The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (45 page)

“Like hell.”

“No kidding, I mean it.”

“I can picture you going out of your way for a woman. I’d give my right arm to hear you say that in a different tone of voice, though. There’s something about you that fascinates me. Now that we have the love-making over with, what do I have that you want?”

I shouldn’t have let my eyes do what they did.

“Besides that, I mean,” she said.

“Your boss has a certain file on Toady Link. I want a look at it.”

Her hands came together to cover her eyes. “I should have known. I spend every waking hour making myself pretty for you, hoping that you’ll pop in on me and when you do you ask me to climb up a cloud.”

“Well?”

“It’s ... well, it’s almost impossible, Mike.”

“Why?”

Her eyes drifted away from mine reluctantly. “Mike, I ...”

“It isn’t exactly secret information with me, Ellen. Pat told me about the D.A. getting ready to wrap Link up in a gray suit.”

“Then he should have told you that those files are locked and under guard. He doesn’t trust anybody.”

“He trusts you.”

“And if I get caught doing a thing like that I’ll not only lose this job and never be able to get another one, but I’ll get a gray suit too. I don’t like the color.” She reached out and plucked a Lucky from my pack and toyed with it before accepting the light I held out.

“I only want a look at it, kid. I don’t want to steal the stuff and I won’t pass the information along to anybody.”

“Please, Mike.”

I bent the match in my fingers and threw it on my plate. “Okay, okay. Maybe I’m asking too damn much. You know what the score is as well as I do. Everything is so almighty secret with the D.A. that he doesn’t know what he has himself. If he’d open up on what he knows he’d get a little more action out of the public. Right now he’s trying to squelch the big-time gambling in the city and what happens? Everybody thinks it’s funny. By God, if they had a look behind the scenes at what’s been going on because of the same gambling they condone they’d think twice about it. They ought to take a look at a corpse with some holes punched in it. They ought to take a look at some widows crying at a funeral or a kid who was made an orphan crying for his father who’s one of the corpses.”

The cigarette had burned down in her fingers without being touched, the long ash drooping wearily, ready to fall. Ellen’s eyes were bright and smoky at the same time—languid eyes that hid the thoughts behind them.

“I’ll get it for you, Mike.”

I waited and saw the richness of her lips grow richer with a smile.

“But it’ll cost you,” she said.

I didn’t get it for a second. “Cost me what?”

“You.”

And that thing on my spine started crawling around again.

She reached out for my hand and covered it with hers. “Mike ... you’re only incidental in the picture this time. It’s the only way I’ll ever be able to get you and it’s worth it even if I have to buy you. But it’s because of what you said that I’m doing it.”

There was something new about her, something I hadn’t noticed before. I said, “You’ll never have to buy me, Ellen.”

It was a long minute before I could take my eyes off her face and get rid of the thing chasing up my back. The waitress dropped the check on the table and I put down a bill to cover them both and told her to keep the change. When we came out of the booth together the guy across the room looked at me enviously and Ellen longingly. His lunch date looked relieved.

We went back to the street and got as far as the bar on the corner. Ellen stopped me and nodded toward the door. “Wait here for me. I can’t go back upstairs or somebody’s likely to think it peculiar.”

“Then how are you going to get the file out?”

“Patty—my short and stout roommate, if you remember—is on this afternoon. I’ll call her and have her take them when she leaves this evening. The way my luck runs, if I took them any earlier he’d pick just this day to want to see them.”

“That’s smart,” I agreed. “You know her well enough so there won’t be a hitch, don’t you?”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Patty owes me more favors than I can count. I’ve never asked her for anything before and I might as well start now. I’ll be back in about ten minutes. Stay at the bar and wait for me, will you?”

“Sure. Then what?”

“Then you’re going to take me to the races. Little Ellen cleans up today.”

I gave her my fattest smile and jingled a pocketful of coins. “Pat told me about that. You’re not going to be selfish about the thing, are you?”

“I think we’re both going to have a profitable day, Mike,” she said impishly. She wasn’t talking about money, either. I watched her cross the street and admired her legs until she was out of sight, then went into the bar and ordered a beer.

The television was tuned to the game in Brooklyn and the bets were flowing heavy and fast. I stayed out of the general argument and put my beer away. A tall skinny guy came in and stood next to me and did the same thing himself. A kid came in peddling papers and I bought one before the bartender told him to scram and quit annoying the customers.

But it didn’t do any good. The guys on my left were arguing batting averages and one poked me to get my opinion. I said he was right and the other guy started jawing again and appealed to the tall skinny guy. He shrugged and tapped his ear, then took a hearing aid out of his shirt pocket and made indications that it wasn’t working. He was lucky. They turned back to me again, spotted my paper and I handed it over to settle the argument. The one guy still wouldn’t give in and I was about to become the backstop of a beautiful brawl.

But Ellen walked in just then and baseball switched to sex in whispers. I got her out so they could see her going away and really have something to talk about.

She cuddled up under my arm all the way back to the car and climbed in next to me looking cool and lovely and very pleased with herself. When I had about as much silence as I could take I asked, “Did it work out?”

“Patty was glad to help out. She was a little nervous about it, but she said she’d wait until everyone had cleared out and put it in her brief case. She’s taking some work home with her tonight and it shouldn’t be hard to do at all.”

“Good girl.”

“Don’t I deserve a kiss for effort?” She timed it as the light turned red.

Her mouth wasn’t as cool as it looked. It was warm, a nice soft, live warmth with a delicate spicy sweetness that was excited into a heady wine by the tip of her tongue.

Then the car behind me blasted that the light was green again and I had to put my cup of wine down not fully tasted.

* * *

I hit three winners that afternoon. The two of us crowded the railing and yelled our heads off to push the nags home and when the last one slowed up in the stretch my heart slowed up with it because I had a parlay riding on his nose that was up in four figures. Fifty yards from the finish the jock laid on the whip and he crossed the line leading by a nostril.

Ellen shook my arm. “You can open your eyes now. He won.”

I checked the board to make sure and there it was in big square print. I looked at the tickets that had gotten rolled up in the palm of my hand. “I’ll never do that again! How the hell do the guys who bet all their lives stand this stuff! You know what I just won?”

“About four thousand dollars, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, and before this I worked for a living.” I smoothed out the pasteboards with my thumb and forefinger. “You ought to be a millionaire, kitten.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why? You cleaned up today, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I did very well.”

“So?

“I don’t like the color of the money.”

“It’s green, isn’t it? You got a better color than that?”

“I have a cleaner kind of green,” she said. Her body seemed to stiffen with a tension of some sort, drawing her hands into tight little fists. “You know why I like to see the Scobie horses win. It’s the only way and the best way I can get back at my father. Just because of me he tries to run them under other colors, but I always learn about it before the races. He pays me a living whether he wants to or not and it hurts him right where he should be hurt. However, it’s still money that came from him, even if it was indirectly given, and I don’t want any part of it.”

“Well, if you’re going to throw it away, I’ll take it.”

“It doesn’t get thrown away. You’ll see where it goes.”

We walked back to the ticket window and picked up a neat little pile of brand-new bills. They felt crisp as new lettuce and smelled even better. I folded mine into my wallet and stowed it away with a fond pat on the leather and started thinking of a lot of things that needed buying bad. Ellen threw hers in the wallet as if it happened every day. Thinking about it like that put a nasty buzz in my head.

“Why can’t somebody follow you play for play? If anybody used your system and put a really big bundle down the odds would go skittering all over the place.”

She gave me a faint smile and took my hand going up the ramp to the gate. “It doesn’t work that way, Mike. All Scobie horses don’t win by a long sight. It just happens that I know the ones that will win. It isn’t that I’m a clever handicapper either. Dad has a trainer working for him who taught me all I know about horses. Whenever a winner is coming up I’m notified about it and place my bets.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all. Once the papers did a piece about it and according to them I did all the picking and choosing. I let them get the idea just to infuriate the old boy. It worked out fine.”

“You’re a screwball,” I said. She looked hurt. “But you’re nice,” I added. She squeezed my arm and rubbed her face against my shoulder.

On the way back to the city the four G’s in my pocket started burning through and it was all I could do to keep it there and let it burn. I wanted to stop off at the fanciest place we could find and celebrate with a drink, but Ellen shook her head and made me drive over to the East Side, pointing out the directions every few minutes.

Everything was going fine until we got stuck behind a truck and I had a chance to see where we were. Then everything wasn’t so fine at all. There was a run-down bar with the glass cracked across the center facing the sidewalk. The door opened and a guy walked out, and before it shut again the familiarity of it came back with a rush and I could smell the rain and the beer-soaked sawdust and almost see a soggy little guy kissing his kid good-by.

My throat went dry all of a sudden and I breathed a curse before I wrenched the wheel and sent the heap screaming around the truck to get the hell out of the neighborhood.

We went straight ahead for six blocks, then Ellen said, “Turn right at the next street and stop near the corner.”

I did as I was told and parked between a beer truck and a dilapidated sedan. She opened the door and stepped out, looking back at me expectantly. “Coming, Mike?”

I said okay and got out myself.

Then she walked me into a settlement house that was a resurrected barn or something. The whole business took about five minutes. I got introduced to a pair of nice old ladies, a clergyman and a cop who was having a cup of tea with the old ladies. Everybody was all smiles and joy and when Ellen gave one of the women a juicy wad of bills I thought they were going to cry.

Ellen, it seemed, practically supported the establishment.

I had a chance to look through the door at a mob of raggedy kids playing in the gym and I got rid of a quarter of the bundle of my wallet. I avoided a lot of thanks and got back to the car as fast as I could and looked at Ellen like I hadn’t seen her before.

“Boy, am I a big-hearted slob,” I said.

She laughed once and leaned over and kissed me. This time I had a long sip of the wine before she took my cup away. “It was worth it at that,” I mused.

“You know something, Mike ... you’re not such a heel. I mean, such a very big heel.”

I told her not to come to any hasty conclusions and backed the car out. It was a quarter to six and both of us were pretty hungry, so I drove up Broadway to a lot, left the car and walked back to a place that put out good food as well as good dinner music. While we waited for our orders Ellen bummed a nickel from me and went back to the phone booth to call Patty.

I could hardly wait for her to sit down again. “Get her?”

“Uh-huh. Everything’s all set. Most of the office crew have left already. She’ll leave the stuff at the house for us.”

“Could we meet her somewhere? It would save time.”

“Too risky. I’d rather not. Patty seemed a little jittery on the phone and I doubt if she’d like it either. I only hope they can be put back as easily as they’re taken out.”

“You won’t have any trouble.” Maybe I didn’t put enough conviction in my voice, because she just looked at me and bent down to her salad. I said, “Now quit worrying. There won’t be anything there that I couldn’t find out if I had the time to look for it.”

“All right, Mike, it’s just that I’ve never done anything like that before. I won’t worry.”

She wrinkled her nose at me and dug into her supper.

It was eight-ten when we left the place. A thunderhead was moving up over Jersey blotting out the stars, replacing them with the dull glow of sheet lightning. I let Ellen pick up a couple quarts of beer while I rolled the car out and met her on the corner. She hopped in as the first sprinkle of rain tapped on the roof.

Sidewalks that were just damp a moment before took on a black sheen of water and drained it off into the gutter. Even with the wipers swatting furiously like a batter gone mad I could hardly see out. The car in front of me was a wavering shadow with one sick red eye, the neon signs and window fronts on either side just a ghostly parade of colors.

It was another night like that first one. The kind that made you run anywhere just to get away from it. You could see the vague shapes that were people huddled under marquees and jammed into doorways, the braver making the short dash to waiting cabs and wishing they hadn’t.

By the time we reached Ellen’s apartment it had slacked off into a steady downpour without the electrical fury that turned the night into a noisy, deafening day.