The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Read online

  “Yeah, I’ll get out. When you tell me who’s banking the soaks along the docks I’ll get out.”

  “I ... I can’t. Oh, Lord, lemme alone, will ya!”

  “They’re tough, huh?” He read something in my words and his eyes came up in a series of little jerks until they were back on mine. “Are they tougher than the guys you pushed on me?”

  Mel swallowed hard. “I didn’t ... ”

  “Don’t crap me, friend. Those guys weren’t there by accident. They weren’t there just for me, either. Somebody’s got a finger on you, haven’t they?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “They were there for you,” I said, “only you saw a nice way to shake them loose on me. What gives?”

  His finger moved by itself and traced the scar that lay along the side of his jaw. “Look, I got cut up once, I did. I don’t want to fool around with them guys no more. Honest. I didn’t do nothing! I don’t know why they was there but they was!”

  “So you’re in a trap too,” I said.

  “No I ain‘t!” He shouted it. His face was a sickly white and he drooled a little bit. “I’m clean and I don’t know why they’re sticking around me. Why the hell did you came butting in for?”

  “Because I want to know why your pal Decker needed dough.”

  “Christ, his wife was dying. He had to have it. How’d I know he couldn’t pay it back!”

  “Pay what back to who?”

  His tongue flashed over his lips and his mouth clammed shut.

  “You have a union and a welfare fund for that, don’t you?”

  This time he spit on the floor.

  “Who’d you steer him to, Mel?”

  He didn’t answer me. I got up off the edge of the table and jerked him to his feet. “Who was it, Mel ... or do you want to find out what happened to the tough boys back in the bar?”

  The guy went limp in my hands. He didn’t try to get away. He just hung there in my fist, his eyes dead. His words came out slow and flat.

  “He needed the dough. We ... thought we had a good tip on the ponies and pooled our dough.”

  “So?”

  “We won. It wasn’t enough so we threw it back on another tip, only Bill hit up a loan shark for a few hundred to lay a bigger bet. We won that one too and I pulled out with my share. Bill thought he could get a big kill quick and right after he paid the shark back, knocked him down for another grand to add to his stake and this time he went under.”

  “Okay, so he owed a grand.”

  Mel’s head shook sadly. “It was bigger. You pay back one for five every week. It didn’t take long to run it up into big money.”

  I let him go and he sank back into the chair. “Now names, Mel. Who was the shark?”

  I barely heard him say, “Dixie Cooper. He hangs out in the Glass Bar on Eighth Avenue.”

  I picked up my deck of smokes and stuffed them in my pocket. I walked out without closing the door and down past the landlady who still held down her post in the vestibule. She didn’t say anything until Mel hobbled to the door, glanced down the stairs and shut it. Then the old biddy humphed and let me out.

  The sky had clouded up again, shutting out the stars and there was a damp mist in the air. I called Pat from a candy store down the corner and nobody answered his phone at home, so I tried the office. He was there. I told him to stick around and got back in my car.

  Headquarters building was like a beehive without any bees when I got there. A lone squad car stood at the curb and the elevator operator was reading a paper inside his cab. The boys on the night stand had that bored look already and half of them were piddling around trying to keep busy.

  I got in the elevator and let him haul me up to Pat’s floor. Down the corridor a typewriter was clicking busily and I heard Pat rummaging around the drawers of his file cabinet. When I pushed the door open he said, “Be right with you, Mike.”

  So I parked and watched him work for five minutes. When he got through at the cabinet I asked him, “How come you’re working nights?”

  “Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I didn’t come up against any juicy murders.”

  “Murders, hell. The D.A. has me and everybody else he can scrape together working on that gambling probe.”

  “What’s he struggling so hard for, it isn’t an election year for him. Besides, the public’s going to gamble anyway.”

  Pat pulled out his chair and slid into it. “The guy’s got scruples. He has it in for Ed Teen and his outfit.”

  “He’s not getting Teen,” I said.

  “Well, he’s trying.”

  “Where do you come in?”

  Pat shrugged and reached for a cigarette. “The D.A. tried to break up organized gambling in this town years ago. It flopped like all the other probes flopped ... for lack of evidence. He’s never made a successful raid on a syndicate establishment since he went after them.”

  “There’s a hole in the boat?”

  “A what?”

  “A leak.”

  “Of course. Ed Teen has a pipeline right into the D.A.’s office somehow. That’s why the D.A. is after his hide. It’s a personal affront to him and he won’t stand for it. Since he can’t nail Teen down with something, he’s conducting an investigation into his past. We know damn well that Teen and Grindle pulled a lot of rough stuff and if we can tie a murder on them they’ll be easy to take.”

  “I bet. Why doesn’t he patch that leak?”

  Pat did funny things with his mouth. “He’s surrounded by men he trusts and I trust and we can’t find a single person who’s talking out of turn. Everybody’s been investigated. We even checked for dictaphones, that’s how far we went. It seems impossible, but nevertheless, the leak’s here. Hell, the D.A. pulls surprise raids that were cooked up an hour before and by the time he gets there not a soul’s around. It’s uncanny.”

  “Uncanny my foot. The D.A. is fooling with guys as smart as he is himself. They’ve been operating longer too. Look, any chance of breaking away early tonight?”

  “With this here?” He pointed toward a pile of papers on his desk. “They all have to be classified, correlated and filed. Nope, not tonight, Mike. I’ll be here for another three hours yet.”

  Outside the racket of the typewriter stopped and a stubby brunette came in with a wire basket of letters. Right behind her was another brunette, but far from stubby. What the first one didn’t have she had everything of and she waved it around in front of you like a flag.

  Pat saw my foolish grin and when the stubby one left said, “Miss Scobie, have you met Mike Hammer?”

  I got one of those casual glances with a flicker of a smile. “No, but I’ve heard the District Attorney speak of him several times.”

  “Nothing good, I hope,” I said.

  “No, nothing good.” She laughed at me and finished sorting out the papers on Pat’s desk.

  “Miss Scobie is one of the D.A.’s secretaries,” Pat said. “For a change I have some help around here. He sent over three girls to do the manual labor.”

  “I’m pretty good at that myself.” I think I was leering.

  The Scobie babe gave me the full voltage from a pair of deep blue eyes. “I’ve heard that too.”

  “You should quit getting things secondhand.”

  She packed the last of the papers in a new pile and tacked them together with a clip. When she turned around she gave me a look Pat couldn’t see but had a whole book written there in her face. “Perhaps I should,” she said.

  I could feel the skin crawl up my back just from the tone of her voice.

  Pat said, “You’re a bastard. Mike. You and the women.”

  “They’re necessary.” I stared at the door that closed behind her.

  His mouth cracked in a grin. “Not Miss Scobie. She knows her way around the block without somebody holding her hand. Doesn’t her name mean anything to you?”

  “Should it?”

  “Not unless you’re a society follower. Her
family is big stuff down in Texas. The old man had a ranch where he raised horses until they brought oil in. Then he sat back and enjoyed life. He raises racing nags now.”

  “The Scobie Stables?”

  “Uh-huh. Ellen’s his daughter. When she was eighteen she and the old boy had a row and she packed up and left. This department job is the first one she ever had. Been here better than fifteen years. She’s the gal the track hates to see around. When she makes a bet she collects.”

  “What the hell’s she working for then?”

  “Ask her.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  Pat grinned again. “The old man disinherited her when she wouldn’t marry the son of his friend. He swore she’d never see a penny of his dough, so now she’ll only bet when a Scobie horse is running and with what she knows about horses, she’s hard to fool. Every time she wins she sends a telegram to the old boy stating the amount and he burns up. Don’t ask her to tip you off though. She won’t do it.”

  “Why doesn’t the D.A. use her to get an inside track on the wire rooms?”

  “He did, but she’s too well known now. A feature writer for one of the papers heard about the situation, and gave it a big play in a Sunday supplement a few years ago, so she’s useless there.”

  I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “Texas gal. I like the way they’re built.”

  “Yeah, big.” Pat grunted. “A big one gets you every time.” His fingers rapped on the desk. “Let’s come back to earth, Mike. What’s new?”

  “Decker.”

  “That’s not new. We’re still looking for the driver who ran down his buddy. They found the car, you know.”

  I sat up straight.

  “You didn’t miss everything that night. There were two bullet holes in the back. One hit the rear window and the other went through the gas tank. The car was abandoned over in Brooklyn.”

  “Stolen heap?”

  “Sure, what’d you expect? The slugs came from your gun, the tires matched the imprints in the body and there wasn’t a decent fingerprint anywhere.”

  “Great.”

  “We’ll wrap it up soon. The word’s out.”

  “Great.”

  Pat scowled at me in disgust. “Hell, you’re never satisfied.”

  I shook a cigarette out and lit up. Pat pushed an ash tray over to me. I said, “Pat, you got holes in your head if you think that this was a plain, simple job. Decker was in hock to a loan shark for a few grand and was being pressured into paying up. The guy was nuts about his kid and they probably told him the kid would catch it if he didn’t come across.”

  “So?”

  “Christ, you aren’t getting to be a cynic like the rest of the cops, are you? You want things like this to keep on happening? You like murder to dirty up the streets just because some greaseball wants his dirty money! Hell, who’s to blame ... a poor jerk like Decker or a torpedo who’ll carve him up if he doesn’t pay up? Answer me that.”

  “There’s a law against loan sharks operating in this state.”

  “There’s a law against gambling, too.”

  Pat’s face was dark with anger.

  “The law has been enforced,” he snapped.

  I put the emphasis on the past tense. “It has? That’s nice to know. Who’s running the racket now?”

  “Damn it, Mike, that isn’t my department.”

  “It should be; it caused the death of two men so far. What I want to know is, is the racket organized or not?”

  “I’ve heard that it was,” he replied sullenly. “Fallon used to bank it before he died. When the state cracked down on them somebody took the sharks under their wing. I don’t know who.”

  “Fallon? Fallon, hell, the guy’s been dead since 1940 and he’s still making news.”

  “Well, you asked me.”

  I nodded. “Who’s Dixie Cooper, Pat?”

  His eyes went half shut. “Where do you get your information from? Goddamn, you have your nose in everywhere.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The guy’s a stoolie for the department. He has no known source of income, though he claims to be a promoter.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything. He’s a guy who knows where something is that somebody else wants and collects a percentage from the buyer and seller both. At least, that’s what he says.”

  “Then he’s full of you know what. The guy is a loan shark. He’s the one Decker hit up for the money.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Show me and we’ll take him into custody.”

  I stood up and slapped on my hat. “I’ll show you,” I said. “I’ll have him screaming to talk to somebody in uniform just to keep from getting his damn arms twisted off.”

  “Go easy, Mike.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do just that. I’ll twist ‘em nice and easy like he twisted Decker. I’ll go easy, all right.”

  Pat gave me a long look with a frown behind it. When I said so long he only nodded, and he was reaching for the phone as I shut the door.

  Down the hall another door slammed shut and the stubby brunette came by, smiled at me politely and kept on going to the elevator. After she got in I went back down the corridor to the office, pushed the door open and stuck my head in. Ellen Scobie had one foot on a chair with her dress hiked up as far as it would go, straightening her stocking.

  “Pretty leg,” I said.

  She glanced back quickly without bothering to yank her dress down like most dames would. “I have another just like it,” she told me. Her eyes were on full voltage again.

  “Let’s see.”

  So she stood up in one of those magazine poses and pulled the dress up slowly without stopping until it couldn’t go any further and showed me. And she was right. The other was just as pretty if you wasted a sight like that trying to compare them.

  I said, “I love brunettes.”

  “You love anything.” She let the dress fall.

  “Brunettes especially. Doing anything tonight?”

  “Yes ... I was going out with you, wasn’t I? Something I should learn about manual labor?”

  “Kid,” I said, “I don’t think you have anything to learn. Not a damn thing.”

  She laughed deep in her throat and came over and took my arm. “I’m crazy about heels,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  We passed by Pat’s office again and I could still hear him on the phone. His voice had a low drone with a touch of urgency in it but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. When we were downstairs in the car Ellen said, “I hope you realize that if we’re seen together my boss will have you investigated from top to bottom.”

  “Then you do the investigating. I have some fine anatomy.”

  Her mouth clucked at me. “You know what I mean. He’s afraid to trust himself these days.”

  “You can forget about me, honey. He’s investigated me so often he knows how many moles I got. Who the hell’s handing out the dope, anyway?”

  “If I knew I’d get a promotion. Right now the office observes war-time security right down to burning everything in the wastebaskets in front of a policeman. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “Somebody sits in another building with a telescope and reads lips.”

  I laughed at her. “Did you tell the D.A. that?”

  She grinned devilishly. “Uh-huh. I said it jokingly and damned if he didn’t go and pull down the blinds. Everybody hates me now.” She stopped and glanced out the windows, then looked back at me curiously. “Where’re we going?”

  “To see a guy about a guy,” I said.

  She leaned back against the cushions and closed her eyes. When she opened them again I was pulling into a parking lot in Fifty-second Street. The attendant took my keys and handed me a ticket. The evening was just starting to pick up and the gin mills lining the street were starting to get a play.

  Ellen tugged at my hand. “We aren’t drinking ver
y fancy tonight, are we?”

  “You come down here much?”

  “Oh, occasionally. I don’t go much for these places. Where are we going?”

  “A place called the Glass Bar. It’s right down the block.”

  “That fag joint,” she said with disgust. “The last time I was there I had three women trying to paw me and a guy with me who thought it was funny.”

  “Hell, I’d like to paw you myself,” I laughed.

  “Oh, you will, you will.” She was real matter-of-fact about it, but not casual, not a bit. I started to get that feeling up my back again.

  The Glass Bar was a phony name for a phonier place. It was all chrome and plastic, and glass was only the thing you drank out of. The bar was a circular affair up front near the door with the back half of the place given over to tables and a bandstand. A drummer was warming up his traps with a pair of cuties squirming to his jungle rhythm while a handful of queers watched with their eyes oozing lust.

  Ellen said, “The bar or back room?”

  I tossed my hat at the redhead behind the check booth. “Don’t know yet.” The redhead handed me a pasteboard with a number on it and I asked her, “Dixie Cooper been in yet?”

  She leaned halfway out of the booth and looked across the room. “Don’t see him. Guess he must be in back. He came in about a half hour ago.”

  I said thanks and took Ellen’s arm. We had a quick one at the bar, then pushed through the crowd to the back room where the babes were still squirming with the drummer showing no signs of tiring. He was all eyes for the wriggling hips and the table with the queers had been abandoned for one closer to the bandstand.

  Only four other tables were occupied and the kind of people sitting there weren’t the kind I was looking for. Over against the wall a guy was slouched in a chair reading a late tabloid while he sipped a beer. He had a hairline that came down damn near to his eyebrows and when his mouth moved as he read his top teeth stuck out at an angle. On the other side of the table a patsy was trying to drag him into a conversation and all he was getting was a grunt now and then.

  The guy with the bleached hair looked up and smiled when I edged over, then the smile froze into a disgusted grimace when he saw Ellen. I said, “Blow, Josephine,” and he arched his eyebrows and minced off.