Hammered: A Jewel to Die For

Having done so many interrogations over the years, I could tell she probably had more to say. "Anything else?"

"Well...he'd always been a little, I don't know, dark? Depressed? This time though, he was happy and said he had something in the works that would be really important and that he'd tell me about it soon. I don't know what he meant, though."

"Okay, back to the original question: afterward? Did he say or do anything else? This could be important, too, so think hard, okay?"

She nodded and immersed herself in thought for a few moments before speaking. "Nash had already paid me my fee—double in this case since he'd agreed and I always collect it in advance—but then he turned around and pulled a stack of money out of his bag, a leather satchel—you know, like people take to work?—and gave it to me, too, saying he'd call again soon. He said I should hide the money and then wait at least five minutes after he left before following." She glanced down. "I haven't heard from him since then though."

Not wanting to hurt her or potentially cause a scene, I didn't tell her she wouldn't be hearing from him again. Instead, I asked, "So, the stack of money he gave you was a tip? A big one?"

"Yeah! Huge! A lot more than my usual fee, all in brand-new twenties. This was his third date with me; while he'd always paid my fee without question, this was the first time he'd ever given me a tip, so I figured he was making up for the others, especially since I'd charged him double this time. I was pretty shocked at the time; added up, it came up to $2,000! I didn't know he had that kind of money so it was a surprise at the time, but I must admit now I'm disappointed that he hasn't called again."

We were approaching yet another stop so I concentrated, as I'd done each time, on the doors as people entered and exited. No one, other than the two women giving us one last scowl as they exited, paid us any attention and soon we were on our way once more.

Nash, our stiff, had come into money, whether legally or not I couldn't know. He'd blown some if not all of it on the professional services of Dyna Myte, who happened to leave her calling card right below his collar bone. If he'd come by the cash legally, chances were that Diamond's fears had to do with a pimp trying to add her to his stable; however, if the cash wasn't really Nash's, whoever was after her might be trying to get their money back.

I needed to find out which and to get Diamond protection.

We switched lines a couple of stations later and exited at the 145th street station. I hailed a taxi, we piled in, and minutes later pulled up in front of my precinct. I paid the driver before we got out of the car and we ran up the steps to safety.

***

It was late morning by then so George, Lieutenant Crosley, and the rest of my usual crew were off duty but I'd been at the precinct for years and had worked a number of different shifts so I knew almost everyone and most of them knew me. Still, I still got some strange looks as I took Diamond upstairs to my desk.

"Have a seat, Diamond. Can I get you some coffee, a soda, or anything?"

"Girls' room?"

"Right down the hall on the left," I replied, pointing.

When she returned a couple of minutes later, her hair was brushed and her makeup had been touched up. She sat down and stared at me for a few seconds before slumping as if a tire had been punctured. "I'm scared, Les. It's a big city and I don't know who's after me. Or what they want to do with me if they catch me. Do you think you can help me? Can you keep me safe?"

"Diamond, the NYPD is set to do everything possible to help you and keep you—"

"Les, no! Not the police department. You! Mama said to only trust you. Can you do it?"

My breath caught before I slowly breathed out. Knowing it was a promise I might not be able to keep, I still said, "Yeah, Diamond, I'm going to keep you safe. Now, I hate to say it but we've got some work to do to help us keep that promise."

She was all for that and crowded in close to me so that her dab of perfume, ever-so-light, still almost made my head spin. I tried to put it all out of my mind as we went through it all again, this time with me taking lots of notes and asking more questions. When I thought I had everything, we shifted to searching the mug books. Now that I had a name, even if it was an alias, I had a starting point so I had one of the clerks bring us a new batch of mug books periodically while another searched the department's still-very-much-incomplete computer records for possible cross matches.

Diamond sat close as we looked through the books, with each of us searching. Her hand touched me from time to time, little absentminded brushes and familiar pats interspersed among attention-getting taps and occasional, all-too-comfortable holds where she didn't even know she was doing it.

Or at least I didn't think she did.

Her knee was even worse, frequently resting against mine, and her foot rubbed the back of my calf more than once. I shifted frequently, trying to avoid the contact and the excitement it was causing me. If circumstances were different, if she wasn't so young, if I wasn't so old, if she wasn't Dinah's daughter, and if she wasn't actually mine, I knew I could easily see myself being, at minimum, distracted by her for a while.

A long while.

"Les, here!" she said, pointing to a photo in a mug book I'd deliberately handed her a few minutes earlier. "David Kinley Nachman, AKA David/Dave Nash. That's the Nash guy I met."

I looked at it and nodded, finding that her identification had matched my own based on the photo the ME had given in the autopsy report. While she was searching the mug book, I'd already prepared an interdepartmental envelope with a request for one of the lab guys to compare the fingerprints the ME had taken to those on file from Mr. Nachman's previous stay upstate.

"Diamond, I hate to tell you this but Mr. Nash, ah, Nachman, won't be calling you again. He was found dead in an alley, ah, eight nights ago."

"He's dead? Oh no, that's sad." She looked sad for him but it took a moment before the implication sank in. "Les, do you think they want to kill me too?"

"I don't know, Diamond, but we're not going to let them, are we?"

***

Several hours later when our usual shift started, I introduced George and Diamond before giving him a quick rundown on the case. Then I went to see Lieutenant Crosley.

"Pardee, come in. You look like shit. What's going on?"

"That's what I get on less than three hours of sleep, sir, and already putting in a long day." I explained the situation in detail and told him I wanted to put Diamond in protective custody.

He thought for a moment before shaking his head. "Miss Woodall identified the Nachman stiff for us but she's not a material witness in the case. If we took someone to court on his murder, she wouldn't even be on the witness list. Then there's the point that she thinks—thinks, mind you," he said, waving his index finger at me—"that someone's after her but she doesn't know and she has no idea why. I want to help her, Pardee, believe me, but our friends at city hall have saddled us with a budget tighter than the pussy on a $2,000 whore so the bigwigs downtown would never spring for it." He paused for a moment as if having a thought before adding, "Well, she is a hooker so I guess we could put her in the tank and hold her, if you'd like?"

My head was shaking as soon as he started making that suggestion, so he told me to cut her loose.

"Lieutenant, she's...well, the daughter of an old friend."

He gave me a look that caused his face to screw up like Popeye's for a moment. "Then get with Vaughan to make sure he's using his time wisely, go stash her at your place and get a couple hours of sleep, and then get your ass back here to solve that Nachman case. Pardee, you've got a mountain of other cases growing on your desk but that one looks like it's the plug causing the bottleneck."

***

After making sure George knew what was going on and which cases needed our immediate focus, Diamond and I returned to the subway station and made our way across town to my condo. I showed her to my guest room and told her to keep the front door locked.

"You'll be safe here but no need to take chances. I'm going to get a couple hours of sleep before heading back to the precinct, so you sleep well and I'll see you in the morning when I get back home."

I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and the dream began sometime thereafter. Maybe it was having spent so much time with her daughter, reminding me of our time together, but Dinah was there with me again for the first time in many years, since before I met Patricia. Atop me, her hands caressing me, my neck, my face, she was soon kissing me all around before focusing on my lips, the side of her nose grazing against mine as her platinum blonde hair fell around my face, tickling me.

Her sweet tits, I realized, brushed against my chest, her hard nipples dragging through my chest hair. While I didn't have much left up top, I was amply blessed with it on my chest and she ran a hand through it, massaging my pecs as our kissing continued.

Dinah lowered herself then, moving her pelvis down so her oh-so-soft lips just touched my erection. Slow and steady, she swept forward and back, trailing her dew all along the spongy ridge of my otherwise rigid dream salute.

Her hands moved to my shoulders, gripping them as she rose up above me, and she arched her back and pelvis so that the next round, instead of riding atop me, caught the head of my dick and slid into the loving comfort of her depths.

I took those exquisite boobs in my hands, loving the softness of her skin as well as the warm, supple feel of her globes, and massaged them gently as she began her dance down below, drawing me all the way in and then grinding me out and in and out again in her tight, tight loving embrace.

There was silence in my dream except for the labored breathing of two long-lost lovers reunited for a few moments for the first time in many years. As such, it didn't take long for me to reach that point of no return just as I sensed her reaching her critical point too. I shot into her, over and over, as she gripped me with loving spasms of her own.

My alarm went off two hours later feeling more rested than I had in days and probably feeling happier than I'd felt in years. Then I found the mess resulting from my dream and realized why.

"Fuck," I laughed at myself, having had my first wet dream in many years.

I moved to the shower and quickly cleaned up before dressing. On exiting the bathroom, I turned on the light to my room so I could strap on my holster, I saw something on the floor by my bed. Not recognizing it, I bent down to pick it up only to say, "Fuck!" once more, only this time, louder, harsher, and with intense meaning.

I was holding a little pair of panties and, to my horror, I suddenly knew it hadn't been a dream.

***

As I made my way back to the precinct, my mind was reeling as I considered the implications of what I'd done. Diamond probably didn't know that I was most-likely her father but I did and I would never be able to live down the shame of what I'd allowed to happen. I didn't throw up at the thought, but it was close.

George was waiting for me when I got to my desk. He gave me a questioning look on seeing me but I shook my head sharply so he cut straight to business.

"Les, I've been on the phone with the owner of a bodega near where we found Nachman's body. He'd called in a report on an incident to the 37th precinct the day the body was discovered, and Ty Miller just heard about it so he gave me a call since the description of the perp in that incident may match Nachman. I think we should check it out."

"Yeah, George, I think you're right."

***

"I told the other officers," replied Mr. Santana, a short Hispanic man from Puerto Rico or somewhere to the south, as he rang up a sale.

"So now tell us," replied George as he stepped in front of the line and kept the customers from moving forward. As big as George was, that wasn't hard to do.

Defeated, the man glared at George under his brow, knowing it would be faster to cooperate so business could go on rather than risk being dragged to the precinct. When he agreed, George stepped to the side and said, "Next?" to the woman standing behind him.

The clerk ran up sales as he said, "A customer came in last week, a man, gringo, about 30 years and 5 foot nine or so on the scale—"

He pointed to the lines painted in 1-foot increments on both sides of the door frame.

"—with brown hair and brown eyes and wearing blue jeans and a striped shirt—no, don't remember the color on that. The main thing was that the guy was kind of plain-looking really, just not very memorable."

"Then why do you remember all this?" I asked.

Suddenly becoming concerned for the first time, he leaned in and whispered to us, "Cause when a plain-looking gringo pulls out a stack of brand-new twenties to pay a two-dollar order, he suddenly becomes much, much more memorable, sabes?"

"So he had a lot of cash on him."

"Sí, or so it seemed. He handed me a bill but when I looked at it, he grabbed it out of my hand, handed me a different one, and shoved the first one back in his pocket with the others."

"You said you looked at it. Why? Was something wrong with it? Was it fake?" asked George.

"Sí, fake as a three-dollar bill," whispered the man, "only this one was a twenty. And I swear there were a whole lot more of them in his stack, all looking as fake as that one."

George got a little more information while I thought about what Diamond had told me. Nachman had given her a big tip, for the first time ever, in brand-new twenties. If he'd started to pay the bodega clerk in counterfeit cash, I suspected that he'd done the same with Diamond, thinking that she might not be able to recognize it was fake. That's when it struck me that Diamond might be in a lot more danger than I'd suspected.

"George, we've got to go. Now."

I tried calling my condo from a nearby phone booth; my phone rang and rang but Diamond didn't pick up. Since it wasn't her place, I wasn't sure if she'd even bother but it was the chance that she couldn't pick up that worried me.

Lights flashing and siren blaring, I drove, finally skidding to a stop outside my condo, leaving the car in the no parking zone with the lights still going. Up the stair I ran, four flights, and approached my door with my revolver drawn, George taking the hinge side with his snubby Colt Detective Special almost hidden in his hands.

I turned the knob and was surprised the door was unlocked. Pushing the door open, I started to round the corner when George screamed, "Down!" and proceeded to tackle me on my side of the door.

If he'd been a second slower, we'd have both been dead from the blast that followed.

***

My ears were ringing, I was coughing up a storm, and I was sorer than I'd ever been playing QB back home for the Steamers (though admittedly that last part was from George's tackle and not from the blast. The building's thick brick walls protected us from that), but by the time the fire department arrived, we'd put out the resulting little fire using the hose reel from down the hall. I was glad Annie hadn't been home because I could see her coming out and having been caught in the blast.

George had been on alert for any other booby traps as we entered and put out the fire but we saw nothing other than the wreck that someone had left of my apartment. As soon as the fire was out, I rushed in and found that Diamond was gone; I suspected she'd been asleep or possibly lying on the bed when they entered because the bedclothes were pulled off the bed toward the door.

There was also, I noticed, a platinum blonde wig on the floor by her suitcase.

No, I now knew for sure, it hadn't been a dream.

Silently cursing at myself and knowing it wasn't proper procedure, I also knew it wasn't an ordinary case and I didn't really care. I threw down towels and quilts to sop up the water, and George and I were already well into the search for evidence by the time the detectives from the precinct near my building arrived. Lieutenant Crosley was about thirty minutes behind them.

"What the hell'd you get into, Pardee?" he asked. "The chief doesn't like it when we become the news rather than us breaking news about cases. What the fuck is this?"

"Lieutenant, I'm not sure but we think it had to do with Diamond. She's missing, her things are still here, and it looks like she may have been dragged out. To make matters worse, she may have unknowingly stumbled into the middle of a counterfeiting operation connected to the Nachman case, though we haven't been able to contact the Secret Service guys to be sure."

The lieutenant issued an extended string of profanity before asking, "So how in hell did you two keep from being turned into chopped liver? And why did somebody want you that way?"

"We don't know why, though it could be that we were asking questions and shining a spotlight on them. As for how, George?"

"My little brother, sir. He served in Nam in '68-69 and he told me about the booby-traps the VC would set. I saw the string and guessed that was what it was; if I'd been wrong, Les would have been sore as hell but his apartment wouldn't have been blown to smithereens either."

Lieutenant Crosley was shaking his head when we filled him in on the rest. "Guys, you're right in the middle of all this so you're off the case. Take the—"

"But, sir, Diamond?" I exclaimed. "We've got to save her."

"You don't have to do anything, Pardee, except—well, I usually tell guys to go home at this point, but your home's fucked up as bad as you are. Go somewhere, get some rest, and report in, hell, Monday. I'll have your new assignments then, in addition to all your old cases except for this one and Nachman. Go. Now."

Although it was a mess from someone searching for something and smelling of smoke, my bedroom didn't have any fire or water damage so I stepped inside and quickly packed a bag for a couple of nights. They'd be smelly but wearable even if I couldn't make it to a laundromat.

The local cops put up crime tape as a deterrent to keep people out but that wouldn't stop anyone who wished from entering so I stopped at the phone booth in the building's little lobby and called a cleanup company to dry my place out and install a new door. In our business, I'd recommended their services a few times over the years but never expected to need them myself, particularly the same day.

After agreeing to pay the premium for fast service, I said, "Leave the spare keys on the table and one with the building super. His office is just off the entry lobby." I thanked the guy and hung up.

"Do you want to come to my place for the night?" asked George.

"No. I've got to get over to Diamond's apartment. If they're looking for something, maybe I can catch them there or at least get some leads."

"Les, you're not giving up on this?"

"George, tell me, if it was your daughter, would you let it go?"

"Hell no. I'd do anything for her, even die for her if I had to."

"That's the way I feel. Diamond may or may not be my daughter but she's definitely Dinah's so I have to do whatever's necessary to save her. You take off and I'll see you on Monday."

George gave me a questioning look for a moment before slowly shaking his head. "Les, we're partners, remember. If you're doing this, we do it together."

He extended his hand toward me and I smiled as I shook it. "Let's go, partner."

***

We didn't have a warrant but considering it a well-being check and myself her protector if not her dad, I had George stand behind me as I picked the lock and let us in.