The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 3 Read online

  “Me either, kid.”

  “So blow.”

  I grinned at him, teeth all the way. “Scram.”

  My hand hit his chest as he swung and he went on his can swinging like an idiot. The little guy came in low, thinking he was pulling a good one, and I kicked his face all out of shape with one swipe and left him whimpering against the wall.

  The whole bar had turned around by then, all talk ended. You could see the excitement in their faces, the way they all thought it was funny because somebody had nearly jumped the moat—but not quite. They were waiting to see the rest, like when the big guy got up off the floor and earned his keep and the big guy was looking forward to it too.

  Out of the sudden quiet somebody said, “Ten to one on Sugar Boy,” and, just as quietly, another one said, “You’re on for five.”

  Again it was slow motion, the bar looking down at the funny little man at the end, wizened and dirty, but liking the odds, regardless of the company. Somebody laughed and said, “Pepper knows something.”

  “That I do,” the funny little man said.

  But by then the guy had eased up to his feet, his face showing how much he liked the whole deal, and just for the hell of it he let me have the first swing.

  I didn’t hurt him. He let me know it and came in like I knew he would and I was back in that old world since seven years ago, tasting floor dirt and gagging on it, feeling my guts fly apart and the wild wrenching of bones sagging under even greater bones and while they laughed and yelled at the bar, the guy slowly killed me until the little bit of light was there like I knew that would be too and I gave him the foot in the crotch and, as if the world had collapsed on his shoulders, he crumpled into a vomiting heap, eyes bulging, hating, waiting for the moment of incredible belly pain to pass, and when it did, reached for his belt and pulled out a foot-long knife and it was all over, all over for everybody because I reached too and no blade argues with that great big bastard of a .45 that makes the big boom so many times, and when he took one look at my face his eyes bulged again, said he was sorry, Mac, and to deal him out, I was the wrong guy, he knew it and don’t let the boom go off. He was close for a second and knew it, then I put the gun back without letting the hammer down, stepped on the blade and broke it and told him to get up.

  The funny little guy at the bar said, “That’s fifty I got coming.”

  The one who made the bet said, “I told you Pepper knew something.”

  The big guy got up and said, “No offense, Mac, it’s my job.”

  The owner came over and said, “Like in the old days, hey Mike?”

  I said, “You ought to clue your help, Benny Joe.”

  “They need training.”

  “Not from me.”

  “You did lousy tonight. I thought Sugar Boy had you.”

  “Not when I got a rod.”

  “So who knew? All this time you go clean? I hear even Gary Moss cleaned you one night. You, even. Old, Mike.”

  Around the bar the eyes were staring at me curiously, wondering. “They don’t know me, Benny Joe.”

  The little fat man shrugged. “Who would? You got skinny. Now how about taking off.”

  “Not you, Benny Joe,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re pushing too.”

  “Sure. Tough guys I got all the time. Old tough guys I don’t want. They always got to prove something. So with you I call the cops and you go down. So blow, okay?”

  I hadn’t even been looking at him while he talked, but now I took the time to turn around and see the little fat man, a guy I had known for fifteen years, a guy who should have known better, a guy who was on the make since he began breathing but a guy who had to learn the hard way.

  So I looked at him, slow, easy, and in his face I could see my own face and I said, “How would you like to get deballed, Benny Joe? You got nobody to stop me. You want to sing tenor for that crib you have keeping house for you?”

  Benny Joe almost did what he started out to do. The game was supposed to have ended in the Old West, the making of a reputation by one man taking down a big man. He almost took the .25 out, then he went back to being Benny Joe again and he was caught up in something too big for him. I picked the .25 out of his fingers, emptied it, handed it back and told him, “Don’t die without cause, Benny Joe.”

  The funny little guy at the bar with the new fifty said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Mike?”

  I shook my head.

  “Ten, fifteen years ago—the fire at Carrigan’s?”

  Again, I shook my head.

  “I was a newspaperman then. Bayliss Henry of the Telegram. Pepper, they call me now. You had that gunfight with Cortez Johnson and his crazy bunch from Red Hook.”

  “That was long ago, feller.”

  “Papers said it was your first case. You had an assignment from Aliet Insurance.”

  “Yeah,” I told him, “I remember the fire. Now I remember you too. I never did get to say thanks. I go through the whole damn war without a scratch and get hit in a lousy heist and almost burn to death. So thanks!”

  “My pleasure, Mike. You got me a scoop bonus.”

  “Now what’s new?”

  “Hell, after what guys like us saw, what else could be new?”

  I drank my beer and didn’t say anything.

  Bayliss Henry grinned and asked, “What’s with you?”

  “What?” I tried to sound pretty bored.

  It didn’t take with him at all. “Come on, Big Mike. You’ve always been my favorite news story. Even when I don’t write, I follow the columns. Now you just don’t come busting in this place anymore without a reason. How long were you a bum, Mike?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Seven years ago you never would have put a gun on Sugar Boy.”

  “I didn’t need it then.”

  “Now you need it?”

  “Now I need it,” I repeated.

  Bayliss took a quick glance around. “You got no ticket for that rod, Mike.”

  I laughed, and my face froze him. “Neither had Capone. Was he worried?”

  The others had left us. The two guys were back at their table by the door watching the rain through the windows, the music from the overlighted juke strangely soft for a change, the conversation a subdued hum above it.

  A rainy night can do things like that. It can change the entire course of events. It seems to rearrange time.

  I said, “What?”

  “Jeez, Mike, why don’t you listen once? I’ve been talking for ten minutes.”

  “Sorry, kid.”

  “Okay, I know how it is. Just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “When you gonna ask it?”

  I looked at him and took a pull of the beer.

  “The big question. The one you came here to ask somebody.”

  “You think too much, Bayliss, boy.”

  He made a wry face. “I can think more. You got a big one on your mind. This is a funny place, like a thieves’ market. Just anybody doesn’t come here. It’s a special place for special purposes. You want something, don’t you?”

  I thought a moment, then nodded. “What can you supply?”

  His wrinkled face turned up to mine with a big smile. “Hell, man, for you just about anything.”

  “Know a man named Richie Cole?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, casually, “he had a room under mine. He was a good friend. A damn smuggler who was supposed to be small-time, but he was better than that because he had loot small smugglers never get to keep. Nice guy, though.”

  And that is how a leech line can start in New York if you know where to begin. The interweaving of events and personalities can lead you to a crossroad eventually where someone stands who, with one wave of a hand, can put you on the right trail—if he chooses to. But the interweaving is not a simple thing. It comes from years of mingling and mixing and kneading, and although the answer seems to be an almost casual thing, it really isn’t at all.

  I said, �
��He still live there?”

  “Naw. He got another place. But he’s no seaman.”

  “How do you know?”

  Bayliss grunted and finished his beer. “Now what seaman will keep a furnished room while he’s away?”

  “How do you know this?”

  The little guy shrugged and waved the bartender over. “Mike— I’ve been there. We spilled plenty of beer together.” He handed me a fresh brew and picked up his own. “Richie Cole was a guy who made plenty of bucks, friend, and don’t you forget it. You’d like him.”

  “Where’s his place?”

  Bayliss smiled broadly, “Come on, Mike. I said he was a friend. If he’s in trouble I’m not going to make it worse.”

  “You can’t,” I told him. “Cole’s dead.”

  Slowly, he put the beer down on the bar, turned and looked at me with his forehead wrinkling in a frown. “How?”

  “Shot.”

  “You know something, Mike? I thought something like that would happen to him. It was in the cards.”

  “Like how?”

  “I saw his guns. He had three of them in a trunk. Besides, he used me for a few things.”

  When I didn’t answer, he grinned and shrugged.

  “I’m an old-timer, Mike. Remember? Stuff I know hasn’t been taught some of the fancy boys on the papers yet. I still got connections that get me a few bucks here and there. No trouble, either. I did so many favors that now it pays off and, believe me, this retirement pay business isn’t what it looks like. So I pick up a few bucks with some well chosen directions or clever ideas. Now, Cole, I never did figure just what he was after, but he sure wanted some peculiar information.”

  “How peculiar?”

  “Well, to a thinking man like me, it was peculiar because no smuggler the size he was supposed to be would want to know what he wanted.”

  “Smart,” I told him. “Did you mention it to Cole?”

  “Sure,” Bayliss grinned, “but we’re both old at what we were doing and could read eyes. I wouldn’t pop on him.”

  “Suppose we go see his place.”

  “Suppose you tell me what he really was first.”

  Right then he was real roostery, a Bayliss Henry from years ago before retirement and top dog on the news beat, a wizened little guy, but one who wasn’t going to budge an inch. I wasn’t giving a damn for national security as the book describes it, at all, so I said, “Richie Cole was a Federal agent and he stayed alive long enough to ask me in on this.”

  He waited, watched me, then made a decisive shrug with his shoulders and pulled a cap down over his eyes. “You know what you could be getting into?” he asked me.

  “I’ve been shot before,” I told him.

  “Yeah, but you haven’t been dead before,” he said.

  The place was a brownstone building in Brooklyn that stood soldier-fashion shoulder to shoulder in place with fifty others, a row of face-like oblongs whose windows made dull, expressionless eyes of the throttled dead, the bloated tongue of a stone stoop hanging out of its gaping mouth.

  The rest wasn’t too hard, not when you’re city-born and have nothing to lose anyway. Bayliss said the room was ground-floor rear so we simply got into the back through a cellarway three houses down, crossed the slatted fences that divided one pile of garbage from another until we reached the right window, then went in. Nobody saw us. If they did, they stayed quiet about it. That’s the kind of place it was.

  In a finger-thick beam of the pencil flash I picked out the sofa bed, an inexpensive contour chair, a dresser and a desk. For a furnished room it had a personal touch that fitted in with what Bayliss suggested. There were times when Richie Cole had desired a few more of the creature comforts than he could normally expect in a neighborhood like this.

  There were a few clothes in the closet: a military raincoat, heavy dungaree jacket and rough-textured shirts. An old pair of hip boots and worn high shoes were in one corner. The dresser held changes of underwear and a few sports shirts, but nothing that would suggest that Cole was anything he didn’t claim to be.

  It was in the desk that I found the answer. To anyone else it would have meant nothing, but to me it was an answer. A terribly cold kind of answer that seemed to come at me like a cloud that could squeeze and tear until I thought I was going to burst wide open.

  Cole had kept a simple, inexpensive photo album. There were the usual pictures of everything from the Focking Distillery to the San Francisco Bridge with Cole and girls and other guys and girls and just girls alone the way a thousand other seamen try to maintain a visual semblance of life.

  But it was in the first few pages of the album that the fist hit me in the gut because there was Cole a long time ago sitting at a table in a bar with some RAF types in the background and a couple of American GI’s from the 8th Air Force on one side and with Richie Cole was Velda.

  Beautiful, raven hair in a long pageboy, her breasts swelling tautly against the sleeveless gown, threatening to free themselves. Her lips were wet with an almost deliberate gesture and her smile was purposely designing. One of the GIs was looking at her with obvious admiration.

  Bayliss whispered, “What’d you say, Mike?”

  I shook my head and flipped a page over. “Nothing.”

  She was there again, and a few pages further on. Once they were standing outside a pub, posing with a soldier and a WREN, and in another they stood beside the bombed-out ruins of a building with the same soldier, but a different girl.

  There was nothing contrived about the album. Those pictures had been there a long time. So had the letters. Six of them dated in 1944, addressed to Cole at a P.O. box in New York, and although they were innocuous enough in content, showed a long-standing familiarity between the two of them. And there was Velda’s name, the funny “V” she made, the green ink she always used and, although I hadn’t even known her then, I was hating Cole so hard it hurt. I was glad he was dead but wished I could have killed him, then I took a fat breath, held it once and let it out slowly and it wasn’t so bad anymore.

  I felt Bayliss touch my arm and he said, “You okay, Mike?”

  “Sure.”

  “You find anything?”

  “Nothing important.”

  He grunted under his breath. “You’re full of crap.”

  “A speciality of mine,” I agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What about those guns? He had a trunk some place.”

  “We don’t need them. Let’s go.”

  “So you found something. You could satisfy my curiosity.”

  “Okay,” I told him, “Cole and I had a mutual friend.”

  “It means something?”

  “It might. Now move.”

  He went out first, then me, and I let the window down. We took the same route back, going over the fences where we had crossed earlier, me boosting Bayliss up then following him. I was on top of the last one when I felt the sudden jar of wood beside my hand, then a tug at my coat between my arm and rib cage and the instinct and reaction grabbed me again and I fell on top of Bayliss while I hauled the .45 out and, without even knowing where the silenced shots were coming from, I let loose with a tremendous blast of that fat musket that tore the night wide open with a rolling thunder that let the world know the pigeon was alive and had teeth.

  From a distance came a clattering of cans, of feet, then windows slammed open and voices started yelling and the two of us got out fast. We were following the same path of the one who had followed us, but his start was too great. Taillights were already diminishing down the street and in another few minutes a prowl car would be turning the corner.

  We didn’t wait for it.

  Six blocks over we picked up a cab, drove to Ed Dailey’s bar and got out. I didn’t have to explain a thing to Bayliss. He had been through it all too often before. He was shaking all over and couldn’t seem to stop swallowing. He had two double ryes before he looked at me with a peculiar expression and said softly, “Jeez, I’ll n
ever learn to keep my mouth shut.”

  Peerage Brokers could have been anything. The desks and chairs and filing cabinets and typewriters represented nothing, yet represented everything. Only the gray man in the glasses sitting alone in the corner drinking coffee represented something.

  Art Rickerby said, “Now?” and I knew what he meant.

  I shook my head. He looked at me silently a moment, then sipped at the coffee container again. He knew how to wait, this one. He wasn’t in a hurry now, not rushing to prevent something. He was simply waiting for a moment of vengeance because the thing was done and sooner or later time would be on his side.

  I said, “Did you know Richie pretty well?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did he have a social life?”

  For a moment his face clouded over, then inquisitiveness replaced anger and he put the coffee container down for a reason, to turn his head away. “You’d better explain.”

  “Like girls,” I said.

  When he turned back he was expressionless again. “Richie had been married,” he told me. “In 1949 his wife died of cancer.”

  “Oh? How long did he know her?”

  “They grew up together.”

  “Children?”

  “No. Both Richie and Ann knew about the cancer. They married after the war anyway but didn’t want to leave any children a difficult burden.”

  “How about before that?”

  “I understood they were both pretty true to each other.”

  “Even during the war?”

  Again there was silent questioning in his eyes. “What are you getting at, Mike?”

  “What was Richie during the war?”

  The thought went through many channels before it was properly classified. Art said, “A minor O.S.I. agent. He was a Captain then based in England. With mutual understanding, I never asked, nor did he offer, the kind of work he did.”

  “Let’s get back to the girls.”

  “He was no virgin, if that’s what you mean.”