I found the drug store and went in for a soda. They sold magazines up front so I brought one back with me while I waited. It was five minutes past the hour when Velda came in, saw me and slipped into the booth.
“You get around, Mike.”
“I was thinking of saying the same to you. How come you tangled with Mist?”
“Later. Now listen, I haven’t too much time. Earlier this evening two names came up. One of Carl’s men turned in a report and I was close enough to hear it. The report was that somebody had double checked on Nicholas Raymond and Walter McGrath. Carl got all excited about it.
“At the time I was talking to Al and Billy and had my back to Carl. He sent the guy off, called Billy off and I could tell from Billy’s face that he passed the news on to him. He looked like a dead fish when he came back to the bar with us. He was so mad his hands were shaking.”
I said, “Did Affia get the news?”
“Most likely. I excused myself for a few minutes to give him a chance to pass it politely.”
“I wonder about something, Kitten.”
“What?”
“I made a few phone calls.”
“It sounded more important than that.”
“Maybe Washington is getting hot.”
“They’ll have to get hotter,” Velda grinned. “Billy said he had to talk a little business tonight.” She reached in her handbag and brought out something. “He gave me a key to his apartment and told me to go ahead up and wait for him there.”
I whistled between my teeth and picked the key out of her fingers. “Let’s go then. This is hot.”
“Not me, Mike. You go.” There was a deadly seriousness about her face.
“What’s the rest of it, Velda?”
“This is a duplicate key I dragged Carlo Barnes out of bed to make up for me. It took some fast and fancy working to get it so quickly.”
“Yeah.”
“Al Affia caught the pitch and invited me up to his place for awhile before I went to Billy’s,” Velda said softly.
“The lousy little ...”
“Don’t worry about it, Mike.”
“I’m not. I’m just going to smash his face in for him, that’s all.” I sat there with my hands making fists and the hate pumping through my veins so hard it hurt.
Velda squeezed my hand and dumped a small aspirin bottle out of her bag and showed it to me. There weren’t any pills in it, only a white powder. “Chloral,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
I didn’t like it. I knew what she figured to do and I didn’t go for the play. “He’s no tourist. The guy’s been around.”
“He’s still a man.”
My mouth felt dry. “He’s a cagey guy.”
Her elbow nudged her side meaningly. “I still have that, Mike.”
You have to do things you don’t want to do sometimes. You hate yourself for it but you still have to do it. I nodded, said, “Where’s his place?”
“Not Brooklyn. He has a special little apartment under the name of Tony Todd on Forty-seventh between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.” She pulled a note pad out, jotted down the number with the phone to go with it and handed it over. “Just in case, Mike.”
I looked at it, memorized every detail there, then let the flame of my lighter wipe it out of existence. My beautiful, sleek animal was smiling at me, her eyes full of excitement and when you looked hard you could see the same thing there that you could see in mine. She stood up, winked and said, “Good hunting, Mike.”
Then she was gone.
I gave her five minutes. I followed the shadows further uptown along the Drive to the building Billy Mist owned.
For the first time I was glad he was such a big man. He was so damn big he didn’t have to stake anybody out around his place. He could relax in the luxury of security knowing that just one word could bring in an army if anybody tried to take the first step across the line.
It was another one of those things that came easy. You go in like you belonged there. You get on the elevator and nobody notices. You get off and go down the hall then stick the key in the lock and the door opens. You get treated to the best that money can buy even if the taste is crummy.
There were eight rooms in all. They were spotlessly clean and treated with all the care a well-paid maid could give them. I took forty-five minutes going through seven of them without finding one thing worth looking at until I came to the eighth.
It was a little room off the living room. At one time it must have been intended for a storeroom, but now it had a TV set, a tilt-back chair with an ottoman in place facing it, a desk and a bookcase loaded with pulps. Out of eight rooms here was the place where Billy Mist spent his solo time.
The desk was locked, but it didn’t take more than a minute to get it open. Right in the middle section was a dimestore scrapbook fat with clippings and photos and he was in all of them. My greasy little friend was one hell of an egotist from the looks of the thumbmarks on the pages.
Another ten minutes went by going through the book and then I came to Berga’s picture. There was no caption. It was just a rotogravure cutout and Billy was grinning at the camera. Berga was supposed to be background but she outsmiled Billy. Two pages later she came up again only this time she was with Carl Evello and it was Billy who was in the background talking to somebody hidden by Carl’s back. I found two more like that, first with Billy, then with Carl, and topping it all was a close-up glossy of Berga at her best with “love to my Handsome Man” penned in white across the bottom.
Nothing else unless you wanted to count the medicine bottles in the pigeonholes. It looked like the cabinet in the bathroom. Billy must have had a pretty nervous stomach.
I closed the desk, locked it and wiped it clean. I went back to the living room, checked my watch and knew the time was getting close. I picked up the phone and dialed Pat’s home number. Nobody answered so I called headquarters and that’s where he was. It was a tired, disgusted Pat that said hello.
“Busy, Pat?”
“Yeah, up to my ears. Where have you been? I’ve been calling between your office and your house all night.”
“If I told you you’d never believe it. What’s up?”
“Plenty. Sugar Smallhouse talked.”
I could feel the chills crawl up my legs until the hairs on the backs of my hands stood straight out.
“Give, Pat. What’s the score?”
He lowered his voice deliberately and didn’t sound like himself at all. “Sugar was on the deal when Berga got bumped. Charlie Max was called in on the job but didn’t make it.”
“Come on, come on. Who did he finger?”
“He didn’t. The other faces were all new to him.”
“Damn it,” I exploded, “can’t you get something out of him?”
“Not any more, pal. Nobody can. They were taking the two downtown to the D.A.’s and somebody chopped them.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Sugar and Charlie are dead. One Federal man and one city cop are shot up pretty bad. They were sprayed by a tommy gun from the back seat of a passing car.”
“Capone stuff. Hell, this isn’t prohibition. For Pete’s sake, Pat, how big are these guys? How far can they go?”
“Pretty far, it looks like. Sugar gave us one hot lead to a person with a Miami residence. He’s big, too.”
I could taste something sour in my mouth. “Yeah,” I said, “so now he’ll be asked polite questions and whatever answers he gives will satisfy them. I’d like to talk to the guy. Just him and me and a leather-covered sap. I’d love to hear his answers.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Mike.”
“For me it does. Any trace of the car?”
“Sure, we found it.” He sounded very tired. “A stolen job and the gun was still in it. We traced it to a group heisted from an armory in Illinois. No prints. Nothing. The lab is working on other things.”
“Great. A year from now we’ll get the report. I’d like to do i
t my way.”
“That’s why I was calling you.”
“Now what.”
“That screwball play of yours with Sugar and Max. The feds are pretty sore about it.”
“You know what to tell them,” I said.
“I did. They don’t want to waste time pulling you out of jams.”
“Why, those apple heads! Who are they supposed to be kidding? They must have had a tail on me all night to run me down in that joint and they sure waited until it was finished before they came in to get their suits dirty.”
“Mike ...”
“Nuts to them, brother. They can stick their heads ...”
“Shut up for a minute, will you!” Pat’s voice was a low growl. “You didn’t have a tail ... those two hoods did. They lost the boys and didn’t get picked up again until they reached Long John’s.”
“So what?”
“So they needed a charge to drag them in on. The boys caught the tail, ditched their rods someplace and when one of our plain-clothes men braced them they were clean. They had a second tail and didn’t know it, but they didn’t take any chances and pulled some pretty fancy footwork just in case. If they could have been pulled in on a Sullivan rap we would have squeezed something out of them. You didn’t leave them in condition to talk.”
“Tell ’em thanks,” I grunted. “I don’t like to be gunned for. I’ll try not to break up their next play.”
“Yeah,” Pat said sourly.
“Anything on Carver yet?” I asked him.
“Not a thing. We have two freshly killed blondes, more or less. One’s been in the river at least three days and the other was shot by an irate lover just tonight. They interest you?”
“Quit being funny.” I looked at my watch. Time was getting too damn short. I said, “I’ll buzz you if anything turns up, otherwise I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Okay. Where are you now?”
“In the apartment of a guy named Billy Mist and he’s due in any second.”
His breath made a sharp hissing sound over the phone as I hung up.
I had almost timed it too close. The elevator marker was climbing toward the floor when I reached it and just in case I stepped around the comer of the stairs, went up to the first landing and waited.
Billy Mist and a heavyset muscleman came off the elevator, opened the apartment door and went in. There wasn’t anything I wanted to talk to him about so I took the stairs back down instead of the elevator and got out the front door in one piece.
I got halfway down the block when some elusive little thing flashed across my mind and my eyes twisted into a squint as I tried to catch it. Something little. Something trivial. Something in the apartment I should have noticed and didn’t. Something that screamed out to be seen and I had passed it by. I tried to bring it into focus and it wouldn’t come and after a minute or so it passed out of sight altogether.
I stood there on the comer waiting for the light and a taxi swung by. I had the briefest glimpse inside the back and I saw Velda sitting there with somebody else. I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t chase it. I had to stand there and think about it until I was all mixed up and I wasn’t going to feel right until I knew the score. An empty cab came along and I told him to take me down to Forty-seventh Street.
The house was in the middle of the block. It was a beat-up affair fifty years old bearing the scars only a neighborhood like that can give it. The doorbell position said Todd lived on the ground floor in back. I didn’t have to do any ringing because the front door was open. The hall was littered with junk I had to push aside until I came to the door that had Todd written on the card in the square metal holder.
I didn’t have to ring any bells here either. This door was open too. I shoved it open and the light streamed out around me, light that glistened off the fetid pools of vomit on the floor, shining even more ominously from the drops of blood between the pools. The blood was in the hall too, and the light picked it up. It made sticky sounds on the soles of my shoes.
With a rod in my hand I would have felt better. It’s company that can do your talking for you and a voice they listen to. I missed the rod, but I went in anyway but on my toes ready to move if I had to.
Nothing happened.
But I saw what had happened.
The glasses were there on the table with a half-empty bottle of mixer and an almost empty fifth of whisky. Ice had melted in the bowl with a few small pieces floating on top of the water.
On the floor was the remains of a milk bottle and there was blood all over one piece. Velda had given him the chloral treatment and he went out, but somehow he had spilled it out of his system and made a play for her. He would have killed her if he could have but she got him with the milk bottle.
Then it hit me all at once and I felt like adding to the pools on the floor. She had gone about in her search, left for Billy’s and Al snapped out of it. He didn’t stay cold as she had expected him to and Al would have got the news to him by now.
I made a grab for the phone in the corner, spun the dial to Pat’s number again and sweated until he answered. I said, “Listen fast, Pat and no questions. They got Velda. She went up to Billy Mist’s place and walked into a trap. Get a squad car up there as fast as you can. Got that? Get her the hell out of there no matter what happens and be damn fast about it because they may be working her over.” I shot my number to him and told him to call back as soon as word came through.
When I hung up I was cold with sweat and tasting the cotton in my mouth. I closed the door and hoped Al would come back so I could do things to him myself. I didn’t move out of the room until I got impatient waiting for the phone to ring, then I prowled through the place.
There was a full cabinet of liquor I was going to try but the smell of it sickened me when I got the bottle near my mouth so I shoved it back again. Damn it, I thought, why doesn’t he call!
I started a butt going, spit it out after a second drag and went around the place some more. To keep my mind still and the buzzing out of my ears I used my eyes and saw why Al kept the place at all. For what he wanted it was a pretty good base of operation. There were souvenirs all over the place. It was a sloppy hovel, but sloppiness was part of the setup and probably nobody complained.
Al must have even done a little work there when he was finished with his parties. There were work sheets and union reports spread out on the table and a batch of company check stubs in the drawer held together by a rubber band. Like a sap he left a pair of empty checkbooks in the same drawer and the hundred and fifty he made a week from the company wouldn’t have backed up the withdrawals shown in the books.
So he had a sideline. He cheated the government most likely. Try to find whose name the checking account was in and there’d be fun.
The phone still didn’t ring so I rolled a stack of blueprints that showed dock layouts. At least two of them did. Nine of the others were ships’ plans that were blown up in detail until they centered around one mass of lines I couldn’t make out. I threw them all back on the table and started to walk away as the phone rang.
I caught it before the ring was finished and Pat said, “You Mike?”
“Speaking.”
“What’re you pulling, kid?”
“Cut the funny stuff, Pat, what happened?”
“Nothing, except a pair of my men are highly squiffed off. Mist was in bed alone. He let the cops in, let them look around, then chewed the hell out of them for pulling a search. He made one phone call and I’ve been catching it ever since.”
I wasn’t hearing him. I laid the phone back on its rack and stared at it dumbly. It started to ring again. It went through the motions four times, then stopped.
Outside it had started to rain. It tapped the windows in the back of the room, cutting streaks through the dust. When I looked again the dust was gone completely and the window seemed to have a live wavy motion about it. I pulled the Luckies out of my pocket, lit one and watched the smoke. It floated lazily in t
he dead air, then slowly followed a draft that crossed the room.
I was thinking things that scared me.
My watch counted off the seconds and each tick was louder and more demanding, screaming not to be wasted.
I went back to the table, unfolded the blueprints, pushed the first two aside and looked at the legend on the bottom of the nine others.
The ship’s name was there. Same ship. The name was Cedric.
It was starting to hang together now. When it was too late it was starting to hang together.
They wouldn’t kill her yet, I thought. They’d do a lot of things, but they wouldn’t kill her until they were sure. They couldn’t afford the chance.
Then when they were sure they’d kill her.
Chapter Ten
I SLEPT HARD. The rain on the windows kept me asleep and I went through the morning and the rest of the day with all the things I pictured going through my mind and when they came together in one final, horrible ending I woke up. It was nearly six in the evening but I felt better. Time was too important to waste but I couldn’t afford to let it pass while I was half out on my feet.
There was a box of frozen shrimp in the refrigerator I put on the fire and while it cooked up I put through a call. It took two more to locate Ray Diker and his voice sounded as sharp and pinched as his face. He said, “Glad you called, Mike. I was going to buzz you.”
“Got something?”
“Maybe. I followed up on Kawolsky. The office he worked for pulled out the records and I got the details. He was hired to cover the Torn kid. She complained that someone was following her and she was a pretty scared baby. She paid the fee in cash and they put Lee on permanent duty. He picked her up in the morning and took her home at night.”
“You told me that already, Ray.”
“I know, but here’s the good part. Lee Kawolsky quit reporting to the office in person after a week of it. He started checking in by phone. The office got ideas about it and put another man outside the apartment and found out Lee was pulling a voluntary twenty-four-hour duty. He was staying with the dame all the time.”
Kiss Me Deadly Page 13
