The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Read online

  I didn’t hear Pat because his voice was so low it was almost a whisper, but he repeated it loud enough so I could hear it and he made me look at him so I wouldn’t forget it. His hands were a nervous bunch of fingers that opened and shut with every word and his mouth was all teeth with sharp biting edges.

  “Mike, you try pulling a smart frame that will pull Grindle into that damn murder case of yours and you and I are finished! We’ve worked too damn long and hard to nail that punk and his boss to have you slip over a cutie that will stink up the whole works. Don’t give me the business, friend. I know you and the way you work. Anything appeals to you just as long as you can point a gun at somebody. For my money Lou Grindle is as far away from this as I am and because one of his boys tried to pick up some extra change you can’t fix him for it. All right, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that if you tried hard enough and lived through it you’d do it, but Lou’s got Teen and a lot more behind him. He’d get out of that charge easy as pie and only leave the department open for another big laugh. When we get those two, we want them so it’ll stick, and no frame is going to do it. You lay off, hear?”

  I didn’t answer him for a long minute, then: “I wasn’t thinking of any frame, Pat.”

  Pat’s hands were still jerking on the bar. “The hell you weren’t. Remember what I told you, that’s all.” He swilled his beer down and fiddled with the empty glass until the bartender moved in and filled it up again. I didn’t say a damn thing. I just sat. Pat’s fingernails were little firecrackers going off against the wood while his coat rippled as the muscles bunched underneath the fabric.

  It lasted about five minutes, then he drained the glass and shoved it back. He muttered, “Goddamn!”

  I said, “Relax, chum.”

  Then he repeated what he said the first time, told me to take it easy, and swung off the stool. I waited until he was out the door, then started to laugh. It wasn’t so easy to be a cop. At least not a city cop. Or maybe it was the years that were getting him down. Six years ago you couldn’t get him excited about anything, not even a murder or a naked dame with daisies in her hair.

  The bartender came over and asked me if I wanted another. I said no and shoved him a quarter to make into change, then picked up a dime and walked back to the phone booth. The book listed the Little Theater as being on the edge of Greenwich Village and a babe with a low-down voice told me that Miss Lee was there and rehearsing and if I was a friend I could certainly come up.

  The Little Theater was an old warehouse with a poster-decorated front that was a lousy disguise. The day had warped into a hot afternoon and the air inside the place was even hotter, wetter and bedded down with the perfumed smell of make-up. A sawed-off babe in a Roman toga let me in, locked the door to keep out the spies, then wiggled her fanny in the direction of all the noise to show me where to go. A pair of swinging doors opened and two more dames in togas came through for a smoke. They stood right in the glare of the only light in the place looking too cool to be real and lit up the smokes without seeing me there in the shadows.

  Then I saw why they were so cool. One of them flipped the damn thing open and stood with her hands on her hips and she didn’t have a thing on underneath it. Sawed-off said, “Helen, we have a visitor.”

  And Helen finally saw me, smiled, and said, “How nice.”

  But she didn’t bother to do anything about the toga. I said, “The play’s the thing,” and sawed-off grinned a little like she wished she had thought of the open-toga deal first herself and sort of pushed me into the swinging doors.

  Inside, a pair of floor fans moved the air around enough to make you think you were cool, at least. I opened my shirt and tie, then stood there for a moment getting used to the artificial dusk. All around the place were stacks of funeral-parlor chairs with clothes draped over them. Up front a rickety stage held up some more togas and a few centurians in uniform while a hairy-legged little squirt in tennis shorts screamed at them in a high falsetto as he pounded a script against an old upright piano.

  It wasn’t hard to find Marsha. There was a baby spot behind her outlining a hundred handfuls of lovely curves through the white cotton toga. She was the most beautiful woman in the place even with a touched-up shiner, and from where I stood I could see that there was plenty of competition.

  The squirt with the hairy legs called for a ten-minute break and sawed-off called something up to Marsha I didn’t catch. She tried to peer past the glare of the footlights, didn’t make out too well, so came off the stage in a jump and ran all the way back to where I was.

  Her hands were warm, friendly things that grabbed mine and held on. “Did you get my package, Mike?”

  “Yup. Came down to think you personally.”

  “How is the boy?”

  “Fine, just fine. Don’t ask me how I feel because I’ll give you a stinking answer. Somebody tried to break my head open last night.”

  “Mike!”

  “I got a hard head.”

  She moved up close and ran her hand over my hair to where the bump was and wrinkled her nose at me. “Do you know who it was?”

  “No. If I did the bastard’d be in the hospital.”

  Marsha took my arm and nodded over to the side of the wall. “Let’s sit down a few minutes. I can worry better about you that way.”

  “Why worry about me at all?”

  The eye with the shiner was closed just enough to give it the damnedest look you ever saw. “I could be a fool and tell you why, Mike,” she said. “Shall I be a fool?”

  If ever I had wanted to kiss a woman it was then, only she had too much make-up on and there were too many people for an audience. “Later. Tonight, maybe,” I told her. “Be a fool then.” I was grinning and her lips went into a smile that said a lot of things, but mostly was a promise of tonight.

  When we had a pair of cigarettes going I tipped my chair back against the wall and stared at her. “We have another murder on our hands, kitten.”

  The cigarette stopped halfway to her lips and her head came around slowly. “Another? Oh, no!”

  I nodded. “Guy named Mel Hooker. He was Decker’s best friend. You know, Marsha, I think there’s a hell of a lot more behind this than we thought.”

  “Chain reaction,” she softly.

  “Sort of. It didn’t take much to start it going. Three hundred bucks and a necklace, to be exact.”

  Marsha nodded, her lips between her teeth. “My playboy friend in the other apartment was coerced into keeping his money in a bank instead of the wall safe. The management threatened to break his lease unless he co-operated. Everybody in the building knows what happened and raised a fuss about it. Apparently the idea of being beaten up by a burglar doesn’t sound very appealing, especially when the burglar is wild over having made a mistake in safes.”

  “You got off easy. He might have killed you.”

  Her shoulders twitched convulsively. “What are you going to do, Mike?”

  “Keep looking. Make enough stink so trouble’ll come looking for me. Sometimes it’s easier that way.”

  “Do you ... have to?” Her eyes were soft, and her hand on my arm squeezed me gently.

  “I have to, kid. I’m made that way. I hate killers.”

  “But do you have to be so ... so damned reckless about it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I don’t have to be but that’s the way I like it. Then I can cut them down and enjoy it.”

  “Oh, Lord! Mike, please ...”

  “Look, kid, when you play with mugs you can’t be coy. At first this looked all cut-and-dried-out and all there was to it was nailing a bimbo who drove a car with a hot rod in the back seat. That’s the way it looked at first. Now we got names creeping into this thing, names and faces that don’t belong to any cheap bimbos. There’s Teen and Grindle and a guy who died a long time ago but who won’t stay buried ... his name was Charlie Fallon and I keep hearing it every time I turn around.”

  Somebody said, “Charlie Fallon?
” in a voice that ended with a chuckle and I turned around, chewing on my words.

  The place was getting to look like backstage of a burlesque house. The woman in the dress toga did a trick with the oversize cigarette holder and stood there smiling at us. She was medium in height only. The rest of her was over-done, but that’s the way they liked them in Hollywood. Her name was Kay Cutler and she was right in there among the top movie stars and it wasn’t hard to see why.

  Marsha introduced us and I stood there like an idiot with one of those nobody-meets-celebrity grins all over my pan. She held my hand longer than was necessary and said, “Surprised?”

  “Hell, yes. How come all the talent in this dump?”

  The two of them laughed together. Kay did another trick with the holder. “It’s a hobby that gets a lot of exciting publicity. Actually we don’t play the parts for the audience. Instead we portray them so the others can use our interpretation as a model, then coach them into giving some sort of a performance. You wouldn’t believe it, but the theater group makes quite a bit of money for itself. Enough to cover expenses, at least.”

  “You come for free?”

  She laughed and let her eyes drift to one of the centurians who was giving me some dark looks. “Well, not exactly.”

  Marsha poked me in the back so I’d quit leering. I said, “You mentioned Charlie Fallon before. Where’d you hear of him?”

  “If he’s the one I’m thinking of a lot of people knew him. Was he the gangster?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was a fan-letter writer. God, how that man turned them out! Even the extras used to get notes and flowers from the old goat. I bet I’ve had twenty or more.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I reminded her.

  She smiled until the dimples showed in her cheeks. “You aren’t supposed to mention the passage of time so lightly. I still claim to be in my early thirties.”

  “What are you?”

  I got the dimples again. “I’m a liar,” she said. “Marsha, didn’t you ever get mail from that character?”

  “Perhaps. At the time I didn’t handle my own correspondence and it was all sorted out for me.” She paused and squinted a little. “Come to think of it, yes. I did. I remember talking about it to someone one day.”

  I pulled on the butt and let the smoke out slowly. “He was like that. The guy made plenty and didn’t know how to spend it, so he threw it away on the girlies. I wonder if he ever followed it up?”

  “Never,” Kay stated flatly. “When he was still news some of the columnists kept up with his latest crushes and slipped in a publicity line now and then, but nobody ever saw him around the Coast. By the way, what’s so important about him now?”

  “I wish I knew. For a dead man he’s sure not forgotten.”

  “Mike is a detective, Kay,” Marsha said bluntly. “There have been a couple of murders and Mike’s conducting an investigation.”

  “And not getting far,” I added.

  “Really?” Her eyebrows went up and she cocked the holder between her teeth and gave me a look that was sexy right down to her sandals. “A detective. You sound exciting.”

  “You’re not going to sound at all if you don’t get back to your warrior, lady,” Marsha cut in. “Now scram.”

  Kay faked a pout at her and said so long to me after another long hand-clasp. When she was across the room Marsha slipped her arm through mine. “Kay’s a wonderful gal, but if you have it and it wears pants she wants it.”

  “Good old Kay,” I said.

  “Luckily, I know her too well.”

  “Any more around like that?”

  “Well, if it’s a celebrity you’d like to meet, I can take you backstage and introduce you to a pair of Hollywood starlets, a television sensation, the country’s biggest comic and ...”

  “Never mind,” I said. “You’re enough for me.”

  She gave me another one of those squeezes with a laugh thrown in and I wanted to kiss her again. The kid with an arm in a sling who tapped her on the shoulder as he murmured, “Two minutes more, Marsha,” must have read my mind, because his eyes went limp and sad.

  Marsha nodded as he walked off and I pointed my cigarette at his back. “The kid’s got a crush on you.”

  She watched him a moment, then glanced at me. “I know it. He’s only nineteen and I’m afraid he has stars in his eyes. A month ago he was in love with Helen O‘Roark and was so far down in the dumps when he found out she was married he almost starved himself to death. He’s the one I took to the hospital the night the Decker fellow broke into my apartment.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was setting up props and fell off the ladder.”

  Down at the end of the hall hairy legs in short pants was banging on the piano again screaming for everyone to get back on the stage. Togas started to unravel from the floor, chairs and the scenery and if I had a dozen more pairs of eyes I could have enjoyed myself. Those babes didn’t give a damn what they showed and I seemed to be the only one there who appreciated the view. The overhead lights went out and the stage spots came on and I was doing good watching the silhouettes until Marsha said, “I’m getting jealous, Mike.”

  It wasn’t so much what she said as the way she said it that made me jerk around. And there she was leaning on the stack of chairs like a nymph under a waterfall with her own toga wide open down the middle and an impish little grin playing with her mouth. She was barely a reflection of light and shadow, a vague white statue of warm, live flesh that moved with her breathing, then the toga came shut slowly before I could move and she was out of reach.

  “You don’t have to be jealous of anybody,” I said.

  She smiled again, and in the darkness her hand touched mine briefly and the cigarette fell out of my fingers to the floor where it lay like a hot red eye. Then she was gone and all I could think about was tonight.

  CHAPTER 5

  After the Little Theater the glare of the sun was almost blinding. I fired up another butt and climbed back into the car where I finished smoking it before I had myself in line again. All the while I kept seeing Marsha in that white toga until it was branded into my brain so deeply that it blotted out everything else. Marsha and Kay and Helen of Troy or something in a lot of white togas drifting through the haze like beautiful ghosts.

  Like the ghost of a killer I was after. I threw the butt out the window and hit the starter.

  I let my hands and my eyes drive me through traffic while the rest of me sat and thought. It should have been so damn easy. Three guys dead and a killer running loose looking for his lousy split of a robbery that didn’t happen. Decker dead on the sidewalk. Arnold Basil dead in the gutter. Hooker dead in his own room and me damn near dead on the floor. Sure it was easy, just like an illiterate doing acrostics.

  Then where the hell was the big puzzle? Was it because Basil had been Lou Grindle’s boy, or because Fallon’s name kept cropping up? I jammed the horn down at the guy in front of me and yelled as I pulled around him. He gave me a scared grimace and plenty of room and I shot by him swearing at the little things that piled up one after the other.

  Then I grinned because that was where the puzzle was. In all the little things.

  Like the boys who tried to take me when I was putting the buzz on Hooker.

  Like the money that Decker had picked up from somewhere to pay off Dixie Cooper.

  Like Decker putting his affairs in order before he walked out and got himself bumped.

  Now I knew where I was going and what I wanted to do, so I got off the avenue onto a street and headed west until I could smell the river and see the trucks pulling into their docks for the night and hear the mixture of tongues as the longshoremen streamed out of the yards.

  The nearest of them were still ten minutes away when I pulled up outside the hole-in-the-wall saloon and there weren’t any early birds inside when I pushed the door open. The bartender was perched on a stool watching the television and his h
and automatically went out for a glass as he heard me slide up to the bar.

  I didn’t let him waste his beer. I said, “Remember me, buddy?”

  He had a frown all set and his mouth shaped to tell me off when his memory came back with a jolt. “Yeah.” His frown had a twisted look now.

  I leaned on the bar so my coat hung loose enough for him to see the leather of the gun sling and he knew I wasn’t kidding around. “Who were they, buddy?”

  “Look, I ...”

  “Maybe I ought to ask it different. Maybe I ought to ask it with the nose of a gun shoved down your throat. You can get it that way if you want.”

  He choked up a little and his eyes kept darting toward the door hoping someone would come in. He licked his lips to bring the words out and said, “I ... don’t know ... who the hell they were.”

  “You like it the hard way, don’t you? Now just once I’m going to tell you something and I want an answer. Scarface Hooker is dead. He was shot last night and because you know who they were you might be sitting on top of a powder keg. In case you’re not sure, let me tell you that you are right now ... with me. I’m going to bust you wide open or leave you for those babies to handle.”

  The guy started to sweat. It formed in little cold drops along the ridges of his forehead and rolled down his cheeks. He made a swipe with the back of his hand across his mouth and swallowed hard. “They was private detectives.”

  “They were like hell.”

  “Look, I’m telling ya, I saw their badges.”

  “Tell me some more.”

  “They come in here looking for Hooker. They said he was working against the union and pulling a lot of rough stuff. Hell, how’d I know? I’m a union man myself. If that’s what he was doing he shoulda got beat up. They showed me their badges and said they was working for the union so I played along.”

  “Ever see them before?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody else see them?”

  “Yeah.”