Killing Town Read online

  “Oh? Well how about you, Senator? What was really going on between you and Jean Warburton? And how did your son fit in? Don’t you normally pay your chippies off when you’re done with them? Send them packing? Or is it typical of you to pass one on to sonny for sloppy seconds?”

  “Shut up!” He pounded a fist on the desk. The tumbler jumped and some precious bourbon spilled. “Shut up…”

  “What did the Warburton girl want from you, Senator? It must not have been money. Why did she go along with a hand-off to Lawrence?”

  He was trembling. The great, powerful man was trembling. He gulped bourbon greedily, then poured and had some more.

  “Senator?”

  He sighed. His eyes looked past me at nothing. Or maybe everything.

  “Mike,” the Senator said, the familiarity back, rather desperately, “she wanted the one thing I wouldn’t… couldn’t… give her. Marriage.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  He shook his head. “No, she had something else to hold over me.”

  “What the hell could that be? Photographs, maybe?”

  He covered his face and began to cry. Quietly at first, then racking sobs kicked in. I watched him, appalled and fascinated. This seemed way too human for a captain of industry.

  “She knew,” he said, “she knew… knew I… that I loved her.”

  And it came to me.

  “She was going to meet you that night,” I said. That was who her elaborate reverse striptease in the window had been about. “Tell me, Senator—was Lawrence in love with her, too? Was she about to throw your son over to go back to his daddy?”

  He sighed, nodded, the ugly yet folksy face a streaky wet mask of tears.

  “All three of you were in New York at that convention,” I said. “She must have been shuttling between your hotel rooms, keeping both father and son happy! And Lawrence got wind of it. So he did rape and kill her! He followed her from the train when he saw she was all dolled up to go back to her sugar daddy. Little Larry was furious with both of you and so he dragged that girl into the bushes and he raped her and then he strangled her!”

  “Stop!” he said. “Don’t. You don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, right, you loved her.”

  “You… you would have loved her, too, Mike.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She was special… so very special.” He gazed at the bourbon bottle. “… The best goddamn piece of tail I ever had.”

  I just looked at him. Nobody that big had ever looked so small to me.

  Then I said, “Well, why didn’t you marry her then? You’re a widower, free and clear. Marry her and bang her till you’re blue in the face.”

  “Hammer—you… don’t… under… stand. My wife, my late wife, was a Killington.”

  “What?”

  He sat forward in the padded swivel chair, a professor schooling a very slow student. “The Charles & Company Cannery was originally the Killington Cannery.”

  “After the town?”

  “No, you fool! After the family the town was named for! My wife’s father was the great-grandson of the Killington who started it all. That generation, there was no male Killington to carry on the family line.”

  “Okay. So your late wife was a Killington. So what?”

  He was waving his hands, an out-of-control politician. “So I can never remarry! Are you mad? It would tarnish the family’s reputation, disgrace the good name of our business! Bad enough that after Alice and I married, she agreed to put the company in our name. Now, so many years later, I would become the object of derision, the aging degenerate who married his young secretary. As if I would ever consider marrying a woman who came from the stock she did!”

  I’d had enough of this creature.

  I stood.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll keep what I know to myself—for a price.”

  He was so drunk he could barely smile, but he managed. Contempt oozed from him like pus from a boil. “I should have expected that.”

  “Not the price you think.” I leaned two hands on the desk. “Institutionalize Lawrence. Protect him from himself, and protect the world from him. Your daughter needs help, too, and I’ll talk to her about it. There are plenty of good shrinks in Manhattan. But I want proof that you’ve put that chip-off-the-old-block away. For good. You’re a powerful man. You can pull that off. I got faith in you, Ernest.”

  He was shaking. “Lawrence… Lawrence is next in line.”

  “If you really care about the future of your company and the family reputation and that crap, then stay healthy. Take vitamins or something, maybe lay off the cigars and Old Grand-Dad. You have grandsons upstairs, right? Just keep yourself breathing till one is of age. Maybe the kid won’t grow up a monster—who knows? We got a deal?”

  He looked at me, possibly wondering if he could arrange better assassins to try to kill me than the New York mobsters had, but finally nodded.

  I went out.

  In the entryway, as I collected my raincoat from a rack, I felt something prod my back gently.

  “That’s a gun, Mr. Hammer,” Eva Charles informed me. “A little automatic I carry in my purse. But quite large enough to sever your spine.”

  She knew to reach around and get the .45 out from under my arm. Of course, she didn’t have sense to switch her pea shooter with my cannon. I wished I’d had the sense to replace the hideaway .38.

  “Outside,” she said. Quiet but insistent. “We’ll take the car you borrowed from my sister-in-law.”

  * * *

  The fish-glue factory—Charles & Company Glue Works—was a modern-looking two-and-a-half-story building that might have been a grade school. Its brick was pale yellow and shiny, reflecting moonlight that peeked between the streaky dark clouds, rays that also danced on the bay the factory edged. The building had some size, but seemed insignificant next to the sprawling, ancient, prison-like cannery that also fronted the bay. The Charles & Company Cannery was twice as tall, three times as wide and four times the length of its offspring, its towering smokestacks like guard towers.

  We pulled into a lot where only one other car was parked, her husband’s sleek black Alfa Romeo. I had driven here with Eva keeping the tiny rod trained on me from the rider’s seat. I had considered running the Packard into a telephone pole or maybe just snatching the midget automatic from the pudgy little broad’s fat fingers, but for the former I couldn’t work up the speed in town, and as for the latter, I could take that away from her any time, with some, but not great, risk.

  Better to let this play out.

  She had said nothing on the way, except “Turn here,” and various other driving instructions. I had not been surprised that the factory was where we ended up. I got out of the Packard, and she and her gun directed me toward a side entrance.

  As we went, the breeze whipped her dark slacks like flags and got under her loose white top and ballooned it, making a parody of her already considerable shape. The scene was eerie, with the water irregularly reflecting moonlight darting through the clouds, the threat of rain hovering like dark ghosts, the half heels of her sandals clicking on the slanted pavement of the parking lot.

  She used a key with her left hand, unlocking the side door, and I skipped another chance to grab that little gun away. Maybe curiosity was going to kill a cat named Hammer.

  We were inside one big high-ceilinged room that appeared to be the entire plant, which on Sunday was empty of workers. Eight open stainless steel vats, each nine or ten feet high, five or six feet wide, ran along the many-windowed wall on the bay side of the building. A wide area for worker access was between these vats with another eight, identical in height and width, on the opposite side, where a three-tiered catwalk overlooked the tanks, which were filled with a jelly-like liquid. Hanging from the ceiling, high above each vat, was a metal mixing device like a giant corkscrew drill.

  Eva walked me up to the top catwalk tier, passing stacked boxes labeled alum, egg albumen, sulfurous aci
d, phosphoric acid and zinc, among other ingredients to season this sticky soup. There were stations over each vat with control panel sets of switches. At the end of the top catwalk, extending out a ways over the lower two levels, was a box-like enclosure constructed of the same black metal-work. She prodded me at the base of my spine with the gun and I made my way down to the door that said, LAWRENCE T. CHARLES, PRESIDENT.

  She reached around me and knocked—again, an opportunity for me to wrest that rod away from her and I didn’t.

  The president himself answered.

  Lawrence Charles had a stricken look, the vacation tan overtaken by flushed cheeks. The thing that gave me the creeps about this clown was how much he looked like Melba, the same long lashes and pretty gray eyes. His black hair was still slicked back, thirties gangster-style, but a few strands had come loose, like a spring that had slightly sprung.

  She peeked around me and he frowned at her, somewhat petulantly.

  He said, “I still don’t see why you insisted on bringing him here.”

  She let out a disgusted little huff. “Where would you suggest?” she asked indignantly. “You were already here, working.”

  Then she handed him my .45 and he took it and trained it on me with a thin, nasty smile, and I realized I may have misjudged the situation.

  “Inside,” he told me, backing up as he did, waving me in like a plane on a flattop deck.

  Nothing fancy about the office. A row of file cabinets at right, a central modern-looking metal desk with piles of paperwork, a big window out on the plant floor, with blinds that could shut, as they were now.

  But under that window was a very comfortable-looking couch, black leather, lots of padding, including the arm rests. I had a good idea that it was used for more than an occasional nap by the top glue company executive, and the faint smell of perfume suggested he may have spent his Sunday afternoon working on more than the papers on the desk.

  Eva directed me to the visitor’s chair. Lawrence got behind his desk, keeping the gun steady in my direction, and sat in his swivel chair, as if I was about to be interviewed.

  She stuck the little gun in the back of my neck as she stood behind me, looking across at her husband. “He knows everything. We have to do something.”

  Lawrence frowned, devastated. “He knows?”

  “Well… maybe not everything. But enough.”

  Only suddenly I did know everything.

  I risked turning my head to look at her, just a little.

  “You strangled that girl.”

  She bonked me on the top of the head with the tiny rod. “Shut up. You don’t know that.”

  “I’d ruled out a woman doing it, because the hands were too big. I saw the marks on the girl’s neck at the morgue. But you’ve got big hands, lady. You’ve got big everything.”

  “Shut up!” she screamed in my ear.

  I ignored her and spoke to her husband. “Does your father know, Lawrence? That you loved her, too? She wanted to marry him, so he passed her to you, and then you fell for her like a ton of bricks. She must have been something in the sack. I watched her getting dressed for your old man.” I whistled. “Something to see, all right.”

  “Sure you did,” Lawrence said sullenly.

  “No, swear to God. I crawled out from under a freight and I’m in Killington maybe ten seconds before I get a real old-fashioned eyeful. One of those reverse stripteases, like Lili St. Cyr, starting with the sheer stockings.”

  Eva conked me again.

  “No,” Lawrence said to her, holding up a hand. “Let’s hear what he has to say. Let’s see what he thinks he knows.”

  I accommodated him. “You were on the train, Lawrence—not sharing a compartment with the girl. You already had a feeling she’d been running a relay back at the convention hotel, between you and Daddy Fishbucks. Now you see her stepping off the train, dressed to kill. One look and you knew who she was going to meet. You followed her, you confronted her, and dragged her off into those bushes. You had your way with her, and your way is rough to begin with, and she was furious. She must have told you she’d go to Daddy and tell him what you’d done.”

  I turned just a little and smiled at Eva. She was the one with the stricken look now, the heavy make-up turning the beautiful features clownish.

  “This is where you come in, sweetie. You came down to meet your loving hubby, a nice little surprise. I have a feeling you work pretty hard to try to show him he can have a good time at home and doesn’t have to go after these cheap little tramps. You must have learned to like it rough a long time ago. But it’s hard to compete with a beauty like Jean Warburton, who didn’t deliver two boys to your man like you did. So you followed him, didn’t you? And you saw what he did. Did it horrify you? Or did the punishment he dished out please you? Maybe excite you? Doesn’t matter. What does matter is you heard Jean Warburton threaten your husband. Threaten to go to Daddy. Threaten to go to the cops, maybe. Rape charges are no picnic—take my word for it. Or maybe she would go to the papers—expose the whole sordid mess. The father and son whose idea of a promotion for a hardworking gal in the plant is a comfy couch in their private office. The son whose idea of lovemaking is forcing a female, hurting her, hitting her, raping her. The wife who has a weight problem and pretends not to notice when her husband steps out, and looks for other ways to be important to him. Like this one.”

  She had tears in her eyes, but I’m surprised they didn’t freeze, as cold as her expression was.

  “You strangled her, all right, Eva. But don’t pretend it was for your husband. It was very much for you. Just for you. And about time one of Larry’s chippies made you feel good.”

  She started to strangle me now, but with the little gun in her hand, it didn’t go anywhere, and Lawrence said, “Stop,” and she did as she was told.

  He could have stopped her that night, too, but he didn’t. These two were a match made in hell.

  Lawrence stood. “I’ll get the boat.”

  She nodded. “We’ll have to weigh him down. Bodies swell up and float. If they find him in the bay, this whole thing will start up again.”

  “We’ll weigh him down, don’t worry.”

  “Maybe we could just shoot him and dump him on a side road, and the police will write it off as part of these out-of-town gangsters killing each other.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “No, darling. Boat’s better.”

  I said, “You know, it really isn’t polite, talking about me like this. I mean, I’m sitting right here.”

  She cuffed my ear with the little gun.

  “Hey!” I said, and gave her a dirty look.

  Lawrence came around and jerked me to my feet. He had surprising power, but then he did have those broad shoulders on that skinny frame.

  They took me out of the office and Eva led the way while Lawrence walked behind me with the .45 leveled at my back. Our feet clanged on the black metal floor of the narrow walkway. We were about halfway down the catwalk when I dropped to my knees, swung around and grabbed Lawrence by the knees and pitched him over the side.

  He splashed into the jelly in the cooling vat and was floundering down there as Eva screamed, but instead of taking a shot at me, she leaned over the rail to see how much trouble her precious man was in. I jumped her and was trying to wrest the gun away, but she had weight and surprising strength going for her, and we did an awkward dance while Lawrence provided the music, splashing and screaming, in a gurgling kind of way.

  Maybe the switch got thrown accidentally, when Eva and I bumped into it together, or maybe I threw it myself, to distract her, because that’s what the near deafening whirring did as the giant drill bit came twisting down, and her eyes were big and watching the monstrous corkscrew when I shoved her over and sent her to join her husband.

  She displaced some of the jelly but replaced it as well, and as I leaned on the rail, I noted the consistency of that yellow-green glop was really too thick to swim in. And yet they tried. They tried.
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  And all the while their eyes were on the giant descending mixing blade.

  Finally it plunged in, a mammoth metallic phallus, and it took them down, whirling and twirling them as they shrieked in terror.

  But the shrill screams of their discordant duet soon ceased, only a nightmare accompaniment remaining—electrical whirring, mechanical grinding, bones crunching, flesh ripping, the mucilage mixture bubbling and gurgling like a witch’s cauldron, stripes of red circling, the gooey thick surface roiling with strange shapes beneath.

  “Huh,” I said.

  The little woman got what she wanted, after all.

  A husband who would stick by her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  MICKEY SPILLANE and MAX ALLAN COLLINS collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the Mike Danger comic book series.

  SPILLANE was the bestselling American mystery writer of the 20th century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, and several television series, starring Darren McGavin in the 1950s and Stacy Keach in the ’80s and ’90s. Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), in which the writer played his own famous hero.

  COLLINS has earned an unprecedented twenty-three Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for the novels True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1991) in his Nathan Heller series, and for “So Long, Chief,” a Mike Hammer short story begun by Spillane and completed by Collins. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks/Sam Mendes film. As a filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his innovative Quarry novels, also the basis of Quarry, a Cinemax TV series. As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (recently Antiques Wanted).