Killing Town Read online

  “Both the father and the son had her as—”

  “Leave it right there. Both the father and the son had her. You have to understand, the Charles men are shameless letches.”

  “Did you ever have them as clients?”

  “No. But after Jean Warburton went over to the fish-glue plant, to be Junior’s secretary, I became the Senator’s new secretary. And he wanted for free what I value dearly.”

  I leaned toward her. “The Senator was the boss with busy hands? The one you clubbed with an ashtray?”

  She laughed some smoke out. “The very captain of industry himself, the old—what’s the fancy word?—satyr. And sonny boy, they say, is no better. So, uh… Mike, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t you have any bad habits you’d like to indulge? Wouldn’t cost you a thing, although I wouldn’t frown at a gratuity.”

  “Sorry, honey. I’m spoken for.”

  “It’s really true, then? You’re going to marry that poor little rich girl? She is a fetching thing.”

  “You aren’t hard to look at, either. Buy you another drink?”

  She shook the brunette mane. “No thanks. I’m working and have to gauge my intake. Look me up sometime, Mike, on my off hours… after you’ve been married a while.”

  She slid out of the booth, then leaned in and gave me a sticky little kiss. Then she swayed over and found herself a stool at the bar.

  And me with a room in this hotel.

  I finished my highball and went up to it.

  * * *

  I called the Herald and asked the switchboard girl for Mort Jackson, a reporter who had covered my arrest, the coroner’s jury, and even that farce at the police station when Melba got me shaken loose.

  “Jackson, City Desk,” a rushed voice said over the typewriter clatter, muffled talk and general newsroom bustle.

  “Mike Hammer, Mr. Jackson.”

  That got his attention, but after a couple of seconds he said, dismissively, “I coulda used an interview a couple days ago, Hammer. Now you’re what we call old news, my friend. And I’m on deadline for the morning edition.”

  “I’ll meet you when you’ve turned your copy in,” I told him. “It’ll be worth your time. I can tell you all about how the Senator and his family reacted to having a freight-hopper for a son-in-law.”

  He took another couple seconds to chew that, then said, “Dingbat’s, around the corner on Broadway and Ninth. Hour from now.”

  He clicked off.

  Dingbat’s was a hangout for reporters, a hole in the wall but more respectable than the other dives I’d sampled in town. The walls were decorated with framed front pages—PROHIBITION ENDS AT LAST!, HINDENBURG EXPLODES!, U.S. DECLARES WAR!, that kind of thing. The only women present, always in the company of two or more men, were hard-looking news hens adding to the fog of cigarette smoke. Beer and the occasional boilermaker seemed the libations of choice.

  I found a back booth, ordered a beer and got a Lucky going. Why not add to the atmosphere? I was on a second beer when he finally came in, twenty after eleven.

  “Last minute rewrite,” Jackson said, a little guy in a rumpled off-the-rack suit, loose tie, and shapeless hat, a cigarette bobbing in thin lips. He had the typically anonymous look of a good reporter, but if you paid attention, the small dark eyes were alert—even at the end of a long day. Unbidden, a waitress delivered a glass of beer and he thanked her with a wink.

  With no further social niceties, he dug a spiral pad and a pencil out of his pocket and said, “So I bet you went over real big with the Senator and the assorted Charleses.”

  “That’s what makes it interesting,” I said.

  “What does?”

  “I got a ticker tape parade out of ’em. Of course, I’m not the hobo you guys made me out to be. If I wasn’t old news, maybe you’d have dug a little, like the Senator, and found out I have a distinguished war record, including not getting killed, am an ex-cop and currently a licensed private investigator out of Manhattan.”

  He pushed the pad away, tossed the pencil on it and looked at me closer. “This starts to interest me. I don’t understand it, but it interests me.”

  I shrugged. “What interests me is that I’m still a stranger to everybody but Melba Charles, who met me at a USO dance during the war.” I had to stick by that story, at least for now.

  He was nodding a little. “Well, there’s an angle, anyway. More like sob sister stuff, but sentimental crap with a wartime slant always plays. You had a long-distance romance, huh? Letters and stuff. You in a foxhole, her at the beauty shop?”

  “You’re missing the point. I’m a nobody to the most important family in town, and yet they take me in like Rockefeller, Jr. Why?”

  His eyebrows hiked damn near to his crumpled hat brim. “Do I know?”

  “I’m not sure I do. But somebody in that family is covering something up. I’m convinced the Senator framed me, or if his son did, it had to be with the old man’s consent. Maybe guidance.”

  The sharp little eyes peered out of slits. “That’s not a story, Hammer. That’s opinion. I don’t handle the editorial page. And if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t take on Senator Charles.”

  “You in his pocket, too?”

  He smirked, pawed the air. “The town’s in his pocket. You’ve been around here long enough to pick up on that. But if he framed you, why send his daughter to help you squirm your way out?”

  “I was hoping you might know.”

  He thought for a moment. “I just might. You tangled with Sykes. You put him in a hospital bed. You have any idea of just how powerful he is in this town?”

  “I’m starting to. Is he the Senator’s boy?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not how it works, not in a town this size. Sykes is the guy in the department who the Senator goes to if there’s a problem. In fairness to the old boy, I can’t say it’s a privilege he’s ever abused. He’s decent enough, for a guy with that kind of money and power.”

  “If you say so.”

  He leaned forward, eyes glittering. “But Sykes is the boy anybody who wants something done around here can go to—Mafia types who want to run whores or gambling, wealthy guys in Dutch, nice girls in trouble, respectable types who got caught in a bus station john with a John. It’s quite a menu.”

  So that was how the Two Tonys found me—Sykes had led them to me. Even if the “Mafia types” were local, they’d have New York City ties.

  “If Sykes went off the deep end and flat-out murdered you in custody,” Jackson said, “think of the unwanted attention it would attract. The Senator might have gone to great lengths to tamp that down.”

  “What’s the score on Belden?” I asked, figuring Sykes could only have got my location through him.

  “He’s as straight as possible in a town like this.”

  “Which doesn’t sound all that straight. Would he pass information to Sykes?”

  He shook his head again. “I don’t think so. Anyway, not intentionally. But a chief of police can be isolated from the rank and file. He could pass something on through an intermediary to Sykes without even knowing.”

  “He’s that naive?”

  “No. He’s in that corrupt a department. Do I have to tell you they’re a bunch of bully boys?”

  “They already made that point, thanks. So what do you know about the Warburton girl?”

  He shrugged. “I know her brothers are low-class trash and maybe so was she, but at least she had ambition. She was trying to better herself… working with what she had.”

  “And I guess we both know what she had. You want to tell me about how she and the Senator and his son tie up?”

  He almost flinched at that, and his kind of newshound doesn’t flinch so easy. He waved the waitress over for another beer. I was still working on my second one.

  He took a few sips.

  I had all night. I could wait.

  Then he said, “The way this works is, I ask you questions.
You’re not supposed to pump me.”

  “Did you sleep through the part where I said I was an investigator? I’m going to find out what’s going on with that girl’s rape and murder. And it’s going to make a hell of a story.”

  “…If I can print it.”

  “And why wouldn’t you be able to?” I gave him a nasty grin. “Would it have anything to do with the Warburton girl being the Senator’s pink-collar plaything at the cannery? And after that went on to be his son’s secretary at the fish-glue factory?”

  He waved the idea off. “There’s nothing to that.”

  “Why not?”

  He snorted a laugh. “Those two are a couple of chasers from way back, and everybody in this town knows it. The Senator’s a dirty old man. And like father, like son… And when either one gets tired of the latest model, he pays her off and sends ’er packing. Enough hush money can heal all sorts of hurt feelings, y’know. That pair doesn’t have to do any more than that, even if they are—”

  “Lady killers?”

  He leaned forward, keeping his voice low. “Look, Old Man Charles is more king than senator. He can do what he wants in his kingdom. Still, he’s paid dearly over the years, for being on the make, and in a lot of ways.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well… everybody says he loved his late wife, but he couldn’t control his urges, and look how that turned out.”

  “How did it turn out?”

  “You didn’t know? She killed herself. Cut her wrists in the bathtub.”

  “Hell. When was this?”

  “Long time ago. Twenty years?”

  When Melba was just nine.

  “The real creep in the family,” the reporter went on, “is that son of his. Lawrence.” He said the name like it was a dirty word. “Larry married that sweet wife of his, back when she was a real beauty. She was a runner-up for Miss Rhode Island in Miss America, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “They say Lawrence was faithful, as far as she knew, for a time. But after she had her first kid, she blew up like a balloon. Second kid, she went dirigible.”

  HINDENBURG EXPLODES!

  “Bastard doesn’t even bother hiding his tomcatting from her,” Jackson said. “And look at how they both behave! The father thinks Miss Warburton is getting too close for comfort, she’s talking marriage and God knows what she has to hang over the old S.O.B., so he shunts her off to his baby boy for sloppy seconds. ‘ You keep her happy, sonny.’”

  Then the Senator promoted another girl off the line, that brunette who as it turned out would rather turn tricks than put up with the slimy likes of the boss man.

  Jackson was shaking his head, his expression disgusted in that worldly way reporters have. “They don’t kill these girls, Hammer. Like I said—they pay them off, send them away, when they’re tired of them, or feel threatened by talk of love and marriage, or, in Lawrence’s case, divorce. Murder them? They just don’t have to!”

  “But it does explain why a hasty frame was arranged for me,” I said. “Even if they had nothing to do with the girl’s death, the Charles men would want that case closed up good and tight and right away, before their dirty laundry started smelling worse than their damn factories.”

  The reporter nodded. “Even in this town, you can’t cover up something like that. Murder. Rape. But why would either of them rape that girl? Makes no sense.”

  I tossed a couple bucks on the table and slid out of the booth. “Thanks.”

  He frowned up at me. “So where’s the story?”

  “I’ll give it to you,” I said, “when I know what it is.”

  Out on the street, I lit up another Lucky. The overcast sky hadn’t kept its promise. The sky was clear tonight; stars, moon, a full one at that. The works. The night was cool and pleasant, and while I hadn’t assembled the puzzle yet, I was pretty sure I had all the pieces.

  Somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

  I wheeled and it was Sykes. The tall, slender detective was in a raincoat and a derby. He cast his almost pretty, light-blue eyes on me, two nice jewels in the bony, angular setting that was his face.

  “I hear you been askin’ around about me,” he said.

  And somebody else tapped me.

  Not on the shoulder.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The warehouse was close to the water, if my nostrils were to be believed—twitching with that familiar fishy stench that so defined Killington. The ceiling was high, crisscrossed with pipes from which occasional conical lamps hung like Asian rice hats, throwing amber spotlights as if some singer or dancer might come from the wings and start a vaudeville routine.

  The floor was concrete and fairly clean, but the structure had been here a long time—it was a brick building with high, many-paned windows whose opaque glass let minimal illumination in, particularly now, at night, when street lamps were about it. Cardboard cartons were stacked ten feet high and six feet wide, forming aisles that wheeled carts could be conveyed down for loading. Some ladders on wheels were here and there, too. A few of the aisles were formed with wooden crates, similarly stacked, each box labeled CHARLES & COMPANY FISH GLUE. All very neat, and not terribly ominous. Just a place where men labored hard at dull, necessary work.

  But the only men working here tonight, both from the local police department, wouldn’t have to work very hard, though it would probably not prove dull for them, if necessary in their view.

  I was centerstage in the only open area, with double garage doors fore and a workbench aft, hanging by my wrists about two feet off the ground, like a beef carcass in a butcher shop. My shirt was off. The rope chewing into my wrists disappeared up into the rafters, tied off at an angle to my left. I was a solo performer featured in a yellow spotlight under one of those lamp-shade cones in the rafters.

  My police department audience was Lieutenant Henry Sykes, still in his raincoat and derby and leather gloves, and that dish-faced, fat-bellied cop, wearing his blue uniform with shiny brass buttons like this was typical duty in Killing Town. Hell, maybe it was. His right shirtsleeve had been rolled up to accommodate the cast over his broken arm.

  Sitting back on a couple of folding chairs, facing each other, the two men were drinking beer—a metal tub filled with cans of Rheingold between them—and laughing and talking. They were smoking cigars, too, like a couple of backroom politicians. I got the feeling they were waiting for me to come around and join the party.

  And I had come around, just now, but within seconds I slitted my eyes near shut and kept my chin down against my chest. But I wasn’t missing anything. They hadn’t started beating me yet, but with these two, that would be coming. And since Sykes had gone to the hospital with two balls and come out with one—thanks to me—what awaited the third guest at the party was not likely to be a cold can of Rheingold and a cigar…

  My muscles were aching like hell, my weight stretching my tendons like the rubber bands they weren’t. I couldn’t have been like this long, though—I still had feeling in my fingers, my hands, and that would go soon enough. And the back of my head where I’d been sapped was still wet with blood, not scabbed or dried yet. I was already having trouble breathing—this was damn near crucifixion, when your lungs got compressed to where you couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t the nails and infection and bugs or even the Romans that killed the religious martyrs—they suffocated. But at least my wrists and shoulders weren’t dislocated yet.

  Better yet, as I took this inventory, I realized I could still feel the little holster strapped in place on my right ankle under my trousers, with a heaviness that suggested the .38 was still there. They hadn’t given me enough of a frisk, or felt it when they trussed me up, to tumble to it.

  Dish Face said, “When are the New York guys coming over?”

  The long-faced plainclothes dick checked his watch. “They had a couple of girls in their room. Said it would be half an hour, forty-five minutes.”

  “Gives us time to have some fun first.”
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br />   Sykes shook his head. “They don’t want us to kill him. He knows something they want to know.”

  The fat cop grunted in displeasure. “What are they after, out of him?”

  “I don’t know. Something to do with those other heavies we sent out to the Charles girl’s cottage.”

  They each had some beer.

  Then Dish Face asked, “You really think Hammer killed them both?”

  “Why, you think they were playing Russian roulette, Sarge?”

  The fat cop frowned over at me. “I mean, Jesus! He’s hanging right there! Low hanging damn fruit! We’re just gonna sit here and wait for somebody else to take over?”

  Now Sykes glanced my way. “Well, we can offer to do the softening up for ’em. Just kind of throw that in for the five C’s. I mean, we both got scores to settle with the son of a bitch.”

  Dish Face was damn near whining now. “Damnit, Henny, let’s get started! Go wet down your gloves if you like. All we got to do is not kill him.”

  “…I suppose a little fun isn’t going to hurt anybody.”

  “Anybody but Hammer!” And the fat prick started in on an uh-haw, uh-haw horse laugh.

  Nothing from Sykes for a while.

  Then: “Well… let’s indulge ourselves a little.”

  Sykes pitched his cigar and rose, that tall frame of his unfolding like a circus guy on stilts. Dish Face did the same, only he didn’t unfold—he more spilled out of his chair. In his left hand he was clutching a nightstick as straight and taut as he wasn’t, a leather strap hanging like the tail of a beast.

  Then they were standing in front of me, looking up at me like they had front row seats at a lynch party.

  Disappointment dripped off Dish Face’s voice. “Hell, he’s still out. Where’s the fun in that? Beatin’ on a guy already out cold.”

  Sykes was staring up at me. “He isn’t out. He’s faking.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think so. Give him a few love taps.”

  The fat cop swung the nightstick into my side. I didn’t react. It hurt, but he’d missed my ribs, and with a lefthand swing—I’d put his right arm out of commission, remember—he didn’t have all that much power.