The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (24 page)

“Can’t help it.”

“Sure. Then let’s go in and see somebody who died by their own hand instead of yours.”

“That’s not funny, pal. Can it.” Pat laughed again and walked in.

The guy was a middle-aged average man. He had a shock of white hair and a peculiar expression and color that come from breathing too much gas. He stunk of whisky and lay in a heap on the floor with his head partially propped up against the cushioned leg of a chair.

Barner was slipping into his coat. “Damn good thing there wasn’t a pilot light on that stove. Would have blown the block to bits.”

Pat knelt down and took a close look at the body. “How long has he been dead?”

“Few hours, at least. There hasn’t been anybody home in this building all morning. The landlady came in around noon and smelt the gas. The door was closed, but not locked, and she smashed a couple of windows out and called a doctor. There wasn’t anything he could do so he called us.”

“Any note?”

“Nah. The guy was tanked up. He probably got disgusted with himself and turned on the gas. He used to be an actor. Name’s Jenkins, Harvey Robinson Jenkins. The landlady said he was pretty good about thirty years ago, a regular matinee idol. He dropped into character parts, got wiped out when vaudeville went out and picked up a few bucks working in small road shows now and then.”

I looked around the room and took stock of his things. There was a good leather chair by the window and a new floor lamp, but the rest of the furnishings had lost their shape and luster with age. There were two rooms, a combination sitting-room-bedroom and a kitchenette. A stack of old theater posters were neatly stacked behind the bed and a new military kit decorated the top of the dresser. The kitchen was big enough to hold one person at a time. A faint odor of gas still hung up high and clung to the curtains. The refrigerator didn’t work, but then it didn’t have to because it was empty. Ajar of jam was on the table next to an empty bottle of whisky. There were a dozen other empties under the table in a cardboard carton.

So this is death. This is the way people die if you don’t help them. He was on the long road and glad of it. Too bad he had to leave his most prized possessions behind. The make-up kit was old and battered, but it was clean, unlike everything else, and the tubes and jars inside it were all neatly arranged and labeled. The mirror fastened to the back of the lid was polished clear by a careful hand. I could picture the little guy sitting there night after night playing all the great roles of history, seeing his hand transform him to the glories of his youth.

They were taking the body out in the basket when the landlady came in to see that that was all they took out. Barner said so long and left us watching the procession down the stairs. The landlady was a chubby woman whose scraggly hair fell down past her ears. Her hands were calloused and red from work and she kept rubbing them together as though they were cold.

She turned to me, clucking through her teeth. “There you see the evil of drink, young man. I lost me two husbands that way and now I lose a boarder.”

“Tough. Did he owe you any money?”

“No, not one red cent. Oh, he was an honorable one was Mr. Jenkins. Lived here over three years he did but always paid his rent somehow. Too bad he got that inheritance. It was too much for him who never had any real money. He spent it all on drink and now look at him.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I warned him, you can’t say I didn’t try. He was always making those speeches like an actor does and he told me that drink was food for the soul. Food for the soul! He never went hungry then.”

Pat grunted, anxious to leave. “Let that be a lesson to you, Mike.” He looked at the landlady pointedly. “How long was he on that binge?”

“Oh, for quite a while. Let me see, the letter with the money came a week after the Legion Parade. That was a Wednesday, the 13th. Yes, that’s it, a week later he got the money. He paid me the three months he owed me and for two more months in advance, then he started drinking. I never did see a man drink so much. Every night he’d get carried in still mumbling one of them silly parts of his and messing up my floor.”

Pat nodded thoughtfully. “See, Mike, that’s what you’re heading for. An untimely end.”

“Nuts, I don’t drink that much. Anyway, I’ll shoot myself before I try to get charged up on gas. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

The landlady showed us to the door and watched from the stoop as we pulled away. I hunched behind the wheel when I began thinking of the old coot who took the easy way out.

I thought about it for a long time.

I let Pat out at his office, found a saloon that was half empty and perched on a stool where I could think about it some more. The rows of whisky bottles behind the bar gleamed with reflected light. They were like women. Bait. They lured you in where you forgot what you were doing then sprang the trap and kicked you out.

The bartender filled my glass again, scooping up the rest of my change. I watched myself in the back mirror, wondering if I was as ugly to others as I was to myself. I grinned and the bartender scowled my way. I scowled and the bartender started grinning because my scowl isn’t as pretty as most. I swirled the drink around in my glass, slopping it over the top so I could make patterns on the bar.

I made rings, ovals, faces, then overlaid the whole picture with a bridge that towered high at both ends. I stared at the hump in the middle and drained the glass in a hurry to get my mind off it.

A lot of it had fallen into place, piece by piece. Things I didn’t see before were suddenly clear. It was a gigantic puzzle that only started here in Manhattan ... the rest of it reached down to Washington, across to San Francisco, then on across the ocean. And onward still until it encompassed the world and came back to where it started.

It was a picture of hate, terror and death that had no equal in history and it was here with us now. I was the only one who could see it. There were still parts of the puzzle missing, but it had a broad, recognizable outline now. I could make up parts that would fit, but that wouldn’t do.
I had to know. I had to be sure!

This time I wasn’t dealing in murder, I was dealing in war!

It was a curious puzzle that had two solutions. Every part could fit in different places, fooling you into thinking you had it. They were clever, I thought. They were clever, crafty, cunning, anything you wanted to call it.

They had a slogan that the end justified the means.

They would kill to accomplish a purpose.

They would wreck everything to gain their ends, even if they had to build again on the wreckage.

They were here and they were smart as hell. Even the Nazis were like schoolchildren as compared to them.

But that was the catch. They were smart ... for them! I could laugh now and think rings around them all because I was smarter than the best they could offer. Torture, Death, and Lies were their brothers, but I had dealt with those triplets many times myself. They weren’t strangers to me. I gave them my orders and they took them because they had to.

I was a ruthless bastard with a twisted mind who could look on death and find it pleasant. I could break an arm or smash in a face because it was easier that way than asking questions. I could out-fox the fox with a line of reasoning that laughed at the truth because I was the worst of the lot and never did deserve to live. That’s what that damned judge thought anyway.

This time I got back in the car and drove over to the building that had the radio antenna projecting up from the roof. There were two police cars parked in front of it and I nodded to the drivers. For once I was glad to have been seen around so much with Pat. I went in and leaned on the railing that separated the room and waited until the cop in the faded alpaca coat and the eyeshade came over to me.

He nodded too.

I said, “Hello, George. I need a favor done.”

“Sure, Mike. That is, if I can do it.”

“You keep a record of incoming calls, don’t you?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Look one up for me. A few days ago a New York prowl car crossed the George Washington bridge.” I gave him the date and the approximate time. “See if it was on a call.”

He went back to a stall where he rummaged around in a filing cabinet. When he returned he carried a sheet, reading from it. He looked up and raised his eyeshade farther on his forehead. “Here it is. Unidentified girl called and asked to have a police car meet her. I think I remember this one. She was in a hurry and instead of giving her address she said on the walk of the bridge. A car was dispatched to see what went on and called in that it was a wild-goose chase.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah. Anything to it?”

“I don’t know yet. Thanks a lot, George.”

“Sure, Mike, any time. So long.”

I went out and sat in the car with a cigarette drooping from my lips. Unidentified girl. That car on the bridge wasn’t there by chance. I had just missed things. Too bad, too damn bad in one way that the boys in the car had gotten there late. The weather, no doubt. Then again it was lucky they didn’t make it.

The engine came to life under my feet and I drove away from the curb. I took the notebook from my pocket and thumbed the pages while I was stalled in traffic, picking up Paula Riis’s address from the jumble of notes. I hoped I had it right, because I had jotted it down after coming from Pat’s the time he had thrown her identity at me.

It was a number in the upper Forties just off Eighth Avenue, a four-story affair with three apartments above a shoddy beauty parlor that took up the first floor. A sedan with United States Post Office Department inscribed on the door was double parked outside it. I found a place to leave my heap and got back just as two men came down the stairs and got into the car. I had seen the taller guy before; he was a postal inspector.

A dark, swarthy woman stood in the door with her hands on chunky hips muttering to herself. I took the steps two at a time and said hello to her.

She looked me up and down first. “Now what you want? You not from Post Office.”

I looked past her shoulder into the vestibule and knew why those men had been here. A good-sized rectangle had been torn out of the wall. The mailbox that had been there had been ripped out by the roots and the marks of the crowbar that did it still showed in the shattered lath and plaster.

I got that cold feeling again, of being just a little bit too late. I palmed my buzzer and held it out where she could see it.

“Oh, you the police. You come about the room. Whassa matter with other police? He see everything. These crooks! When that girl comes back she be one mad cookie, you bet!”

“That’s right, I came about the room. Where is it?”

“Upstairs, what’s left of it. Now there’s nothing but junk. Thassall, just junk. Go look.”

I went and looked. I saw the same thing that had happened to Charlie Moffit’s room. This was a little worse because there was more to it. I cursed softly and backed out of the room. I cursed because I was pleased that the room
was
like Charlie Moffit’s room, a room ripped apart by a search that didn’t have an end. They were still looking. They tore the room up then stole the mailbox because they thought that Charlie had mailed his girl friend the stuff.

Then I stopped cursing because I knew then that they did have it after all. Charlie mailed the stuff and it lay in the mailbox because she was dead. They couldn’t get it out so they took the whole works. This time I cursed because I was mad, mad as hell.

I made a circuit of the room, kicking at the pieces with a frenzied futility. Clothes that had been ripped apart at the seams were everywhere. The furniture was broken, disemboweled and scattered across the floor. The bottom had been taken out of the phone and lay beneath the stand by the window. I picked it up, turned it over then chucked it away.

They had come in through the window and gouged hunks out of the sill when they pried up the sash. I threw it up and looked around, saying damn to myself because it had been so easy. There was an overturned ash can on the ground below. They had stepped on that, then on to the roof of the extension below and right into the room.

Too bad Mr. MVD. couldn’t have tripped over the phone line and broken his lousy neck. I picked up the strand of wire that ran out the window to the pole and switched it out of the way. It was slack, too damn slack. I saw why in a minute. The insulator that had held it to the wall had been pulled out. I climbed out on the roof and ran my hand along the wire and the answer was in the slit that was in the insulation.

Somebody had a tap on that wire and when they pulled it off they yanked too hard and it came right off the wall. Damn! Damn it all to hell and back again! I climbed back in the room and slammed the window shut, still swearing to myself.

The woman still stood in the doorway. “You see, you see?” Her voice went higher on each word. “These damn crooks. Nobody is safe. What for are the police? What that girl going to say, eh? You know! She give me hell, you betcha. She was all paid up, too. Now whatcha think?”

“Don’t get excited. Whoever searched her room took the mailbox too. They were looking for a letter.”

She made a sour mouth. “Huh. They don’t get it, I tell you that, for sure. She’s a lose her key a month ago and I always get her mail personal. The postman he’s give it to me every day and I take it inside.”

My heart hammered against my ribs and I heard it send the blood driving into my head. I licked my lips to get the words out. “Maybe I better take it all along then. She can call for it when she returns.”

She squinted, then bobbed her head. “That is good. I don’t have to worry no more about it. From now on till I get a new mailbox I have to take everybody’s mail anyhow. Come inside, I give it to you.”

We went into the beauty parlor on the first floor and I waited with my hat in my hand. She came back with a handful of envelopes and one of them was a heavy job stuffed so full the flap had torn a little. I thanked her and left.

Just like that.

How simple could it get?