One Lonely Night mh-4 Page 16

  She thought it was a love nest. We were locked in against the world where we could practice the human frailties without interruption. She thought I didn't know and was going to give her all for the party so as not to arouse my suspicions. She was crying softly as if the sudden passion was too much for her.

  I put the key in my pocket and crossed the room to where she was and put my hands on her shoulders. She spun around, her hands locking behind my waist, her mouth reaching up for mine. I kissed her with a brutal force she'd remember and while I kissed her my fingers hooked in the fabric of her dress.

  She ripped her mouth away from mine and pressed it against my cheek. She was crying hard and she said, "I love you, Mike. I never wanted to love again and I did. I love you." It was so low I hardly heard it.

  My teeth were showing in a grin. I raised my hand until it was against her breast and pushed. Ethel staggered back a step and I yanked with the hand that held her dress and it came off in one piece with a quick loud tear, leaving her gasping and hurt with vivid red marks on her skin where the fabric had twisted and caught.

  She gasped, pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and looked at me through eyes wide with fear. "Mike . . . you didn't have to . . ."

  "Shut up." I took a step forward and she backed off, slowly, slowly, until the wall was at her back and she could retreat no more. "Am I going to rip 'em right off your hide, Ethel?"

  Her head shook, unbelieving what was happening to her. It only lasted a moment, and her hands that trembled so bent up behind her back and the bra fell away and landed at her feet. Her eyes were on mine as she slid her hands inside the fragile silk of the shorts and pushed them down.

  When she stepped out of them I slid my belt off and let it dangle from my hand. I watched her face. I saw the gamut of emotions flash by in swift succession, leaving a startled expression of pure animal terror.

  "Maybe you should know why you're getting this, Ethel. It's something you should have gotten a long time ago. Your father should have given it to you when you started fooling around one of those Commie bastards who was after the dough you could throw his way instead of yourself. I'm going to lace the hell out of you and you can scream all you want, and nobody will be around to hear you but me and that's what I want to hear.

  "You put the finger on me twice now. You fingered me when you saw the badge inside my wallet and the party put a man on my back. They put a lot of men, I guess. Two of 'em are dead already. It didn't go so good and you saw a chance to finger me again in the lobby back there. What did you expect for it, a promotion or something?"

  I started to swing the belt back and forth very gently. Ethel pressed against the wall, her face a pale oval. "Mike . . . it wasn't . . ."

  "Keep quiet," I said.

  A naked woman and a leather belt. I looked at her, so bare and so pretty, hands pressed for support against the paneling, legs spread apart to hold a precarious balance, a flat stomach hollowed under the fear that burned her body a faint pink, lovely smooth breasts, firm with terrible excitement, rising and falling with every gasping breath. A gorgeous woman who had been touched by the hand of the devil.

  I raised the belt and swung it and heard the sharp crack of the leather against her thighs and her scream and that horrible blasting roar all at once. Her body twisted and fell while I was running for the window with the .45 in my hand pumping slugs into the night and shouting at the top of my voice.

  And there in the darkness I heard a body crashing through the brush, running for the road. I ran to the door that I had locked myself and cursed my own stupidity while I fumbled for the key in my pocket.

  The door came open, but there was only silence outside, a dead, empty silence. I jammed a fresh clip into the gun and held it steady, deliberately standing outlined in the light of the door asking to be made a target.

  I heard it again, the heavy pounding of feet going away. They were too far to catch. When they stopped a motor roared into life and he was gone. My hands had the shakes again and I had to drop the rod back in the sling. The prints of his feet were in the grass, winding around the house. I followed them to the window and bent over to pick up the hat.

  A pork-pie hat. It had a U-shaped nick taken out of the crown. The boy in the blue Chevy. Mr. MVD himself, a guy who looked like a schoolboy and could pass in a crowd for anything but what he was. I grinned because he was one thing he shouldn't have been, a lousy shot. I was duck soup there in that room with my back toward him and he missed. Maybe I was supposed to be his first corpse and he got nervous. Yeah. I turned and looked in the window.

  Ethel was still on the floor and a trickle of red drained from her body.

  I ran back to her, stumbling over things in the darkness. I turned her over and saw the hole under her shoulder, a tiny blue thing that oozed blood slowly and was beginning to swell at the edges.

  I said, "Ethel . . . Ethel honey!"

  Her eyes came open and she looked tired, so tired. "It . . . doesn't hurt, Mike."

  "I know. It won't for a while. Ethel . . . I'm sorry. God, I feel awful."

  "Mike . . . don't."

  She closed her eyes when I ran my hand over her cheek. "You said . . . a badge, Mike. You're not one of them, are you?"

  "No. I'm a cop."

  "I'm . . . glad. After . . . I met you I saw . . . the truth, Mike. I knew . . . I had been a fool."

  "No more talking, Ethel. I'm going for a doctor. Don't talk."

  She found my hand and hung on. "Let me, Mike . . . please. Will I die?"

  "I don't know, Ethel. Let me go for a doctor."

  "No . . . I want to tell you . . . I loved you. I'm glad it happened. I had to love somebody . . . else."

  I forced her fingers off my hand and pushed her arm away gently. There was a phone on the bar and I lifted it to my ear. I dialed the operator and had a hard time keeping my voice level. I said I wanted a doctor and wanted one quick. She told me to wait and connected me with a crisp voice that sounded steady and alert. I told him where we were and to get here fast. He said he would hurry and broke the connection.

  I knelt beside her and stroked her hair until her eyes came open, silently protesting the pain that had started. Her shoulder twitched once and the blood started again. I tried to be gentle. I got my arms under her and carried her to the couch. The wound was a deeper blue and I prayed that there was no internal hemmorrhage.

  I sat beside her holding her hand. I cursed everything and everybody. I prayed a little and I swore again. I had thoughts that tried to drive me mad.

  It was a long while before I realized that she was looking at me. She struggled to find words, her mind clouding from the shock of the bullet. I let her talk and heard her say, "I'm not . . . one of them any more. I told . . . everything . . . I told . . ."

  Her eyes had a glazed look. "Please don't try to talk, kid, please."

  She never heard me. Her lips parted, moved. "I never . . . told them about you . . . Mike. I never saw . . . your badge. Tonight . . . those men . . ." It was too much for her. She closed her eyes and was still, only the cover I had thrown over her moved enough to tell that she was still alive.

  I never heard the doctor come in. He was a tall man with a face that had looked on much of the world. He stepped past me and leaned over her, his hand opening the bag he carried. I sat and waited, smoking one cigarette after another. The air reeked with a sharp chemical smell and the doctor was a tall shadow passing back and forth across my line of vision, doing things I wasn't aware of, desperate in his haste.

  His voice came at me several times before I answered him. He said, "She will need an ambulance."

  I came out of the chair and went to the phone. The operator said she would call and I hung up. I turned around. "How is she, doc?"

  "We won't know for a while yet. There's a slight chance that she'll pull through." His whole body expressed what he felt. Disgust. Anger. His voice had a demanding, exasperated tone. "What happened?"

  Perhaps it was the sharpn
ess of his question that startled me into a logical line of reasoning. There was a sudden clarity about the whole thing I hadn't noticed before I heard Ethel telling me that she had pulled out of the party and it left me with an answer that said this time it wasn't me they were after . . . it was her . . . and Pork Pie had been a good shot. He would have been a dead shot, only Ethel had twisted when I laid the strap across her and the bullet that was intended for her heart had missed by a fraction and might give her life back to her.

  The soft kill-music that I always hear at the wrong times took up a beat and was joined by a multitude of ghostly instruments that plucked at my mind to drive away any reason that I had left.

  I walked to the doctor and stared at his eyes so he could see that I had looked on the world too, and could see the despair, the lust, the same dirty thoughts that he had seen in so many others and said, "Do you know who I am, doctor?"

  He looked long this time, searching me. "Your face is familiar."

  "It should be, doctor. You've seen it in the papers. You've read about it many times. It's been described a hundred different ways and there's always that reference to a certain kill-look that I have. My name is Mike Hammer. I'm a private detective. I've killed a lot of people."

  He knew me then; his eyes asked if I were trying to buy his silence with the price of death. "Did you do that to her too?"

  "No, doctor. Somebody else did that, and for it that somebody is going to die a thousand times. It wasn't just one person who wanted that girl dead. One person ordered it, but many demanded it. I'm not going to tell you the story of what lies behind this, but I will tell you one thing. It's so damned important that it touches your life and mine and the lives of everyone in this country and unless you want to see the same thing happen again and again you'll have to hold up your report.

  "You know who I am and I can show you my papers so there will never be any trouble in finding me if you think it should be done. But listen . . . if ever you believed anything, believe this . . . if I get connected with this I'll be tied up in that crazy web of police detail and a lot of other people will die. Do you understand me?"

  "No." Just like that, no. I tried to keep from grabbing his neck in my hands and forcing my words down his throat. My face went wild and I couldn't control it. The doctor didn't scare, he just stood there and watched me make myself keep from killing him too.

  "Perhaps I do after all." His face became sober and stern. I swallowed hard with the relief I felt. "I don't understand it at all," he said. "I'll never understand these things. I do know this though, a powerful influence motivates murder. It is never simple enough to understand. I can't understand war, either. I'll do what I can, Mr. Hammer. I do have a good understanding of people and I think that you are telling me a truth that could have some very unpleasant aspects, whatever they are."

  I squeezed his hand hard and got out of there. So much to be done, I thought, so much that's still left to do. My watch said it was after ten and Velda would be waiting. Tonight we had a mission planned and after that another and another until we found the ending.

  I touched the starter and the engine caught with a roar. The night had sped by and there never was enough time to do what I wanted. First Pork-Pie Hat, then those men, then Ethel. I stopped and retraced my thoughts. Ethel and those men. She was going to tell me about them; she almost did. I reached in my pocket and took out the wallet.

  The card was behind some others in one of the pockets. It was an official card with all the works. The words I saw stood out as though they were written in flame. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. Good Lord, Ethel had fingered me to the FBI! She had turned on the party and even on me! Now it was clear . . . Those two Feds had tailed me hoping to be led to my apartment and perhaps a secret cache of papers that could lead to those missing documents! They tailed me but they in turn were being tailed by somebody else who knew what had happened. Pork-Pie Hat ran them off the road and came after us with the intention of killing Ethel before she could spill anything else she knew!

  I let the music in my head play. I laughed at it and it played harder than ever, but this time I didn't fight it. I sat back and laughed, enjoying the symphony of madness and cheered when it was done. So I was mad. I was a killer and I was looking forward to killing again. I wanted them all, every one of them from bottom to top and especially the one at the top even if I had to go to the Kremlin to do it. The time for that wouldn't be now . . . I'd only get a little way up the ladder if one of the rungs didn't break first and throw me to my death.

  But some day, maybe, some day I'd stand on the steps of the Kremlin with a gun in my fist and I'd yell for them to come out and if they wouldn't I'd go in and get them and when I had them lined up against the wall I'd start shooting until all I had left was a row of corpses that bled on the cold floors and in whose thick red blood would be the promise of a peace that would stick for more generations than I'd live to see.

  The music gave up in a thunder of drums and I racked my wheels against the curb outside Velda's apartment house. I looked up at her floor when I got out and saw the lights on and I knew she was ready and waiting.

  I went on in.

  She said hello and knew that something was wrong with me. "What happened, Mike?"

  I couldn't tell her the whole thing. I said simply, "They tried again."

  Her eyes narrowed down and glinted at me. They asked the question.

  I said, "They got away again, too."

  "It's getting deeper, isn't it?"

  "It'll go deeper before we're through. Get your coat on."

  Velda went inside and reappeared with her coat on and her handbag slung over her shoulder. It swung slowly under the weight of the gun. "Let's go, Mike."

  We went downstairs to the car and started driving. Broadway was a madhouse of traffic that weaved and screamed, stopped for red lights and jumped away at the green. I let the flow take me past the artificial daylight of the marquees and the signs and into the dusk of uptown. When we came to the street Velda pointed and I turned up it, parking in the middle of the block under a street light.

  Here was the edge of Harlem, that strange no-man's-land where the white mixed with the black and the languages overflowed into each other like that of the horde around the Tower of Babel. There were strange, foreign smells of cooking and too many people in too few rooms. There were the hostile eyes of children who became suddenly silent as you passed.

  Velda stopped before an old sandstone building. "This is it."

  I took her arm and went up the stairs. In the vestibule I truck a match and held it before the name plates on the mailboxes. Most were scrawled in childish writing on the backs of match books. One was an aluminum stamp and it read C.C. LOPEX, SUPT.

  I pushed the button. There was no answering buzz of the door. Instead, a face showed through the dirty glass and the door was pulled open by a guy who only came up to my chest. He smoked a smelly cigar and reeked of cheap whisky. He was a hunchback. He said, "Whatta ya want?"

  He saw the ten bucks I had folded in my fingers and got a greedy look on his face. "There ain't but one empty room and ya won't like that. Ya can use my place. For a tenner ya can stay all night."

  Velda raised her eyebrows at that. I shook my head. "We'll take the empty."

  "Sure, go ahead. Ya coulda done whatcha wanted in my place but if ya want the empty go ahead. Ya won't like it, though."

  I gave him the ten and he gave me the key, telling me where the room was. He leered and looked somewhat dissatisfied because he wouldn't be able to sneak a look on something he probably never had himself. Velda started up the stairs using her flashlight to pick out the snags in the steps.

  The room faced on a dark corridor that was hung heavy with the smell of age and decay. I put the key in the lock and shoved the door open. Velda found the lone bulb that dangled from the ceiling and pulled the cord to throw a dull yellow light in the room. I closed the door and locked it.

  Nobody had to tell us what had happe
ned. Somebody had been here before us. The police had impounded Charlie Moffit's personal belongings, but they hadn't ripped the room up doing it. The skinny mattress lay in the center of the floor ripped to shreds. The hollow posts of the bed had been disemboweled and lay on the springs. What had been a rug at one time lay in a heap in the corner under the pile of empty dresser drawers.

  "We're too late again, Mike."

  "No we're not." I was grinning and Velda grinned too. "The search didn't stop anywhere. If they found it we could have seen where they stopped looking. They tore the place apart and never came to the end. It never was here."

  I kicked at the papers on the floor, old sheets from weeks back. There was a note pad with pencil sketches of girls doing things they shouldn't. We roamed around the room poking into the remains doing nothing but looking out of curiosity. Velda found a box of junk that had been spilled under the dresser, penny curios from some arcade.

  There was no place else to look that hadn't already been searched. I took the dresser drawers off the rug and laid them out. They were lined with newspapers and had a few odds and ends rolling on the bottoms. There was part of a fountain pen and a broken harmonica. Velda found a few pictures of girls in next to nothing that had been cut from a magazine.

  Then I found the photographs. They were between the paper lining and the side of the drawer. One was of two people, too fuzzy to identify. The other was that of a girl and had "To Charlie, with love from P." written on the bottom. I held it in my hand and looked at the face of Paula Riis. She was smiling. She was happy. She was the girl that had jumped off the bridge and was dead. I stared at her face that smiled back at me as if there never had been anything to worry about.

  Velda peered over my shoulder, took the picture from me and held it under the light. "Who is she, Mike?"

  "Paula Riis," I said finally. "The nurse. Charlie Moffit's girl friend. Oscar Deamer's nurse and the girl who chose to die rather than look at my face. The girl who started it all and left it hanging in mid-air while people died and killed."