False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  Acclaim for the Work of JOSEPH KOENIG!

  “A superior piece of work...beautifully written.”

  —New York Times

  “Inventive...engrossing...could make as splendid a film as it does a book.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Stunning...the murderer is the slickest, most charming madman around.”

  —Providence Journal

  “Koenig’s done it again...his best yet. A gripping story, told with skill and style.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “A fine...and entirely original crime novel.”

  —Washington Post

  “Gripping...cleverly plotted and filled with wonderfully drawn characters.”

  —Philadelphia Daily News

  “Koenig invests his story with unusual resonance... superbly maintained suspense as he builds to the thrilling, unrelenting—and very cinematic—final pages.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Get the book. You’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

  —True Detective

  Mollie came out in the robe, and de Costa showed her where to stand. She shrugged the robe off her shoulders, surprising Jordan as it fell around her feet. De Costa showed no expression while Mollie’s confidence melted, a woman naked in every way.

  De Costa gave her a second look through the viewfinder of a Nikon. “You’ve been startled,” he said, “and are trying to locate the source of a disturbing sound.”

  De Costa fired off a handful of shots, then removed the camera from the tripod. “Let me see you cognizant of danger, but not panicky, prepared for anything.”

  Expression flickered across her face, and was extinguished at de Costa’s command to clear the slate for their next experiment. Jordan knew the edgy look he wanted from the shooting on Park Place, when Mollie had walked past the dead body on the floor. De Costa would refine it into something glamorous, keeping readers in mind that they were paying for a detective magazine.

  De Costa changed lenses and came close, barking commands. Jordan saw tears on Mollie’s cheeks. De Costa ordered her to stop crying, mocked her, browbeat her while he captured each drop. Then he unloaded the camera, and gave her a towel to dry her face, brewed a cup of tea for her, and thanked the other girls for their time.

  “That was a terrific impersonation of quiet fear,” Jordan said when she was dressed.

  “What impersonation? I was scared to death...”

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai

  KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block

  THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny

  THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake

  HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt

  CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner

  FAKE I.D. by Jason Starr

  PASSPORT TO PERIL by Robert B. Parker

  STOP THIS MAN! by Peter Rabe

  LOSERS LIVE LONGER by Russell Atwood

  HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent

  THE CORPSE WORE PASTIES by Jonny Porkpie

  THE VALLEY OF FEAR by A.C. Doyle

  MEMORY by Donald E. Westlake

  NOBODY’S ANGEL by Jack Clark

  MURDER IS MY BUSINESS by Brett Halliday

  GETTING OFF by Lawrence Block

  QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins

  THE CONSUMMATA

  by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

  CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Donald E. Westlake

  BLOOD ON THE MINK by Robert Silverberg

  FALSE Negative

  by Joseph Koenig

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-107)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: June 2012

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Koenig

  Cover painting copyright © 2012 by Glen Orbik

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-580-3

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-740-1

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  For Naught

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  CHAPTER 1

  Flynn from the Bulletin, dead earnest over a four-martini lunch, said he had a ticket he was looking to get rid of. “Front row, center. You’ll taste ozone when the lights dim.”

  A younger man drinking Schmidt’s moved his head noncommittally.

  “Best seat in the house,” Flynn said, “aside from Conrad Franklin Palmer’s, and he would gladly change places with you.”

  The beer drinker looked at his watch. In the United States courthouse across Market Street a lackadaisical jury was deliberating racketeering charges against stewards from the Atlantic City racetrack. “Where will you be?”

  “New Haven.” Flynn peeled back a lapel, uncovering yellow pasteboards in an inside pocket. “Be a crime not to use these, too. I was talking to Professor Einstein on the anniversary of his coming to America, and I mentioned, I asked him did he know a way I could be in two places, the same time. Not with the technology presently available, he said, but see him again in thirty, forty years.”

  The beer drinker, whose name was Adam Jordan, said, “While you’re watching the Yalies roll over Princeton, who’s the Bulletin got to see Palmer die?”

  Flynn turned a swizzle stick around the lip of his glass. “I thought you might make that small gesture.”

  “I work for the competition.”

  “Loyalty’s overrated, you want my opinion.”

  Jordan shook his head at the waiter who asked if he was ready for another Schmidt’s.

  “Con Palmer will sell a lot of papers for the Atlantic City Press,” Flynn said. “Would it kill you to do two thousand words under my byline for the Bulletin, or pull an old death house story from the clips, and slap a fresh lead on it?”

  Flynn turned the stick the other way. To Jordan it looked like he was determined to separate the martini into its individual parts again.

  “This is a story that’s begging for you,” Flynn said. “Bulletin hacks don’t know what to make of a divinity school student standing to inherit twenty-five million who poisons his parents so he can marry a big-titted Steel Pier hostess. Rita Snyder says Adam Jordan’s the only reporter in our circulation zone worth
reading besides myself.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Our ladies page editor. Big, big fan of yours,” Flynn said. “The Snyders are major stockholders in the Bulletin corporation. Show us what you can do, and there’ll be more pinch-hitting assignments down the road.”

  He put a ticket to the execution on the table, and moved it to Jordan’s side. “You might even be hired away from the Press by a paper that pays better than beer money.”

  Flynn captured a waiter by the arm, held him while he finished his drink before sending him for a refill with a gentle shove.

  “Eddie Fisher’s opening at the Steel Pier next week,” he said. “Rita’s nuts for Eddie Fisher. If she doesn’t get to see him, she’ll make a scene more disturbing than what you can expect from Con Palmer. Press reporters are comped at the Steel Pier. Give me your freebies, and you won’t have to feel you owe me anything.”

  Palmer’s girl, there to watch him die, left Jordan uninspired—the massive chest failing to make the case for a forgettable face. He left Trenton State Prison racking his brain for a better angle. Late for a deadline at the Press, he called the Philadelphia Bulletin switchboard indentifying himself to a dictation operator as Thomas Flynn.

  “The green room in reality is a soothing shade of buff with indirect lighting and sound-proof panels on the ceiling,” he began. “The executioner is a grandfatherly fellow who looks like the florist he is when not moonlighting for the state. But ‘old sparky,’ a straight-back oak seat—No, make that ‘throne’—tricked out with leather straps and ankle restraints is a nasty prop out of a nightmare set in a torture chamber...”

  He started home trying out a fresh take from the point of view of the lovestruck heir to millions with minutes left to live. In his room above a law office in Absecon he reviewed his notes, then rolled copy paper and two carbons into his typewriter. The words came in bunches, as they always did when the work went well, his fingers racing to keep pace with his ideas. When he dropped into bed two stories for the Press were on his desk, the one he liked best a dry-eyed interview with Conrad Palmer’s sister for the Sunday features.

  At 8:15 he kicked off the covers. Congressman Theodore Garabedian would deliver his Armistice Day Speech at the American Legion Hall in Brigantine in forty-five minutes. Jordan dangled his legs off the mattress, and then he crossed them and lit a Lucky. Holiday boilerplate from a windbag politician was not worth getting out of bed for. He doubted that many Press readers would blame him if he went back to sleep.

  But his editors would. They had a news hole to fill, and were counting on him for twenty column inches. A call to the Legion Hall was answered by a woman with a stuffed nose. “God Bless America” blared from tinny speakers in the background.

  “I’m Jordan with...with the Garabedian party,” he said, “running late in Absecon, and trying to catch up to the congressman. Do you know if he—?”

  “Speak louder, will you? I can’t hear you above the commotion,” the woman with the stuffed nose said. “Representative Garabedian just entered the hall.”

  Jordan got back under the blankets to finish his smoke. A medical columnist advised that cigarettes weren’t as healthy as advertised, but it wasn’t Luckys that were choking him. In his first year as a police reporter for the Press he had written every kind of story that he ever would, and he had been on the paper now for close to four. Crime on the Jersey Shore followed the seasons. Con artists appeared on the boardwalk in summer, and were joined by hotel thieves around Labor Day when the Miss America pageant came to town. By Christmas the chiselers were gone, and Jordan kept busy with assaults and drunken brawls until the horseplayers returned from the Florida meets with pickpockets in tow. He had covered fires, drownings, fatal drag races and other car crashes, stabbings, shootings, knife fights, suicides, murder-suicides, three wife-murders, two murders for hire, and now an execution.

  He’d interviewed elected officials in prison, and broke news of the indictments of the good government types appointed to replace them. Three times he had heard Theodore Garabedian’s Armistice Day valedictory. Nothing but a headache would be accomplished by a visit to the Legion Hall to hear it again.

  On his way to work around 2:00 he stopped to pick up a Bulletin. His death house story was on the front page in the favored spot in the extreme right-hand column above the fold and under a four-column headline and three decks. Any tickets passing hands between Tom Flynn and himself should be moving his way for a job well done.

  He parked in front of the Press building and went upstairs. At deadline the city room became a madhouse, but on a Saturday afternoon in late November he had the third floor almost to himself. There was little on his calendar besides the speech in Brigantine. He dialed the Legion Hall for someone who could give him the gist of Garabedian’s remarks, but hung up before the call went through. It was easier to go to the clip file instead.

  Last year’s story, updated with a new opening graph, was on the city desk in fifteen minutes. One dupe was on his spike, and the other in the basket for the Press’ radio station to be turned into a 30-second spot. None of his readers would suspect that he hadn’t been near Brigantine today. Professor Einstein could learn a thing or two from Adam Jordan. It was not impossible to be in two places at the same time, if no one checked.

  The rest of the weekend was his. The thing to do was to get started on the novel that would pave his way out of Atlantic City. Facing down an empty first page held no terror for him. He’d been doing it for years. A quick run to New York would be more rewarding. Charlie Parker was at Birdland, and there was time to make the early show.

  Rain sprinkled with ice pellets turned to sleet as he reached the parkway. Carefully, he felt for the brake. He could forget the early show. And if he stayed for the midnight jam, he’d be returning half in the bag on slick roads. Another crack at the novel wasn’t a bad idea.

  Illinois Jacquet was on the radio, his choppy tenor interrupted by static from another speaker under the dash. Jordan had installed a Bearcat police scanner when he’d come to the Press. Not every cop car was equipped with something as good. Frequently he beat troopers to the scene of major accidents.

  More static accompanied a dispatcher’s call that faded under a bridge. Jordan cruised the shoulder till the 10-54 was repeated, a report of a possible dead body on the beach at Little Egg Harbor. A dog-walker who had made the discovery would be on hand to point out the spot. Jordan moved the gas pedal closer to the floor. On that miserable afternoon his new ’53 Hudson Hornet was the only car headed toward the shore.

  There were no cops at the beach. No dog-walker. He pulled off the pavement, keeping out of the soft sand. From the dunes he watched a cruise ship strung with colored lights sailing to warm waters. A black pup was hunkered by the tide line. He kept an eye out for its master until the animal wriggled into the surf on stubby flippers, and dove under the waves.

  This wouldn’t be the first time a 10-54 had led to nothing. The body might be a driftwood log, or not that much. A prankster’s day at the beach.

  The funny pages swirled around his ankles with the debris from picnic lunches and Coney Island whitefish. Plenty of those. In a cleft in the dunes he spotted a blanket spread over brittle beach grasses. The sea breeze fluttered the corners, threatened to carry it away. But it was anchored by a woman curled on her side.

  Wet sand coated her face, which was turned away from the rain. She was barefoot, in a pleated skirt and cashmere sweater. A silk kerchief was tied across her mouth, and her ankles, knees and thighs were bound with a single piece of rope that was also looped around her throat. If she had tried to free herself she would have strangled, and it seemed to Jordan that was what she had done. Handcuffs cinched her wrists behind her back. Jordan pictured her killer crafting the tableau on the blanket, stepping back from time to time to appraise his work.

  He scraped the sand from her cheek, and tilted it toward himself. She was a beautiful woman dead for several hours whose looks hadn’t begun
to fade. He reproached himself for being sentimental. Beauty was the cheap accolade that newsmen rewarded automatically to female victims of murder.

  Adam Jordan didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. The dead woman had flame red hair, and a shape on the neat side of voluptuous. Her skin, colorless now, was unblemished, and he would write also about her fine jaw and the sensitive cast of her features. If he drew back her lids to inspect the color of her eyes, who would reprimand him for doing his job? But his readers would have to get along without that information. Perhaps a sentimental bone or two.

  A couple of men tramping across the dunes made him think of The Lost Patrol, his favorite desert movie. A Mutt-and-Jeff team in blue uniforms with yellow piping. They waved him back from the blanket, and then told him not to move. Troopers Michael Brannon and Dennis Riley were attached to the state police barracks in Absecon where Jordan prowled for fatal accidents around the winter holidays when drunk drivers terrorized the roads.

  “You called it in?” Brannon was the tall one.

  Jordan shook his head.

  “Who did?”

  “She was alone when I got here. I don’t know.”

  Riley, pouring sand from his shoes, said, “What were you doing with her?”

  “Keeping her company while she waited for you. Long wait.”

  “Have the M.E. see if the corpse was sodomized,” Riley said to Brannon.

  The needling was not good-natured. The real crime for Brannon and Riley was a reporter beating them to the scene, and mentioning it in his paper.

  “She’s hog-tied,” Brannon said. “You were in the Navy, Jordan. You must be handy with a rope.”

  “I was an MP at Fifteenth Army headquarters in Vienna under General Clark,” he said. “All thumbs. I washed out of the Cub Scouts because I couldn’t tie a slipknot.”

  Brannon and Riley were adept at chasing speeders, and refereeing domestic disputes. In their largely rural county homicide was a rare occurrence for which they prepared with a three-week course in forensic investigation. Usually it meant one of the family squabbles getting out of hand, and a remorseful spouse in a bloody nightgown or pajamas waiting by the phone for arresting officers. A murder entailing a search for the killer came along a couple of times in a decade. Riley went back over the dunes to radio for assistance.