One Lonely Night Page 5

  He made no attempt to introduce me. Apparently nobody seemed to care. Especially Ethel Brighton. A quick look flashed between them that brought the scowl back to her face for a brief moment. A shadow on the wall that came from one of the Trench Coats behind me was making furious gestures.

  I started to get the willies. It was the damnedest thing I had ever seen. Everybody was acting like at a fraternity initiation and for some reason I was the man of the moment. I took it as long as I could. I said, “I’m going uptown. If you’re going back you can come along.”

  For a dame who had her picture in most of the Sunday supplements every few weeks, she lost her air of sophistication in a hurry. Her cheeks seemed to sink in and she looked to Gladow for approval. Evidently he gave it, for she nodded and said, “My car ... it’s right outside.”

  I didn’t bother to leave any good nights behind me. I went through the receptionist’s cubicle and yanked the door open. When Ethel Brighton was out I slammed it shut. Behind me the place was as dark as the vacant hole it was supposed to be.

  Without waiting to be asked I slid behind the wheel and held out my hand for the keys. She dropped them in my palm and fidgeted against the cushions. That car ... it was a beauty. In the daylight it would have been a maroon convertible, but under the street lights it was a mass of mirrors with the chrome reflecting every bulb in the sky.

  Ethel said, “Are you from ... New York?”

  “Nope. Philly,” I lied.

  For some reason I was making her mighty nervous. It wasn’t my driving because I was holding it to a steady thirty to keep inside the green lights. I tried another grin. This time she smiled back and worried the fingers of her gloves.

  I couldn’t get over it, Ethel Brighton a Commie! Her old man would tan her hide no matter how old she was if he ever heard about it. But what the hell, she wasn’t the only one with plenty of rocks who got hung up on the red flag. I said, “It hasn’t been too easy for you to keep all this under your hat, has it?”

  Her hands stopped working the glove. “N-no. I’ve managed, though.”

  “Yeah. You’ve done a good job.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, no thanks at all, kid. For people with intelligence it’s easy. When you’re, er, getting these donations, don’t people sorta wonder where it’s going?”

  She scowled again, puzzled. “I don’t think so. I thought that was explained quite fully in my report.”

  “It was, it was. Don’t get me wrong. We have to keep track of things, you know. Situations change.” It was a lot of crap to me, but it must have made sense to her way of thinking.

  “Usually they’re much too busy to listen to my explanations, and anyway, they can deduct the amounts from their income tax.”

  “They ought to be pretty easy to touch, then.”

  This time she smiled a little. “They are. They think it’s for charity.”

  “Uh-huh. Suppose your father finds out what you’ve been doing?”

  The way she recoiled you’d think I smacked her. “Oh ... please, you wouldn’t!”

  “Take it easy, kid. I’m only supposing.”

  Even in the dull light of the dash I could see how pale she was. “Daddy would ... never forgive me. I think ... he’d send me some place. He’d disinherit me completely.” She shuddered, her hands going back to the glove again. “He’ll never know. When he does it will be too late!”

  “Your emotions are showing through, kid.”

  “So would yours if ... oh ... oh, I didn’t mean ...” Her expression made a sudden switch from rage to that of fear. It wasn’t a nice fear, it was more like that of the girl on the bridge.

  I looked over slowly, an angle creeping into the comer of my mind. “I’m not going to bite. Maybe you can’t say things back there in front of the others, but sometimes I’m not like them. I can understand problems. I have plenty of my own.”

  “But you ... you’re ...”

  “I’m what?”

  “You know.” She bit into her lip, looking at me obliquely.

  I nodded as if I did.

  “Will you be here long?”

  “Maybe,” I shrugged. “Why?”

  The fear came back. “Really, I wasn’t asking pointed questions. Honest I wasn’t. I just meant ... I meant with the ... other being killed and all, well ... ”

  Damn it, she let her sentence trail off as if I was supposed to know everything that went on. What the hell did they take me for anyway? It was the same thing all night!

  “I’ll be here,” I said.

  We went over the bridge and picked a path through the late traffic in Manhattan. I went north to Times Square and pulled into the curb. “This is as far as I go, sugar. Thanks for the ride. I’ll probably be seeing you again.”

  Her eyes went wide again. Brother, she could sure do things with those eyes. She gasped, “Seeing me?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “But ... you aren’t ... I never supposed ...”

  “That I might have a personal interest in a woman?” I finished.

  “Well, yes.”

  “I like women, sugar. I always have and always will.”

  For the first time she smiled a smile she meant. She said, “You aren’t a bit like I thought you’d be. Really. I like you. The other ... agent ... he was so cold that he scared me.”

  “I don’t scare you?”

  “You could ... but you don’t.”

  I opened the door. “Good night, Ethel.”

  “Good night.” She slid over under the wheel and gunned the motor. I got one last quick smile before she pulled away.

  What the hell. That’s all I could think of. What the hell. All right, just what the hell was going on? I walked right into a nest of Commies because I flashed a green card and they didn’t say a word, not one word. They played damn fool kids’ games with me that any jerk could have caught, and bowed and scraped like I was king.

  Not once did anyone ask my name.

  Read the papers today. See what it says about the Red Menace. See how they play up their sneaking, conniving ways. They’re supposed to be clever, bright as hell. They were dumb as horse manure as far as I was concerned. They were a pack of bugs thinking they could outsmart a world. Great. That coffee-urn trick was just great.

  I walked down the street to a restaurant that was still open and ordered a plate of ham and eggs.

  It was almost two o’clock when I got home. The rain had stopped long ago, but it was still up there, hanging low around the buildings, reluctant to let the city alone. I walked up to my apartment and shoved the key in the lock. My mind kept going back to Gladow, trying to make sense of his words, trying to fit them into a puzzle that had no other parts.

  I could remember his speaking about somebody’s untimely death. Evidently I was the substitute sent on in his place. But whose death? That sketch in the paper was a lousy one. Fat boy didn’t look a bit like that sketch. All right then, who? There was only one other guy with a green card who was dead, the guy Lee Deamer was supposed to have killed.

  Him. He’s the one, I thought. I was his replacement. But what was I supposed to be?

  There was just too much to think about; I was too tired to put my mind to it. You don’t kill a fat man and see a girl die because of the look on your face and get involved with a Commie organization all in two days without feeling your mind sink into a soggy ooze that drew it down deeper and deeper until it relaxed of its own accord and you were asleep.

  I sat slumped in the chair, the cigarette that had dropped from my fingers had burned a path through the rug at right angles with another. The bell shrilled and shrilled until I thought it would never stop. My arm going out to the phone was an involuntary movement, my voice just happened to be there.

  I said hello.

  It was Pat and he had to yell at me a half-dozen times before I snapped out of it. I grunted an answer and he said, “Too late for you, Mike?”

  “It’s four o’clock in the mornin
g. Are you just getting up or just going to bed?”

  “Neither. I’ve been working.”

  “At this hour?”

  “Since six this evening. How’s the vacation?”

  “I called it off.”

  “Really now. Just couldn’t bear to leave the city, could you? By the way, did you find any more green cards with the ends snipped off?”

  The palms of my hands got wet all of a sudden. “No.”

  “Are you interested in them at all?”

  “Cut the comedy, Pat. What’re you driving at? It’s too damn late for riddles.”

  “Get over here, Mike,” his voice was terse. “My apartment, and make it as fast as you can.”

  I came awake all at once, shaking the fatigue from my brain. “Okay, Pat,” I said, “give me fifteen minutes.” I hung up and slipped into my coat.

  It was easier to grab a cab than wheel my car out of the garage. I shook the cabbie’s shoulder and gave him Pat’s address, then settled back against the cushions while we tore across town. We made it with about ten seconds to spare and I gave the cabbie a fin for his trouble.

  I looked up at the sky before I went in. The clouds had broken up and let the stars come through. Maybe tomorrow will be nice, I thought. Maybe it will be a nice normal day without all the filth being raked to the top. Maybe. I pushed Pat’s bell and the door buzzed almost immediately.

  He was waiting outside his apartment when I got off the elevator. “You made it fast, Mike.”

  “You said to, didn’t you?”

  “Come on in.”

  Pat had drinks in a shaker and three glasses on the coffee table. Only one had been used so far. “Expecting company?” I asked him.

  “Big company, Mike. Sit down and pour yourself a drink.”

  I shucked my coat and hat and stuck a Lucky in my mouth. Pat wasn’t acting right. You don’t go around entertaining anybody at this hour, not even your best friends. Something had etched lines into his face and put a smudge of darkness under each eye. He looked tight as a drumhead. I sat there with a drink in my hand watching Pat trying to figure out what to say.

  It came halfway through my drink. “You were right the first time,” he said.

  I put the glass down and stared at him. “Do it over. I don’t get it.”

  “Twins.”

  “What?”

  “Twins,” Pat repeated. “Lee Deamer had a twin brother.” He stood there swirling the mixture around in his glass.

  “Why tell me? I’m not in the picture.”

  Pat had his back to me, staring at nothing. I could barely hear his voice. ‘Don’t ask me that, Mike. I don’t know why I’m telling you when it’s official business, but I am. In one way we’re both alike. We’re cops. Sometimes I find myself waiting to know what you’d do in a situation before I do it myself. Screwy, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty screwy.”

  “I told you once before that you have a feeling for things that I haven’t got. You don’t have a hundred bosses and a lot of sidelines to mess you up once you get started on a case. You’re a ruthless bastard and sometimes it helps.”

  “So?”

  “So now I find myself in one of those situations. I’m a practical cop with a lot of training and experience, but I’m in something that has a personal meaning to me too and I’m afraid of tackling it alone.”

  “You don’t want advice from me, chum. I’m mud, and whatever I touch gets smeared with it. I don’t mind dirtying myself, but I don’t want any of it to rub off onto you.”

  “It won’t, don’t worry. That’s why you’re here now. You think I was taken in by that vacation line? Hell. You have another bug up your behind. It has to do with those green cards and don’t try to talk your way out of it.”

  He spun around, his fact taut. “Where’d you get them, Mike?”

  I ignored the question. “Tell me, Pat. Tell me the story.” He threw the drink down and filled the glass again. “Lee Deamer ... how much do you know about him?”

  “Only that he’s the up-and-coming champ. I don’t know him personally.”

  “I do, Mike. I know the guy and I like him. Goddamn it, Mike, if he gets squeezed out this state, this country will lose one of its greatest assets! We can’t afford to have Deamer go under!”

  “I’ve heard that story before, Pat,” I said, “a political reporter gave it to me in detail.”

  Pat reached for a cigarette and laid it in his lips. The tip of the flame from the lighter wavered when he held it up. “I hope it made an impression. This country is too fine to be kicked around. Deamer is the man to stop it if he can get that far.

  “Politics never interested you much, Mike. You know how it starts in the wards and works itself right up to the nation. I get a chance to see just how dirty and corrupt politics can be. You should put yourself in my shoes for a while and you’d know how I feel. I get word to lay off one thing or another ... or else. I get word that if I do or don’t do a certain thing I’ll be handed a fat little present. You’d think people would respect the police, but they don’t. They try to use the department to push their own lousy schemes and it happens more often than you’d imagine.”

  “And you, Pat, what did you do?” I leaned forward in my chair, waiting.

  “I told them to go to hell. They can’t touch an honest man until he makes a mistake. Then they hang him for it.”

  “Any mistakes yet?”

  Two streams of smoke spiraled from his nostrils. “Not yet, kid. They’re waiting though. I’m fed up with the tension. You can feel it in the air, like being inside a storage battery. Call me a reformer if you want to, but I’d love to see a little decency for a change. That’s why I’m afraid for Deamer.”

  “Yeah, you were telling me about him.”

  “Twins. You were right, Mike. Lee Deamer was at that meeting the night he was allegedly seen killing this Charlie Moffit. He was talking to groups around the room. I was there.”

  I stamped the butt out in a tray and lit another. “You mean it was as simple as that ... Lee Deamer had a twin brother?”

  Pat nodded. “As simple as that.”

  “Then why the secrecy? Lee isn’t exactly responsible for what his brother does. Even a blast in the papers couldn’t smear him for that, could it?”

  “No ... not if that was all there was to it.”

  “Then ...”

  Pat slammed the glass down impatiently. “The brother’s name was Oscar Deamer. He was an escaped inmate of a sanitarium where he was undergoing psychiatric treatment. Let that come out and Lee is finished.”

  I let out a slow whistle. “Who else knows about this, Pat?”

  “Just you. It was too big. I couldn’t keep it to myself. Lee called me tonight and said he wanted to see me. We met in a bar and he told me the story. Oscar arrived in town and told Lee that he was going to settle things for him. He demanded money to keep quiet. Lee thinks that Oscar deliberately killed this Charlie Moffit hoping to be identified as Lee, knowing that Lee wouldn’t dare reveal that he had a lunatic for a brother.”

  “So Lee wouldn’t pay off and he got the treatment.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Hell, this Oscar could have figured Lee would have an alibi and couldn’t be touched. It was just a sample, something to get him entangled. That doesn’t make him much of a loony if he can think like that.”

  “Anybody who can kill like that is crazy, Mike.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Before he could answer me, the bell rang, two short burps and Pat got up to push the buzzer. “Lee?” I asked.

  Pat nodded. “He wanted more time to think about it. I told him I’d be at home. It has him nearly crazy himself.” He went to the door and stood there holding it open as he had done for me. It was so still that I heard the elevator humming in its well, the sound of the doors opening and the slow, heavy feet of a person carrying a too-heavy weight.

  I stood up myself and shook hands with Lee Deamer. He wasn�
��t big like I had expected. There was nothing outstanding about his appearance except that he looked like a school-teacher, a very tired, middle-aged Mr. Chips.

  Pat said, “This is Mike Hammer, Lee. He’s a very special, capable friend of mine.”

  His handshake was firm, but his eyes were too tired to take me in all at once. He said to Pat very softly, “He knows?”

  “He knows, Lee. He can be trusted.”

  I had a good look at warm gray eyes then. His hand tightened just a little around mine. “It’s nice to find people that can be trusted.”

  I grinned my thanks and Pat pulled up a chair. Lee Deamer took the drink Pat offered him and settled back against the cushions, rubbing his hand across his face. He took a sip of the highball, then pulled a cigar from his pocket and pared the end off with a tiny knife on his watch chain.

  “Oscar hasn’t called back,” he said dully. “I don’t know what to do.” He looked first at Pat, then to me. “Are you a policeman, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Just call me Mike. No, I’m not a city cop. I have a Private Operator’s ticket and that’s all.”

  “Mike’s been in on a lot of big stuff, Lee,” Pat cut in. “He knows his way around.”

  “I see.” He was talking to me again. “I suppose Pat told you that so far this whole affair has been kept quiet?” I nodded and he went on. “I hope it can stay that way, though if it must come out, it must. I’m leaving it all to the discretion of Pat here. I—well, I’m really stumped. So much has happened in so short a time I hardly know where I’m at.”

  “Can I hear it from the beginning?” I asked.

  Lee Deamer bobbed his head slowly. “Oscar and I were born in Townley, Nebraska. Although we were twins, we were worlds apart. In my younger days I thought it was because we were just separate personalities, but the truth was ... Oscar was demented. He was a sadistic sort of person, very sly and cunning. He hated me. Yes, he hated me, his own brother. In fact, Oscar seemed to hate everyone. He was in trouble from the moment he ran off from home until he came back, then he found more trouble in our own state. He was finally committed to an institution.

  “Shortly after Oscar was committed I left Nebraska and settled in New York. I did rather well in business and became active in politics. Oscar was more or less forgotten. Then I learned that he had escaped from the institution. I never heard from him again until he called me last week.”