PROLOGUE
An NYPD chaplain officiated at the graveside ceremony, as per Velda’s wishes. She had, after all, been a policewoman once, before she became the other licensed investigator in the Hammer agency. She could also have asked for, and received, a military send-off, because her remarkable heroic life had included service with the Central Intelligence Agency.
A heroine’s send-off was what she rated, after living a lifetime with me. We’d only married a few years ago, but we’d been together for decades prior, sharing a business, living in the same apartment building, then the same apartment, and finally retiring to beachfront Florida, an old married couple. But she’d made it clear, when the finality of the doctor’s diagnosis made the inevitable sooner than later, that she would lay to rest in Manhattan, where she had only occasionally rested in a lifetime of activity.
A heroine’s life.
About an equivalent of a third of the living population of Manhattan already rested here. It was a popular place, Green-Wood Cemetery. And why not? Trees everywhere, half-a-million or so acres of rolling hills and dales, an occasional pond, a chapel. I’d been here visiting dead friends – Jack Williams was here – back when you could hardly move left or right without running into gravediggers, and nothing spoils a cemetery visit like running into one of those.
But now the diggers seemed almost rare – not much space left for burials. Dying is costly these days. They’d taken to stacking family members like pancakes in some plots, presumably minus syrup. Of course, Velda had planned ahead. She’d reserved a space for me, as well. My name was next to hers on the gravestone, with a place waiting for the eventual death date to be carved in.
Don’t be impatient, doll, I thought. I’ll be there soon enough.
For such a beautiful burying place, the day had insisted on a melancholy mien, as if the sky was sorry to see her go, too. The gray was gentle, though, not threatening rain, just respecting and protecting the sorrow of the day with a balmy breeze, an umbrella courtesy of God, a final kiss courtesy of Velda.
Looking like a movie star who’d aged well, Pat Chambers, the longtime captain of Homicide who’d finally made inspector before they retired him out, had made the trip from Florida, too. He and the ex-policewoman wife he’d finally found – his love for Velda paying off only in friendship – were a couple with whom we’d often socialized; they were in Key West and we weren’t far from there. We’d play cards and reminisce, and our wives would try (rarely successfully) to curtail how much Miller beer we imbibed.
Pat’s wife hadn’t made the trip. She knew something very personal bound Pat, Velda and me, and she paid her respects by keeping her distance.
The funeral had been held at the Green-Wood chapel, and the place had been packed. That had surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. I’d figured a couple of dinosaurs like Mike and Velda Hammer, however well-preserved the former Miss Sterling had been, would be very old news in the town with so much vice they named it twice.
But people with whom our lives had intersected, people she had touched and their children and their children’s children, surprised us with their sorrow and support, and many accompanied us to the graveside, an army of appreciation.
Pat really had loved Vel, and his eyes were brimming with tears that never quite made their
escape. I was less manly about it. I held up through the service just fine, and even laughed at some of the anecdotes that got told by friends invited up to share their memories. Velda and I knew professional comedians and showbiz columnists who could work a crowd, particularly a sentimental one like this. And they scored big. People needed to laugh.
Then when that fucking dark hole yawned at me, and slowly swallowed the simple bronze casket she’d insisted upon, and after I tossed in the requisite handful of dirt, the rains came – not the sky’s, but mine. It took blowing my nose to return to my reputation as the hard-ass who Mike Hammer was supposed to be.
We were walking away, Pat and me, when he spotted her. I’d noticed Mikki at the chapel. We’d nodded at each other. We were close but not that close.
“My God,” Pat breathed, “that gave me a start.”
“Remarkable, isn’t it?”
He might have seen a ghost. “I thought it was her for a moment. I thought it was Velda.”
“No. Her sister. Mikki. Named for her grandfather, Michael Sterling. Mike. Like me. He was a longshoreman, not a sissy P.I.”
“What a lovely woman.”
And she was, all in form-fitting black, but no veil of affectation – the same sleek black style-defying page boy, the dark, slightly Asian eyes, the full lips, the figure that could stop traffic, even a funeral procession.
I said, “I’ll introduce you.”
He raised a traffic-cop palm. “No need – I remember meeting her when she was young. Would like to say hello.” He shook his head. “I’d damn near forgotten all of that. That business on Long Island.”
“Long time ago, Pat.”
“Everything was. A long time ago."
CHAPTER ONE
They were backed up against a fence at the dead-end of a Greenwich Village brick alley, three over-age hippies, one Black and the other two White, ...
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