The Girl Hunters Page 4

  The first cabby in line glanced up once, ran his eyes up and down me, then went back to his paper. Great picture, I thought. I sure must cut a figure. I grinned, even though nothing was funny, and shoved my hands in my jacket pockets. In the right-hand one somebody had stuck five tens, neatly folded and I said, “Thanks, Art Rickerby, old buddy,” silently, and waved for the cab first in line to come over.

  He didn’t like it, but he came, asked me where to in a surly voice and when I let him simmer a little bit I told him Lex and Forty-ninth. When he dropped me there I let him change the ten, gave him two bits and waited some more to see if anyone had been behind me.

  No one had. If Pat or anyone else had been notified I had been released, he wasn’t bothering to stick with me. I gave it another five minutes then turned and walked north.

  Old Dewey had held the same corner down for twenty years. During the war, servicemen got their paper free, which was about as much as he could do for the war effort, but there were those of us who never forgot and Old Dewey was a friend we saw often so that we were friends rather than customers. He was in his eighties now and he had to squint through his glasses to make out a face. But the faces of friends, their voices and their few minutes’ conversation were things he treasured and looked forward to. Me? Hell, we were old friends from long ago, and back in the big days I never missed a night picking up my pink editions of the News and Mirror from Old Dewey, even when I had to go out of my way to do it. And there were times when I was in business that he made a good intermediary. He was always there, always dependable, never took a day off, never was on the take for a buck.

  But he wasn’t there now.

  Duck-Duck Jones, who was an occasional swamper in the Clover Bar, sat inside the booth picking his teeth while he read the latest Cavalier magazine and it was only after I stood there a half minute that he looked up, scowled, then half-recognized me and said, “Oh, hello, Mike.”

  I said, “Hello, Duck-Duck. What are you doing here?”

  He made a big shrug under his sweater and pulled his eyebrows up. “I help Old Dewey out alla time. Like when he eats. You know?”

  “Where’s he now?”

  Once again, he went into an eloquent shrug. “So he don’t show up yesterday. I take the key and open up for him. Today the same thing.”

  “Since when does Old Dewey miss a day?”

  “Look, Mike, the guy’s gettin’ old. I take over maybe one day every week when he gets checked. Doc says he got something inside him, like. All this year he’s been hurtin’.”

  “You keep the key?”

  “Sure. We been friends a long time. He pays good. Better’n swabbing out the bar every night. This ain’t so bad. Plenty of books with pictures. Even got a battery radio.”

  “He ever miss two days running?”

  Duck-Duck made a face, thought a second and shook his head. “Like this is the first time. You know Old Dewey. He don’t wanna miss nothin’. Nothin’ at all.”

  “You check his flop?”

  “Nah. You think I should? Like he could be sick or somethin’?”

  “I’ll do it myself.”

  “Sure, Mike. He lives right off Second by the diner, third place down in the basement. You got to—”

  I nodded curtly. “I’ve been there.”

  “Look, Mike, if he don’t feel good and wants me to stay on a bit I’ll do it. I won’t clip nothin’. You can tell him that.”

  “Okay, Duck.”

  I started to walk away and his voice caught me. “Hey, Mike.”

  “What?”

  He was grinning through broken teeth, but his eyes were frankly puzzled. “You look funny, man. Like different from when I seen you last down at the Chink’s. You off the hop?”

  I grinned back at him. “Like for good,” I said.

  “Man, here we go again,” he laughed.

  “Like for sure,” I told him.

  Old Dewey owned the building. It wasn’t much, but that and the newsstand were his insurance against the terrible thought of public support, a sure bulwark against the despised welfare plans of city and state. A second-rate beauty shop was on the ground floor and the top two were occupied by families who had businesses in the neighborhood. Old Dewey lived in humble quarters in the basement, needing only a single room in which to cook and sleep.

  I tried his door, but the lock was secure. The only windows were those facing the street, the protective iron bars imbedded in the brickwork since the building had been erected. I knocked again, louder this time, and called out, but nobody answered.

  Then again I had that funny feeling I had learned not to ignore, but it had been so long since I had felt it that it was almost new and once more I realized just how long it had been since I was in a dark place with a kill on my hands.

  Back then it had been different. I had the gun. I was big.

  Now was—how many years later? There was no gun. I wasn’t big anymore.

  I was what was left over from being a damn drunken bum, and if there were anything left at all it was sheer reflex and nothing else.

  So I called on the reflex and opened the door with the card the tall thin man gave me because it was an old lock with a wide gap in the doorframe. I shoved it back until it hit the door, standing there where anybody inside could target me easily, but knowing that it was safe because I had been close to death too many times not to recognize the immediate sound of silence it makes.

  He was on the floor face down, arms outstretched, legs spread, his head turned to one side so that he stared at one wall with the universal expression of the dead. He lay there in a pool of soup made from his own blood that had gouted forth from the great slash in his throat. The blood had long ago congealed and seeped into the cracks in the flooring, the coloring changed from scarlet to brown and already starting to smell.

  Somebody had already searched the room. It hadn’t taken long, but the job had been thorough. The signs of the expert were there, the one who had time and experience, who knew every possible hiding place and who had overlooked none. The search had gone around the room and come back to the body on the floor. The seams of the coat were carefully torn open, the pockets turned inside out, the shoes ripped apart.

  But the door had been locked and this was not the sign of someone who had found what he wanted. Instead, it was the sign of he who hadn’t and wanted time to think on it—or wait it out—or possibly study who else was looking for the same thing.

  I said, “Don’t worry, Dewey, I’ll find him,” and my voice was strangely hushed like it came from years ago. I wiped off the light switch, the knob, then closed the door and left it like I found it and felt my way to the back through the labyrinth of alleys that is New York over on that side and pretty soon I came out on the street again and it had started to rain.

  His name was Nat Drutman. He owned the Hackard Building where I used to have my office and now, seven years later, he was just the same—only a little grayer and a little wiser around the eyes and when he glanced up at me from his desk it was as if he had seen me only yesterday.

  “Hello, Mike.”

  “Nat.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  This time his eyes stayed on me and he smiled, a gentle smile that had hope in it. “It has been a long time.”

  “Much too long.”

  “I know.” He watched me expectantly.

  I said, “You sell the junk from my office?”

  “No.”

  “Store it?”

  He shook his head, just once. “No.”

  “No games, kid,” I said.

  He made the Lower East Side gesture with his shoulders and let his smile stay pat. “It’s still there, Mike.”

  “Not after seven years, kid,” I told him.

  “That’s so long?”

  “For somebody who wants their loot it is.”

  “So who needs loot?”

  “Nat—”

  “Yes, Mike?�
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  His smile was hard to understand.

  “No games.”

  “You still got a key?” he asked.

  “No I left to stay. No key. No nothing anymore.”

  He held out his hand, offering me a shiny piece of brass. I took it automatically and looked at the number stamped into it, a fat 808. “I had it made special,” he said.

  As best I could, I tried to be nasty. “Come off it, Nat.”

  He wouldn’t accept the act. “Don’t thank me. I knew you’d be back.”

  I said, “Shit.”

  There was a hurt look on his face. It barely touched his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but I knew I had hurt him.

  “Seven years, Nat. That’s a lot of rent.”

  He wouldn’t argue. I got that shrug again and the funny look that went with it. “So for you I dropped the rent to a dollar a year while you were gone.”

  I looked at the key, feeling my shoulders tighten. “Nat—”

  “Please—don’t talk. Just take. Remember when you gave? Remember Bernie and those men? Remember—”

  “Okay, Nat.”

  The sudden tension left his face and he smiled again. I said, “Thanks, kid. You’ll never know.”

  A small laugh left his lips and he said, “Oh I’ll know, all right. That’ll be seven dollars. Seven years, seven dollars.”

  I took out another ten and laid it on his desk. With complete seriousness he gave me back three ones, a receipt, then said, “You got a phone too, Mike. Same number. No ‘thank yous,’ Mike. Augie Strickland came in with the six hundred he owed you and left it with me so I paid the phone bill from it. You still got maybe a couple bucks coming back if we figure close.”

  “Save it for service charges,” I said.

  “Good to see you, Mike.”

  “Good to see you, Nat.”

  “You look pretty bad. Is everything going to be like before, Mike?”

  “It can never be like before. Let’s hope it’s better.”

  “Sure, Mike.”

  “And thanks anyway, kid.”

  “My pleasure, Mike.”

  I looked at the key, folded it in my fist and started out. When I reached the door Nat said, “Mike—” I turned around. “Velda… ?”

  He watched my eyes closely. “That’s why you’re back?”

  “Why?”

  “I hear many stories, Mike. Twice I even saw you. Things I know that nobody else knows. I know why you left. I know why you came back. I even waited because I knew someday you’d come. So you’re back. You don’t look like you did except for your eyes. They never change. Now you’re all beat up and skinny and far behind. Except for your eyes, and that’s the worst part.”

  “Is it?”

  He nodded. “For somebody,” he said.

  I put the key in the lock and turned the knob. It was like coming back to the place where you had been born, remembering, yet without a full recollection of all the details. It was a drawing, wanting power that made me swing the door open because I wanted to see how it used to be and how it might have been.

  Her desk was there in the anteroom, the typewriter still covered, letters from years ago stacked in a neat pile waiting to be answered, the last note she had left for me still there beside the phone some itinerant spider had draped in a nightgown of cobwebs.

  The wastebasket was where I had kicked it, dented almost double from my foot; the two captain’s chairs and antique bench we used for clients were still overturned against the wall where I had thrown them. The door to my office swung open, tendrils of webbing seeming to tie it to the frame. Behind it I could see my desk and chair outlined in the gray shaft of light that was all that was left of the day.

  I walked in, waving the cobwebs apart, and sat down in the chair. There was dust, and silence, and I was back to seven years ago, all of a sudden. Outside the window was another New York—not the one I had left, because the old one had been torn down and rebuilt since I had looked out that window last. But below on the street the sounds hadn’t changed a bit, nor had the people. Death and destruction were still there, the grand overseers of life toward the great abyss, some slowly, some quickly, but always along the same road.

  For a few minutes I just sat there swinging in the chair, recalling the feel and the sound of it. I made a casual inspection of the desk drawers, not remembering what was there, yet enjoying a sense of familiarity with old things. It was an old desk, almost antique, a relic from some solid, conservative corporation that supplied its executives with the best.

  When you pulled the top drawer all the way out there was a niche built into the massive framework, and when I felt in the shallow recess the other relic was still there.

  Calibre .45, Colt Automatic, U.S. Army model, vintage of 1914. Inside the plastic wrapper it was still oiled, and when I checked the action it was like a thing alive, a deadly thing that had but a single fundamental purpose.

  I put it back where it was beside the box of shells, inserted the drawer and slid it shut. The day of the guns was back there seven years ago. Not now.

  Now I was one of the nothing people. One mistake and Pat had me, and where I was going, one mistake and they would have me.

  Pat. The slob really took off after me. I wondered if Larry had been right when he said Pat had been in love with Velda too?

  I nodded absently, because he had changed. And there was more to it, besides. In seven years Pat should have moved up the ladder. By now he should have been an Inspector. Maybe whatever it was he had crawling around in his guts got out of hand and he never made the big try for promotion, or, if he did, he loused up.

  The hell with him, I thought. Now he was going wide open to nail a killer and a big one. Whoever killed Richie Cole had killed Senator Knapp in all probability, and in all probability, too, had killed Old Dewey. Well, I was one up on Pat. He’d have another kill in his lap, all right, but only I could connect Dewey and the others.

  Which put me in the middle all around.

  So okay, Hammer, I said. You’ve been a patsy before. See what you’ll do with this one and do it right. Someplace she’s alive. Alive! But for how long? And where? There are killers loose and she must be on the list.

  Absently, I reached for the phone, grinned when I heard the dial tone, then fingered the card the thin man gave me from my pocket and called Peerage Brokers.

  He was there waiting and when I asked, “Rickerby?” a switch clicked.

  Art answered, “You still have a little more time.”

  “I don’t need time. I need now. I think we should talk.”

  “Where are you?”

  “My own office through courtesy of a friend. The Hackard Building.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be up in ten minutes.”

  “Sure. Bring me a sandwich.”

  “A drink too?”

  “None of that. Maybe a couple of Blue Ribbons, but nothing else.”

  Without answering, he hung up. I glanced at my wrist, but there was no watch there anymore. Somehow, I vaguely remembered hocking it somewhere and called myself a nut because it was a good Rollex and I probably drank up the loot in half a day. Or got rolled for it.

  Damn!

  From the window I could see the clock on the Paramount Building and it was twenty past six. The street was slick from the drizzle that had finally started to fall and the crosstown traffic was like a giant worm trying to eat into the belly of the city. I opened the window and got supper smells in ten languages from the restaurants below and for the first time in a long time it smelled good. Then I switched on the desk lamp and sat back again.

  Rickerby came in, put a wrapped sandwich and two cans of Blue Ribbon in front of me and sat down with a weary smile. It was a very peculiar smile, not of friendliness, but of anticipation. It was one you didn’t smile back at, but rather waited out.

  And I made him wait until I had finished the sandwich and a can of beer, then I said, “Thanks for everything.”

  Once again,
he smiled. “Was it worth it?”

  His eyes had that flat calm that was nearly impenetrable. I said, “Possibly. I don’t know. Not yet.”

  “Suppose we discuss it.”

  I smiled some too. The way his face changed I wondered what I looked like. “It’s all right with me, Rickety.”

  “Rickerby.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But let’s do it question-and-answer style. Only I want to go first.”

  “You’re not exactly in a position to dictate terms.”

  “I think I am. I’ve been put upon. You know?”

  He shrugged, and looked at me again, still patient. “It really doesn’t matter. Ask me what you want to.”

  “Are you officially on this case?”

  Rickerby didn’t take too long putting it in its proper category. It would be easy enough to plot out if you knew how, so he simply made a vague motion with his shoulders. “No. Richie’s death is at this moment a local police matter.”

  “Do they know who he was?”

  “By now, I assume so.”

  “And your department won’t press the matter?”

  He smiled, nothing more.

  I said, “Suppose I put it this way—if his death resulted in the line of duty he was pursuing—because of the case he was on, then your department would be interested.”

  Rickerby looked at me, his silence acknowledging my statement.

  “However,” I continued, “if he was the victim of circumstances that could hit anybody, it would remain a local police matter and his other identity would remain concealed from everyone possible. True?”

  “You seem familiar enough with the machinations of our department, so draw your own conclusions,” Rickerby told me.

  “I will. I’d say that presently it’s up in the air. You’re on detached duty because of a personal interest in this thing. You couldn’t be ordered off it, otherwise you’d resign and pursue it yourself.”

  “You know, Mike, for someone who was an alcoholic such a short time ago, your mind is awfully lucid.” He took his glasses off and wiped them carefully before putting them back on. “I’m beginning to be very interested in this aspect of your personality.”