The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (46 page)

A doorman with an oversize umbrella led Ellen into the foyer and came back for me. Once we were out of it we could laugh. I was only making sloshing noises with my shoes but Ellen had gotten rained on down the back and her dress was plastered against her skin like a postage stamp. Going up in the elevator she stood with her back against the wall and edged sidewise after making me walk ahead of her.

I was going to knock first, but she poked her key in the lock and waved me inside.

“Nobody home?”

“Don’t be silly. Tonight’s date night ... or haven’t you noticed the couples arm in arm dashing for shelter.”

“Yeah.” I kicked my shoes off and carried them out to the kitchen. Ellen dumped the beer on the table and showed me where the glasses were.

“Pour me, Mike. I’ll be back as soon as I get these wet things off.”

“Hurry up.”

She grinned at me and waltzed out while I was uncorking the bottles. I just finished topping the glasses off when she waltzed right back in again wrapped up in a huge terrycloth bathrobe, rubbing the rain out of her hair with a towel.

I handed her a glass and we clinked them in a toast we didn’t speak. I drank without taking my eyes from hers, watching the deep blue swirl into a smoky gray that seemed to come up from the depths of a fire.

It got to be a little more than I could take. She knew it when I said, “Let’s look at the files, Ellen.”

“All right.” She tucked the bottle under her arm and I trailed after her into the living room. A large console set took up a corner of the room and she pulled it away from the wall and worked her hand into the opening.

“Your private safe?”

“For intimate letters, precious nylons and anything else a nosy cleaning woman might take home with her.”

She pulled out another of those manila folders held together with a thick rubber band and handed it to me. My hand started to shake when I worked the band off it. The thing snapped and flew across the room.

I took it sitting down. I reached in and pulled out a stack of official reports, four photographs and more affidavits than I could count. I spread them out across the coffee table and scanned them to see what I could pick up, laying the discards on top of the empty folder. When I tried to do it carefully I got impatient, and when I went faster I got clumsy and knocked the whole batch on the floor. Ellen picked them up and sorted them out again and I went on from there.

I was cursing myself and the whole damn mess long before I was finished because it was ending in a blank, a goddamn stone wall with nothing there but a fat ha-ha and to hell with you, bub. My hand went out of its own accord and spilled everything all across the room while Ellen let out a little scream and stepped back with her hand to her mouth.

“Mike!”

“I’m sorry, kid. It’s a dud. Goddamn it, there’s not a thing in there!”

“Oh, Mike ... it can’t be! The D.A. has been working on that a month!”

“Sure, trying to tangle Link up in that lousy gambling probe of his. So he proves he’s a bookie. Hell, anybody can tell you that. All he had to do was go in and lay a bet with the guy himself. I’ll say he’s worked a month on it. Link doesn’t stand a chance of getting out of this little web, but for all the time he’ll draw for it, it will be worth it.”

I scooped up a couple of the reports and slammed them with my fingers. “Look at this stuff. Two official reports that give any kind of background on the guy at all and those were turned in while Roberts was the D.A. What was going on in all the years until a month ago?”

Ellen glanced at the reports curiously and took them out of my hand, tapping the rubber-stamped number in the upper right-hand corner with her finger. “This is a code number, Mike. These reports are part of a series.”

“Where are the rest of them then?”

“Either in the archives or destroyed. I won’t say so for certain, but it’s more likely that they were discarded. I’ve been with the department long enough to have seen more than one new office holder make a clean sweep of everything including what was in the files.”

“Damn!”

“I’ll check on it the first thing in the morning, Mike. There’s a possibility that they’re stored away someplace.”

“Nuts on tomorrow morning. There isn’t that much time to waste. There has to be another way.”

She folded the sheets up carefully, running her nail along the edges. “I can’t think of anything else unless you want to contact Roberts. He might remember something about the man.”

“That’s an idea. Where does he live?”

“I don’t know ... but I can find out.” She looked at me pensively. “Does it have to be tonight?”

“Tonight.”

I caught up with her before she reached the phone. I put my arms around her and breathed the fragrance that was her hair. “I’m sorry, kitten.”

Ellen let her head fall back on my shoulder and looked up at me. “It’s all right, Mike, I understand.”

She had to make three separate calls to locate Roberts’ number. It was an address in Flushing and when she had it she handed me the phone to do the calling. It was a toll call, so I put it through the operator and listened to it ring on the other end. When I was about ready to hang up a woman came on and said, “Hello, this is Mrs. Roberts.”

“Can I speak to Mr. Roberts, please?”

“I’m sorry, but he isn’t home right now. Can I take a message?”

Somebody had bottled up all my luck and thrown it down the drain. I said, “No, but can you tell me when he’ll be back?”

“Not until tomorrow sometime. I expect him about noon.”

“Well, thanks. I’ll call him then. ‘By.”

I tried not to slam the receiver back in its cradle. I tried to sit on myself to keep from exploding and if it hadn’t been for Ellen chuckling to herself from the depths of the couch I would have kicked something across the room. I spun around to tell her to shut up, but when a woman looks at you the way she was doing you don’t say anything at all. You just stand there and look back because a toast-colored body that is all soft, molded curves and smooth hollows makes a picture to take your breath away, especially when it is framed against the thick texture of white terrycloth.

She laughed again and said, “You’re trapped, Mike.”

I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t trapped at all, but there wasn’t any room for words in my throat. I walked across the room and stood there staring at her, watching her come up off the couch into my arms to prove that she was real and not just a picture after all.

The cup was full this time, the wine mellow and sweet, and she was writhing in my arms fighting to breathe, yet not wanting me to stop holding her. I heard her say, “Mike ... I’m sorry you’re trapped, but I’m glad ... glad.” And I kissed her mouth shut again letting the rain slashing against the window pitch the tempo, hearing it rise and rise in a crescendo of fury, shrieking at me because the minutes were things not to be wasted.

It took all I had to shove her away. “Texas gal, don’t make it rough for me. Not now.”

She opened her eyes slowly, her fingers kneading my back. “I can’t even buy you, can I?”

“You know better than that, sugar. Let me finish what I have to do first.”

“If I let you get away you’ll never come back, Mike. There are too many others waiting for you. Every week, every month there will be someone new.”

“You know too much.”

“I know I’m a Texas gal who likes a Texas man.”

My grin was a little flat. “I’m a city boy, kid.”

“An accident of birth. Everything else about you is Texas. Even a woman doesn’t come first with you.”

She stretched up on her toes, not far because she didn’t have to go far, and kissed me lightly. “Sometimes Texas men do come back. That’s why there are always more Texas men.” She smiled.

“Don’t forget to take those files in,” I reminded her. Then there was nothing more to say.

I went back to the rain and the night, looking up just once to see her silhouetted against the window waving to me. She didn’t see me, but I waved back to her. She would have liked it if she’d known what I was thinking.

On the way back I stopped off for a drink and a sandwich and tried to think it out. I wanted to be sure of what I was doing before I stuck my neck out. I spent an hour going over the whole thing, tying it into Toady Link and no matter how I looked at it the picture was complete.

At least I tried to tell myself that it was.

I said it over and over to myself the same way I told Pat, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind that some place something didn’t fit. It was only a little thing, but it’s the little things that hold bigger things together. I sat there and told myself that it was Toady who drove the murder car and Toady who gave the orders to Arnold Basil because he couldn’t afford to trust anybody else to do the job right. I told myself that it was Toady who engineered Hooker’s death and tried to engineer mine.

Yet the more I told myself the more that little voice inside my head would laugh and poke its finger into some forgotten recess and try to jar loose one fact that would make me see what the picture was really like.

I gave up in disgust, paid my bill and walked out.

I walked right into trouble, too. Pat was slouched up against the wall outside my apartment with the friendliness gone completely from his face.

He didn’t even give me a chance to say hello. He held out his hand with an abruptness I wasn’t used to. “Let’s have your gun, Mike.”

I didn’t argue with him. He packed it open, checked the chamber and the slide, then smelled the barrel.

“You already know when I shot it last,” I said.

“I do?” It didn’t sound like a question at all.

It started down low around my belly, that squeamish feeling when something is right there ready to pop in your face. “Quit being a jerk. What’s the act for?”

He came away from the door frame with a scowl. “Goddamn it, Mike, play it straight if you have to play it at all!”

I said a couple of words.

“You’ve had it, Mike,” he told me. He put it flat and simple as if I knew just what he meant.

“You could tell me about it.”

“Look, Mike, I’m a cop. You were my friend and all that, but I’m not getting down on my knees to anybody. I did everything but threaten you to lay off and what happened? You did it your way anyhow. It doesn’t go, feller. It’s finished, washed up. I hated to see it happen, but it was just a matter of time. I thought you were smart enough to understand. I was wrong.

“That isn’t telling me about it.”

“Cut it, Mike. Toady’s dead. He was shot with a .45,” he said.

“And I’m tagged.”

“That’s right,” Pat nodded. “You’re tagged.”

CHAPTER 8

Sometimes you get mad and sometimes you don’t. If there was any of that crazy anger in me it had all been drained out up there in Ellen’s apartment. Now it’s making sense, I thought. Now it’s where it should be.

Pat dropped my gun in his pocket. “Let’s go, Mike.”

So I went as far as the front door and watched the rain wash through under the sill. Before Pat opened the door I said, “You’re sure about this, aren’t you?”

He was sure. Two minutes ago he had been as sure of it as the day he was born and now he wasn’t sure of it at all. His mouth hardened into a gash that pushed his eyes halfway shut with some uncontrollable emotion until they seemed to focus on something right behind me.

I didn’t want him to answer me before he knew. “I didn’t kill him, Pat. I was hoping I would, but somebody beat me to it.”

“The M.E. sets the time of death around four o‘clock last night.” His voice asked for an explanation.

I said, “You should have told me, Pat. I was real busy then. Real busy.”

His hand came away from the door. “You mean you can prove it?”

“I mean just that.”

“Mike ... if you’re lying ...”

“I’ve never been that stupid. You ought to know that.”

“I ought to know a lot of things. I ought to know where you were every minute of last night.”

“You know how to find out.”

“Show me.”

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me at all. Maybe I’m not so good at lying any more, and I was lying my head off. Last night I was busy as hell sleeping and there wasn’t one single way I could prove it. If I tried to tell him the truth it would take a month to talk my way clear.

I said, “Come on,” and headed for the phone in the lobby. I shoved a dime in the slot and dialed a number, hoping that I could put enough across with a few words to say what I wanted. He stood right there at my elbow ready to take the phone away as soon as I got my party and ask the question himself.

I couldn’t mistake her voice. It was like seeing her again with the lava green of her dress flowing from her waist.

“This is Mike, Marsha. A policeman ... wants to ask you something. Mind?”

That was as far as I could get. Pat had the phone while she was still trying to figure it out. He gave me a hard smile and turned to the phone. “Captain Chambers speaking. I understand you can account for Mr. Hammer’s whereabouts last night. Is that correct?”

Her voice was music pouring out of the receiver. Pat glanced at me sharply, curiously, then muttered his thanks and hung up. He still didn’t quite know what to make of it. “So you spent the night with the lady.”

I said a beautiful thanks to Marsha under my breath. “That’s not for publication, Pat.”

“You better stop tomcatting around when Velda gets back, friend.”

“It makes a good alibi.”

“Yeah, I’d like to see the guy who’d sooner kill Toady than sleep with a chick like that. Okay, Mike, you got yourself an alibi. I have a screwy notion that I shouldn’t believe it, but Link isn’t Decker and if you’re in this there’ll be hell to pay and I’ll find out about it soon enough.”

I handed him a butt and flipped a light with my thumbnail. “Can I hear about the deal or is it secret info like everything else?”

“There’s not much to it. Somebody walked in and killed him.”

“Just like that?”

“He was in bed asleep. He got it right through the head and whoever killed him went through the place like a cyclone. I’m going back there now if you want to come along.”