The Mike Hammer Collection (19 page)

“I'll run along then. Maybe I'll see you later. Right now I want to get a haircut before I do anything else.”

“Okay, darling.” She came over and put her arms around me. “There's a place on the corner.”

“That'll do as well as any,” I told her between kisses.

“Hurry back, Mike.”

“You bet, darling.”

Luckily, the place was empty. A guy was just getting out of the chair when I went in. I hung my coat on a hook and plunked into the seat. “Trim,” I told the barber. After he ogled my rod a bit, he draped me with the sheet and the clippers buzzed. Fifteen minutes later he dusted me off and I walked out of there slicked down like an uptown sharpie. I got the boiler rolling and turned across town to get on Broadway.

I heard the sirens wailing, but I didn't know it was Pat until the squad car shot past me and I saw him leaning out of the side window. He was too busy to notice me, but cut across the intersection while the cop on the corner held traffic back. Further down the avenue another siren was blasting a path northward.

It was more a hunch than anything else, the same kind of a hunch that put me on the trail of George Kalecki. And this one paid off, too, but in a way I didn't recognize at first. As soon as the cop on the corner waved us on, I followed the howl of police cars and turned left on Lexington Avenue. Up ahead I saw the white top of Pat's car weaving in and out of the lanes. It slowed down momentarily and turned into a side street.

This time I had to park a block away. Two police cars had the street barred to traffic at either end. I flashed my badge and my card to the patrolman on the corner. He let me pass and I hurried down to the little knot of people gathered outside a drugstore. Pat was there with what looked like the whole homicide bureau. I pushed my way through the crowd and nodded to Pat. I followed his eyes down to the crumpled figure on the sidewalk. Blood had spilled out of the single hole in the back, staining the shabby coat a deep maroon. Pat told me to go ahead and I turned the face around to see who it was.

I whistled. Bobo Hopper would keep bees no longer.

Pat indicated the body. “Know him?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Know him well. His name is Hopper, Bobo Hopper. A hell of a nice guy even if he was a moron. Never hurt anything in his life. He used to be one of Kalecki's runners.”

“He was shot with a .45, Mike.”

“What!” I exploded.

“There's something else now. Dope. Come over here.” Pat took me inside the drugstore. The fat little clerk was facing a battery of detectives led by a heavy-set guy in a blue serge suit. I knew him all too well. He never liked me much since I blew a case wide open under his very nose. He was Inspector Daly of the narcotics squad.

Daly turned to me. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Same thing you are, I think.”

“Well, you can start walking as of now. I don't want any private noses snooping around. Go on, beat it.”

“One moment, Inspector.” When Pat talked in that tone of voice he could command attention. Daly respected Pat. They were different kinds of cop. Daly had come up the hard way, with more time between promotions, while Pat had achieved his position through the scientific approach to crime. Even though they didn't see eye to eye in their methods, Daly was man enough to give Pat credit where credit was due and listen to him.

“Mike has an unusual interest in this case,” he continued. “It was through him we got as far as we have. If you don't mind, I would like him to keep in close touch with this.”

Daly glared at me and shrugged his beefy shoulders. “Okay. Let him stay. Only be sure you don't withhold any evidence,” he spat at me.

The last time I was involved in a case he was working on I had to play my cards close to my vest, but hanging on to the evidence I had led me to a big-time drug dealer we never would have nailed otherwise. Daly never forgot that.

The head of the narcotics bureau was blasting away at the druggist and I picked up every word. “Once more now. Give me the whole thing and see what else you can remember.”

Harried to the breaking point, the druggist wrung his pudgy hands and looked at the sea of faces glaring at him. Pat must have had the most sympathetic expression, so he spoke to him.

“I was doing nothing. Sweeping out under the counter, maybe. That is all. This man, he walks in and says fill a prescription. Very worried he was. He hands me a broken box that has nothing written on the cover. He says to me he will lose his job and nobody will trust him if I can't do it. He drops the box he was delivering and somebody steps on it and his prescription is all over the sidewalk.

“This powder was coming out of the sides. I take it in the back and taste it yet, then test it. Pretty sure I was that I knew what was in it, and when I test it I was positive. Heroin. This should not be, so like a good citizen I phone the police and tell them what I have. They tell me to keep him here, but how do I know that he is not a gangster and will shoot me?” Here the little guy stopped and shuddered.

“I have a family yet. I take my time, but he tells me to hurry up and puts his hand in a pocket. Maybe he has a gun. What can I do? I fill another box with boric acid, charge him a dollar and he walks out. I leave my counter to go see where he goes, but before I get to the door he falls to the sidewalk. He is shot. All the way dead. I call police again, then you come.”

“See anyone running off?” Pat asked.

He shook his head. “Nobody. At this time it is slow. Nobody on the street.”

“Did you hear a shot?”

“No. That I could not understand. I was too scared. I see the blood from the hole and I run back inside.”

Pat stroked his chin. “How about a car. Did any go by at that time?”

The little guy squinted his eyes and thought back. Once he started to speak, stopped, then reassured, said, “Y-yes. Now that you remind me, I think one goes by just before. Yes. I am sure of it. Very slow it goes and it was turning.” He continued hurriedly from here. “Like it was coming from the curb maybe. It goes past, then when I am outside it is gone. I don't even look for it after that, so scared I am.”

Daly had one of his men taking the whole thing down in shorthand. Pat and I had heard enough. We went outside to the body and checked the bullet angle. From the position of where it lay, the killer had been going toward Lexington when the shot was fired. The packet of boric acid, now a blood red, lay underneath Bobo's hand. We patted the pockets. Empty. His wallet held eight dollars and a library card. Inside the coat was a booklet on the raising of bees.

“Silencer,” Pat said. “I'll give ten to one it's the same gun.”

“I wouldn't take that bet,” I agreed.

“What do you make of it, Mike?”

“I don't know. If Kalecki were alive it would involve him even deeper. First prostitution, now dope. That is, if Bobo was still working for Kalecki. He said not, and I believed him. I thought Bobo was too simple to try to deceive anybody. I'm not so sure now.”

We both stared at the body a bit, then walked down the street a way by ourselves. I happened to think of something.

“Pat.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Remember when Kalecki was shot at in his home? When he tried to put the finger on me?”

“Yeah. What of it?”

“It was the killer's gun. The killer we want fired that shot. Why? Can you make anything out of it? Even then Kalecki was on the spot for something and he moved to town for his own protection. That's what we want, the answer to the question of why he was shot at.”

“That's going to take some doing, Mike. The only ones that can tell us are dead.”

I gave him a grin. “No. There's still someone. The killer. He knows why. Have you anything to do right now?”

“Nothing I can't put off. This case will be in Daly's hands for a while. Why?”

I took his arm and walked him around the block to my car. We got in and headed toward my apartment.

The mailman was just coming out when we got there. I opened my box and drew out the envelope I addressed to myself at the college and ripped it open. I explained to Pat I had to get the piece of charred evidence out of the hands of those hick cops while I could and he agreed that I did it right.

Pat knew the ropes. He put in three phone calls and when we reached the bank a guard ushered us into the office of the president. By that time he had already received the court order by phone to permit us to inspect the box listed on the slip.

It was there, all of it. Evidence enough to hang George Kalecki a dozen times over. I was really grateful now that I had put a slug into him. The guy was a rat, all right. He had his fingers in more than I had suspected. There were photostats of checks, letters, a few original documents, and plenty of material to indict George Kalecki for every vice charge there was, including a few new ones. But nothing else. Where George had gone there was no need for a court. Hal Kines had tied him up in a knot with both ends leading to the hot squat if he had tried to make a break.

Pat ran over the stuff twice, then scooped them all into a large envelope, signed for it and left. Outside I asked, “What are you going to do with the junk?”

“Go over it carefully. Maybe I can trace these checks even though they are made out to cash and don't show the signature on the reverse side. How about you?”

“Might as well go home like I planned. Why, got something else?”

Pat laughed. “We'll see. I had the idea you might be holding out on me, so I wasn't going to tell you this, but since you're still playing it square I'll let you in on something.”

He took a pad from his pocket and flipped it open. “Here's some names. See if you know anything about them.”

Pat cleared his throat.

“Henry Strebhouse, Carmen Silby, Thelma B. Duval, Virginia R. Reims, Conrad Stevens.” Pat stopped and waited, looking at me expectantly.

“Strebhouse and Stevens spent a stretch in the big house,” he said. “I don't know the others. Think I saw the Duval girl's name in the society columns once.”

“You did. Well, you're not much help, so I'll tell you. Each one of these people is in city or private sanitariums. Dope fiends.”

“That's nice,” I mused. “How did it get out?”

“Vice squad reported it.”

“Yeah. I know they've been on something like that, but it's funny it didn't reach the papers. Oh, I get it. They haven't found the source yet, huh? What is it?”

Pat gave me a wry grin. “That's what Daly would like to know. None of them will reveal it. Not even under threat of imprisonment. Unfortunately for us, some of them have connections too high up for us to try to extract information the hard way. We did get this, though, the stuff was delivered to them via a half-witted little guy who didn't know from nothing.”

I let my breath go out hard. “Bobo!”

“Exactly. They'll be able to identify him—if they will. Maybe his death will make them clam up even tighter.”

“Damn,” I said softly, “and while they're under treatment we can't push them. Our hands are tied very neatly. There's a tie-up, Pat, there has to be. Look how closely all this is connected. At first glance it seems to be loose as hell, but it's not. Bobo and Kalecki ... Hal and Kalecki ... Hal and Eileen ... Eileen and Jack. Either we've run into an outfit that had a lot of irons in the fire or else it was a chain reaction. Jack started it going and the killer knocked him off, but the killer had to cover up something else. From then on it was a vicious circle. Brother, have we run into something!”

“You're not kidding. And we're standing right in the bottom of the well. Now what?”

“Beats me, Pat. I see a little light now, a few things are falling into place.”

“What?”

“I'd rather not say. Just little things. They don't point in any direction except to tell me that the killer has a damn good motive for all this.”

“Still racing me, Mike?”

“You can bet your pretty white tail on that! I think we're in the home stretch, but the track is muddy now and bogging us down. We'll have to plod through it to firmer ground before we can start whipping it up.” I grinned at him. “You won't beat me out, Pat.”

“What do you bet?”

“A steak dinner.”

“Taken.”

I left him then. He grabbed a cab back to the office and I went up to my apartment. When I took off my pants I felt for my wallet. It was gone. That was nice. Had two hundred berries in my billfold and I couldn't afford to lose it. I put my pants back on and went down to the car. Not there, either. I thought. I might have dropped it in the barber shop, but I paid that bill with change I had in my side pocket. Damn.

I climbed back in the car and turned it over, then headed south to Charlotte's apartment. The lobby door was open and I walked up. I rang the bell twice, but no one answered. Someone was inside, though, and I could hear a voice singing
Swanee River.
I pounded on the door and Kathy opened it up.

“What's the matter,” I asked her, “doesn't the bell ring any more?”

“Sho' nuff, Mistah Hammah. Ah think so. Come in. Come in.”

When I walked in the door Charlotte came running out to meet me. She had on a stained smock and a pair of rubber gloves. “Hey, honey,” she smiled at me. “You sure made that trip fast. Goody, goody, goody.” She threw her arms around me and tilted her head for a kiss. Kathy stood there watching, her teeth flashing whitely in her mouth.

“Go 'way,” I grinned. Kathy turned her back so I could kiss her boss. Charlotte sighed and laid her head against my chest.