The Mike Hammer Collection (77 page)

Five minutes. My teeth were making harsh, grinding noises I could feel through my jaw. I came to my street and pulled into a parking space. Another minute went by while I oriented myself and followed the numbers in the right direction. Another two minutes went by before I found it.

Three minutes. She should almost be there by now. The name on the bell read, ANTON LIPSEK, Esq., and some kid had written a word under it. The kid had my sympathy. I felt the same way myself. I pushed the bell and heard it tinkle someplace upstairs.

Nothing happened. I pushed it again and kept my finger on it. The tinkling went on and on and on and still nothing happened. I pushed one of the other bells and the door clicked open. A voice from the rear of the first floor said, “Who is it?”

“Me,” I said. “I forgot my key.”

The voice said, “Oh ... okay,” and the door closed. Me, the magic password. Me, the sap, the sucker, the target for a killer. Me, the stupid bastard who was going around in circles while a killer watched and laughed. That was me.

I had to light a match at every door to see where I was. I found Anton's on the top floor with another Esq. after it. There was no sound and no light, and when I tried the knob it was locked.

I was too late. I was too late all around. It was five after twelve. Velda would be inside. The door would be closed and the nuptial couch laid. Velda would know all about it the hard way.

I kicked the door so hard the lock snapped and the door flew open. I kicked it shut the same way and stood there hoping the killer would come at me out of the darkness, hoping he'd run right into the rod I held in my fist. I prayed that he'd come, listened hard hoping to hear him. All I heard was my own breathing.

My hand groped for the wall switch and found it, bathing the place with a brilliant white light. It was some place. Some joint. The furniture was nothing but wooden porch furniture and the lamps were rigged up from discarded old floodlights. The rug on the floor must have been dragged out of an ash can.

But the walls were worth a million dollars. They were hung with canvas painted by the Masters and must have been genuine, otherwise their lavish frames and engraved brass nameplates were going to waste. So Anton had money and he didn't spend it on dames. No, it went into pictures, something with a greater permanent value than money. The inscriptions were all in French and didn't mean a thing to me. Although the rest of the room was littered with empty glasses and cigarette butts, not a speck of dust nested on the frames or the pictures, and the brass plates had been recently polished.

Could this be Anton's reward for wartime collaboration? Or was it his own private enterprise?

I picked some of the trash out of the way and prowled around the apartment. There was a small studio filled with the usual claptrap of a man who brings his work home with him, and adjoining, a tiny darkroom. The sinks were filled and a small red light burned over a table. That was all there was to it. I would have left, but the red light winked at me from a reflected image in a shiny bit of metal against the wall and I ran my hand over the area.

It wasn't a wall, it was a door. It was set flush with the wall and had no knob. Only the scratch on the concealed hinge showed me where it was. Someplace a hidden latch opened it and I didn't waste time looking for it. I braced my back against the sink and kicked out as hard as I could.

Part of the wall shook and cracked.

I kicked again and my foot went through the partition. The third time I had made a hole big enough to crawl into. It was an empty clothes closet that faced into another apartment.

Here was where Anton Lipsek lived in style. A wall had separated two worlds. There was junk lying around here, just the evidence of a recent and wild party. One side was a bar, stocked to the hilt with the best that money could buy. The rest of the room was the best that money could buy too. There were couches and tables that didn't come from any department store and they matched the drapes and color scheme perfectly. Someone with an eye for good taste had done a magnificent job of decorating. Someone like an artist-photographer named Anton Lipsek. The only things out of place were the cheap prints that were framed in bamboo. They belonged outside with the junk. Anton was as cracked as the Liberty Bell.

Maybe.

There were other rooms, a whole lot of rooms. Apparently he had rented two apartments back to back and used the darkroom as a secret go-between. There was a hall that led into three beautiful bedrooms, each with its own shower stall and toilet. Each bedroom had ash trays filled with cigarette butts, some plain, some stained with lipstick. In one room there were three well-chewed cigar stubs squashed out in a glass coaster beside the bed.

Something was wrong. There had to be something wrong. I would have seen it if my mind wasn't twisted and dead. The whole thing was as unnatural as it was possible to be. Why the two apartments? Why the one place crawling with dirt and decorated with a fortune in pictures and the other lavish in furnishings and nothing else?

Anton was a bachelor. Until recently he didn't mess with women, so why all the bedrooms? He wasn't so popular that he was overloaded with guests. I sat on the edge of the bed and shoved my hat back on my head. It was a nice bed, soft, firm and quiet. It made me want to lean back and sleep forever to wash the fatigue from my mind. I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

It was a white ceiling with faint lines crisscrossing in the calcimine. My eyes followed the lines to the wall where they disappeared into the molding. Those lines were like the tracks the killer made. They started at no place and went everywhere, disappearing just as effectively. A killer who was strong as he was vicious.

I stared at the molding some more then picked out the pictures that hung over the bed and stared at them. They were funny little pictures painted on glass, seascapes, with the water a shimmering silver. The water had tiny palms. I got up off that bed slowly and looked at the lines crisscrossing it too, reflecting the cracks in the ceiling.

My breath was hot in my throat and my eyes must have been little slits. I could feel my nails bite into my palms. The water was shiny and silver because the water part was a mirror. It made a lovely, decorative picture.

Lovely, but very practical. I tried to wrench the frames loose, but they were screwed into the wall. All I could do was swear and claw at the damn things and it didn't do any good. I ran back through the living room, opened the door of the closet and wiggled through the hole in the wall. The splinters grasped at my coat and held me back until I smacked at them with my hand.

The pictures. Those beautiful canvases by the Old Masters. They were worth a million as they stood and they had another million dollars' worth behind them. I grabbed the one with the two nudes playing in the forest and lifted it from the hook. It came away easily and I had what I was looking for.

On the other side a hole had been cut into the wall and I saw the little seascape in its frame on the other side. The shore line and the sky were opaque under the paint, but where the glass had been silvered you could see everything that went on in the room.

What a blackmail setup that was! One-way glass set above a bed! Oh, brother!

It took me about ten seconds to locate the camera Anton used. It was a fancy affair that would take shots without missing a single detail of expression. It had been tucked in a cabinet along with a tripod whose legs were still set at the proper level to focus the camera into the bedroom.

I threw it all on the floor and hauled out everything else that was in that cabinet. I was looking for pictures, direct evidence that would be hanging evidence. Something that would give me the big excuse when I pumped a slug into his guts.

It was simple as hell now, as simple as it could ever get. Anton Lipsek was using some of the girls to bait the big boys into the bedroom. He took pictures that set him up for life. It was the best kind of blackmail I could think of. The public could excuse anything else, but coarse infidelity, no.

Even Chester Wheeler fitted it. He was money, big money. He was in town alone and a little bit drunk. He walked into the trap, but he made one mistake that cost him his life. He recognized the girl. He recognized her as a girl that went to school with his daughter. The girl got scared and told Anton so Anton had to see to it that Wheeler died. But the girl was still scared and eloped, grabbing the first guy who was handy. She did fine until the killer caught up with her again and didn't take any chances with her getting so scared she
would
talk.

Yeah, it all was so simple now. Even Marion. Anton was afraid of me. The papers had it down that I was a cop and my ticket had been lifted. If I had never shown my face around neither Jean nor Marion would have died, but it was too late to think of that now. Anton made Marion pick up the story and say she was the one who went out with Wheeler, but she gave it an innocent touch that couldn't be tracked down. It should have stopped there.

What happened? Did Marion get too big for her pants and want a pay-off for the story she told? Sure, why not? She was in this thing. When those pictures turned up her face would be there. All she could lose would be her character and her job, but if she had something on somebody too, she didn't stand to lose a thing. So she died. Pretty? You bet your life it was!

I started to grin and my breath came fast through my teeth. Even right back to the beginning it checked. It didn't start from the night Wheeler died, it started a few days before, long enough to give the killer time to register in the hotel and take Wheeler at a convenient moment. I was just there by accident. I was a witness who didn't matter because I was out cold, and if I had been anybody else but me it made the killing so much the better. Whisky-drunk and out like a light with no memory of what happened. The cops would have tagged me and I would have tagged myself.

All the killer forgot was my habit of keeping that .45 loaded with six shots. He took back the extra slug and shell case and overlooked that one little item. If the killer had had sense enough to go through my pockets he would have found a handful of loose shells and replaced that one bullet that went into the mattress.

But it only takes one mistake to hang a guy. Just one. He made it. The killer must have been scared witless when he found out I was a cop. He must have known I'd been looking to get my ticket back, and he must have gone even further ... he'd want to know what I was like. He'd check old papers and court records and ask questions, then he'd
know
what I was like. He'd know that I didn't give a damn for a human life any more than he did. I was just a bit different. I didn't shoot anything but killers. I loved to shoot killers. I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor. It was fun to kill those bastards who tried to get away with murder and did sometimes.

I started to laugh and I couldn't stop. I pulled the Luger out and checked it again when it didn't need it. This time I pulled the trigger off half cock and let it sit all the way back ready to nudge a copper-covered slug out of the barrel and into a killer's face.

It was later than ever, late enough to make my blood turn cold as ice. I had to make myself stop thinking. I couldn't look for those pictures and think too.

If ever a room got torn apart, this was it. I ripped and I smashed and I tore looking for those damn photographs and there wasn't a damn thing to see except some unexposed plates. I pulled the room apart like Humpty Dumpty and started on the darkroom when I heard the steps outside.

They came from the hall that led into the good apartment, the one with the bedrooms. The key turned in the lock and the door opened. For one second I had a glimpse of Anton's face, a pale face suddenly gone stark white, then the door slammed shut and the feet pounded down the stairs.

I could have killed myself for leaving the lights on when they had been out!

My coat caught on the sink and ripped. It caught again when I crawled through the hole in the partition. I ripped it loose and felt it tear clear up to the collar. I screamed my rage and took plaster and lath with me when I burst through.

Damn that son of a bitch, he was getting away! I twisted the lock and tumbled into the hall without bothering to close the door. I heard feet slamming on the stairs and the downstairs door smash shut. I started down the steps and fell. I ran and fell again and managed to reach the bottom without breaking any bones. All over my body were spots that would wait until later to hurt, raw spots that stuck to my clothes with my own blood.

My gun was in my hand when I ran out on the street and it was nothing more than a useless weight because Anton's car was screaming up the street toward the intersection.

How important can a guy get? What does he have to do to please the fates that hamstring him every inch of the way? I saw the red dot of his tail-light swing to the right as a cruising cab cut him off. I heard the grinding of metal and the shouts of the drivers and Anton Lipsek was up on the sidewalk trying to back off.

It was too far to run, too much of a chance to take. I wheeled and dashed into the alleyway that passed between the buildings and leaped for the fence at the end and pulled myself over. I climbed in my car and turned the key, felt the motor cough and catch, and I said a prayer that the snow under the wheels would hold long enough for me to get away.

The fates laughed a little and gave me a push. I pulled away from the curb and sped down the street. Just as I turned the corner Anton drove across the sidewalk and back into the street while the cab driver ran after him waving his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs. I had to lean on my horn to get him out of the way.