The Long Wait

Chapter Nine

“You all right?”

“I... think so.” Her hand passed over her face and brushed a fragment of glass away. “Who... was it, Johnny?”

“Somebody who’s so damn anxious to see me dead he doesn’t give a hoot who else dies in the process. It’s not very healthy to be around me any more, baby.”

“No. That’s a fact, isn’t it?” She looked around at the holes, her face blank with astonishment as she visualized how close she’d come to getting booted out of this land of the living. She fumbled for a cigarette, lit two and stuck one in my mouth. When she had a deep drag settled in her lungs she asked. “How did he miss? I don’t understand.”

“I do,” I told her. “The jerk misjudged his distance. If he hadn’t plowed into us I probably would have kept going straight ahead and been a lovely target. At least I know one thing; he was alone, that’s why he stayed on the right, so he could shoot through the driver’s side instead of firing across the seat. With all his plans he muffed it anyway. Well, we can’t just sit here. Climb out a minute.”

When we were both outside I dug the jack handle from under the seat and knocked out the rest of the glass in the frames. Venus found a whisk broom in the glove compartment and cleared off the cushions and we were ready to get moving. Luckily, the rear wheels were still on the pavement, so it wasn’t any trouble hauling the front free. Just about the time I got the heap rolling the headlights of the first car turned out of the parking area back down the road. When he saw we were moving the car stopped, turned around and went back to the parking lot.

Either the wind wasn’t right or the people in this section weren’t very curious when other people started popping away with a rod. Hell, maybe they thought it was a gag. Yeah.

The breeze whipped in through the blank space in the windshield, kicking the dust around our faces. Venus waited until we had reached the main highway before she finally broke down and let herself cry. When the spasm passed I said, “Feel better now?”

“Much, only I need some coffee. Stop someplace, all right?”

“Sure.”

I pulled in at the first all-night joint I came to. It was a regular Hollywood affair, a fancy dog palace sprawled along the highway with tables inside and out, car-hop service and a small bar if you wanted one for the road. The place was packed with couples heading home after a big time in Lyncastle and there were more drunks around trying to sober up than anything else.

Venus wanted to go inside so I found a table, signaled a waitress over and ordered two coffees and a foursome of hot dogs. My eyes were hungrier than my stomach. You don’t get almost shot up then try to get your insides to take things calmly. The dogs wrinkled up on the plates, but the hot coffee held me together somewhat.

Or almost did anyway. Just before I finished the cup I saw something happen to Venus’s eyes and looked where she was looking. There was a table in the far comer completely dominated by a red-headed bundle of curves who would have gone six feet in her stocking feet. She almost completely obscured the guy who was leering across the table at her.

Venus’s mouth made silent words that said, “Eddie Packman,” and something went crawling up my back. The little bastard’s hair shone over a face that should have been peering out of a cage. There were muscles built into the hundred-buck suit he wore and I could see the flash of the diamond on his hand all the way across the room.

The redhead must have loved him because she was holding his hand while her finger kept fiddling with the brilliant hunk-of ice enviously. I could have sat there and watched for one minute or thirty. Time didn’t make a bit of difference any more. All I knew was that when he paid his bill and walked out I was right behind him.

What I wanted most of all was to see the kind of car he was driving. In my mind I could still see the black hulk of the sedan with the winking red eye sticking out the front window. I wanted to see if they were the same before I tore his arms and legs off.

The car was big and it was a sedan. It wasn’t black, but the color was close enough. In the dark there isn’t any difference in colors to talk about anyway. I said, “Hello, Eddie,” good and slow and watched him turn around. He almost said hello, but it never came out. His narrow eyes looked propped open momentarily then came down to meet the sneer that was twisting his mouth out of shape.

And you know what the little bastard did? He came for me! He didn’t wait. Hell no. He shoved the redhead away, took a jerky little step forward and winged his right at me without even bothering to make a fist of his hand. The lousy little punk tried to slap me across the jaw and damn near did it, too.

Not quite.

I grabbed that open palm, twisted him right off his feet, watched him come up off the ground screaming until my fist smashed the yell right back down his throat again. He lay there face down in his own blood and I was just going to give him another taste of it when I felt my skull get parted down the middle. It didn’t even hurt. It was just a big blanket of noise that rolled in like thunder. The animal reflexes a man is born with kept me standing and seeing long enough to catch the shine of polished brass buttons and see the barrel of a gun come down again and make another sharp crack across the top of my head.

Things weren’t all white this time. There was a funny smell in the air, but it wasn’t antiseptic. No mummy, either. Everything was painted an ugly efficient green and the light that streaked in the windows seemed to be slatted. After five minutes of looking at it I realized why. There were horizontal steel bars built right into the frames.

The cop said, “Awake, eh?”

I grunted and touched my head. It would have been better if I hadn’t. The top of my skull was soft and squashy, held together by strips of tape that went down to my ears. My body seemed to throb all over, trying to explode.

“Want something to eat?”

My stomach started to heave at the word. I said no, but he brought in a tray anyhow so I managed to get some of the coffee down. It helped things enough so I could swallow some limp toast.

Then a doctor came in and probed around, checking what he found against a pair of X-ray pictures. I said, “Look good?”

“Looks lucky.”

“That’s what the last doctor said.”

“If either one of those blows had landed a half-inch on either side you’d be dead.”

“That’s nice. I saw brass buttons behind the gun that nailed me.”

The cop in the corner lowered his paper. “You was disturbing the peace. You committed assault with intent to kill.”

“You should live to be a hundred, but right away,” I said. “I want a lawyer.”

“The court’ll assign one.”

“The hell it will. I’ll pick my own. Who’s in charge of this rattrap?”

The doctor shook out some pills on the table-top beside the bed. “I don’t think you’re in condition to be excited at this moment. You’re going to have to stay quiet a few days.”

“Nuts. I’ll pick my own doctor too if I want to and you know damn well I can. I want out of this trap.”

I saw the doctor look at the cop and shrug. “It’s up to him,” he said. The cop put down the paper and walked to the door. Five minutes later he came back and he wasn’t alone. Lindsey was with him. The guy looked happy again. Real happy. I called him a son of a bitch and tried to kick him in the stomach. He leered at me and stayed out of range. All I did was make my head hurt worse.

“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” Lindsey grinned.

The cop muttered. “He knows. I told him. He thinks he’s pretty wise.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lindsey agreed. He pulled a pad out of his pocket, leaned back against a chair and waited for me to say something.

He’d still be waiting if the press didn’t walk in as nice as you please. The cop at the door looked at Lindsey kind of puzzled-like waiting to see if Logan would get tossed out or not.

My boy handed an envelope to Lindsey and said tonelessly, “It’s a writ. Very legal and all that. McBride’s free on bail so you can put your pad away, copper.”

Remember how I told you Lindsey looked the first day I saw him at the hotel desk? How his eyes went all the way up and the red came into his face? He looked like that again. Maybe a little worse.

But you’d never know how mad he was by the way he spoke. His voice was calm as still-frozen water and just as cold. He said, “I heard you were mixed up with him, Logan. I didn’t want to think so because you used to be a nice guy.”

“So did you, Lindsey.” Logan had ice of his own.

The chief’s head made a slow turn until his face was pointed at me. “Now you got friends, Johnny. Now you got friends who can pull writs out of a hat early in the morning because a judge is afraid of getting in wrong with the press. Somebody even went to the trouble of putting up ten-grand bail, so you have some very powerful friends all of a sudden.” His eyes shifted to Logan a moment before coming back to me. “You’re going to need them, feller, but they’ll never be able to help you enough.”

The doctor and the other cop edged out the room and closed the door. I went to sit up, managed it after the second try and perched on the edge of the bed. Lindsey took a step closer to Logan, the hate oozing out of every pore. “Don’t ever come near me, Logan. Never again, understand?” Then he swung on his heel and reached for the doorknob.

Logan said, “Lindsey...”

The cop barely looked back.

“We used to be friends,” Logan said.

“No more.”

“You used to be a good cop, too.”

“No more,” I put in, and Lindsey looked all the way back, his hand still on the door.

“When you finally realize that it’s possible for even a brain like you to be wrong, maybe we can be friends again. You’re not much smarter than me in police business and I say McBride never killed Minnow. Think about it sometime.”

He thought about it. For at least three seconds. Then he opened the door and slammed it behind him so hard it almost came off the hinges.

Logan shrugged sadly and turned back to my remains. “Feeling well enough to clear this place?”

“I certainly don’t feel bad enough to stay. Give me a lift, will you?”

He came over and hooked his hand under my arm, half dragging me upright. When he was sure I wasn’t going to topple over he got my clothes out of the closet and helped me into them. The whole operation took awhile, but I was fairly presentable except for the patch over my skull. The boys at the desk downstairs handed me a Manila envelope with my personal effects and that was the end of that. Logan had his Chevvy outside and got me into the seat next to him, then lit up a brace of smokes and handed me one.

He had to say it sometime. I was waiting for it and he said it. “Of all the lame-brain stupes you take the cake. How much trouble can a guy get into anyway?”

“A lot more than this.”

“Feel like talking?”

“Not especially, but if you’re curious, what would you like to know?”

“A few things the cops don’t seem to know. First about a dead man outside of town. He was a very special kind of dead man. He and two friends were part of an out-of-town team who specialize in rough stuff. The other two were found very nicely killed.”

“So?”

“He made the third. It might have been accidental but the chances are it wasn’t.”

“It was. At least he wasn’t murdered. I was chasing him and he ran off the road. He died without talking. Next question.”

Logan took another drag on the butt and nodded. “Same guy was seen in Eddie Packman’s place only a short time before. Then you beat up on Packman while the cops are looking and get tossed in the can. Why?”

“Because said dead man had a grand in new bills on him, that’s why. Eddie paid him off for the job he didn’t do. There must have been trouble about it because the guy came away mad.”

“So that’s why you went after Packman this morning.” He made a nice neat statement out of it.

I shook my head carefully. “That was only half why, friend. About a half hour before that somebody fired a hatful of bullets at me and they weren’t kidding. Whoever it was waited for me to come out of the Ship’n Shore, barreled up and let loose. Nobody got hurt, but I got pretty mad. I checked Eddie’s car and that could’ve been the one.”

“It wasn’t,” Logan said.

“What?”

“Eddie had been at the road stand for a good two hours before you came along. I checked.”

I remembered every curse word I had ever learned and strung them out in a row. When they were out of my system I dragged the butt down to my fingers and tossed it out to the sidewalk. “Logan,” I said, “this whole thing is a screwed-up mess if ever I saw one. Everybody wants me dead but the wrong people. A killer wants me dead. The cops want me dead. Not Servo or Packman, pal. Servo was behind me in the joint when I left and Packman was in the other place. Whoever shot at me this time was the same one who tried it from the roof top the last time, and if it wasn’t Servo or Packman this time it wasn’t Servo or Packman then. No, they don’t want me dead.”

Logan’s face tightened up until it was white. “Who says they don’t?” He kept staring out the windshield.

“Finish it.”

“Packman’s threatening to kill you on sight and Servo’s going to be in a blue funk when he finds out you aren’t where you can be gotten to easily.”

“Like in the clink?”

“Exactly.”

“Where he has men on his pay roll?”

“You got better eyes than I thought you had.”

“Then to whom do I owe the debt of putting up ten grand for my bail?”

Logan dropped his butt on the floor and stepped on it. “This’ll kill you. Your old boss put it up. Havis Gardiner.”

“Fine, but I don’t get it.”

“You will. Your direct-approach system seems to have had its effect. The guy thinks you’re innocent. Or at least your buddy was. His insurance investigators have uncovered a lead on Vera West.”

“Fine,” I said again. This time my voice shook.

“Not fine, kid. They think she’s dead.”

“Oh, hell, when’s it going to end!”

He turned around and glanced at me absently. “When somebody finds out why Robert Minnow died, that’s when.” His foot went down on the starter and churned the engine into life.

“I’ve been looking into that angle. I saw his wife.”

“Yeah?”

“It was a pretty good story.”

“Tell me about it.”

I told him. I gave it to him in detail right down to the last minute Robert Minnow had spent on this earth and all the while I was talking his face kept getting tighter and tighter. His eyes seemed to sink deeper into his head and he didn’t ask any questions. When I finished I let him mull over it for a while, hoping he’d make a break but nothing happened. After he thought about it ten minutes the scowl turned into a puzzled frown and stayed there. Hell, if that’s the way he wanted it, good enough. I wasn’t going to pump it out of him.

I said, “Where to?”

“You’re going to stay with me until I deliver you to Gardiner.”

“Okay, pal, whatever you say. But how about letting me get my car back. I wouldn’t want the friend it belongs to worried about it.”

It didn’t take more than an hour to collect the Ford and park it at a garage where they promised to have it ready before noon. All the slugs had gone through the glass and since I had knocked out what was left of it nobody could tell what happened. Logan let me get finished then hauled us back to the new office where he went in to see about some business.

When he came back I asked “Where to?”

“No place special for a while. I’m still on that murder case.”

“The dame?”

“Yeah. The cops are up a tree too. They’re trying to run down the truckers she was friendly with.”

“What about her roommate?”

“She took a powder when she heard about it. Got skunky drunk right after she identified the body and was last seen climbing into a truck for a necking party outside a joint on the highway.”

“Didn’t show up yet?”

“Naw, probably still on a binge. She’s just the type, according to those who knew her. Right now she’s probably sleeping if off if she isn’t already back at work. I’m going down there now and see what the score is. Look, if you don’t feel like running around I’ll drop you off at my place.”

“Hell, I’m okay.”

So at nine-thirty we pulled into the ABC Diner and I waited in the car while Logan went inside to ask his questions. He didn’t take long. Five minutes later he was back shaking his head. He got back in the car and started to pull out just as a prowl car drove up. Logan grimaced at the driver through the windshield. “You won’t get anyplace either, copper.”

“No soap?” I asked.

“Hell, she’s still missing. At least it isn’t anything new. Her boss said she took off like that a couple times before. Didn’t show for a week.” He reached in his pocket and flipped a snapshot out at me. “There’s what she looks like.”

I said, “Umm,” because she wasn’t bad at all. It was taken at a beach and she was oozing out of a Bikini suit like toothpaste out of a tube. She was some hunk of stuff if you didn’t mind a face that was too much lipstick, too arched eyebrows, too wide eyes and too little sense than to try to wear an up-sweep in a stiff wind. I gave him back the snap and settled down against the cushions. It was his working day, not mine. My head was putting up an argument against staying awake and I didn’t have anything to say about it. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

I kept dreaming about a blonde, a real honey blonde with a soft curving body and a beautiful face that had a wonderful radiance about it. She came close to me, smiling, her eyes telling me she loved me, then when she was only an arm’s length away the hands that had been reaching for my face grew sharp, curved talons and she raked at my eyes viciously. I batted them away and tried to grab her, but she stayed out of reach and laughed at me. I said, “Vera, I’ll kill you when I get you, so help me!”

The elbow that rammed my ribs wasn’t trying to be gentle. Logan gritted, “Wake up, damn it.”

“Where are we?” I came out of it fast, trying to see everything at once. The day had drifted into dusk and the cars coming toward us had their dimmers on. We were nestled against the curb beside a six-foot field-stone fence in a section of town I hadn’t seen before.

Logan let me get the sleep out of my eyes first. “Gardiner’s place. He wants to talk to you.”

“I been asleep all day?”

“You’re not kidding. Come on, snap out of it.”

So I snapped out of it. Logan locked the car then took me for a short walk around the field-stone fence to a wrought-iron gate that might have been swiped from Buckingham Palace. He rang a bell, we waited, then a tall gent in riding breeches did the honors of opening the gate. The guy was the type who could turn politeness on or off and since he had it on right then I gathered that we were expected.

There was a long walk up a flagstone path that curved through a series of gardens, ending abruptly at the foot of a gently sloping lawn that encircled a fine old house. A three or four car garage was set back in the shadows under the trees and behind that the faint outlines of a tennis court probing the sky with metal fingers of its fence corners.

“Some dump.”

Logan nodded curtly. “Some have and some don’t. I’ll let Gardiner have it. Taxes on this place must cost a fortune.”

“Yeah, it’s rough having to be a bank president and live in style. I feel for him.”

“Quit being class-conscious,” he said.

Evidently there was some communication between the gate and the house. The door opened as we were going up the steps and an elderly woman in a severe black dress smiled and ushered us in. She took Logan’s hat, escorted us into a walnut-paneled room lined with books and said, “Mr. Gardiner will be right with you, gentlemen. Make yourselves comfortable.”

We didn’t have time to do that. Havis Gardiner came in before we had gotten seated, nodded hello and pulled a chair up for himself. He was as distinct as the men of distinction come. Strictly sharp in a hundred-buck pin-stripe suit and looking like he just stepped out of the pages of a magazine. His graying hair was freshly trimmed around the edges and for a minute I was wishing it was me sitting over there instead of here with a bandage for a hat and a headache to keep it company. He waved for us to sit down and crossed his legs carefully enough to show he was teed off about something. Logan and I shared the couch and lit up a pair of cigarettes.

“You have something on your mind, Mr. Gardiner?” I asked.

“That’s a mild way of putting it. The way you seem to move events around to suit yourself is quite disturbing.”

“Like last night?”

“Like last night. Do you realize what you did?”

“Sort of. Maybe you better explain in case I missed a point.”

Gardiner looked at Logan. “Tell him, Alan. You’re more familiar with conditions than I am.”

“Hell, he won’t listen to me.”

“Tell him anyway.”

Logan tapped his butt into an ash tray. “We’re after two things. Robert Minnow’s murderer and a couple hundred thousand bucks. Your coming back here has spread this case wide open again as fars as we’re concerned. Until now you were tagged for both jobs, now there’s reason to believe that you never pulled anything.

“Let’s look at it this way. Minnow, as District Attorney, wasn’t concerned with the law-abiding element... it was the gang making Lyncastle a criminal paradise that he was after. He was doing fine until he happened to get called in on a routine case of suspected embezzlement, then all his good work was washed out when the embezzler killed him out of pure revenge. That embezzler was supposed to have been you.”

“Great,” I said.

“Shut up. However, after you ducked out of sight it made the case certain, and in one respect, even if it wasn’t you, the heat was directed away from the guilty party. Now we know this much. Vera West could have done the actual embezzling, though the details of it aren’t clear yet. The money involved was worth killing for, especially if the murder could be directed away from herself. We know too that after it happened Vera and Lenny Servo, who we’ll unofficially class as part of the criminal element of town, were pretty chummy until Vera disappeared.

“Now for the reasons for her disappearance. She might have stuck close to Lenny as long as he could afford her some protection, and there’s no doubt at all that he’s influential enough to give plenty of protection. She had enough dough to pay for that protection and enough to make the proposition interesting to him, too. But remember this, it was still big dough and if you could get away without splitting it, a couple hundred grand could make for some pretty fancy living. Vera might very well have taken that cash without cutting Lenny in and taken off for somewhere.”

Gardiner nodded approvingly. “Or,” he added, “Servo could have kept the money and killed Vera.”

“I like it better the first way,” I said.

Logan’s butt poised over the ash tray. “Why?”

“Because Servo was in love with her, that’s why. She left him flat somewhere along the line.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I get around,” I grinned. “You mentioned something about Vera being dead. What about it?”

Gardiner looked at me squarely. “The investigators for the insurance company have managed to trace Vera West out of the state. There’s no need going into detail of how they did it, but they found that she had spent some time in the state capital then moved on to New York. Her last known address was a small uptown hotel off Times Square, but after she left no further trace of her was found. The investigators went on the premise that she might have died, and checked with the New York police. Their morgue records showed two cases of drowning, both suicides, either of which could have been Miss West. Since both bodies had been buried in a pauper’s grave an exhumation for purposes of facial identification wasn’t practical. After so long a time decomposition would have made identification impossible.”

“So?” I said.

“So there’s still the money to be accounted for,” Logan said. “There was no indication on Vera’s having lived high.”

Gardiner saw the frown on my face. “The point is this, Johnny, the case is not exactly a local one any longer. Since it has been reopened, the insurance company for the bank has its own men assigned to the case working in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am quite aware of the situation that exists as far as our local police force is concerned, which is to say that in their minds the case is already settled except for a positive means to identify you. Now, you have been a sort of a center of the controversy. You can upset things if you aren’t careful.”

I stood up and flicked my butt into the fireplace. “In other words, I’m to pull in my horns?”

“Until the proper authorities have reached a conclusion.”

I could feel.Logan’s eyes on me, waiting to see what I’d do. I said, “The insurance company and the F. B. I., what are they looking for?”

After a moment’s pause Gardiner said, “Primarily a murderer, then the stolen funds.”

“That’s very good,” I told him, “very good. Me, I want a killer too. But that doesn’t come first. I want a whole town of people to know that Johnny McBride didn’t have anything to do with anything. I want to prove that there’s still something to be proud of in a name and you know how I’m going to do it?”

They were both waiting for me to tell them and I didn’t. Instead, I said, “Nope, the horns don’t get pulled in. Not even a little bit. Maybe the cops’ll trip over me some, but there’s more of a chance that somebody else will trip over me first.”

I expected an argument and didn’t get any. Gardiner shook his head in a slightly puzzled fashion. “I... understand quite well how you feel, Johnny. Please understand this. I’m not trying to interfere with your... crusade. I know the kind of people you’re dealing with and I don’t want you to be in further trouble before we come to the truth of the matter.”

“Like getting myself killed?”

“Yes.”

I looked down at Logan. “You feel the same way too?”

“More or less. You’re screwing the works up pretty nicely.”

“Then if Vera’s still alive and she pulled this stunt you’re willing to see her pay for it?”

He got mad first, then dropped his eyes. “If she’s behind it.”

I said, “Nuts,” and was going to say more. The words were there in my mouth but they didn’t come out. My mind was going around in cute little circles making ends meet here and there and a picture started to form that was vague in a way but with definite outlines that could paint a picture of murder.

So instead of all the words I had stored up I said, “Any chance of seeing the report of the investigation?”

Gardiner reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope of official documents with COPY printed across the face of them. Everything he had told me was there in black and white all signed and stamped with an official seal. When I looked them over I handed them back with a nod. “Okay,” I told them. “I’ll pull in my horns.”

Gardiner saw us to the door personally. The housekeeper handed Logan his hat and we went back down the path to the car. The poor guy looked pretty upset and it didn’t help his face any. He climbed behind the wheel, made a U-turn and picked his way back to town. When he got on the edge of the lights he said, “Where do you want to go?”

“Get my car back first. Take me over to the garage.”

“Then where?”

“Someplace you can’t go, chum.”

“A dame?”

“Natch.”

“That’ll probably keep you out of trouble more than anything else I can think of.”

“It will?”

“As long as you don’t marry one.” Logan sounded too damned sour.

He wheeled the car over to the garage, waited until I had paid the bill, then waved me over. “If you want me for anything I’ll probably be at the Circus Bar. I hope you don’t want me for anything. I’m going to get stinking drunk and I want to do it alone and without having you in my hair, understand?”

“You’re the one who’s got woman trouble.”

“Shut up.”

“Okay, okay.” I started to go back to the Ford then remembered something. “You know anything or anybody by the name of Harlan?”

“No. Is it important?”

“It could be. How about finding out? It may be a woman.”

“I’ll find out,” he said. I watched him roll up the window then pull away. When his taillight had turned off down the street I climbed in my heap, went about a hundred yards to the first diner I came to, parked, had something to eat, then found a phone booth around by the men’s room.

The operator took my number, rang and the velvet voice said hello.

“Johnny, Venus. I’ve been wondering how you staged a disappearing act last night.”

The voice kept its velvety tone, but that was all. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid it will have to be some other time.”

“No, you don’t understand. This is Johnny. You remember.”

“If you care to I’ll be glad to make arrangements later in the week.”

It finally came to me, I said, “Trouble, kid?”

“Yes, that’s right.” There was no hesitation at all in her answer.

“Bad trouble.”

She even made it sound good. “Certainly.”

“Cops?”

“No... no, of course not.”

“Hang on, Venus. Give me five minutes. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

I slid the phone back in its cradle, slapped a bill on the counter to pay for my meal and got out of there in a hurry. For a change I was lucky. Traffic was light enough for me to edge by on the outside lane and there weren’t any stop lights to hold me up. I cut across town at an angle, picked up the road I was looking for and came out on the street I wanted. It must have been too early for the customers because the cars weren’t bumper to bumper along the curb. I counted four on the one side and two on the other, then picked a spot behind a new Buick and killed the engine.

The house was completely dark. Not that it was any different that way because more than half the others were showing blank spaces where the windows were. But somebody had to be home. A short stocky girl came out of a place that was still lit up and walked toward me. She was whistling under her breath until she saw me then stopped. Her smile was as friendly as it was professional. “Looking for somebody special, stranger?”

“Sort of. What happened to everything? The last time I was here everything was lit up.”

The smile flashed again. “Please, it’s supper time. Everybody has to eat, you know, even us.”

“Oh.”

“Give you a ride to town if you want. You can come back with me later.”

“No... thanks anyway. I’ll stick around.”

She shrugged and crossed over to a small coupé. I watched her drive away before going up the walk to the house. I didn’t even bother checking around the place first. I didn’t give a damn if somebody was standing right inside the front door and in a way I was hoping somebody would be. I tried the knob and it didn’t turn so I gave the window alongside it a tentative shove. That didn’t budge either. But it did when I slid a knife blade between the crosspieces and pushed the lock open.

I couldn’t see a damn thing. Oh, I heard them all right, but I couldn’t see anything so I had to stand there until I could. Then things began to take shape and I walked across the room to the stairs where I could hear them fine, even the muffled sobbing of a woman and a sharp, ratty voice of a man. I heard them better at the top of the landing, and outside the room that opened off the end of the hall I could even make out their words.

When I kicked open the room I could see them too. Both of them.

Servo and Eddie Packman. And Venus.

She lay across a couch crying into her hands while Eddie tried to prop her up so he could slap her again. Servo was watching with a wise sneer twisting his mouth up on one side.

If he hadn’t tried to go for something he had in his pocket he might have ducked the first wild swing I let loose. It caught him right on the mouth and the remains of his teeth tore jagged holes through his lips into my fingers and he went into the wall with a sickening smash and lay there. Eddie was a kill-mad face looking at the blood on my hand and the wild expression I wore. A whole mouthful of yellow teeth bared in a crazy grimace and he did the same thing he had done the night before.

He came right for me and in that one second I saw two things... Eddie was just the right size to fit those impressions on the roof top where somebody had tried to turn me inside out with a slug and the other thing was a nasty switch-blade knife in his hand held the way a pro holds it, low and with the blade up ready to make one final swipe across a stomach or throat.

You don’t use your hands against a blade. You don’t kick or punch or rush cold steel. You do things and wonder later how you knew those things but don’t really care because they worked.

I had the pillow off the couch between my fingers and let him come. He was too mad to see what I was going to do until it happened. When the knife whipped out I went into it, caught the blade in the pillow and tore the damn thing out of his hand.

He tried to run. Sure, he made a good try, but he ran into my foot and fell face down on the floor and I jumped on his back. His mouth was bubbling out a scream when I pulled his arm up over his head and broke it with a snap that was the loudest thing I ever heard.

Maybe it was just my imagination, because just as it popped Venus let out a short, hoarse sound and something laid my scalp open again.

This time it was better than the other two times. There were flowers in the air and my head was on a soft warm pillow that was a leg attached to a face that had the red imprints of a hand on one side, but a mighty pretty face just the same. A lot of black hair tumbled down where I could reach up and feel it and when Venus saw I was still alive she smiled and bent down and kissed me.

“He hit you.”

“Hard, too.”

“He used the ash tray. I tried to yell, but he didn’t give me a chance.”

“What did he look like?”

“He didn’t have any teeth and his mouth looked like he was eating an apple.”

“Eddie...?”

Venus gave me a grin of sheer pleasure. “You broke his arm. He was still screaming when Lenny dragged him out. He wanted to kill you and was cursing Lenny out because he thought he had already done the job.”

I wanted to grin myself, but my head hurt too much. The ash tray was still there on the floor, a heavy metal job that would have made a pulp of my skull if it hadn’t been for the layers of bandage that softened the blow. The tape was torn and soggy with the blood that seeped through, but as far as I could tell I wasn’t any worse off than before.”

I rolled my head and looked up at her. “Chick, how come our friends left me for dead and didn’t try to knock you off too?”

“Now you’re not thinking, man. In this town you could have died and it would have been self-defense, especially with a witness on hand to tell how you attacked them first.”

“You’d tell a jury that?”

Her mouth made a smile again. “There wouldn’t be much else I could tell, could there? Living is fun. I’d like to live it without Lenny Servo around sometime.”

She was right. I put my head down and closed my eyes. “What’d they want with you?”

“Information. Why I was fooling around with you. They thought I had something to do with it.”

“Oh.”

She ran her fingers across my face, stroking it gently. “Feel pretty bad?”

“Not much worse than usual.”

“Sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

This time both her hands went under my head, lifted it, then laid it down gently on the cushions. She did something to the lamp, turned it so that its brightness diminished until there was nothing but a faint hint of light like that of dawn in the room. For the first time I saw how she looked, not trim and tailored like last night, but smooth and sleek in a clinging black dress that swept to the ground.

She moved languidly, turning on the record player, standing in front of it swaying to the faint but deep rhythm of a chorus of drums. She said, “I know things you might want to know.”

“What things?”

Her feet took two rapid steps and she spun gracefully so that her skirt lifted and swirled around her legs, the white of her thighs flashing momentarily against the black of the dress.

“About Lenny Servo and his Business Group. Do you know how powerful his organization is?”

“I have a good idea. He’s the money man behind the boys, isn’t he?”

The drums went into a single throbbing beat and she stood there with her legs apart, stiff at first, then melting slowly into a gentle undulation. I could see her half-closed eyes watching me, her mouth faintly smiling as her hands went to the buttons at her back.

Each word was timed with the drums, keeping pace to the motion of her body. “It’s more than that, Johnny. It’s a place like this and other places down the street. It’s places like the back rooms of night clubs where men have smokers and girls are hired for the occasion. It’s places where very candid pictures can be taken and casually shown to the right people afterward so they know that a club doesn’t have to be made out of wood or iron.”

She had the dress in her hand and curled it over her arm so that it was a curtain that parted briefly every now and then, a black curtain she stepped through and disappeared behind so fast you thought your eyes were playing a trick.

There was a glistening black wedge around her hips. Another crossing her breasts. Tight. Sensual. It wasn’t easy to speak. I finally said, “What else?”

“Servo was broke when he came to town. Somebody put him on his feet again.”

She smiled, turned her head and made the gesture of covering her eyes coyly. Her hips went back and back, then jerked forward. She did it again, laughed and tightened up so that every muscle in her body seemed to be working at once. “I used to be good, man.”

My mouth felt dry. “Who backed him?”

“Somebody said you must have. Nobody else in town had that kind of money. He couldn’t have gotten it any other way.”

She stopped dancing. She moved and dipped quickly and something fluttered to the floor. When she took up the rhythm again I saw through the curtain and the glistening black was only around her hips this time.

“That makes Lenny the boss... and me the sucker.”

The drums got louder and faster. The curtain whirled and parted too fast, much too fast. “Definitely,” I heard her say. Then, “There may be a pair of suckers. There’s more.”

“Spell it out.”

“I was told he came with a woman. A very possessive woman. She disappeared before he got to be a big shot.”

“Who told you this?”

“Don’t ask me that. There wasn’t any more information and she isn’t important enough to be dragged into anything.”

“Okay, kid,” I said. “You did good enough.”

Venus smiled again, did something too quick for me to follow, but I had a chance to see through the curtain before the music ended in a crazy, strained beat. The black around her waist was gone too. Then she threw the curtain at me. It missed.

It was supposed to cover my face so I wouldn’t have a chance to see her before she snapped the light off, but it missed and there she was, a symphony in black and white, lithe and graceful with sharply rising breasts that swelled with every breath she took, the muscles of her stomach a predatory ripple, quivering and dancing above the luscious taper of her legs.

Then the light was gone and I could only hear her moving toward me in the darkness. “I liked what you did to them, man,” she said.

“I’m glad of that.”

“Now I’ll show you what a real woman’s like. In style, of course.”

I said, “Of course,” and my voice sounded weak like it did the first time I had said it.

She showed me.