The Big Kill mh-5 Page 18

  Her hands were flat on the table, pushing her up from her chair. "Good heavens, Mike, no!" She trembled all over.

  "They won't do it again, kid."

  "But... why, Mike?"

  "I don't know. Honest to God, I don't know."

  She sat down limply and pushed her hair back from her face. "All this all this started... from that night..."

  "That's right. From a loused-up robbery. You got beat to hell, I got beat to hell. A kid's an orphan. A big-shot racketeer and two of his boys are dead. Arnold Basil's dead. Toady Link is dead and so are a pair of phony private investigators who tried to shoot it out with the cops. Mel Hooker's dead. Goddamn, there won't be anybody alive before you know it!"

  "Supposing they come back?"

  "They won't. I'm not going to give them the chance. If anybody goes after anybody else I'll do the going." I snubbed the butt out in my saucer. "Mind if I use your phone?"

  She told me to go ahead and came inside with me. I checked the directory again and dialed Marvin Holmes' number. It buzzed at steady intervals and just as somebody picked it up there was a knock at the door and Marsha grabbed my arm. It rattled me for a second too. Then I picked the .45 out of the holster, thumbed the safety off and handed it to her while I answered the hellos that were making a racket in my ear.

  She opened the door with the gun pointed straight ahead, stared a moment then began to shake in a soft hysterical laugh. I said, "Is Mr. Holmes there?"

  It was the butler with the accent. "If this is the police again may I say that he has not come in during the last five minutes. You are being very annoying. He is not expected back, but if he comes I will give him your message."

  I slammed the phone back the same time he did and walked over to Marsha who was still laughing crazily. The kid with his arm in a sling was trying to comfort her and shake the gun loose at the same time. I picked it out of her fingers, put it back where it belonged and shook her until she snapped out of it.

  The laughing left her and she leaned against my shoulder. "I... I'm sorry, Mike. I thought..."

  The kid said, "Gee, Marsha..."

  "Come on in, Jerry." He stepped inside and shut the door. "This is Mr. Hammer... Jerry O'Neill."

  Jerry said "Hi," but didn't make any effort to shake hands. Jerry didn't like me very much. It was easy to see why.

  Marsha gave my hand a little squeeze. "Mike, I need a drink. Do you mind?"

  "Not a bit, kitten. How about you, Jerry?"

  "No. No, thanks. I gotta go right away. I..." he looked at Marsha hoping for some sign of jealousy, "... gotta date tonight."

  She disappointed him. The stars in his eyes blinked out when she said, "Why, that's fine, Jerry. Is there something you wanted to see me about?"

  "Well," he hesitated and shot me a look that was pure disgust, "we were all kind of worried when you didn't show up today. We called and all that and I kinda thought, well, they didn't want me to, but I came up anyway. To make sure. Nobody was home then."

  "Oh, Jerry, I'm sorry. I was with Mr. Hammer all day."

  "I see."

  "You tell them they can stop worrying."

  "I'll do that." He reached for the knob. "By, Marsha."

  "Good-by, Jerry."

  He didn't say anything to me. I handed Marsha the drink. "You shouldn't have done that. He's crazy mad in love with you."

  She sipped and stared at the amber liquid thoughtfully. "That's why I have to do it, Mike. He's got to learn sometime."

  I raised my glass and toasted her. "Well, I don't blame the kid much at that."

  "I wish you felt the same way," she said.

  It was a statement that needed an answer, but she didn't let me give it. She smiled, her face reflecting the fatigue of her body, finished her drink in a long draught and walked away to the bedroom. I sat down on the arm of the chair swirling the ice around in the glass. I was thinking of the kid with the busted wing, knowing how he must have felt. Some guys got everything, I thought. Others have nothing at all. I was one of the lucky ones.

  Then I knew how lucky I was because she was standing in the doorway bathed in the last of the light as the sun went down into the river outside. The soft pink tones of her body softened the metallic glitter of the nylon gown that outlined her in bronze, flowing smoothly up the roundness of her thighs, melting into the curve of her stomach, then rising higher into rich contours to meet the dagger point of the neckline that dropped into the softly shaded well between her breasts.

  She said simply, "Good night, Mike," and smiled at me because she knew she was being kissed right then better than she had ever been kissed before. The sun said good night too and drowned in the river, leaving just indistinct shadows in the room and the sound of a door closing.

  I waited to hear a lock click into place.

  There wasn't any.

  Chapter Eleven

  I thought it would be easy to sit there with a drink in my hand and think, staring into the darkness that was a barrier against any intrusion. It wasn't easy at all. It was comfortable and restful, but it wasn't easy. I tried to tell myself that it was dark like this when Decker had come through the window and gone to the wall directly opposite me and opened the safe. I tried like hell to picture the way it started and see it through to the way it ended, but my mind wouldn't accept the continuity and kept throwing it back in jumbled heaps that made no sense. The ice in my glass clinked against the bottom four times and that didn't help either.

  Someplace, and I knew it was there, was an error in the thought picture. It was a key that could unlock the whole thing and I couldn't pick it out. It was the probing finger in my brain and the voice that nagged at me constantly. It made me light one butt after another and throw them away after one drag. It got to me until I couldn't think or sit still. It made my hands want to grab something and break it into a million fragments and I would have let myself go ahead and do it if it weren't for Marsha asleep in the room, her breathing a gentle monotone coming through the door.

  I wasn't the kind of guy who could sit still and wait for something to happen. I had enough of the darkness and myself. Maybe later I'd want it that way, but not now.

  I snapped the latch on the lock that kept it open and closed the door after me as quietly as I could. Rather than go through another routine with the elevator operator I took the stairs down and got out to the street to my car without scaring anybody. I rolled down the window and let the breeze blow in my face, feeling better for it. I sat there watching the people and the cars go by, then remembered that Pat had told me Ellen had wanted me to call her.

  Hell, I could do better than that. I shoved the key in the lock and hit the starter.

  My finger found the bell sunk in the framework of the door and pushed. Inside a chair scraped faintly and heels clicked on the woodwork. A chain rattled on metal and the door opened.

  "Hello, Texas."

  She was all bundled up in that white terrycloth robe again and she couldn't have been lovelier. Her mouth was a ripe red apple waiting to be bitten, a luscious curve of surprise over the edges of her teeth. "I... didn't expect you, Mike."

  "Aren't you glad to see me?"

  It was supposed to be a joke. It went flat on its face because those eyes that seemed to run through the full colors of the spectrum at times suddenly got cloudy with tears and she shook her head.

  "Please come in."

  I didn't get it at all. She walked ahead of me into the living room and nodded to a chair. I sat down. She sat down in another chair, but not close. She wouldn't look directly at me either.

  I said, "What's the matter, Ellen?"

  "Let's not talk about it, Mike."

  "Wait a minute... you did tell Pat that you wanted me to call, didn't you?"

  "Yes, but I meant... oh, never mind. Please, don't say anything more about it." Her mouth worked and she turned her head away.

  That made me feel great. Like I kicked her cat or something.

  "Okay, let's hear about it,"
I said.

  She twisted out of the chair and walked over to the radio. It was already pulled out so she didn't have to fool with it. Then she handed me another one of those Manila folders.

  This one had seen a lot of years. It was dirty and crisp with years. The string that held it together had rotted off leaving two stringy ends dangling from a staple. Ellen went back to her chair and sat down again. "It's the file on Toady Link. I found it buried under tons of other stuff in the archives."

  I looked at her blankly. "Does the D.A. know you have this?"

  "No."

  "Ellen..."

  "See if it's what you want, Mike." Her voice held no emotion at all.

  I turned up the flap only to have it come off in my hand, then reached in for the sheets of paper that were clipped together. I leaned back and took my time with these. There wasn't any hurry now. Toady was dead and his file was dead with him, but I could look in and see what his life had been like.

  It was quite a life.

  Toady Link had been a photographer. Apparently he had been a good one because most of the professional actresses had come to him to have their publicity pictures made. Roberts hadn't missed a trick. His reports were full of marginal notes speculating on each and every possibility and it was there that the real story came out.

  Because of Toady's professional contacts he had been contacted by Charlie Fallon. The guy was a bug on good-looking female celebrities and had paid well for pictures of them and paid better when an introduction accompanied the photographs.

  But it wasn't until right after Fallon died that Toady became news in police circles. After that time there was no mention made of photography at all. Toady went right from his studio into big-time bookmaking and though he had little personal contact with Ed Teen it was known that, like the others, he paid homage and taxes to the king and whenever he took a step it was always up.

  There was a lot of detail stuff there that I didn't pay any attention to, stuff that would have wrapped Toady up at any time if it had been put to use. Roberts would have used it, that much was evident by the work put in on collecting the data for the dossier. But like Ellen had said, a new broom had come in and swept everything out including months and miles of legwork.

  Ellen had to speak twice before I heard her. "Does it... solve anything?"

  I threw them on the coffee table in disgust. "Fallon. It solves him. He's still dead and so is Toady. Goddamn it anyway."

  "I'm sorry. I thought it would help."

  "You tried, kid. That was enough. You can throw these things away now. What the D.A. never saw he won't miss." I picked up my cigarettes from the table and stuffed them in my pocket. She still watched me blankly. "I'd better be going," I told her.

  She didn't make any motion to see me out. I started to pass her and stopped. "Texas... what the hell goes on? Tell me that at least, will you? It wasn't so long ago that you were doing all the passing and I thought you were a woman who knew what was going on. All right, I asked you to do me a favor and I put you in a spot. It wasn't so bad that I couldn't get you off it."

  "That's not it, Mike." She still wouldn't look at me.

  "So you're a Texas gal who likes guys that look like Texas men. Maybe I should learn to ride a horse."

  She finally looked up at me from the depths of the couch. Her eyes were blue again and not clouded. They were blue and hurt and angry all at once. "You're a Texas man, Mike. You're the kind I dreamed of and the kind I want and the kind I'll never have, because your kind are never around long enough. They have to go out and play with guns and hurt people and get themselves killed.

  "I was wrong in wanting what I did. I read too many stories and listened to too many old men telling big tales. I dreamed too hard, I guess. It isn't so nice to wake up suddenly and know somebody you're all gone over is coming closer to dying every day because he likes it that way.

  "No, Mike. You're exactly what I want. You're big and strong and exciting. While you're alive you're fun to be with but you won't be any fun dead. You're trouble and you'll always be that way until somebody comes along who can make bigger trouble than you.

  "I'm afraid of a Texas man now. I'm going to forget all about you and stop looking for a dream. I'll wait until somebody nice and safe comes along, somebody peaceful and quiet and shy, and I'll get all those foolish romanticisms out of my head and live a bored and relatively normal life."

  I planted my feet apart and looked down at her with a laugh that came up from my chest. "And you'll always wonder what a Texas man would have been like," I said.

  The change stole over her face slowly, wiping out the bitterness. Her eyes half closed and the blue of her irises was gray again. The smile and the frown blended together like a pleasant hurt. She leaned back with a fluid animal motion, her head resting languidly against the couch. The pink tip of her tongue touched her lips that were parted in a ghost of a smile making them glisten in the light of the single lamp. Then she stretched back slowly and reached out her arms to me, and in reaching the entire front of the robe came open and she made no move to close it.

  "No," she said, "I'll find out about that first."

  We said good-by in the dim light of morning. She said goodby, Texas man, and I said so-long, Texas gal, and I left without looking back because everything she had said was right and I didn't want to hear it again by looking back at her eyes. I got in the car, drove over to Central Park West and cruised along until I found a parking place. It was right near an entrance so I left it there and walked off the pavements to the grass and sat on a hill where I could see the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings in the background.

  The ground still held the night dampness, letting it go slowly in a thin film of haze that was suspended in mid-air, rising higher as the sun warmed it. The whole park had a chilled eerie appearance of something make-believe. An early stroller went by on the walk, only the top half of him visible, the leash in his hand disappearing into the fog yet making all the frantic motions of having some unseen creature on its end.

  When the wind blew it raised the gray curtain and separated it into angry segments that towered momentarily before filtering back into the gaps. There were other people too, half-shapes wandering through a dream world, players who didn't know they had an audience. Players buried in their own thoughts and acts on the other side of a transparent wall that shut off all sound.

  I sat there scowling at it until I remembered that it was just like my dream even to the colors and the synthetic silence. It made me so uncomfortable that I turned around expecting to see the woman in black who had no face.

  She was there.

  She wasn't in black and she had a face, but she stopped when she saw me and turned away hurriedly just like the other one did. This one seemed a little annoyed because I blocked her favorite path.

  And I knew who the woman was in the compound with me that night. She had a name and a face I hadn't seen yet. She was there in the compound trying to tell me something I should have thought of myself.

  I waited until the sun had burned off the mist and made it a real world again. I went back to the daylight and searched through it looking for a little guy with big ears and a brace of dyed blondes on his arms. The sun made an arc through the sky and was on its way down without me finding him.

  At three-thirty I made a call. It went through three private secretaries and a guy who rumbled when he talked. He was the last man in front of Harry Bailen, the columnist, and about as high as I was going to get.

  I said, "This is a friend of Cookie Harkin's. I got something for him that won't keep and I can't find the guy. I want his address if you have it."

  He had it, but he wasn't giving it out. "I'm sorry, but that's private information around here."

  "So is what I got. Cookie can have it for your boss free or I can sell it to somebody else. Take your pick."

  "If you have anything newsworthy I'll be glad to pass it on to Mr. Bailen for you."

  "I bet you would, felle
r, only it happens that Cookie's a friend of mine and either he gets it or the boss'll get scooped and he isn't gonna like that a bit."

  The phone dimmed out a second as he covered up the mouthpiece. The rumble of his voice still came through as he talked to somebody there in the office and when he came back to me he was more sharp than before.

  "Cookie Harkin lives in the Mapuah Hotel. That's M-A-P-UA-H. Know where it is?"

  "I'll find it," I told him. "And thanks."

  He thanked me by slamming the phone back.

  I looked up the Mapuah Hotel in the directory and found it listed in a crummy neighborhood off Eighth Avenue in the upper Sixties. It was as bad as I expected, but just about the kind of a place a guy like Cookie would go for. The only rule it had was to pay the rent on time. There was a lobby with a couple of old leather chairs and a set of wicker furniture that didn't match. The clerk was a baldheaded guy who was shy a lower plate and he was bent over, the desk reading a magazine.

  "Where'll I find Cookie Harkin?"

  "309." He didn't look up and made no attempt at announcing me.

  The only concession to modernization the place made was the automatic elevator. Probably they couldn't get anybody to run a manual job anyway. I closed the door, pushed the third button in the row and stood there counting bricks until the car stopped.

  Cookie had a good spot. His room took up the southwest corner facing the rear court where there was a reasonable amount of quiet and enough of a breeze that wasn't contaminated by the dust and exhaust gases on the street side.

  I knocked twice, heard the bedsprings creak inside, then Cookie yelled, "Yeah?"

  "Mike, Cookie. Get out of the sack."

  "Okay, just a minute."

  The key rattled in the lock and Cookie stood there in the top half of his pajamas rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "This is a hell of an hour to get up," I said.

  "I was up late."

  I looked at the second pillow on his bed that still had the fresh imprint of a head, then at the closed door that led off the room.

  "Yeah, I'll bet. Can she hear anything in there?"