The Mike Hammer Collection (26 page)

Jimmy had a steak in the broiler as soon as I entered the door of his snack bar. Luckily, I like it rare and it was on deck before it was fully warmed through. While I was shoveling it down Jimmy said, “That dame in your office has been on the phone all day. Maybe you better call her back.”

“What'd she want?”

“Wondered where you were. Guess she thinks you were out with a broad somewhere.”

“Nuts. She's always thinking something.” I finished my dessert and threw a bill down. “If she calls up again, tell her I'm on my way up to the office, will you?”

“Sure, Mr. Hammer, glad to.”

I patted my meal in place, lit up a smoke and hopped into my car. The trip downtown didn't take long, but I was a half hour finding a parking place. When I finally barged into the office Velda looked up with those big brown eyes starting to give me hell before she even opened her mouth. When I got a girl to hold down the office I figured I'd might as well get a good-looking one as a bean head, and I sure skimmed the cream off the top. Only I didn't figure she'd turn out to be so smart. Good-looking ones seldom are. She's big and she's beautiful, and she's got a brain that can figure angles while mine only figures the curves.

“About time you got in.” She looked me over carefully for lipstick stains or whatever those tip-offs are that spell trouble for a guy. I could tell by the way she let a slow grin play around with her mouth that she decided that my time was on the job and not on the town.

When I shucked out of my coat I tossed most of the package of fifties on her desk. “Meal money, kiddo. Take expenses out of that and bank the rest. Any callers?”

She tucked the cabbage in a file and locked it. “A couple. One wanted a divorce setup and the other wanted himself a bodyguard. Seems like his girl friend's husband is promising to chill him on sight. I sent both of them over to Ellison's where they'd get proper treatment.”

“I wish you'd quit making up my mind for me. That bodyguard job might have been all right.”

“Uh-huh. I saw a picture of the girl friend. She's the bosomy kind you go for.”

“Ah, bugs. You know how I hate women.”

I squeezed into the reception chair and picked up the paper from the table. I riffled through it from back to front, and as I was going to lay it down I caught the picture on the front page. It was down there in the corner, bordered by some shots of the heavyweight fights from the night before. It was a picture of the redhead lying cuddled up against the curbstone. She was dead. The caption read, HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER KILLS, ESCAPES.

“The poor kid! Of all the rotten luck!”

“Who's that?” Velda asked me.

I shoved the paper over to her. “I was with that kid the other night. She was a streetwalker and I bought her a coffee in a hash joint. Before I left I gave her some dough to get out of the business, and look what happened to her.”

“Fine company you keep.” Her voice was sarcastic.

I got sore. “Damn it, she was all right. She wasn't after me. I did her a favor and she was more grateful than most of the trash that call themselves people. The first time in a month of Sundays I've done anything halfway decent and this is the way it winds up.”

“I'm sorry, Mike. I'm really sorry honest.” It was funny how she could spot it when I was telling the truth. She opened the paper and read the news item, frowning when she finished. “She wasn't identified. Did you know her name?”

“Hell no. She was a redhead, so I called her Red. Let's see that.” I went over the item myself. She was found in the street at half past two. Apparently she had been there for some time before someone had sense enough to call the cop on the beat. A guy who had passed her twice as she lay there told the cop that he thought she was a drunk who had passed out. It was reasonable enough. Over there you find enough of them doing just that. But the curious part was the complete lack of identification on her.

When I folded the paper up I said, “Look, stick around a while, I have a little walking to do.”

“That girl?”

“Yeah. Maybe I can help identify her some way. I don't know. Call Pat and tell him I'm on my way down.”

“Okay, Mike.”

I left the car where it was and took a cab over to the red-brick building where Pat Chambers held down his office. You want to see that guy. He's a Captain of Homicide and all cop, but you couldn't tell it to look at him. He was young and charged with knowledge and the ambition to go with it, the best example of police efficiency I could think of. It isn't often that you see cops hobnobbing with private dicks, but Pat had the sense to know that I could touch a lot of places outside the reach of the law, and he could do plenty for me that I couldn't for myself. What started out as a modest business arrangement turned into a solid friendship.

He met me over in the lab where he was running a ballistics test. “Hello, Mike, what brings you around so early?”

“A problem, chum.” I flipped the paper open in front of him and pointed to the picture. “This. Have you found out about her?”

Pat shook his head. “No ... but I will. Come on in the office.” He led me into the cubbyhole off the lab and nodded to a chair. While I fired a cig he called an extension number and was connected. He said, “This is Chambers. I want to find out if that girl who was killed by a hit-and-run driver last night has been identified.” He listened a little bit, then frowned.

I waited until he hung up, then: “Anything?”

“Something unusual—dead of a broken neck. One of the boys didn't like the looks of it and they're holding the cause of death until a further exam is made. What have you?”

“Nothing. But I was with her the night before she was found dead.”

“So?”

“So she was a tramp. I bought her coffee in a hash house and we had a talk.”

“Did she mention her name?”

“Nope, all I got out of her was ‘Red.' It was appropriate enough.”

Pat leaned back in his chair. “Well, we don't know who she is. She had on all new clothes, a new handbag with six dollars and change in it, and not a scar on her body to identify her. Not a single laundry mark, either.”

“I know. I gave her a hundred and fifty bucks to get dressed up and look for a decent job. Evidently she did.”

“Getting bighearted, aren't you?” He sounded like Velda and I got mad.

“Damn it, Pat, don't you give me that stuff, too! Can't I play saint for five minutes without everyone getting smart about it I've seen kids down on their luck before, probably a damn sight more than you have. You think anyone would give them a break? Like hell. They play 'em for all they can get and beat it. I liked the kid; does that make me a jerk? All right, she was a hustler, but she wasn't hustling for me and I did her a favor. Maybe she gets all wrapped up in a new dream and forgets to open her eyes when she's crossing the street, and look what happens. Anytime I touch anything it gets killed!”

“Hey, wait up, Mike, don't jump me on it. I know how you feel ... it's just that you seemed to be stepping out of character.”

“Aw, I'm sorry, Pat. It's kind of got me loused up.”

“At least you've given me something to go on. If she bought all new clothes we can trace them. If we're lucky we can pick up the old stuff and check them for laundry marks.”

He told me to wait for him and took off down the corridor. I sat there for five minutes and fidgeted, and cursed people who let their kids run loose. A hell of a way to die. They just lower you into a hole and cover you up, with nobody around but the worms, and the worms don't cry. But Pat would find out who she was. He'd put a little effort behind the search and a pair of parents would turn up and wring themselves dry with grief. Not that it would do much good, but at least I'd feel better.

Pat came back looking sour. I guess I knew what was coming when he said, “They covered that angle downstairs. The salesclerks in the stores all said the same thing ... she took her old clothes with her and wore the new ones.”

“Then she must have left them at home.”

“Uh-huh. She wasn't carrying them with her when she was found.”

“Nope, I don't like that either, Pat. When a girl buys a new outfit, she won't look at the old one, and what she had on when I met her was a year out of date. She probably chucked them somewhere.”

Pat reached into his desk and came up with a note pad. “I think the best we can do is publish her picture and hope someone steps up with an identification. At the same time we'll get the bureau checking up in the neighborhood where you met her. Does that suit you?”

“Yeah. Can't do more than that, I guess.”

He flipped the pages over, but before I could tell him where the hash house was a lab technician in a white smock came in and handed over a report sheet. Pat glanced at it, then his eyes squinted and he looked at me strangely.

I didn't get it, so I stared back. Without a word he handed me the sheet and nodded to dismiss the technician. It was a report on Red. The information was the same that Pat had given me, but down at the bottom was somebody's scrawled notation. It said very clearly that although there was a good chance that death could have been accidental, the chance was just as good that she had been murdered. Her neck had been broken in a manner that could have been caused only by the most freakish accident.

For the first time since I'd known him, Pat took a typical cop's attitude. “A nice story you gave me, Mike. How much of it am I supposed to believe?” His voice was dripping with sarcasm.

“Go to hell, Pat.” I said it coldly, burning up inside.

I knew damn well what was going on in that official mind. Just because we had tangled tails on a couple of cases before he thought I was pitching him a fast one. I got it off my chest in a hurry. “You used to be a nice boy, Pat,” I said. “There was a time when we did each other favors and no questions asked. Did I ever dummy up a deal on you?”

He started to answer, but I cut him off. “Yeah, sure, we've crossed once or twice, but you always have the bull on me before we start. That's because you're a cop. I can't withhold information ... all I can do is protect a client. Since when do you figure me to be putting the smear on you?”

This time Pat grinned. “Okay, that makes me sorry twice today. Do me another favor and admit I had a halfway decent reason to be suspicious. You're usually in something up to your neck, and you aren't above getting a little free info even from me, and I can't blame you. It's just that I have to look out for my own neck once in a while. You know the pressure that's being put on our department. If we get caught short we have a lot of people to answer to.”

He kept talking, but I wasn't listening to him. My eyes kept drifting back to that report sheet until that one word, MURDERED, kept jumping at me like it was alive. I was seeing Red standing there with the dimples in her cheeks, kissing her finger, and smiling a smile that was for me alone. Just a two-bit tramp who could have been a lady, and who was, for a few short minutes, a damn decent friend.

And I had jinxed her.

My guts were a tight little ball under my belt, because Red wasn't the only one I remembered. There was that greaseball with the rod and the dirty sneer. There was the way Red had looked at him with terror in her eyes, and I felt my fingernails bite into my palms and I started cursing under my breath. It always starts that way, the crazy mad feeling that makes me want to choke the life out of some son of a bitch, and there's nothing to grab but air. I knew damn well what it was then. They could cross all the probable words off in front of murder and let it stand alone.

Pat said, “Give, Mike.”

“There's nothing to give,” I told him. “I'm teed off. Things like this give me the pip. I might as well have killed her myself.”

“What makes you think it's murder?” He was watching me closely again.

I flipped the sheet to his desk. “I don't know, but she's dead and what difference does it make how she died. When you're dead you're dead and it doesn't matter much to you any more how you got that way.”

“Let's not have any tangents, Mike. What do you know that I don't?”

“What she looked like when she was alive. She was a nice kid.”

“Go on.”

“Nuts. There isn't any place to go. If she was killed accidentally, I feel like hell. If she was murdered....”

“Yeah, Mike, I've heard it before ... if she was killed you're going to go out all by yourself and catch the bastard and rub his nose in the dirt. Maybe so hard that you break his neck, too.”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I said it again.

“Mike.”

“What?”

“Look, if it's a kill it belongs in my department. It probably isn't, but you get me so damn excited I'm getting positive that it is, and I'm getting mad, too, because you have thoughts in that scrambled brain of yours that will make the track nice and muddy if it's another race. Let's not have any more of that, Mike. Once was enough. I didn't mind so much then, but no more of it. We've always played it square, though only God knows why I set myself up to be knocked down. Maybe I'm the jerk. Are you leveling with me on what you know?”

“I'm leveling, Pat.” I wasn't lying. What I had told him was the truth. I just hadn't told him the rest. It's awfully nice to get so goddamn mad at something you want to bust wide open, and it's a lot better to take that goddamn something you're mad at and smash it against the wall and do all the things to it you wanted to do, wishing it could have been done before it was too late.