The Mike Hammer Collection Volume 1

by Spillane, Mickey; Collins, Max Allan

  He finished with the pad and stuck it under his coat. I didn’t need it anymore. “I think you may be right, Mike. Where to now?”

  “The bookstore. Jack may have had other books. I should have asked Eileen what school she went to, damn it, but I didn’t catch on until later.”

  Pat went to the phone book and thumbed through it until he found the number of the bookstore. The place was closed, but the owner was still there. Pat told him who he was and to stay put until we arrived. I turned out the lights and we left after Pat posted one of his men at the door.

  I didn’t bother with the jalopy. We piled into the squad car and headed for Times Square with the siren wailing. Traffic pulled off to one side to let us pass and we made record time. The driver turned off on Sixth and stopped across the street from the bookstore.

  The blinds were drawn, but a light still glowed from within. Pat knocked and the wizened little proprietor fussed with the lock and let us in. He was nervous as a hen with a yardful of chicks and kept pulling at the bottom of his vest. Pat got to the point after he flashed his badge.

  “You had a customer come in here a few days ago and buy several college yearbooks.” The little guy shook all over. “Do you keep a record of the sales?”

  “Yes and no. We record the sales tax, yes, but the books we don’t keep. This is old stock as you can see.”

  “Never mind,” Pat said. “Do you remember what ones he took out with him?”

  The guy hesitated a second. “N-no. Maybe I can find out, yes?”

  With the little guy leading the way, we went to the rear of the store and he climbed a rickety ladder to the top shelf. “We don’t have many calls for these. I remember we had about two dozen. Ah, yes. There are perhaps ten gone.”

  Ten. Three were in Jack’s apartment, and Pat had three. That left four unaccounted for. “Hey,” I called up to him, “can you remember what schools they were from?”

  He shrugged his skinny shoulders. “I don’t know. They have been here a long time. I didn’t even take them down. I remember I was busy and showed him where they were and he climbed up and got them.”

  This wasn’t getting us anyplace. I shook the ladder and he grabbed the wall for support. “Take ’em all down,” I told him. “Just toss them to me. Come on, we haven’t got all night.”

  He pulled the books from the shelves and let them tumble to the floor. I caught a few, but the rest spilled all over. Pat helped me carry them to the wrapping table, then the little guy came over to join us. “Now,” I said to him, “get out your invoices. These must have been signed for when you bought ’em and I want to see the receipts.”

  “But that was so long ago, I ...”

  “Damn it, shake your tail before I boot it all over the store. Don’t be piddling around with me!” He shot off like a scared rabbit.

  Pat laid his hand on my arm. “Slack off, Mike. Remember, I work for the city and this guy is a taxpayer.”

  “So am I, Pat. We just haven’t got time to fool around, that’s all.”

  He was back in a minute with an armful of dusty ledgers. “Some place in here I have the items marked. You want to look for them now?” I could see he was hoping we’d take them along, otherwise it would mean an all-night job. Pat knew that, too, but he used his head. He called headquarters and asked for a dozen men. Ten minutes later they were there. He told them what to look for and passed the ledgers out.

  The guy was a hell of a bookkeeper. His handwriting was hardly legible. How he arrived at his balances I didn’t know, but I wasn’t after that. I threw down the ledger I had after a half hour and picked up another. I was in the middle of the second when a patrolman called Pat over.

  He pointed to a list of items. “This what you’re looking for, sir?”

  Pat squinted at it. “Mike. Come here.”

  There it was, the whole list, bought at one time from an auctioneer who had sold the estate of a deceased Ronald Murphy, a book collector.

  “That’s it,” I said. We took the list to the table and compared it with the books there while Pat was dismissing the men. I found the four that were missing. One was from the Midwest, the others were from schools in the East. Now all we had to do was to get a copy of the yearbooks from somewhere.

  I handed the list to Pat. “Now locate them. I haven’t got an idea where we’ll do it.”

  “I have,” Pat said.

  “Where?” I asked hopefully.

  “Public library.”

  “At this time of night?”

  He gave me a grin. “Cops do have some privileges,” he told me. Once again he got on the telephone and made a few calls. When he was done he called the bookman over and pointed to the mess we had made of his wrapping desk. “Want us to help you with that?”

  The guy shook his head vigorously. “No, no. In the morning is plenty of time. Very glad to help the police. Come again if you want.” The city was, full of self-respecting citizens. He’ll probably want a ticket fixed sometime and come knocking on Pat’s door—as if that could help him in this town.

  Pat’s calls were very effective. They were waiting for us when we got to the library. An elderly gentleman, looking extremely nervous, and two male secretaries. We passed through the turnstile and a guard locked the door behind us.

  The place was worse than a morgue. Its high, vaulted ceilings were never reached by the feeble light that struggled to get out of the bulbs. Our footsteps echoed hollowly through the corridors and came back to us in dull booming sounds. The statues seemed to come alive as our shadows crossed them. The place was a bad spot to be in at night if you had the jitters.

  Pat had told him what we were looking for and we wasted no time. The elderly librarian sent his two men somewhere into the bowels of the building and they returned in ten minutes with the four yearbooks.

  We sat down there under the light of a table lamp in a reading room and took two books apiece. Four books. Jack had had them and somebody had taken them. He had ten altogether, but the others hadn’t been of any use to the one that stole the rest.

  The librarian peered at us intently over our shoulders. We flipped page after page. I was about to turn the last leaf of the sophomore section over when I stopped. I found John Hanson. I couldn’t speak, I just stared. Now I had the whole picture.

  Pat reached out and tapped my hand and pointed to a picture. He had found John Hanson, too. I think Pat caught on as quickly as I did. We both reached for another book and went through them, and we both found John Hanson again. I threw the books on the table and yanked Pat to his feet.

  “Come on,” I said.

  He raced after me, stopping long enough in the main lobby to put through another call for a squad. Then we shot past a startled guard and dashed to the curb and into the police car. Pat really let the siren go full blast and we threaded our way through traffic. Ahead of us we saw the blinking red light of the police truck and pulled up on it. Another car came out of a side street and joined us.

  The same cars were still there. The police blocked the street off at either end and fell in behind Pat and me as we went up the stoop. This time there were no three longs and a short. A fire ax crashed against the lock and the splintered door swung inward.

  Somebody screamed and others picked it up. The place was a bedlam, but the cops had it under control in a minute. Pat and I didn’t stick around downstairs. He let me lead the way through the modern waiting room, up the stairs and into the room on the landing. It was empty. We took the door off the small foyer into the hall of doors and ran to the next to last one on the left.

  The door opened under my touch and a blast of cordite fumes stung my nostrils. Eileen Vickers was dead. Her body was completely nude as she lay there on the bed, eyes staring vacantly at the wall. A bullet hole was directly over the heart, a bullet hole that was made by a .45.

  We found John Hanson, all right. He lay at the foot of the bed with his head in a puddle of his own blood and brains, and with a hole squarely between the eye
s. On the wall was more of his goo, with the plaster cracked from where the bullet entered.

  He was a mess, this John Hanson. At least that’s what he called himself. I called him Hal Kines.

  CHAPTER 9

  We left the place exactly as it was. Pat whistled for a patrolman and had him stand guard inside the door. All exits to the house had been blocked off, and the crowd milled within the ring of cops on the main floor. Two other captains and an inspector joined us. I threw them a nod and ran for the back of the house.

  Those shootings had taken place not two minutes before we came in. If the killer wasn’t in the crowd he was just around the corner. I found the back door in a hurry. It led into an undersized yard that was completely surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence. Someone had taken the trouble to keep the grass cut and the place cleaned out. Even the fence had been whitewashed.

  I went around that place looking for prints, but the grass hadn’t been trampled in a week. If anyone had gone over that fence he certainly would have left some sort of a mark. There was none. The cellar opened into the place, but the door was locked from the outside with a padlock; so was the door that led between the building and the one next door. The killer never took the back way.

  I jumped the steps into the small kitchen and went through the hall to the showroom. Quite a place. All the restraining partitions had been torn down and a stage set up at one end. The cops had the audience back in the cushioned movie-type seats and the girls of the show herded into a compact group on the stage.

  Pat came at me from across the room. “What about the back?” he asked breathlessly.

  “Nothing doing. He didn’t go that way.”

  “Then the killer is in here. I couldn’t find a place even a mouse could get out. The streets are blocked and I got some men behind the houses.”

  “Let’s go over the gang here,” I said.

  The both of us went down the rows of seats looking over the faces that didn’t want to be seen. There was going to be a lot of fixing done tomorrow if some of these jokers didn’t want to lose their happy homes. We searched every face. We were looking for George Kalecki, but he either got out in time or never was there.

  Neither was the madam.

  The homicide boys arrived and we went to Eileen’s room. They found what I expected them to find. Nothing. Downstairs I could hear the anguished wails of the girls and the louder voices of some of the men yapping in pretty determined tones. How the commissioner was going to get around this was beyond me. When the pics were taken Pat and I took a good look of what was left of Hal Kines. With a pencil I traced a few very faint lines along his jaw line.

  “Very neat, isn’t it?”

  Pat shot a quick look at me. “Neat enough, but tell me about it. I know who, but not why.”

  I had difficulty keeping my voice under control as I spoke. “Hal isn’t a college kid. I caught that when I saw a shot of him and George against the background of the Morro Castle, but I never fitted it in. This bastard was a procurer. I told you George had his finger in the rackets. I thought it was the numbers, but it turned out to be more than that. He was part of a syndicate that ran houses of prostitution. Hal did the snatch jobs, oh, very subtly, then turned them over to George. It wouldn’t surprise me if Hal had been the big cheese.”

  Pat looked more closely at the lines on his face and pointed out a few more just under his hairline. They were hard to see because the blood had matted the hair into a soggy mass.

  “Don’t you see, Pat,” I went on. “Hal was one of these guys who looked eternally young. He helped nature a bit with a few plastic-surgery operations. Look at those yearbooks we found, every one from a different college. That’s where he got his women, small-town girls going to an out-of-state school. Knocks them up, puts the squeeze on them and here they are. God knows how many he got from each place. I bet he never spent more than one semester in a place. Probably worked out a scheme for falsifying his high-school records to gain admittance, then got busy with his dirty work. Once he had the dames, they couldn’t get out of it any more than a mobster can break away from the gang.”

  “Very cute,” Pat said, “very cute.”

  “Not too,” I told him. “This wrecks my theory. I had him slated for the first kill, but I know now he didn’t do it. Jack got on to him somehow, and either Hal saw the books in his apartment and caught wise or the other one did. This was why Jack wanted the place raided tonight, before this could happen. He knew Hal would be here and he wanted him caught with his pants down. If I had taken his advice Eileen might have been alive.”

  Pat walked over to the wall and dug the slug out of the plaster with a penknife. The one in Eileen hadn’t gone all the way through; the coroner was busy dislodging it. When he had it out he handed it to Pat. Under the light Pat examined them carefully before he spoke. Then, “They’re both .45’s, Mike. And dumdums.”

  He didn’t have to tell me that. “Somebody sure likes to make sure they stay dead,” I said through tight lips. “The killer again. There’s only one. The same lousy bastard that shot Jack. Those slugs will match up sure as hell. Damn,” I spat out, “he’s kill crazy! Dumdums in the gut, head and heart. Pat, I’m going to enjoy putting a bullet in that crazy son of a bitch more than I enjoy eating. I’d sooner work him over with a knife first.”

  “You’re not going to do anything of the sort,” Pat remarked softly.

  The coroner’s men got the bodies out of there in a hurry. We went downstairs again and checked with the cops who were taking down the names and addresses of the people. The patrol wagon was outside and the girls were loading into it. An officer came up to Pat and saluted him.

  “No one got through the line, sir.”

  “Okay. Have some men hold and the rest search the alleyways and adjacent buildings. Make everyone identify himself satisfactorily or arrest them. I don’t care who they are, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” The cop saluted and hurried away.

  Pat turned to me. “This madam, would you recognize her again?”

  “Hell, yes. Why?”

  “I have a folder of persons convicted or suspected of running call houses at the office. I want you to look them over. We got her name from the girls, or at least the only name they knew her by. She was called Miss June. None of the guests here knew her at all. Half the time one of the girls answered the door. She always came herself if the proper signal wasn’t given.”

  I held Pat back a moment. “But what about George Kalecki. He’s the guy I want.”

  Pat grinned. “I have the dragnet out for him. Right now a thousand men are looking for the guy. Think you stand a better chance?”

  I let that one ride. Before I went looking for George Kalecki I wanted to do a few other things first. Even if he was the killer, there were others behind the racket that had to be nailed and I wanted them all, not just the trigger puller. It was like a turkey dinner. The whole outfit would be the meal, the killer the dessert. I wish I knew how Jack had gotten the lead on Hal. Now I would never know.

  But Jack had connections. Maybe he had run across Hal before, or knew Kalecki’s end of it and suspected the rest, and when he met up with Eileen, put two and two together. A guy that operated as long as Hal had couldn’t cover himself completely. There had to be a break in the trail somewhere. Whatever Jack did, he did it fast. He knew right where to look to find John Hanson, and he found him the way we did and maybe plenty more times—in the yearbooks of the colleges.

  Even if Hal killed Jack, how did his own murderer get the gun? That weapon was as hot as the killer and not a toy to be passed around. No, I didn’t think Hal killed Jack. He might have spotted the books and told someone else. That would be the killer. That was what the killer was after. Or was it? Maybe it was just incidental. Maybe the killer only had a remote tie-up with Hal. If that was it Jack was killed for another reason, and the killer, knowing there still was the bare possibility of being traced through that tie-up, didn’t take the chance and swip
ed the books to keep Hal clean.

  And where the hell did that leave me? Right up the creek again. I couldn’t sit back and wait for something to happen again and work from there. Right now I had to start thinking. Little things were beginning to show their heads. Not much, but enough to show that behind it all was a motive. I didn’t see it yet, but I would. I wasn’t after a killer now. I was after a motive.

  I told Pat that I was going home to bed and he wrote me a pass to get through the police lines. I walked down the street and gave the note to a red-faced cop and went on. A cruising cab came by and I grabbed it to Jack’s apartment. My buggy was still outside, and after I paid off the cabby I got in my own heap. There was a lot of work to do tomorrow and I needed some sleep.

  Twenty minutes later I was home in bed smoking a cigarette before I went to sleep, still thinking. I couldn’t get anywhere, so I crushed out the butt and turned over.