Mickey Spillane - [Mike Hammer 02] (6 page)

“I do, but I don’t have a chance to show it.” She wrinkled her nose at me. “What news?”

“We found the guy that killed the redhead.”

My heart started hammering against my ribs. “Who?”

“Some young kid. He was drunk, speeding and beat out the red light. He remembered hitting somebody and knew he was in the wrong, whole hog, and kept on going. His father turned him in to us.”

I had to sit down after that. “You sure, Pat?”

“As sure as you were that she was killed deliberately.” He laughed, and said, “I was all hopped up for a while, but it’s been turned over to another department and I can relax. Every time I’m on the same trail as you I get the jumps. You ought to be a city cop, Mike. We could use you.”

“Sure, and I’d go bats trying to stay within all the rules and regulations. Look, what makes you so sure the kid did it?”

“Well, as far as we can determine, it was the only accident along the avenue that night. Then, too, we have his confession. The lab checked the car for fender dents and paint chips on her clothing, but the kid had anticipated that before he confessed and did a good job of spoiling any traces that might have been left. We had a good man on the job and he seems to think that the unusual nature of the accident was caused because she was hit a glancing blow and broke her neck when she struck the edge of the curb.”

“It would have broken her skin then.”

“Not necessarily. Her coat collar prevented that. All the indications point that way. The only abrasions were those caused by the fall and roll after she was hit. Her cheek and knees were skinned up, but that was all.”

“What about identification?”

“Nothing yet. The Bureau of Missing Persons is checking on it.”

“Horse manure!”

“Mike,” he said, “just why are you so damn upset about her name? There are thousands of kids just like her in the city and every day something happens to some of them.”

“Nuts, I told you once. I liked her. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to find out. You aren’t going to stick her in a hole in the ground with an ‘X’ on a slab over her head!”

“Okay, don’t get excited. I don’t know what you can do about it when there’s a full-staffed bureau working on it.”

“Horse manure to the bureaus, too.”

I jammed a butt in my mouth and Pat waited until I lit it, then he got up and walked over to me. He wasn’t laughing any more. His eyes were serious and he laid an arm on my shoulder and said, “Mike, I kind of know you pretty well. You still got a bug up your tail that says she’s been murdered, right?”

“Uh-huh!”

“Got the slightest reason why?”

“No.”

“Well, if you find out, will you let me know about it?”

I blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling and nodded my head. I looked up at him and the old friendship was back. Pat was one of those guys with sense enough to know that other people had hunches besides the cops. And not only hunches. There’s a lot of experience and know-how that lies in back of what people call hunches.

“Is she in the morgue now?” I asked him. Pat nodded. “I want to see her.”

“All right, we’ll go down now.”

I looked at Velda, then the clock, and told her to blow. She was putting on her coat when we went out the door. On the way Pat didn’t say much. I fought the traffic up to the old brick building and slid out to wait for Pat.

It was cold inside there. Not the kind of cold that comes with fresh air and wintry mornings, but a stale cold that smelt of chemicals and death. It was quiet, too, and it gave me the creeps. Pat asked the attendant for the listing of her personal belongings, and while he ruffled through a desk drawer we waited, not speaking.

There wasn’t much. Clothes, but everybody wears clothes. Lipstick, powder and some money; a few trinkets of no account every girl totes in a handbag. I handed the listing back. “Is that all?”

“All I got, mister,” the attendant yawned. “Want to see her?”

“If you don’t mind.”

The attendant went down the row of file cases, touching them with his finger like a kid does with a stick on a picket fence. When he came to the “Unidentified” row he checked a number with a slip in his hand and unlocked the second case from the bottom. For all he was concerned, Red could have been a stack of correspondence.

Death hadn’t changed her, except to erase some of the hardness from her face. There was a bruise on the side of her neck and abrasions from the fall, neither seemingly serious enough to be fatal. But that’s the way it is. People go under subway cars and get back on the platform, scared but laughing; others pile a car over a cliff and walk away. She gets clipped lightly and her neck is broken.

“When’s the autopsy, Pat?”

“There won’t be one now. It hardly seems necessary when we have the driver. It isn’t murder any more.”

Pat didn’t see me grimace then. I was looking at her hands folded across her chest, thinking of the way she held that cup of coffee. Like a princess. She had had a ring, but there wasn’t one now. The hand it had graced was scratched and swollen, and the marks where some bastard had forced the ring off went unnoticed among the others.

No, it wasn’t stolen. A thief would have taken the handbag and not the ring while she had lain in the gutter. And girls aren’t ones to forget to wear rings, especially when they’re dressed up.

Yeah, Pat was wrong. He didn’t know it and I wasn’t about to tell him... yet. It was murder if ever I saw one. And it wasn’t just a guess now.

“Seen enough, Mike?”

“Yep. I’ve seen everything I want to see.” We went back to the desk and for a second time I checked the listing of her belongings. No ring. I was glad to get out of there and back into the fresh air. We sat in the car a few minutes and I lit up a cigarette.

“What’s going to happen to her now, Pat?”

He shrugged. “Oh, the usual thing. We’ll hold the body the regular time while we check identification, then release it for burial.”

“You aren’t burying her without a name.”

“Be reasonable, Mike. We’ll do everything we can to trace her.”

“So will I.” Pat shot me a sidewise look. “Anyway,” I said, “whatever happens, don’t put her through the disposal system. I’ll finance a funeral for her if I have to.”

“Uh-huh. But you’re thinking you won’t have to again. All right, Mike, do what you want to. It’s officially out of my hands now, but damn it, man... if I know you, it will be back in my hands again. Don’t try to cut my throat, that’s all. If you get anything, let me know about it.”

“Of course,” I said, then started up the car and pulled away from the curb.

The letter was three days late. The address had been taken from the telephone book, which hadn’t been revised since I moved to my new apartment. The post office had readdressed it and forwarded it to me. The handwriting was light and feminine, touched with a gracious Spencerian style.

My hand was shaking when I slit it open; it shook even more when I started to read it, because the letter was from the redhead.

Dear Mike (it read), What a lovely morning, what a beautiful day and I feel so new all over I want to sing my way down the street! I can’t begin to tell you “thank you” because words are so small and my heart is so big that anything I could write would be inadequate. When I met you, Mike, I was tired ... so tired of doing so many things... only one of which had any meaning to me. Now I’m not tired at all and things are clear once more. Someday I may need you again, Mike. Until now there has been no one I could trust and it has been hard. It isn’t a friendship I can impose upon because we’re really not friends. It’s a trust, and you don’t know what it means to me to have someone I can trust.

You’ve made me very happy.

Your Redhead

Oh, damn it to hell, anyway. Damn everybody and everything. And damn me especially because I made her happy for half a day and put her in a spot where living was nice and it was hard to die.

I folded the letter up in my fist and threw it at the wall.

A bumper bottle of beer cooled me off and I quit hating myself. When I killed the quart I stuck the empty under the sink and went back and picked up the letter, smoothing it out on the table top. Twice again I read it, going over every word. It wasn’t the kind of letter a tramp would write; the script and the phrasing had a touch of eloquence that wasn’t used by girls who made the gutter their home. I’ve seen a lot of bums, and I’ve fooled around with them from coast to coast, and one thing I know damn well... they’re a definite type. Some give it away and some sell it, but you could pick out those who would and who wouldn’t. And those who would had gutter dirt reflected in everything they did, said and wrote.

Red had been a decent kid. She had to give up her decency to do something important. Something had a meaning for her

... and someday she was going to need me again. She needed me more now than she ever did. Okay, I was hers then.

 

They don’t start walking the streets until midnight, if that’s what you’re after. But if you’re in a hurry there are guys you can see who will steer you straight to a house and pick up their cut later. Usually they’re sallow-faced punks with sharp, pointed faces and wise eyes that shift nervously, and they keep toying with change in their pocket or a key chain hooked to high-pleated pants as they talk out of the corner of their mouths.

Cobbie Bennett was like that. As long as there are girls who make a business out of it, you’ll find guys like Cobbie. The only shadow he cast was by artificial light, and he looked it. I found him in a dirty bar near Canal Street, his one hand cupped around a highball and his other hooked in his belt, in earnest conversation with a couple of kids who couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Both of them looked like high-school seniors out to spend a week’s allowance.

I didn’t wait for them to finish talking. Both kids looked at me once when I nudged in beside them, turned a little white and walked away without a word.

“Hello, Cobbie,” I said.

The pimp was more like a weasel backed into a comer than a man. “What do you want?”

“Not what you’re selling. By the way, who are you selling these days?”

“Try and find out, banana nose.”

I said okay and grabbed a handful of skin around his leg and squeezed. Cobbie dropped his drink and started cursing. When spit drooled out of the comer of his mouth I quit and ordered him another drink. He could hardly find his face with it. “I could punch holes in you and make you talk if I felt like it, pal,” I grinned.

“Damn it, what’d you do that for?” His eyes were squinted almost shut, chopping me up into little pieces. He rubbed his leg and winced. “I don’t have to draw you pitchers, you know what I’m doing. Same thing I been doing right along. What’s it to you?”

“Working for an outfit?”

“No, just me.” His tone was sullen.

“Who was the redhead who was murdered the other night, Cobbie?”

This time his eyes went wide and he twitched the comer of his mouth. “Who says she was murdered?”

“I do.” The bartender drew a beer and shoved it at me. While I sipped it I watched the pimp. Cobbie was scared. I could see him try to shrink down inside his clothes, making himself as unobtrusive as possible, as though it weren’t healthy to be seen with me. That put him in a class with Shorty... he had been scared, too.

“The papers said she was hit with a car. You call that murder?”

“I didn’t say what killed her. I said she was murdered.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Cobbie ... you wouldn’t want me to get real sore at you, would you?” I waited a second, then, “Well ... ?”

He was slow in answering. His eyes sort of crawled up to meet mine and stayed there. Cobbie licked his lips nervously, then he turned and finished with his drink with a gulp. When he put the glass down he said, “You’re a dirty son of a bitch, Hammer. If I was one of them hop-heads I’d go get a sniff and a rod and blow your goddamn guts out. I don’t know who the hell the redhead was except another whore and I don’t give a damn either. I worked her a couple of times, but mostly she wasn’t home to play ball and I got complaints from the guys, so I dropped her. Maybe it was lucky for me that I did, because right after it I got word that she was hot as hell.”

“Who passed the word?”

“How should I know? The grapevine don’t come from one guy. Enough people said it, so I believed it and forgot her. One of the other babes told me she wasn’t doing so good. The trade around here ain’t like it is uptown. We don’t get no swells... some kids maybe, like them you loused up for me, but the rest is all the jerks who don’t care what they get so long as they get it. They heard the word and laid off too. She wasn’t making a nickel.”

“Keep talking.” He knew what I was after.

Cobbie rapped on the bar for another drink. He wasn’t talking very loud now. “Get off me, will you! I don’t know why she was hot. Maybe some punk gun slinger wanted her for a steady and was getting rough. Maybe she was loaded three ways to Sunday. All I know is she was hot and in this business a word is good enough for me. Why don’t’cha ask somebody else?”

“Who? You got this end sewed up pretty tight, Cobbie. Who else is there to ask? I like the way you talk. I like it so much that I might spread it around that you and me have been pretty chummy and you’ve been yapping your greasy little head off. Why should I ask somebody else when I got you to tell me. Maybe I don’t know who to ask.”

His face was white as it could get. He hunched forward to get his drink and almost spilled that one too. “... Once she said she worked a house....” He finished the highball and muttered the address as he wiped his mouth.

I didn’t bother to thank him; it was favor enough to throw my drink down silently, pick up my change and walk out of there. When I reached the street I crossed over and stood in the recess of a hallway for a few minutes. I stuck a butt between my lips and had just cupped my hands around a match when Cobbie came out, looked up and down the street, jammed his hands in his pockets and started walking north. When he rounded the comer I got in the car and sat there a few minutes, trying to figure just what the hell was going on.