The Death of Lorenzo Jones Read online

  THE THREE ENTERED THE LOT

  and walked over to Sykes’s brown Nash. Sykes put the key in the door and was turning it when there was the crack of a rifle’s firing that echoed through the walls of the stadium.

  Lockwood grabbed at Amanda and they hit the ground. Then, he crawled over to Sykes.

  Sykes was very dead. Blood oozed out of a bullet wound in his left temple that left his brains exposed. His eyes stared blankly into the beyond.

  Lockwood began to think that maybe Lorenzo Jones had been murdered after all. The rifle cracked again. Shards of glass flew like schrapnel. Lockwood decided this was no time to theorize about somebody else’s untimely death. For the moment, he had one driving, overwhelming need: to get out of this goddamn stadium alive!

  Books by Brad Latham

  Hook #1: The Gilded Canary

  Hook #2: Sight Unseen

  Hook #3: Hate Is Thicker Than Blood

  Hook #4: The Death of Lorenzo Jones

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56610-0

  Contents

  THE THREE ENTERED THE LOT

  BOOKS BY BRAD LATHAM

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER

  1

  “And you’re sure you left them on the dresser?” Lockwood asked her.

  “You’re so persistent, Mr. Lockwood,” she said in a teasing way. She leaned over him now, and he saw almost all of her naked breasts under the loose robe. The sight aroused him, but he pulled himself back to the job at hand.

  “Miss Archer, Transatlantic isn’t going to pay your claim if you don’t answer my questions.”

  “But I don’t like things to go by me in such a rush,” she said and gave him a mock pout. She moved from the dresser with its huge vanity mirror toward the window, crooking her finger at him as she lowered herself onto the window seat.

  “Come over here,” she said, “and I’ll answer any questions you might have.”

  He sighed and followed her. Lois Archer had inherited $10 million when Mummy and Daddy had crashed in that Pan-American disaster last year, and according to the Daily Mirror and other tabloids had spent all day and all night ever since struggling to rid herself of her fortune by burning the candle at both ends. Last night some “beastly thief had made off with a pair of diamond earrings and a bracelet worth $10,000; Transatlantic Underwriters had sent Bill Lockwood, its ace troubleshooter, to the Archer mansion on Fifth Avenue to see if he could find the missing jewels.

  “You sure you didn’t just put them in your sugar bowl in order to have something to play with this morning, Miss Archer?” Lockwood asked as he sat down.

  “Look at the view,” she said.

  The Archer mansion looked out over Central Park, and September in the park was something—He felt her hands running up his chest under his jacket.

  “Hey, cut that out,” he said.

  “Don’t you like to get a chest rub?”

  He grinned at her. Why was he making it hard for her? Poor girl, twenty-six and cooped up here for an hour or two before she had lunch at the Waldorf and tennis at Forest Hills and dinner at El Morocco. Surely Hook Lockwood didn’t have to disappoint her need for a good time before lunch, did he? He scooped her up in his arms and gave her a long hard kiss.

  When they broke, she gasped and smiled. “See, I knew you could! Hey, would you like to see the costume I’m wearing to the Artists Ball tonight?”

  “The Artists Ball? Costume?” What was with this dizzy broad anyway?

  “It gets kind of wild,” she said. “It’s down in the Village, and every year we do wilder and crazier things.”

  Well, it might get her off his back for a while so he could finish this investigation.

  “Yeah, show me your costume.”

  “Promise me you’ll tell me what you really think of it,” she said. “I don’t want you to say you like it if you don’t.”

  He promised, and she went into the bathroom and closed the door. He went back to the dresser and then to the window. Only one guy, Butch West, broke into houses this way, using a long screwdriver to pry open the top windows of Fifth Avenue mansions. From the bath he heard the sound of buzzing. God knew what she was up to in there.

  “Okay,” she shouted. “I’m coming out.”

  He turned, and the creature who came through the bathroom door astonished him: Lois Archer wore not a stitch of clothing except for black high-heeled shoes and an elegant rhinestone-studded mask that covered her face from her eyes up. Her figure was long, lean, and trim: she had small breasts and her hips were a bit boyish, but the most astonishing thing about her was that she had no pubic hair. Where women had at least the breath of fuzz, Lois Archer had nothing. Undulating saucily, she moved toward him.

  “Like it?” she asked.

  “You’re going where in that?” he asked.

  “The Artists Ball.” She grinned.

  “How many people?”

  “At least four hundred.”

  “You’ll get arrested.”

  “Nope. No cops there.”

  He snorted and shook his head. “You must be kidding me.”

  “Do you like it?” she asked in a concerned way, as if Lock-wood’s opinion was crucial.

  He frowned. “Let me see how it fits in back.”

  She spun around slowly and peeked over her shoulder with a worried look. “Does everything fit all right?”

  “Fits fine.”

  She turned back to him. “I shaved myself down there so the costume would be complete.”

  “It’s complete all right. You can’t go to a public ball like this.”

  “Now you sound like Daddy used to,” she said. “Last year I wore ten feathers, and a girl who came as a stripper, she got more attention.”

  Lockwood grinned. “What happens at these things?”

  Her tongue flicked out of her mouth. “I’d rather show you than tell you.”

  She came up to him and made him take her to dance with her. For a couple of minutes they glided around the bedroom floor. He felt her hands caress his buttocks, and then she had stopped him and was massaging his aroused cock with her hands. Before he knew what she was doing, she had unzipped his pants and his cock stood out at alert attention. With a loud “Ummm!” she dropped to her knees and began to caress it and lick it and rub it with her cheeks. Christ, he said to himself, they can’t really do this sort of thing at a public ball. He became more aroused; his cock disappeared into her mouth.

  Before he came, she stood up and
kissed him. “Now me,” she said, and before he knew it he was kneeling in front of her, looking at a neat slit around which he could see just the faintest hint of shaved pubic hair. He licked the slit and she moved her lips closer to him. He bore down harder. Lois moved against him.

  “With your tongue!” she said, and he pushed his tongue up into her slit as far as he could. It tasted salty, but that excited him still more. With a sudden whoop Lockwood picked her up and carried her toward the bed. Lois squealed delightedly. Her mask fell to the side of the bed.

  “Got you! Got you! Got you!” she said.

  He threw her down on the bed, which she hit with legs spread. Her shaved pubis looked bald and raw, and she did nothing to hide its full view from him. It seemed the work of seconds to get his clothes off, and then they were stretched out alongside each other in the 69 position. Lockwood buried his face in her pussy, and he felt his cock disappear into a long dark soft tunnel of caresses.

  The phone rang. She groaned at the interruption, but neither of them stopped.

  The phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing. Then it stopped, and they became even more involved in bringing each other off.

  The damn phone rang again.

  Lois jerked away from Lockwood and snatched the phone off the cradle.

  “What do you want?” she screamed. She listened for a second, then thrust the phone to Lockwood. “It’s for you.”

  His mouth felt raw. Feeling somewhat sheepish, he slid across the bed and took the receiver.

  “Lockwood, you get your ass back to this office this instant,” roared his boss, Mr. Gray.

  “Sir?”

  “I know what’s going on over there!”

  “Sir?”

  “Those jewels turned up at Stymie the fence’s shop this morning. I’m sure what you’re doing is screwing that scatterbrained young heiress.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You get yourself to this office right this minute, Bill Lockwood, or you can join the victims of last year’s panic out looking for work.”

  After Lockwood hung up, he pulled his clothes together and started dressing.

  “Hey, you’re not going, are you?” she asked.

  “I got to. That was my boss.”

  “Damn! I shouldn’t have answered it.”

  He nodded glumly and pulled on his socks.

  “Hey, aren’t you going to bring me off or anything?” she asked.

  He sighed in weary disappointment. “Big new case. Got to get back. They found your jewels.”

  Lewdly, she reached for his balls and gave them a gentle squeeze. “I know. They are right here.”

  He continued to dress. All the while she didn’t bother to dress herself, just moved about in a provocative way.

  “You’re really going to go?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He stood up.

  “Before you go—kiss me.” Her eyes looked at, him with a kooky look.

  He smiled. “I owe you that.”

  “Kiss me, and hold me down there while you do.”

  “Hold you?”

  “Put your hand on my pussy while you kiss me, and rub me.”

  Puzzled at her request, he agreed. She continued, “And don’t take your hand off or stop till I tell you to. Okay?”

  He nodded, and they went into a long clench with Lock-wood’s hand covering her bush and three fingers half up her. She began to shudder and buck beneath him so violently that he thought she might shake loose from his grasp. Then she lay limp in his arms.

  “I knew I was close,” she said with a weak smile. “Come back sometime, and I’ll do the same for you.”

  He was tempted to stay. But all he could do was grin and say he would call and bolt out the door on the run to get to the office.

  Damn the telephone! Damn Mr. Gray! Damn Transatlantic Underwriters!

  CHAPTER

  2

  When Bill Lockwood, chief investigator for Transatlantic Underwriters, came into Mr. Gray’s office, he thought it was for a bawling out.

  After all, the company had only recently and reluctantly paid on three cases assigned to Lockwood. No reason not to, for the investigations had proved no fraud was involved. But Gray hated to pay, even if the claim was legitimate. And Gray, damn him, was probably going to bitch about these cases again.

  On the way down the RCA Building’s corridor Lockwood decided that he wouldn’t take it, he would be just as gruff. Still, it could mean his job, and Lockwood didn’t like the idea of hunting for a new one, not in these times after the ‘37 Panic.

  Behind the frosted glass sat a surprisingly quiescent Gray, dapper in his ancient sort of way in a plain brown worsted with his pince-nez on, squinting as he read some papers. At least he looked calmer than he had sounded on the phone.

  Gray sat in his office like a spider waiting for a fly. His suit certainly was borrowed from a funeral parlor. Lockwood saw Mr. Gray as a person with all the warmth of Boris Karloff in The Mummy.

  Lockwood approached the spider’s desk. He tried to wipe the frown from his face as he sat down.

  “Bill, I have a case for you.”

  Oh no—Gray only called him Bill when he figured that Transatlantic would lose some loot.

  “A little case really, should take no time to clear up. A definite fraud, no doubt about it. An ‘accidental death.’ The victim—a baseball player, not anyone important really—was obviously murdered for his insurance. You go out and prove that the company doesn’t have to pay on the policy. Prove it’s murder or suicide, so long as it wasn’t an accident. As long as we don’t pay.”

  Lockwood didn’t like it. He didn’t like it when Mr. Gray changed moods so fast, from hysteria on the telephone to this deceptive calm.

  “A second ago you said it was definitely murder.” Hook’s gray eyes tried to bore through to the brain of the chief of claims to see what was ticking there. The shield of Mr. Gray’s implacable stare returned the look, his face as expressionless as a wax figure. Gray raised the gold-rimmed pince-nez that he wore on a black cord looped about his neck to get a better bead on his employee.

  “Whatever, Bill. You know, you haven’t been quite up to par lately, and we at Transatlantic have been considering a reduction in your sala—”

  Lockwood didn’t like threats. “Now look here—”

  “But, come through on this little case, and we’ll let bygones be bygones. I attribute your lack of success “lately, Bill—and I say this with your best interests in mind—to your overzealous pursuit of the female gender.”

  “I get results with my methods.” Lockwood was about to blast out that his personal life was none of Gray’s business, when Gray sweetened the pot.

  “If you can possibly avoid debauching yourself on this case, Bill, and avoid trailing the name of Transatlantic through the mud, and if you can accomplish this case without—ahem—resorting to your usual violent solutions, then the company is prepared to double your regular Christmas bonus, to $200. Despite these hard times.”

  Lockwood took out his black and silver Dunhill lighter and extracted a Camel from the pack in his suit pocket. He lit up and took a deep drag. He saw now that he was about to be handed a case that not only would be difficult but would probably be hazardous. Damn Gray. Still, a couple of C-notes would go a long way toward overhauling his gun-metal gray 1937 Cord downstairs in the garage, all twelve cylinders of her. He blew the smoke out, toward Gray.

  “Well, let’s hear the case. That’s a most generous offer by the company.”

  Gray lifted a sheet of paper off his desk blotter and sighted down his spectacles.

  “The insured’s name is Lorenzo Jones. He’s some sort of baseball player… .” Gray’s mouth looked like he had just sucked a lemon. “Heaven’s knows why a baseball player is so valuable, just for throwing-a few balls at a bat—”

  “Not at the bat,” Hook interjected. “The trick if you’re the batter is to hit the ball, and if you’re the pitcher to miss the bat.”

&
nbsp; Gray, the left side of his mouth twitching in irritation, continued. “Well. Anyway, this Mr. Jones was so valuable, or at least his services were, that a part-owner of the team, Cyrus Wade, insured his life for $25,000. Have you ever heard of a team called the Giants?”

  “I think so,” Lockwood said sarcastically. “They play up at the Polo Grounds, don’t they?”

  “Yes, Lockwood, they do, I believe.”

  The chief of claims opened a drawer on his left and pulled out a file folder, very thick. The kind of fine print that Lockwood hated to read, but often had to.

  “Well, here are the papers,” Gray said. “They’ll make good reading. Clear this up quickly, so the company can avoid the loss of—”

  “Paying on a claim? Of course, Mr. Gray. Why should the company ever pay on a claim?”

  “Sometimes, Lockwood, I’m not sure you have the attitude a person in your position needs.”

  Gray looked down at his desk and shuffled papers.

  Swell, Lockwood, thought, I’m dismissed. He took the thick file from the edge of the desk, nodded, and walked back to his own office. Voices in his head yelled things at Mr. Gray. He walked into his office, threw the file on the floor, and put his feet up on the desk.

  He called in his secretary, Molly. “Do me a favor, honey. Read me that pile of stuff there.” He pointed to a thick sheaf of papers.

  As she read the documents Lockwood threw darts at a picture of Mr. Gray, a photograph he had taken from the company newspaper for just this purpose. He hit the center of the target three times, right between the eyes.

  “Not serious? Not serious, am I?” he muttered as Molly droned on, reading the small print on Lorenzo Jones’ policy.

  The beneficiary was one Cyrus Wade. The gist of it was, as Lockwood saw it, that Transatlantic Underwriters had managed to insure a baseball pitcher who had a penchant for the dangerous hobby of flying a biplane he had rebuilt himself. Transatlantic had received additional payments to include air accidents, and now, he, Hook Lockwood, was supposed to get the company out of the hole. Prove Jones’ death was suicide, or murder committed by the beneficiary, and Transatlantic wouldn’t have to pay.