Mickey Spillane - Kiss Her Goodbye

"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.