss that damn hanky in a BEAUTIFY NEW YORK bin. If Velda found it, there’d be hell to pay.
Glass houses was right.
* * *
At the Blue Ribbon Restaurant on Forty-fourth, I sat at my corner table in the bar nursing a Four Roses and ginger, waiting half an hour for Des Casey to meet me, as we’d arranged. Then I asked for a phone and Angie brought one over. I tried my apartment number, where I thought Casey might be.
No answer.
I called Velda, who had stayed home for the morning, waiting until I came up with a new assignment for her. She had heard from Casey mid-morning.
“Des said he connected with an old cellmate pal of this Romanos character,” she told me. “Apparently the week of the Jasper party, Romanos was bragging about a big job he had coming up. Something that would change everything for him.”
“That could be a jewelry heist.”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t give that to you exactly right, Mike. It was a ‘big-paying job.’ And there’s one other interesting wrinkle— Romanos told his pal he’d be out of touch for a while. Not just laying low—out of the country.”
“A guy doesn’t have to leave the country after a jewel heist.”
“Not usually. You’ve lost track of your M.P.?”
“Yeah, Des was supposed to meet me at the Ribbon over half an hour ago.”
“Well, you know traffic in this town.”
“Vel, where was he calling you from? Did he say?”
“I think he was right here in the building. In your apartment. Should I go down and check?”
“No. Stay put. You’ll hear from me.”
We said goodbye and I hung up. I went out the back way, cut over to Broadway and caught a cab. Nobody seemed to be following. If that was bad guys who’d lost my trail, that was fine. If I’d shaken the good guys, maybe not so fine...
I could have said something to the agent posing as a doorman or the agent playing porter in the lobby, but I didn’t. I just got on the elevator. When the doors closed, I pressed 9, then slid the .45 out of the sling, thumbed off the safety and full-cocked the hammer back.
I tucked myself by the front right corner of the elevator car and when the doors opened, I was ready. But nothing happened. I edged out into the hall and made my way down to 9-E. Carefully, as close to silent as humanly possible, I got to my door, and listened.
Nothing.
Just silence, but that funny kind of silence that wasn’t silence at all, because city sounds were mixed in and building noise and then the soft speech of two men exchanging a few words, not outside, not elsewhere in the building, but right inside my apartment, not far beyond that door, just some friendly, small conversation.
In Russian.
I didn’t use my key. I used my foot, which was risky, because kicking open doors isn’t as easy in real life as it is in the movies and on TV, and if I didn’t hit just the right spot with just the right force, I would be announcing myself and bullets could come punching through the wood of that door into me, ending this before it began, getting me out of the game before I even the knew players.
I kicked it just right.
It flew off its hinges and I flew into the darkened apartment, no lights on in my little living room, the blinds onto the street shut, but the hallway light exposed them, all three of them, the smaller one in the topcoat and the big man in the raincoat and the M.P. in civvies on the floor, sprawled there, possibly dead, certainly unconscious, his face to one side in a pool of blood from his nose and mouth.
The prone Des Casey was between us but the smaller of the two—a man said to be a master of disguise, though in the muted light the shape of him was the same—was my visitor from the office, aka Soviet assassin Felipe Mandau, who was digging in his topcoat pocket for his weapon when my .45 slug caught him in the shoulder and knocked him back on his ass. The other guy, a big bald guy deeper in the living room near the window with the blinds, was just a monstrous silhouette, but he already had his gun out, and it blasted orange flame at me, the bullet going way high as I dropped to the floor, near where Casey lay—breathing, I could see him breathing!—and when I came up with the .45 ready to return fire, the big guy threw a lamp at me, catching my shoulder, and the .45 sprung out of my grasp as I saw him lumbering toward me. I scrambled to my feet just in time for him to grab me by the trenchcoat lapels and toss me like a shot put into my couch, sending it over on its back and me with it, ass over teakettle. Then he was looming over me, just a black shape, and the barrel of his Makarov was pointing down at me.
“Do not move, Hammer,” a thickly Russian-accented voice ordered. The guy was six two, easy.
I was on my back on the overturned couch, and that put my feet in a perfect position to kick him, and both feet caught him in the chest and he went back, smacking into a cabinet, the Makarov flying. I threw myself at him, taking him the rest of the way down, and I slammed my fists into him, his face, his chest, his breadbasket, but nothing seemed to have much effect. The big man scrambled backward under me, grasping at anything, and that was when he grabbed the blinds and pulled them down just as sun was finding its way through the clouds to send a laser beam of light into my face...
...through the scarred-edged quarter-size hole in the middle of the big man’s right palm.
The hole that I had made with a ball-peen hammer when I slammed a twenty-penny nail into his hand into the floor of that barn.
The face looking up at me, with big yellow teeth bared under a thick mustache, his cheekbones Apache high, nostrils flared in the Slavic face, belonged to an assassin named Gorlin. Code name: the Dragon. The surviving half, anyway.
I was straddling the son of a bitch now, my knees on his shoulders, pinning him down, a great big man like a little bug on its back, wriggling, squirming, but I just hunkered over him and laughed in his face, my spittle flecking his high cheekbones like tiny tears, my hands digging in around his throat and I squeezed and squeezed and savored the way his eyes popped out and how his tongue lolled like a thirsty dog’s.
I had damn near finished the fucker when an arm looped around my neck and yanked me backward and I turned my head just enough to see Mandau, his eyes popping there, too, but not the way the Dragon’s had been, his smaller yellow teeth exposed in an awful smile, and his free hand with a hypodermic needle in it was seeking the exposed flesh of the side of my neck.
Mandau hadn’t been going for a weapon, at least not a gun: it was a needle! They did want to abduct me again, that’s why the Dragon hadn’t shot me when he had the chance, and my hands were off Gorlin’s throat and reaching around to try to get at my hypo-wielding attacker when the Dragon grabbed me by the wrists and held me there, that needle in his comrade’s grasp maybe an eighth of an inch from my throat when something, somebody, ripped the smaller man off the back of me like a scab.
Des Casey, his face bloody, looking as dazed as a drunk, which meant he was likely badly concussed, had hauled the little man with the big needle off me and I was still smiling like a lunatic when the Dragon was on me, flinging me aside again, and I bumped hard against the underside of the couch, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, so that I was just half-sitting, half-standing there when the Dragon, who had found his gun, shot Des Casey in the head.
The M.P.’s eyes emptied of life and that once strong body fell like a stringless marionette to the floor and I saw my .45, dove for my .45, and it was in my hand as the two Russians ran pell mell from the apartment, my slugs raining their way, chewing up walls and furniture and making thunder in the small room, taking Mandau’s head apart in red jagged chunks, but the Dragon was out the door, and by the time I got to my feet and pursued, navigating the dead, I slipped in somebody’s blood and knocked my head into the side of a table. It stunned me just enough to slow me, and when I got into the hall, it was empty, other than the billowing curtains down at the other end where the window on the fire escape was up.
I ran there, leaned out with my rod ready but saw no one on the metal stairs and wondered if I’d been suckered, that maybe Gorlin had taken some other escape route. I went to check the elevator just as Velda stepped off, wide-eyed and ready with a .32 Browning in her hand. She had heard the shots from two floors down and come up to help.
But when we went back to check Des Casey, there was no helping him.
The M.P. was dead.
“He’s back, Velda,” I said.
“What? Who?”
“The Dragon. Comrade Gorlin. Rickerby lied to me—and I will know the goddamn reason why!”
That was when a brace of Rickerby’s agents, those faithful watchdogs from across the street and down in the lobby, came racing up to our rescue.
“Just in the nick of time, boys,” I told them.