The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (55 page)

Her mouth wasn’t soft and rich now. It was slitted until it bared her teeth to the gums. “You don’t like me to laugh, do you? Hell, you must have laughed at me plenty of times. Woman, when you were alone you must have laughed your damned head off. You know, it was funny the way this thing went. I based everything I had on a false premise yet I wound up with the right answers in the long run. You had me talked into it as nicely as you please.

“All this time I thought Decker had made a mistake in apartments.
Like hell! Decker knew what he was doing. They had your place cased too well to make any mistake.

“But just to see if I’m right, let’s go back to the beginning. I haven’t got a damn thing to stand on but speculation, yet I bet I can call every turn right on the button. What I have got will hold you until we can dig up the real stuff though. We may have to go back a way, but we’ll get it and you’ll burn for it.

“You were even nice enough to give me a lot of hints. There you were out in Hollywood in a spot most girls would give their right arms to be in and there was only one drawback. You weren’t big time. You weren’t going to get to be big time, either. You were one of that big middle class of actors who were okay, but not for the feature films. Then a man came along who gave you a hard time and you got sour on the world.

“Right then you were ripe for the kicker. You were shaking hands with the devil and didn’t know it. Back in New York a guy named Charlie Fallon was writing a batch of letters. One was a fan letter to you. The other was to the District Attorney with enough evidence on microfilms to put a couple of racketeers where they belonged. Old Charlie was feeling good that night. He felt so good that he got his envelopes mixed and those films came to you.

“That was just before your secretary died, wasn’t it? Yeah, I can tell that much by your face. She was all for turning them in to the authorities and you put the kibosh on that. You saw a way to get yourself a lot of easy dough. That man came in handy too. When you knocked off that secretary you made it look like a suicide and it wasn’t hard to explain away at all.

“Now let me speculate on what happened right here in New York. The D.A. got a letter, all right. It was from Fallon, but it contained a fan letter to you. Teen and Grindle put out a lot of cash to have a pipeline in where it counted and they had a slick cop watching the mail for that letter. When they got it they must have turned green because it didn’t take much thought to figure out what had happened. All they could do was to sit back and see what you would do.

“You did it. You came around with your hand out and they greased it to whatever tune you called. For ten years that went on. Even the time checks. It’s a lot of years, too. Hell, you know what blackmail is like. It grows and grows like a damned fungus. Ed and Lou had two of you on their necks. When Toady Link made those films for Fallon he made a copy for himself. But at least he added something to the outfit. Then one day one of you put too much pressure on the boys. One of you had to go. Toady probably pulled the squeeze play. Since he knew all about it anyway they told him that if he could lift those copies you had he’d make out better himself.

“That’s where Decker came in. Good safe men are hard to get for those jobs. Toady located Decker somehow and had Mel Hooker steer him right into a trap where he had to play ball with Toady or else. They figured it out nice as you please and never stopped to figure out what can go in inside a guy’s mind.

“Decker had been through the mill and he wasn’t setting his kid up to have any part of it. In his own way he was a martyr. He knew what he was going to do and knew he’d die for it. When he lifted that stuff from your place I think he planned to take it straight to the police. He didn’t move fast enough though. So he did the next best thing. He stuck those films where they’d probably be found and went out and died.

“You know the rest of it from there, Marsha. I don’t have to tell you any more, do I? I shot my mouth off to you and spilled it about Toady, so you went up there to see him yourself. You did a nice job of bumping him. Nice and clean. Maybe in those ten years you figured it all out for yourself, and if you didn’t think Toady had those films you were going to get his copy. Yeah, me and my big mouth. You hung on like a leech and kept giving me the old sex treatment just to know where you stood. And I fell for it. You sure learned how to act these last ten years, all right. I thought it was pretty real.

“What gets me is the way you thought that I had them all this time. You couldn’t get that out of your head. You thought I had them and Teen thought I had them. They were worth a million bucks on the open market and I didn’t look like a guy who’d throw it away. You even went to the trouble of getting a copy made of my keys while I was asleep, didn’t you? Tonight you used them. Tonight you had to take a look to be sure because you knew that when I talked to Fallon’s old girl I was going to know the truth!

“Yeah, everybody was looking for those pictures. That’s what should have tipped me off. Toady searched Decker’s apartment and I thought Toady or his boys searched mine. That was where I kept tripping up. That was the one fault in the whole picture.
When Toady drove that car he never had time to see who I was at all, so how could he know where I lived? You, Marsha, were the only other person at the time who knew I had gone over Decker’s body right after he was shot because I told you that myself.

“That was a nice set-to up here that night. Want me to guess who it was? It was that jerk from the theater ... the kid with the broken arm who’s so much in love with you that he’d do anything you ask. He got me with that damn cast.

“Where is he tonight? He’d like to be in on this, wouldn’t he?”

All that pent-up hate on her face turned into a cunning sneer and she said, “He’s here, Mike.”

I started to move the same time she started to talk and I wasn’t fast enough. I had a glimpse of something white streaking toward my head just before it smashed the consciousness from my body.

Long before my eyes could see again I knew what would be there when I opened them. I heard the kid crying, a series of terror-stricken gasps because the world was too much for him. I pushed up from the floor, forced my eyes open and saw him huddled there in the corner, his thin body shivering. Whatever I did with my face made him stop, and with the quick switch of emotions a child is capable of, he laughed. He climbed to his feet and held on to the arm of the chair babbling nonsense at the wall.

I raised my head and caught her looking at me, a spiteful smile creasing her face. She was a big beautiful evil goddess with a gun in her hand ready to take a victim and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. My .45 was over there on the table and I didn’t have the strength to go for it.

Jerry was in a chair holding his broken arm to his chest, rocking back and forth from the pain in it. One side of the cast was split halfway.

Then I saw the junk on the floor. The suit I had thrown away and the kid’s overalls that had been stuffed in the bottom of the can. And Marsha smiled. She opened her palm and there were the films, four thin strips of them. “They were in the pocket of the overalls.” She seemed amazed at the simplicity of it.

“They won’t do you any good, Marsha. Teen’s finished and so are they. Your little racket’s over.” I had to stop for breath. Something sticky ran down my neck.

“They’ll serve their purpose,” she said. “Somebody else might guess like you did, but they’ll never know now. Those Toady had I destroyed. These will go too and only you will be left, Mike. I really hate having to kill you, but it’s necessary, you know.”

There was none of the actress in her voice now. There was only death. She had finished acting. The play was over and she could put away the smiles and tears until the next time.

I swung my head around until my eyes were fixed on Jerry. He stopped rocking. I said, “Then I guess you’ll have to marry Jerry won’t you? He’ll have you trapped like you had Ed and Lou trapped. He’ll have something you’ll pay dearly for, won’t he?”

I think she laughed again. It was a cold laugh. “No, Mike. Poor Jerry will have to go too. You see, he’s my alibi.” Her hand went out and picked up my gun. “Everyone knows how crazy he is about me. And he’s so jealous he’s liable to do anything ... especially if he came up here and caught us together ... like tonight. There would have been gunplay. Unfortunately, you killed each other. The nurse was in the way and she died too. Doesn’t that make a good story, Mike?”

Jerry came out of his chair slowly. He had time to whisper incredulously, “Marsha!” The .45 slammed in her hand and blasted the night to bits. She watched the guy jerking on the floor and threw the gun back on the table. The rod she held on me was a long-barreled revolver and it didn’t tremble in her hand at all. She held it at her hip slanting it down enough to catch me in the chest.

She was going to get that shot off fast for the benefit of the people who were listening. She was killing again because murder breeds murder and when she had killed she was going to put the guns in dead hands and go into her act. She’d be all faints and tears and everyone would console her and tell her how brave she was and damn it all to hell, her story would stand up! There wouldn’t be a hole in it because everything was working in her favor just like when she killed her secretary! It would be a splash in the papers and she could afford that.

The hate was all there in my face now and she must have known what I was thinking. She gave me a full extra second to see her smile for the last time, but I didn’t waste it on the face of evil.

I saw the kid grab the edge of the table and reach up for the thing he had wanted for so long, and in that extra second of time she gave me his fingers closed around the butt safety and trigger at the same instant and the tongue of flame that blasted from the muzzle seemed to lick out across the room with a horrible vengeance that ripped all the evil from her face, turning it into a ghastly wet red mask that was really no face at all.

KISS ME, DEADLY

CHAPTER
1

All I saw was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash of power and almost ran up the side of the cliff as the car fishtailed. The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to the pavement and held.

Somehow I had managed a sweeping curve around the babe. For a few seconds she had been living on stolen time because instead of getting out of the way she had tried to stay in the beam of the headlights. I sat there and let myself shake. The butt that had fallen out of my mouth had burned a hole in the leg of my pants and I flipped it out the window. The stink of burned rubber and brake lining hung in the air like smoke and I was thinking of every damn thing I ever wanted to say to a harebrained woman so I could have it ready when I got my hands on her.

That was as far as I got. She was there in the car beside me, the door slammed shut and she said, “Thanks, mister.”

Easy, feller, easy. She’s a fruitcake. Don’t plow her. Not yet. Hold your breath a minute, let it out easy, then maybe bend her over the fender and paddle her tail until she gets some sense in her head. Then boot her the hell out and make her walk the rest of the way home.

I fumbled out another cigarette, but she reached it before I did. For the first time I noticed her hands shaking as hard as mine were. I lit hers, got one out for me and lit that one too. “How stupid can you get?” I said.

She bit the words off. “Pretty stupid.”

Behind me the lights of another car were reaching around a curve. Her eyes flicked back momentarily, fear pulling their corners tight. “You going to sit here all night, mister?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m thinking of throwing you over that cliff over there.”

The headlights shone in the car through the rear window, bathed the roadway in light then swept on past. In the second that I had a good look at her she was rigid, her face frozen expressionlessly. When only the red dot of the taillight showed in front of us she let out her breath and leaned back against the seat.

In a way she was good-looking, but her face was more interesting than pretty. Wide-set eyes, large mouth, tawny hair that spilled onto her shoulders like melted butter. The rest of her was wrapped into a tailored trench coat that was belted around her waist and I remembered her standing there in the road like something conjured up too quickly in a dream. A Viking. A damn-fool crazy Viking dame with holes in her head.

I kicked the stalled engine over, crawled through the gears and held on tight to the wheel until my brain started working right. An accident you don’t mind. Those you halfway expect when you’re holding seventy on a mountain road. But you don’t expect a Viking dame to jump out of the dark at you while you’re coming around a turn. I opened the window all the way down and drank in some of the air. “How’d you get up here?”

“What does it look like?”

“Like you got dumped.” I looked at her quickly and saw her tongue snake out over her lips. “You picked the wrong guy to go out with.”

“I’ll know better the next time.”

“Pull a trick like that last one and there won’t be any next time. You damn near became a painting on the face of that rockslide.”

“Thanks for the advice,” she said sarcastically, “I’ll be more careful.”

“I don’t give a hoot what you do as long as you don’t get strained through my radiator.”

She plucked the cigarette from her lips and blew a stream of smoke at the windshield. “Look, I’m grateful for the ride. I’m sorry I scared hell out of you. But if you don’t mind just shut up and take me somewhere or let me out.”

My mouth pulled back in a grin. A dame with nerve like that sure could’ve made a mess out of a guy before he gave her the boot. “Okay, girl,” I said, “now it’s my turn to be sorry. It’s a hell of a place for anybody to be stranded and I guess I would have done the same thing. Almost. Where do you want to go?”