“It doesn’t make any difference what I think?”
I set the can on the end table and made the three-ring pattern on the label. “What you think makes a lot of difference, kitten, but when it comes to making the decisions I’ll make them on what I think. I’m a man. So I’m just one man, but as long as I have a brain of my own to use and experience and knowledge to draw on to form a decision I’ll keep on making them myself.”
“And you’re going after them?”
“Would you like me better if I didn’t?”
The grin crept back through the seriousness on her face. “No.” Then her eyes laughed at me too. “Ten million dollars’ worth of men and equipment bucking another multi-million outfit and you elect yourself to step in and clean up. But then, you’re a man.” She sipped from the beer can again, then said, “But what a man. I’ll be glad when you step off that bachelorhood pedestal and move over to where I have a little control over you.”
“Think you ever will?”
“No, but at least I’ll have something to bargain with,” she laughed. “I’d like to have you around for a long time without worrying about you.”
“I feel the same way myself, Velda. It’s just that some things come first.”
“I know, but let me warn you. From now on you’re going to be up against a scheming woman.”
“That’s been tried before.”
“Not like this.”
“Yeah,” I said, and finished the beer. I waited until she put hers down too, then shook out a Lucky and tossed the pack over to her. “What did you pick up?”
“A few details. I found a trucker who passed your car where they had it parked with the flares fore and aft. The guy stopped, and when he saw nobody around he went on. The nearest phone was three miles down the road in a diner and he was surprised when nobody had shown up there because he hadn’t seen anyone walking. The girl in the diner knew about an abandoned shack a few hundred yards from the spot and I went there. The place was alive with feds.”
“Great.”
“That’s hardly the word for it.” She squirmed in the chair and ran her fingers through her hair, the deep ebony of it rubbed to a soft glow in the pale lamplight. “They held me for a while, questioned me, and released me with a warning that had teeth in it.”
“They find anything?”
“From what I could see, nothing. They backtracked the same way that I did and anything they found just supported what you had already told them.
“There’s a catch in it though,” she said. “The shack was a good fifty yards in from the highway and covered with brush. You could light the place up and it wouldn’t be seen, and unless you knew where to look you’d never find it.”
“It was too convenient to be coincidental, you mean?”
“Much too convenient.”
I spit out a stream of smoke and watched it flow around the empty beer can. “That doesn’t make sense. The kid was running away. How’d they know which direction she’d pick out?”
“They wouldn’t, but how would they know where that shack was?”
“Who’d the shack belong to?”
A frown creased her forehead and she shook her head. “That’s another catch. The place is on state property. It’s been there for twenty years. One thing I did learn while I was being questioned was that aside from its recent use the place had no signs of occupancy at all. There were dates carved in the doorpost and the last one was 1937.”
“Anything else?”
Velda shook her head slowly. “I saw your car. Or what’s left of it.”
“Poor old baby. The last of the original hot rods.”
“Mike ...”
I finished the beer and put the empty down on the table. “Yeah?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Guess.”
“Tell me.”
I had a long pull on the smoke and dropped the butt into the can. “They killed a dame and tried to frame me for it. They wrecked my heap and put me in the hospital. They’re figuring us all for suckers and don’t give a hang who gets hurt. The slobs, the miserable slobs.” I rammed my fist against my palm until it stung. “I’m going to find out what the score is, kid. Then a lot of heads are going to roll.”
“One of them might be yours, Mike.”
“Yeah, one of ‘em might, but it sure won’t be the first to go. And you know something? They’re worried, whoever they are. They read the papers and things didn’t quite happen like they wanted them to. The law of averages bucked ’em for a change and instead of getting a sucker to frame they got me. Me. That they didn’t like because I’m not just the average joe and they’re smart enough to figure out an angle.”
Her face pulled tight and the question was in her eyes. “They were up here looking around,” I said.
“Mike!”
“Oh, I don’t know what they were after, but I don’t think they knew either. But you can bet on this, they went through this place because they thought I had something they wanted and just because they didn’t find it doesn’t mean they think I haven’t got it. They’ll be back. The next time I won’t be in an emergency ward.”
“But what could it be?”
“Beats me, but they tried to kill two people to find out. Whether I like it or not I’m in this thing as deep as that dame was.” I grinned at Velda sitting there. “And I like it, too. I hate the guts of those people. I hate them so bad it’s coming out of my skin. I’m going to find out who ‘they’ are and why and then they’ve had it.”
A note of sarcasm crept into her voice. “Just like always, isn’t that right?”
“No,” I said, “Maybe not. Maybe this time I’ll do it differently. Just for the fun of it.”
Velda’s hands were drawn tight on the arms of the chair. “I don’t like you this way, Mike.”
“Neither do a lot of people. They know something just like their own names. They know I’m not going to sit on my fanny and wait for something to happen. They know from now on they’re going to have to be so careful they won’t even be able to spit because I’m going to get closer and closer until I have them on the dirty end of a stick. They know it and I know it too.”
“It makes you a target.”
“Kitten, it sure does and that I go for. If that’s one way of pulling ’em inside shooting range I’m plenty glad to be a target.”
Her face relaxed and she sat back. For a long minute neither one of us spoke. She sat there with her head against the cushion staring at the ceiling, then, “Mike, I have news for you.”
The way she said it made me look up. “Give.”
“Any shooting that’s to be done won’t be done by you.”
A muscle in my face twitched.
Velda reached in her jacket pocket and came out with an envelope. She flipped it across the room and I caught it. “Pat brought it in this morning. He couldn’t do a thing about it, so don’t get teed off at him.”
I pulled the flap out and fingered the sheet loose. It was very brief and to the point. No quibbling. No doubting the source. The letterhead was all very official and I was willing to bet that for the one sheet they sent me a hundred more made up the details of why the thing should be sent.
It was a very simple order telling me I no longer had a license to carry a gun and temporarily my state-granted right to conduct private investigations was suspended. There was no mention of a full or partial refund of my two-hundred-buck fee for said license to said state.
So I laughed. I folded the sheet back into the envelope and laid it on the table. “They want me to do it the hard way,” I said.
“They don’t want you to do it at all. From now on you’re a private citizen and nothing else and if they catch you with a gun you get it under the Sullivan law.”
“This happened once before, remember?”
Velda nodded slowly. There was no expression at all on her face. “That’s right, but they forgot about me. Then I had a P.I. ticket and a license for a
gun too. This time they didn’t forget.”
“Smart boys.”
“Very.” She closed her eyes again and let her head drop back. “We’re going to have it rough.”
“Not we, girl. Me.”
“We.”
“Look ...”
Only the slight reflection of the light from her pupils showed that her eyes were open and looking at me. “Who do you belong to, Mike?”
“You tell me.”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes opened halfway and there was something sad in the way her lips tried to curve into a smile. I said, “All right, kid, you know the answer. It’s we and if I stick my neck out you can be there to help me get back in time.” I picked the .45 up off the floor beside the chair, slid the clip out and thumbed the shells into my palm. “Your boy Mike is getting on in years, pal. Soft maybe?”
There was laughter in the sad smile now. “Not soft. Smarter. We’re up against something that’s so big pure muscle won’t even dent it. We’re up against a big brain and being smart is the only thing that’s going to move it. At least you have the sense to change your style.”
“Yeah.”
“It won’t be so easy.”
“I know. I’m not built that way.” I grinned at her. “Let’s not worry about it. Everybody’s trying to step on me because they don’t want me around. Some of ’em got different reasons, but the big one is they’re afraid I’ll spoil their play. That happened before too. Let’s make it happen again.”
Velda said, “But let’s not try so hard, huh? Seven years is a long time to wait for a guy.” Her teeth were a white flash in the middle of her smile. “I’d like him in good shape when he gets ready to take the jump.”
I said, “Yeah,” but not so loud that she heard me.
“Where do we take it from here, Mike?”
I let the shells dribble from my fingers into the ash tray. They lay there, deadly and gleaming, but helpless without the mother that could give them birth.
“Berga Torn,” I said. “We’ll start with her. I want those sanitarium records. I want her life history and the history of anybody she was associated with. That’s your job.”
“And you?” she asked.
“Evello. Carl Evello. Someplace he comes into this thing and he’s my job.”
Velda nodded, drummed her fingernails against the arm of the chair and stared across the room. “He won’t be easy.”
“Nobody’s easy.”
“Especially Evello. He’s organized. While you were under wraps in the hospital I saw a few people who had a little inside information on Evello. There wasn’t much and what there was of it was mostly speculation, but it put the finger on a theme you might be interested in.”
“Such as?”
She looked at me with a half smile, a beautiful jungle animal sizing up her mate before telling him what was outside the mouth of the den. “Mafia,” she said.
I could feel it starting way down at my toes, a cold, burning flush that crept up my body and left in its wake a tingling sensation of rage and fear that was pure emotion and nothing else. It pounded in my ears and dried my throat until the words that came out were scratchy, raspy sounds that didn’t seem to be part of me at all.
“How did they know?”
“They don’t. They suspect, that’s all. The Federal agencies are interested in the angle.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They would be interested. They’d go in on their toes, too. No wonder they don’t want me fishing around.”
“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 Five
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.
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.
Kiss Me Deadly Page 4
