The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 15

  I patted her hand.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t be quick enough. He never saw me. He stood in the center of the room covering both entrances and I knew what he was waiting for and I knew you’d come after him. He would have killed you, Mike.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “He was standing close enough so I could reach out and put my gun right against him.” Her lips tightened. “Is this how ... you feel, Mike? Is it all right for me to feel like this? Not having a sensation of guilt?”

  “I feel happy.”

  “So do I. Perhaps I shouldn‘t, Mike. Maybe I should feel ashamed and sinful, but I don’t. I’m glad I shot him. I’m glad I had the chance to do it and not you. I wanted to, do you understand that?”

  “I understand completely. I know how you feel because it’s how I feel. There’s no shame or sin in killing a killer. David did it when he knocked off Goliath. Saul did it when he slew his tens of thousands. There’s no shame to killing an evil thing. As long as you have to live with the fact you might as well enjoy it.”

  This time Velda laughed, easily. My mind turned to the judge and I could picture his face, disappointed and angry that my time still hadn’t come. And we had the best alibi in the world. Self-defense. We had a gun license and they didn’t. If it reached us we were still clear.

  Velda said, “They were there after the same thing, weren’t they?”

  “What?”

  She repeated it. I slammed the wheel with my hand and said something I shouldn’t have. Velda looked at me, her forehead furrowed. “They were ... weren’t they?”

  I shook my head in disgust at myself. “What a sap I am. Of course they were! I thought they were after me again and they were searching for those damn documents!”

  “Mike! But how would they know? The papers never carried any news of Charlie Moffit’s murder. They reported it, but that was all. How could they know?”

  “The same way the public knew the documents were stolen. Look, it’s been a good time since he was knocked off. Just about long enough for somebody to get a loose tongue and spill something. That’s how they knew ... there was a leak. Somebody said something they shouldn’t have!”

  “The witnessess. They’d be the ones. Didn’t Pat say they were warned to keep quiet about it?”

  “ ‘Advised’ is the word,” I said. “That doesn’t make them liable to any official action. Damn it, why can’t people keep their big mouths shut!”

  Velda fidgeted in her seat. “It was too big to keep, Mike. You don’t witness a murder and just forget about it.”

  “Ah, maybe you’re right. Maybe I give people credit for having more sense than they actually have. Hell, the leak could just as well have come out of police headquarters too. It’s too late now to worry about it. The damage is done.”

  Velda lost herself in her thoughts for a good five minutes. I stayed hunched over the wheel trying to see through the fog. “It wasn’t there, Mike. If it wasn’t there then it has to be somewhere else.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You looked around the place right after Oscar died. It wasn’t among his things. The police must have looked too. Then we looked again. Do you think it could possibly be that Oscar didn’t have them?”

  “What else is there to think? Either that or he hid them outside his room.”

  “Doubtful, Mike. Remember one thing, if Oscar showed himself anywhere he would have been mistaken for Lee. He couldn’t have done much fooling around.”

  I had to grin because the girl who was wearing my ring was so smart I began to feel foolish around her. I did pretty good for myself. I picked a woman who could shoot a guy just like that and still think straight. “Go on, Velda.”

  “So maybe Oscar never got those documents. Charlie’s ripped pocket just happened when he fell. If Charlie was the courier, and if the documents he was carrying are missing, then Charlie must have them tucked away somewhere. Remember what the men at the pie factory said ... that he was dopey for certain periods of time? He was forgetful? Couldn’t he have....”

  I stopped her and took it from there myself. She had tapped it right on the nose.

  “When, Mike?”

  I glanced at her quickly. “When what?”

  “When do we go through his apartment?”

  She was asking for more! Once in a night wasn’t enough. “Not now,” I told her. “Tomorrow’s another day. Our dead friends won’t be making a report tonight and the party won’t be too anxious to make any more quick moves until they figure this one out first. We have time, plenty of time.”

  “No we don’t.”

  I convinced her that we had by talking my head off all the way up to her apartment. When I let her out I only had one more thing to say. She waited, knowing well enough what was coming. “In case anyone asks, I was with you in your place all night, understand?”

  “Can’t we partially tell the truth?”

  “Nope, we’re engaged.”

  “Oh. Now I have to wait some more.”

  “Not long, kid, not too long. When this is all finished there’ll be time for other things.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Good. Now hop upstairs and get to bed, but first, take that gun of yours and hide it somewhere. Put it where it can’t be found until I tell you to take it out.”

  She leaned over and kissed me, a soft, light kiss that left my mouth tingling with the thought of what lay behind this girl who could be so completely lovable and so completely deadly. There were fires burning in her eyes that nothing could ever quench, but they asked me to try ... to try hard.

  I looked at her legs as she got out of the car and decided that I’d never see enough of them. They had been there all the time, mine any time I had wanted to ask and until now I never had the sense to ask. I had been stupid, all right. I was much smarter now. I waited until she was in the door before I turned the car around and crawled back to my own place.

  It was late and I was tired. There had been too much in this one night again, I thought to myself. You get wound up like a watch spring, tighter and tighter until the limit is reached and you let go with a bang that leaves you empty and gasping.

  When I locked the door I went directly to the closet and took down the box of parts and shells for the gun. I laid them out on the kitchen table and took the .45 apart piece by piece, cleaning and oiling every bit of it. I unwrapped the new barrel and put it in place, throwing the rest of the gun together around it. On second thought I changed the firing pin too. A microscope could pick up a lot of details from empty shell cases.

  It took a half-hour to get the gun ready to go again. I shoved the old barrel and pin in a quart beer can, stuffed in some paper to keep it from rattling and dumped the works down the incinerator.

  I was feeling pretty good when I crawled into the sack. Now let’s see what would happen.

  The alarm was about to give up when I finally woke up. There was nothing I wanted more than staying in bed, but I forced myself into a sitting position, fought a brief battle with the sheets and got my feet on the floor. A cold shower took the sleep out of my eyes and a plate of bacon and eggs put some life into my body.

  I dressed and called Velda. She wasn’t at home so I tried the office. She was there. I said, “How the devil do you do it?”

  She laughed and came right back at me. “I’m still a working girl, Mike. Office hours are from eight to five, remember?”

  “Any customers?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any bills?”

  “Nope.”

  “Love me?”

  “Yup. Love me?”

  “Yup. What a conversation. Any calls?”

  “Yup. Pat called. He wants to see you. Lee Deamer called. He wants to see you, too.”

  I brightened up fast. “If they call back, tell them I’ll check in. How about the papers?”

  “Headlines, Mike. Big black headlines. It seems that a couple of rival gangs met up with each other in an old building over on t
he East Side. They forgot to carry their dead off when the battle was finished.”

  “Don’t sound so smug. Did Pat mention anything about it?”

  “No, but he will. He was pretty edgy with me.”

  “Okay, give him my love. I’ll see you shortly.” I hung up and laid out my working suit for the day. When I finished dressing I looked out the window and swore to myself. The fog was gone, but a drizzle had come in on its heels and the people on the street were bundled into coats trying to keep warm. The winter was dying a hard death.

  On the way to the office I stopped off at a saloon and saw a friend of mine. I told him I wanted an unlicensed automatic of a certain make and .32 caliber, one that hadn’t done anything except decorate somebody’s dresser drawer since it was bought. My friend went to the phone and made two calls. He came back, told me to wait a few minutes, served a few customers at the bar, then went into the kitchen in the rear and I heard his voice arguing for a while. He came back with a package in his hand and said, “Twenty bucks, Mike.”

  I peeled off twenty, took the gun apart and removed the barrel and the pin. The rest I told my friend to dump in with his trash, thanked him and left. I stopped off at the office long enough to hand the two parts to Velda and tell her to slip them in her gun during her lunch hour. Then I went down to see Pat.

  As Velda said, he wasn’t happy. He said, “Hell, Mike,” but his eyes raked me up and down. “Sit,” he said.

  I sat down and picked the paper off his desk. The headlines were big and black. There was a picture of the outside of the house with an interior shot in the middle section with white dotted lines to indicate where the bodies had been found. “Real trouble, huh, Pat?”

  “Yeah, I thought maybe you could explain some of it.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Been shooting your gun lately?”

  “Yesterday, as a matter of fact. I fired one into some waste right in my own apartment to check the ejector action. Why?”

  “A paraffin test is out of order then. Mind if I see your gun?”

  I said no and handed it over. Pat pressed a button on his desk and one of the technicians came in. Pat handed him the gun. “Get me a photograph of one of the slugs, Art.”

  “You’re assuming a lot, aren’t you, Pat?”

  “I think so. Want to talk about it?”

  “No, wait until you get your photograph.”

  He sat back and smiled and I read the papers. The two men were identified as Martin Romberg and Harold Valleck. They were good and dead. Both had prison records for various crimes and were suspected of being killed in a gang brawl. The police were expecting early developments in the crime. The reporters didn’t have much to go on.

  Art came back before I finished the funnies and handed Pat an enlarged sheet that was covered with angle shots of the slug. He laid the gun on the desk. Pat smiled again and pulled another sheet from his desk drawer. There wasn’t anything funny about the way he smiled. I looked at him with a frown covering up the grin that was trying to break through, lit a butt and went back to the paper and finished the funnies.

  Pat said, “You’re too smart to be dumb, Mike. That or you’re clean and I’m stupid as hell.” His face looked empty.

  I had a nice speech all ready to take him down a peg or two when I realized that he was on the spot. “You mean they were supposed to match, is that it?”

  He nodded. “Something like that. A .45 killed one of them. There were only three of us who knew about Oscar’s being there.”

  “Were they after Oscar or just there?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, Mike. Murder isn’t uncommon in that neighborhood. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give a hoot about it, but this isn’t an ordinary thing. I feel about as effective as a clam right now.”

  “What for? Cripes, you can’t help yourself if somebody gets shot. The place was empty. It was a good place for a hideout. Maybe those two eggs were holed up in there when they got caught up with.”

  Pat leaned back and rubbed his hands across his eyes. “Look, Mike, I’m not too dumb. Anybody can change barrels in a gun. I’ll bet you the shell cases won’t match your pin either.”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You’re treating me like a kid now, feller. You’re the one who’s forgetting that we’re friends. I know you like a book and I don’t want to tear any pages out of that book because if I do I’m afraid of what the ending will be like. I know it was you, I don’t know who handled the .32, I’m scared to ask questions and I hate to have you lie to me. Little lies I don’t like.”

  I folded the paper and put it back on his desk. Pat wouldn’t look at me. “Why the finger pointing at me, Pat?”

  “Nuts. Just plain nuts. You should know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “One of those boys had a green Commie card on him. Now do you know why?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I had forgotten all about that. I lifted the cigarette and dragged the smoke down into my chest. “Now what?”

  “I want to know what you’re after. I want to know everything, Mike. Whenever I think about things I get cold all over and want to smash things. You’ve been playing cute and there’s no way I can touch you. I have to absorb myself in police work and routine detail when I know I’m on the outside hoping for a look in.”

  “That’s the trouble with the police. They have to wait until something happens. A crime has to be committed before they can make a move.”

  Pat watched me thoughtfully, his hands locked behind his head. “Things have happened.”

  “Roger, but, as you stated, they have been played very cute.”

  “I’m still on the outside looking in.”

  I snubbed the butt out and stared at the shreds of tobacco hanging out the end. “Pat ... more things are going to happen. I know you like a book, too, but there’s something else I have to know.”

  “Go on.”

  “How far can I trust you?”

  “It depends on a lot of things. Never forget that I’m still a cop.”

  “You’re still a plain citizen who likes his country and likes to see it stay the way it is, aren’t you?”

  “Naturally.”

  “All right. You’re all snagged up in the ritual of written law and order. You have to follow the rules and play it square. There’s a weight around your neck and you know it. If I told you what I knew you’d bust a gut trying to get something done that couldn’t be done and the rats would get out of the trap.

  “I’m only one guy, Pat, but I’m quite a guy and you know it. I make my own rules as I go along and I don’t have to account to anybody. There’s something big being kicked around and it’s exactly as you said ... it’s bigger than you or me or anybody and I’m the only one who can handle it. Don’t go handing me the stuff about the agencies that are equipped to handle every conceivable detail of this and that. I’m not messing with detail ... I’m messing with people and letting them see that I’m nobody to mess with and there are a lot more like me if you want to look for them.

  “What’s going on isn’t a case for the crime laboratory and it isn’t a case for the police. The whole thing is in the hands of the people, only they don’t know it yet. I’m going to show it to them because I’m the only one who has the whole works wrapped up tight trying to bring it together so we can see what it is. You can stop worrying about your law and your order and about Lee Deamer, because when I’m finished Lee can win his election and go ahead and wipe out the corruption without ever knowing that he had a greater enemy than crime plain and simple.”

  I picked up my gun and stuck it in the sling. Pat hadn’t moved. His head bobbed slightly when I said so long, but that was all.

  I was still seeing the tired smile on Pat’s face, telling me that he understood and to go ahead, when I called Lee Deamer’s office. His secretary told me that he was speaking at a luncheon of U.N. delegates in a midtown hotel and had already left. I got the name of the hotel, thanked her and hung up. />
  He must be getting anxious and I didn’t blame him a bit. It was a little before noon, so I hopped in the heap and tooled it up Broadway and angled over to the hotel where it cost me a buck to park in an unloading zone with a guy to cover for me.

  The clerk at the desk directed me to the hall where the luncheon was to be held and had hardly finished before I saw Lee come in the door. He swung a brief case at his side and one of the girls from his office trailed behind him carrying another. Before I could reach him a swarm of reporters came out of nowhere and took down his remarks while the photogs snapped his picture.

  A covey of important-looking joes stood on the outside of the circle impatient to speak to Deamer, yet unwilling to offend the press by breaking up the party. It was Lee himself who told the boys to see him after the luncheon and walked through their midst. He had spotted me leaning against the desk and went directly into the manager’s office. That little man went in after him, came out in a minute and scanned the desk. I didn’t have to be told that he was looking for me.

  I nodded and strode in as casually as I could. The manager smiled at me, then took up a position near the door to give us a few minutes in private. Lee Deamer was sitting in a leather-covered chair next to the desk and his face was a study in anxiety.

  “Hello, Lee.”

  “Mike, how are you? I’ve been worried sick ever since I saw the papers this morning.”

  I offered him a butt and he shook his head. “There’s nothing to worry about, Lee. Everything is fine.”

  “But last night. I ... you mean you weren’t connected with the doings in Oscar’s place?” I grinned and lit the smoke.

  “I don’t know what to think. I called Captain Chambers and he led me to believe that he thought the same thing.”

  “He did. I talked him out of it.” I raked another chair up with my foot and sat down. Murder is murder. It can be legal and it can’t. No matter what it is it’s still murder and the less people know about it the better. I said, “I went through Oscar’s place right after the accident. Pat went through it himself. Later I took another check and I’m satisfied that if Oscar did leave any incriminating junk lying around, he didn’t leave it in his room.”