The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (52 page)

She was all bundled up in that white terrycloth robe again and she couldn’t have been lovelier. Her mouth was a ripe red apple waiting to be bitten, a luscious curve of surprise over the edges of her teeth. “I ... didn’t expect you, Mike.”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

It was supposed to be a joke. It went flat on its face because those eyes that seemed to run through the full colors of the spectrum at times suddenly got cloudy with tears and she shook her head.

“Please come in.”

I didn’t get it at all. She walked ahead of me into the living room and nodded to a chair. I sat down. She sat down in another chair, but not close. She wouldn’t look directly at me either.

I said, “What’s the matter, Ellen?”

“Let’s not talk about it, Mike.”

“Wait a minute ... you did tell Pat that you wanted me to call, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I meant ... oh, never mind. Please, don’t say anything more about it.” Her mouth worked and she turned her head away.

That made me feel great. Like I kicked her cat or something.

“Okay, let’s hear about it,” I said.

She twisted out of the chair and walked over to the radio. It was already pulled out so she didn’t have to fool with it. Then she handed me another one of those manila folders.

This one had seen a lot of years. It was dirty and crisp with years. The string that held it together had rotted off leaving two stringy ends dangling from a staple. Ellen went back to her chair and sat down again. “It’s the file on Toady Link. I found it buried under tons of other stuff in the archives.”

I looked at her blankly. “Does the D.A. know you have this?”

“No.”

“Ellen ...

“See if it’s what you want, Mike.” Her voice held no emotion at all.

I turned up the flap only to have it come off in my hand, then reached in for the sheets of paper that were clipped together. I leaned back and took my time with these. There wasn’t any hurry now. Toady was dead and his file was dead with him, but I could look in and see what his life had been like.

It was quite a life.

Toady Link had been a photographer. Apparently he had been a good one because most of the professional actresses had come to him to have their publicity pictures made. Roberts hadn’t missed a trick. His reports were full of marginal notes speculating on each and every possibility and it was there that the real story came out.

Because of Toady’s professional contacts he had been contacted by Charlie Fallon. The guy was a bug on good-looking female celebrities and had paid well for pictures of them and paid better when an introduction accompanied the photographs.

But it wasn’t until right after Fallon died that Toady became news in police circles. After that time there was no mention made of photography at all. Toady went right from his studio into big-time bookmaking and though he had little personal contact with Ed Teen it was known that, like the others, he paid homage and taxes to the king and whenever he took a step it was always up.

There was a lot of detail stuff there that I didn’t pay any attention to, stuff that would have wrapped Toady up at any time if it had been put to use. Roberts would have used it, that much was evident by the work put in on collecting the data for the dossier. But like Ellen had said, a new broom had come in and swept everything out including months and miles of legwork.

Ellen had to speak twice before I heard her. “Does it ... solve anything?”

I threw them on the coffee table in disgust. “Fallon. It solves him. He’s still dead and so is Toady. Goddamn it anyway.”

“I’m sorry. I thought it would help.”

“You tried, kid. That was enough. You can throw these things away now. What the D.A. never saw he won’t miss.” I picked up my cigarettes from the table and stuffed them in my pocket. She still watched me blankly. “I’d better be going,” I told her.

She didn’t make any motion to see me out. I started to pass her and stopped. “Texas ... what the hell goes on? Tell me that at least, will you? It wasn’t so long ago that you were doing all the passing and I thought you were a woman who knew what was going on. All right, I asked you to do me a favor and I put you in a spot. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t get you off it.”

“That’s not it, Mike.” She still wouldn’t look at me.

“So you’re a Texas gal who likes guys that look like Texas men. Maybe I should learn to ride a horse.”

She finally looked up at me from the depths of the couch. Her eyes were blue again and not clouded. They were blue and hurt and angry all at once. “You’re a Texas man, Mike. You’re the kind I dreamed of and the kind I want and the kind I’ll never have, because your kind are never around long enough. They have to go out and play with guns and hurt people and get themselves killed.

“I was wrong in wanting what I did. I read too many stories and listened to too many old men telling big tales. I dreamed too hard, I guess. It isn’t so nice to wake up suddenly and know somebody you’re all gone over is coming closer to dying every day because he likes it that way.

“No, Mike. You’re exactly what I want. You’re big and strong and exciting. While you’re alive you’re fun to be with but you won’t be any fun dead. You’re trouble and you’ll always be that way until somebody comes along who can make bigger trouble than you.

“I’m afraid of a Texas man now. I’m going to forget all about you and stop looking for a dream. I’ll wait until somebody nice and safe comes along, somebody peaceful and quiet and shy and I’ll get all those foolish romanticisms out of my head and live a bored and relatively normal life.”

I planted my feet apart and looked down at her with a laugh that came up from my chest. “And you’ll always wonder what a Texas man would have been like,” I said.

The change stole over her face slowly, wiping out the bitterness. Her eyes half closed and the blue of her irises was gray again. The smile and the frown blended together like a pleasant hurt. She leaned back with a fluid animal motion, her head resting languidly against the couch. The pink tip of her tongue touched her lips that were parted in a ghost of a smile making them glisten in the light of the single lamp. Then she stretched back slowly and reached out her arms to me, and in reaching the entire front of the robe came open and she made no move to close it.

“No,” she said “I’ll find out about that first.”

We said good-by in the dim light of morning. She said good-by, Texas man, and I said so long, Texas gal, and I left without looking back because everything she had said was right and I didn’t want to hear it again by looking back at her eyes. I got in the car, drove over to Central Park West and cruised along until I found a parking place. It was right near an entrance so I left it there and walked off the pavements to the grass and sat on a hill where I could see the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings in the background.

The ground still held the night dampness, letting it go slowly in a thin film of haze that was suspended in mid-air, rising higher as the sun warmed it. The whole park had a chilled eerie appearance of something make-believe. An early stroller went by on the walk, only the top half of him visible, the leash in his hand disappearing into the fog yet making all the frantic motions of having some unseen creature on its end.

When the wind blew it raised the gray curtain and separated it into angry segments that towered momentarily before filtering back into the gaps. There were other people too, half-shapes wandering through a dream world, players who didn’t know they had an audience. Players buried in their own thoughts and acts on the other side of a transparent wall that shut off all sound.

I sat there scowling at it until I remembered that it was just like my dream even to the colors and the synthetic silence. It made me so uncomfortable that I turned around expecting to see the woman in black who had no face.

She was there.

She wasn’t in black and she had a face, but she stopped when she saw me and turned away hurriedly just like the other one did. This one seemed a little annoyed because I blocked her favorite path.

And I knew who the woman was in the compound with me that night. She had a name and a face I hadn’t seen yet. She was there in the compound trying to tell me something I should have thought of myself.

I waited until the sun had burned off the mist and made it a real world again. I went back to the daylight and searched through it looking for a little guy with big ears and a brace of dyed blondes on his arms. The sun made an arc through the sky and was on its way down without me finding him.

At three-thirty I made a call. It went through three private secretaries and a guy who rumbled when he talked. He was the last man in front of Harry Bailen, the columnist, and about as high as I was going to get.

I said, “This is a friend of Cookie Harkin’s. I got something for him that won’t keep and I can’t find the guy. I want his address if you have it.”

He had it, but he wasn’t giving it out. “I’m sorry, but that’s private information around here.”

“So is what I got. Cookie can have it for your boss free or I can sell it to somebody else. Take your pick.”

“If you have anything newsworthy I’ll be glad to pass it on to Mr. Bailen for you.”

“I bet you would, feller, only it happens that Cookie’s a friend of mine and either he gets it or the boss’ll get scooped and he isn’t gonna like that a bit.”

The phone dimmed out a second as he covered up the mouthpiece. The rumble of his voice still came through as he talked to somebody there in the office and when he came back to me he was more sharp than before.

“Cookie Harkin lives in the Mapuah Hotel. That’s M-A-P-U-A-H. Know where it is?”

“I’ll find it,” I told him. “And thanks.”

He thanked me by slamming the phone back.

I looked up the Mapuah Hotel in the directory and found it listed in a crummy neighborhood off Eighth Avenue in the upper Sixties. It was as bad as I expected, but just about the kind of a place a guy like Cookie would go for. The only rule it had was to pay the rent on time. There was a lobby with a couple of old leather chairs and a set of wicker furniture that didn’t match. The clerk was a baldheaded guy who was shy a lower plate and he was bent over the desk reading a magazine.

“Where’ll I find Cookie Harkin?”

“309.” He didn’t look up and made no attempt at announcing me.

The only concession to modernization the place made was the automatic elevator. Probably they couldn’t get anybody to run a manual job anyway. I closed the door, pushed the third button in the row and stood there counting bricks until the car stopped.

Cookie had a good spot. His room took up the southwest corner facing the rear court where there was a reasonable amount of quiet and enough of a breeze that wasn’t contaminated by the dust and exhaust gases on the street side.

I knocked twice, heard the bedsprings creak inside, then Cookie yelled, “Yeah?”

“Mike, Cookie. Get out of the sack.”

“Okay, just a minute.”

The key rattled in the lock and Cookie stood there in the top half of his pajamas rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “This is a hell of an hour to get up,” I said.

“I was up late.”

I looked at the second pillow on his bed that still had the fresh imprint of a head, then at the closed door that led off the room. “Yeah, I’ll bet. Can she hear anything in there?”

He came awake in a hurry. “Nah. Whatcha got, Mike?”

“What would you like to have?”

“Plenty. Did you see the papers?” I said no. “I’m not so dumb, Mike. The D.A.’s giving out a song and dance about that triple kill in Islip. Me, I know what happened. The rags gotta clam up because no names are mentioned, but you let me spill it and I’ll clean up.”

I sat down and pulled out a butt. “I’ll swap,” I said.

“Now wait a sec, Mike ...”

“There aren’t any rough boys this time. Do something for me and you’ll get the story. Right from the beginning.”

“You got a deal.”

So I told him straight without leaving anything out and he was on the phone before I was finished talking. Dollar bills were drooling out of his eyes and the thing was big enough to get a direct line to Harry Bailen himself. I told him not to play the cops down and when he passed it down with the hint that more was yet to come if it was played right, the big shot agreed and his voice crackled excitedly until he hung up.

Cookie came back rubbing his hands and grinning at me. “Just ask me, Mike. I’ll see that you get it.”

I dragged in on the smoke. “Go back a ways, Cookie. Remember when Charlie Fallon died?”

“Sure. He kicked off in a movie house on Broadway, didn’t he? Had a heart attack.”

“That’s right.”

“He practically lived in them movies. Couldn’t tell if he was in the classiest playhouse or the lousiest theater if you wanted to go looking for him.”

I nodded that I knew about it and went on, “At the time he was either married or living with a woman. Which was it?”

“Umm ...” he tugged at one ear and perched on the edge of the bed. “Nope, he wasn’t married. Guess he was shacking with somebody.”

“Who?”

“Hell, how’d I know? That was years ago. The guy was woman-happy”

“This one must have been special if he was living with her.”

His eyes grew shrewd. “You want her?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

“As soon as you can.”

“I dunno, Mike. Maybe she ain’t around no more.”

“She’ll be around. That kind never leaves the city.”

Cookie made a face like a weasel and started to grin a little bit. “I’ll give it a spin. Supposing I gotta lay out cash?”

“Go ahead. I’ll back it up. Spend what you have to.” I stood up and scrawled a number on the back of a match-book cover. “I’ll be waiting for you to call. You can reach me here anytime and if anybody starts buzzing you about that story your boss is going to print, tell them you picked it up as a rumor and as far as I’m concerned, you haven’t seen me in a month of Sundays.”

“I got it, Mike. You’ll hear from me.”

He was reaching for his shorts when I closed the door and I knew that if she was still there he’d find her. All I had to do was wait.