The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (60 page)

“You make too much noise.”

“Things happen, don’t they?”

Velda didn’t answer that one either.

“So now it makes sense,” I told her. “They have the idea I’m in the deal someplace but they can’t come out and say it. They play twenty questions hoping I do have a share of it so they’ll have someplace to start. They won’t give up until the day they die or I do because once the finger touches you it never comes away. There’s no such thing as innocence, just innocence touched with guilt is as good a deal as you can get.”

Velda’s mouth moved slowly. “Maybe it’s a good thing, Mike. It’s a funny world. Pure innocence as such doesn’t enter in much nowadays. There’s always at least one thing people try to hide.” She paused and ran her finger along the side of her cheek. “If a murderer is hung for the wrong killing, who is wrong?”

“That’s a new twist for you, kid.”

“I got it from you.”

“Then finish it.”

Her fingers reached out and plucked a cigarette from the pack. It was a graceful, feminine motion that spoke of soft girlishness, the texture of her skin satiny and amber in the light. You could follow the fingers into the hand and the hand into the arm, watching the curves melt into each other like a beautiful painting. Just watching like that and you could forget the two times that same hand held a snarling, spitting rod that chewed a guy’s guts out. “Now innocence touched with guilt pays off,” she said. “You’ll be one of the baited hooks they’ll use until something bites.”

“And in the end the public will benefit.”

“That’s right.” She grinned, the corner of her mouth twisting upward a little. “But don’t feel badly about it, Mike. They’re stealing your stuff. You taught them that trick a long time ago.”

My fingers went out and began to play with the slugs that squatted in the bottom of the ash tray where I had dropped them. She watched me from across the room, her eyes half closed in speculation. Then she uncurled, tossed my deck of smokes into the chair beside me and reached for her coat.

I didn’t watch her walk away. I sat there dreaming of the things I’d like to do and how maybe if nobody was there to see me I’d do anyway. I was dreaming of a lot of fat faces with jowls that got big and loose on other people’s meat and how they’d look with that smashed, sticky expression that comes with catching the butt end of a .45 across their noses. I was dreaming of a slimy foreign secret army that held a parade of terror under the Mafia label and laughed at us with our laws and regulations and how fast their damned smug expressions would change when they saw the fresh corpses of their own kind day after day.

She didn’t have to go far to read my mind. She had seen me look like this before. She didn’t have to go far to get me back on the track, either. “Isn’t it about time you taught them some fresh tricks, Mike?” Velda said softly.

Then she left and the room got a little darker.

CHAPTER
5

I sat there for a while, staring at the multicolored reflections of the city that made my window a living, moving kaleidoscope. The voice of the monster outside the glass was a constant drone, but when you listened long enough it became a flat, sarcastic sneer that pushed ten million people into bigger and better troubles, and then the sneer was heard for what it was, a derisive laugh that thought blood running from an open wound was funny, and death was the biggest joke of all.

Yeah, it laughed at people like me and you. It was the voice of the guy with the whip who laughed at each stroke to drown out the screams of the victim. A subtle voice that hid small cries, a louder voice that covered the anguished moans.

I sat and heard it and thought about it while the statistics ran through my head. So many a minute killed by cars, so many injured. So many dead an hour by out-and-out violence. So many this and so many that. It made a long impressive list that was recited at board meetings and assemblies.

There was only one thing left out. How many were scared stiff? How many lay awake nights worrying about things they shouldn’t have to worry about at all? How many wondered where their kids were and what they were doing.
How many knew the army of silent men who made their whispered demands and either got them or extracted payment according to the code?

Then I knew the voice outside for what it was. Not some intangible monster after all. Not some gigantic mechanical contrivance that could act of its own accord. Not a separate living being with its own rules and decrees. Not one of those things.

People, that’s all.

Just soft, pulpy people, most of them nice. And some of them filthy and twisted who gorged themselves on flesh and puffed up with the power they had so that when they got stuck they popped like ripe melons and splashed their guts all over the ground.

The Mafia. The stinking, slimy Mafia. An oversize mob of ignorant, lunkheaded jerks who ruled with fear and got away with it because they had money to back themselves up.

The Black Hand? You think you can laugh it off? You think all that stuff went out with Prohibition? There’s a lot of widows around who can tell you differently. Widowers, too.

Like Velda said, it wasn’t going to be easy at all. You don’t just ask around where you can find the top boy.

First you find somebody to ask and if you’re not dead by then, or he’s not dead, you ask. Then you ask and look some more, each time coming closer to the second when a bullet or a knife reaches across space and spears you.

There’s a code they work by, a fixed unbreakable code. Once the Mafia touches you it never takes its hand away. And if you make one move, just one single, hesitant move to get out from under, it’s all over. Sometimes it takes a day or two, even a year maybe, but it was all over from then.

You get dead.

In a sense though, it was funny. Someplace at the top of the heap was a person. From him the fear radiated like from the center of a spiderweb. He sat on his throne and made a motion of his hand and somebody died. He made another motion and somebody was twisted until they screamed. A nod of his head did something that sent a guy leaping from a roof because he couldn’t take it any more.

Just one person did that. One soft, pulpy person.

I started to grin a little bit thinking how he’d act stripped of weapons and his power for a minute or so in a closed room with someone who didn’t like him. I could almost see his face behind the glass and my grin got bigger because I was pretty sure of what I was going to do now.

It was late, but only by the clock. The city was yawning and stretching after its supper, waking up to start living. The rain had died, leaving a low grumble in the skies overhead to announce its passing. The air was fresher now, the light a little brighter, and the parade of cabs had slowed down enough so I could whistle one down and hop a ride over to Pat’s apartment.

He let me in with a grin and muttered something between the folder of papers he had clamped in his teeth, waved me into the living room and took my coat. His eyes made a casual sweep over my chest and he didn’t have to look a second time to tell I wasn’t wearing a rig under my arm.

Pat said, “Drink?”

“Not now.”

“It’s only ginger ale.”

I shook my head and sat down. He filled his glass, relaxed into a wing chair and shoved all the papers into an envelope. “Glad to see you traveling light.”

“Didn’t you expect me to?”

His mouth crooked up at the corner. “I figured you’d know better than not to. Just don’t blame me for the deal, that’s all.”

“You’re not too sorry about it, are you?”

“As a matter of fact, no.” His fingers tapped the envelope, then his eyes came up to mine. “It puts you on the spot as far as business is concerned, but I don’t imagine you’ll starve.”

“I don’t imagine I will either,” I grinned back at him. “How long am I supposed to be in solitary for?”

He didn’t like the grin at all. He got those wrinkles around his eyes that showed when something was getting under his hide and took a long drag on the drink to muffle what he knew I saw. “When they’re ready to lift it they’ll lift it and not before.”

“They won’t have it that soft,” I told him.

“No?”

I flicked a butt into my mouth and lit it. “Tomorrow you can remind ‘em I’m an incorporated business, a taxpayer and a boy with connections. My lawyer has a judge probably getting up a show cause right now and until they settle the case in court they aren’t pulling any bill-of-attainder stuff on me.”

“You got a mouthful of words on that one, Mike.”

“Uh-huh. And you know what I’m talking about. Nobody, not even a Federal agency is going to pull my tail and not get chewed a little bit.”

His hands got too tight around the glass. “Mike ... this isn’t just murder.”

“I know.”

“How much?”

“No more than before. I’ve been thinking around it though.”

“Any conclusions?”

“One.” I looked at him, hard. “Mafia.”

Nothing changed in his face. “So?”

“I can be useful if you’d quit booting me around.” I took a drag on the smoke and let it curl out into the light. “I don’t have to pull my record out. You know it as well as I do. Maybe I have shot up a few guys, but the public doesn’t seem to miss them any. If your buddies think I’m stupid enough to go busting in on something over my head without knowing what I’m doing then it’s time they took a refresher course. They haven’t got one guy in Washington that’s smarter than I am ... not one guy. If they had they’d be making more moolah than I am and don’t fool yourself thinking they’re in there for love of the job. It’s about the limit they can do.”

“You sure think a lot of yourself.”

“I have to, friend. Nobody else does. Besides, I’m still around when a lot of others have taken their last car ride.”

Pat finished off the glass and swirled the last few drops around the bottom. “Mike,” he said, “if I had my way I’d have you and ten thousand more in on this thing. That’s about how many we’d need to fight it. As it is, I’m a city cop and I take orders. What do you want from me?”

“You say it, Pat.”

He laughed this time. It was like the old days when neither one of us gave a damn about anything and if we had to hate it was the same thing. “Okay, you want me for your third arm. You’re going to dive into this thing no matter who says what and as long as you are we’d might as well use your talents instead of tripping over them.”

The grin was real. It was six years ago and not now any longer. The light was back in his eyes again and we were a team riding over anything that stood in our way. “Now I’ll tell you something, Mike,” he said, “I don’t like the way the gold-badge boys do business either. I don’t like political meddling in crime and I’m sick of the stuff that’s been going on for so long. Everybody is afraid to move and it’s about time something jolted them. For so damn long I’ve been listening to people say that this racket is over our heads that I almost began to believe it myself. Okay, I’ll lay my job on the line. Let’s give it a spin and see what happens. Tell me what you want and I’ll feed it to you. Just don’t hash up the play ... at least not for a while yet. If something good comes of it I’ll have a talking point and maybe I can keep my job.”

“I can always use a partner.”

“Thanks. Now let’s hear your angle.”

“Information. Detailed.”

He didn’t have to go far for it. The stuff was right there in his lap. He pulled it all out of the envelope and thumbed the sheets apart. The light behind his head made the sheets translucent enough so the lines of type stood out and there weren’t very many lines.

“Known criminals with Mafia connections,” he drawled. “Case histories of Mafia efficiency and police negligence. Twenty pages of arrests with hardly enough convictions to bother about. Twenty pages of murder, theft, dope pushing, and assorted felonies and all we’re working with are the bottom rungs of the ladder. We can name some of the big ones but don’t fool yourself and think they are the top joes. The boys up high don’t have names we know about.”

“Is Carl Evello there?”

Pat looked at the sheets again and threw them on the floor in disgust. “Evello isn’t anywhere. He’s got one of those investigatable incomes but it looks like he’ll be able to talk his way out of it.”

“Berga Torn?”

“Now we’re back to murder. One of many.”

“We don’t think alike there, Pat.”

“No?”

“Berga was special. She was so special they put a crew of boys on her who knew their business. They don’t do that for everybody. Why did the committee want her?”

I could see him hesitate a moment, shrug and make up his mind. “There wasn’t much to the Torn dame. She was a good-looking head with a respectable mind but engaged in a mucky racket, if you get what I mean.”

“I know.”

“There was a rumor that Evello was keeping her for a while. It was during the time he was raking in a pile. The same rumor had he gave her the boot and the committee figured she’d be mad enough to spill what she knew about him.”

“Evello wouldn’t be that dumb,” I said.

“When it comes to dames, guys can be awfully dumb,” he grinned at me knowingly.

“Finish it.”

“The feds approached her. She was scared stiff, but she indicated that there was something she could give out, but she wanted time to collect her information and protection after she let it out.”

“Great.” I snuffed the butt out and leaned back in the chair. “I can see Washington assigning her a permanent bodyguard.”

“She was going to appear before the committee masked.”

“No good. Evello could still spot her from the info she handed them.”

Pat confirmed the thought with a nod. “In the meantime,” he went on, “she got the jitters. Twice she got away from the men assigned to cover her. Before the month was out she was practically hysterical and went to a doctor. He had her committed to a sanitarium and she was supposed to stay there for three weeks. The investigation was held up, there were agents assigned to guard the sanitarium, she got away and was killed.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that only you were there when it happened.”