Mickey Spillane - Kiss Her Goodbye

His words were tight, bit off, with an undercurrent of indignant hysteria. "Haven't you heard, Hammer? You can't legislate morality. Look at how eager the mayor and every politician in this town were to rub shoulders with celebrities at Club 52. No one cares about drugs. No one cares about anything anymore."

I wasn't here to talk philosophy or social mores. "You were supposed to get that gemstone handed off to you by Ginnie Mathes. That out-of-the-way location was chosen because it was close to where you'd be that evening, and yet was an area no one would associate with you. Only you didn't get to her in time—her sailor boy Joe Fidello mugged his own girlfriend for it, and when she saw it was him, he panicked and killed her."

" He killed her, Hammer. Not me."

"But Fidello missed the stone. He got her purse, but she'd tucked the little beauty away in her sleeve, and it fell out onto the street where, as fate would have it, I ran across the thing. Ain't kismet a bitch?"

"Hammer, that stone is immensely valuable. If you deliver it to me, and forget any of this happened, then—"

"You mean forget you tried to run me down with a stolen car? Forget that a young woman named Dulcie Thorpe got splashed on the pavement because you weren't up to the job? What I'm wondering is, why such a big payoff? You're just a local politician. But then I thought about it—you're young, good-looking, personable, with TV experience. Your roving reporter background gives you contacts here and in Canada. You're a natural conduit to get cash to other bent politicos, plus down the road, you'll make an ideal candidate for governor or maybe U.S. senator. Who was it that said someday the Mafia will own the man in the White House, and he won't even know it? That's almost right. You'd know it."

He was shaking his head, desperation in his tone. "All right. All right. I admit I panicked and I stole that car and ... but you weren't killed, you were barely injured." Hope leapt into his eyes. "So we can still do business."

"Dulcie Thorpe can't do business anymore."

That remark astounded him. "A hooker? A filthy little street tramp, and you pretend to care? I made a mistake, Hammer, and now you can take advantage of it, and me. You can go back to Florida and retire out of the New York rat race with an ongoing pension the likes of which you never dreamed."

"Okay, Alex. Let's shrug off Dulcie Thorpe's life and death. In her game, her life expectancy was a big question mark anyway, right? But how do you justify Bill Doolan? Your mentor! A man who valued you and your friendship, encouraged you, but who you only got close to for your own aggrandizement, and to keep an eye on the enemy. No wonder the Bonetti family tried to hit you in those drive-bys! You helped run them out of the neighborhood at the very same time you were partnered with Little Tony Tret!"

He had been shaking his head ever since I mentioned Doolan, and now he got a word in: "I cop to the hooker, but not Doolan. I didn't kill him, I would never kill him, I loved that old guy!"

"Maybe. I don't think so, but maybe. I know for sure you killed Tony Tret. I can sell it to Captain Chambers, too. I saw your name in the Enfilade book—you were there yesterday in the late afternoon, picking up a rifle from your locker. The little guy on the door, Gerald, saw you leave with a zippered carrying bag. And he saw you bring it back this morning. Ballistics will take about five minutes to make a match with the shell casings from that office window. You left a kind of funny signature—you have a rep at the Enfilade for not being much of a shot. And it took you three tries to nail Tony."

Jaynor was smiling now. Still nervous, but smiling. "All right, Hammer. Am I supposed to believe you take any offense at me getting rid of a mob lowlife like Anthony Tretriano? There are some people saying that what happened at the Y and S Club yesterday wasn't two warring mob factions—that it was just you, a one-man army, who did it all. You're a murderer yourself, Hammer. Where the hell do you get your moral indignation? Your sickening self-righteous attitude?"

"I like to think of myself as the guy who puts those extra little weights on the scale ... to make things balance out. But maybe I'm as evil a shit as you. I don't think so, though. Because there's still Doolan, isn't there? There's still Doolan."

"I told you, I had nothing to do with that!" Jaynor pointed at the chair. "He sat right there and thought about the protracted death sentence he was facing and took the easy way out. He was an old man, and you can't blame him."

"I don't blame him. I blame you. I'm guessing you spent the evening with him, and drugged his coffee or his beer—there'd be no toxicology screen on a gunshot suicide victim. I figure you had a key to the place, to lock up after—you and Doolan were that tight. Just like you were tight enough to know about his secret stash of handguns in the desk. You selected one, and when he fell asleep in that chair, you pressed one of his prize guns in his hand and helped the unconscious old man pull the trigger. And burst his heart. At least he slept through it. Had he been awake, you'd have broken it before you exploded it."

"I had no reason to do that."

"Sure you did. I think Doolan finally told you about Velda and the work he and she did, investigating Little Tony and 52, and how she'd been in Colombia for months gathering intel that would be shared with the feds. You knew that Doolan was getting close—that he'd be onto you very soon. I'm guessing you figured you would find documents in his desk, not knowing he kept his work-related files with Peter Cummings, the P.I. he sometimes worked for. Even then, even before the handoff of Basil's pebble was botched, you were in damage-control mode. And you have been in that mode ever since, panicking. Killing Doolan. Trying to kill me. Shooting Tret. An amateur, just floundering around, trying to save his ass."

He grabbed the nearest of the guns, one of the matched German P38s. He pointed it at me and it clicked and clicked.

"If you really knew anything about guns," I said, "you'd have noticed the weight was off. I unloaded all of those. You can keep trying if you like."

He looked down aghast at the other weapons on the blotter that were just useless hunks of metal without their little messengers.

I didn't fool around, since he might have another rod on him, one that did have ammunition, and whipped the .45 out and squeezed off a round, hitting him right in the heart.

It rocked him back a little, against the desk—the .45 had considerable recoil. He winced. It hurt. He braced himself on the lip of the desk with the heels of his hands.

"That's where you shot Doolan," I said, gesturing with the .45 at his chest. "Of course, he wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest."

"You ... you made your point, Hammer. Call your friend Chambers. I want a lawyer. We'll see ... see how much evidence you really have."

"That's a good one," I said with a chuckle, and shot him in the stomach. "Like I give a shit about evidence."

He was bent over clutching his belly, his mouth open, the air knocked out of him. The next shot was in the sternum and I heard the splintering crack of bone. He made a gargling sound and went down, hard, across the chalk outline of where the chair had been, where Doolan had been found.

"It's like getting punched by Joe Frazier, huh?"

I put one in his rib cage and he squirmed like a bug on its back. "I could unload a dozen clips into you, and this standard army cap-and-ball ammo would never penetrate that vest of yours. These are just nice soft lead slugs that will tenderize your muscle tissue and puree your organs and break every goddamn bone in their path. Hard to say how long it will take you to die, Alex, but you should have time to work up a good speech for Saint Peter. Kind of think you're heading south, though, no matter how glib you are."