The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (72 page)

“They were arguing in whispers outside about the chain, then they closed the door and went away. One of them said they’d need a saw. I ... couldn’t stay here, Mike. I was terrified. I threw my clothes in the bag and ran out but when I got to the street I was afraid they might still be watching and I went down the cellar! Mike ... I’m ... I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right, Lily. I know how it is. Did you see them?”

“No. No, Mike.”

The shudder racked her body again and she bit into her finger.

“When ... that man found me ... I thought he was ... one of them.”

“You don’t have to worry any more, Lily. I’m not going to leave you here alone again. Look, go in and clean up. Take a nice hot bath and fix your hair. Then get something in your stomach.”

“Mike ... are you ... going out?”

“For a little while. I’ll have the super’s wife stay with you until I get back. Would you mind that?”

“You’ll hurry back?”

I nodded that I would and picked up the phone. The super’s wife said she’d be more than glad to help out and would come right up.

From in back of me Lily said, “I’m so dirty. Ask her to bring some rubbing alcohol, Mike.”

She said she’d do that too and hung up. Lily had finished her drink and lay with her head against the back of the chair watching me sleepily. The tautness had left her cheeks and color had come back to her mouth. She looked like a dog who had just been lost in the swamp then suddenly found his way home.

I started the water in the tub, filled it and lifted her out of the chair. She was light in my arms, completely relaxed, her breathing soft against my face. There was something too big in her eyes while she was so close to me and the strain of it showed in the corner of her mouth. She dug her fingers into my arms with a repressed hunger of a sort, sucked in her breath in a series of almost soundless staccato jerks and before I could kiss her she twisted her head and buried it against my shoulder.

The super’s wife came in while she was still splashing around in the tub. She made clucking noises like a mother hen and wanted to go right to her, but the door was locked so she started scrounging some chow up in the kitchen. The bottle of alcohol was on the table and before I left I knocked on the door.

“You want a rub-down, Lily?”

The water stopped splashing.

“Glad to give you a hand if you want,” I said.

She laughed from inside and I felt better. I left the bottle by the door, told the mother hen I was leaving and got out.

Seven thirty-two. The gray overcast brought a premature dusk to the city, a gloomy wet shroud that came down and poured itself inside your clothes. It was the kind of night that made the city withdraw into itself, leaving the sidewalks empty and people inside the glass-fronted stores staring aimlessly into the wet.

I left my car where it was and hopped a cab down to Canal. He let me out at Pascale’s and I went in the door on the right of the place. Here the hall was clean, clear and well lit. You could hear the hum of voices from the gin mill through the walls, but it diminished as I went up the stairs.

She was a short woman, her hair neatly in place and a ready smile that said hello.

“Mrs. Wallace?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Hammer. I’d like to talk to your husband if he’s home.”

“Certainly. Won’t you come in?”

She stepped aside, closed the door and called out, “Harv, there’s a gentleman here to see you.”

From inside a paper rustled and kids’ voices piped up. He said something to them and they quieted down. He came out to the kitchen with that expression one stranger has for another stranger, nodded to his wife, then to me and stuck out his hand.

“Mr. Hammer,” his wife said and smiled again. “I’ll go in with the children if you’ll excuse me.”

“Sit down, Mr. Hammer.” He pulled a chair out by the table, waved me into it and took one himself. He was one of those big guys with beefy shoulders and thinning hair. There was Irish in his face and a trace of Scandinavian.

“This’ll be quick,” I told him. “I’m an investigator. I’m not digging up anything unpleasant just for the fun of it and what you say won’t go any further.”

His tongue rolled around his cheek and he nodded.

“Sometime ago you drove the truck that killed a man named Lee Kawolsky.”

The side of his face moved.

“I explained ...”

“You don’t get the angle yet,” I said. “Wait. As far as you were concerned it was an out-and-out accident. Your first. It was one of those things that couldn’t be helped so you weren’t touched for it.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay. Like I said, it’s been a long time since it happened. Nobody else but you saw it. Tell me, have you ever gone over the thing in your mind since?”

Harvey said very quietly, “Mr. Hammer ... there are some nights when I never get to sleep at all.”

“You could see the thing happen. Sometimes the details would be sharp, then they’d fade?”

He squinted his eyes at me. “Something like that.”

“What are you uncertain about?”

“You know something, Mr. Hammer?”

“Maybe.”

This time he leaned forward, his face set in a puzzled grimace. “It’s not clear. I see the guy coming out from behind the L pillar and I’m yelling at him while I slam on the brakes. The load in the truck lets go and rams the wall back of the cab and I can feel the wheels ...” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “He came out too fast. He didn’t come out walking.”

Harvey looked at me, his eyes beseeching. “You know what I mean? I’m not making up excuses.”

“I know,” I said.

“I came out of the cab fast and he was under the axle. I know I yelled for somebody to help me. Sometimes ... I think I remember a guy running. Away, though. Sometimes I think I remember that and I can’t be sure.”

I stood up and put my hat on. “You can stop worrying then. It wasn’t an accident.” His eyes came wide open. “It was murder. Kawolsky was pushed. You were the sucker.”

I opened a door, waved a finger at him. “Thanks for the help.”

“Thank ... you, Mr. Hammer.”

“It’s over with so there’s no use fooling with the report,” I said.

“No ... but it’s good to know. I won’t be waking up in the middle of the night any more now.”

Ten minutes after nine. In the lobby of the hotel a row of empty telephone booths gaped at me. Two people were sitting in the far corner holding hands. One other, not looking as though he belonged there, was reading the paper and dripping water all over the floor.

The girl at the magazine counter changed a buck into dimes for me and I took the end booth on the row.

Thirty cents got me my party. His voice was deep and fat and it never sounded right coming out of the skinny little neck. He’d need a shave and his suit pressed but he didn’t give a damn for either. He was strictly a nobody up until the squash was put on bookie operations then all of a sudden he was a somebody. He had a mind like a recording machine and was making hay in the new deal of black-market betting operations.

“I said, ”Dave?“

“Right here.”

“Mike Hammer.”

The voice got closer to the phone and almost too casual. I could see him with his hand cupped around the mouthpiece and his eyes watching everybody in the place. “Sure, boy, whatcha doin‘?”

“They’re saying things along the row, Dave?”

“Piling up, big boy. Everybody got it.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“Come on, mister, you know better’n that.” The meaning sifted out of his words and I grinned. There was no humor in the grin.

I said, “I got what they want, kid. You tell it in the right places.”

“You’re killing me. Try again.”

“So you saw me. I was in the bag and let it slip.”

His voice dropped an octave. “Look, I’ll do a lot of things, but you don’t mess with them monkeys. They make a guy talk. Me, I got a big mouth when I get hurt up.”

“It’ll set, Dave. This is a big one. If it was a little one I’d ask somebody else. They got Velda. Understand that?”

He said three sharp, nasty curses at the same time. “You’re trading.”

“I’m willing. If it don’t come off I’ll blow the thing apart.”

“Okay, Mike. I’ll spin it. Don’t bother calling me again, okay?”

“Okay,” I said and hung up.

I walked over to the desk and the clerk smiled, “Room, sir?”

“Not now, thanks. I’d like to see the manager.”

“I’m afraid you can’t. He’s gone for the evening. You see ...”

“He live here?”

“Why, er ... why, yes, but ...”

I let a bill do the talking. The guy was well-dressed but underpaid and the ten looked big. “No trouble. I have to speak to him. He won’t know.”

The bill left my fingers magically. “Suite 101.” He pointed a long forefinger across the room. “Take the stairs past the mezzanine. It’s quicker.”

There was a buzzer beside the door. I leaned on it until I heard the knob turn and a middle-aged, sensitive Latin face was peering out at me. The professional smile creased his lower jaw pulling the thin mustache tighter and he cocked his head in an attentive attitude ready to hear my complaint. His eyes were telling me that he trusted it would be a good one because Mr. Carmen Trivago was preparing to leave in a moment for a very important engagement.

I gave him a shove that wiped the smile clean off his face and he stumbled back inside while I closed the door. There was an instantaneous flash of mingled terror and hatred in his expression that dissolved into indignation as he drew himself up stiffly and said, “What is the meaning of this?”

“Get back inside.”

“I ...”

My hand cracked him across the mouth so hard he hit the wall, flattened against it making unintelligible noises in his throat. He wasn’t so stiff when I gave him a shove into the living room. He was all loose and jelly-like as if his bolts were ready to come apart.

I said, “Turn around and look at me.” He did. “I’m going to ask you things and you answer them right. If you think you’d do better by lying look at my face and you won’t lie. Let me catch you in one and I’ll mangle you so damn bad you won’t even crawl out of this dump for a month. Just for the hell of it I ought to do something to you now so you know I’m not kidding about it.”

Carmen Trivago couldn’t stand up any more. His knees went as watery as his eyes and he slumped crookedly on the edge of a chair.

“No . . . don’t ...”

“His right name was Nicholas Raymondo. With an ‘O.’ You were the only one who knew that. I thought it was your accent, but you knew his name, didn’t you?”

His mouth opened to speak but the words wouldn’t come out. He nodded dumbly.

“Where’d he get his dough?”

The spread of his hands said he didn’t know and before he could shake his head to go with it I rocked him with another open-handed slap that left the prints of my fingers across his jaw.

He couldn’t take anything at all and tried to burrow into the chair while he moaned, “Please. No ... I’ll tell you ... anything. Please.”

“When, then?”

“He had ... the business. From abroad he ...”

“I know about that. Business didn’t give him the kind of money he spent.”

“Yes, yes. It is true. But he never said. He spoke of big things but he never said ...”

“He liked dames.”

Carmen’s eyes told me he didn’t get what I was driving at.

I said slowly, “So do you. Two of a kind, you guys. Lady killers. You knew his right name. Those things only come when you know a person. You know that much and you know a lot more. Think about it. I’ll give you a minute. Just one.”

His neck seemed to stretch out of shape as he held his head up. The longer he looked at me the more he curled up inside and his mouth started to move. “It is true ... he had the money. It was enough. He was ... satisfied to spend it all on much foolishness. There would be more soon, he told me, much more. At first ... I thought he was making a boast. But no. He was serious. Never would he tell me more than that.”

I took a slow step a little closer to him.

His hands went up to hold me off. “It is true, I swear it! This other money ... several times when he was feeling, how you say it, high? he would ask me how I would like to have two million dollars. It was always the same. Two million dollars. I would ask how to get it and would smile. Raymondo ... he had it, I know he had it. I tell you, this money was no good. I knew it would happen someday. I knew ...”

“How?”

This time his eyes made passes around me, looking for something that wasn’t there yet. “Before he ... died ... there were men. I knew of these men.”

“Say the word.”

It almost stuck in his throat, but he managed it. “Mafia,” he said hoarsely.

“Did Raymondo know he was being followed?”

“I do not think so.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

He looked at me as if I was crazy.

“You never thought he was killed accidentally either, did you?” The fear showed in his face so plain it was a voice by itself. “You knew the score right along,” I said.

“Please ...”

“You’re a crummy little bastard, Trivago. There’s a lot of dead people lying around because you made them that way.”

“No, I ...”

“Shut up. You could have sounded off.”

“No!” He stood up, his hands claws that dangled at his sides. “I know them! From Europe I know them and who am I to speak against them. You do not understand what they do to people. You ...”

My knuckles cracked across his jaw so hard he went back over the arm of the chair and spilled in a heap on the floor. He lay there with his eyes wide open and the spit dribbling out of his open mouth started to turn pink. He was the bug caught in the web trying to hide from the spider and he’d backed into the hornet’s nest.

Carmen Trivago would never be the same again.

I used the phone in the lobby again. I buzzed my apartment and the super’s wife answered it. I hadn’t told her not to do so, she was doing me a favor. I told her it was me, asked if everything was okay and she said it was. Lily was asleep with the door locked but she could hear her breathing and talking in there. Her husband was making doubly sure things stayed quiet by pretending to do some work in the hall outside.