“I know. For the first time I wish I were wearing your badge instead of mine. You aren’t so dumb.”
“Neither are you, kid. The answer’s plain, isn’t it?” I was sneering myself now. He looked up and met my eyes and nodded. A nasty grin split his lips apart and his teeth were together, tight.
“Call it, Mike.”
“You take care of your end. I’ll brace the boys who give you trouble. If I have to I’ll ram their teeth down their throats and I hope I have to. There’s more to it than that. I don’t have to tell you how big this racket is. The girls in the flashy clothes and the high price tags are only one side of it. The same group with its hand on them reaches down to the smaller places, too. It’s all tied in together. The only trouble is that when you untie one knot the whole thing can come apart.
“They are scared now. They’re acting fast. We have that book, but you can bet it isn’t much. There are other books, too, nicely ducked out of sight where it’ll take a lot of looking to dig up. They’ll come. We’ll get hold of somebody who will sing, and to save their own necks the others will sing, too. Then the proof will pop up.”
I slammed my hand against the table and curled my fingers into tight knots until the flesh was white around the knuckles. “We don’t need proof, Pat. All we have to do is look for proof. The kind of boys behind the curtain won’t take that. They’ll make a move and we’ll be ready for them.”
“Yeah, but when?”
“Tomorrow night. The big boys are hiring their work done. One of their stoolies is on the list because he sounded off to me. Tomorrow night at exactly nine-thirty a pimp called Cobbie Bennett is going to walk out of his rooming house and down the street. Sometime that night he’s going to be spotted and a play will be made. That’s all we need. Beat them to the jump and we’ll make the first score. It will scare the hell out of them again. Let them know that politics are going to pot. We can get the politicians later if we have to.”
“Does this Bennett know about this?”
“He knows he’s going to be a clay pigeon of some sort. It’s his only chance of staying alive. Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. He has to take it. You have your men spotted around ready to wade in when the trouble starts. After it’s finished, let Cobbie beat it. He’s no good any more. He won’t be back.”
I wrote the address of the rooming house on the back of an envelope, diagramming the route Cobbie would take, and passed it over. Pat glanced at it and stuck it in his pocket. “This can mean my job, kid.”
“It might mean your neck, too,” I reminded him. “If it works you won’t have any more sly hints and phone calls, and those rotten little jerks with the bloc of votes will be taking the next train out of town. We’re not going to stop anything because the game is as old as Eve. What we will do is slow it up long enough to keep a few people alive who wouldn’t be alive and maybe knock off some who would be better off dead.”
“And all because of one redheaded girl,” Pat said slowly.
“That’s right. All because of Nancy. All because she was murdered.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’m supposing it. I’ve uncovered a few other things. If it was an accident she wasn’t expected to die that way. Nancy was slated to be killed. Here’s something else, Pat. This looks like one thing, the part you can’t see is tied in with that same redhead. I can’t understand it, but I’m kicking a few ideas around that look pretty good.”
“The insurance company is satisfied it was an accident. They’re ready to pay off if her inheritors can be found.”
“Ah, that’s the rub, as the bard once said. That, my chum, is the big step.”
My watch was creeping up on itself. I stood up and finished the beer that had turned flat while we talked. “I’ll call you early tomorrow, Pat. I want to be in on the show. Let me know what comes out of the little black book.”
He still wore his sneer. Back of his eyes a fire was burning bright enough to put somebody in hell. “Something came out of it already. We paid a call on Murray Candid. Among his belongings we found a few doodles and some notes. The symbols compare with some of those in his book. He’s going to have to do some tall explaining when we find him.”
My mouth fell open at that. “What do you mean ... find him?”
“Murray Candid has disappeared. He wasn’t seen by anybody after he left us,” he said.
CHAPTER 12
As I got in my car I thought over what Pat had said. Murray was gone? Why? That damned, ever present why? Did he duck out to escape what would follow, or was he taken away because he knew too much? A guy like Murray was a slicker. If he knew too much he knew he knew it, and knew what it would cost him, so he’d have to play it smart and have insurance. Murray would let it be known that anybody who tried to plow him under would be cutting their own throats. He’d have a fat, juicy report in a lawyer’s hands, ready to be mailed to the police as soon as he was dead. That’s double indemnity ... the bigger boys would have to keep him alive to keep their own noses clean.
No. Murray wasn’t dead. The city was big enough to hide even him. He’d show sooner or later. Pat would have covered that angle, and right now there’d be a cop watching every bus terminal, every train station. I bet they’d see more rats than Murray trying to desert the sinking ship.
The rain had turned into a steady drizzle that left a slick on the pavement and deadened the evening crowd. I turned north with the windshield wipers clicking a monotonous tune and stopped a block away from Lola’s apartment. A grocery store was still open and the stack of cold cuts in the window looked too inviting to pass up. When I had loaded my arms with more than I could eat for a month, I used the package to shield my face and walked up to her place.
I kicked the door with my foot and she yelled to come in. I had to peek around the bundle to see her stretched out on the couch with her shoes off and a wet towel across her forehead.
“It’s me, honey.”
“Do tell. I thought it was a horse coming up the stairs.”
I dropped the package in a chair and sat down on the edge of the couch, reaching for the towel. She came out from under it grinning. “Oh, Mike. It’s so good to see you!”
She threw her arms around my neck and I leaned over and kissed her. She was nice to look at. I could sit there all day and watch her. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hair in my face. “Rough day, kid?”
“Awful,” she said. “I’m tired, I’m wet and I’m hungry. And I didn’t find the camera.”
“I can take care of the hungry part. There’s eats over there. Nothing you have to cook either.”
“You’re a wonderful guy, Mike. I wish....”
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s eat.”
I slid my arm under her and lifted her off the couch. Her eyes had a hungry sparkle that could mean many things. “You’re a big girl,” I said.
“I have to be ... for you. To the kitchen, James.” She scooped up the bag as I passed the chair and went through the doorway.
Lola put the coffee on while I set the table. We used the wrappings for plates and one knife between us, sitting close enough so our knees touched. “Tell me about today, Lola.”
“There isn’t much to tell. I started at the top of the list and reached about fifteen hock shops. None of them had it, and after a few discreet questions I learned that they never had had it. A few of the clerks were so persuasive that they almost made me buy one anyway.”
“How many more to go?”
“Days and days worth, Mike. It will take a long time, I’m afraid.”
“We have to try it.”
“Uh-huh. Don’t worry, I’ll keep at it. Incidentally, in three of the places that happened to be located fairly close to each other, someone else had been looking for a camera.”
My cup stopped halfway to my mouth. “Who?”
“A man. I pretended that it might have been a friend of mine who was shopping for me and got one clerk to remember that
the fellow had wanted a commercial camera for taking street pictures. Apparently the kind I was after. He didn’t look any over; just asked, then left.”
It was a hell of a thought, me letting Lola run head on into something like that. “It may be a coincidence. He may have shopped just those three places. I don’t like it.”
“I’m not afraid, Mike. He....”
“If it wasn’t a coincidence he might shop the other places and find that you were ahead of him. If he guessed what you were doing he could wait up for you. I still don’t like it.”
She became grim then, letting a shadow of her former hardness cloud her face for an instant. “Like you said, Mike, I’m a big girl. I’ve been around long enough to stand any guy off if he pulls something on the street. A knee can do a guy a lot of damage in the right places, and if that doesn’t work, well ... one scream will bring a lot of heroes around to take care of any one guy no matter how tough he is.”
I had to laugh at that. “Okay, okay, you’ll get by. After that speech I’ll even be afraid to kiss you good night.”
“Mike, with you I’m as powerless as a kitten and as speechless as a giraffe. Please kiss me good night, huh?”
“I’ll think about it. First we have work to do.”
“What kind, I hope?”
“Look at pictures, I have a batch of pics Nancy had tucked away. They’re pictures and I paid for them, so I’ll look at them.”
We cleared the mess off the table and I went in for the box. I took them out of the box and piled half in front of Lola and half in front of me. When we took our seats I said, “Give every one a going-over. They may mean something, they may not. They weren’t where they should have been, that’s why I’m thinking there might be something special in the lot.”
Lola nodded and picked a snapshot from the top of her pile. I did the same. At first I took in every detail, looking for things out of the ordinary, but the pictures followed such a set pattern that my inspection grew casual and hurried. Faces and more faces. Smiles, startled expressions, deliberate poses. One entire group taken from the same spot on Broadway, always the same background.
In two of them the man in the picture tried to shield his face. The camera was fast enough to stop the motion, but the finger on the shutter trigger was too slow to prevent him getting his hand in the way. I went to put one back on the discard pile, looked at it again carefully and put it aside instead. The portion of the face that showed looked familiar.
Lola said, “Mike....”
She had her lip between her teeth and was fingering a snap. She turned it around and showed it to me, a lovely young girl smiling at a middle-aged man who was frowning at the camera. My eyes asked the question. “She was ... one of the girls, Mike. We . , . went on dates together.”
“The guy?” “I don’t know.”
I took the snap and laid it face down with the other. Five minutes later Lola found another. The girl was a poetic creature about thirty with the statuesque lines of a mannequin. The guy she was with could have been a stand-in for a blimp. He was short and fat, in clothes that tried to make him look tall and thin and only made him look shorter and fatter.
“She’s another one, Lola?”
“Yes. She didn’t last long in New York. She played it smart and married one of the suckers. I remember that man, too. He runs a gambling joint uptown. Some sort of a small-time politician, too. He used to call for her in an official car.”
It was coming now. Little reasons that explained the why. Little things that would be big things before long. My pile was growing nicely. Maybe every picture on the table had a meaning I couldn’t see. Maybe most were just camouflage to discourage hasty searchers.
I turned the snap over, and lightly penciled on the back near the bottom was “See S-5.” There was more to it than the picture, evidently.
Could it be nothing more than an office memo ... or did Nancy have a private file of her own?
My breath started coming in quick, hot gasps. It was like seeing a half-finished picture and recognizing what it would be like when it was finished. If this was an indication ... I pulled the remaining photos closer and went to work on them.
The next one came out of my deal. I got it because I was lucky and I was hating some people so damn hard that their faces drew an automatic response. The picture was that of a young couple, no more than twenty. They smiled into the camera with a smile that was youth with the world in its pocket and a life to be led. But they weren’t important.
It was the background that was important. The faces in the background. One was that of my client, his hand on the knob of a door, a cane swinging jauntily over his arm. Behind him was Feeney Last in a chauffeur’s uniform, closing the door of the car. It wasn’t just Feeney, it was the expression on his face. It was a leer of hateful triumph, a leer of expectancy as he eyed a guy in a sports outfit that had been about to step past him.
The guy was popeyed with fear, his jaw hanging slack, and even at that moment he had started to draw back as he saw Feeney.
He should have been scared. The guy’s name was Russ Bowen and he was found shot full of holes not long after the picture was taken.
I could feel the skin pulling tight around my temples and my lips drew back from my teeth. Lola said something, but I didn’t hear her. She grabbed my hand, made me look at her. “What is it? What is it, Mike? Please ... don’t look that way!”
I shoved the picture in front of her and pointed to the little scene in the background. “This guy’s dead, Lola. The other guy is Feeney Last.”
Her eyes came up slowly, unbelievingly. She shook her head. “Not Feeney ... it can’t be, Mike.”
“Don’t tell me, kid. That’s Feeney Last. It was taken when he worked for Mr. Berin. I couldn’t miss that greaseball in a million years.”
She stared at me hard. Her eyes drifted back to the picture and she shook her head again. “His name is Miller. Paul Miller. He-he’s one of the men who supplies girls to ... the houses.”
“What?”
“That’s right. One of the kids pointed him out to me some time ago. He used to work the West Coast, picking them up there and sending them East to the syndicate. I’m positive that’s him!”
Nice going, Feeney, I thought, very nice going. Keep a respectable job as a cover-up for the other things. Good heavens, if Berin-Grotin in all his insufferable pride ever knew that, he would have had Feeney hanging by the thumbs! I looked at the snap again, saw my client unaware of the little scene behind him, completely the man about town bent on an afternoon of mild pleasure. It was a good shot, this one. I could see the lettering on the door there. BAR ENTRANCE, ALBINO CLUB, it read. Apparently Mr. Berin’s favorite haunt. He’d have his cup of good cheer while five feet away a murder was in progress.
“Do you know the other guy?”
“Yes. He ran some houses. They—found him shot, didn’t they?”
“That’s right. Murdered. This thing goes back a long way.”
Lola closed her eyes and dropped her head forward. Her face was relaxed in sadness. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “There’s something on the back, Mike.”
It was another symbol. This one said, “See T-9-20.” If that dash stood for “to,” it meant eleven pages of something was connected with this. The details of the Russ Bowen murder maybe? Could there be a possibility that the redhead had come up with something covering that murder? Ye gods, if that were true, no wonder Feeney was on her neck. How many angles could there be to this thing?
I couldn’t find anything else; I went through my pile twice and nothing showed for me, so I swapped with Lola and started all over again. I didn’t find any more, either, but Lola did. When she was through she had half a dozen shots beside her and called my attention to the women. They were her former associates. She knew some of the men by sight, too, and they weren’t just pickups. They dripped dough in the cut of their clothes and the sparkle of diamonds on their fingers.
And always w
as that notation on the back referring to some other file. There was an envelope on the dish closet and I tucked the prints in it, stowing them in my pocket. The rest I threw back in the box and pushed aside. Lola followed me into the living room, watched me pace up and down the room. When she held out a lit cigarette I took it, had one deep drag and snuffed it out in a dish.
Feeney Last. Paul Miller. He came from the Coast. He saw a way to get back East without arousing suspicion. He was connected with the racket but good, and he could operate under the cover of old boys’ respectability. Feeney was after Nancy and for good reason. If it was blackmail, the plot went pretty deep. She wasn’t content to stick to strangers with herself as the catch ... she used the tie-up with girls already in the racket.
I stopped in the middle of the floor, fought to let an idea battle its way into my consciousness, felt it blocked by a dozen other thoughts. I shook my head and began pacing again.
“I need a drink,” I said.
“There’s nothing in the house,” Lola told me.
I reached for my hat. “Get your coat. We’re going out.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“Not that dead. Come on.”
She pulled a raincoat from the closet, stepped into frilly boots that did things for her legs. “All set, Mike. Where are we going?”
“I’ll tell you better when we get there.”
All the way downtown I put my mind to it. Lola had snuggled up against me and I could feel the warmth of her body soaking through her coat to mine. She knew I was trying to think and kept quiet, occasionally looking up at me with interest. She laid her head on my shoulder and squeezed my arm. It didn’t help me think any.
The rain had laid a pall over the city, keeping the spectators indoors. Only the tigers were roaming the streets this night. The taxis were empty hearses going back and forth, the drivers alert for what few faces there were, jamming to a stop at the wave of a hand or a shrill whistle.
We went past the Zero Zero Club and Lola sat up to look. There wasn’t much to see. The sign was out and the place in darkness. Somebody had tacked a “Closed” sign on the door. Pat was going whole hog on this thing. I pulled into a half-empty parking lot and we found a small bar with the windows steamed up. Lola had a Martini and I had a beer there, but the place had a rank odor to it and we left. The next bar was three stores down and we turned into it and climbed on the stools at the end.
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 1 Page 36
