The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 36

  “Good girl.”

  “Don’t I deserve a kiss for effort?” She timed it as the light turned red.

  Her mouth wasn’t as cool as it looked. It was warm, a nice soft, live warmth with a delicate spicy sweetness that was excited into a heady wine by the tip of her tongue.

  Then the car behind me blasted that the light was green again and I had to put my cup of wine down not fully tasted.

  * * *

  I hit three winners that afternoon. The two of us crowded the railing and yelled our heads off to push the nags home and when the last one slowed up in the stretch my heart slowed up with it because I had a parlay riding on his nose that was up in four figures. Fifty yards from the finish the jock laid on the whip and he crossed the line leading by a nostril.

  Ellen shook my arm. “You can open your eyes now. He won.”

  I checked the board to make sure and there it was in big square print. I looked at the tickets that had gotten rolled up in the palm of my hand. “I’ll never do that again! How the hell do the guys who bet all their lives stand this stuff! You know what I just won?”

  “About four thousand dollars, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, and before this I worked for a living.” I smoothed out the pasteboards with my thumb and forefinger. “You ought to be a millionaire, kitten.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why? You cleaned up today, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, I did very well.”

  “So?

  “I don’t like the color of the money.”

  “It’s green, isn’t it? You got a better color than that?”

  “I have a cleaner kind of green,” she said. Her body seemed to stiffen with a tension of some sort, drawing her hands into tight little fists. “You know why I like to see the Scobie horses win. It’s the only way and the best way I can get back at my father. Just because of me he tries to run them under other colors, but I always learn about it before the races. He pays me a living whether he wants to or not and it hurts him right where he should be hurt. However, it’s still money that came from him, even if it was indirectly given, and I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Well, if you’re going to throw it away, I’ll take it.”

  “It doesn’t get thrown away. You’ll see where it goes.”

  We walked back to the ticket window and picked up a neat little pile of brand-new bills. They felt crisp as new lettuce and smelled even better. I folded mine into my wallet and stowed it away with a fond pat on the leather and started thinking of a lot of things that needed buying bad. Ellen threw hers in the wallet as if it happened every day. Thinking about it like that put a nasty buzz in my head.

  “Why can’t somebody follow you play for play? If anybody used your system and put a really big bundle down the odds would go skittering all over the place.”

  She gave me a faint smile and took my hand going up the ramp to the gate. “It doesn’t work that way, Mike. All Scobie horses don’t win by a long sight. It just happens that I know the ones that will win. It isn’t that I’m a clever handicapper either. Dad has a trainer working for him who taught me all I know about horses. Whenever a winner is coming up I’m notified about it and place my bets.”

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “That’s all. Once the papers did a piece about it and according to them I did all the picking and choosing. I let them get the idea just to infuriate the old boy. It worked out fine.”

  “You’re a screwball,” I said. She looked hurt. “But you’re nice,” I added. She squeezed my arm and rubbed her face against my shoulder.

  On the way back to the city the four G’s in my pocket started burning through and it was all I could do to keep it there and let it burn. I wanted to stop off at the fanciest place we could find and celebrate with a drink, but Ellen shook her head and made me drive over to the East Side, pointing out the directions every few minutes.

  Everything was going fine until we got stuck behind a truck and I had a chance to see where we were. Then everything wasn’t so fine at all. There was a run-down bar with the glass cracked across the center facing the sidewalk. The door opened and a guy walked out, and before it shut again the familiarity of it came back with a rush and I could smell the rain and the beer-soaked sawdust and almost see a soggy little guy kissing his kid good-by.

  My throat went dry all of a sudden and I breathed a curse before I wrenched the wheel and sent the heap screaming around the truck to get the hell out of the neighborhood.

  We went straight ahead for six blocks, then Ellen said, “Turn right at the next street and stop near the corner.”

  I did as I was told and parked between a beer truck and a dilapidated sedan. She opened the door and stepped out, looking back at me expectantly. “Coming, Mike?”

  I said okay and got out myself.

  Then she walked me into a settlement house that was a resurrected barn or something. The whole business took about five minutes. I got introduced to a pair of nice old ladies, a clergyman and a cop who was having a cup of tea with the old ladies. Everybody was all smiles and joy and when Ellen gave one of the women a juicy wad of bills I thought they were going to cry.

  Ellen, it seemed, practically supported the establishment.

  I had a chance to look through the door at a mob of raggedy kids playing in the gym and I got rid of a quarter of the bundle of my wallet. I avoided a lot of thanks and got back to the car as fast as I could and looked at Ellen like I hadn’t seen her before.

  “Boy, am I a big-hearted slob,” I said.

  She laughed once and leaned over and kissed me. This time I had a long sip of the wine before she took my cup away. “It was worth it at that,” I mused.

  “You know something, Mike ... you’re not such a heel. I mean, such a very big heel.”

  I told her not to come to any hasty conclusions and backed the car out. It was a quarter to six and both of us were pretty hungry, so I drove up Broadway to a lot, left the car and walked back to a place that put out good food as well as good dinner music. While we waited for our orders Ellen bummed a nickel from me and went back to the phone booth to call Patty.

  I could hardly wait for her to sit down again. “Get her?”

  “Uh-huh. Everything’s all set. Most of the office crew have left already. She’ll leave the stuff at the house for us.”

  “Could we meet her somewhere? It would save time.”

  “Too risky. I’d rather not. Patty seemed a little jittery on the phone and I doubt if she’d like it either. I only hope they can be put back as easily as they’re taken out.”

  “You won’t have any trouble.” Maybe I didn’t put enough conviction in my voice, because she just looked at me and bent down to her salad. I said, “Now quit worrying. There won’t be anything there that I couldn’t find out if I had the time to look for it.”

  “All right, Mike, it’s just that I’ve never done anything like that before. I won’t worry.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me and dug into her supper.

  It was eight-ten when we left the place. A thunderhead was moving up over Jersey blotting out the stars, replacing them with the dull glow of sheet lightning. I let Ellen pick up a couple quarts of beer while I rolled the car out and met her on the corner. She hopped in as the first sprinkle of rain tapped on the roof.

  Sidewalks that were just damp a moment before took on a black sheen of water and drained it off into the gutter. Even with the wipers swatting furiously like a batter gone mad I could hardly see out. The car in front of me was a wavering shadow with one sick red eye, the neon signs and window fronts on either side just a ghostly parade of colors.

  It was another night like that first one. The kind that made you run anywhere just to get away from it. You could see the vague shapes that were people huddled under marquees and jammed into doorways, the braver making the short dash to waiting cabs and wishing they hadn’t.

  By the time we reached Ellen’s apartment it had slacked off in
to a steady downpour without the electrical fury that turned the night into a noisy, deafening day.

  A doorman with an oversize umbrella led Ellen into the foyer and came back for me. Once we were out of it we could laugh. I was only making sloshing noises with my shoes but Ellen had gotten rained on down the back and her dress was plastered against her skin like a postage stamp. Going up in the elevator she stood with her back against the wall and edged sidewise after making me walk ahead of her.

  I was going to knock first, but she poked her key in the lock and waved me inside.

  “Nobody home?”

  “Don’t be silly. Tonight’s date night ... or haven’t you noticed the couples arm in arm dashing for shelter.”

  “Yeah.” I kicked my shoes off and carried them out to the kitchen. Ellen dumped the beer on the table and showed me where the glasses were.

  “Pour me, Mike. I’ll be back as soon as I get these wet things off.”

  “Hurry up.”

  She grinned at me and waltzed out while I was uncorking the bottles. I just finished topping the glasses off when she waltzed right back in again wrapped up in a huge terrycloth bathrobe, rubbing the rain out of her hair with a towel.

  I handed her a glass and we clinked them in a toast we didn’t speak. I drank without taking my eyes from hers, watching the deep blue swirl into a smoky gray that seemed to come up from the depths of a fire.

  It got to be a little more than I could take. She knew it when I said, “Let’s look at the files, Ellen.”

  “All right.” She tucked the bottle under her arm and I trailed after her into the living room. A large console set took up a corner of the room and she pulled it away from the wall and worked her hand into the opening.

  “Your private safe?”

  “For intimate letters, precious nylons and anything else a nosy cleaning woman might take home with her.”

  She pulled out another of those manila folders held together with a thick rubber band and handed it to me. My hand started to shake when I worked the band off it. The thing snapped and flew across the room.

  I took it sitting down. I reached in and pulled out a stack of official reports, four photographs and more affidavits than I could count. I spread them out across the coffee table and scanned them to see what I could pick up, laying the discards on top of the empty folder. When I tried to do it carefully I got impatient, and when I went faster I got clumsy and knocked the whole batch on the floor. Ellen picked them up and sorted them out again and I went on from there.

  I was cursing myself and the whole damn mess long before I was finished because it was ending in a blank, a goddamn stone wall with nothing there but a fat ha-ha and to hell with you, bub. My hand went out of its own accord and spilled everything all across the room while Ellen let out a little scream and stepped back with her hand to her mouth.

  “Mike!”

  “I’m sorry, kid. It’s a dud. Goddamn it, there’s not a thing in there!”

  “Oh, Mike ... it can’t be! The D.A. has been working on that a month!”

  “Sure, trying to tangle Link up in that lousy gambling probe of his. So he proves he’s a bookie. Hell, anybody can tell you that. All he had to do was go in and lay a bet with the guy himself. I’ll say he’s worked a month on it. Link doesn’t stand a chance of getting out of this little web, but for all the time he’ll draw for it, it will be worth it.”

  I scooped up a couple of the reports and slammed them with my fingers. “Look at this stuff. Two official reports that give any kind of background on the guy at all and those were turned in while Roberts was the D.A. What was going on in all the years until a month ago?”

  Ellen glanced at the reports curiously and took them out of my hand, tapping the rubber-stamped number in the upper right-hand corner with her finger. “This is a code number, Mike. These reports are part of a series.”

  “Where are the rest of them then?”

  “Either in the archives or destroyed. I won’t say so for certain, but it’s more likely that they were discarded. I’ve been with the department long enough to have seen more than one new office holder make a clean sweep of everything including what was in the files.”

  “Damn!”

  “I’ll check on it the first thing in the morning, Mike. There’s a possibility that they’re stored away someplace.”

  “Nuts on tomorrow morning. There isn’t that much time to waste. There has to be another way.”

  She folded the sheets up carefully, running her nail along the edges. “I can’t think of anything else unless you want to contact Roberts. He might remember something about the man.”

  “That’s an idea. Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know ... but I can find out.” She looked at me pensively. “Does it have to be tonight?”

  “Tonight.”

  I caught up with her before she reached the phone. I put my arms around her and breathed the fragrance that was her hair. “I’m sorry, kitten.”

  Ellen let her head fall back on my shoulder and looked up at me. “It’s all right, Mike, I understand.”

  She had to make three separate calls to locate Roberts’ number. It was an address in Flushing and when she had it she handed me the phone to do the calling. It was a toll call, so I put it through the operator and listened to it ring on the other end. When I was about ready to hang up a woman came on and said, “Hello, this is Mrs. Roberts.”

  “Can I speak to Mr. Roberts, please?”

  “I’m sorry, but he isn’t home right now. Can I take a message?”

  Somebody had bottled up all my luck and thrown it down the drain. I said, “No, but can you tell me when he’ll be back?”

  “Not until tomorrow sometime. I expect him about noon.”

  “Well, thanks. I’ll call him then. ‘By.”

  I tried not to slam the receiver back in its cradle. I tried to sit on myself to keep from exploding and if it hadn’t been for Ellen chuckling to herself from the depths of the couch I would have kicked something across the room. I spun around to tell her to shut up, but when a woman looks at you the way she was doing you don’t say anything at all. You just stand there and look back because a toast-colored body that is all soft, molded curves and smooth hollows makes a picture to take your breath away, especially when it is framed against the thick texture of white terrycloth.

  She laughed again and said, “You’re trapped, Mike.”

  I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t trapped at all, but there wasn’t any room for words in my throat. I walked across the room and stood there staring at her, watching her come up off the couch into my arms to prove that she was real and not just a picture after all.

  The cup was full this time, the wine mellow and sweet, and she was writhing in my arms fighting to breathe, yet not wanting me to stop holding her. I heard her say, “Mike ... I’m sorry you’re trapped, but I’m glad ... glad.” And I kissed her mouth shut again letting the rain slashing against the window pitch the tempo, hearing it rise and rise in a crescendo of fury, shrieking at me because the minutes were things not to be wasted.

  It took all I had to shove her away. “Texas gal, don’t make it rough for me. Not now.”

  She opened her eyes slowly, her fingers kneading my back. “I can’t even buy you, can I?”

  “You know better than that, sugar. Let me finish what I have to do first.”

  “If I let you get away you’ll never come back, Mike. There are too many others waiting for you. Every week, every month there will be someone new.”

  “You know too much.”

  “I know I’m a Texas gal who likes a Texas man.”

  My grin was a little flat. “I’m a city boy, kid.”

  “An accident of birth. Everything else about you is Texas. Even a woman doesn’t come first with you.”

  She stretched up on her toes, not far because she didn’t have to go far, and kissed me lightly. “Sometimes Texas men do come back. That’s why there are always more Texas men.”
She smiled.

  “Don’t forget to take those files in,” I reminded her. Then there was nothing more to say.

  I went back to the rain and the night, looking up just once to see her silhouetted against the window waving to me. She didn’t see me, but I waved back to her. She would have liked it if she’d known what I was thinking.

  On the way back I stopped off for a drink and a sandwich and tried to think it out. I wanted to be sure of what I was doing before I stuck my neck out. I spent an hour going over the whole thing, tying it into Toady Link and no matter how I looked at it the picture was complete.

  At least I tried to tell myself that it was.

  I said it over and over to myself the same way I told Pat, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind that some place something didn’t fit. It was only a little thing, but it’s the little things that hold bigger things together. I sat there and told myself that it was Toady who drove the murder car and Toady who gave the orders to Arnold Basil because he couldn’t afford to trust anybody else to do the job right. I told myself that it was Toady who engineered Hooker’s death and tried to engineer mine.

  Yet the more I told myself the more that little voice inside my head would laugh and poke its finger into some forgotten recess and try to jar loose one fact that would make me see what the picture was really like.

  I gave up in disgust, paid my bill and walked out.

  I walked right into trouble, too. Pat was slouched up against the wall outside my apartment with the friendliness gone completely from his face.

  He didn’t even give me a chance to say hello. He held out his hand with an abruptness I wasn’t used to. “Let’s have your gun, Mike.”

  I didn’t argue with him. He packed it open, checked the chamber and the slide, then smelled the barrel.

  “You already know when I shot it last,” I said.

  “I do?” It didn’t sound like a question at all.

  It started down low around my belly, that squeamish feeling when something is right there ready to pop in your face. “Quit being a jerk. What’s the act for?”