Kiss Me, Deadly mh-6 Read online

  "I got it."

  "Good. Now take it easy until I get back."

  She gave me a slow, friendly wink and a grin, then followed it up with a soft kiss that formed on her lips and crossed the room to me. She was all dressed up with no place to go and didn't care, a beautiful white-headed doll with funny eyes that said she had been around too long and seen too many things. But now she looked happy.

  I went downstairs, waited until a cab cruised by and grabbed it. We made the Texan Bar with ten minutes left out of the hour so I loafed around outside until a cab pulled into the curb and Velda got out.

  Getting out of a cab is one of the things most women don't do right. But most women aren't Velda. Without half trying she made a production out of it. When you saw her do it you knew she wasn't getting out of a cab so much as making an entrance onto the street. Nothing showed, but there was so much to show that you had to watch to see if it would happen or not and even when it didn't you weren't a bit disappointed.

  She turned around, gave me that impish grin and took my arm with a tight squeeze that said she was happy as all get out to see me and the guy with the packages beside me sighed and muttered something about some guys having all the luck.

  Inside the Texan we picked a booth as far back as we could get, ordered up lunch for Velda, a beer for me and then she handed me the envelope from her handbag. "As much as I could get. It cost two hundred and a promise of favors to be repaid ... if necessary."

  "By you?"

  Her face darkened, then twisted into a smile. "By you."

  I slipped my finger under the flap and drew out the sheets. One was a handwritten copy of the sanitarium report with the rest filling in Berga Tom's life history. Velda had carried out instructions. At the bottom of the last page was a list of names.

  Evello's was there. So was Congressman Geyfey's. At the tail end was Billy Mist and when I held my finger on it Velda said, "She went out with him periodically. She was seen with him, but whenever it was, the spotlight was on him... not her."

  "No," I said softly, "the spotlight is always on Billy. The picture's starting to get dirty."

  `Mike..." She was tapping her nails against the table. "Who is Billy Mist?"

  I grunted, picked up a Lucky and lit it. "It's a picture that goes back pretty far. He used to be known as Billy the Kid and he had as many notches on his rod as the original, if they still notch rods. Just before the war he went legit. At least on the outside he looked clean. He's been tied into a lot of messy stuff but nothing's been proven against him."

  "So?"

  "He's a known Mafia connection," I said. "He sits pretty high, too."

  Velda's face paled a little. "Brother!"

  "Why?"

  "Eddie Connely gave me the lead this morning in Toscio's Restaurant. He and another reporter seemed to have a pretty good inside track on the Torn gal, both of them being on the police beat. Trouble was, they had to suppress most of it and they were pretty disgusted. Anyway, Eddie mentioned Billy Mist and pointed him out. He was over at the bar and: I turned around to look at him. About then he happened to turn around too, caught me watching him and got the wrong slant on things. He left his drink, came over and handed me the slimiest proposition I ever heard right out in the open. What I told him no lady should repeat, but Eddie and his pal got a little green and I thought the Mist character would pop his buttons. Eddie didn't say much after that. He finished his coffee, paid the check and out they went."

  I could feel my teeth showing through the grin. My chest was tight and things were happening in my head. Velda said, "Easy, chum."

  I spit the cigarette out and didn't say anything for a minute. Billy Mist, the jerk with the duck's-tail haircut held down with a pound of grease. The tough guy who took what he wanted whenever he wanted. The uptown kid with the big money and the heavy connections.

  When I got rid of the things in my head I squinted at her across the table. "Kitten, don't ever say I'm the guy who goes looking for trouble."

  "Bad, Mike?"

  "Bad enough. Mist isn't the type to forget. He can take anything except a slam at his manhood."

  "I can take care of myself."

  "Honey... no dame can take care of herself, including you. Be careful, will you?"

  She seemed to smile all over. "Worried, Mike?"

  "Certainly."

  "Love me?"

  "Yeah," I said, "I love you, but I go for the way you are and not the way you could look if Mist started working you over." I grinned at her and slapped my hand down over hers. "Okay, I'm not the romantic type this early and in this place."

  "I don't care."

  She sat there, tall and straight, the black pageboy hair swirling around her shoulders like a waterfall at night with the moon glinting on it. Broad-shouldered, smooth and soft-looking, but firm underneath. She always had that hungry animal quality about her, eyes that drank everything in and when they looked at me seemed to drain me dry. Her mouth was expressive, with full, ripe lips that shone wetly, a crimson blossom that hid even white teeth.

  I said it again and this time it sounded different and her fingers curled up over mine and squeezed.

  A guy like me doesn't take the kind of look she was giving me very long. I shook my head, got my hand loose and went back to the report she had compiled.

  "Let's not get off the track." Her laugh was a silent thing, but I knew she felt the same way I did. "We have three names here. What about the other three?"

  Velda leaned across the table to see where I was pointing and I had to keep my eyes down. "Nicholas Raymond was an old flame apparently. She went with him before the war. He was killed in an auto accident."

  It wasn't much, but to pick up details like that takes time. "Who said?"

  "Pat. The police know that much about her." "He's really going all out, isn't he?"

  "The next one came from him too. Walter McGrath seemed to be another steady she was heavy on. He kept her for about a year during the war. She had an apartment on Riverside Drive then."

  "He local?"

  "No, from out of state, but he was in the city often." "Business?"

  "Lumber. Gray-market operations on steel too. He has a police record." She saw my eyebrows go up. "One income-tax evasion, two arrests for disorderly conduct, one conviction and suspended sentence for carrying concealed weapons."

  "Where is he now?"

  "He's been in the city here for about a month taking orders for lumber."

  "Nice." She nodded agreement.

  "Who's this Leopold Kawolsky?"

  Velda frowned, her eyes turning a little darker. "I can't figure that one out. Eddie tapped him for me. Right after the war Berga was doing a number in a nightclub and when the place closed down there was a street brawl that seemed to center around her. This guy knocked off a couple of men giving her a hard time and a photog happened along who grabbed a pic for the front page of his tabloid. It was pure sensationalism, but the picture and the name stuck in Eddie's mind. The same thing happened about a month later and one of those kids who snap photos in the night clubs caught the action and submitted it for the usual pay-on-acceptance deals. That's how Eddie remembered who the girl was so well."

  "The guy, honey... what about him?"

  "I'm coming to him. From the pictures he looked like an exfighter. I called the sports editor of a magazine and he picked the name out for me. Kawolsky fought under the name Lee Kawolsky for a year and was looking pretty good until he broke his hand in training. After that he dropped out of the picture. Now, about a month and a half after the last public brawl Lee was hit by a truck and killed. Since there were two deaths by cars in the picture I went into the insurance records and went over them carefully. As far as I could tell, or anybody else for that matter, they were accidents, pure and simple."

  "Pure and simple," I repeated. "The way it would have to look."

  "I don't think so, Mike."

  "Positive."

  "Good enough." I ran my eyes over the cop
y of the medical report, folded it before I finished it and tucked it back into the envelope. "Brief me on this thing," I said.

  "There really isn't much. She appeared before Dr. Martin Soberin for an examination, he diagnosed her case as extreme nervousness and suggested a rest cure. They mutually agreed on the sanitarium she was admitted to, an examination there confirmed Dr. Soberin's diagnosis and that was that. She was to stay there approximately four weeks. She paid in advance for her treatment."

  If ever there was a mess, this was it. Everything out of place and out of focus. The ends didn't even try to meet. Meet? Hell, they were snarled up so completely nothing made any sense.

  "How about this Congressman Geyfey?"

  "Nothing special. He was seen with her at a couple of political rallies. The man isn't married so he's clean that way. Frankly, I don't think he knew anything about her."

  "This keeps getting worse."

  "Don't get impatient. We're only getting started. What did Pat have to say about her?"

  "It's all in writing. Probably the best parts they're not telling. Except for her connection with Evello she didn't seem to be out of the ordinary for a kid with her tastes. She was born in Pittsburgh in 1920. Her father was Swedish, her mother Italian. She made two trips to Europe, one when she was eight to Sweden, the next one in 1940 to Italy. The jobs she held didn't pay the kind of money she spent, but that's easy to arrange for a babe like that." "Then Evello's the connection?"

  "Evello's the one," I said. She looked at my face and her breathing seemed to get heavier. "He's here in New York. Pat'll give you the address."

  "He's mine then?"

  "Until I get around to him."

  "What's the angle?"

  "An approach. Better arrange for a regular introduction and let

  him do the rest. Find out who his friends are." Only her eyes smiled. "Think I can pull it off?" "You can't miss, baby, you can't miss."

  The smile in her eyes got bigger.

  "Where are you carrying the heater, kitten?"

  The smile faded then. It got a little bit cold and deadly. "The shoulder rig. Left side and low down."

  "Nobody'd ever notice, kitten."

  "They're not supposed to," she said.

  We finished eating and went back into the daylight. I watched her get into the cab the way she had got out and when the hack turned the corner I could feel the skin on my shoulder crawl thinking about where she was going. The next cab that came along I flagged down, gave him a Brooklyn address with instructions to stop by the Atlantic Avenue apartment first. The answer came fast enough when we reached the joint. The name was still on the wall but the neighbors said she had moved out during the night and the apartment was empty. A small truck with the trunks of a new customer started backing into the curb as we drove away.

  The second Brooklyn address belonged to a newspaper man who had retired ten years ago. He was forty-nine years old but looked seventy. One side of his face had a scar that ran from the corner of his eye to his ear and down to his mouth. If he took off his shirt he could show you the three dimples in his stomach and the three larger angry pink scars in his back. One arm couldn't move at the elbow. He hadn't retired because he had wanted to. Seems like he had written an expose about the Mafia one time.

  When I came out it was two hours later and I had a folio of stuff under my arm that would have been worth ten grand to any good slick magazine. I got it free. I took another cab back uptown, sat in the back room of a drugstore a buddy of mine ran, went through it twice, then wrapped it and mailed it back to the guy I got it from. I went into a bar and had a beer while the facts settled down in my mind. While I sat there I tried to keep from looking at myself in the mirror behind the back bar but it didn't work. My face wasn't pretty at all. Not at all. So I moved to a booth in the back that had no mirrors.

  Evello's name was there. Billy Mist's name was there. In the very beginning. They were punks then but they showed promise. The guy in Brooklyn said you didn't. pick up the connections any more because most likely the boys had new assignments. They had been promoted. That was a long time ago so by now they should be kings. There were other names that I didn't know, but before long I'd know. There were empty spaces where names should be but couldn't be supplied and those were in the throne room. Nobody knew who the royalty was. They couldn't even suspect.

  Big? Sure, they were big. But then even the big ones would hear the word and their bigness would start to leak out all the holes. I was thinking about it and wondering if they had heard it yet when Mousie Basso came in.

  Guys like Mousie you see around when there's not too much light and never see around when the heat's on. Guys like Mousie you see in the papers when the police pull in their dragnet at a time when there were no holes in the walls for them to duck into. In the faces of guys like Mousie you can tell the temperature of the underworld caldron or read your popularity with the wrong people by the way they shy away or hang on to you.

  From Mousie's face I knew I was hot.

  I knew, too, I wasn't very popular.

  Mousie took one look at me sitting there, shot a quick look at the door and would have been out if I hadn't been reaching inside my coat for a smoke at the time. Mousie got white past the point of being pale when he saw where my hand was and when I gave him the nod to come over, he didn't walk, he slunk.

  I said, "Hello, Mousie," and the corner of his mouth made a fast, fake smile and he slid into the booth hoping nobody had seen him.

  He grabbed a nervous cigarette that didn't do him a bit of good, shook out the match and flicked it under the table. "Look, Mr. Hammer, you and me ain't got a thing to talk about. I..."

  "Maybe I like your company, Mousie."

  His lips got tight and he tried hard to keep from watching my hands. Half under his breath he said, "You ain't good company to be seen with."

  "Who says?"

  "Lots of people. You're nuts, Mr. Hammer..." He waited to see what would happen and when nothing did, said, "you go blowing off your stack like you been doing and you'll be wearing a D.O.A. tag on your toe."

  "I thought we were friends, kid." I bit into my sandwich and watched him squirm. Mousie wasn't happy. Not even a little bit.

  "Okay, so you did me a favor. That doesn't make us that kind of buddies. If you want trouble you go find it by yourself. Me, I'm a peace-loving guy, I am."

  "Yeah."

  Mousie's face sagged under the sarcasm. "So I'm a chiseler. So what? I don't want shooting trouble. If I'm small potatoes that's all I want to be. Nobody gets bumped for being small potatoes."

  "Unless somebody sees them talking to big potatoes," I grinned at him.

  It scared him, right down to his shoes. "Don't... don't kid around with me, will you? You don't need me for nothing. Besides which if you do I ain't giving or selling. Lay off."

  "What did you hear, Mousie?"

  His eyes were quick things that swept the whole room twice before they came back to me. "You know."

  "What?"

  "You're going to scramble some people."

  "What people." I didn't ask him. I told him to say it.

  He whispered the word. "Mafia." Then as if it had been a key he swallowed he spilled over with the things he had been holding down while his eyes bulged in his head. His hands grabbed the edge of the table and hung on while the butt he had started to smoke burned through the tablecloth. "You're nuts. You went and got everybody hopped up. Wherever you go you'll be poison. Is it true you got something on the wheels? You better clam if you have. That kind of stuff is sure to lead to trouble. Charlie Max and Sugar..." The mouth stopped and stayed open.

  "Say it, Mousie."

  Maybe he didn't like the way I had edged forward. Maybe he saw the things that should have been written across my face.

  The bulging eyes flattened out, sick. "They're spending advance money along the Stem."

  "Moving fast?"

  I could hardly hear his voice. "Covering the bars and making phone
calls."

  "Are they in a hurry?"

  "Bonus, probably."

  Mousie wasn't the same guy who came in. He was the mouse, but a mouse who didn't care any more. He was the mouse who spilled his guts to the cat about where the dog was and if the dog found out, he was dead. He reached for the remains of the cigarette, tried to drag some life into it and couldn't make it. I shook a new one out of my pack and handed it to him. The light I held out was steady, but he couldn't keep the tip of the butt in it. He got it going after a few seconds and stared into the flame of the lighter.

  "You ain't scared a bit, are you?" He looked at his own hands, hating himself. "I wish I was that way. What makes a guy like me, Mr. Hammer?"

  I could hate myself too. "Guys like me," I said.

  The laugh came out his nose like he didn't believe me. "One guy," he said, "just one big guy and everybody gets hopped up. For anybody else, even the mayor, they wouldn't even blink, but for you they get hopped up. You say you're going to scramble and they make like a hillbilly feud. The word goes out and money starts passing hands. Two of the hottest rods in town combing the joints looking for you and you don't even get bothered enough to stop eating. They know you, Mr. Hammer. Guess maybe everybody knows something about you. That's why Charlie Max and Sugar Smallhouse got the job. They don't know nothing about you. They're Miami boys. You say you're going to do something, you do it and always there's somebody dead and it ain't you. Now the word has it you're going to scramble the top potatoes. Maybe you will and maybe you won't. With anybody else I'd take bets on your side, only this time it's different."

  He stopped and waited to see what I'd say. "It's not so different."

  "You'll find out."

  He saw my teeth through the smile and shuddered. It does funny things to some people. "The word still goes," I said. "From now on to the end they'll have to stay away from windows and doors. They'll never be able to go out alone. Every one of the pack will have to keep a rod in his fist and wait. They'll have to double check everything to make sure I won't find out who they are and no matter how hard they try I'll reach them. Their office boys'll try to check me off but they're like flies on the wall. I'm going to the top. Straight up. I'm finding out who they are and when I do they're dead. I know how they operate... they're bad, but they know me and I'm worse. No matter where I find them, or when... any time, any place... that's it. The top dogs, those, are the ones I want. The slime who pull the strings in the Mafia. The kings, you understand? I want them."