Hellbent on Homicide

By Gary Lovisi

by Gary Lovisi

A Griff and Fats crime novel

(Also available in softcover format)

“First-rate hard-boiled fiction. Mike Hammer probably crossed paths with Griff and Fats, who live in the back alleys of Jim Thompson country.” — Booklist

Bay City, 1962 — a time of peace and trust, when girls hitch-hiked without a care. But for an ice-hearted killer, it’s a time of easy pickings. When he kills the daughter of a rich power-broker, all hell breaks loose, and he goes on a crazy killing spree to cover his tracks. Then Griff and Fats, two free-wheeling homicide detectives, begin hunting the monster who tortures and kills, but time is running out. This police procedural novel is a hardboiled roller-coaster of sex, violence, and suspense.

Hellbent on Homicide marks the beginning of Gary Lovisi's chronicles of Griff and Fats, two homicide detectives who often cross the line bringing killers to justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bold Venture Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463523803

Gary Lovisi

Gary Lovisi lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award nominated author for his crime fiction, and a Western Writers of America Spur Award Winner as editor. He is the founder of Gryphon Books, editor of Paperback Parade magazine, and the author of over twenty-five books, which include More Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Ramble House); Murder of A Bookman (Wildside Press); and his collection of 23 hard crime stories, Ultra-Boiled (Ramble House). His dark science fiction novel Mars Needs Books! (Wildside Press) and Sherlock Holmes: The Baron’s Revenge (Airship27 Productions) have garnered praise, while his Jon Kirk of Ares Trilogy: #1, The Winged Men, #2 The Invisible Men, and #3 The Space Men is heroic pulp SF series in the tradition of John Carter of Mars. Homicide Harvest continues Lovisi’s chronicles of his hard-boiled tough guys Griff & Fats. Learn more or contact him through the Gryphon Books website: www.gryphonbooks.com.

Book preview

Hellbent On Homicide

Gary Lovisi

Published by Bold Venture Press

www.boldventurepress.com

Cover design: Rich Harvey

Hellbent On Homicide by Gary Lovisi

Copyright 2018 by Gary Lovisi. All Rights Reserved.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, please purchase your own copy.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 : Kathy Wilson

Chapter 2: Angus Wilson

Chapter 3: Where’s Henry Armitage?

Chapter 4: Streeting It

Chapter 5: What We Found

Chapter 6: The Butler Didn’t Do It

Chapter 7: The Next Step

Chapter 8: At The Carlton

Chapter 9: No Knocking

Chapter 10: Where’s Gando Jarmandeu?

Chapter 11: Guess What We Found At Rita’s Place?

Chapter 12: The Hideout Is Found Out!

Chapter 13: Gando Jarmandeu

About the Author

Connect with Bold Venture Press

Prologue

1962

It was in another world and a long time ago. Fats and I had been cops working in a town I’ll call Bay City. I can’t talk truthful about all of it to you. Even today. Ya see, it was a long time ago. In the old days. A lot has changed since those early days; procedure-wise, Miranda rules, the very way cops are supposed to act. Things are done so different today. They say it’s for the better. They say they’re right. I got no comment.

What hasn’t changed is crime, murder, mayhem. It’s worse than ever out on the streets today. It grows worse each year. If the powers that be was all so right in dealing with it, wouldn’t it be getting better? Wouldn’t there be less of it today?

Fats and I had our own ways of dealing with things back then. It was an easier time, less complicated. You knew who the enemy was. You knew who your friends were. A man did what a man had to do.

We were partners.

We’d been together a long time.

It was thirty years ago. Remembering back now. Remembering back just how it all had been.

This is our story.

Chapter 1

Kathy Wilson

It was a hot and muggy Bay City morning and already everything had turned out bad.

We got the call at nine a.m. I grabbed Fatso and we drove out to the corner of Dumont and Fifth. It was quiet at that time of the morning. At least, all the streetwalkers and other riff-raff that inhabited the area were still in their third dream by then. We were waved over to the corner by an old lady with a furious wrist trying to get our attention with a handkerchief she held like a white flag. To me it just looked like a flag of surrender. In this part of town that’s the only flag there was. It was surrender or die. I figured she’d stumbled upon one of them that had died.

What’s up? I asked her, pulling our car to the curb. She stood there nervous, blanched as white as a baker’s hat. All she could do was mumble something unintelligible and point to an old refrigerator laying in the vacant lot where someone had dumped it.

Someone’s in there, she finally spat out, but Fatso and I got the message long before her words appeared. We’d been tipped off that the girl we were looking for might turn up soon. They always do eventually. One way or the other.

Bet it’s the Wilson girl, Fats offered, and I just watched in exasperation as he chucked down the last of his bagel and morning coffee. Wiping his hands on his pants, he added, Well, let’s go and have a look-see. Bet it’s a sex job, all cut up and a real mess. How much you wanna bet?

You know, I replied, looking at him with a sad shake of my head, you can be a real disgusting person sometimes.

You know, he told me with a large belly laugh as we walked through the high reeds of the empty lot, you’re not the first one to tell me that.

I just nodded. My mind was on the refrigerator, standing alone in the center of the lot amid a sea of tall grass and weeds — off to one side was a torn-up old sofa with a kitchen sink laying on the stained cushions. I didn’t even want to think of what the stains were from. The refrigerator had to be fifty feet away from us at that point but I could already smell the death lurking within it. It was ugly death and new death.

Fatso belched; there was a whiff of salami on his breath, though where he’d gotten time to eat salami that early in the morning was beyond me at that point. Perhaps it was a bit of residue from the previous night?

Fats shook his head. She hasn’t been dead that long, Griff.

That’s me, Bill Griffin, lieutenant, Bay City PD, a half-assed detective on a double-barreled case. The other guy’s my partner, Fats: the ubiquitous Sergeant Herman Stubbs, a man nobody wants to fool around with if they’ve got even an ounce of brain pudding that works properly. We were out on a nasty job of a missing person case that had just turned into a murder case — something nice and jolly to get the blood flowing on a hot stagnant morning. Just the sort of thing to start off a new week.

Murder, Monday morning nine a.m. style.

Well, it appeared we’d found the Wilson girl. Now all we had to do was find the animal who killed her — something altogether different.

Usually the two have no relation to each other; in other words, most murders go unsolved. Especially in this part of town. Now it was our job to find that relation, bring the pieces together, track them down, bring them together, hound them, discover them, think them through, and find them out where they didn’t exist. We had to solve the damn case. It was just one of those Monday mornings. We have them about once every week here in Bay City, usually on Monday, usually in the morning.

You see, back then in this town, it went down like this: Kathy Wilson’s old man was that rich bastard Angus Wilson, the same guy everyone who didn’t have his head buried in the Bay City sand like an ostrich or something, knew about. He was the wealthy, fat-cat banker powerbroker and naturally he assumed the worst when his only daughter had been missing for two weeks. It was said he was a man full of fatherly concern.

The way Fats put it was to say: The guy’s full of something, Griff, but it ain’t concern. I mean, this was his only daughter, his only child. She’s missing for two full weeks and he just now gets around to calling us in? Sure taking his sweet-ass time, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, I said with a smirk. Guess he didn’t want to act premature on this. We wouldn’t want him to be rushing things now, would we?

Shit, man, why didn’t he wait a few more weeks? Then the trail would be sure to be colder than a Coney Island whore’s heart. Two weeks is an awful long time to be waiting without saying anything. Mighty strange to me. There is more to this than meets the eye. This rat is hiding something big.

I gotta admit it’s piqued my curiosity a bit also, Mr. Stubbs.

So, after too damn long, this Wilson guy finally calls the cops and Captain Landis throws the thing in our laps early Monday morning. Now all of a sudden it looks like things are just starting to break. Coincidence? Who the hell can say right now. Too bad things usually end up breaking on the bad side of the tracks in these types of cases though. That’s never coincidence, that’s the way it works out on the streets. Figure on the worst thing possible, the truth will usually be worse, definitely surprise you, and a lot of times just never figure. Oh there’s reason to it, but there’s all kinds of reason, and all kinds of people. Until they invent a device that can look into people’s heads, see what they’re made of, see how their minds work, what they’re thinking and how they think, there’ll be just too many mysteries for cops like me and Fats. That hasn’t changed from the old days, it has just got a lot worse.

Well, rich Daddy Wilson wanted his daughter back, and if there was any foul play, we wanted the player of that foulness. So in a way, we were just sort of human extended claws of old, rich, Daddy Wilson. So what else was new? Working for the money men. We didn’t mind. We’d find the girl’s killer and make him pay big for this. That’s the way things were done in the old days. We didn’t accept this murder crap and we sure didn’t coddle criminals back then either.

We approached the refrigerator slowly, carefully, and half-heartedly. When you find a body in this type of situation you can never hope for the best. Fats opened the refrigerator door. I kept thinking that people who throw out these damn old metal boxes should always disconnect the door. In fact, it used to be a law, unless they changed that now too, so as kids wouldn’t be able to get locked inside while playing and suffocate, like too many have done. We didn’t have to worry about that this time. This time what we found inside was a full-grown woman. It was also a bloody mess.

I don’t like to describe mutilation, so your imagination can fill in some of the blanks, but Fats and I have seen this sort of thing before. It tears at you. It’s meant to, but you can’t let it get to you. At the same time you can’t ignore it and still remain human. Another one of life’s little no-win situations.

I looked inside the box. It was a mess all right, but there was enough there to go on. It was the Wilson girl. That’s all we really needed to know at that point.

The old lady who had called us over was like most of the nosy and curious in the neighborhood. She’d made the mistake of following us out into the lot. Now she screamed and fainted, her eyes must have got a real good glimpse of just what was in that refrigerator. I revived her but she only fainted again, and Fatty ended up having to carry her back to the street and place her in the back of our car. He tried to revive her and calm her down, then he left her and radioed for print-men and body-bags. The ghoul squad would be here soon enough, but for now the pall of death sat like a quiet shroud over the entire area and just the two of us and the corpse.

That gave me some time to be alone with Kathy Wilson. Damn pretty girl, I muttered quietly.

I was angry at seeing the mutilation, and when the girl was so young and a stunner as this one had been, it somehow made it worse. Of course it shouldn’t, but hey, we’re all human — or at least most of us are. I wasn’t sure about the guy who had done this though, and to classify him as an animal, so to speak, would be a wretched insult to anything in the animal kingdom that swam, crawled, slithered, or walked on four legs. I was pissed off. I was thinking too much. That’s the way it always goes when you see crazy stuff like this.

I took a careful look at what was in that refrigerator. It sure was terrible. I didn’t know it was a defense mechanism back then, that’s what they call it now, that’s how they explain it to the rookies. Hey, insensitivity just came natural to us back then. I let out a tiny forced laugh, said, You smell pretty bad, girl. So sorry.

Fatso came over. He had heard my remark. Talking to the corpse. He nodded his head negatively, like I was whacko or something, smiled a twisted leer and said, Girl could use some deodorant, or something. She sure stinks. She’s been drawing files for days, Griff.

I nodded. He was right. The smell was terrible.

Fats just laughed, he was too damn witty at times, but I saw the tear in the Fatman’s right eye. I saw him hide it as it slowly tricked down his puffy cheek. I pretended I didn’t see a damn thing. I said nothing. I looked away at the tall grass in the empty lot waving in the slight morning breeze. It was all brown and rotten, even the morning sunshine looked rotten at that point.

Straight dope, Griff. You know I’m just a fat slob who no decent woman would have, but I’d always hoped, wished, even damn well prayed for a woman like her. A woman I could never get and would never have, and who probably would never have me. Never love me back and be true for more than a few weeks, like all the others. But when I see this, such a terrible thing … Why, man?

"Be careful of you’ll