The Mike Hammer Collection (60 page)

“Can I ... help you some way? I want to, Mike. Honest.”

She had a hell of a cute face. I turned my head and looked down into it and the seriousness in her expression made me nod before I could help myself. “I need a lot of help, Connie. I'm not sure my friend went out with this girl; I'm not sure she'll admit it if she did and I can't blame her; I'm not sure about anything any more.”

“What did Juno tell you?”

“Come back tomorrow. She'll try to find her in the meantime.”

“Juno's quite a ... she's quite a ...”

“Quite,” I finished.

“She makes that impression on everybody. A working girl doesn't stand a chance around that woman.” Connie faked a pout and squeezed my arm. “Say it ain't so, Mike.”

“It ain't so.”

“You're lying again,” she laughed. “Anyway, I was thinking. Suppose this girl
did
go out with your friend. Was he the type to try for a fast affair?”

I shoved my hat back on my head and tried to picture Chester Wheeler. To me he was too much of a family man to make a decent wolf. I told her no, but doubtfully It's hard to tell what a guy will or won't do when he's in town without an overseer or a hardworking conscience.

“In that case,” Connie continued, “I was thinking that if this girl played games like a lot of them do, she'd drag him around the hot spots with him footing the bill. It's a lot of fun, they tell me.”

She was getting at something. She shook her head and let her hair swirl around her shoulders. “Lately the clotheshorses have been beating a path to a few remote spots that cater to the model-and-buyer crowd. I haven't been there myself, but it's a lead.”

I reached over and tipped her chin up with my forefinger. “I like the way you think, girl.” Her lips were full and red. She ran her tongue over them until they glistened wetly, separated just a little to coax me closer. I could have been coaxed, only the cab jolted to a stop against the curb and Connie stuck out her tongue at the driver. She made a wry face and held on to my hand just to be sure I got out with her. I handed the driver a bill and told him to keep the change.

“It's the cocktail hour, Mike. You will come up, won't you?”

“For a while.”

“Damn you,” she said, “I never tried so hard to make a guy who won't be made. Don't I have wiles, Mike?”

“Two beauties.”

“Well that's a start, anyway. Leave us leave.”

The place was a small-sized apartment house that made no pretense at glamour. It had a work-it-yourself elevator that wasn't working and we hoofed it up the stairs to the third floor where Connie fumbled in her pocket until she found her key. I snapped on the light like I lived there permanently and threw my hat on a chair in the living room and sat down.

Connie said, “What'll it be, coffee or cocktails?”

“Coffee first,” I told her. “I didn't eat lunch. If you got some eggs put them on too.” I reached over the arm of the chair into a magazine rack and came up with a handful of girlie mags that were better than the post cards you get in Mexico. I found Connie in half of them and decided that she was all right. Very all right.

The smell of the coffee brought me into the kitchen just as she was sliding the eggs onto a plate and we didn't bother with small talk until there was nothing left but some congealed egg yolk. When I finally leaned back and pulled out my deck of Luckies she said, “Good?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Will I make somebody a good wife?”

“Somebody.”

“Bastard.” She was laughing again. I grinned back at her and faked a smack at her fanny. Instead of pulling away she stuck it out at me so I laid one on that made her yowl.

We had the cocktails in the living room. The hands on my watch went around once, then twice. Every so often the shaker would be refilled and the ice would make sharp sounds against the metal surface. I sat there with a glass in my hand and my head back, dreaming my way through the haze. I ran out of matches and whenever I put a cigarette in my mouth Connie would come across the room with a light for me.

A nice guy who was dead.

Two shots gone.

One bullet and one shell case found in the hall.

Suicide.

Hell.

I opened my eyes and looked at Connie. She was curled up on a studio couch watching me. “What's the program, kid?”

“It's almost seven,” she said. “I'll get dressed and you can take me out. If we're lucky maybe we can find out where your friend went.”

I was too tired to be nice. My eyes were heavy from looking into the smoke that hung in the air and my belly felt warm from the drinks. “A man is dead,” I said slowly. “The papers said what the cops said, he died a suicide. I know better. The guy was murdered.”

She stiffened, and the cigarette bent in her fingers. “I wanted to find out why so I started tracing and I found he might have been with a babe one night. I find where that babe works and start asking questions. A very pretty model with a very pretty body starts tossing me a line and is going to help me look. I start getting ideas. I start wondering why all the concern from a dame who can have ten other guys yet makes a pass at a guy who hasn't even got a job and won't buy her more than beer and takes her eggs and coffee and her cocktails.”

Her breath made a soft hissing noise between her teeth. I saw the cigarette crumple up in her hand and if she felt any pain it wasn't reflected in her face. I never moved while she pushed herself up. My hands were folded behind my head for a cushion and stayed there even while she stood spraddled-legged in front of me.

Connie swung so fast I didn't close my eyes for it. Not a flat palm, but a small, solid fist sliced into my cheek and cracked against my jaw I started to taste the blood inside my mouth and when I grinned a little of it ran down my chin.

“I have five brothers,” she said. Her voice had a snarl in it. “They're big and nasty but they're all men. I have ten other guys who wouldn't make one man put together. Then you came along. I'd like to beat your stupid head off. You have eyes and you can't see. All right, Mike, I'll give you something to look at and you'll know why all the cancern.”

Her hand grabbed her blouse at the neckline and ripped it down. Buttons rolled away at my feet. The other thing she wore pulled apart with a harsh tearing sound and she stood there proudly, her hands on her hips, flaunting her breasts in my face. A tremor of excitement made the muscles under the taut flesh of her stomach undulate, and she let me look at her like that as long as it pleased me.

I had to put my hands down and squeeze the arms of the chair. My collar was too tight all of a sudden, and something was crawling up my spine.

Her teeth were clamped together. Her eyes were vicious.

“Make me,” she said.

Another trickle of blood ran down my chin, reminding me what had happened. I reached up and smacked her across the mouth as hard as I could. Her head rocked, but she still stood there, and now her eyes were more vicious than ever. “Still want me to make you?”

“Make me,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

W
e ate supper in a Chinese joint on Times Square. The place was crowded but nobody had eyes for the meal; they were all focused on Connie including mine and I couldn't blame them any. If low-cut gowns were daring, then she took the dare and threw it back at them.

I sat across the table wondering if skin could really be that soft and smooth, wondering how much less could be worn before a woman would be stark naked. Not much less.

The meal went that way without words. We looked, we smiled, we ate. For the first time I saw her objectively, seeing a woman I had and not just one I wanted. It was easy to say she was beautiful, but not easy to say why

But I knew why. She was honest and direct. She wanted something and she let you know it. She had spent a lifetime with five men who treated her as another brother and expected her to like it. She did. To Connie, modeling was just a job. If there was glamour attached to it she took it without making the most of it.

It was nearly nine o'clock when we left, straggling out with full bellies and a pleasant sensation of everything being almost all right. I said, “Going to tell me the schedule?”

Her hand found mine and tucked it up under her arm. “Ever been slumming, Mike?”

“Some people think I'm always slumming.”

“Well, that's what we're going to do. The kids all have a new craze on an old section of town. They call it the Bowery. Sound familiar?”

I looked at her curiously. “The Bowery?”

“You ain't been around recently, bub. The Bowery's changed. Not all of it, but a spot here and there. Not too long ago a wise guy spotted himself a fortune and turned a junk joint into a tourist trap. You know, lousy with characters off the street to give the place atmosphere all the while catering to a slightly upper crust who want to see how the other half lives.”

“How the hell did they ever find that?”

A cab saw me wave and pulled to the curb. We got in and I told him where to go and his hand hit the flag. Connie said, “Some people get tired of the same old thing. They hunt up these new deals. The Bowery is one of them.”

“Who runs the place?”

Connie shrugged, her shoulders rubbing against mine. “I don't know, Mike. I've had everything secondhand. Besides, it isn't only one place now. I think there're at least a dozen. Like I said, they're model-and-buyer hangouts and nothing is cheap, either.”

The cab wound through traffic, cut over to a less busy street and made the running lights that put us at the nether end of Manhattan without a stop. I handed the driver a couple of bills and helped Connie out of the door.

The Bowery, a street of people without faces. Pleading voices from the shadows and the shuffle of feet behind you. An occasional tug at your sleeve and more pleading that had professional despair in the tone. An occasional woman with clothes too tight giving you a long, steady stare that said she was available cheap. Saloon doors swung open so frequently they seemed like blinking lights. They were crowded, too. The bars were lined with the left-overs of humanity keeping warm over a drink or nursing a steaming bowl of soup.

It had been a long time since I had made the rounds down here. A cab swung into the curb and a guy in a tux with a redhead on his arm got out laughing. There was a scramble in his direction and the redhead handed out a mess of quarters then threw them all over the sidewalk to laugh all the louder when the dive came.

The guy thought it was funny too. He did the same thing with a fin, letting it blow out of his hand down the street. Connie said, “See what I mean?”

I felt like kicking the bastard. “Yeah, I see.”

We followed the pair with about five feet between us. The guy had a Midwestern drawl and the dame was trying to cover up a Brooklyn accent. She kept squeezing the guy's arm and giving him the benefit of slow, sidewise glances he seemed to like. Tonight he was playing king, all right.

They turned into a bar that was the crummiest of the lot on the street. You could smell the stink from outside and hear the mixture of shrill and raucous voices a block away. A sign over the doorway said

NEIL'S JOINT.

The characters were there in force. They had black eyes and missing teeth. They had twitches and fleas and their language was out of the gutter. Two old hags were having a hair-pull over a joker who could hardly hold on to the bar.

What got me was the characters who watched them. They were even worse. They thought it was a howl. Tourists. Lousy money-heavy tourists who thought it was a lot of fun to kick somebody else around. I was so damn mad I could hardly speak. A waiter mumbled something and led us to a table in the back room that was packed with more characters. Both kinds.

Everybody was having a swell time reading the dirty writing on the walls and swapping stories with the other half. The pay-off was easy to see. The crowd who lived there were drinking cheap whisky on the house to keep them there while the tourists shelled out through the nose for the same cheap whisky and thought it was worth it.

It sure was fun. Nuts.

Connie smiled at a couple of girls she knew and one came over. I didn't bother to get up when she introduced us. The girl's name was Kate and she was with a crowd from upstate. She said, “First time you've been here, isn't it, Connie?”

“First ... and last,” she told her. “It smells.”

Kate's laugh sounded like a broken cowbell. “Oh, we're not going to stay here long. The fellows want to spend some money, so we're going over to the Inn. Feel like coming along?”

Connie looked at me. I moved my head just enough so she'd know it was okay by me. “We'll go, Kate.”

“Swell, come on over and meet the gang. We're meeting the rest later on. They wanted to see all the sights including ...” she giggled, “those houses where ... you know.” She giggled again.

Connie made a
moue
and I grunted.

So we got up and met the gang. If it weren't that I had Connie with me they would have treated me like another character too. Just for a minute, maybe, then a few fat guts would have been bounced off the walls. There was Joseph, Andrew, Homer, Martin and Raymond and not a nickname in the pack. They all had soft hands, big diamonds, loud laughs, fat wallets and lovely women. That is, all except Homer. He had his secretary along who wasn't as pretty as she was ready, willing and able. She was his mistress and made no bones about it.

I liked her best. So did Connie.

When I squeezed their hands until they hurt we sat down and had a few drinks and dirty jokes then Andrew got loud about bigger and better times elsewhere. The rest threw in with him and we picked up our marbles and left. Martin gave the waiter a ten spot he didn't deserve and he showed us to the door.