One Lonely Night (7 page)

“It’s four o’clock in the morning. 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.”

“That’s all?”

“What else can there be, Mike? Oscar probably read about me in the papers and trailed me here. He knew what it would mean if I was known to have a brother who wasn’t quite ... well, normal. He made a demand for money and told me he’d have it one way or another.”

Pat reached for the shaker and filled the glasses again. I held mine out and our eyes met. He answered my question before I could ask it. “Lee was afraid to mention Oscar, even when he was identified as the killer of Moffit. You can understand why, can’t you?”

“Now I can,” I said.

“Even the fact that Lee
was
identified, although wrongly, would have made good copy. However, the cop on the beat brought the witnesses in before they could speak to the papers and the whole thing was such an obvious mistake that nobody dared take the chance of making it public.”

“Where are the witnesses now?”

“We have them under surveillance. They’ve been instructed to keep quiet about it. We checked into their backgrounds and found that all of them were upright citizens, plain, ordinary people who were as befuddled as we were about the whole thing. Fortunately, we were able to secure their promise of silence by proving to them where Lee was that night. They don’t understand it, but they were willing to go along with us in the cause of justice.”

I grunted and pulled on the cigarette. “I don’t like it.”

Both of them looked at me quickly. “Hell, Pat, you ought to smell the angle as well as I do.”

“You tell me, Mike.”

“Oscar served his warning,” I said. “He’ll make another stab at it. You can trap him easily enough and you know it.”

“That’s right. It leaves one thing wide open, too.”

“Sure it does. You’ll have another Lee Deamer in print and pictures, this one up for a murder rap which he will skip because he’s nuts.” Lee winced at the word but kept still.

“That’s why I wanted you here,” Pat told me.

“Fine. What good am I?”

The ice rattled against the side of his glass. Pat tried to keep his voice calm. “You aren’t official, Mike. My mind works with the book. I know what I should do and I can’t think of anything else.”

“You mean you want me to tell you that Oscar should be run down and quietly spirited away?”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m the boy who could do it?”

“Right again.” He took a long swallow from the glass and set it on the table.

“What happens if it doesn’t work out? To you, I mean.”

“I’ll be looking for a job for not playing it properly.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Lee Deamer ran his hand through his hair nervously. “I-I can’t let you do it. I can’t let you jeopardize your positions. It isn’t fair. The best thing is to let it come to light and let the public decide.”

“Don’t be jerky!” I spat out. Lee looked at me, but I wasn’t seeing him. I was seeing Marty and Pat, hearing them say the same thing ... and I was hearing that judge again.

There were two hot spaces where my eyes should have been. “I’ll take care of it,” I said. “I’ll need all the help I can get.” I looked at Pat. He nodded. “Just one thing, Pat. I’m not doing this because I’m a patriot, see? I’m doing it because I’m curious and because of it I’ll be on my toes. I’m curious as hell about something else and not about right and wrong and what the public thinks.”

My teeth were showing through my words and Pat had that look again. “Why, Mike?”

“Three green cards with the edges cut off, kid. I’m curious as hell about three green cards. There’s more to them than you think.”

I said good night and left them sitting there. I could hear the judge laughing at me. It wasn’t a nice laugh. It had a nasty sound. Thirteen steps and thirteen loops that made the knot in the rope. Were there thirteen thousand volts in the chair too? Maybe I’d find out the hard way.