[Mike Hammer 03] - Vengeance Is Mine Read online

  It was getting funnier all the time. I went back to the bar and drank my beer.

  The after-supper crowd began drifting in and taking places at the bar. At eight-thirty I called Velda but she wasn’t home. I tried again an hour later and she still wasn’t there. She wasn’t at the office, either. Maybe she was out hiring a sign-painter to change the name on the door.

  When I finally shifted into the corner up against the cigarette machine I started to think. It didn’t come easy because there hadn’t been any reason to remember then and we had let the booze flow free. Last night.

  Famous last words.

  Last night the both of us had thrown five years to the wind and brought the war back to the present. We were buddies again. We weren’t the kind of buddies you get to be when you eat and sleep and fight with a guy, but we were buddies. We were two-strong and fighting the war by ourselves. We were two guys who had met as comrades-in-arms, happy to be on the right side and giving all we had. For one night way back there we had been drinking buddies until we shook hands to go finish the war. Was that the way it was supposed to be? Did some odd quirk of fate throw us together purposely so that later we’d meet again?

  Last night I had met him and drunk with him. We talked, we drank some more. Was he happy? He was after we ran into each other. Before that he had been curled over a drink at the bar. He could have been brooding. He could have been thinking. But he was happy as hell to see me again! Whatever it was he had been thinking about was kicked aside along with those five years and we had ourselves one hell of a drinking bout. Sure, we fought the war again. We did the same thing anybody else did when they caught up with someone they knew from those days. We talked it and we fought it and we were buddies again decked out in the same uniform ready to give everything for the other guy on our side whether we knew him or not. But the war had to give out sometime. The peace always has to come when people get too tired of fighting. And yet, it was the end of our talk that brought the cloud back to his eyes. He hadn’t wanted it to stop or be diverted into other channels. He told me he had been in town a week and was getting set to go home. The whole deal was a business trip to do some buying for his store.

  Yeah, we were buddies. We weren’t long, but we were buddies good. If we had both been in the jungle and some slimy Jap had picked him off I would have rammed the butt of a rifle down the brown bastard’s throat for it. He would have done the same for me, too. But we weren’t in any damn jungle. We were right here in New York City where murder wasn’t supposed to happen and did all the time. A guy I liked comes into my own city and a week later he’s dead as hell.

  One week. What did he do? What happened? Who was he with? Where was the excuse for murder, here or in Columbus, Ohio? A whole damn week. I slapped my hat on the stool to reserve it and took another few nickels from my change and wormed into the phone booth again. There was one other question, what was I going to do about it? My face started to go tight again and I knew the answer.

  I dialed two numbers. The second got my man. He was a private investigator the same as I used to be except that he was essentially honest and hard-working. His name was Joe Gill and he owed me a favor that he and his staff could begin repaying as of now.

  I said, “This is Mike, Joe. Remember me?”

  “Hell,” he laughed, “with all your publicity how could I forget you? I hope you aren’t after a job.”

  “Not exactly. Look, you tied up right now?”

  “Well ... no. Something on your mind?”

  “Plenty, friend. You still doing insurance work?”

  Joe grunted an assent. “That’s all I’m doing. You can keep your guns and your tough guys. I’ll track down missing beneficiaries.”

  “Care to do me a favor, Joe?”

  He only hesitated a second. “Glad to, Mike. You’ve steered me straight plenty of times. Just name it.”

  “Swell. This guy that died in the hotel room with me, Chester Wheeler—I want some information on him. Not a history ... I just want him backtracked over the past week. He’s been in town doing some buying for his store in Columbus, Ohio, and I want a record of what he’d done since he hit town. Think it can be done?”

  I could hear his pencil rasping on paper. “Give me a few hours. I’ll start it myself and put the chain gang out on the details. Where can I reach you?”

  I thought a moment, then told him, “Try the Greenwood Hotel. It’s a little dump on a side street up in the Eighties. They don’t ask questions there.”

  “Right. See you later.”

  I cradled the receiver and picked my way back through the crowd to the bar. My hat was hanging over a pin-up lamp on the wall and my seat was occupied and the guy was spending my money for beer.

  I didn’t get mad, though. The guy was Pat.

  The bartender put down another beer and took some more of my change. I said, “How’s tricks, kid?”

  Pat turned around slowly and looked at me for the first time. His eyes were clouded and his mouth had a grim twist to it. He looked tired and worried. “There’s a back room, Mike. Let’s go sit down. I want to talk to you.”

  I gulped my beer down and carried a full one back to the booth. When I slid my deck of Luckies across the table to him he shook his head and waited until I lit up. I asked, “How did you find me?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he popped one of his own, very softly, very forcefully. He wasn’t kidding around. “What’s it all about, Mike?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You know.” He leaned forward on his arms, never taking his eyes off my face. “Mike, I’m not going to get excited this time. I’m not going to let you talk me into losing a lot of sleep any more. I’m a police officer, or at least I’m supposed to be. Right now I’m treating this like it might be something important and like you know more about it than I do. I’m asking questions that are going to be answered. What’s going on?”

  Smoke drifted into my eyes and I squinted them almost shut. “Supposing I told you Chester Wheeler was murdered, Pat.”

  “I’d ask how, then who.”

  “I don’t know how and I don’t know who.”

  “Then why, Mike? Why is it murder?”

  “Two shots were fired from my gun, that’s why.”

  He gave the table a rap with his knuckles. “Damn you, Mike, come out with it! We’re friends, but I’m tired of being hamstrung. You’re forever smelling murder where murder isn’t and making it come out right. Play it square!”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “With reservations!”

  I gave a sour laugh. “Two shots out of that rod. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Not for me it isn’t. Is that all you have?”

  I nodded and dragged in on the butt.

  Pat’s face seemed to soften and he let the air out of his lungs slowly. He even smiled a little. “I guess that’s that, Mike. I’m glad I didn’t get sweated up about it.”

  I snubbed the cigarette out on the table top. “Now you’ve got me going. What are you working up to?”

  “Precedent, Mike. I’m speaking of past suicides.”

  “What about ’em?”

  “Every so often we find a suicide with a bullet in his head. The room has been liberally peppered with bullets, to quote a cliché. In other words, they’ll actually take the gun away from the target but pull the trigger anyway. They keep doing it until they finally have nerve enough to keep it there. Most guys can’t handle an automatic anyway and they fire a shot to make sure they know how it operates.”

  “And that makes Wheeler a bona fide suicide, right?”

  He grinned at the sneer on my face. “Not altogether. When you pulled your little razzmatazz about the slugs in your gun I went up in the air and had a handful of experts dig up Wheeler’s itinerary and we located a business friend he had been with the day before he died. He said Wheeler was unusually depressed and talked of suicide several times. Apparently his business was on the dawngrade.”

  “W
ho was the guy, Pat?”

  “A handbag manufacturer, Emil Perry. Well, if you have any complaints, come see me, but no more scares, Mike. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I hissed. “You still didn’t say how you found me.”

  “I traced your call, friend citizen. It came from a bar and I knew you’d stay there awhile. I took my time at the hotel checking your story. And, er ... yes, I did find the bullet hole in the mattress.”

  “I suppose you found the bullet too?”

  “Why yes, we did. The shell case too.” I sat there rigid, waiting. “It was right out there in the hall where you dropped it, Mike. I wish you’d quit trying to give this an element of mystery just to get me in on it.”

  “You chump!”

  “Can it, Mike. The house dick set me straight.”

  I was standing up facing him and I could feel the mad running right down into my shoes. “I thought you were smart, Pat. You chump!”

  This time he winked. “No more games, huh, Mike?” He grinned at me a second and left me standing there watching his back. Now I was playing games. Hot dog!

  I thought I was swearing under my breath until a couple of mugs heard their tomatoes complain and started to give me hell. When they saw my face they told their dames to mind their business and went on drinking.

  Well, I asked for it. I played it cute and Pat played it cuter. Maybe I was the chump. Maybe Wheeler did kill himself. Maybe he came back from the morgue and tried to slip out with the slug and the shell too.

  I sure as a four letter word didn’t. I picked up my pack of butts and went out on the street for a smell of fresh air that wasn’t jammed with problems. After a few deep breaths I felt better.

  Down on the corner a drugstore was getting rid of its counter customers and I walked in past the tables of novelties and cosmetics to a row of phone booths in the back. I pulled the Manhattan directory out of the rack and began thumbing through it. When I finished I did the same thing with the Brooklyn book. I didn’t learn anything there so I pulled up the Bronx listing and found an Emil Perry who lived in one of the better residential sections of the community.

  At ten minutes after eleven I parked outside a red brick one-family house and killed the motor. The car in front of me was a new Cadillac sedan with all the trimmings and the side door bore two gold initials in Old English script, E. P.

  There was a brass knocker on the door of the house, embossed with the same initials, but I didn’t use it. I had the thing raised when I happened to glance in the window. If the guy was Emil Perry, he was big and fat with a fortune in jewels stuck in his tie and flashing on his fingers. He was talking to somebody out of sight and licking his lips between every word.

  You should have seen his face. He was scared silly.

  I let the knocker down easy and eased back into the shadows. When I looked at my watch ten minutes had gone by and nothing happened. I could see the window through the shrubs and the top of the fat man’s head. He still hadn’t moved. I kept on waiting and a few minutes later the door opened just far enough to let a guy out. There was no light behind him so I didn’t see his face until he was opposite me. Then I grinned a nasty little grin and let my mind give Pat a very soft horse-laugh.

  The guy that came out only had one name. Rainey. He was a tough punk with a record as long as your arm and he used to be available for any kind of job that needed a strong arm.

  I waited until Rainey walked down the street and got in a car. When it pulled away with a muffled roar I climbed into my own heap and turned the motor over.

  I didn’t have to see Mr. Perry after all. Anyway, not tonight. He wasn’t going anywhere. I made a U-turn at the end of the street and got back on the main drag that led to Manhattan. When I reached the Greenwood Hotel a little after midnight the night clerk shoved the register at me, took cash in advance and handed me the keys to the room. Fate with a twisted sense of humor was riding my tail again. The room was 402.

  If there was a dead man in it tomorrow it’d have to be me.

  I dreamt I was in a foxhole with a shelter half dragged over me to keep out the rain. The guy in the next foxhole kept calling to me until my eyes opened and my hand automatically reached for my rifle. There was no rifle, but the voice was real. It came from the hall. I threw back the covers and hopped up, trotting for the door.

  Joe slid in and closed it behind him. “Cripes,” he grunted, “I thought you were dead.”

  “Don’t say that word, I’m alone tonight. You get it?”

  He flipped his hat to the chair and sat on it. “Yeah, I got it. Most of it anyway. They weren’t very co-operative at the hotel seeing as how the cops had just been there. What did you do to ’em?”

  “Put a bug up his behind. Now the honorable Captain of Homicide, my pal, my buddy who ought to know better, thinks I’m pulling fast ones on him as a joke. He even suspects me of having tampered with some trivial evidence.”

  “Did you?”

  “It’s possible. Of course, how would I know what’s evidence and what’s not. After all, what does it matter if it was a suicide?”

  Joe gave a polite burp. “Yeah,” he said.

  I watched him while he felt around in his pocket for a fistful of notes. He tapped them with a forefinger. “If I charged you for this you’d of shelled out a pair of C’s. Six men lost their sleep, three lost their dates and one caught hell from his wife. She wants him to quit me. And for what?”

  “And for what?” I repeated.

  He went on: “This Wheeler fellow seemed pretty respectable. By some very abstract questioning here and there we managed to backtrack his movements. Just remember, we had to do it in a matter of hours, so it isn’t a minute-by-minute account.

  “He checked in at the hotel immediately upon arriving eight days ago. His mornings were spent visiting merchandising houses here in the city where he placed some regular orders for items for his store. None of these visits were of unusual importance. Here are some that may be. He wired home to Columbus, Ohio, to a man named Ted Lee asking for five thousand bucks by return wire. He received it an hour later. I presume it was to make a special purchase of some sort.

  “We dug up a rather sketchy account of where he spent his evenings. A few times he returned to the hotel slightly under the influence. One night he attended a fashion show that featured a presentation of next year’s styles. The show was followed by cocktails and he may have been one of the men who helped one of a few models who had a couple too many down the elevator and into a cab.”

  I started to grin. “Models?”

  He shook his head. “Forget it,” he told me, “it wasn’t a smoker with a dirty floor show for dessert.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “From then on he was in and out of the hotel periodically and each time he had a little more of a jag on. He checked in with you and was dead before morning. The hotel was very put out. That’s it.”

  He waited a second and repeated, “That’s it, I said.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Well?”

  “Joe, you’re a lousy detective.”

  He shot me an impatient glance tainted with amazement. “I’ma lousy detective? You without a license and I’m the lousy detective? That’s a hell of a way of thanking me for all my trouble! Why I’ve found more missing persons than you have hairs on that low forehead of yours and ...”

  “Ever shoot anybody, Joe?”

  His face went white and his fingers had trouble taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “Once ... I did.”

  “Like it?”

  “No.” He licked his lips. “Look, Mike ... this guy Wheeler ... you were there. He was a suicide, wasn’t he?”

  “Uh-uh. Somebody gave him the business.”

  I could hear him swallow clear across the room. “Uh ... you won’t need me again, will you?”

  “Nope. Thanks a lot, Joe. Leave the notes on the bed.”

  The sheaf of papers fell on the bed and I heard the door close softly. I sat on t
he arm of the chair and let my mind weave the angles in and out. One of them had murder in it.

  Someplace there was a reason for murder big enough to make the killer try to hide the fact under a cloak of suicide. But the reason has to be big to kill. It has to be even bigger to try to hide it. It was still funny the way it came out. I was the only one who could tag it as murder and make it stick. Someplace a killer thought he was being real clever. Clever as hell. Maybe he thought the lack of one lousy shell in the clip wouldn’t be noticed.

  I kept thinking about it and I got sore. It made me sore twice. The first time I burned up was because the killer took me for a sap. Who the hell did he think I was, a cheap uptown punk who carried a rod for effect? Did he think I was some goon with loose brains and stupid enough to take it lying down?

  Then I got mad again because it was my friend that died. My friend, not somebody else’s. A guy who was glad to see me even after five years. A guy who was on the same side with me and gave the best he could give to save some bastard’s neck so that bastard could kill him five years later.

  The army was one thing I should have reminded Pat of. I should have prodded his memory with the fact that the army meant guns and no matter who you were an indoctrination course in most of the phases of handling lethal weapons hit you at one time or another. Maybe Chester Wheeler did try to shoot himself. More likely he tried to fire it at someone or someone fired it at him. One thing I knew damn well, Chet had known all about automatics and if he did figure to knock himself off he wasn’t going to fire any test shot just to see if the gun worked.

  I rolled into bed and yanked the covers up. I’d sleep on it.

  Chapter 3

  I STOOD ON THE CORNER of Thirty-third Street and checked the address from Joe’s notes. The number I wanted was halfway down the block, an old place recently remodeled and refitted with all the trimmings a flashy clientele could expect. While I stared at the directory a covey of trim young things clutching hatboxes passed behind me to the elevator and I followed them in. They were models, but their minds weren’t on jobs. All they talked about was food. I didn’t blame them a bit. In the downstairs department they were shipshape from plenty of walking, but upstairs it was hard to tell whether they were coming or going unless they were wearing falsies. They were pretty to look at, but I wouldn’t give any of them bed room.