“Nice,” Pat said. “You’re thinking. They can make a few educated guesses, all right, but even back then, what was available was incredibly destructive. Luckily, they worked on antibiotics, vaccines and the like at the same time so they could probably avoid total contamination with a crash immunization program.”
I looked at him and grinned. “Except that there isn’t enough time to go into mass production of the stuff.”
Pat didn’t answer me.
“That means only a preselected group would be given immunization and who will that group consist of ... the technicians who have it at hand, a power squad who can take it away from them, or selection by the democratic method of polls and votes?”
“You know what it means,” Pat said.
“Sure. Instant panic, revolution, everything gets smashed in the process and nobody gets a thing”
“What would you do, Mike?”
I grinned at him again. “Oh, round up a few hundred assorted styles of females, a couple of obstetricians, a few male friends to share the pleasure and to split the drinks, squirt up with antibiotics and move to a nice warm island someplace and start the world going again.”
“I never should have asked,” Pat said with a tired laugh. “At least now I’ll be able to get some sleep knowing the problem has been solved.” He yawned elaborately, then stifled it. “Unless you got another one.”
“Just one. Did ballistics get anything on those shots in Lippy’s apartment?”
Pat moved a coffee cup aside and tugged out a stained typewritten sheet of paper. “They dug a .38 slug out of the floor. The ejected cartridge was a few feet away. The ring bands on the lead were well defined so it was either a new piece or an old gun with a fresh barrel. My guess would be a Colt automatic.”
“You check the sales from local outlets?”
“Peterson did. Everything turned up clean since the new law in the state went into effect, but prior to that there were thousands of sales made outside the state that would be almost impossible to run down. Anybody intending to use a gun illegally is going to be pretty cagy about it, especially buying one through a legitimate source. I wouldn’t pin any hopes on tracking that job down unless you locate the gun itself. Or have you?”
“Not yet.”
“I wish I had the time or inclination to nail your pants to a chair,” Pat said. “Right now I couldn’t care less. Incidentally,” he added, “I might as well give you a little fatherly advice. Although several people in rather high places who seem to know you pretty well have vouched for your so-called integrity, the skeptics from the bureaus in D.C. decided a little surveillance wouldn’t hurt. They didn’t like the contact between you and Eddie Dandy this morning.”
“I didn’t have any tail on me.”
“Eddie did. He works in a more sensitive area than you do. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he went into custody until this thing was over.”
“They wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“Like hell they wouldn’t. He tell you about that business in Kansas City?”
“He mentioned it.”
“Plain luck we stopped it this time.”
“It’ll get a lot stickier if anybody really wants to get inquisitive,” I said. “How about some lunch?”
“Thanks, but I’m too bushed. I’m grabbing some sleep. Tonight I got a detail covering the reception at that new delegation building they just opened. The Soviets and their satellite buddies are throwing a bash and everybody’s got visions of fire bombs and bullets dancing through their heads.”
“Crazy,” I said. “Can I use your phone?”
“Go ahead.”
I dialed my office number, waited for the automatic signal, held the tone gimmick up to the mouthpiece and triggered it. Four faint musical bleeps came out, there was a pause and a voice with a laugh hidden in it said, “Please, Mr. Tape Recorder, inform your master that his cultivator is available for an afternoon drink. He has the office phone number.”
I felt myself grinning and hung up.
“Has to be a broad,” Pat said. “It has to.”
“It was,” I told him.
“Just how many broads you figure you collect any given month, pal?”
“Let’s put it this way,” I said. “I throw away more than most guys get to see.”
Pat wrinkled his face and waved for me to get the hell away from him. Some perennial bachelors are different from others.
The bar at Finero’s Steak House was packed three deep with a noisy crowd fighting the martini-Manhattan war, the combatants armed with stemmed glasses and resonant junior-executive voices. A scattering of women held down the barstools, deliberately spaced out to give the stags room to operate, knowing they were the objects of attention and the possible prizes. The one on the end was nearly obscured by the cluster of trim young men jockeying for position, but for some reason the back of her head and the way her hair tumbled around her shoulders was strangely familiar to me. She swung around to say something and laugh at the one behind her who was holding out a lighter to fire up her cigarette when her eyes reached out between the covey of shoulders and touched mine.
And Heidi Anders smiled and I smiled back.
The two young men turned and they didn’t smile because they were Woody Ballinger’s two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant there was something in their faces that didn’t belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know.
Could.
From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of.
So I made a little wave with my forefinger and Heidi Anders said something to her entourage, put her glass down on the bar and came to me through the path they opened for her and when she reached me said, “Thank you, Mike.”
“For what?”
“Yelling at me. I looked in the mirror. It’s worse than the camera. It tells you the truth without benefit of soft lighting, makeup men and development techniques.”
“Sugar,” I asked her, “when did you last pop one?”
“You were there.”
“And it was cold turkey all the way? Kid, you sure don’t look like you’re in withdrawal.”
A flash of annoyance tugged at her eyes and that beautiful mouth tightened slightly. “I had help, big man. I went for it right after you left. Dr. Vance Allen. You’ve heard of him?”
I nodded and studied her. Vance Allen wasn’t new to me. He was a longtimer in the field of narcotic rehabilitation. Some of his measures were extreme and some not yet accepted into general practice, but his results had been extremely significant.
“Hurt any?”
“At first. You’re looking at an experiment with a new medication. In a way I’m lucky. I wasn’t hooked as badly as you thought.”
“Who put you on it?”
“That’s one of those things I’d rather not talk about. In time it will be taken care of. Meanwhile, I’m working at being unhooked.”
I shook my head and looked past her. “Not yet. Right now you’re nibbling at another line.”
Heidi tilted her face and squinted at me, not understanding.
“That pair you’re with are a couple of hoods.”
“Oh ... don’t be silly.” She gave me a disgusted grimace. “They work for Mr. Ballinger and Mr. Ballinger
“... is a legitimate businessman,” I finished for her. “One day try old issues of the newspapers... about July, four years ago, or check into your nearest friendly precinct station. The desk sergeant will fill you in on his background.”
“I don’t believe...”
“You got any reason not to believe me?”
“
No.” But her voice was hesitant.
“Somebody tried to kill me last night.” I looked past her to the bar again and she almost turned to follow my gaze.
“But...”
“When you go back there,” I said. “tell your friends that I’ll be looking them up. Right after I see their boss. We have a little business to discuss too.”
Some of the color drained out of her face and she gave an annoyed toss of her head, her lower lip pinched between her teeth. “Damn! You men...”
“Just tell them, Heidi.”
“I don’t know why...”
“Tell them. And have the message passed on to Larry Beers too.”
I winked at her and left her standing there a moment watching me before she walked back, that wild hip-swaying walk reflecting her annoyance. Carl and Sammy weren’t going to be too happy with the news. They’d been too used to doing the chasing and calling the shots when and where they wanted them.
The maître d’ and headwaiter had seen Woody Ballinger earlier, but he had left about an hour ago. His office secretary had called a little while back looking for him, so he wouldn’t be there. I just told them that they could tell Woody Mike Hammer was looking for him on a “business matter” and if he didn’t find me I’d find him. Let Woody sweat a little too.
Between three and four in the afternoon the New York cabbies change shifts. It’s bad enough on a nice day trying to fight the women shoppers and the early commuters for one, but in the rain, forget it. You could stand in the street and get splashed by their wheels or try walking, but either way you’d get soaked. For once the weathermen had been right and they were predicting three more days of the same. Intermittent heavy rain, occasional clearing, windy and cool. It was a hell of a time to be on the streets.
A girl walked by the store entranceway I was nestled in, head lowered into the slanted rain, her plastic coat plastered to her body, outlining her scissoring thighs as she doggedly made her way to the corner to make a green light. At least she reminded me of something. I went inside the store, bought a pack of cigarettes, walked back to the phone booth, put a dime in the slot and dialed a number.
The secretary told me to hold, checked me out, then put Renée Talmage on the line. She chuckled once and said, “Hello, teaser.”
“But fun, kid.”
“Too frustrating, but yes... fun. At least different. Where are you?”
“A couple blocks away and soaking wet.”
“There’s a nice little bar downstairs in the building where you can dry out while we have a drink.”
“Fine,” I told her. “Five minutes.”
It was closer to fifteen and she was part of the way through a cocktail, totally engrossed with the bartender in a discussion about the latest slump in the stock market, when I got there. I tossed my soggy trench coat and hat on the back of a chair and climbed on the barstool next to her. “Must be great to be intelligent. Bring me a beer,” I told the bartender.
She stopped in the middle of Dow-Jones averages and tilted her head at me. “And I thought you had class. A beer. How plebeian.”
“So I’m a slob.” I took the top off the beer and put the glass down with a satisfied burp. “Good stuff, that. You have to raise your hand to get out of class?”
“Recess time.” She laughed and sipped her cocktail. “Actually, the day is done. William is socializing with the wheels of the world and I’m left to my own devices for the time being.”
“You got nice devices, kid,” I said. The dress she had on wasn’t exactly office apparel. The vee-neckline plunged down beside the naked swell of her breasts to disappear behind a four-inch-wide leather belt. “Don’t you have anything on under that?” I asked her.
“We women are exercising our newfound freedom. Haven’t you heard about the brassiere-burning demonstrations?”
“Yeah. I heard. Only I didn’t figure on being this close to the ashes. It’s distracting.”
“Well?”
“Don’t guys find it hard to keep their eyes off you?” Renée looked at me with an amused smile, her mouth formed into a tiny bow. “Very hard.”
“Cut it out.”
Her,smile got deeper. “Me? You’re the one making all the dirty remarks.”
I almost spilled my beer before I managed to get it down.
“Now what have you been doing to get so wet ... tailing a suspect?”
“Not quite. There are better ways of nailing them. I’ve been walking and remembering a dead friend who shouldn’t have died and thinking out why he died until things begin to make a little sense. One day, one second, it’s all going to be nice and clear right in front of me and all those targets will be ready to be knocked off.”
The funny little smile on her face warped into a worried frown and some deep concern showed in her eyes. “Is it... that personal, Mike?”
“All the way.”
“But you’re serious... about killing.”
“So was somebody else,” I told her.
Renée looked into her glass, started to raise it, then put it down and looked at me again. “Strange.”
“What is?”
“My impressions. I read about people in your line of work, I see the interpretations on TV and in movies... it’s rather hard to believe there really arepeople like that. But with you it’s different. The police...”
“Cops are dedicated professionals, honey. They’re in a tough, rough, underpaid racket with their lives on the line every minute of the day. They get slammed by the public, sappy court decisions and crusading politicians, but somehow they get the job done.”
“Mike ... I thought I knew people. I’m personally responsible for the actions and decisions of several thousands and answerable only to William Dorn. I can’t afford to make mistakes in selecting them for sensitive positions, but I would have made a mistake with you.”
“Why?”
“Because... well, there are different sides of you that nobody can truly see.”
“You’ve just lost touch with the lower class, kid. You work on too high a level. Get out there on the street where the buying public is and you’ll see a lot of other faces too. Some of them probably work for you too. Not everybody is in an executive position. Macy’s and Sears Roebuck still do a whopping big business by catering to their tastes.”
“Take me with you, Mike,” she said.
“What?”
“You could be right. I’d like to see these people.”
“Renée, you’d get your clothes dirty, your nails broken, and your ass patted. It’s different.”
“I’ll survive it.”
She was so serious I had to laugh at her. I finished the fresh beer the bartender set in front of me and thought, what the hell, a change of pace could be good for her. It was one of those evenings where nobody was going anyplace anyway, so why not? We could cruise through the entrails of the city and maybe pick up pieces here and there that were lying around loose.
Down at the end the bartender had switched on the TV to a news station and the announcer finished with the weather and turned the program over to the team who handled the major events. Somebody in Congress was raising a stink about the expenses involved in calling up National Guard and Army Reserve units for a practice maneuver that apparently had no meaning. Film clips taken by some enterprising photographer who had slipped past the security barrier showed uniformed figures slogging through mud and water, flashlights probing the darkness. Another shot had a group locating and dismantling some apparatus of destruction around a power station. He even included the information that they were deliberately planted decoys with a minimum explosive capacity to sharpen the soldiers’ abilities. It seemed that most of the activity was centered around the watershed areas in key areas across the nation with chemical analysis teams right in the thick of things. The commentator even speculated briefly on sophisticated chemical-biological warfare techniques and this exercise was possibly for training in detection and neutralizing an enemy’s attack fr
om that direction.
He never knew how nearly right he was.
Tom-Tom Schneider’s killers had escaped a trap laid by the Detroit police. Somebody had passed the word where they could be found and there was a shoot-out in the Dutchess Hotel. Two cops were wounded, a porter killed, and it was believed that one of the suspects was shot during the exchange. An hour later a known police informer was found murdered with three .38’s in his chest along a highway leading from the city. It was going to make a good pictorial spread in tomorrow’s papers.
The mayor was screaming for more crime control and was setting up a panel to study the situation. Good luck, mayor.
“Great world out there,” I said.
“I’d still like to see it with you.”
“Okay. Finish your drink.”
I hoped I wouldn’t run into Velda. Women don’t exactly appreciate other women’s plunging necklines.
Caesar Mario Tulley was a professional panhandler who bused over from Patterson, New Jersey, every day, picked up a hundred bucks in nickles and dimes from the tourist suckers, then went back to his flashy suite in a midtown hotel. He had pageboy hair, a faceful of stringy whiskers and a motley outfit of clothes held together with beads and chains that no decent hippie would be caught high in. But it was his gimmick. That and the lost look in the young-old face and tired eyes. The women felt sorry for him and the men flipped their quarters in his hand to pay for the snide remarks that went with the coin. Hell, he probably was making out better than any of them.
He saw me and Renée squeezed together under her umbrella, half stepped out of the shoe store doorway, then recognized me and those deliberately tired eyes pepped right up. A loose-lip grin split the whiskers and he said, “Oh, hi, Mike. Almost put the bite on you.”
“Fat chance,” I told him. “How you doing, Caesar?”
“Lousy tonight. Tried working Radio City and got rousted by the fuzz. Then some drunk belts me in the chops figuring I was his own kid and tried to drag me back to Des Moines, Iowa. I was halfway to the Forty-second Street subway before I shook him loose. What kind of kooks they got around here these days?”
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