The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 3 Page 10

  He knew he reached me with that one but didn’t know why. I could feel myself tighten up and had to relax deliberately before I could speak to him again.

  “Who did he go with when he was here? When he wasn’t on a job.”

  Rickerby frowned and touched his glasses with an impatient gesture. “There were—several girls. I really never inquired. After Ann’s death—well, it was none of my business, really.”

  “But you knew them?”

  He nodded, watching me closely. Once more he thought quickly, then decided. “There was Greta King, a stewardess with American Airlines that he would see occasionally. And there was Pat Bender over at the Craig House. She’s a manicurist there and they had been friends for years. Her brother, Lester, served with Richie but was killed just before the war ended.”

  “It doesn’t sound like he had much fun.”

  “He didn’t look for fun. Ann’s dying took that out of him. All he wanted was an assignment that would keep him busy. In fact, he rarely ever got to see Alex Bird, and if—”

  “Who’s he?” I interrupted.

  “Alex, Lester and Richie were part of a team throughout the war. They were great friends in addition to being experts in their work. Lester got killed, Alex bought a chicken farm in Marlboro, New York, and Richie stayed in the service. When Alex went civilian he and Richie sort of lost communication. You know the code in this work—no friends, no relatives—it’s a lonely life.”

  When he paused I said, “That’s all?”

  Once again, he fiddled with his glasses, a small flicker of annoyance showing in his eyes. “No. There was someone else he used to see on occasions. Not often, but he used to look forward to the visit.”

  My voice didn’t sound right when I asked, “Serious?”

  “I—don’t think so. It didn’t happen often enough and generally it was just a supper engagement. It was an old friend, I think.”

  “You couldn’t recall the name?”

  “It was never mentioned. I never pried into his business.”

  “Maybe it’s about time.”

  Rickerby nodded sagely. “It’s about time for you to tell me a few things too.”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “True.” He looked at me sharply and waited.

  “If the information isn’t classified, find out what he really did during the war, who he worked with and who he knew.”

  For several seconds he ran the thought through his mental file, then: “You think it goes back that far?”

  “Maybe.” I wrote my number down on a memo pad, ripped off the page and handed it to him. “My office. I’ll be using it from now on.”

  He looked at it, memorized it and threw it down. I grinned, told him so-long and left.

  Over in the west Forties I got a room in a small hotel, got a box, paper and heavy cord from the desk clerk, wrapped my .45 up, addressed it to myself at the office with a buck’s worth of stamps and dropped it in the outgoing mail, then sacked out until it was almost noon in a big new tomorrow.

  Maybe I still had that look because they thought I was another cop. Nobody wanted to talk, and if they had, there would have been little they could have said. One garrulous old broad said she saw a couple of men in the back court and later a third. No, she didn’t know what they were up to and didn’t care as long as they weren’t in her yard. She heard the shot and would show me the place, only she didn’t know why I couldn’t work with the rest of the cops instead of bothering everybody all over again.

  I agreed with her, thanked her and let her take me to where I almost had it going over the fence. When she left, wheezing and muttering, I found where the bullet had torn through the slats and jumped the fence, and dug it out of the two-by-four frame in the section on the other side of the yard. There was still enough of it to show the rifling marks, so I dropped it in my pocket and went back to the street.

  Two blocks away I waved down a cab and got in. Then I felt the seven years, and the first time back I had to play it hard and almost stupid enough to get killed. There was a time when I never would have missed with the .45, but now I was happy to make a noise with it big enough to start somebody running. For a minute I felt skinny and shrunken inside the suit and cursed silently to myself.

  If she was alive, I was going to have to do better than I was doing now. Time, damn it. There wasn’t any. It was like when the guy in the porkpie hat had her strung from the rafters and the whip in his hand had stripped her naked flesh with bright red welts, the force of each lash stroke making her spin so that the lush beauty of her body and the deep-space blackness of her hair and the wide sweep of her breasts made an obscene kaleidoscope and then I shot his arm off with the tommy gun and it dropped with a wet thud in the puddle of clothes around her feet like a pagan sacrifice and while he was dying I killed the rest of them, all of them, twenty of them, wasn’t it? And they called me those terrible names, the judge and the jury did. And they called me those terrible names, the judge and the jury did.

  Damn. Enough.

  CHAPTER 7

  The body was gone, but the police weren’t. The two detectives interrogating Nat beside the elevators were patiently listening to everything he said, scanning the night book one held open. I walked over, nodded and said, “Morning, Nat.”

  Nat’s eyes gave me a half-scared, half-surprised look followed by a shrug that meant it was all out of his hands.

  “Hello, Mike.” He turned to the cop with the night book. “This is Mr. Hammer. In 808.”

  “Oh?” The cop made me in two seconds. “Mike Hammer. Didn’t think you were still around.”

  “I just got back.”

  His eyes went up and down, then steadied on my face. He could read all the signs, every one of them. “Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “Were you here last night?”

  “Not me, buddy. I was out on the town with a friend.”

  The pencil came into his hand automatically. “Would you like to—”

  “No trouble. Bayliss Henry, an old reporter. I think he lives—”He put the pencil away with a bored air. “I know where Bayliss lives.”

  “Good,” I said. “What’s the kick here?”

  Before the pair could tell him to shut up, Nat blurted, “Mike—it was old Morris Fleming. He got killed.”

  I played it square as I could. “Morris Fleming?”

  “Night man, Mike. He started working here after—you left.”

  The cop waved him down. “Somebody broke his neck.”

  “What for?”

  He held up the book. Ordinarily he never would have answered, but I had been around too long in the same business. “He could have been identified. He wanted in the easy way so he signed the book, killed the old man later and ripped the page out when he left.” He let me think it over and added, “Got it figured yet?”

  “You don’t kill for fun. Who’s dead upstairs?”

  Both of them threw a look back and forth and stared at me again. “Clever boy.”

  “Well?”

  “No bodies. No reported robberies. No signs of forcible entry. You’re one of the last ones in. Maybe you’d better check your office.”

  “I’ll do that,” I told him.

  But I didn’t have to bother. My office had already been checked. Again. The door was open, the furniture pushed around, and in my chair behind the desk was Pat, his face cold and demanding, his hands playing with the box of .45 shells he had found in the niche in the desk.

  Facing him with her back to me, the light from the window making a silvery halo around the yellow of her hair, was Laura Knapp.

  I said, “Having fun?”

  Laura turned quickly, saw me and a smile made her mouth beautiful. “Mike!”

  “Now how did you get here?”

  She took my hand, held it tightly a moment with a grin of pleasure and let me perch on the end of the desk. “Captain Chambers asked me to.” She turned and smiled at Pat, but the smile was lost on him. “He came t
o see me not long after you did.”

  “I told you that would happen.”

  “It seems that since you showed some interest in me he did too, so we just reviewed all—the details of what happened—to Leo.” Her smile faded then, her eyes seeming to reflect the hurt she felt.

  “What’s the matter, Pat, don’t you keep files anymore?”

  “Shut up.”

  “The manual says to be nice to the public.” I reached over and picked up the box of .45’s. “Good thing you didn’t find the gun.”

  “You’re damn right. You’d be up on a Sullivan charge right now.”

  “How’d you get in, Pat?”

  “It wasn’t too hard. I know the same tricks you do. And don’t get snotty.” He flipped a paper out of his pocket and tossed it on the desk. “A warrant, mister. When I heard there was a kill in this particular building I took this out first thing.”

  I laughed at the rage in his face and rubbed it in a little. “Find what you were looking for?”

  Slowly, he got up and walked around the desk, and though he stood there watching me it was to Laura that he spoke. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Knapp, wait out in the other room. And close the door.”

  She looked at him, puzzled, so I nodded to her and she stood up with a worried frown creasing her eyes and walked out. The door made a tiny snick as it closed and we had the place all to ourselves. Pat’s face was still streaked with anger, but there were other things in his eyes this time. “I’m fed up, Mike. You’d just better talk.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  The coldness took all the anger away from his face now. “All right, I’ll tell you the alternative. You’re trying to do something. Time is running against you. Don’t give me any crap because I know you better than you know yourself. This isn’t the first time something like this cropped up. You pull your connections on me, you try to play it smart—okay—I’ll make time run out on you. I’ll use every damn regulation I know to harass you to death. I’ll keep a tail on you all day, and every time you spit I’ll have your ass hauled into the office. I’ll hold you on every pretext possible and if it comes to doing a little high-class framing I can do that too.”

  Pat wasn’t lying. Like he knew me, I knew him. He was real ready to do everything he said and time was one thing I didn’t have enough of. I got up and walked around the desk to my chair and sat down again. I pulled out the desk drawer, stowed the .45’s back in the niche without trying to be smug about what I did with the gun. Then I sat there groping back into seven years, knowing that instinct went only so far, realizing that there was no time to relearn and that every line had to be straight across the corners.

  I said, “Okay, Pat. Anything you want. But first a favor.”

  “No favors.”

  “It’s not exactly a favor. It’s an or else.” I felt my face go as cold as his was. “Whether you like it or not I’m ready to take my chances.”

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was ready to throw his fist at my face again and would have, only he was too far away. Little by little he relaxed until he could speak, then all those years of being a cop took over and he shrugged, but he wasn’t fooling me any. “What is it?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t do if I had the time. It’s all a matter of public record.”

  He glanced at me shrewdly and waited.

  “Look up Velda’s P.I. license.”

  His jaw dropped open stupidly for a brief second, then snapped shut and his eyes followed suit. He stood there, knuckles white as they gripped the edge of the desk and he gradually leaned forward so that when he swung he wouldn’t be out of reach this time.

  “What kind of crazy stunt are you pulling?” His voice was almost hoarse.

  I shook my head. “The New York State law says that you must have served three or more years in an accredited police agency, city, state, or federal in a rating of sergeant or higher to get a Private Investigator’s license. It isn’t easy to get and takes a lot of background work.”

  Quietly, Pat said, “She worked for you. Why didn’t you ask?”

  “One of the funny things in life. Her ticket was good enough for me at first. Later it never occurred to me to ask. I was always a guy concerned with the present anyway and you damn well know it.”

  “You bastard. What are you trying to pull?”

  “Yes or no, Pat.”

  His grin had no humor in it. Little cords in his neck stood out against his collar and the pale blue of his eyes was deadly. “No,” he said. “You’re a wise guy, punk. Don’t pull your tangents on me. You got this big feeling inside you that you’re coming back at me for slapping you around. You’re using her now as a pretty little oblique switch—but, mister, you’re pulling your crap on the wrong soldier. You’ve just about had it, boy.”

  Before he could swing I leaned back in my chair with as much insolence as I could and reached in my pocket for the slug I had dug out of the fence. It was a first-class gamble, but not quite a bluff. I had the odds going for me and if I came up short, I’d still have a few hours ahead of him.

  I reached out and laid the splashed-out bit of metal on the desk. “Don’t punk me, man. Tell ballistics to go after that and tell me what I want and I’ll tell you where that came from.”

  Pat picked it up, his mind putting ideas together, trying to make one thing fit another. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, but one thing took precedence over all others. He was a cop. First-rate. He wanted a killer. He had to play his own odds too.

  “All right,” he told me, “I can’t take any chances. I don’t get your point, but if it’s a phony, you’ve had it.”

  I shrugged. “When will you know about the license?”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  He straightened up and stared out the window over my head, still half in thought. Absently, he rubbed the back of his neck. “You do that,” he told me. He turned away, putting his hat on, then reached for the door.

  I stopped him. “Pat—”

  “What?”

  “Tell me something.”

  His eyes squinted at my tone. I think he knew what I was going to ask.

  “Did you love Velda too?”

  Only his eyes gave the answer, then he opened the door and left.

  “May I come in?”

  “Oh, Laura—please.”

  “Was there—trouble?”

  “Nothing special.” She came back to the desk and sat down in the client’s chair, her face curious. “Why?”

  With a graceful motion, she crossed her legs and brushed her skirt down over her knees. “Well, when Captain Chambers was with me—well, he spoke constantly of you. It was as if you were right in the middle of everything.” She paused, turning her head toward me. “He hates you, doesn’t he?”

  I nodded. “But we were friends once.”

  Very slowly, her eyebrows arched. “Aren’t most friendships only temporary at best?”

  “That’s being pretty cynical.”

  “No—only realistic. There are childhood friendships. Later those friends from school, even to the point of nearly blood brotherhood fraternities, but how long do they last? Are your Army or Navy friends still your friends or have you forgotten their names?”

  I made a motion with my shoulders.

  “Then your friends are only those you have at the moment. Either you outgrow them or something turns friendship into hatred.”

  “It’s a lousy system,” I said.

  “But there it is, nevertheless. In 1945 Germany and Japan were our enemies and Russia and the rest our allies. Now our former enemies are our best friends and the former allies the direct enemies.”

  She was so suddenly serious I had to laugh at her. “Beautiful blondes aren’t generally philosophers.”

  But her eyes didn’t laugh back. “Mike—it really isn’t that funny. When Leo was—alive, I attended to all his affairs in Washington. I still carry on, more or less. It’
s something he would have wanted me to do. I know how people who run the world think. I served cocktails to people making decisions that rocked the earth. I saw wars start over a drink and the friendship of generations between nations wiped out because one stupid, pompous political appointee wanted to do things his way. Oh, don’t worry, I know about friendships.”

  “So this one went sour.”

  “It hurts you, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so. It never should have happened that way.”

  “Oh?” For a few moments she studied me, then she knew. “The woman—we talked about—you both loved her?”

  “I thought only I did.” She sat there quietly then, letting me finish. “We both thought she was dead. He still thinks so and blames me for what happened.”

  “Is she, Mike?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all very strange, but if there is even the most remote possibility that some peculiar thing happened seven years ago and that she is still alive somewhere, I want to know about it.”

  “And Captain Chambers?”

  “He could never have loved her as I did. She was mine.”

  “If—you are wrong—and she is dead, maybe it would be better not to know.”

  My face was grinning again. Not me, just the face part. I stared at the wall and grinned idiotically. “If she is alive, I’ll find her. If she is dead, I’ll find who killed her. Then slowly, real slowly, I’ll take him apart, inch by inch, joint by joint, until dying will be the best thing left for him.”

  I didn’t realize that I was almost out of the chair, every muscle twisted into a monstrous spasm of murder. Then I felt her hands pulling me back and I let go and sat still until the hate seeped out of me.

  “Thanks.”

  “I know what you feel like, Mike.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” Her hand ran down the side of my face, the fingers tracing a warm path along my jaw. “It’s the way I felt about Leo. He was a great man, then suddenly for no reason at all he was dead.”

  “I’m sorry, Laura.”

  “But it’s not over for me anymore, either.”

  I swung around in the chair and looked up at her. She was magnificent then, a study in symmetry, each curve of her wonderful body coursing into another, her face showing the full beauty of maturity, her eyes and mouth rich with color.