The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (62 page)

I punched the button three times while I stood there in the dark, heard nothing ringing so I eased myself into the smell. It wasn’t just an odor. It was something that moved, something warm and fluid that came down the stairs, tumbling over slowly, merging with other smells until it leaked out into the street.

In each flight there were fourteen steps, a landing, a short corridor that took you to the next flight and at the top of the last one, a door. Up there the smell was different. It wasn’t any fresher; it just smelled better. A pencil line of light marked the sill and for a change there was no bag of garbage to trip over.

I rapped on the door and waited. I did it again and springs creaked inside. A quiet little voice said, “Yes?”

“Carver?”

Again, “Yes.” A bit tired-sounding this time.

“I’d like to speak to you. I’m pushing my card through under the door.”

“Never mind. Just come right in.”

I felt for the knob, twisted it and pushed the door open.

She was sitting there swallowed up in a big chair facing me, the gun in her hand resting on her knee in a lazy fashion and there wasn’t even the slightest bit of doubt that it would start going off the second I breathed too hard.

Carver wasn’t pretty. She was small and full bodied, but she wasn’t pretty. Maybe no dame can be pretty with a rod in her mitt, even one with bleached white hair and a scarlet mouth. A black velvet robe outlined her against the chair, seeming like the space of nighttime between the white of her hair and that of the fur-lined slippers she wore.

For a minute she looked at me, her eyes wandering over me slowly. I let her look and pushed the door shut. Maybe she was satisfied by what she saw, maybe not. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t put the gun away either. I said, “Expecting someone else?”

What she did with her mouth didn’t make up a smile. “I don’t know. What have you to say?”

“I’ll say what it takes to make you point that heater someplace else.”

“You can’t talk that loud or that long, friend.”

“Do I reach in my pocket for a smoke?”

“There’s some on the table beside you. Use those.”

I picked one up, almost went for my lighter in my pocket, thought better of it and took the matches that went with the cigarettes. “You’re sure not good company, kid.” I blew a stream of smoke at the floor and rocked on my toes. That little round hole in the tip of the automatic never came off my stomach.

“The name is Mike Hammer,” I told her. “I’m a private investigator. I was with Berga Torn when she got knocked off.”

This time the rod moved. I was looking right down the barrel.

“More,” her mouth said.

“She was trying to hitch a ride to the city. I picked her up, ran a roadblock that was checking for her, got edged off the road by a car and damn near brained by a pack of hoods who were playing for keeps. I was there with my head dented in when they worked her over and behind the wheel of the car they pushed over the cliff. To them I was a handy, class-A red herring that was supposed to cover the real cause of her death only it didn’t quite happen that way.”

“How did it happen?”

“I was thrown clear. If you want I’ll show you my scars.”

“Never mind.”

So we stared at each other for a longer minute and I was still looking down the barrel and the hole kept getting bigger and bigger.

“You loaded?”

“The cops lifted my rod and P.I. ticket.”

“Why?”

“Because they knew I’d bust into this thing and they wanted to keep me out.”

“How did you find me?”

“It’s not hard to find people when you know how. Anybody could do it.” Her eyes widened momentarily, seemed to deepen, then narrowed sharply.

“Suppose I don’t believe you,” she said.

I sucked in a lungful of smoke and dropped the butt to the floor. I didn’t bother to squash it out. I let it lie there until you could smell the stink of burned wool in the room and felt my face start to tighten around the edges. I said, “Kid, I’m sick of answering questions. I’m sick of having guns pointed at me. You make the second tonight and if you don’t stow that thing I’m going to beat the hell out of you. What’ll it be?”

I didn’t scare her. The gun came down until it rested in her lap and for the first time the stiffness left her face. Carver just looked tired. Tired and resigned. The scarlet slash of her mouth made a wry grimace of sadness. “All right,” she said, “sit down.”

So I sat down. No matter what else I could have done, nothing would have been more effective. The bewilderment showed on her face, the way her body arched before sinking back again. Her leg moved and the gun dropped to the floor and stayed there.

“Aren’t you ...”

“Who were you expecting, Carver?”

“The name is Lily.” Her tongue was a lighter pink against the scarlet as it swept across her lips.

“Who, Lily?”

“Just ... men.” Her eyes were hopeful now. “You ... told me the truth?”

“I’m not one of them if that’s what you mean. Why did they come?”

The hardness left her face. It seemed to melt away like a film that should never have been there and now she was pretty. Her hair was a pile of snow that reflected the loveliness of her face. She breathed heavily, the robe drawing tight at regular intervals.

“They wanted Berga.”

“Let’s start at the beginning. With you and Berga. How’s that?”

Lily paused and stared into the past. “Before the war, that’s when we met. We were dance-hall hostesses. It was the first night for the both of us and we both sort of stuck together. A week later we found an apartment and shared it.”

“How long?”

“About a year. When the war came I was pretty sick of things and went into a defense plant. Berga quit too ... but what she did for a living was her business. She was a pretty good kid. When I was sick she moved back in and took care of me. After the war I lost my job when the plant closed down and she got a friend of hers to get me a job in a night club in Jersey.”

“Did she work there too?” I asked.

The white hair made a negative. “She was ... doing a lot of things.”

“Anybody special?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. We went back to living in the same apartment for a while, though she was paying most of the bills. She seemed to have a pretty good income.”

Lily’s eyes came off the wall behind my head and fastened on mine. “That’s when I noticed her starting to change.”

“How?”

“She was ... scared.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. She laughed it off. Twice she booked passage to Europe, but couldn’t get the ship she wanted and didn’t go.”

“She was that scared.”

Lily shrugged, saying nothing, saying much. “It seemed to grow on her. Finally she wouldn’t even leave the house at all. She said she didn’t feel well, but I knew she was lying.”

“When was this?”

“Not so very long ago. I don’t remember just when.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“She went out once in a while after that. Like to the movies or for groceries. Never very far. Then the police came around.”

“What did they want?”

“Her.”

“Questions or an arrest?”

“Questions, mostly. They asked me some things too. Nothing I knew about. That night I saw someone following me home.” Her face had a curious strained look about it. “It’s been that way every night since. I don’t know if they’ve found me here yet or not.”

“Cops?”

“Not cops.” She said it very simply, very calmly, but couldn’t quite hide the terror that tried to scream the answer out.

She begged me to say something, but I let her squeeze it out herself. “The police came again, but Berga wouldn’t tell them anything.” The tongue moistened the lips again. The scarlet was starting to wash away and I could see the natural tones of the wet flesh. “The other men came ... they were different from the police. Federal men, I think. They took her away. Before she came back ... Those men came.”

She put something into the last three words that wasn’t in the others, some breathless, nameless fear. Her hands were, tight balls with the nails biting into the palms. A glassiness had passed over her eyes while she thought about it, then vanished as if afraid it had been seen.

“They said I’d die if I talked to anyone.” Her hand moved up and covered her mouth. “I’m tired of being scared,” she said. Her head drooped forward, nodding gently to the soft sobs that seemed to stick in her chest.

What’s the answer? How do you tell them they won’t die when they know you’re lying about it because they’re marked already?

I got up and walked to her chair, looked at her a second and sat down on the arm of it. I took her hand away from her face, tilted her chin up and ran my fingers through the snow piled on top of her head. It was as soft and as fine as it looked in the light and when my fingers touched her cheek she smiled, dropped her eyes and let that beauty come through all the way, every bit of it that she had kept hidden so long. There was a faint smell of rubbing alcohol about her, a clean, pungent odor that seemed to separate itself from the perfume she wore.

Her eyes were big and dark, soft ovals under the delicate brows, her mouth full and pink, parted in the beginning of a smile. My fingers squeezed her shoulder easily and her head went back, the mouth parting even further and I bent down slowly.

“You won’t die,” I said.

And it was the wrong thing to say because the mouth that was so close to mine pulled back and everything had changed. I just sat there next to her for a little while until the dry sobs had stopped. There were no tears to be wiped away. Terror doesn’t leave any tears. Not that kind of terror.

“What did they want to know about Berga?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “They made me tell everything I knew about her. They made me sit there while they went through her things.”

“Did they find anything?”

“No. I ... I don’t think so. They were horribly mad about it.”

“Did they hurt you?” I asked.

An almost imperceptible shudder went through her whole body. “I’ve been hurt worse.” Her eyes drifted up to mine. “They were disgusting men. They’ll kill me now, won’t they?”

“If they do they’ve had it.”

“But it would still be too late for me.”

I nodded. It was all I could do. I got up, took the last smoke out of my old pack and tapped the butt against my knuckle. “Can I take a look at that suitcase of hers?”

“It’s in the bedroom.” She pushed her hair back with a tired motion. “The closet.”

I walked in, snapped on the light and found the closet. The suitcase was there where she said it was, a brown leather gladstone that had seen a lot of knocking around. I tossed it on the bed, unfastened the straps and opened it up.

But nothing was in there that could kill a person. Not unless a motive for murder was in a couple old picture albums, three yearbooks from high school, a collection of underwear, extra-short bathing suits, a stripper’s outfit and a batch of old mail.

I thought maybe the mail would do it, but most of them were trivial answers from some friend to letters she had written and were post-marked from a hick town in Idaho. The rest were steamship folders and a tour guide of southern Europe. I shoved everything back in the suitcase, closed it up and dropped it in the closet.

When I turned around Lily was standing there in the doorway, a fresh cigarette in her mouth, one hand holding the robe closed around her waist, her hair a white cloud that seemed to hover above her. When she spoke the voice didn’t sound as though it belonged to her at all.

“What am I to do now?”

I reached out and folded my hand over hers and drew her closer to me. The fingers were cold, her body was a warm thing that wanted to search for something.

“Got any place to go?”

“No,” faintly.

“Money?”

“Just a little.”

“Get dressed. How long will it take?”

“A ... a few minutes.”

For the briefest interval her face brightened with a new hope, then she smiled and shook her head. “It ... won’t do any good, I’ve seen men like that before. They’re not like other people. They’d find me.”

My laugh was short and hard. “We’ll make it tough for them just the same. And don’t kid yourself about them being too different. They’re just like anybody else in most ways. They’re afraid of things too. I’m not kidding you or me. You know what the score is so all we can do is give it a try.”

I stopped for a second and let a thought run through my head again. I grinned down at her and said, “You know ... don’t be a bit surprised if you live a lot longer than you think you should.”

“Why?”

“I have an idea the outfit who worked you over don’t really know what they’re after and they’re not going to kill any leads until they get it.”

“But I ... don’t have any idea ...”

“Let them find that out for themselves,” I interrupted. “Let’s get you out of here as fast as we can.”

I dropped her hand and pushed her into the bedroom. She looked at me, her face happy, then her body went tight and it showed in the way her eyes lit up, that crazy desire to say thanks somehow; but I pulled the door shut before she could do what she wanted to do and went inside opening a fresh deck of Luckies.

The gun was still there on the floor, a metallic glitter asleep on a bed of faded green wool. The safety was off and the hammer was still back. All that time in the beginning I was about a literal ounce away from being nice and dead. Lily Carver hadn’t been fooling a bit.

She took almost five minutes. I heard the door open and turned around. It wasn’t the same Lily. It was a new woman, a fresh and lovely woman who was a taller, graceful woman. It was one for whom the green gabardine suit had been intended, exquisitely molding every feature of her body. Her legs were silken things, their curves flashing enough to take your eyes away from the luxury of her hair that poked out under the hat.

It wasn’t a worried or a scared Lily this time. It was a Lily who took my arm and held it tightly, smiling a smile that was real. “Where are we going, Mike?”

It was the first time she had said my name and I liked the way she said it.