The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 33

  “Shut up and answer questions. You’re lucky I’m not a city cop or you’d be doing your talking with a light in your face. Where’d Decker get the dough to lay?”

  He relaxed into a sullen frown, his pudgy hands balled into tight fists. “He borrowed it, that’s where.”

  “From Dixie Cooper if you’ve forgotten.” He looked at me and if the name meant anything I couldn’t read it in his face. “How much did Decker drop to you?”

  “Hell, he went in the hole for a few grand, but don’t go trying to prove it. I don’t keep books.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “Goddamn you!” He came out of the chair and stood there shaking from head to foot. “I gave him that dough back so he could pay off his loan! Understand that? I hate them creeps who can’t stand a loss. The guy was ready to pull the dutch act so I gave him back his dough so’s he could pay off!”

  He stood there staring at me with his eyes hanging out of that livid face of his sucking in his breath with a wheezy rasp. “You’re lying, Toady,” I said: “You’re lying through your teeth.” My hands twisted in the lapels of his coat and I pulled him in close so I could spit on him if I felt like it. “Where were you when Decker was killed?”

  His hands fought with mine to keep me from choking him. “Here! I was ... right here! Let go of me!”

  “What about your boys ... Nocky and that other gorilla?”

  “I don’t know where they were. I ... didn’t have anything to do with that! Goddamn, that’s what I get for being a sucker! I should’ve let them work on the bastard. I should’ve kept his dough and kicked him out!”

  “Maybe they did work over somebody. They had Decker’s buddy all lined up for a shellacking until he shook ‘em off on me. I thought I taught ’em to keep their noses out of trouble, but I guess I didn’t teach ‘em hard enough. The guy they were going to give the business to died with a bullet in him the same night. I hear tell those boys work for you, and they weren’t out after the guy on their own.”

  “You ... you’re crazy!”

  “Am I? Who put them on Hooker ... you?”

  “Hooker?” He worked his head into a frown that wouldn’t stick.

  “Don’t play innocent, damn it. You know who I’m talking about. Mel Hooker. The guy who teamed up with Decker to play the nags.”

  An oversize tongue made a quick pass over his lips. “He ... yeah, I know. Hooker. Nocky and him got in a fight. It was when he picked up his dough and cleared out. He was drunk, see? He started shooting off his mouth about how it was all crooked and he talked enough to keep some dough from coming across the board. That’s how it was. Nocky tried to throw him out and he nearly brained him.”

  “So your boy picked him off?”

  “No, no. He wouldn’t do that. He was plenty mad, that’s why he was laying for him. He didn’t knock anybody off. I don’t go for that. Ask anybody, they’ll tell you I don’t go for rough stuff.”

  I gave him a shove to get him away from me. “For a bookie you’re a big-hearted son-of-a-bitch. You’re one in a million and, brother, you better be telling the truth, because if you aren’t you’re going to get a lot of that fat sweated off you. Where’s these two mugs?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  I didn’t play with him this time. I backhanded him across the mouth and did it again when he stumbled away and tried to grab the gun on the chair. His big belly shook so hard he swayed off balance and I gave it to him again. Then he just about fell into the chair and with the rod right under his hand he didn’t have the guts to make a play for it.

  I asked him again. “Where are they, Toady?”

  “They ... have rooms over the ... Rialto Restaurant.”

  “Names, Pal.”

  “Nocky ... he’s Arthur Cole. The other one’s Glenn Fisher.” He had to squeeze the words out between lips that were no more than a thin red gash in his face. The marks of my fingers were across his cheek, making it puff out even farther. I could tell that he was hoping I’d turn my back, even for a second. The crazy madness in his eyes made them bulge so far his eyelids couldn’t cover them.

  I turned my back. I did it when I picked up the phone, but there was a mirror right in front of me and I could stand there and watch him hate me while I thumbed through the directory until I found the number listed under “Cole” and dialed it.

  The phone rang, all right, but nobody answered it. Then I called the Rialto Restaurant and went through two waiters before the manager came on and told me that the boys didn’t live there any more. They had packed their bags about an hour before, climbed into a cab and scrammed. Yeah, they were all paid up and the management was glad to be rid of them.

  I hung up and turned around. “They beat it, Toady.”

  Link just sat.

  “Where’d they go?”

  His shoulders hunched into a shrug.

  “I have a feeling you’re going to die pretty soon, Toady,” I said. And after I said it I looked at him until it sank all the way in and put his eyes back in place so the eyelids could get over them. I picked up the gun that lay beside him, flipped out the cylinder and punched the shells into my hand. They were .44’s with copper-covered noses that could rip a guy in half. I tossed the empty rod back on the chair beside him and walked out of the room.

  Somehow the night smelled cleaner after Toady. The rain was a light mist washing the stink of the swamp away. It shaded part of the monstrous castle the ugly frog sat in as though it were ashamed of it. I looked back at the lights and I could see why they were all on. They were the guy’s only friends.

  When I got back in my car I drove down to the corner, swung around and came back up the street. Before I got as far as the house the Packard came roaring out of the drive and skidded halfway across the road before it straightened out and went tearing off down the street. I had to laugh because Toady wasn’t going anyplace at all. Not driving like that he wasn’t. Toady was so goddamn mad he had to take it out on something and tonight the car took the beating.

  I would have kept right on going myself if he hadn’t left the door wide open so that the light made a streaming yellow invitation down the gravel. I jammed on the brakes and left the car sitting, the motor turning over and picked up the invitation.

  The house was Toady’s attempt at respectability, but it was only an attempt. The upstairs lights were turned on from switches at the foot of the stairs and only one set of prints showed in the dust that lay over the staircase. There were three bedrooms, two baths and a sitting room on the top floor, a full apartment-sized layout on the second and the only places that had been used were one bedroom and a shower stall. Everything else was neat and dormant, with the dust-mop marks last week’s cleaning woman had left. Downstairs the kitchen was a mess of dirty dishes and littered newspapers. The pantry was stocked to take care of a hundred people who never came and the only things in the guest closet were Toady’s hat and coat that he hadn’t bothered to wear when he dashed out.

  I rummaged around in the library and the study without touching anything then went down the cellar and had a drink of private stock at his bar. It was a big place with knotty pine walls rimmed with a couple hundred beer steins that were supposed to give it the atmosphere of a beer garden. Off to one side was the poolroom with the balls neatly racked and gathering more dust. He even had a cigarette machine down there. The butts were on the house and all you had to do was yank the lever, so I had a pack of Luckies on Toady too.

  There were two other doors that led off the poolroom. One went into the furnace room and I stepped into a goddamned rattrap that nearly took my toes off. The other was a storeroom and I almost backed out of it when the white cloths that shrouded the stockpile of junk took shape. I found the light switch and turned it on. Instead of an overhead going on, a red light blossomed out over a sink on the end of the wall, turning everything a deep crimson.

  The place was a darkroom. Or at least it had been. The stuff hadn’t been touched since it was sto
red here. A big professional camera was folded up under wraps with a lot of movie-screen-type backdrops and a couple of wrought-iron benches. The processing chemicals and film plates had rotted away on a shelf next to a box that held the gummy remains of tubes of retouching paints. Off in the corner was a screwy machine of some sort that had its seams all carefully dustproofed with masking tape.

  I put the covers back in place and turned the light off. When I closed the door I couldn’t help thinking that Toady certainly tried hard to work up a hobby. In a way I couldn’t blame him a bit. For friends all that repulsive bastard had was a lot of toys and dust. The louse was rich as sin with nobody to spend his money on.

  I left the door open like I found it and climbed in under the wheel of my heap. I sat there feeling a little finger probing at my mind, trying to jar something into it that should already be there and the finger was still probing away when I got back to Manhattan and started down Riverside Drive.

  So damn many little things and none of them added up. Some place between a tenement slum that had belonged to Decker and Toady’s dismal swamp castle a killer was whistling his way along the street while I sat trying to figure out what a finger nudging my mind meant.

  Lord, I was tired. The smoke in the car stung my eyes and I had to open the window to let it out. What I needed was a long, natural sleep without anything at all to think and dream about, but up there in the man-built cliffs of steel and stone was Marsha and she said she’d wait for me. The back of my head started to hurt again and even the thought of maybe sleeping with somebody who had been a movie star didn’t make it go away.

  But I went up.

  And she was still waiting, too.

  Marsha said, “You’re late, Mike.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” She picked the hat out of my hand and waited while I peeled off my coat. When she had them stowed in the closet she hooked her arm under mine and took me inside.

  There were drinks all set up and waiting beside a bowl that had held ice but was now all water. The tall red candles had been lit, burned down a few inches, then had been blown out.

  “I thought you would have been here earlier. For supper perhaps.”

  She handed me a cigarette from a long narrow box and followed it with a lighter. When I had my lungs full of smoke I leaned back with my head pillowed against the chair and looked at her close up. She had on a light green dress that swirled up her body, over her shoulder and came down again to a thin leather belt at her waist. The swelling around her eye had gone down and in the soft light of the room the slight purple discoloration almost looked good.

  I watched her a second and grinned. “Now I’m nearly sorry I didn’t. You’re nice to look at, kitten.”

  “Just half?”

  “No. All this time. From top to bottom too.”

  Her eyes burned softly under long lashes. “I like it when you say it, Mike. You’re used to saying it too, aren’t you?”

  “Only to beautiful women.”

  “And you’ve seen plenty of them.” The laugh was in her voice now.

  I said, “You’ve got the wrong slant, kid. Pretty is what you mean. Pretty and beautiful are two different things. Only a few women are pretty, but even one who’s not so hot to look at can be beautiful. A lot of guys make mistakes when they turn down a beautiful woman for one who’s just pretty.”

  Her eyebrows went up in the slightest show of surprise, letting the fires of her irises leap into plain view. “I didn’t know you were a philosopher, Mike.”

  “There’re a lot of things you don’t know about me.”

  She uncurled from the chair and picked up the glasses from the table. “Should I?”

  “Uh-uh. They’re all bad.” I got that look again, the one with the smile around the edges, then she brought in some fresh ice from the kitchen and made a pair of highballs. The one she gave me went down cold and easy, nestling there at the bottom of my stomach with a pleasant, creeping kind of warmth that tiptoed silently throughout my body until it was the nicest thing in the world to just sit there with my eyes half shut and listen to the rain drum against the windows.

  Marsha’s hand went to the switch on the record player, flooding the room with the soft tones of the “Blue Danube.” She filled the glasses again, then drifted to the floor at my feet, laying her head back against my knees. “Nice?” she asked me.

  “Wonderful. I’m right in the mood to enjoy it.”

  “You still ...”

  “That’s right. Still.” I closed my eyes all the way for a minute. “Sometimes I think I’m standing still too. It’s never been like this before.”

  Her hand found mine and pulled it down to her cheek. I thought I felt her lips brush my fingers, but I wasn’t sure. “Do you have the boy yet?”

  “Yeah, he’s in good hands. Tomorrow or maybe the next day they’ll come for him. He’ll be all right.”

  “I wish there was something I could do. Are you sure there isn’t? Could I keep him for you?”

  “He’d be too much for you. Hell, he’s only a little over a year old. I have a nurse for him. She’s old, but reliable.”

  “Then let me take him out for a walk or something. I really do want to help, Mike, honest.”

  I ran my fingers through the sheen of her hair and across the soft lines of her face. This time I knew it when her lips parted in a kiss on my palm.

  “I wish you could, Marsha. I need help. I need something. This whole thing is getting away from me.”

  “Would it help to tell me about it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then tell me.”

  So I told her. I sat there staring at the ceiling with Marsha on the floor and her head on my knees and I told her about it. I lined up everything from beginning to end and tried to put them together in the right order.

  When you strung them out like that it didn’t take long to tell. They made a nice neat pile of facts, one on top of the other, but there was nothing there to hold them together. One little push scattered them all over the place. Before I finished my jaws ached from holding my teeth together so tightly.

  “Being so mad won’t help you think,” Marsha said.

  “I gotta be mad. Goddamn, you can’t go at a thing like this unless you are mad. I never knew much about kids, but when I held the Decker boy in my hands I could see why a guy would give his insides to keep his kid alive. Right there is the thing that screws everything up. Decker knew he was going to die and didn’t try to do a single thing about it. Three days before, he knew it was going to happen too. He got all his affairs put right and waited. God knows what he thought about in those three days.”

  “It couldn’t have been nice.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t get it at all.” I rubbed my face disgustedly. “Decker and Hooker tie in with Toady Link and he ties in with Grindle and Teen and it was one of Grindle’s boys who shot Decker. There’s a connection there if you want to look for one.”

  “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “But I am. In a way it started with me. I keep thinking of the boy.”

  “It would have been the same if Decker had broken into the other apartment. The guy knew he was going to die ... but why? Whether or not he got what he was after he was still planning to die!”

  Marsha lifted her face and turned around. “Couldn’t it have been ... a precaution? Perhaps he was planning to run out with the money. In that case he would know there was a possibility that they might catch up with him. As it was, it turned out to be the same thing. He knew they’d never believe his story about the wrong apartment so he ran anyway, bringing about the same results.”

  My eyes felt hot and heavy. “It’s crazy as hell. It’s a mess no matter how I look at it, but someplace there’s an answer and it’s lost in my head. I keep trying to work it loose and it won’t come. Every time I stop to think about it I can feel it sitting here and if the damn thing was human it would laugh at me. Now I can’t even thin
k any more.”

  “Tired, darling?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at her and she looked at me and we were both thinking the same thing. Then her head dropped slowly and her smile had a touch of sadness in it.

  “I’m a fool, aren’t I?” she said.

  “You’re no fool, Marsha.”

  “Mike ... have you ever been in love?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that so I just nodded.

  “Was it nice?”

  “I thought so.” I was hoping she wouldn’t ask me any more. Even after five years it hurt to think about it.

  “Are you ... now?” Her voice was low, almost inaudible. I caught the brief flicker of her eyes as she glanced at my face.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what to tell her.

  She smiled at her hands and I smiled with her. “That’s good,” she laughed. Her eyes went bright and happy and she tossed her head so that her hair fell in a glittering dark halo around her shoulders. “I had tonight all planned. I was going to be a fool anyway and make you want me so that you’d keep wanting me.”

  “It’s been like that.”

  She came up off the floor slowly, gracefully, reaching for my hand to pull me out of the chair. Her mouth was warmer than it should have been. Her body was supple and lovely, like a fluid filling in the gaps between us. I ran my fingers through her hair, pulling her face away while still wanting to keep her crushed against me.

  “Why, Marsha?” I asked. “Why me? You know what I’m like. I’m not fancy and I’m not famous and I work for my dough. I’m not in your class at all.”

  She looked up at me with an expression you don’t try to describe. A sleepy expression that wasn’t a bit tired. Her hands slid up my back and tightened as she leaned against me. “Let me be a woman, Mike. I don’t want those things you say you’re not. I’ve had them. I want all the things you are. You’re big and not so handsome, but there’s a devil inside you that makes you exciting and tough, yet enough of an angel to make you tender when you have to be.”

  My hands wanted to squeeze right through her waist until they met and I had to let her go or she would have felt the way they were shaking. I turned around and reached for the bottle and glass on the table and while I was pouring one there was a click and the light dimmed to a pale glow.