That was that. Or not quite. Maybe they still had an office but no phone.
One of the boys asked me if I was going uptown and I nodded for him to come along. For ten blocks he kept up an incessant line of chatter that I didn’t hear until he poked me to let him out at a subway station. I pulled over, he opened the door and thanked me and ran down the stairs.
Behind me a line of horns blasted an angry barrage in my direction and over it a cop’s whistle shrilled a warning. I came back to the present with a dirty word and my mind in a spin, because on the newsstand by the subway was a pile of the late evening papers and each one screamed to the world that the police were conducting a city-wide clean-up campaign of vice.
Somebody had talked.
I stopped for another red light, yelling to a newsy to bring one over and I gave him a buck for his trouble. It was there, all right, heads, captions and subcaptions. The police were in possession of information that was going to lead to the biggest roundup of this, that and the next thing the city ever saw.
Which was fine, great. Just what we wanted in the pig’s neck. Pat must be raving mad. The papers were doing a beautiful civic job of chasing the rats out of town. Damn them, why couldn’t they keep quiet!
The light changed and I saw my street coming up. I had to circle the block because it was a one way, then squeeze in between a decrepit delivery truck and a battered sedan. The number I wanted was a weather-beaten loft building, with an upholstery shop fronting on the street. On one side was a narrow entrance with a service elevator in the rear and a sign announcing the available vacancies hanging on the door.
I rang the bell and heard the elevator rattle its way downward, and come to a stop. The door opened and a guy with a week’s growth of beard looked at me with rheumy eyes and waited for me to say something.
“Where can I find the super of this building?”
“Whatcha want him fer?” He spat a stream of tobacco juice between the grill of the elevator.
I palmed my badge in one hand and a fin in the other and let him see both. “Private cop.”
“I’m the super,” he said.
He reached for the fin and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “I’m listening.”
I said, “I’m looking for an outfit called Quick Pix. They were listed as being here.”
“That was a long time ago, buster. They pulled out in a hurry ’most a year ago.”
“Anybody there now?”
“Naw. This place’s a dive. Who the hell would want to rent here? Maybe another outfit like Q.P. They was a fly-by-night bunch, I think.”
“How about a look at the place.”
“Sure, come on.”
I stepped aboard and we crept up to the fourth floor and stopped. He left the elevator there and turned the lights on, pointed to the end of the hall. “Room 209.”
The door wasn’t locked. Where an ordinary house night latch should be was a round hole like an eye in a skull. The super did some trick with a switch box in a closet and the lights went on in the room.
It was a mess, all right. Somebody had packed out of there like the devil was on his tail. Finished proofs and negatives littered the floor, covered with spider webs and long tendrils of dust. The two windows had no shades and didn’t need them, that’s how thick the dirt was. Hypo had blown or was knocked from a box, covering one end with once white powder. Even now a few heel prints were visible in the stuff.
I gathered up a handful of snaps and looked them over. They were all two by three prints taken on the streets of couples walking arm in arm, sitting on park benches, coming out of Broadway theaters grinning at each other. On the backs were numbers in pencil and scrawled notations of the photogs.
A large packing box served as a filing cabinet, spilling out blank tickets with a slot built in for a quarter. The back half of the box contained other tickets that had been sent in with the mailer’s name and address written in the right spot. They were tied in groups of about a hundred and all in all, there was a couple thousand dollars represented in cash right there. Quick Pix had done all right for itself.
To one side was a shelf running around the wall lined with shoe boxes and inscribed with names. One said “N. Sanford” and my interest picked up. In it were cards numbered to correspond with the film in the camera, which looked like a three- or four-day supply. A penciled note was a reminder to order more film. Neat, precise handwriting. Very feminine. It was Nancy’s without a doubt. I plucked it out and tucked it in my pocket.
The guy had been standing near the door watching me silently. I heard him grunt a few times, then: “You know something? This place wasn’t like this when they moved out.”
I stopped what I was doing. “How’s that?”
“I came in to see if they left the walls here and all this junk on the floor was stacked in one corner. Looks like somebody kicked it around.”
“Yeah?”
He spat on the floor. “Yeah.”
“Who ran the business?”
“Forgot his name.” He shrugged. “Some character on his uppers. Guess he did pretty good after a while. One day he packs in here with a new convertible, tells me he’s moving out and scrams. Never give me a dime.”
“What about the people that worked for him?”
“Hell, they was all out. They came in here that night and raised a stink. What was I supposed to do, pay their wages? I was lucky I tagged the guy, so I got the rent. Never said nothing to nobody, he didn’t.”
I stuck a match in my mouth and chewed the end off it. When I gave one last quick glance I walked out. “That does it.” He shut the door and played with the switch box again, then stepped into the elevator after me and we started down.
“Get what you come for?” he asked
“I didn’t come for anything special. I’m, er, checking on the owner. He owed some money and I have to collect. For films.”
“You don’t say. Come to think of it, there’s some stuff down in the cellar yet. One of the kids what worked there asked me if she could park it there. I let her when she slipped me a buck.”
“She?”
“Yeah, a redhead. Nice kid.”
He spat through the grill again and it splattered against the wall. “Do you ever read the papers?” I asked him.
“Funnies sometimes. Just the pictures. Broke my glasses four years ago and never got new ones. Why, what’s going on?”
“Nothing. Let’s see that stuff downstairs.”
Before he could suggest it I came across with another five and it went in the pocket with the other. His grin showed teeth that were brown as mud. We passed the main floor and jolted to a stop at the basement. The air was damp and musty, almost like the morgue, but here was the smell of dirt and decay and the constant whirr of rat feet running along the pipes and timbers. There weren’t any lights, but the guy had a flashlight stashed in a joint and he threw the beams around the walls. Little beady eyes looked back at me and ran off, to reappear again farther down. I got the creeps.
He didn’t seem to mind it at all.
“Down back, I think.” He pointed the flash at the floor and we stepped over crates, broken furniture and the kind of trash that accumulates over a span of years. We stopped by a bin and he poked around with a broom handle, scaring up some rats but nothing else. Beyond that was a row of shelves piled to capacity and he knocked the dust off some of the papers with a crack of the stick. Most of them were old bills and receipts, a few dusty ledgers and a wealth of old paper that had been saved up carefully. I opened a couple of boxes to help out. One was full of pencil stubs; the other some hasty sketches of nudes. They weren’t very good.
The light got away from me before I could shove them back and the super said, “Think this is it.” I held the light while he dragged out a corrugated cardboard box tied with twine. A big SAVE was written across the front in red crayon. He nodded and pursed his mouth, looking for a rat to spit tobacco juice at. He saw one on a pipe and let loose. I heard the rat sque
aking all the way to the end, where he fell off and kicked around in some papers. The stuff he chewed must have been poison.
I pulled the twine off and opened the top. Inside was another box tied with lighter cord that broke easily enough. My hand was shaking a little as I bent back the cover and I pulled the light closer.
There were pictures in this one, all neatly sorted in two rows and protected by layers of tissue paper. Both sides of the box were lined with blotters to absorb any moisture, and between each group of shots was an index card bearing the date they were taken.
Perhaps I expected too much. Perhaps it was the thought of the other pictures that were stolen from me, perhaps it was just knowing that pictures fitted in somewhere, but I held my breath expectantly as I lifted them out.
Then I went into all the curse words I knew. All I had was another batch of street photos with smiling couples waving into the camera or doing something foolish. I was so damn mad I would have left them there if I hadn’t remembered that they cost me five bucks and I might as well get something for my dough. I tucked the box under my arm and went back to the elevator.
When we got to the street floor the super wanted to know if I felt like signing the after-hours book and I scratched J. Johnson in it and left.
At eight-fifteen I called Pat’s home. He still hadn’t come in, so I tried the office. The switchboard located him and the minute I heard his voice I knew there was trouble. He said, “Mike? Where are you?”
“Not far from your place. Anything new?”
“Yes.” His words were clipped. “I want to speak to you. Can you meet me in the Roundtown Grill in ten minutes?”
“I’ll be there. What’s up?”
“Tell you then. Ten minutes.” Someone called to him and he hung up. Ten minutes to the second I reached the Roundtown and threaded my way to the back and found Pat sitting in the last booth. There were lines of worry across his forehead that hadn’t been there before, giving him an older look. He forced a grin when he saw me and waved me to sit down.
Beside him he had a copy of the evening paper and he spread it out on the table. He tapped the headline. “Did you have anything to do with this?”
I shoved a butt in my mouth and fired it. “You know better than that, Pat.”
He rolled the paper up into a ball and threw it aside, his mouth twisting into a snarl. “I didn’t think so. I had to be sure. It got out some way and loused things up nice.”
“How?”
A waiter set two beers down in front of us and Pat polished his off before the guy left and ordered another, quick. “I’m getting squeezed, pal. I’m getting squeezed nice. Do you know how many rotten little jerks there are in this world? There must be millions. Nine-tenths of them live in the city with us. Each rotten little jerk controls a bloc of votes. Each rotten little jerk wants something done or not done. They make a phone call to somebody who’s pretty important and tell him what they want. Pretty soon that person gets a lot of the same kind of phone calls and decides that maybe he’d better do something about it, and the squeeze starts. Word starts drifting up the line to lay off or go slow and it’s the kind of a word that’s backed up with a threat that can be made good.
“Pretty, isn’t it? You get hold of something that should be done and you have to lay off.” The second beer followed the first and another was on its way. I had never seen Pat this mad before.
“I tried to be a decent cop,” he ranted, “I try to stick to the letter of the law and do my duty. I figure the taxpayers have a say in things, but now I begin to wonder. It’s coming from all directions ... phone calls, hints that traveled too far to trace back, sly reminders that I’m just a cop and nothing but a captain, which doesn’t carry too much weight if certain parties feel like doing something about it.”
“Get down to cases, Pat.”
“The D.A. called Ann Minor’s death murder. He’s above a fix and well in the public eye, so there’s no pressure on him. The murder can be investigated if necessary, but get off the angles. That’s the story. Word got out about the book, but not the fact that it’s in code.”
I tapped the ashes in the tray and squinted at him. “You mean there are a lot of big boys mixed up with call girls and the prostitution racket who don’t want their names to get out, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
No, Pat wasn’t a bit happy. He said, “Either I go ahead with it, dig up the stuff and then get nicely pushed into a resignation, or I lay off and keep my job, sacrificing this case to give the public their money’s worth in future cases.”
I shook my head pathetically. “That’s what you get for being honest. What’ll it be?”
“I don’t know, Mike.”
“You’ll have to make up your mind soon.”
“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 t
hings. 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.”
The Mike Hammer Collection Volume 1 Page 38
