The Mike Hammer Collection (74 page)

“Will you come back when it's over, Mike?”

I put on my hat and looked down at her. She looked so damn desirable and agreeable I wanted to stay. I said, “I'll be back, Juno. You can dance for me again ... all by yourself. I'll sit down and watch you dance and you can show me how you have fun on Olympus. I'm getting a little tired of being a mortal.”

“I'll dance for you, Mike. I'll show you things you never saw before. You'll like Olympus. It's different up there and there's nothing like it on this earth. We'll have a mountaintop all to ourselves and I'll make you want to stay there forever.”

“It'd take a good woman to make me stay anywhere very long.”

Her tongue flicked out and left her lips glistening wetly, reflecting the desire in her eyes. Her body seemed to move, squirm, so the sheen of the housecoat threw back the lithe contours of her body, vivid in detail.
“I
could,” she said.

She was asking me now. Demanding that I come to her for even a moment and rip that damn robe right off her back and see what it was that went to make up the flesh of a goddess. For one second my face must have changed and she thought I was going to do it, because her eyes went wide and I saw her shoulders twitch and this time there was woman-fear behind the desire and she was a mortal for an instant, a female crouching away from the male. But that wasn't what made me stop. My face went the way it did because there was something else again I couldn't understand and it snaked up my back and my hands started to jerk unconsciously with it.

I picked up my butts and winked good night. The look she sent me made my spine crawl again. I walked out and found my car half buried in a drift and drove back to the street of lights where I parked and checked into a hotel for a long winter's nap.

CHAPTER 10

I
slept the sleep of the dead, but the dead weren't disturbed by dreams of the living. I slept and I talked, hearing my own voice in the stillness. The voice asked questions, demanded answers that couldn't be given and turned into a spasm of rage. Faces came to me, drifting by in a ghostly procession, laughing with all the fury the dead could command, bringing with their laughter that weird, crazy music that beat and beat and beat, trying to drive my senses to the furthermost part of my brain from which they could never return. My voice shouted for it to stop and was drowned in the sea of laughter. Always those faces. Always that one face with the golden hair, hair so intensely brilliant it was almost white. The voice I tried to scream with was only a hoarse, muted whisper saying, “Charlotte, Charlotte ... I'll kill you again if I have to! I'll kill you again, Charlotte!” And the music increased in tempo and volume, pounding and beating and vibrating with such insistence that I began to fall before it. The face with the gold hair laughed anew and urged the music on. Then there was another face, one with hair a raven-black, darker than the darkness of the pit. A face with clean beauty and a strength to face even the dead. It challenged the golden hair and the music, commanding it to stop, to disappear forever. And it did. I heard my voice again saying over and over, “Velda, thank God! Velda, Velda, Velda.”

I awoke and the room was still. My watch had stopped and no light filtered in under the shade. When I looked out the sky was black, pin-pointed with the lights of the stars that reflected themselves from the snow-covered street below.

I picked up the phone and the desk answered. I said, “This is Hammer in 541. What time is it?”

The clerk paused, then answered, “Five minutes to nine, sir.”

I said thanks and hung up. The clock had come mighty close to going around twice at that. It didn't take me more than ten minutes to get dressed and checked out. In the restaurant that adjoined the hotel I ate like I was famished, took time for a slow smoke and called Velda. My hand trembled while I waited for her to answer.

I said, “Hello, honey, it's Mike.”

“Oh ... Mike, where have you been? I've been frantic.”

“You can relax, girl. I've been asleep. I checked into a hotel and told them not to disturb me until I woke up. What happened with you and Clyde? Did you learn anything?”

She choked back a sob and my hand tightened around the receiver. Clyde was dying right then. “Mike ...”

“Go on, Velda.” I didn't want to hear it but I had to.

“He almost ... did.”

I let the phone go and breathed easier. Clyde had a few minutes left to live. “Tell me,” I said.

“He wants me in the worst way, Mike. I—I played a game with him and I was almost sorry for it. If I hadn't gotten him too drunk ... he would have ... but I made him wait. He got drunk and he told me ... bragged to me about his position in life. He said he could run the city and he meant it. He said things that were meant to impress me and I acted impressed. Mike ... he's blackmailing some of the biggest men in town. It's all got to do with the Bowery Inn.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Not yet, Mike. He thinks ... I'm a perfect partner for him. He said he'd tell me all about it if ... if I ... oh, Mike, what shall I do? What shall I do? I hate that man ... and I don't know what to do!”

“The lousy bastard!”

“Mike ... he gave me a key to his apartment. I'm going up there tonight. He's going to tell me about it then ... and make arrangements to take me in with him. He wants me, Mike.”

A rat might have been gnawing at my intestines. “Shut up! Damn it, you aren't going to do anything!”

I heard her sob again and I wanted to rip the phone right off the wall. I could barely hear her with the pounding of the blood in my head. “I have to go, Mike. We'll know for sure then.”

“No!”

“Mike ... please don't try to stop me. It isn't nearly as ... serious as what you've done. I'm not getting shot at ... I'm not giving my life. I'm trying to give what I can, just like you ... because it's important. I'm going to his apartment at midnight and then we'll know, Mike. It won't take long after that.”

She didn't hear me shout into the phone because she had hung up. There was no stopping her. She knew I might try to, and would be gone before I could reach her.

Midnight. Three hours. That's all the time I had.

It wasn't so funny any more.

I felt in my pocket for another nickel and dialed Pat's number. He wasn't home so I tried the office and got him. I told him it was me without giving my name and he cut me off with a curt hello and said he'd be in the usual bar in ten minutes if I wanted to see him. The receiver clicked in my ear as he hung up. I stood there and looked at the phone stupidly.

The usual bar was a little place downtown where I had met him several times in the past and I went there now. I double-parked and slid out in front of the place to look in the windows, then I heard, “Mike ... Mike!”

I turned around and Pat was waving me into my car and I ran back and got in under the wheel. “What the hell's going on with you, Pat?”

“Keep quiet and get away from here. I think there's been an ear on my phone and I may have been followed.”

“The D.A.'s boys?”

“Yeah, and they're within their rights. I stopped being a cop when I lied for you. I deserve any kind of an investigation they want to give me.”

“But why all the secrecy?”

Pat looked at me quickly, then away. “You're wanted for murder. There's a warrant out for your arrest. The D.A. has found himself another witness to replace the couple he lost.”

“Who?”

“A local character from Glenwood. He picked you out of the picture file and definitely established that you were there that night. He sells tickets at the arena as a side line.”

“Which puts you in a rosy red light,” I said.

Pat muttered, “Yeah. I must look great.”

We drove on around the block and on to Broadway. “Where to?” I asked.

“Over to the Brooklyn Bridge. A girl pulled the Dutch act and I have to check it myself. Orders from the D.A. through higher headquarters. He's trying to make my life miserable by pulling me out on everything that has a morgue tag attached to it. The crumb hopes I slip up somewhere and when I do I've had it. Maybe I've had it already. He's checked my movements the night I was supposed to have been with you and is getting ready to pull out the stops.”

“Maybe we'll be cellmates,” I said.

“Ah, pipe down.”

“Or you can work in my grocery store ... while I'm serving time, that is.”

“I said, shut up. What've you got to be cheerful about?”

My teeth were clamped together, but I could still grin. “Plenty, kid. I got plenty to be cheerful about. Soon a killer will be killed. I can feel it coming.”

Pat sat there staring straight ahead. He sat that way until we reached the cutoff under the bridge and pulled over to the curb. There was a squad car and an ambulance at the wharf side and another squad car pulling up when Pat got out. He told me to sit in the car and stay there until he got out. I promised him I'd be a good boy and watched him cross the street.

He took too long. I began to fidget with the wheel and chain-smoked through my pack of butts. When I was on the last one I got out myself and headed toward the saloon on the corner. It was a hell of a dive, typically waterfront and reeking with all the assorted odors you could think of. I put a quarter in the cigarette machine, grabbed my fresh deck and ordered a beer at the bar. Two guys came in and started talking about the suicide across the street.

One was on the subject of her legs and the other took it up. Then they started on the other parts of her anatomy until the bartender said, “Jeez, cut it out, will ya! Like a couple ghouls ya sound. Can the crap.”

The guy who liked the legs fought for his rights supported by the other one and the bartender threw them both out and put their change in his pockets. He turned to me and said, “Ever see anythin' like that? Jeez, the dame's dead, what do they want of her now? What ghouls!”

I nodded agreement and finished my beer. Every two minutes I'd check my watch and find it two minutes later and start cursing a slimy little bastard named Clyde.

Then the beer would taste flat.

I took it as long as I could and got the hell out of the saloon and crossed the street to see what was taking Pat so long. There was a handful of people grouped around the body and the ambulance was gone. The car from the morgue had taken its place. Pat was bending over the body looking for identification without any success and had the light flashed on her face.

He handed one of the cops a note he fished out of her pocket and the cop scowled. He read, “He left me.” He scowled some more and Pat looked up at him. “That's all, Captain. No signature, no name. That's all it says.”

Pat scowled too and I looked at her face again.

The boys from the morgue wagon moved in and hoisted the body into a basket. Pat told them to put it in the unidentified file until they found out who she was.

I had a last look at her face.

When the wagon pulled away the crowd started to break up and I wandered off into the shadows that lined the street. The face, the face. Pale white to the point of transparency, eyes closed and lips slightly parted. I stood there leaning up against a plank wall staring at the night, hearing the cars and the trolley rattle across the bridge, hearing the cacophony of noises that go to make up the voice of the city.

I kept thinking of that face.

A taxi screamed past and slid to a stop at the corner. I backed up and a short fat figure speaking a guttural English shoved some bills in the driver's hand and ran to the squad cars. He spoke to the cop, his arms gesticulating wildly; the cop took him to Pat and he went through the same thing again.

The crowd that had turned away turned back again and I went with them, hanging on the outside, yet close enough so I could hear the little fat man. Pat stopped him, made him start over, telling him to calm himself down first.

The fat man nodded and took the cigarette that was offered him but didn't put it in his mouth. “The boat captain I am, you see?” he said. “The barges I am captain of. We go by two hours ago under the bridge and it is so quiet and peaceful then I sit on the deckhouse and watch the sky. Always I look up at the bridge when I go by. With my night glasses I look up to see the automobiles and marvel at such things as we have in this country.

“I see her then, you understand? She is standing there fighting and I hear her scream even. She fights this man who holds his hand over her mouth and she can't scream. I see all this, you understand, yet I am not able to move or do a thing. On the barge we have nothing but the megaphone to call with. It happens so fast. He lifts her up and over and she goes into the river. First I thought she hit the last barge on the string and I run and shout quickly but it is not so. I must wait so long until I can get somebody to take me off the barge, then I call the police.

“The policeman, he told me here to come. You were here. The girl has already been found. That is what I have come to tell you. You understand?”

Pat said, “I understand all right. You saw this man she fought?”

The guy bobbed his head vigorously.

“Could you identify him?”

Everyone's eyes were on the little guy. He lifted his hands out and shrugged. “I could tell him from someone else ... no. He had on a hat, a coat. He lifted this girl up and over she goes. No, I do not see his face for I am too excited. Even through the night glasses I could not see all that so well.”

Pat turned to the cop next to him. “Take his name and address. We'll need a statement on it.”