“Don’t do that. I just had the rug cleaned.” I grinned at her.
Then she laughed, picked up her drink and sat down in my Naugahyde recliner like she was at a presidential reception. “Curious,” she said again. Her eyes went up and down me twice, her smile getting broader. “We make a great couple. Naked six feet apart. What can be more curious than that?”
I got up, mixed another drink and went back to the couch again. “Why you came on so strong. This is our second time out, kid. Two hellos and you’re ready to go fifteen rounds in the hay. You’re class, big business and big money with enough style to snag any guy you want...” I held up my hand to cut off her interruption “... and suddenly you get the hots for a lousy beat-up old soldier in the shadow police business.”
Renée’s teeth glistened in her smile and she raised her glass in a mock toast to me. “Crude, but very astute, Mike. But I told you I was going to cultivate you, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“And I told you it would be hard, didn’t I?”
I grinned back and adjusted my position. There were times when a guy could be quite uncomfortable.
“So the answer should be obvious,” she said. “I enjoy my position, I enjoy my wealth, I take pleasure from my social obligations, but oh, they’re so damned dull.” She nodded toward the window. “There aren’t any challenges left out there. I operate on a man’s level, but they won’t let me get in there and swing. Everybody’s so hellishly condescending and polite, patting my head because I did my homework and came up with the right answers. Then when nobody’s looking they try to pat my fanny and always seem to miss. Sometimes I wish one of them would get me alone in the stockroom or something.”
“Attagirl, tiger,” I said.
“Stop laughing. It’s serious.”
“Why don’t you marry William?”
“Because he’s already married.”
“Oh?”
“To corporate structure,” she said. “Commerce is his wife, children and mistress. Women are nothing unless they are an adjunct to the business. We are nutured, tolerated and exploited according to our abilities to perform.”
“Come on, honey, you like the guy.”
“He’s the biggest challenge of all, but the only game you play without any possible chance of winning.”
“That sure pigeonholes me, doesn’t it?” I asked her.
Renée tried her drink again, then swirled the ice around in the glass, making it clink musically. “Who can win with you, Mike?”
“Nobody, unless I let them,” I said.
“Are you going to let me?”
“No.”
“You dirty dog. Why not?”
“Right now you’re having too much fun sitting here talking about it. The experience is new and exciting. It’s like kicks, doll. It’s even better than having a guy roped to stakes in the ground and standing over him with a whip. The only thing that bugs you is that I laid down the ground rules.”
“What a bastard you are.”
“How come everybody says that to me?”
“Because you are. I can even tell what you’re thinking.” I looked at her and waited.
She said, “You’re getting kicks out of it, too, sitting there naked and horny, watching me suffer, knowing damn well there’s going to be a next time and when that happens it’s going to be something incredible.”
“You called me, remember?”
“And I’ll call you again.” She let her teeth show in another brilliant smile. “I don’t care if you are a bastard. I wish you didn’t know so much about women, though. Tell me one thing, Mike ...”
“What?”
“You could have stopped it all by having a casual drink with me and turning the conversation into more normal avenues. Why didn’t you?”
I finished my drink, studied the empty glass a moment then put it on the floor. “It’s been a rough few days, sugar. I lost a friend, got shot at, clobbered, interrogated by... oh hell. You were a welcome relief, a lift to the old ego. You have to get up to bat before you know if you can hit or not.”
“Now you’re going to make me get dressed and send me home,” Renée said.
I felt a laugh rumble out of my chest. “Roger, doll. So hate me. You’ll always wonder what it would have been like.”
Her glass went down to the floor too and her laugh had a throaty tinkle to it. “I’ll find out. Cultivating you may take longer than I thought. You may turn out to be the biggest challenge of all.”
“Not tonight.”
“I know. But since you’ve been such a bastard, will you do something for me?”
“Maybe.”
She pushed herself out of the chair slowly, all naked, smooth skin radiating warmth and desire, little pulse beats throbbing erotically in the lush valleys. She reached out, took my hand and encouraged me to my feet until flesh met flesh, insinuating themselves together in a way that only flesh can.
“Kiss me,” Renée said. After the briefest pause. “Hard.”
I climbed out of bed and stood in front of the window watching the thin patter of rain dribble down the dust-caked glass. The morning crowds were at their desks inside their offices and the shoppers hadn’t started out yet. Two blocks away a fire siren howled and a hook and ladder flashed through the intersection, an emergency truck right behind it. Damn games, I thought. I lost a night; I started out for Woody Ballinger and almost wound up doing bedroom gymnastics. I wiped my face with my hand, feeling the stubble of a beard under my fingers, then grinned at my reflection in the window pane. Hell, I needed the break. Even near-sex could be good therapy. “Buddy,” I said out loud, “maybe you still got it, maybe you haven’t, but either way they think you have and want some of it.”
Okay, so a guy needs an ego boost occasionally.
I switched on the television, dialed in to a news station and went to the bathroom to shave and clean up. I was putting a new blade in the razor when I heard the announcer talk about a shooting during an attempted robbery on West Forty-sixth Street, one that was broken up by a civic-minded passerby.
Thanks, Pat, I said mentally.
While I shaved there was news about the troop movements going into critical areas of the state, sections where power stations and reservoirs were located, their training missions all highly secretive. Results of the operations would be analyzed and announced within two weeks.
Two weeks. That’s how much time they knew they had. Success meant announcement. Failure meant destruction. There would be no need for an announcement then. Somehow I still couldn’t get excited about it. I wondered what the city would look like if the project failed. New York without smog because the factories and incinerators had no one to operate them. No noise except the wind and the rain until trees grew back through the pavement, then there would be leaves to rustle. Abandoned vehicles would rot and blow away as dust, finally blending with the soil again. Even bones would eventually decompose until the remants of the race were gone completely, their grave markers concrete and steel tombstones hundreds of feet high, the caretakers of the cemetery only the microscopic organisms that wiped them out. Hell, it didn’t sound so bad at all if you could manage to stick around somehow and enjoy it.
A commercial interrupted the broadcast, then the announcer came back with news of a sudden major-power meeting of the United Nations. A possible summit meeting at the White House was hinted at. The dove factions were screaming because our unexpected military maneuvers might trigger the same thing in hostile quarters. The hawks were applauding our gestures at preparedness. Everything was going just right. Eddie Dandy’s bomb was demolished in the light of the blinding publicity that seared the unsuspecting eyes of the public.
And all I wanted to do was find me a pickpocket. Plus a couple of guys who had tried to knock me off.
I finished my shower, got dressed, made a phone call, then went down to the cabstand on the corner. Eddie Dandy met me for coffee in a basement counter joint on Fifty-third, glad to g
et away from the usual haunts where he was bugged about his supposed TV goof. He was sitting there staring at himself in the polished stainless steel side of the bread box, his face drawn, hair mussed, in a suit that looked like it had been slept in. Somehow, he seemed older and thinner and when I sat down he just nodded and waved to the counterman for another coffee.
“You look like hell,” I said.
“So should you.” His eyes made a ferret-like movement at mine, then went back to staring again.
I spilled some milk and sugar into my coffee and stirred it. “I got other things to think about.”
“You’re not married and got kids, that’s why,” he said.
“That bad?”
“Worse. Nothing’s turned up. You know how they’re faking it?” He didn’t let me answer. “They’ve planted decoy containers in all shapes and sizes that are supposed to be explosive charges. Everybody’s out on a search, Army, Navy, C.D. units, even the Scouts. They’re hoping somebody will turn up something that isn’t a decoy and they’ll have a starting place. Or a stopping place.”
I grabbed a doughnut and broke it in two, dunking the big end in my coffee. “That bad?”
“Oh, cool, Mike, cool. How the hell do you do it?”
“I don’t. I just don’t worry about it. They got thousands of people doing the legwork on that one. Me, I have my own problems.”
“Like getting shot at in Lippy’s apartment.”
“You get around, friend.”
“There was a news leak out of Kansas City and Pat had me in again. I heard him talking about it to the guy with the squeaky voice from the D.A.’s office. All I did was put two and two togeher. What happened?”
“Nothing.” I gave him the details of the episode and watched him shrug it off. Nothing was as big as what he was sitting on right then.
“Maybe you got the right attitude after all,” Eddie finally said. He sipped his coffee and turned around. I knew his curiosity would get the better of him. “When you going to ask me something you don’t know?”
I stuffed the rest of the doughnut in my mouth, wiped the jelly off my fingers and grinned at him. “Woody Ballinger,” I said.
“Come on, Mike.” His voice sounded disgusted with me.
“Two months ago you did that crime special on TV,” I reminded him. “Part of the expose touched his operation.”
“So what? I made him a typical example of hoods the law doesn’t seem to tap out, always with enough loot to hire good lawyers to find the loopholes. He hides everything behind legitimate businesses and goes on bilking the public. You saw the show.”
“I’m interested in what you didn’t say, friend. You researched the subject. You got some pretty weird contacts too. You were fighting a time element in the presentation and the network didn’t want to fight any libel suits, even from Woody.”
“Mike ... what’s to know? He’s in the rackets. The cops know damn well he’s number two in the policy racket uptown but can’t prove it. It used to be bootlegging and whores, then narcotics until he rubbed Lou Chello wrong and the mob gave him that one-ended split. He has what he has and can keep it as long as his nose stays clean with the lasagne lads. They’ll protect their own, but only so far.”
“A year ago there was a rumble about buddy Woody innovating a new policy wrinkle in the Wall Street crowd. Instead of nickels and dimes it was a grand and up. Winning numbers came from random selections on the big board. There was a possibility of it being manipulated.”
“Balls. Those guys wouldn’t fall for it,” Eddie reminded me.
“They’re speculators, kid,” I said. “Legit gamblers. Why not?”
Eddie waited while the counterman poured him another coffee and left to serve somebody else. “I checked that out too. Nobody knew anything. I got lots of laughs, that’s all.”
“Wilbur Craft supposedly made a million out of one payoff,” I said.
“Nobody saw it if he did. Or maybe he paid it to his lawyers to get him off that stock fraud hook. I spoke to him up in Sing Sing and he said it was all talk.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to get hit with an income tax rap on top of everything else. He only drew three years on the fraud rap.”
“Keep trying, Mike.”
“Craft still has his estate in Westchester.”
“Sure, and the place in Florida and the summer place in Hawaii. It was all free and clear before they rapped him.”
“Upkeep, pal. It takes a lot of dough,” I said.
“I know. I got a five-room apartment on the East Side.”
“Suppose Woody did run a big operation independently?”
“Then he’d be sticking his neck way out there just asking it to get chopped off. The dons would have their pizza punks out there with their shooters in his ears for even trying it. No dice, Mike.”
“Guys get big,” I said. “They don’t want somebody else’s hand in their affairs. They think they’re big enough to stand them off. They have their own shooters ready to protect the territory.”
“Unknown powers can do it. Not slobs who like to parade it in public.”
“Egos like to be recognized,” I said.
“That’s how they get dead.”
“Just suppose,” I asked him.
Eddie blew on his coffee and tasted it. He had forgotten the sugar, made a face and stirred some in. “He’d have to do it in his head. No books, no evidence. All cash, personal contacts, and hard money payoffs.”
“Woody’s a thinker, but no damn computer.”
“Then a minimum of notations, easy to hide, simple to destroy.”
“But it could be done?”
“Certainly, but ...” Eddie put his cup down and turned around to look at me, his eyes squinted half shut. “Either you’re trying to make me feel good by getting my mind off things or you got something. Which?”
“You’ll never feel good, kid. I was just confirming something I thought of.”
“Damn, you’re a bastard,” Eddie said with a quick grin.
“Why does everybody call me that?” I asked.
CHAPTER 7
Velda had left a recorded message at ten fifteen stating that she had located Little Joe, the no-legged beggar who pushed himself along on a skate-wheeled platform. Little Joe had seen Lippy and a tall, skinny guy together on several occasions. They were obviously friends, but Little Joe didn’t buy the other guy at all. He figured him for a hustler, but didn’t ask any questions. His own business was enough for him. He could probably recognize the guy again if he saw him, but the skimpy description was the best Little Joe could do. Velda had left him my numbers to call if he saw him again and if it turned up right Little Joe earned himself a quick hundred. Meanwhile, Velda was going to stay in the area and see what else she could pick up.
Tall and skinny. Probably a million guys like that in the city, but at least it was a start. Eliminate the squares, look for a hustler in a ten-block area during a critical time period when the theater crowds were going in and out and you could narrow it down to a handful. The trouble was, that handful would be the cagy ones. They wouldn’t be that easy to spot. They had their moves plotted and a charted course of action if somebody made them. They could disappear into a hundred holes and nobody was going to smell them out for you. I put the phone back, turned my raincoat collar up and went outside and waited for a cab.
Pat’s office wasn’t the madhouse I thought it would be. All officers available for duty were out in the field and only a lone bored-looking reporter was on a telephone turning in a routine report. A dozen empty cardboard coffee cups stuffed with drowned cigarette butts littered the desk, holding down sheafs of paper.
I said, “Hi, buddy,” and he turned around, his face seamed with fatigue lines, his eyes red-veined from lack of sleep. “You look beat.”
“Yeah.”
I pulled a chair up, sat down and stretched my legs. “Since when does an operation this size involve homicide?”
“Ever since that
guy died in the subway.”
“Anything new?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“Then why don’t you try sleeping in a bed for a change?”
“We’re not all private citizens,” Pat growled.
“How’s the general reaction so far?”
“We’re managing.”
“Somebody’s going to wonder about the Russians looking for a summit meeting and the bit going on in the U.N.”
“There’s enough tension in the world to make it look plausible. You have four shooting fracases going on right now and three of those involved have nuclear capabilities if they decide to use them. There’s reason enough for international concern. Washington can handle it if certain parties who know just a little too damn much can keep quiet.”
“Don’t look at me, buddy. It’s your problem.”
Pat gave me a lopsided grin. “Oh no. Some of it’s yours. Unless you’re immune to certain deadly diseases.”
“They isolate it yet?”
“No.”
“Locate the agents that were planted here?”
“No.”
“You talk too much,” I said.
Pat leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “There’s nothing to talk about. For the first time the Reds are as bugged about it as we are. They know we have a retaliation policy and damn well know its potential. Nobody can afford to risk a C.B. war. They haven’t been able to run down a single piece of written evidence on this business at all. If there ever was any, it’s been deliberately destroyed by that previous regime. That bunch tried to keep a dead hand in office and they did a pretty good job. We have to work on rumor and speculation.”
“Did the technicians at Fort Detrick come up with anything?”
His eyes gave me an unrelenting stare.
“Come on, Pat. There’s nothing really new about our chemical-biological warfare program being centered there.”
“What could they come up with?” he asked me softly.
“Like nuclear physics, problems and solutions seem to be arrived at simultaneously. When that agent was planted here that bacteriological program would have been developed to a certain point. Now it’s twenty-some years later, so they should be able to guess at what he had as a destructive force.”
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