The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 35

  “Are you positive that he’s the one who did the shooting?”

  “As positive as the paraffin test. Of course, he may have discharged the bullet prior to the killing, but if he did I don’t know where. If this Decker thing has even the slightest tie-up with the boys we want then we’ll get to it.”

  “Hang on, Pat. I’m not saying that it has.”

  “I’ll damn soon find out.”

  I tried to be unconcerned as I pulled on my smoke. “How about letting me find out for you. So far Decker has been my party.”

  “Nix, Mike. I know what you want. All you have in your head is the idea that you want to tangle with that killer. Not this time. Taking that one guy out of play could screw up this whole thing so nicely we’ll be left with nothing at all.”

  “Okay, pal,” I grinned, “go right to it. Just try to get an identification Out of me. Just try it.”

  “Mike ...”

  “Aw, nuts, Pat. I’m as critical to this thing as those two mugs are. It was me who saw them and me who pushed them around. Without my say-so you don’t have a thing to haul them in on. You’re taking all the gravy for yourself ... or at least you’re trying to.”

  “What do you want, Mike?”

  “I want three or four days to make my own play. Things are just beginning to look up. I’d like a file on Toady Link too.”

  “That’s impossible. The D.A. has it classified top secret. That’s out.”

  “Can’t you get it, kid?”

  “Nope. That would mean an explanation and I’m not giving blue boy a chance to climb up my back again.”

  “Well, hell ... do you know anything about the guy at all?”

  He leaned back in the chair and shook his head slowly. “Probably no more than you know, Mike. I haven’t done anything more than listen in and supply a little information I had when Toady’s name came up. The D.A. had his own men doing the legwork.”

  I looked out the window and while I watched the people on the roofs across the street Pat studied my face and studied it hard. I could feel his eyes crawl across me and make everything I was thinking into thoughts and words of his own.

  He said, “You’re thinking Toady Link’s the last step in the chain, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Spell it out for me.”

  So I spelled it out. I said, “Big-money boys like to splurge. They say they go for wine, women and song but whoever said it forgot to add the ponies too. Go out to the races and take a look around. Take a peek at the limousines and convertibles and the bank rolls that own them.”

  “So?”

  “So there was a big-money boy named Marvin Holmes who likes his blondes fast and furious and very much on hand. He spends his dough like water and keeps plenty of it locked up in a safe on his wall. He plays the nags through a bookie named Toady Link and doesn’t like the way the ponies run so he won’t pay off his bet. He’s too big to push around, but Link can’t take a welch so he looks around for a way to get his dough. Somebody tips him about a former safe expert named Decker, but the guy is honest and wants to stay that way. Okay, so Toady waits until the guy needs dough. He finds out who his friend is ... a guy named Mel Hooker, and pays him to steer Decker his way. They use a rigged-up deal to make it look like they’re winning a pot and everybody is happy. Then Decker goes in over his head. He borrows from a loan shark to make the big kill and loses everything. That’s where the pressure starts. He’s not a big shot and he’s got a kid and he’s an easy mark to push around. He knows what happens on this loan-shark deal and he’s scared, so when Toady comes up with the proposition of opening a safe ... a simple little thing like that ... Decker grabs it, takes a pay-off from Link to keep the shark off his neck and goes to it.

  “It would have been fine if Decker had hit the right apartment, but he made a mistake he couldn’t afford. He had to take a powder. Maybe he had even planned on taking a powder and arranged for his kid to be taken care of if things didn’t go right. I don’t know about that. He had something planned anyway. The only trouble was that he didn’t plan well enough, or the guys who went out with him in the job were too sharp. They had him cold. Basil shot him then went over him for the dough. He must have yelled out that Decker was clean just before I started shooting. When he went down the driver couldn’t afford to let him be taken alive and ran over him.

  “Just take it from there ... he already knew where Decker lived and thought that maybe when he went back for his kid he stashed the dough he was supposed to have. The guy searched the place and couldn’t find it. Then he got the idea that maybe Basil had been too hurried when he searched Decker’s corpse ... but I had been right there and figured that I wouldn’t overlook picking up a pile from a corpse if I got the chance. So while I was out my apartment was searched and I came back in time to catch the guy at it. I was in too damn much of a hurry and he beat the hell out of me.

  “Now let’s suppose it was Toady. Two guys are dead and he can be right in line for the hot seat if somebody gets panicky and talks. After all, Hooker didn’t know the details of the kill so he could have thought that Toady was getting him out of the way to keep him from talking. That puts him in the same spot and he’s scared stiff. Evidently he did have one run-in with the tough boys before and carried the scar around on his face to prove it.

  “So Hooker spots two of Toady’s boys and gets the jumps. They’re sticking around waiting for the right spot to stick him. When Hooker got confidential with me they must have thought that Mel was asking for protection or trying to get rid of what I knew so they tried to take me. They muffed that one and went back to get Hooker. They didn’t muff that one.

  “Up to there Toady didn’t have too much to worry about, but when I showed my face he got scared. Just before that he packed his boys out of town because he couldn’t afford to have them around, so if we can get them back we ought to finger Toady without any trouble at all. Not the least little bit of trouble.”

  There was a silence that lasted for a full minute and I could hear Pat breathing and my own watch ticking. Pat said, “That’s supposing you got all this dealt out right.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We can find out soon enough.” He picked up the phone and said, “Give me an outside line, please,” and while he waited riffled through the phone book. I heard the dial tone come on and Pat fingered out a number. The phone ringing on the other end made a faraway hum. Then it stopped. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Holmes,” Pat said. “This is Captain Chambers, Homicide, speaking.”

  He sat there and frowned at the wall while he listened, then put the receiver back too carefully. “He’s gone, Mike. He left for South America with one of his blondes yesterday morning.”

  “That’s great,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like me at all.

  Pat’s mouth got tight around the corners. “That’s perfect. It proves your point. The guy isn’t too big to push around after all. Somebody’s scared him right out of the city. You called every goddamn move right on the nose.”

  “I hope so.”

  I guess he didn’t like the way I said it.

  “It looks good to me.”

  “It looks too good. I wish we had the murder weapons to back it up.”

  “Metal doesn’t rot out that fast. If we get those two we’ll get the gun and we’ll get Toady too. It doesn’t matter which one we get him for.”

  “Maybe. I’d like to know who drove the car that night.”

  “Toady certainly wouldn’t do it himself.”

  I stopped watching the people on the roof across the way and turned my face toward Pat. “I’m thinking that he did, Pat. If it was the kind of haul he expected he wasn’t going to let it go through a few hands before it got back to him. Yeah, feller, I think I’ll tag Toady with this one.”

  “Not you, Mike ... we’ll tag him for it. The police. The public. Justice. You know.”

  “Want to bet?”

  Suddenly he wasn’t my friend any more. His eyes wer
e too gray and his face was too bland and I was the guy in the chair who was going to keep answering questions until he was done with me. Or that’s what he thought.

  I said, “A few minutes ago I asked you if you’d like to nail the whole batch of them at once.”

  “So there’s more to it?”

  “There could be. Lots more. Only if I get a couple extra days first.”

  Something you might call a smile threw a shadow around his mouth. “You know what will happen to me if you mess things up?”

  “Do you know what might happen to me?”

  “You might get yourself killed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, Mike, you got your three days. God help you if you get in a jam because I won’t.”

  He was lying both times and I knew it. I’d no more get three days than he’d give me a boot when I needed a hand, but I played it like I didn’t catch the drift and got up out of my chair. He was sitting there with the same expression when I closed the door, but his hand had already started to reach for the phone.

  I went down the corridor to where a bunch of typewriters were banging out a madhouse symphony and asked one of the stenos where I could find Ellen Scobie. She told me that she had gone out to lunch at noon and was expected back that afternoon, but I might still find her in the Nelson Steak House if I got over there right away.

  It took me about ten minutes to make the four blocks and there was Ellen in the back looking more luscious than the oversize T-bone steak she was gnawing on.

  She saw me and waved and I wondered what it was going to cost to get hold of that file on Toady Link.

  It made nice wondering.

  CHAPTER 7

  She was all in black, but without Ellen inside it the dress would have been nothing. The sun had kissed her skin into a light toast color, dotting the corner of her eyes with freckles. Her hair swept back and down, caressing her bare shoulders whenever she moved her head.

  She said, “Hello, man.”

  I slid in across the table. “Did you eat yourself out of company?”

  “Long ago. My poor working friends had to get back to the office.”

  “What about you?”

  “You are enjoying the sight of a woman enjoying the benefits of working overtime when the city budget doesn’t allow for unauthorized pay. They had to give me the time off. Want something to eat?”

  A waitress sneaked up behind me and poised her pencil over her pad. “I’ll have a beer and a sandwich. Ham. Plenty of mustard and anything else you can squeeze on.”

  Ellen made a motion for another coffee and went back to the remains of the steak. I had my sandwich and beer without benefit of small talk until we were both finished and relaxing over a smoke.

  She was nice to look at. Not because she was pretty all over, but because there was something alive about everything she did. Now she was propped in the corner of the booth with one leg half up on the bench grinning because the girl across the way was talking her head off to keep her partner’s attention. The guy was trying, but his eyes kept sliding over to Ellen every few seconds.

  I said, “Give the kid a break, will you?”

  She laughed lightly, way down in her throat, then leaned on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. “I feel real wicked when I do things like that.”

  “Your friends must love you.”

  “Ooh,” her mouth made a pouty little circle, “... they do. The men, I mean. Like you, Mike. You came in here especially to see me. You find me so attractive that you can’t stay away.” She laughed again.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I even dream about you.”

  “Like hell.”

  “No kidding, I mean it.”

  “I can picture you going out of your way for a woman. I’d give my right arm to hear you say that in a different tone of voice, though. There’s something about you that fascinates me. Now that we have the love-making over with, what do I have that you want?”

  I shouldn’t have let my eyes do what they did.

  “Besides that, I mean,” she said.

  “Your boss has a certain file on Toady Link. I want a look at it.”

  Her hands came together to cover her eyes. “I should have known. I spend every waking hour making myself pretty for you, hoping that you’ll pop in on me and when you do you ask me to climb up a cloud.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s ... well, it’s almost impossible, Mike.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes drifted away from mine reluctantly. “Mike, I ...”

  “It isn’t exactly secret information with me, Ellen. Pat told me about the D.A. getting ready to wrap Link up in a gray suit.”

  “Then he should have told you that those files are locked and under guard. He doesn’t trust anybody.”

  “He trusts you.”

  “And if I get caught doing a thing like that I’ll not only lose this job and never be able to get another one, but I’ll get a gray suit too. I don’t like the color.” She reached out and plucked a Lucky from my pack and toyed with it before accepting the light I held out.

  “I only want a look at it, kid. I don’t want to steal the stuff and I won’t pass the information along to anybody.”

  “Please, Mike.”

  I bent the match in my fingers and threw it on my plate. “Okay, okay. Maybe I’m asking too damn much. You know what the score is as well as I do. Everything is so almighty secret with the D.A. that he doesn’t know what he has himself. If he’d open up on what he knows he’d get a little more action out of the public. Right now he’s trying to squelch the big-time gambling in the city and what happens? Everybody thinks it’s funny. By God, if they had a look behind the scenes at what’s been going on because of the same gambling they condone they’d think twice about it. They ought to take a look at a corpse with some holes punched in it. They ought to take a look at some widows crying at a funeral or a kid who was made an orphan crying for his father who’s one of the corpses.”

  The cigarette had burned down in her fingers without being touched, the long ash drooping wearily, ready to fall. Ellen’s eyes were bright and smoky at the same time—languid eyes that hid the thoughts behind them.

  “I’ll get it for you, Mike.”

  I waited and saw the richness of her lips grow richer with a smile.

  “But it’ll cost you,” she said.

  I didn’t get it for a second. “Cost me what?”

  “You.”

  And that thing on my spine started crawling around again.

  She reached out for my hand and covered it with hers. “Mike ... you’re only incidental in the picture this time. It’s the only way I’ll ever be able to get you and it’s worth it even if I have to buy you. But it’s because of what you said that I’m doing it.”

  There was something new about her, something I hadn’t noticed before. I said, “You’ll never have to buy me, Ellen.”

  It was a long minute before I could take my eyes off her face and get rid of the thing chasing up my back. The waitress dropped the check on the table and I put down a bill to cover them both and told her to keep the change. When we came out of the booth together the guy across the room looked at me enviously and Ellen longingly. His lunch date looked relieved.

  We went back to the street and got as far as the bar on the corner. Ellen stopped me and nodded toward the door. “Wait here for me. I can’t go back upstairs or somebody’s likely to think it peculiar.”

  “Then how are you going to get the file out?”

  “Patty—my short and stout roommate, if you remember—is on this afternoon. I’ll call her and have her take them when she leaves this evening. The way my luck runs, if I took them any earlier he’d pick just this day to want to see them.”

  “That’s smart,” I agreed. “You know her well enough so there won’t be a hitch, don’t you?”

  She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Patty owes me more favors than I can count. I’ve never asked her for anything
before and I might as well start now. I’ll be back in about ten minutes. Stay at the bar and wait for me, will you?”

  “Sure. Then what?”

  “Then you’re going to take me to the races. Little Ellen cleans up today.”

  I gave her my fattest smile and jingled a pocketful of coins. “Pat told me about that. You’re not going to be selfish about the thing, are you?”

  “I think we’re both going to have a profitable day, Mike,” she said impishly. She wasn’t talking about money, either. I watched her cross the street and admired her legs until she was out of sight, then went into the bar and ordered a beer.

  The television was tuned to the game in Brooklyn and the bets were flowing heavy and fast. I stayed out of the general argument and put my beer away. A tall skinny guy came in and stood next to me and did the same thing himself. A kid came in peddling papers and I bought one before the bartender told him to scram and quit annoying the customers.

  But it didn’t do any good. The guys on my left were arguing batting averages and one poked me to get my opinion. I said he was right and the other guy started jawing again and appealed to the tall skinny guy. He shrugged and tapped his ear, then took a hearing aid out of his shirt pocket and made indications that it wasn’t working. He was lucky. They turned back to me again, spotted my paper and I handed it over to settle the argument. The one guy still wouldn’t give in and I was about to become the backstop of a beautiful brawl.

  But Ellen walked in just then and baseball switched to sex in whispers. I got her out so they could see her going away and really have something to talk about.

  She cuddled up under my arm all the way back to the car and climbed in next to me looking cool and lovely and very pleased with herself. When I had about as much silence as I could take I asked, “Did it work out?”

  “Patty was glad to help out. She was a little nervous about it, but she said she’d wait until everyone had cleared out and put it in her brief case. She’s taking some work home with her tonight and it shouldn’t be hard to do at all.”