The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 18

  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 struck 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 happened. 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.”

  I took out a cigarette and gave her one. “I had it figured wrong. I gave Pat a bum steer, then when I thought it over I got to thinking that maybe I told the truth after all. I thought that Paula and Oscar planned his escape and Oscar killed a guy ... just any guy ... in order to squeeze Lee. Now it seems that it wasn’t just any guy that Oscar killed. It wasn’t an accident. Oscar killed him for a very good reason.”

  “Mike ... could it be a case of jealousy? Could Oscar have been jealous because Paula played up to Charlie?”

  I dragged the smoke down, held it and let it go into the light. “I wish it happened that simply. I wish it did, sugar. I started out with a couple of green cards and took it from there. I thought I had a coincidental connection but now it looks like it wasn’t so damn coincidental after all. We have too many dead people carrying those green cards.”

  “The answer, Mike ... what can it be?”

  I stared at the wall thoughtfully. “I’m wondering that too. I think it lies out West in an asylum for the insane. Tomorrow I want you to take the first plane out and start digging.”

  “For what?”

  “For anything you can find. Think up the questions and look for the answers. The part we’re looking for may be there and it may be here, but we haven’t the time to look together. You’ll have to go out alone while I plod along this end of the track.”

  “Mike ... you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

  “Very careful. Velda. I won’t ask questions if I think a gun will do the job quicker. This time I’m going to live up to my reputation. I’ve been thinking some things I don’t like and to satisfy myself I’m going to find out whether or not they’re true.”

  “Supposing they make another try for you?”

  “Oh, they will, they will. In fact, they have to. From now on I’ll be sleeping with my gun in my fist and my eyes open. They’ll make the play again because I know enough and think too much. I might run into a conclusion that will split things wide open. They’ll be looking for me and possibly you because they know there were two guns that killed those boys in Oscar’s room. They’ll know I wasn’t alone and they may think of you.

  “I’ll have to keep my apartment and the office covered while I’m away. They’ll get around it somehow, but I’ll try anyway.”

  Velda took my shoulder and made me look at her. “You aren’t sending me out West just so I won’t be there if there’s trouble, are you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that to you. I know how much it means to be in on a thing like this.”

  She knew I was telling the truth for a change and dropped her hand into mine. “I’ll do a good job, Mike. When I get back I won’t take any chance on their finding any information I have. I’ll tuck it in that trick wall lamp in the office so you ca
n get to it without waking me from the sleep I’ll probably need.”

  I pulled the cord and the light did a slow fade-out. Velda held her flash on the floor and stared down the corridor. A little brown face peeked out of a door and withdrew when she threw the spot on it. We held on to the banister and went down the steps that announced our descent with sharp squeals and groans.

  The hunchback opened his door at the foot of the landing and took the key back. “That was quick,” he said. “Pretty quick for your age. Thought ya’d take longer.”

  I wanted to rap him in the puss, only that would have shut him up when I had a question to ask him. “We woulda stayed only the room was a mess. Who was in there before us?”

  “Some guy died who lived there.”

  “Yeah, but who was in there next?”

  “Young kid. Said he wanted a bunk for a night. Guess he was hot or something. He gimme a ten too, plus a five for the room. Yeah, I remember him ‘counta he wore a nice topcoat and one of them flat pork-pie hats. Sure woulda like to get that topcoat.”

  I pushed Velda outside and down to the car. The M.V.D. had been there. No wonder the search was so complete. He looked and never looked hard enough. In his hurry to find some documents he overlooked the very thing that might have told him where they were.

  I drove Velda home and went up for coffee. We talked and we smoked. I laughed at the way she looked at the ring on her finger and told her the next thing she knew there’d be a diamond to match. Her eyes sparkled brighter than the stone.

  “When will it be, Mike?” Her voice was a velvet glove that caressed every inch of me.

  I squirmed a little bit and managed a sick grin. “Oh, soon. Let’s not go too fast, kid.”

  The devil came into her eyes and she pushed away from the table. I had another smoke and finished it. I started on another when she called me. When I went into the living room she was standing by the light in a gown that was nothing at all, nothing at all. I could see through it and saw things I thought existed only in a dream and the sweat popped out on my forehead and left me feeling shaky all over.

  Her body was a milky flow of curves under the translucent gown and when she moved the static current of flesh against sheer cloth made it cling to her in a way that made me hold my breath to fight against the temptation I could feel tugging at my body. The inky blackness of the hair falling around her shoulders made her look taller, and the gown shrouded what was yet to come and was there for me alone.

  “For our wedding night, Mike,” she said. “When will it be?”

  I said, “We’re ... only engaged to be engaged, you know.”

  I didn’t dare move when she came to me. She raised herself on her toes to kiss me with a tongue of fire, then walked back to the light and turned around. I could see through that damned gown as though it weren’t there at all.

  She knew I’d never be able to wait long after that.

  I stumbled out of the room and down to my car. I sat there awhile thinking of nothing but Velda and the brief glimpse of heaven she had showed me. I tried thinking about something else and it didn’t work.

  I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

  CHAPTER 9

  I slept with a dream that night. It was a dream of nice things and other things that weren’t so nice. There were a lot of people in the dream and not all of them were alive. There were faces from the past that mingled with those of the present, drawn silent faces turned toward me to see when I would become one of them, floating in that limbo of nonexistence.

  I saw the bridge again, and two people die while the stern face of the judge looked on disapproving, uttering solemn words of condemnation. I saw flashes of fire, and men fall. I saw Ethel hovering between the void that separates life from death, teetering into the black while I screamed for her not to and tried to run to catch her, only to have my feet turn into stumps that grew from the very soil.

  There were others too, bodies of dead men without faces, waiting for me to add that one missing part, to identify them with their brother dead in one sweeping blast of gunfire. I was there with them. They didn’t want me because I wasn’t dead, and the living didn’t want me either. They couldn’t figure out why I was still alive when I dwelt in the land of the dead men.

  Only Velda wanted me. I could see her hovering above the others, trailing the gown of transparent fabric, her finger beckoning me to come with her where nothing would matter but the two of us.

  The dead pushed me out and the living pushed me back. I tried to get up to Velda and I couldn’t reach her. I screamed once for them all to shut up before there was only the land of the dead and none of the living.

  Then I woke up. My head throbbed and the shout was still caught in my throat. My tongue felt thick and there was an ache across my shoulders. I staggered into the bathroom where I could duck myself under a cold shower whose stinging chill would wash away the dream.

  I glanced at the clock, seeing that the morning had come and gone, leaving me only the afternoon and night. I picked up the phone, asked for long distance, then had myself connected with the hospital outside the city. I hung on for ten minutes waiting for the doctor, told him who I was when he came on and asked him how she was.

  The doctor held his hand over the receiver and his voice was a slight mumble of sound. Then: “Yes, Mr. Hammer, I can talk now. The patient has passed the crisis and in my opinion she will live.”

  “Has she talked, doc?”

  “She was conscious a few minutes but she said nothing, nothing at all. There are quite a few people waiting to hear her words.” I sensed the change in his voice. “They are police, Mr. Hammer ... and Federal men.”

  “I figured they’d be there. Have you said anything?”

  “No. I rather believe that you told me the truth, especially since seeing those Federal men. I told them I received an anonymous call to go to the cabin and when I did I found her.”

  “Good. I can say thanks but it won’t mean much. Give me three days and you can say what you like if it hasn’t already been explained.”

  “I understand.”

  “Is Mr. Brighton there?”

  “He has been here since the girl was identified. He seems considerably upset. We had to give him a sedative.”

  “Just how upset is he?”

  “Enough to justify medical attention ... which he won’t have.”

  “I see. All right, doctor, I’ll call you again. Let me have those three days.”

  “Three days, Mr. Hammer. You may have less. Those Federal men are viewing me somewhat suspiciously.” We said our good-bys and hung up. Then I went out and ate breakfast.

  I got dressed and went straight to the office. Velda had left a note in her typewriter saying that she had taken the morning plane out and for me to be careful. I pulled the sheet out of the roller and tore it up. There was no mail to look at so I gave Pat a ring and caught him just as he was coming in from lunch.

  He said, “Hello, Mike. What’s new?”

  If I told him he would have cut my throat. “Nothing much. I wanted to speak to somebody so I called. What’re you doing?”

  “Right now I have to go downtown. I have to see the medical examiner and he’s out on a case. A suicide, I think. I’m going to meet him there and if you feel like coming along you’re welcome.”

  “Well, I don’t feel like it, but I will. Be down in a few minutes. We’ll use my car.”

  “Okay, but shake it up.”

  I dumped a pack of Luckies out of the carton in my desk and shoved it in my pocket, went downstairs and took off for Pat’s. He was waiting for me on the curb, talking earnestly to a couple of uniformed cops. He waved, made a final point to the cops and crossed the street.

  “Somebody steal your marbles, Mike? You don’t look happy.”

  “I’m not. I didn’t get but eleven hours’ sleep.”

  “Gosh, you poor guy. That must hurt. If you can keep awake, drive down to the foot of Third Avenue. How’re you making out with Le
e?”

  “I’ll have a definite report for him in a couple of days.”

  “Negative?”

  I shrugged.

  Pat looked at me querulously. “That’s a hell of a note. What else could it be?”

  “Positive.”

  Pat got mad. “Do you think Oscar left something behind him, Mike? By damn, if he did I want to know about it!”

  “Simmer down. I’m checking every angle I know of and when my report is made you’ll be able to depend on its answer. If Oscar left one thing that could frame Lee I’ll be sure nobody sees it who shouldn’t see it. That’s the angle I’m worried about. A smear on Lee now will be fatal... and Pat, there’s a lot of wrong guys out to smear him. If you only knew.”

  “I will know soon, sonny boy. I’ve already had a few initial reports myself and it seems that your name has cropped up pretty frequently.”

  “I get around,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He relaxed into a silence he didn’t break until I saw the morgue wagon and a prowl ahead of me. “Here’s the place. Stop behind the car.”

  We hopped out and one of the cops saluted Pat and told him the medical examiner was still upstairs. Pat lugged his brief case along and met him on the stairs. I stood in the background while they rambled along about something and Pat handed him a manila folder. The M.E. tucked it under his arm and said he’d take care of it.

  Pat waved his thumb toward the top of the stairs. “What is it this time?”

  “Another suicide. Lieutenant Barner is on the case. Some old duck took the gas pipe. They’re always doing it in this neighborhood. Go up and take a look.”

  “I see enough of that stuff. Let Barner handle it.”

  He would have followed the M.E. down the stairs if I hadn’t been curious enough to step up to the landing and peer in the door. Pat came up behind me and laughed. “Curious?”

  “Can’t help it.”

  “Sure. Then let’s go in and see somebody who died by their own hand instead of yours.”