The Nice Guys Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Some Other Hard Case Crime Books you will Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  March woke up sore and ragged, still dressed, but in his own bed this time, not a bathtub, not an alley, not a morgue. Last night had not been a success, exactly, but—All right, not in any sense. But he’d learned some things that might prove helpful. He had a lead or two. Didn’t he? He scratched his jaw with his good hand, thought about shaving, thought about going back to sleep, decided he wasn’t sleepy anymore. Bone-tired, but not sleepy.

  At least things were looking up. In the sense that he wasn’t dead. His arm would heal. It was itching more than hurting right now, which had to mean he was out of the woods, right? The part of him that always cautioned him against optimism cautioned him against optimism. But it was hard not to feel he’d been through the worst and come out the other end.

  Now it was just a matter of finding Amelia, and he had a promising start on that; then finding out what her connection was to Misty and the world of porn films, and reporting back to the old lady. Then maybe a vacation.

  At his front door, he heard a knock. “Just a minute,” he called. “Who is it?” And through the door, a friendly voice said, “Messenger service, Holland March home?” A glance through the peephole showed a guy with a genial smile standing there on the stoop.

  “Hi,” March said, opening the door, and Jackson Healy slugged him full in the face…

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter

  ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES by Lawrence Block

  EASY DEATH by Daniel Boyd

  THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

  SO NUDE, SO DEAD by Ed McBain

  QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  SOHO SINS by Richard Vine

  THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-S07)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: May 2016

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

  THE NICE GUYS and all related characters and elements © Silver Pictures Entertainment.

  WB SHIELD: ™ & © WBEI. (S16)

  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 978-1-78565-257-8

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-258-5

  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.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  WORD OF THE DAY

  Pulchritude pul-krih-tude, noun:

  Physical beauty, esp. female; sexual attractiveness.

  1.

  She was old. Most of March’s clients were. Foxy chicks walking into a private detective’s office with lots of cleavage showing and feathered Farrah hair, that only happened in the movies.

  “Do you have a recent picture of your niece you could let me have?” March asked, and the old woman seated across from him, on the overstuffed sofa that smelled like old telephone books—or anyway March imagined it did—blushed pink under her powdered cheeks and her thick glasses. She looked uncomfortable. Embarrassed.

  “I’m afraid I do, Mr. March.”

  March sighed. “You must have something. Any photo at all will be—wait, what?”

  The old woman began rummaging in her bag, a yard-wide batik thing with macramé handles that looked as though it could be hiding a family of Chinese immigrants. “I’m very sorry to say I do.” From the bag she took a lipstick container, a compact, a plastic packet containing a folded-up rain bonnet, and set them one by one beside her on the sofa. “Misty was such a good child, such a sweet girl, never a bad word out of her mouth. We all expected her to become a nurse, she loved caring for her animals so.” The cushion beside her now held a notepad showing Scrabble scores, a tin of lemon pastilles, a spritz bottle of 4711 Eau de Cologne.

  “Mrs. Glenn—”

  “One moment, young man. I have it here somewhere.”

  March allowed himself to slump back in the chair. Fuck posture. If a foxy chick ever hired him, he’d sit up straight.

  The old lady finished digging in her bag and came up with a folded sheet of glossy paper, like a page torn from a magazine. She unfolded it and held it out to March.

  March sat up straight.

  The girl in the picture looked to be about twenty-three years old, though it was hard to be sure, with the lighting and the makeup and the feathered Farrah hair. Not to mention the fact that you couldn’t look at her face for very long because your eye kept getting drawn lower down to where, holy Christ, were those real? Fuck. It looked like an ad for a porn movie. It was an ad for a porn movie. There, in the corner, it said I Am Sensuous, Lilac. Starring Mi—The rest was torn off. March forced himself to look away, to look up, to take the photo of the girl in the practically transparent dress with the triple-D bosom and fold it back up and put it in his pocket and say in his most professional voice, “Thank you, Mrs. Glenn. That will be very helpful.”

  “She told her mother she was acting in movies,” the old lady said. “We thought she meant the sort we watched with her growing up. The Wizard of Oz. The Sound of Music.”

  “Well,” March said, “some of these sorts of movies have music in them.”

  Lily Glenn fixed him with a stony stare.

  “You didn’t mention that your niece was an…adult performer,” March said. “What name did she work under?”

  “Oh, Misty,” Mrs. Glenn said. Her voice fell. “Misty Mountains.”

  At which point something clicke
d in March’s brain and he sat up straighter still. He didn’t watch all that much television, but every so often he caught a glimpse, mostly in bars, and one glimpse he’d caught a few days earlier had been a local news report about a porn actress who’d died in a rather spectacular car crash somewhere near Coldwater Canyon. He hadn’t focused on the name, these porn chicks all had similar sounding names, but now that he heard it again, well. Mountains. Misty Mountains. No doubt a reference to her love of the great outdoors.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Glenn,” March said, and it sounded mechanical, and he felt a little bad about that, but he barreled on. “I’m sorry for your loss. But didn’t you say you saw your niece just the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean before the, um, before the accident?”

  “No. After.”

  “But…Mrs. Glenn…didn’t your niece, you know, die in that accident?”

  The old lady meticulously gathered up the things from the sofa, dropped them one by one back into her bag. “Obviously not,” she said.

  “Obviously not,” March said. “Obviously not.”

  “I saw her, Mr. March. Plain as day, through the window of her house, sitting at her desk, in a blue pinstripe jacket, writing something. But when I knocked…”

  “When you knocked?”

  The old lady shrugged, and all the air seemed to go out of her. She was a deflated balloon, tethered by one hand to the batik monstrosity beside her. “She ran away. Out the back door. Jumped in a car and raced off. I called to her, you understand, I shouted, but she didn’t hear.”

  Or heard and didn’t want to stop, March thought.

  “Can you describe the car?”

  “It was red,” Mrs. Glenn said.

  “And…?”

  She shrugged again and looked helplessly at March.

  “Four doors? Two? Little Japanese job? Big old Detroit gas guzzler?”

  Another shrug.

  “Don’t you remember anything about the car at all, Mrs. Glenn?”

  “Well, there was one thing,” the old lady said. “I don’t know if it’s helpful, but I wrote it down.” She went rummaging in her bag again. “I think you call it the license plate number?”

  2.

  This is how it went down:

  It was somewhere between ten PM and midnight, Mulroney didn’t know when exactly, he could look it up, but fuck it, right? What does it matter? Night’s night. Point is, it was dark out, and the kid’s parents were asleep, and do you want to hear the story or not?

  March wanted to hear the story.

  So it’s dark out, the father’s an orthopedist, spent the day fixing bunions, the mother’s a whatchacallit, a, a, Jesus fucking Christ, he couldn’t think of the word, anyway it kept her on her feet all day, so she’s bushed too, and the kid—Bobby’s his name, Bobby Vandruggen, the pop’s Henry, the mom’s Joyce—sometimes your memory works, sometimes it doesn’t, right?—anyway, the kid’s up because, you know, it’s only ten PM—

  Or midnight.

  Or fucking eleven twenty-eight, point is he’s awake, and he’s watched the Hardy Boys, he’s watched that Steve Austin show, sure he could watch Carol Burnett, but he’s a teenage boy and his parents are asleep so you know what he’s gonna do instead, am I right? So he sneaks into his parents’ room, because he knows where the old man stashes the good stuff, right under the bed, copies of Rogue and Oui and Snizz where the lady of the house’ll never find ’em, ’cause when does she ever clean under the bed, right? So mom and pop are sawing logs, and little Bobby sneaks in quiet as a goddamn mouse and snatches whatever’s on top, only I can tell you what it was because we entered it into evidence, didn’t we? Can’t leave shit like that lying around, can we?

  Of course not.

  Of course not. So it’s like a year-old issue of Cavalier—don’t give me that look, like you never bought a copy, March.

  Never in my life.

  Should try it sometime. Anyway, little Bobby takes his prize to the kitchen and makes himself a sandwich and he carries it to the living room and he sits on the couch in his button-fly pajamas, and opens to the centerfold, which this month is Misty Mountains, and if you say you don’t know who that is, I swear to god, March, I’m gonna start thinking you’re a fruit. Don’t answer that, I don’t even want to know.

  Now, meanwhile—this is up by Mulholland, right? On the hillside? And up on the highway, this blue Trans Am comes out of nowhere, takes the curve at maybe eighty, I’m talking real Smokey and the Bandit-type shit here. Smashes through the guardrail, bang, starts tearing down the hill, right toward the kid’s house, where the orthopedist and his lady are sleeping and their boy is focused on Misty Mountains. Can you imagine? Then, boom, the whole fucking side wall of his house comes down, and this Trans Am comes tearing through. Miracle he wasn’t under the wheels, you want to know the truth. Place is a total goddamn disaster area. Car goes right through an armchair, a grandfather clock, the wall on the other side—bam, bam, bam. Half the ceiling comes down. Mom and pop wake up, of course. They’re calling his name, Bobby, Bobby, but Bobby’s outside, running down the hill, to where the car’s fetched up against this stand of trees. And the driver, get this, she’s been thrown, she’s lying on the ground next to the open door, the car’s totaled and she’s pretty badly fucked up too, barely breathing, but she’s—you won’t fucking believe this—completely, bare-ass, like a bluebird, naked. I mean, nothing on. You understand? I’m not saying she went driving in her panties. I mean nothing. And who do you fucking think it is?

  Misty Mountains.

  What, you already heard this?

  It was on the news, Mulroney. Everyone’s heard it.

  Well, I’ll tell you something you didn’t hear on the news. She’s dying, right? She’s got barely enough breath to speak, but she’s trying to get something out, and the boy leans close to hear it. You want to know what she says to him? This naked lady he’d just been whacking off to, who just wrecked his house, who’s lying by the steaming, crumpled wreck of her Trans Am? She takes one last breath and says to him, she says, “How do you like my car, big boy?”

  I shit you not, March.

  And then she dies. Right in front of him. And you know what this kid does? He pulls off his pajama top, and he covers her up with it. Not like over her face, over those beautiful tits of hers. So she’s decent, you know? When mom and pop get there. When Stevenson and Pickler show up.

  * * *

  That’s how it went down, according to Officer William Mulroney of the LAPD, while he looked up the license plate number of a red ’74 Volkswagen Type 181 registered to one Amelia Francine Kuttner.

  WORD OF THE DAY

  Repercussion re-per-kush-uhn, noun:

  The consequence of an action, usually unpleasant; often refers to ongoing or lasting effects.

  3.

  Somewhere on the way to forty, Jackson Healy felt he’d taken a wrong turn, but the thing was, if he tried to pin down just when and where, he couldn’t. It’s not like there’d been anything so bad about his life—I mean, there’d been plenty of bad things, but so bad? Lots of people had it worse, some of them because of Jackson Healy. So if he was being totally honest about it, he didn’t have much to complain about. He had enough work, he got by. He had his room above the Comedy Store, where Mitzi comped him his ginger ales. He had his fish to take care of, which heaven knows was better than having a cat or a dog. Or a person. And when people came to him and asked him for help, he helped.

  Not that he was an altruist or anything. (Altruism, noun: the impulse to help other people, unselfishly. Not every word his Word-a-Day calendar taught him was useful, but that one had been. It had made him stop and think.) He wasn’t unselfish. It was a job. He had a rate, and people paid it or he didn’t take the work. Early on, he’d let people pay on the come, after he’d done his part, but more than once they’d reneged, or tried to, and that just meant he’d had to explain to them why that wasn’t the way you did business. And
the lesson took, of course—he’d gotten paid in the end—but it was like having to do two jobs for one fee, and where’s the sense in that? So now it was pay up front, cash on the barrelhead, or Healy would just take himself upstairs and feed the fish, and you could find some other way to take care of the guy who was threatening you, or messing around with your underage daughter, or whatever it was.

  That said, Healy did like to help. That day in the diner—no one had been paying him then. Now, it’s not like he’d had much choice: that fucker with the shotgun had been out of his goddamn mind, flying so high on PCP or acid or some goddamn thing that he thought the new Grand Slam breakfast they’d introduced was a plot against white people in general and him in particular. But you know, there were at least a dozen people in that Denny’s at the time and nothing said Healy had to be the one to vault the counter and tackle the son of a bitch. Someone else could’ve taken the shot in the fucking bicep. The thing is, no one else did. Everyone else was screaming and turning over tables and hiding behind them. And Healy could’ve done that too, his bicep would’ve thanked him if he had. But what he did instead was stand up and take a flying leap at a crazy motherfucker with a shotgun in his hands and not one but two fingers on the trigger.

  He’d been on the news after that, people from as far away as Oregon had called to say they saw him, flat on his back on an ambulance gurney, his shirt perforated and soaked with blood, grinning as they wheeled him off. And why’d he been grinning? Because it felt good. Not his arm, lord knows, not the prospect of six weeks of recovery with no painkillers. But what he’d done. Like it was a step up or something. It was still beating on people, still using his fists to solve problems, but for a purpose, not a paycheck.

  His sponsor, Scotty, told him maybe it meant he was ready to move on, try a different line of work, which maybe it was. Healy had thought for a couple years now about maybe applying for his investigator’s license, working under an experienced P.I. for a while, then opening his own office, his own business, ad in the Yellow Pages and everything. Those guys help people. It’d feel good to wake up in the morning knowing that’s what was on the docket for the day.