“And now you got men on it.”
“Uh-huh. As many as we can spare. Don’t worry, we’ll find Ballinger.”
“He might have Velda. There isn’t much time.”
“I know,” he told me softly, “not for any of us,” then hung up.
Back to that again, I thought. Six days... no, five days left. In a way there was almost a comic angle to the situation. The ones who didn’t know what was impending couldn’t care, and those who knew about it didn’t. A real wild world, this. Trouble was coming in from so many sources that another one, no matter how big, was no more than an itch to be scratched. Maybe the world wouldn’t give a damn either if it did know. Nobody seems to think that big. Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof.How long since Hiroshima and Nagasaki? You sit on a time bomb so long you get to ignore it. The object of destruction gets to be a familiar thing and one more wouldn’t matter anyway. Defusing the problem was somebody else’s job and somehow in some way it would be taken care of. That’s what we have a government for, isn’t it? So why worry, have another beer and watch the ball game. The Mets are ahead.
I picked up a paper at the stand on the comer and riffled through the pages. The News had a two-column spread on page four about how the special Army teams in their exercise maneuvers upstate had located a possible contamination source in the Ashokan Reservoir, and although the water supply to New York City and adjacent areas had been temporarily curtailed, there was no actual shortage and the Army experts were expected to clear the matter up shortly.
Further on was another little squib about a certain Long Island newspaper suspending operations temporarily due to a breakdown in their presses. Washington was putting the squeeze on, but good. I wondered how Eddie Dandy was making out, wherever he was. By now he must have a mad on as big as his head. Somebody was going to catch hell when they released him, that was for sure.
Little Joe was working his trade on Broadway, pushing himself along on a homemade skateboard. For a beggar he was ahead in his field, peddling cheap ball-point pens instead of pencils, gabbing with all the familiar figures who kept him in business with the daily nickels and dimes.
I drew his attention by fluttering a buck down over his shoulder into his box and he spun around with a surprised grin when he saw me. “Hey, Mike. Thought I just got me a big spender. You want a pen?”
“Might as well get something for my dollar.”
He held up his box. “Take your pick.”
I pulled out two black ones and dropped them in my pocket. “Velda told me she saw you,” I said.
“Yeah,” Joe said, craning his neck up to look at me. “She was looking for that dip I saw with old Lippy.”
A curious tingle ran across my shoulders. “She didn’t say what he was. You didn’t know, either.”
“That was then. Me, I ain’t got much to do except look, and besides, you two always did get me curious. So I look and ask a few people and pretty soon I get a few answers. Since Lindy’s closed I moved my beat up here a couple of blocks and you’d be surprised how much can go on just a pair of traffic lights away. Like another world.”
“Don’t yak so much, Joe.”
“Mike... when do I get the chance to? Like you’re a captive audience.” Then he saw the impatience in my face and nodded. “He came in from Miami about two months ago where he was working Hialeah. That was his thing, working the tracks where the cash money was and the crowds and the excitement. Only the security boys made him and he got the boot.”
“Who fed you that?”
“Banjie Peters. He hustled tout sheets. He even knew the guy from a few other tracks that kicked him out. So the only place he don’t get the boot is Aqueduct and he comes up here for the season. He works it one day and blammo ... security spots him and gives him the heave. He was lucky because he didn’t even have time to make his first touch. They find him with anything on him and it’s curtains out there.”
“They have a name for him?”
“Sure, a dozen, and no two alike.” He gave me a funny little grin and fished around in his legless lap for something. “I kind of figured you’d be around so I had Banjie con his buddies in security outa a picture they had. They mugged him at Santa Anita and sent copies around.”
He held out a two-by-two black and white photo of a lean, sallow-looking face with a mouth that was too small and eyes that seemed to sneer at the world. His hair had receded on the sides and acne scars marred the jawline. The picture cut him off at chest level, but under his coat he had on an off-shade vest with metal buttons that could have been red. His description on the back put him at age forty-six, five feet eleven tall and one hundred fifty-two pounds. Eight aliases were given, no two remotely alike, and no permanent address.
Now I knew what he looked like.
Little Joe said, “He couldn’t score at the track, that’s why he started hustling around here. You remember Poxie?” While I nodded Joe went on. “When he ain’t pimping he keeps his hand in working other people’s pockets. This boy sees him working Shubert Alley and beats the crap outa him. Like he laid out a claim and was protecting it. Over there’s where he and Lippy used to meet up. You know, Mike, I don’t think Lippy knew what the guy was doing.”
“He didn’t,” I said.
“Maybe he found out, huh? Then this guy bumped him.”
“Not quite like that, pal. You know where he is now?”
“Nope, but I seen him last night. He come outa one of them Greek language movies on Eighth Avenue and hopped a cab going uptown. I woulda taken the cab number so you could check out his trip sheet, only I was on the wrong side of the street.”
“Good try, kid.”
“If you want, I’ll try harder.”
I looked at him, wondering what he meant.
Little Joe grinned again and said, “I saw Velda too. She Was right behind him and grabbed the cab after his.”
The knot in my stomach held fast, not knowing whether to twist tighter or loosen. “What time, Joe?”
“Last show was coming out. Just a little after two-thirty.”
And the knot loosened. She was still on her own then and Ballinger hadn’t caught up with her. She had located our pickpocket and was running him down.
Little Joe was still looking at me. “I saved the best until last, Mike,” he said. “The name he really goes by is Beaver. Like a nickname. He was in Len Parrott’s saloon when Len heard two guys ask about him. This guy drops his drink fast and gets out. They were asking about a red vest too and the guy had one on.” A frown drew his eyebrows together. “They was Woody Ballinger’s boys, Mike.”
I said, “Damn” softly.
“The bartender didn’t tell them nothing, though.”
I let a five-spot fall into Little Joe’s box. “I appreciate it, buddy. You get anything else, call Pat Chambers. Remember him?”
“Captain Pat? Sure, how could I ever forget him? He shot the guy who blew my legs off with that shotgun fifteen years ago.”
If you can’t find them, then let them find you. The word was out now in all the right places. It would travel fast and far and someplace a decision would have to be made. I was on a hunt for Sammy and Carl to throw a bullet through their guts and do the explaining afterward. They’d start to sweat because there was plenty of precedent to go by. I had put too many punks they knew under a gun for them to think I wouldn’t do it and the only way to stop it would be to get me first. They were the new cool breed, smart, polished and deadly, so full of confidence that they had a tendency to forget that there were others who could play the game even better. Who was it that said, “Don’t mess around with the old pros”?
I finished straightening up the wreckage in the office, pulled a beer out of the cooler and sat down to enjoy it. From the street I could hear the taxis hooting and thought about Velda. She was a pro too and it would take a pretty sharp article to top her. She knew the streets and she knew the people. She wasn’t about to expose herself and blow the whole job
no matter how far into it she had gotten. If the chips went down, she’d have that little rod in her hand, make herself a lousy target and take somebody down too. At least in New York you heard about shootings.
I switched on the transistor radio she had given me and dialed the news station. For ten minutes there was a political analysis of the new attitude the Russians had taken, seemingly agreeable to acting in harmony with U.S. policy along certain peace efforts, then the announcer got into sports. Halfway through there was a special bulletin rapped out in staccato voice telling the world that the hired killers of Tom-Tom Schneider had been located in a cheap hotel in Buffalo, New York, and police officers and F.B.I. troops had surrounded the building and were engaged in a gunfight, but refraining from a capture attempt because the pair had taken two maids as hostages.
Okay, Pat, there’s your news blast for tomorrow. Plenty of pictures and plenty of stories. It would cover all news media in every edition and the little find at the Ashokan Reservoir would stay a one-column squib that nobody would notice and you had one more day without a panic.
There was a four-car wreck on the West Side highway. A mental patient leaped from the roof of an East Side hospital, landed on a filled laundry cart and was unhurt. No other shootings, though, and the regular musical program resumed.
All I could do was wait awhile.
At six thirty in the morning I woke up when my feet fell off the desk. Daylight had crept into the office, lighting the eerie stillness of a building not yet awake. There was a distant whine of the elevator, probably the servicemen coming in, a sound you never heard at any other hour. I stood up, stretched to get the stiffness out of my shoulders and cursed when a little knife of pain shot across my side where the slug had scorched me. Two blocks away a nice guy I knew who used to be a doctor before they lifted his license for practicing abortions would take care of that for me. Maybe a tailor could fix my jacket. Right now the spare I kept in the office would do me.
At eight fifteen I picked up the duplicate photo cards Gabin’s Film Service had made up for me, mug shots of the guy they called Beaver with his résumé printed on the back. A half hour later I was having coffee with Pat and gave him all but three of them.
He called me two dirty names and stuck them in his pocket. “And you said you wanted nothing to do with it,” he reminded me.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Yeah. Professional curiosity?”
“Personal interest.”
“You’re still out of line. Regulations state you’re supposed to represent a client.” He dunked a doughnut in his coffee and took a bite of half of it.
“Be happy, friend. I’m giving you no trouble, I’m paying for the snack and staying out of your way. You should be glad citizens take an active interest in affairs like this. Besides, you haven’t got the time.”
“So why the photos?”
“You still have routine jobs going. Pass them along to the plainclothes boys. Maybe you got bigger things on your mind, but this is still an open murder.”
“For you it’s not open.”
“I’m just throwing back the foul balls.”
“Mike,” he said, “you’re full of shit. Sometimes I wish I had never known you.”
“You worry too much, friend.”
“Maybe you should. The days are going by fast.”
I took a close look at his face. The lines were deeper now, his eyes a lined red, and when he spoke it was almost without moving his lips. Somehow he couldn’t focus on me, seeming to look past me when he spoke. “Our Soviet friends have come up with another piece of information. When we wouldn’t let them out of the country they really began digging. That strain of bacteria the former regime packaged and sent here was more virulent than even they suspected. If it’s loose there’s no hope of containing it, none at all. The lads at Fort Detrick confirmed it and if we don’t get a break pretty damn quick it’s all over, Mike, all over.”
“That doesn’t sound like police information.”
“Crane broke down when he got the news. I was there when he went hysterical and blew it.”
“How many others know this?” I asked him.
“You’re the eleventh.” He finished the doughnut and sipped at his coffee. “Kind of funny. We sit here like nothing’s happening at all. We want a pickpocket in a red vest, I watch the teletype to see how they’re doing in Buffalo with those contract hoods, everybody else is plugging through the daily grind and in a few days we’ll all be part of the air pollution until nature figures a way out of it in a couple million years.”
“Man, you’re a happy guy today.”
Pat put the cup down and finally got his eyes fixed on mine. “Mike,” he said, “I’m beginning to figure you out.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. You’re crazy. Something’s missing in your head. Right now I could lay odds that all you’re thinking about is a dame.”
“You’d lose,” I said. I picked up the tab and stood up. “I’m thinking about two of them.”
Pat shook his head disgustedly again. “Naked?”
“Naturally,” I said.
CHAPTER 9
Something had happened to the Broadway grapevine. Nobody had seen Velda and although a half-dozen of the regular crowd were able to spot the red-vested Beaver by his photograph, nobody had seen him either. Woody Ballinger, Carl and Sammy were in the nothing pocket too and I was beginning to get those funny little looks like it was “Watch out, Mike, you’re tangling with the trouble crowd now” time. Not that it was a new experience, but they were beginning to watch and wait, hoping to be there when the action started.
Some people liked car races. You could see the big kill happen there too. Others took it where they could find it, and now they were beginning to get a blood smell and watched the field leaders to see who was going to crowd who in the turn and wind up in pieces along the walls of Manhattan. By noon the sunny day had turned overcast again, the smog reaching down with choking little fingers, and I had reached Lexington Avenue where I had another cup of coffee in a side-street deli just to get out of it.
The counterman used to work for Woody and he couldn’t give me a lead at all. It was nearly my last straw until I remembered how close I was to that crazy pad in the new building just a few blocks away, and finished the coffee and picked up a pack of butts at the cashier’s desk while I paid my bill. There was somebody else who knew the people I was looking for.
The doorman flipped a fingertip to his cap and said, “Afternoon, sir.”
“Your partner still courting?”
“He’ll never learn. Last night he got engaged. I do double shifts and don’t get any sleep, but I’m sure making the bucks. Just wait until he starts buying furniture.”
“Miss Anders in?”
“Sure. Different girl, that. Something happened to her. Real bright-eyed now. I think maybe she dumped that clown she was going with. Playboy, no good at all. Too much money. Last night she got in at ten, and alone. You want me to call up, officer?”
I grinned at him, wishing Pat could have been here. He would have turned inside out. To Pat I was always the other side of the fence, with my face always the prime type to get picked up in a general dragnet.
“Don’t bother,” I said. I returned his casual wave and walked to the elevator.
Heidi Anders saw me through the peephole and snapped off the double locks on the door. It opened a scant three inches on the chain and that pert face with the tousled ash-blonde hair and full-lipped mouth was peering at me with a disguised smile and I said, “Trick or treat?”
The door closed and I heard the chain come off. When it opened again her head was tilted in a funny smile, the upslanted eyes laughing at me. “Trick,” she said. Then added, “But if you come in, it’ll be a treat.”
“I’ll come in.”
She let the door open all the way and I walked inside. I was treated. Heidi Anders was standing there bare-ass naked, prettier than any centerfold pictu
re in a girlie magazine and no matter how lovely those uniquely rounded breasts were, or how all that ash-blonde hair contrasted, all I could see was that crazy navel with the eyelashes painted around it like an oversexed Cyclops.
“I just got up,” she said.
“Don’t you ever take your makeup off?”
“It’s part of my personality,” she told me. “Most men have an immediate reaction.” She closed and locked the door behind me. “I wish you had.”
“I want to wink at it.”
“At least that’s different.” She smiled and walked down the hall, not bothering to take my hat this time. That wild gait was still there, but naked it had a totally new sway. I let her get all the way into the living room before I moved. Then I went in slowly, watching all the corners just to be sure, glad to have been in enough games not to get wiped out at the first charge of the opposition.
She didn’t know it, but my hand was hooked over my belt, the palm comfortable against the butt of the .45. Too many times naked women and death walked side by side.
Heidi had thrown back the draperies and stood there in the cold gray light that brought out the tan marks on the flesh, then turned around slowly to face me. “Do I look different, Mike?”
The navel still watched me. Crazy eye. Blind, but crazy and watching. The lashes were extra long.
“Different,” I said.
“You did it. You yelled at me. Mike... you were pretty rough.”
“A broad like you shouldn’t get hooked on H. There’s too much going for you.” I picked a cigarette out of my deck and lit it up. “Sorry about yelling at you.”
“It wasn’t that.” She picked up something filmy from the chair and drew it through her hands. “I saw your face when I turned you off. I was lying there all ready and waiting and I turned you off. That never happened to me before. I wanted to get laid and I was right there waiting for you and I turned you off. You yelled. I felt like... you know what I felt like?”
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