Vengeance Is Mine

VENGEANCE IS MINE

Mickey Spillane

First Published 1950

To Joe and George who are always ready for a new adventure and to Ward . . . who used to be

Chapter One

The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn’t let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.

I said, “Goddamn it, stop!”

Then one of them laughed and shoved me back on the bed.

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember. I was wound up like a spring and ready to bust. All I could see was the dead guy in the middle of the room and my gun. My gun! Somebody grabbed at my arm and hauled me upright and the questions started again. That was as much as I could take. I gave a hell of a kick and a fat face in a fedora pulled back out of focus and started to groan, all doubled up. Maybe I laughed, I don’t know. Something made a coarse, cackling sound.

Somebody said, “I’ll fix the bastard for that!” but before he could the door opened and the feet coming in stopped all the chatter except the groan and I knew Pat was there.

My mouth opened and my voice said, “Good old Pat, always to the rescue.”

He didn’t sound friendly. “Of all the damn fool times to be drunk. Did anyone touch this man!” Nobody answered. The fat face in the fedora was slumped in a chair and groaned again.

“He kicked me. The son of a bitch kicked me . . . right here.”

Another voice said, “That’s right, Captain. Marshall was questioning him and he kicked him.”

Pat grunted an answer and bent over me. “All right, Mike, get up. Come on, get up.” His hand wrapped around my wrist and levered me into a right angle on the edge of the bed.

“Cripes, I feel lousy,” I said.

“I’m afraid you’re going to feel a lot worse.” He took the wet rag and handed it to me. “Wipe your face off. You look like hell.”

I held the cloth in my hands and dropped my face into it. Some of the clouds broke up and disappeared. When the shaking stopped I was propped up and half pushed into the bathroom. The shower was a cold lash that bit into my skin, but it woke me up to the fact that I was a human being and not a soul floating in space. I took all I could stand and turned off the faucet myself, then stepped out. By that time Pat had a container of steaming coffee in my hand and practically poured it down my throat. I tried to grin at him over the top of it, only there was no humor in the grin and there was less in Pat’s tone.

His words came out of a disgusted snarl. “Cut the funny stuff, Mike. This time you’re in a jam and a good one. What the devil has gotten into you? Good God, do you have to go off the deep end every time you get tangled with a dame?”

“She wasn’t a dame, Pat.”

“Okay, she was a good kid and I know it. There’s still no excuse.”

I said something nasty. My tongue was still thick and uncoordinated, but he knew what I meant. I said it twice until he was sure to get it.

“Shut up, he told me. “You’re not the first one it happened to. What do I have to do, smack you in the teeth with the fact that you were in love with a woman that got killed until you finally catch on that there’s nothing more you can do about it?”

“Nuts. There were two of them.”

“All right, forget it. Do you know what’s outside there?”

“Sure, a corpse.”

“That’s right, a corpse. Just like that. Both of you in the same hotel room and one of you dead. He’s got your gun and you’re drunk. What about it?”

“I shot him. I was walking in my sleep and I shot him.”

This time Pat said the nasty word. “Quit lousing me up, Mike. I want to find out what happened.”

I waved my thumb toward the other room. “Where’d the goons come from?”

“They’re policemen, Mike. They’re policemen just like me and they want to know the same things I do. At three o’clock the couple next door heard what they thought was a shot. They attributed it to a street noise until the maid walked in this morning and saw the guy on the floor and passed out in the doorway. Somebody called the cops and there it was. Now, what happened?”

“I’ll be damned if I know,” I said.

“You’ll be damned if you don’t.”

I looked at Pat, my pal, my buddy. Captain Patrick Chambers, Homicide Department of New York’s finest. He didn’t look happy.

I felt a little sick and got the lid of the bowl up just in time. Pat let me finish and wash my mouth out with water, then he handed me my clothes. “Get dressed.” His mouth crinkled up and he shook his head disgustedly.

My hands were shaking so hard I started to curse the buttons on my shirt. I got my tie under my collar but I couldn’t knot it, so I let the damn thing hang. Pat held my coat and I slid into it, thankful that a guy can still be a friend even when he’s teed off at you.

Fat Face in the fedora was still in the chair when I came out of the bathroom, only this time he was in focus and not groaning so much. If Pat hadn’t been there he would have laid me out with the working end of a billy and laughed while he did it. Not by himself, though.

The two uniformed patrolmen were from a police car and the other two were plainclothes men from the local precinct. I didn’t know any of them and none of them knew me, so we were even. The two plainclothes men and one cop watched Pat with a knowledge behind their eyes that said, “So it’s one of those things, eh?”

Pat put them straight pretty fast. He shoved a chair under me and took one himself. “Start from the beginning,” he said. “I want all of it, Mike, every single detail.”

I leaned back and looked at the body on the floor. Someone had had the decency to cover it with a sheet. “His name is Chester Wheeler. He owns a department store in Columbus, Ohio. The store’s been in his family a long time. He’s got a wife and two kids. He was in New York on a buying tour for his business.” I looked at Pat and waited.

“Go on Mike.”

“I met him in 1945, just after I got back from overseas. We were in Cincinnati during the time when hotel rooms were scarce. I had a room with twin beds and he was sleeping in the lobby. I invited him up to share a bed and he took me up, on it. Then he was a captain in the Air Force, some kind of a purchasing agent, working out of Washington. We got drunk together in the morning, split up in the afternoon, and I didn’t see him again until last night. I ran into him in a bar where he was brooding into a beer feeling sorry for himself and we had a great reunion. I remember we changed bars about half a dozen times, then he suggested we park here for the night and we did. I bought a bottle and we finished it after we got up here. I think he began to get maudlin before we hit the sack but I can’t remember all the details. The next thing I knew somebody was beating my head trying to get me up.”

“Is that all?”

“Every bit of it, Pat.”

He stood up and looked around the room. One of the plainclothes men anticipated his question and remarked, “Everything is untouched, sir.”

Pat nodded and knelt over to look at the body. I would like to have taken a look myself, but my stomach wouldn’t stand it. Pat didn’t speak to anyone in particular when he said, “Wound self-inflicted. No doubt about it.” His head jerked up in my direction. “You know, you’re going to lose your license over this, Mike.”

“I don’t know why. I didn’t shoot him,” I said sourly.

Fat Face sneered, “How do you know you didn’t, wise guy?”

“I never shoot people when I’m drunk,” I snarled, “unless they push me around and make like they’re tough.”

“Wise guy.”

“Yeah, real wise.”

“Cut it out, the both of you,” Pat snapped. Fat Face shut up and let me alone with my hangover. I slouched across the room to a chair in the corner and slid down into it. Pat was having a conference over by the door that wound up with everyone but Fat Face leaving. The door hadn’t closed shut before the coroner came in, complete with wicker basket and pallbearers.

The little men in my head started up with their hammers and chisels, so I closed my eyes and let my ears do the work. The medical examiner and the cops reached the same conclusion. It was my gun that shot him. A big round .45 fired at very close range. The fingerprint boys picked my prints off the rod and the other guy’s too. His were on top.

A call came in for Pat right then and while he was on the phone I heard Fat Face suggest something to the M.E. that brought me straight up in the chair.

Fat Face said, “. . . Murder just as easy. They were drunk and had an argument. Bright eyes plugged him and put the gun in his hand to make it look like suicide. Then he soused himself up with liquor to make it look good.”

The M.E. bobbed his head. “Reasonable enough.”

“You dirty fat slob, you!” I came out of the chair like a shot and spun him around on his heels. Cop or no cop, I would have caved his nose in for him if Pat hadn’t dropped the phone and stepped in between us. This time he took my arm and didn’t let go until he finished his phone call. When the body had been hoisted into the basket and carted off Pat unbuttoned his coat and motioned for me to sit on the bed.

I sat.

He had his hands in his pockets and he spoke as much to the plainclothes man as to me. His words didn’t come easy, but he didn’t stumble over them exactly. “I’ve been waiting for this, Mike. You and that damn gun of yours were bound to get in trouble.”

“Stow it, Pat. You know I didn’t shoot the guy.”

“Do I?”

“Hell, you ought to . . .?”

“Do you know you didn’t?”

“It was a closed room and I was so far gone I didn’t even hear the gun go off. You’ll get a paraffin test on the body that will prove it anyway. I’ll, go for one myself and that will settle that. What are we jawing about?”

“About you and that rod, that’s what! If the guy was a suicide you’ll be up the creek without a license. They don’t like for people to be carrying firearms and a load of liquor too.”

He had me cold on that one. His eyes swept the room, seeing the clothes on the backs of the chairs, the empty whisky bottle on the windowsill, the stubs of cigarettes scattered all over the floor. My gun was on the desk along with a spent casing, with the white powder clotting in the oil, still showing the prints.

Pat closed his eyes and grimaced. “Let’s go, Mike,” he said.

I put on my coat over the empty holster and squeezed between the two of them for the ride down to headquarters. There was a parking-lot ticket in my pocket, so I didn’t worry about my heap.

Fat Face had that look in his eyes that said he was hoping I’d make a break for it so he could bounce me one. It was rough having to disappoint the guy.

For once I was glad to have a friend in the department. Pat ran the tests off on me himself and had me stick around downstairs until the report was finished. I had the ash tray half filled before he came back down. “What did it show?” I asked him.

“You’re clean enough. The corpse carried the powder burns all right.”

“That’s a relief.”

His eyebrows went up. “Is it? The D.A. wants to have a little talk with you. It seems that you managed to find an awfully fussy hotel to play around in. The manager raised a stink and carried it all the way upstairs. Ready?”

I got up and followed him to the elevators, cursing my luck for running into an old buddy. What the hell got into the guy anyway? It would have been just as easy for him to jump out the damn window. The elevator stopped and we got out. It would have been better if there was an organ playing a dirge. I was right in the spirit for it.

The D.A. was a guy who had his charming moments, only this time there weren’t any photographers around. His face wore a tailor-made look of sarcasm and there was ice in his words. He told me to sit down then perched himself on the edge of the desk. While Pat was running through the details he never took his eyes off me nor let his expression change one bit. If he thought he was getting under my skin with his professional leer he had another think coming. I was just about to tell him he looked like a frog when he beat me to it.

“You’re done in this town, Mr. Hammer, I suppose you know that.”

What the hell could I say? He held all the cards.

He slid off the desk and stood at parade rest so I could admire his physique, I guess. “There were times when you proved yourself quite useful . . . and quite trying. You let yourself get out of hand once too often. I’m sorry it happened this way, but it’s my opinion that the city is better off without you or your services.” The D.A. was getting a big whang out of this.

Pat shot him a dirty look, but kept his mouth shut. I wasn’t a clam. “Then I’m just another citizen again?”

“That’s right, with no license and no gun. Nor will you ever have one again.”

“Are you booking me for anything?”

“I can’t very well. I wish I could.”

He must have read what was coming in the lopsided grin I gave him because he got red from his collar up. “For a D.A. you’re a pain in the behind,” I said. “If it wasn’t for me the papers would have run you in the comic section long ago.”

“That will be enough, Mr. Hammer!”

“Shut up your yap or arrest me, otherwise I’ll exercise my rights as a citizen, and one of ‘em happens to be objecting to the actions of any public official. You’ve been after my hide ever since you walked into this office because I had sense enough to know where to look for a few killers. It made nice copy for the press and you didn’t even get an honorable mention. All I have to say is this . . . it’s a damn good thing the police are civil service. They have to have a little bit of common sense to get where they are. Maybe you were a good lawyer . . . you should have kept at it and quit trying to be king of the cops.”

“Get out of here!” His voice was a short fuse ready to explode any second. I stood up and jammed on my hat. Pat was holding the door open. The D.A. said, “The very first time you so much as speed down Broadway, I’m going to see to it personally that you’re slapped with every charge in the book. That will make good press copy too.”

I stopped with my hand on the knob and sneered at him, then Pat jerked my sleeve and I closed the door. In the hallway he kept his peace until we reached the stairs; it was as long as he could hold it. “You’re a fool, Mike.”

“Nuts, Pat. It was his game all the way.”

“You could keep your trap closed, couldn’t you?”

“No!” I licked the dryness from my lips and stuck a cigarette in my mouth. “He’s been ready for me too long now. The jerk was happy to give me the shaft.”

“So you’re out of business.”

“Yeah. I’ll open up a grocery store.”

“It isn’t that funny, Mike. You’re a private investigator and a good cop when you have to be. There were times when I was glad to have you around. It’s over now. Come on in my office . . . we might as well have a drink on it.” He ushered me into his sanctum sanctorum and waved me into a chair. The bottom drawer of his desk had a special niche for a pint bottle and a few glasses, carefully concealed under a welter of blank forms. Pat drew two and handed one over to me. We toasted each other in silence, then spilled them down.

“It was a pretty good show while it lasted,” Pat said.

“Sure was,” I agreed, “sure was. What happens now?”

He put the bottle and glasses away and dropped into the swivel chair behind his desk. “You’ll be called in if there’s an inquest. The D.A. is liable to make it hard on you out of meanness. Meanwhile, you’re clear to do what you please. I vouched for you. Besides, you’re too well known to the boys to try to drop out of sight.”

“Buy your bread and butter from me, will you?”

Pat let out a laugh. “I wish you wouldn’t take it so lightly. You’re in the little black book right now on the special S-list.”

I pulled out my wallet and slid my license out of the card case and threw it on his desk. “I won’t be needing that any more.”

He picked it up and examined it sourly. A large envelope on the filing cabinet held my gun and the report sheet. He clipped the card to the form and started to put it back. On second thought he slid the magazine out of the rod and swore. “That’s nice. They put it in here with a full load.” He used his thumb to jack the shells out of the clip, spilling them on the desk.

“Want to kiss old betsy good-by, Mike?”

When I didn’t answer he said, “What are you thinking of?” My eyes were squinted almost shut and I started to grin again. “Nothing,” I said, “nothing at all.”

He frowned at me while he dumped the stuff back in the envelope and closed it. My grin spread and he started to et mad. “All right, damn it, what’s so funny? I know that look . . . I’ve seen it often enough. What’s going through that feeble mind of yours?”

“Just thoughts, Pat. Don’t be so hard on a poor unemployed pal, will you?”

“Let’s hear those thoughts.”

I picked a cigarette out of the container on his desk, then put it back after reading the label. “I was just thinking of a way to et that ticket back, that’s all.”

That seemed to relieve him. He sat down and tugged at his tie. “It’ll be a good trick if you can work it. I can’t see how you can.”

I thumbed a match and lit up a smoke. “It won’t be hard.”

“No? You think the D.A. will mail it back to you with his apologies?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Pat kicked the swivel chair all the way around and glared at me. “You haven’t got your gun any more, you can’t hold him up.

“No,” I laughed, “but I can make a deal with him. Either he does mail it back with his apologies or I’ll make a sap out of him.”

His palms cracked the desk and he was all cop again. This much wasn’t a game. “Do you know anything, Mike?”

“No more than you. Everything I told you was the truth. It’ll be easy to check and your laboratory backs up my statements. The guy was a suicide. I agree with you. He shot himself to pieces and I don’t know why or when. All I know is where and that doesn’t help. Now, have you heard enough?”

“No, you bastard, I haven’t.” This time he was grinning back at me. I shoved my hat on and left him there still grinning. When I closed the door I heard him kick the desk and swear to himself.

I walked out into the glaring brightness of midday, whistling through my teeth, though by rights I should have been in a blue funk. I hopped in a cab at the corner and gave him my office address. All the way uptown I kept thinking about Chester Wheeler, or what was left of him on the rug. An out-and-out suicide and my gun in his mitt, they said. Private citizen Michael Hammer, that’s me. No ticket, no gun and no business, even my hangover was gone. The driver let me out in front of my building and I paid him off, walked in and pushed the bell for the elevator.

Velda was curled up in my big leather chair, her head buried in the paper. When I walked in she dropped it and looked at me. There were streaks across her face from wiping away the tears and her eyes were red. She tried to say something, sobbed and bit her lip.

“Take it easy, honey.” I threw my coat on the rack and pulled her to her feet.

“Oh, Mike, what happened?” It had been a long time since I’d seen Velda playing woman like this. My great big beautiful secretary was human after all. She was better this way.

I put my arms around her, running my fingers through the sleek midnight of her hair. I squeezed her gently and she put her head against my cheek. “Cut it, sugar, nothing is that bad. They took away my ticket and made me a Joe Doe. The D.A. finally got me where he wanted me.”

She shook her hair back and gave me a light tap in the ribs. “That insipid little squirt! I hope you clobbered him good!”

I grinned at her G.I. talk. “I called him a name, that’s what I did.”

“You should have clobbered him!” Her head went down on

my shoulder and sniffed. “I’m sorry, Mike. I feel like a jerk for crying.”

She blew her nose on my fancy pocket handkerchief and I steered her over to the desk. “Get the sherry, Velda. Pat and I had a drink to the dissolution of the Mike Hammer enterprise. Now we’ll drink to the new business. The S.P.C.D., Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Detectives.”

Velda brought out the makings and poured two short ones. “It isn’t that funny, Mike.”

“I’ve been hearing that all morning. The funny part is that it’s very funny.”

The sherry went down and we had another. I lit a pair of smokes and stuck one between her lips. “Tell me about it,” she said. The tears were gone now. Curiosity and a little anger were in her eyes, making them snap. For the second time today I rehashed what I know of it, bringing the story right through the set-up in the D.A.’s office.

When I finished she said some very unladylike curses and threw her cigarette at the waste basket. “Damn these public officials and their petty grievances, Mike. They’ll climb over anybody to get to the top. I wish I could do something instead of sitting here answering your mail. I’d like to turn that pretty boy inside out!” She threw herself into the leather chair and drew her legs up under her.

I reached out a toe and flipped her skirt down. On some people legs are just to reach the ground. On Velda they were a hell of a distraction. “Your days of answering the mail are over, kid.”

Her eyes got wet again, but she tried to smile it off. “I know. I can always get a job in a department store. What will you do?”

“Where’s your native ingenuity? You used to be full of ideas.” I poured another glass of sherry and sipped it, watching her. For a minute she chewed on her fingernail, then raised her head to give me a puzzled frown.

“What are you getting at, Mike?”

Her bag, green leather shoulder-strap affair, was lying on the desk. I raised it and let it fall. It hit the polished wood with a dull clunk. “You have a gun and a license to carry it, haven’t you? And you have a private operator’s ticket yourself, haven’t you? Okay, from now on the business is yours. I’ll do the legwork.”

A twitch pulled her mouth into a peculiar grin as she realized what I meant. “You’ll like that, too, won’t you?”

“What?”

“The legwork.”

I slid off the edge of the desk and stood in front of her. With Velda I didn’t take chances. I reached out a toe again and flipped her dress up to the top of her sheer nylons. She would have made a beautiful calendar. “If I went for any I’d go for yours, but I’m afraid of that rod you use for ballast in your handbag.”

Her smile was a funny thing that crept up into her eyes and laughed at me from there. I just looked at her, a secretary with a built-in stand-off that had more on the ball than any of the devil’s helpers I had ever seen and could hold me over the barrel without saying a word.

“You’re the boss now,” I said. “We’ll forget about the mail and concentrate on a very special detail . . . getting my license and my gun back where it belongs. The D.A. made me out a joker and put the screws on good. If he doesn’t send ‘em back with a nice, sweet note, the newspapers are going to wheel out the chopping block for the guy.

“I won’t even tell you how to operate. You can call the signals and carry the ball yourself if you want to. I’ll only stick my nose in during the practice sessions. But if you’re smart, you’ll concentrate on the body of Chester Wheeler. When he was alive he was a pretty nice guy, a regular family man. All the grisly details are in the paper there and you can start from that. Meanwhile, I’ll be around breaking ground for you and you’ll spot my tracks here and there. You’ll find some signed blank checks in the drawer for your expense account.”

I filled the sherry glass up again and drained it in one gulp. It was a beautiful day, a real dilly. My face cracked into a smile that was followed by a short rumble of pleasure.

Once more Velda said, “It isn’t funny, Mike.”

I lit another cigarette and pushed my hat back on my head. “You’ll never know how real funny it actually is, kid. You see, only one bullet killed Chester Wheeler. I always carry six in the clip and when Pat emptied it out there were only four of them.”

Velda was watching me with the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth. There wasn’t any kitten-softness about her now. She was big and she was lovely, with the kind of curves that made you want to turn around and have another look. The lush fullness of her lips had tightened into the faintest kind of snarl and her eyes were the carnivorous eyes you could expect to see in the jungle watching you from behind a clump of bushes.

I said it slowly. “If you had that gun in your hand pointed at somebody’s belly, could you pull the trigger and stand ready to pull it again if you had to?”

She pulled her tongue back and let her teeth close together. “I wouldn’t have to pull it twice. Not now I wouldn’t.”

She was watching me as I walked across the office. I looked over my shoulder and waved so-long, then closed the door fast. She still hadn’t bothered to pull her dress back down, and like I said, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Someday she wasn’t going to get so smart with me. Or maybe she would.

Chapter Two

The papers were full of it that night. The tabloids had me splashed all over the front pages and part of the middle section. The same guys that hung on my tail when they had wanted a story took me apart at the seams in their columns. Only one bothered to be sentimental about it. He wrote me an epitaph. In rhyme. The D.A. was probably laughing his head off.

In another hour he’d be crying in his beer, the jerk.

I finished off an early supper and stacked the dishes in the sink. They could wait. For fifteen minutes I steamed under a shower until my skin turned pink, then suffered under a cold spray for a few seconds before I stepped out and let a puddle spread around my feet. When I finished shaving I climbed into a freshly pressed suit and transferred a few hundred bucks from the top drawer to my wallet.

I took a look in the mirror and snorted. I could have been a man of distinction except for my face and the loose space in my jacket that was supposed to fit around a rod. That at least I could fix. I strapped on a mighty empty holster to fill out the space under my arm and felt better about it. I looked in the mirror again and grimaced. It was a hell of a shame that I wasn’t handsome.

Last night was a vague shadow with only a few bright spots, but before I started to backtrack there was something I wanted to do. It was just past seven o’clock when I found a parking place near the hotel that had caused all the trouble. It was one of those old-fashioned places that catered to even older-fashioned people

and no fooling around. Single girls couldn’t even register there unless they were over eighty. Before I went in I snapped the back off my watch, pushed out the works and dropped it in my shirt pocket.

The desk clerk wasn’t glad to see me. His hand started for the telephone, stopped, then descended on the desk bell three times, loud and clear. When a burly-shouldered individual who kept the lobby free of loiterers appeared the clerk looked a little better. At least his shaking stopped.

There wasn’t any need to identify myself. “I lost the works out of my watch last night. I want ‘em back.”

“But . . . the room hasn’t been cleaned yet,” he blurted.

“I want ‘em now,” I repeated. I held out a thick, hairy wrist and tapped the empty case. The burly guy peered over my shoulder interestedly.

“But . . .”

“Now.”

The house dick said, “I’ll go up with ‘im and we can look for it, George.”

Evidently the clerk was glad to have his decisions made for him, because he handed over the keys and seemed happy at last.

“This way.” The dick nudged me with his elbow and I followed him. In the elevator he stood with his hands behind his back and glared at the ceiling. He came out of it at the fourth floor to usher me down the hall where he put the key in the lock of number 402.

Nothing had changed. The blood was still on the floor, the beds unmade and the white powder sprinkled liberally around. The dick stood at the door with his arms crossed and kept his eyes on me while I poked around under the furniture.

I went through the room from top to bottom, taking my time about it. The dick got impatient and began tapping his fingernails against the wall. When there was no place left to look the dick said, “It ain’t here. Come on.”

“Who’s been here since the cops left?”

“Nobody, feller, not even the cleaning girls. Let’s get going. You probably lost that watch in a bar somewhere.”

I didn’t answer him. I had flipped back the covers of the bed I slept in and saw the hole right in the edge of the mattress. The slug had entered the stuffing right near the top and another inch higher and I would have been singing tenor and forgetting about shaving.

Mattress filling can stop a slug like a steel plate and it couldn’t

have gone in very far, but when I probed the hole with my forefinger all I felt was horsehair and coil springs. The bullet was gone. Someone had beaten me to it. Beaten me to a couple of things . . . the empty shell case was gone too.

I put on a real bright act when I made like I found my watch works under the covers. I held it up for the guy to see then shoved it back in the case. He grunted. “All right, all right. Let’s get moving.” I gave him what was supposed to be a smile of gratitude and walked out. He stuck with me all the way down and was even standing in the doorway to see me go down the street to my car.

Before long he was going to catch all kinds of hell.

So would the desk clerk when the cops got wise to the fact that Chester Wheeler was no more of a suicide than I was. My late friend of the night before had been very neatly murdered.

And I was due for a little bit of hell myself.

I found a saloon with an empty parking place right out in front and threw a buck on the bar. When my beer came I took a nickel from the change and squeezed into a phone booth down the end. It was late, but Pat wasn’t a guy to leave his office until things were cleaned up and I was lucky this time.

I said, “Michael Q. Citizen, speaking.”

He laughed into the receiver. “How’s the grocery business?”

“Booming, Pat, really booming. I have a large order for some freshly murdered meat.”

“What’s that?”

“Just a figure of speech.”

Oh.”

“By the way, how clear am I on the Wheeler death?”

I could almost see the puzzled frown on his face . . . “As far as I can see you can’t be held for anything. Why?”

“Just curious. Look, the boys in blue were in that room a long time before I came back to the land of the living. Did they poke around much?”

“No, I don’t think so. It was pretty obvious what happened.”

“They take anything out with them?”

“The body,” he said, “your gun, a shell casing, and Wheeler’s personal belongings.”

“That was all?”

“Uh-huh.”

I paused a moment, then; “Don’t suicides generally leave a note, Pat?”

“Generally, yes. That happens when they’re sober and there isn’t a witness. If they’ve thought about it awhile they usually try to explain. In a fit of passion they rarely waste the time.

“Wheeler wasn’t a passionate man, I don’t think,” I told him.

“From all appearances he was an upright businessman.”

“I thought of that. It was peculiar, wasn’t it? Did he look like the suicide type to you?”

“Nope.”

“And he didn’t mention anything along that line beforehand.

Hmmm.”

I let a few seconds go by. “Pat . . . how many slugs were left in my rod?”

“Four, weren’t there?”

“Correct. And I hadn’t shot it since I was on the target range with you last week.”

“So . . . ?” His voice had an uneasy tinge to it.

Real softly I said, “That gun never has less than six in it, chum.” If he had been a woman he would have screamed. Instead he bellowed into the phone and I wouldn’t answer him. I heard him shouting, “Mike, goddamn it, answer me . . . Mike!”

I laughed just once to let him know I was still there and hung up.

All he needed was five minutes. By that time he’d have the D.A. cornered in his office like a scared rabbit. Sure, the D.A. was big stuff, but Pat was no slouch either. He’d tell that guy off with a mouthful of words that would make his hair stand on end and the fair-haired boy of the courts wouldn’t dare do a thing.

It was getting funnier all the time. I went back to the bar and drank my beer.

The after-supper crowd began drifting in and taking places at the bar. At eight-thirty I called Velda but she wasn’t home. I tried again an hour later and she still wasn’t there. She wasn’t at the office, either. Maybe she was out hiring a sign-painter to change the name on the door.

When I finally shifted into the corner up against the cigarette machine I started to think. It didn’t come easy because there hadn’t been any reason to remember then and we had let the booze flow free. Last night.

Famous last words.

Last night the both of us had thrown five years to the wind and brought the war back to the present. We were buddies again. We weren’t the kind of buddies you get to be when you eat and sleep and fight with a guy, but we were buddies. We were two-strong and fighting the war by ourselves. We were two guys who had met as comrades-in-arms, happy to be on the right side and giving all we had. For one night way back there we had been drinking buddies until we shook hands to go finish the war. Was that the way it was supposed to be? Did some odd quirk of fate throw us together purposely so that later we’d meet again?

Last night I had met him and drunk with him. We talked, we drank some more. Was he happy? He was after we ran into each other. Before that he had been curled over a drink at the bar. He could have been brooding. He could have been thinking. But he was happy as hell to see me again! Whatever it was he had been thinking about was kicked aside along with those five years and we had ourselves one hell of a drinking bout. Sure, we fought the war again. We did the same thing anybody else did when they caught up with someone they knew from those days. We talked it and we fought it and we were buddies again decked out in the same uniform ready to give everything for the other guy on our side whether we knew him or not. But the war had to give out sometime. The peace always has to come when people get too tired of fighting. And yet, it was the end of our talk that brought the cloud back to his eyes. He hadn’t wanted it to stop or be diverted into other channels. He told me he had been in town a week and was getting set to go home. The whole deal was a business trip to do some buying for his store.

Yeah, we were buddies. We weren’t long, but we were buddies good. If we had both been in the jungle and some slimy Jap had picked him off I would have rammed the butt of a rifle down the brown bastard’s throat for it. He would have done the same for me, too. But we weren’t in any damn jungle. We were right here in New York City where murder wasn’t supposed to happen and did all the time. A guy I liked comes into my own city and a week later he’s dead as hell.

One week. What did he do? What happened? Who was he with? Where was the excuse for murder, here or in Columbus, Ohio? A whole damn week. I slapped my hat on the stool to reserve it and took another few nickels from my change and wormed into the phone booth again. There was one other question, what was I going to do about it? My face started to go tight again and I knew the answer.

I dialed two numbers. The second got my man. He was a private investigator the same as I used to be except that he was essentially honest and hardworking. His name was Joe Gill and he owed me a favor that he and his staff could begin repaying as of now.

I said, “This is Mike, Joe. Remember me?”

“Hell,” he laughed, “with all your publicity how could I forget you? I hope you aren’t after a job.”

“Not exactly. Look, you tied up right now?”

“Well . . . no. Something on your mind?”

“Plenty, friend. You still doing insurance work?”

Joe grunted an assent. “That’s all I’m doing. You can keep your guns and your tough guys. I’ll track down missing beneficiaries.”

“Care to do me a favor, Joe?”

He only hesitated a second. “Glad to, Mike. You’ve steered me straight plenty of times. Just name it.”

“Swell. This guy that died in the hotel room with me, Chester Wheeler--I want some information on him. Not a history . . . I just want him backtracked over the past week. He’s been in town doing some buying for his store in Columbus, Ohio, and I want a record of what he’d done since he hit town. Think it can be done?”

I could hear his pencil rasping on paper. “Give me a few hours. I’ll start it myself and put the chain gang out on the details. Where can I reach you?

I thought for a moment, then told him, “Try the Greenwood Hotel. It’s a little dump on a side street up in the Eighties. They don’t ask questions there.”

“Right. See you later.”

I cradled the receiver and picked my way back through the crowd to the bar. My hat was hanging over a pin-up lamp on the wall and my seat was occupied and the guy was spending my money for beer.

I didn’t get mad, though. The guy was Pat.

The bartender put down another beer and took some more of my change. I said, “How’s tricks, kid?”

Pat turned around slowly and looked at me for the first time. His eyes were clouded and his mouth had a grim twist to it. He looked tired and worried. “There’s a back room, Mike. Let’s go sit down. I want to talk to you.”

I gulped my beer down and carried a full one back to the booth. When I slid my deck of Luckies across the table to him he shook his head and waited until I lit up. I asked, “How did you find me?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he popped one of his own, very softly, very forcefully. He wasn’t kidding around. “What’s it all about, Mike?”

“What’s what?”

“You know.” He leaned forward on his arms, never taking his eyes off my face. “Mike, I’m not going to get excited this time. I’m not going to let you talk me into losing a lot of sleep any more. I’m a police officer, or at least I’m supposed to be. Right now I’m treating this like it might be something important and like you know more about it than I do. I’m asking questions that are going to be answered. What’s going on?”

Smoke drifted into my eyes and I squinted them almost shut. “Supposing I told you Chester Wheeler was murdered, Pat.”

“I’d ask how, then who.”

“I don’t know how and I don’t know who.”

“Then why, Mike? Why is it murder?”

“Two shots were fired from my gun, that’s why.”

He gave the table a rap with his knuckles. “Damn you, Mike, come out with it! We’re friends, but I’m tired of being hamstrung. You’re forever smelling murder where murder isn’t and making it come out right. Play it square!”

“Don’t I always?”

“With reservations!”

I gave a sour laugh. “Two shots out of that rod. Isn’t that enough?”

“Not for me it isn’t. Is that all you have?” I nodded and dragged in on the butt.

Pat’s face seemed to soften and he let the air out of his lungs slowly. He even smiled a little. “I guess that’s that, Mike. I’m glad I didn’t get sweated up about it.”

I snubbed the cigarette out on the table top. “Now you’ve got me going. What are you working up to?”

“Precedent, Mike. I’m speaking of past suicides.”

“What about ‘em?”

“Every so often we find a suicide with a bullet in his head. The room has been liberally peppered with bullets, to quote a cliché. In other words, they’ll actually take the gun away from the target but pull the trigger anyway. They keep doing it until they finally have nerve enough to keep it there. Most guys can’t handle an automatic anyway and they fire a shot to make sure they know how it operates.”

“And that makes Wheeler a bona fide suicide, right?”

He grinned at the sneer on my face. “Not altogether. When you pulled your little razzmatazz about the slugs in your gun I went up in the air and had a handful of experts dig up Wheeler’s itinerary and we located a business friend he had been with the day before he died. He said Wheeler was unusually depressed and talked of suicide several times. Apparently his business was on the downgrade.”

“Who was the guy, Pat?”

“A handbag manufacturer, Emil Perry. Well, if you have any complaints, come see me, but no more scares, Mike. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I hissed. “You still didn’t say how you found me.”

“I traced your call, friend citizen. It came from a bar and I knew you’d stay there awhile. I took my time at the hotel checking your story. And, er . . . yes, I did find the bullet hole in the mattress.”

“I suppose you found the bullet too?”

“Why yes,, we did. The shell case too.” I sat there rigid, waiting. “It was right out there in the hall where you dropped it, Mike. I wish you’d quit trying to give this an element of mystery just to get me in on it.”

“You chump!”

“Can it, Mike. The house dick set me straight.”

I was standing up facing him and I could feel the mad running right down into my shoes. “I thought you were smart, Pat. You chump!”

This time he winked. “No more games, huh, Mike?” He grinned at me a second and left me standing there watching his back. Now I was playing games. Hot dog!

I thought I was swearing under my breath until a couple of mugs heard their tomatoes complain and started to give me hell. When they saw my face they told their dames to mind their business and went on drinking.

Well, I asked for it. I played it cute and Pat played it cuter. Maybe I was the chump. Maybe Wheeler did kill himself. Maybe he carne back from the morgue and tried to slip out with the slug and the shell too.

I sure as a four letter word didn’t. I picked up my pack of butts and went out on the street for a smell of fresh air that wasn’t jammed with problems. After a few deep breaths I felt better.

Down on the corner a drugstore was getting rid of its counter customers and I walked in past the tables of novelties and cosmetics to a row of phone booths in the back. I pulled the Manhattan directory out of the rack and began thumbing through it. When I finished I did the same thing with the Brooklyn book. I didn’t learn anything there so I pulled up the Bronx listing and found an Emil Perry who lived in one of the better residential sections of the community.

At ten minutes after eleven I parked outside a red brick one-family house and killed the motor. The car in front of me was a new Cadillac sedan with all the trimmings and the side door bore two gold initials in Old English script, E.P.

There was a brass knocker on the door of the house, embossed with the same initials, but I didn’t use it. I had the thing raised when I happened to glance in the window. If the guy was Emil Perry, he was big and fat with a fortune in jewels stuck in his tie and flashing on his fingers. He was talking to somebody out of sight and licking his lips between every word.

You should have seen his face. He was scared silly.

I let the knocker down easy and eased back into the shadows. When I looked at my watch ten minutes had gone by and nothing happened. I could see the window through the shrubs and the top of the fat man’s head. He still hadn’t moved. I kept on waiting and a few minutes later the door opened just far enough to let a guy out. There was no light behind him so I didn’t see his face until he was opposite me. Then I grinned a nasty little grin and let my mind give Pat a very soft horse-laugh.

The guy that came out only had one name. Rainey. He was a tough punk with a record as long as your arm and he used to be available for any kind of job that needed a strong arm.

I waited until Rainey walked down the street and got in a car. When it pulled away with a muffled roar I climbed into my own heap and turned the motor over.

I didn’t have to see Mr. Perry after all. Anyway, not tonight. He wasn’t going anywhere. I made a U-turn at the end of the street and got back on the main drag that led to Manhattan. When I reached the Greenwood Hotel a little after midnight the night clerk shoved the register at me, took cash in advance and handed me the keys to the room. Fate with a twisted sense of humor was riding my tail again. The room was 402.

If there was a dead man in it tomorrow it’d have to be me.

I dreamt I was in a foxhole with a shelter half dragged over me to keep out the rain. The guy in the next foxhole kept calling to me until my eyes opened and my hand automatically reached for my rifle. There was no rifle, but the voice was real. It came from the hall. I threw back the covers and hopped up, trotting for the door.

Joe slid in and closed it behind him. “Cripes,” he grunted, “I thought you were dead.”

“Don’t say that word, I’m alone tonight. You get it?”

He flipped his hat to the chair and sat on it. “Yeah, I got it. Most of it anyway. They weren’t very co-operative at the hotel seeing as how the cops had just been there. What did you do to ‘em?”

“Put a bug up his behind. Now the honorable Captain of Homicide, my pal, my buddy who ought to know better, thinks I’m pulling fast ones on him as a joke. He even suspects me of having tampered with some trivial evidence.”

“Did you?”

“It’s possible. Of course, how would I know what’s evidence and what’s not. After all, what does it matter if it was a suicide?”

Joe gave a polite burp. “Yeah,” he said.

I watched him while he felt around in his pocket for a fistful of notes. He tapped them with a forefinger. “If I charged you for this you’d of shelled out a pair of C’s. Six men lost their sleep, three lost their dates and one caught hell from his wife. She wants him to quit me. And for what?”

“And for what?” I repeated.

He went on: “This Wheeler fellow seemed pretty respectable. By some very abstract questioning here and there we managed to backtrack his movements. Just remember, we had to do it in a matter of hours, so it isn’t a minute-by-minute account.

“He checked in at the hotel immediately upon arriving eight days ago. His mornings were spent visiting merchandising houses here in the city where he placed some regular orders for items for his store. None of these visits were of unusual importance. Here are some that may be. He wired home to Columbus, Ohio, to a man named Ted Lee asking for five thousand bucks by return wire. He received it an hour later. I presume it was to make a special purchase of some sort.

“We dug up a rather sketchy account of where he spent his evenings. A few times he returned to the hotel slightly under the influence. One night he attended a fashion show that featured a presentation of next year’s styles. The show was followed by cocktails and he may have been one of the men who helped one of a few models who had a couple too many down the elevator and into a cab.”

I started to grin. “Models?”

He shook his head. “Forget it,” he told me, “it wasn’t a smoker with a dirty floor show for dessert.”

“Okay, go on.”

“From then on he was in and out of the hotel periodically and each time he had a little more of a jag on. He checked in with you and was dead before morning. The hotel was very put out. That’s it.”

He waited a second and repeated, “That’s it, I said.”

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

“Joe, you’re a lousy detective.”

He shot me an impatient glance tainted with amazement. “I’m a lousy detective? You without a license and I’m the lousy detective? That’s a hell of a way of thanking me for all my trouble! Why I’ve found more missing persons than you have hairs on that low forehead of yours and . . . “

“Ever shoot anybody, Joe?”

His face went white and his fingers had trouble taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “Once . . . I did.”

“Like it?”

“No.” He licked his lips. “Look, Mike . . . this guy Wheeler . . . you were there. He was a suicide, wasn’t he?”

“Uh-uh. Somebody gave him the business.”

I could hear him swallow clear across the room. “Uh . . . you won’t need me again, will you?”

“Nope. Thanks a lot, Joe. Leave the notes on the bed.”

The sheaf of papers fell on the bed and I heard the door close softly. I sat on the arm of the chair and let my mind weave the angles in and out. One of them had murder in it.

Someplace there was a reason for murder big enough to make the killer try to hide the fact under a cloak of suicide. But the reason has to be big to kill. It has to be even bigger to try to hide it. It was still funny the way it came out. I was the only one who could tag it as murder and make it stick. Someplace a killer thought he was being real clever. Clever as hell. Maybe he thought the lack of one lousy shell in the clip wouldn’t be noticed.

I kept thinking about it and I got sore. It made me sore twice. The first time I burned up was because the killer took me for a sap. Who the hell did he think I was, a cheap uptown punk who carried a rod for effect? Did he think I was some goon with loose brains and stupid enough to take it lying down?

Then I got mad again because it was my friend that died. My friend, not somebody else’s. A guy who was glad to see me even after five years. A guy who was on the same side with me and gave the best he could give to save some bastard’s neck so that bastard could kill him five years later.

The army was one thing I should have reminded Pat of. I should have prodded his memory with the fact that the army meant guns and no matter who you were an indoctrination course in most of the phases of handling lethal weapons hit you at one time or another. Maybe Chester Wheeler did try to shoot himself. More likely he tried to fire it at someone or someone fired it at him. One thing I knew damn well, Chet had known all about automatics and if he did figure to knock himself off he wasn’t going to fire any test shot just to see if the gun worked.

I rolled into bed and yanked the covers up. I’d sleep on it.

Chapter Three

I stood on the corner of Thirty-third Street and checked the address from Joe’s notes. The number I wanted was halfway down the block, an old place recently remodeled and refitted with all the trimmings a flashy clientele could expect. While I stared at the directory a covey of trim young things clutching hatboxes passed behind me to the elevator and I followed them in. They were models, but their minds weren’t on jobs. All they talked about was food. I didn’t blame them a bit. In the downstairs department they were shipshape from plenty of walking, but upstairs it was hard to tell whether they were coming or going unless they were wearing falsies. They were pretty to look at, but I wouldn’t give any of them bed room.

The elevator slid to a stop at the eighth floor and the dames got out. They walked down the corridor to a pair of full-length frosted plate-glass doors etched with ANTON LIPSEK AGENCY and pushed in. The last one saw me coming and held the door open for me.

It was a streamlined joint if ever there was one. The walls were a light pastel tint with a star-sprinkled ceiling of pale blue. Framed original photos of models in everything from nylon step-ins to low slung convertibles marched around the walls in a double column. Three doors marked PRIVATE branched off the anteroom, while a receptionist flanked by a host of busy stenos pounding typewriters guarded the entrance to the main office. I dumped my cigarette into an ash tray and grinned at the receptionist. Her voice had a forced politeness but her eyes were snooty. “Yes?”

“The Calway Merchandising Company had a dinner meeting the other night. Several models from this agency were present for the fashion show that came later. I’m interested in seeing them . . . one of them, at least. How can I go about it?”

She tapped her pencil on the desk. Three irritable little taps. Evidently this was an old story to her. “Is this a business or . . . personal inquiry, sir?”

I leaned on the edge of the desk and gave her my real nasty smile. “It could be both, kid, but one thing it’s not and that’s your business.”

“Oh . . . oh,” she said. “Anton--Mr. Lipsek, I mean--he handles the assignments. I’ll . . . call him.”

Her hands flew over the intercom box, fumbling with the keys. Maybe she thought I’d bite, because she wouldn’t take her eyes off my face. When the box rattled at her she shut it off and said I could go right in. This time I gave her my nice smile, the one without the teeth. “I was only kidding, sugar.”

She said “Oh” again and didn’t believe me.

Anton Lipsek had his name on the door in gold letters and under it the word MANAGER. Evidently he took his position seriously. His desk was a roll-top affair shoved in a corner, bulging with discarded photographs and sketches. The rest of the room was given over to easels, display mounts and half-finished sketches. He was very busy managing, too.

He was managing to get a whole lot of woman dressed in very little nothing in place amid a bunch of props so the camera would pick up most of the nothing she was wearing and none of the most she was showing. At least that’s what it looked like to me.

I whistled softly. “Ve-ry nice.”

“Too much skin,” he said. He didn’t even turn around.

The model tried to peer past the glare of the lamps he had trained on her. “Who’s that?”

Anton shushed her, his hands on her nice bare flesh giving a cold professional twist to her torso. When she was set just right he stepped back behind the camera, muttered a cue and the girl threw her bosoms toward the lens and let a ghost of a smile play with her mouth. There was a barely audible click and the model turned human again, stretching her arms so far over her head that her bra filled up and began overflowing.

They could make me a manager any day.

Anton snapped off the lights and swiveled his head around.

“Ah, yes. Now, sir, what can I do for you?”

He was a tall, lanky guy with eyebrows that met above his nose and a scrimy little goatee that waggled when he talked and made his chin come to a point. “I’m interested in finding a certain model. She works here.”

The eyebrows went up like •a window shade. “That, sir, is a request we get quite often. Yes, quite often.”

I said very bluntly, “I don’t like models. Too flatchested.”

Anton was beginning to look amazed when she came out from behind the props, this time with shoes on too. “Tain’t me you’re talkin’ about, podner.” An unlit cigarette was dangling from her mouth. “Got a light?”

I held a match under her nose, watching her mouth purse around the cigarette when she drew in the flame. “No, you’re exceptional,” I said.

This time she grinned and blew the smoke in my face.

Anton coughed politely. “This, er, model you mentioned. Do you know her?”

“Nope. All I know is that she was at the Calway Merchandising affair the other night.”

“I see. There were several of our young ladies present on that assignment, I believe. Miss Reeves booked that herself. Would you care to see her?”

“Yeah, I would.”

The girl blew another mouthful of smoke at me and her eyelashes waved hello again. “Don’t you ever wear clothes?” I asked her.

“Not if I can help it. Sometimes they make me.”

“That’s what I’d like to do.”

“What?”

“Make you.”

Anton choked and clucked, giving her a push. “That will be enough. If you don’t mind, sir, this way.” His hand was inviting me to a door in the side of the room. “These young ladies are getting out of hand. Sometimes I could...”

“Yeah, so could I.” He choked again and opened the door.

I heard him announce my name but I didn’t catch what he said because my mind couldn’t get off the woman behind the desk. Some women are beautiful, some have bodies that make you forget beauty; here was a woman who had both. Her face had a supernatural loveliness as if some master artist had improved on nature itself. She had her hair cut short in the latest fashion, light tawny hair that glistened like a halo. Even her skin had a creamy texture, flowing down the smooth line of her neck into firm, wide shoulders. She had the breasts of youth-high, exciting, pushing against the high neckline of the white jersey blouse, revolting at the need for restraint. She stood up and held her hand out to me, letting it slip into mine with a warm, pleasant grip. Her voice had a rich vibrant quality when she introduced herself, but I was too busy cursing the longer hemlines to get it. When she sat down again with her legs crossed I stopped my silent protests of long dresses when I saw how tantalizingly nice they could mold themselves to the roundness of thighs that were more inviting when covered. Only then did I see the nameplate on the desk that read JUNO REEVES.

Juno, queen of the lesser gods and goddesses. She was well named.

She offered me a drink from a decanter in a bar set and I took it, something sweet and perfumy in a long-stemmed glass.

We talked. My voice would get a nasty intonation then it would get polite. It didn’t seem to come out of me at all. We could have talked about nothing for an hour, maybe it was just minutes. But we talked and she did things with her body deliberately as if I were a supreme test of her abilities as a woman and she laughed, knowing too well that I was hardly conscious of what I was saying or how I was reacting.

She sipped her drink and laid the glass down on the desk, the dark polish of her nails in sharp contrast against the gleaming crystal. Her voice eased me back to the present.

“This young lady, Mr. Hammer . . . you say she left with your friend?”

“I said she may have. That’s what I want to find out.”

“Well, perhaps I can show you their photographs and you can identify her.”

“No, that won’t do it. I never saw her myself either. “Then why . . .”

“I want to find out what happened last night, Miss Reeves.”

“Juno, please.”

I grinned at her.

“Do you suppose they did. . .” she smiled obliquely, “anything wrong?”

“I don’t give a damn what they did. I’m just interested in

knowing. You see, this pal of mine . . . he’s dead.”

Her eyes went soft. “Oh, I’m awfully sorry. What happened?”

“Suicide, the cops said.”

Juno folded her lower lip between her teeth, puzzled. “In that case, Mr. Hammer . . .”

“Mike,” I said.

“In that case, Mike, why bring the girl into it? After all . . .”

“The guy had a family,” I cut in. “If a nosy reporter decides to work out an angle and finds a juicy scandal lying around, the family will suffer. If there’s anything like that I want to squelch it.”

She nodded slowly, complete understanding written in her face. “You are right, Mike. I’ll see the girls as they come in for assignments and try to find out who it was. Will you stop by tomorrow sometime?”

I stood up, my hat in my hand. “That’ll be fine, Juno. Tomorrow then.”

“Please.” Her voice dropped into a lower register as she stood up and held her hand out to me again. Every motion she made was like liquid being poured and there was a flame in her eyes that waited to be breathed into life. I wrapped my hand around hers just long enough to feel her tighten it in subtle invitation.

I walked to the door and turned around to say good-by again. Juno let her eyes sweep over me, up and down, and she smiled. I couldn’t get the words out. Something about her made me too warm under my clothes. She was beautiful and she was built like a goddess should be built and her eyes said that she was , good when she was bad.

They said something else, too, something I should know and couldn’t remember.

When I got to the elevators I found I had company. This company was waiting for me at the far end of the hall, comfortably braced against the radiator smoking a cigarette.

This time she had more clothes on. When she saw me coming she ground the butt under her heel and walked up to me with such deliberate purpose that my eyes began to undress her all over again.

“Make me,” she said.

“I need an introduction first.”

“Like hell you do.” The light over the elevator turned red and I heard the car rattling in the well. “Okay, you’re made.” She turned her grin on me as the car slowed up behind the steel doors. “Right here?”

“Yup”

“Look out, bub, I’m not the coy type. I may take you up on it.”

“Right here?” I asked.

up.

I let out a short laugh as the doors opened and shoved her in. It could be that she wasn’t kidding and I hated audiences. When we hit the ground floor she linked her arm in mine and let me lead her out to the street. We reached Broadway before she said, “If you really need an introduction, my name is Connie Wales. Who’re you?”

“Mr. Michael Hammer, chick. I used to be a private investigator. I was in the papers recently.”

Her mouth was drawn up in a partial smile. “Wow, am I in company.”

We reached Broadway and turned north. Connie didn’t ask where we were going, but when we passed three bars in a row without stopping I got an elbow in the ribs until I got the hint. The place I did turn into was a long, narrow affair with tables for ladies in the rear. So we took a table for ladies as far down as we could get with a waiter mumbling under his breath behind us.

Both of us ordered beer and I said, “You’re not very expensive to keep, are you?”

“Your change’ll last longer this way,” she laughed. “You aren’t rich, or are you?”

“I got dough,” I said, “but you won’t get it out of me, girlie,” I tacked on.

Her laugh made pretty music and it was real. “Most men want to buy me everything I look at. Wouldn’t you?” She sipped her brew, watching me over the rim of the glass with eyes as shiny as new dimes.

“Maybe a beer, that’s all. A kid I knew once told me I’d never have to pay for another damn thing. Not a thing at all.” She looked at me soberly. “She was right.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

The waiter came back with his tray and four more beers. He sat two in front of each of us, picked up the cash and shuffled away. As he left Connie stared at me for a full minute. “What were you doing in the studio?”

I told her the same thing I told Juno.

She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t sound right. Why would any reporter try to make something out of a suicide?”

She had a point there, but I had an answer. “Because he didn’t leave a farewell note. Because his home life was happy. Because he had a lot of dough and no apparent worries.”

“It sounds better now,” she said.

I told her about the party arid what I thought might have happened. When I sketched it in I asked, “Do you know any of the girls that were there that night?”

Her laugh was a little deeper this time. “Golly, no, at least not to talk to. You see, the agency is divided into two factions, more or less . . . the clotheshorses and the no-clotheshorses. I’m one of the sugar pies who fill out panties and nighties for the nylon trade. The clotheshorses couldn’t fill out a paper sack by themselves so they’re jealous and treat us lesser paid kids like dirt.”

“Nuts,” I said. “I saw a few and they can’t let their breaths out all the way without losing their falsies.”

She almost choked on her drink. “Very cute, Mike, very cute. I’ll have to remember all your acid witticisms. They’ll put me over big with the gang.”

I finished the last of the beer and shoved the empties to the edge of the table. “Come on, kid. I’ll take you wherever you want to go then I’ll try to get something done.”

“I want to go back to my apartment and you can get something done there.”

“You’ll get a slap in the ear if you don’t shut up. Come on.”

Connie threw her head back and laughed at me again. “Boy oh boy, what ten other guys wouldn’t give to hear me say that?”

“Do you say that to ten other guys?”

“No, Mike.” Her voice was a whisper of invitation.

There wasn’t an empty cab in sight so we walked along Broadway until we found a hack stand with a driver grabbing a nap behind the wheel. Connie slid in and gave him an address on Sixty-second Street then crowded me into the corner and reached for my hand.

She said, “Is all this very important, Mike? Finding the girl and all, I mean.”

I patted her hand. “It means plenty to me, baby. More than you’d expect.”

“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 modeland-buyer crowd. f 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 the 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 concern.”

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 tremour of excitement made the muscles under the taught 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 Four

We 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 second hand. Besides, it isn’t only one place now. I think there’re at least a dozen. Like I said, they’re modeland-buyer hangouts and nothing is cheap, either.”

The cab wound through traffic, but 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 mouth 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 tenspot he didn’t deserve and he showed us to the door.

Connie didn’t know the way so we just followed. The girls did all the steering. Twice we had to step around drunks and once we moved into the gutter to get out of the way of a street brawl. They should have stayed in the gutter where they belonged. I was so hopping mad I could hardly speak and Connie rubbed her cheek against my shoulder in sympathy.

The Bowery Inn was off the main line. It was a squalid place with half-boarded-up windows, fly-specked beer signs and an outward appearance of something long ago gone to seed.

That was from the outside. The first thing you noticed when you went in was the smell. It wasn’t. It smelled like a bar should smell. The tables and the bar were as deliberately aged with worm holes and cigarette burns as the characters were phony. Maybe the others couldn’t see it, but I could.

Connie grimaced. “So this is The Inn I’ve heard so much about.”

I could hardly hear her over the racket. Everybody was running forward to greet everybody else and the dames sounded like a bunch of pigs at a trough. The fat bellies stood back and beamed. When the racket eased off to a steady clamor everybody checked their coats and hats with a one-eyed bag behind a booth who had a spittoon on the counter to collect the tips.

While Connie was helloing a couple of gaunt things from her office I sidled over to the bar for a shot and a beer. I needed it bad. Besides, it gave me a chance to look around. Down at the back of the room was a narrow single door that hung from one hinge and had a calendar tacked to it that flapped every time it opened.

It flapped pretty often because there was an unending stream of traffic coming and going through that door and the only characters inside there had on evening gowns and tuxes with all the spangles.

Connie looked around for me, saw me spilling down the chaser and walked over. “This is only the front, Mike. Let’s go in where the fun is. That’s what they say, anyway.”

“Roger, baby. I need fun pretty bad.”

I took her arm and joined the tail end of the procession that was heading for the door on one hinge and the calendar.

We had quite a surprise. Quite a surprise. The calendar door was only the first. It led into a room with warped walls and had to close before the other door would open. The one hinge was only a phony. There were two on the inside frame nicely concealed. The room was a soundproof connection between the back room and the bar and it was some joint, believe me.

Plenty of thousands went into the making of the place and there were plenty of thousands in the wallets that sat at the fancy chrome-trimmed bar or in the plush-lined seats along the wall. The lights were down low and a spot was centered on a completely naked woman doing a strip tease in reverse. It was nothing when she was bare, but it was something to watch her get dressed. When she finished she stepped out of the spot and sat down next to a skinny bald-headed gent who was in one hell of a dither having a dame alongside him he had just seen in the raw. The guy called for champagne.

Everybody whooped it up.

Now I saw why the place was a popular hangout. The walls were solid blocks of photographs, models by the hundreds in every stage of dress and undress. Some were originals, some were cut from magazines. All were signed with some kind of love to a guy named Clyde.

Connie and I tipped our glasses together and I let my eyes drift to the pictures. “You up there?”

“Could be. Want to look around?”

“No. I like you better sitting where I can see you personally.”

A band came out and took their places behind the stand. Homer excused himself and came around the table to Connie and asked her to dance. That left me playing kneeses with his mistress until she looked at the floor anxiously and practically asked me to take her out there.

I’m not much for dancing, but she made up for it. She danced close enough to almost get behind me and had a hell of an annoying habit of sticking her tongue out to touch the tip of my ear. Homer did all right for himself.

It took an hour for the party to get going good. At eleven-thirty the place was jammed to the rafters and a guy couldn’t hear himself think. Andrew started talking about spending money again and one of the girls squalled that there was plenty of it to throw away if the boys wanted some sporting propositions. One of them got up and consulted with a waiter who came back in a minute and mumbled a few words and nodded toward a curtained alcove to one side.

I said, “Here we go, kid.”

Connie screwed up her face. “I don’t get it, Mike.”

“Hell, it’s the same old fix. They got gambling tables in the back room. They give you the old peephole routine to make it look good.”

“Really?”

“You’ll see.”

Everybody got up and started off in the direction of the curtain. The pitch was coming in fast now. I began to think of Chester Wheeler again, wondering if he made this same trip. He had

needed five grand. Why? To play or to pay off? A guy could run up some heavy sugar in debts on a wheel. Suicide? Why kill yourself for five grand? Why pay off at all? A word to the right cop and they’d tear this place down and you could forget the debts.

One of the girls happened to look over her shoulder and screamed, “Oh, there’s Clyde. Hello, Clyde! Clyde . . . hello!”

The lean guy in the tux turned his cold smile on her and waved back, then finished making his rounds of the tables. I felt my mouth pulling into a nasty grin and I told Connie to go ahead.

I walked over to Clyde.

“If it ain’t my old pal Dinky,” I said.

Clyde was bent over a table and the stiffness ran through his back, but he didn’t stop talking until he was damned good and ready. I stuck a Lucky between my lips and fired it just as the lights went down and the spot lit up another lewd nude prancing on the stage.

Then Clyde swung his fish eyes on me. “What are you doing here, shamus?”

“I was thinking the same thing about you.”

“You’ve been here too long already. Get out.” The stiffness was still in his back. He threaded through the tables, a quick smile for someone here and there. When he reached the bar a bottle was set up in front of him and he poured himself a quick shot.

I blew a stream of smoke in his face. “Nice layout.”

His eyes were glassy with hate now. “Maybe you didn’t hear me right.”

“I hear you, only I’m not one of your boys to jump when you speak, Dink.”

“What do you want?”

I blew some more smoke at him and he pulled out of the way. “I want to satisfy my curiosity, Dink. Yeah, that’s what I want to do. The last time I saw you was in a courtroom taking the oath from a wheel chair. You had a bullet in your leg. I put it there, remember? You swore that you weren’t the guy who drove a getaway car for a killer, but the bullet in your leg made you out a liar. You did a stretch for that. Remember now?”

He didn’t answer me.

“You sure came a long way, kid. No more wheel spots for you. Maybe now you do the killing?”

His upper lip curled over his teeth. “The papers say you don’t carry a gun anymore, Hammer. That’s not so good for you. Keep out of my way.”

He went to raise his drink to his mouth, but I swatted his elbow and the stuff splattered into his face. His face went livid. “Take it easy, Dink. Don’t let the cops spot you. I’ll take a look around before I go.”

My old friend Dinky Williams who called himself Clyde was reaching for the house phone on the end of the bar when I left.

To cross the room I had to walk around behind the spot and it took me a minute to find the curtain in the semidarkness. There was another door behind the curtain. It was locked. I rapped on the panel and the inevitable peephole opened that showed a pair of eyes over a nose that had a scar down the center.

At first I thought I wasn’t going to get in, then the lock clicked and the door swung in just a little.

Sometimes you get just enough warning. Some reflex action shoves you out of the way before you can get your head split open. My hand went up in time to form a cushion for my skull and something smashed down on my knuckles that brought a bubbling yell up out of my throat.

I kept going, dove and rolled so that I was on my back with my feet up and staring at the ugly face of an oversize pug who had a billy raised ready to use. He didn’t go for the feet, but he didn’t think fast enough to catch me while I was down.

I’m no cat, but I got my shoes under me in a hurry. The billy swung at my head while I was still off balance. The guy was too eager. He missed me. I didn’t miss. I was big, he was bigger. I had one bad hand and I didn’t want to spoil the other. I leaned back against the wall and kicked out and up with a slashing toe that nearly tore him in half. He tried to scream. All I heard was a bubbling sound. The billy hit the floor and he doubled over, hands clawing at his groin. This time I measured it right. I took a short half step and kicked that son of a bitch so hard in the face that his teeth came out in my shoe.

I looked at the billy, picked it up and weighed it. The thing was made for murder. It was too bulky in my pocket so I dropped it in the empty shoulder holster under my arm and grunted at the guy on the floor who was squirming unconsciously in his own blood.

The room was another of those rooms between rooms. A chair was tilted back against the wall beside the door, the edge of it biting into the soundproofing. Just for kicks I dragged the stupe over to the chair, propped him in it and tilted it back against the wall again. His head was down and you could hardly see the blood. A lot could go on before he’d know about it, I thought.

When I was satisfied with the arrangement I snapped the lock off the door to accommodate the customers and tried the other door into the back room. This one was open.

The lights hit me so hard after the semidarkness of the hall that I didn’t see Connie come over. She said, “Where’ve you been, Mike?”

Her hand hooked in my arm and I gave it an easy squeeze. “I got friends here too.”

“Who?”

“Oh, some people you don’t know.”

She saw the blood on the back of my hand then, the skin of the knuckles peeled back. Her face went a little white. “Mike . . . what did you do?”

I grinned at her. “Caught it on something.”

She asked another question, one I didn’t hear. I was too busy taking in the layout of the place. It was a gold mine. Over the babble you could hear the click and whir of the roulette wheels, the excited shrieks when they stopped. There were tables for dice, faro spreads, bird cages and all the games and gadgets that could make a guy want to rip a bill off his roll and try his luck.

The place was done up like an old-fashioned Western gambling hall, with gaudy murals on every wall. The overhead lights were fashioned from cartwheels and oxen yokes, the hanging brass lanterns almost invisible in the glare of the bright lights inside them. Along one wall was a fifty-foot bar of solid mahogany complete with brass rail, never-used cuspidors and plate-glass mirrors with real bullet holes.

If ever I had a desire to be surrounded by beauty, I would have found it there. Beauty was commonplace. It was professional. Beauty was there under a lot of make-up and too much skin showing. Beauty was there in models who showed off what they liked to advertise best. It was like looking into the dressing room of the Follies. There was so much of it you tried to see it all once and lost out with your hurry.

It was incredible as hell.

I shook my head. Connie smiled, “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” That was an understatement. “What’s the pitch?”

“I told you, Mike. It’s a fad. It caught on and spread like the pox. Pretty soon it’ll get around, the place will be jammed and jumpin’, then the whole deal will get boring.”

“So they’ll move on to something else.”

“Exactly. Right now it’s almost a club. They’re fawned over and fought over. They make a big splash. Wait till it all catches up with them.”

“And all this in the Bowery. Right in the middle of the Bowery! Pat would give his right arm for a peep at this. Maybe I’ll let him give me a left arm too.”

I stopped and peered around again. Beauty. It was starting to get flat now. There were too many big bellies and bald heads in the way. They spoiled the picture. I spotted Homer and Andrew in the crowd having a big time at the crap table. Evidently Homer was winning because his babe was stuffing the chips he handed her into a bag that wouldn’t take too many. The ones she had left over got tied up in her handkerchief.

We made a complete tour of the place before picking out a leather-covered corner spot to watch the shindig and drink at the same time. A waiter in a cowboy outfit brought us highballs and crackers and said it was on the house. As soon as he left Connie asked, “What do you think, Mike?”

“I don’t know, sugar. I’m wondering if my pal would have gone for this.”

“Wasn’t he like the rest?”

“You mean, was he a man?”

“Sort of.”

“Hell, he probably would. What guy wouldn’t take in a hot spot with a babe. He’s alone in the city, no chaperon and bored stiff. His work is done for the day and he needs a little relaxation. We’ll leave it at that. If he did get persuaded to come it didn’t take much persuasion.”

I lit a cigarette and picked up my drink. I had a long swallow and was following it with a drag on the butt when the crowd split apart for a second to let a waiter through and I had a clear view of the bar.

Juno was sitting there laughing at something Anton Lipsek just said.

The ice started to rattle against my glass and I had that feeling up my spine again. I said to Connie, “Get lost for a little while, will you?”

“She’s truly beautiful, isn’t she, Mike?”

I blushed for the first time since I wore long pants. “She’s different. She makes most of them look sick.”

“Me too?”

“I haven’t seen her with her clothes off. Until then you’re the best.”

“Don’t lie, Mike.” Her eyes were laughing at me.

I stood up and grinned back at her. “Just in case you really want to know, she’s the best-looking thing I ever saw. I get steamed up watching her from fifty feet away. Whatever a dame’s supposed to have on the ball, she’s got it. My tongue feels an inch thick when I talk to her and if she asked me to jump I’d say, `How high?’ and if she asked me to poop I’d say, `How much?’. But here’s something you can tuck away if it means anything to you. I don’t like her and I don’t know why I don’t.”

Connie reached over and took a cigarette from my pack. When it was lit she said, “It means plenty to me. I’ll get lost, Mike. But just for a little while.”

I patted her hand and walked over to where the queen of the gods and goddesses was holding court. When she saw me her smile made sunshine and the funny feeling started around my stomach.

She held out her hand and I took it. “Mike, what are you doing here?”

Juno guided me to a stool on Olympus, letting go my hand almost reluctantly. More eyes than Anton Lipsek’s watched me enviously. “I was sidetracked into a flirtation when I left your office.”

Anton wiggled his beard with an “Ah hah!” He caught on fast.

“I guess it pays to be physical,” Juno smiled. Her eyes drifted over the crowd. “There aren’t too many men here who are. You’re rather an attraction.”

So was she. You might say she was over-clothed by comparison, but not overdressed. The front of the black gown came up to her neck and the sleeves came down to meet her gloves. The width of her shoulders, the regal taper of her waist was sheathed in a shimmering silk that reflected the lights and clung tenaciously to her body. Her breasts rose full and high under the gown, moving gently with her breathing.

“Drink?”

I nodded. The music of her voice brought the bartender to life and he put a highball in front of me. Anton joined us in a toast, then excused himself and walked over to the roulette wheel. I deliberately swung around on the stool, hoping she’d follow me so I could have her to myself.

She did, smiling at me in the mirrors that had bullet holes. “I have news for you, Mike. Perhaps I should let it keep so I could see you again tomorrow.”

My hand started to tighten around the glass. One of the bullet holes was in the way so I turned my head to look at her. “The girl . . .”

“Yes. I found her.”

Ever have your insides squeeze up into a knot so hard you thought you’d turn inside out? I did. “Go on,” I said.

“Her name is Marion Lester. I ‘presume you’ll want to see her yourself of course. Her address is the Chadwick Hotel. She was the third one I spoke to this afternoon and she readily admitted what had happened, although she seemed a little frightened when I told her the full story.”

“All right, all right, what did she say?” I took a quick drink and pushed the glass across the bar.

“Actually . . . nothing. Your friend did help her into a cab and he saw her home. In fact, he carried her upstairs and tucked her into bed with her clothes on, shoes and all. It seems as if he was quite a gentleman.”

“Damn,” I said, “damn it all to hell anyway!”

Juno’s fingers found mine on the bar rail and her smile was replaced by intense concern. “Mike, please! It can’t be that bad. Aren’t you glad it was that way?”

I cursed under my breath, something nice and nasty I had to get out. “I guess so. It’s just that it leaves me climbing a tree again. Thanks anyway, Juno.”

She leaned toward me and my head filled with the fragrance of a perfume that made me dizzy. She had gray eyes. Deep gray eyes. Deep and compassionate. Eyes that could talk by themselves. “Will you come up tomorrow anyway?”

I couldn’t have said no. I didn’t want to. I nodded and my lip worked into a snarl I couldn’t control. Even my hands tightened into fists until the broken skin over my knuckles began to sting. “I’ll be there,” I said. I got that funny feeling again. I couldn’t figure it, damn it, I didn’t know what it was.

A finger tapped my shoulder and Connie said, “I’m losted, Mike. Hello, Juno.”

Olympus smiled another dawn.

Connie said, “Can we go home now?”

I slid off the stool and looked at the goddess. This time we didn’t shake hands. Just meeting her eyes was enough. “Good night, Juno.”

“Good night, Mike.”

Anton Lipsek came back and nodded to the both of us. I took Connie’s arm and steered her toward the door. Joseph, Andrew, Martin, Homer and Raymond all yelled for us to join the party then shut up when they saw the look on my face. One of them muttered, “Sour sort of fellow, isn’t he?”

The joker with the bashed-in face wasn’t in his chair where I had left him. Two other guys were holding the fort and I knew what they were doing there. They were waiting for me. The tall skinny one was a goon I knew and who knew me and licked his lips. The other one was brand, spanking new. About twenty-two maybe.

They looked at Connie, wondering how to get her out of there so she wouldn’t be a witness to what came next. The goon I knew licked his lips again and rubbed his hands together. “We been waiting for you, Hammer.”

The kid put on more of an act. He screwed up his pimply face to make a sneer, pushing himself away from the wall trying to make shoulders under his dinner jacket. “So you’re Mike Hammer, are ya? Ya don’t look so tough to me, guy.”

I let my hand fool with the buttons on my coat. The billy in the empty holster pushed against the fabric under my arm and looked real as hell. “There’s always one way you can find out, sonny,” I said.

When the kid licked his lips a little spit ran down his chin. Connie walked ahead of me and opened the door. I walked past the two of them and they never moved. In a little while they’d be out of a job.

Not an empty table showed in this first back room. The show was over and the tiny dance floor was packed to the limit. The late tourist crowd was having itself a fling and making no bones about it. I scanned the sea of heads looking for Clyde. It was a hell of a change from Dinky Williams. But he wasn’t around. We picked up our stuff from the hag at the checkroom and I tossed a dime in the spittoon. She swore and I swore back at her.

The words we used weren’t unusual for the front section of the Bowery Inn, and no heads turned except two at the bar. One was Clyde. I waved my thumb toward the back. “Lousy help you hire, Dink.” His face was livid again.

I didn’t even look at the babe. It was Velda.

Chapter Five

I was sitting in the big leather chair in the office when Velda put her key in the lock. She had on a tailored suit that made her look like a million dollars. Her long black page-boy hair threw back the light of the morning sunshine that streamed through the window and it struck me that of all the beauty in the world I had the best of it right under my nose.

She saw me then and said, “I thought you’d be here.” There was frost in her voice. She tossed her handbag on the desk and sat in my old chair. Hell, it was her joint now anyway.

“You move pretty fast, Velda.”

“So do you.”

“Referring to my company of last night, I take it.”

“Exactly. Your legwork. They were very nice, just your type.”

I grinned at her. “I wish I could say something decent about your escort.”

The frost melted and her voice turned soft. “I’m the jealous type, Mike.”

I didn’t have to lean far to reach her. The chair was on casters that moved easily. I wound my fingers in her hair, started to say something and stopped. Instead, I kissed the tip of her nose. Her fingers tightened around my wrist. She had her eyes half closed and didn’t see me push her handbag out of reach. It tipped with the weight of the gun in it and landed on the floor.

This time I kissed her mouth. It was a soft, warm mouth. It was a light kiss, but I’ll never forget it. It left me wanting to wrap my arms around her and squeeze until she couldn’t move. No, I didn’t do that. I slid back into my chair and Velda said, “It was never like that before, Mike. Don’t treat me like the others.”

My hand was shaking when I tried to light another cigarette. “I didn’t expect to find you down the Bowery last night, kid.”

“You told me to get to work, Mike.”

“Finish it. Let’s hear it all.”

Velda leaned back in the chair, her eyes on mine. “You said to concentrate on Wheeler. I did. The papers carried most of the details and there was nothing to be learned here. I hopped the first plane to Columbus, visited with his family and business associates and got the next plane back again.”

She picked her handbag off the floor and extracted a small black loose-leaf pad, flipping the cover back to the first page. “Here is the essence of what I learned. Everyone agreed that Chester Wheeler was an energetic, conscientious husband, father and businessman. There has never been any family trouble. Whenever he was away he wrote or called home frequently. This time they had two picture post cards from him, a letter and one phone call. He phoned as soon as he arrived in New York to tell them he’d had a successful trip. He sent one card to his son, a plain penny post card. The next card was postmarked from the Bowery and he mentioned going to a place called the Bowery Inn. Then he wrote a letter to his wife that was quite commonplace. A postscript to his twenty-two-year-old daughter mentioned the fact that he had met an old high school friend of hers working in the city. That was the last they heard until they were notified of his death.

“When I dug up his business friends I got nowhere. His business was fine, he was making a lot of money, and he had no worries at all.”

I clamped my teeth together. “Like hell you got nowhere,” I said softly. My mind drifted back over that little conversation with Pat. A little talk about how a guy named Emil Perry said Wheeler had been depressed because business was rotten. “You’re

sure about his business?”

“Yes. I checked his credit rating.”

“Nice going. Continue.”

“Well . . . the only lead I saw was this place called the Bowery Inn. I did some fast quizzing when I got home and found out what it was all about. The man who runs the place you seemed to know. I put on an act and he fell for it. Hard. He didn’t seem to like you much, Mike.”

“I can’t blame him. I shot him once.”

“After you left he couldn’t talk for five minutes. He excused himself and went into the back room. When he returned he seemed satisfied about something. There was blood on his hands.”

That would be Dinky, all right. He liked to use his hands when he had a couple of rods backing him up. “That all?”

“Practically. He wants to see me again.”

I felt the cords in my neck pull tight. “The bastard! I’ll beat the pants off him for that!”

Velda shook her head and laughed. “Don’t you get to be the jealous type too, Mike. You don’t wear it so well. Is it important that I see him again?”

I agreed reluctantly. “It’s important.”

“Is it still murder?”

“More than ever, sugar. I bet it’s a big murder, too. A great big beautiful murder with all the trimmings.”

“Then what do you suggest I do next?”

I gave it a thought first, then looked at her a moment. “Play this Clyde. Keep your eyes open and see what happens. If I were you I’d hide that P.I. ticket and leave the gun home. We don’t want him putting two and two together and getting a bee in his bonnet.

“If you follow me on this you’ll see the connection. First we have Wheeler. We have the fact that he might have taken a model out that night and he might have gone to the Inn where he might have run into something that meant murder. If Clyde didn’t enter into this I’d skip the whole premise, but he makes it too interesting to pass up.

“There’s only one hitch. Juno found the girl he left with the night of the party. She didn’t go out with him!”

“But, Mike, then . . .”

“Then I’m supposing he might have gone with somebody else some other time. Hell of a lot of mights in this. Too many. At least it’s something to work on, and if you stick around this Clyde character long enough something will turn up one way or another.”

Velda rose, her legs spread apart, throwing out her arms in a stretch that made her jacket and skirt fill up almost to bursting. I had to bend my head down into a match to get my eyes off her. Clyde was going to get a hell of a deal for his money. I slapped my hat on and opened the door for her.

When we reached the street I put her in a taxi and watched until she was around the corner. It was just nine-thirty, so I headed for the nearest phone booth, dropped a nickel in the slot and dialed police headquarters. Pat had checked in, but he couldn’t be located at present. I told the switchboard operator to have him meet me in a spaghetti joint around the corner from headquarters in a half-hour and the guy said he’d pass the message on. I found my heap and climbed in. It was going to be a busy day.

Pat was waiting for me over a half-finished cup of coffee. When he saw me come in he signaled for another coffee and some pastry. I threw my leg over the chair and sat down. “Morning, officer. How’s every little thing in the department?”

“Going smoothly, Mike.”

“Oh, too bad.”

He set his coffee cup down again. His face was absolutely blank. “Don’t start anything, Mike.”

I acted indignant. “Who, me? What could I start that’s not already started?”

The waiter brought my coffee and some Danish and I dunked and ate two of them before either of us spoke again. Curiosity got the best of Pat. He said, “Let’s hear it, Mike.”

“Are you going to be stupid about it, Pat?”

His face was still frozen. “Let’s hear it, Mike.”

I didn’t make any bones about trying to keep it out of my eyes or the set of my jaw. My voice came up from my chest with a nasty rumble and I could feel my lip working into a snarl that pulled the corners of my mouth down.

“You’re a smart cop, Pat. Everybody knows it but most of all I know it and you know it yourself. You know something else besides. I’m just as smart. I said Wheeler was murdered and you patted me on the head and told me to behave.

“I’m saying it again, Pat. Wheeler was murdered. You can get in this thing or I can do it alone. I told you I wanted that ticket back and I’m going to get it. If I do a lot of reputations are going to fall by the wayside including yours and I don’t want that to happen.

“You know me and you know I don’t kid around. I’m beginning to get ideas, Pat. They think good. I’ve seen some things that look good. Things that put more taste in the flavor of murder. I’m going to have me another killer before long and a certain D.A. is going to get his nose blown for him.”

I don’t know what I expected Pat to do. Maybe I expected him to blow his top or start writing me off as a has-been in the brain department. I certainly didn’t expect to see his face go cold and hear him say, “I gave you the benefit of the doubt a long time ago, Mike. I think Wheeler was murdered too.”

He grinned a little at my expression and went on. “There’s a catch. Word reached the D.A. and he looked into it and passed his professional opinion in conjunction with the Medical Examiner. Wheeler was, beyond doubt, a suicide. I have been told to concentrate my efforts on more recent developments in the wide field of crime.”

“Our boy doesn’t like you either now, eh?”

“Ha.”

“So?”

“What do you know, Mike?”

“Just a little, pal. I’ll know more before long and I’ll drop it in your lap when there’s enough of it to get your teeth in. I don’t suppose your prestige suffered from the D.A.’s tirade.”

“It went up if anything.”

“Good. Tonight I’ll buzz you with all the details. Meanwhile you can look up the whereabouts of one former torpedo called Rainey.”

“I know him.”

“Yeah?”

“We had him on an assault and battery charge a while back. The complainant failed to complain and he was dismissed. He called himself a fight promoter.”

“Street brawls,” I said sourly.

“Probably. He was loaded with jack but he had a room in the Bowery.”

“Where, Pat?” My eyes lit up and Pat went grim.

“The Bowery. Why?”

“Interesting word. I’ve been hearing a lot about it these days. See if you can get a line on him, will you?”

Pat tapped a cigarette on the table. “This is all on the table, isn’t it?”

“Every bit of it, chum. I won’t hold back. I’m curious about one thing, though. What changed your mind from suicide to murder?”

Pat grinned through his teeth. “You. I didn’t think you’d chase shadows. I said I wouldn’t get excited this time but I couldn’t help myself. By the time I reached the office I was shaking like a punk on his first holdup and I went down to take a look at the body. I called in a couple of experts and though there were few marks on the body it was the general opinion that our lad Wheeler had been through some sort of a scuffle prior to taking a bullet in the head.”

“It couldn’t have been much of a fuss. He was pretty damn drunk.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “Just enough to leave indications. By the way, Mike . . . about that slug and shell we found in the hall. Was that your work?”

I let out a short, sour laugh. “I told you that once. No. Somebody had a hole in his pocket.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll check the hotel again. It had to be either a resident or a visitor then. It’s too bad you didn’t lock the door.”

“A lock won’t stop a killer,” I said. “He had all the time in the world and could make as much noise as he wanted. Most of the guests were either half deaf or dead to the world when the gun went off. It’s an old building with thick walls that do a nice job of muffling sound.”

Pat picked up the check and laid a dollar on top of it. “You’ll contact me tonight then?”

“You bet. See you later and tell the D.A. I was asking for him.”

It took fifteen minutes to get to the Chadwick Hotel. It was another side-street affair with an essence of dignity that stopped as soon as you entered the lobby. The desk clerk was the Mom type until she spoke then what came out made you think of other things. I told her I wanted to see a certain Marion Lester and she didn’t bother to question or announce me. She said, “Room 312 and go up the stairs easy. They squeak.”

I went up the stairs easy and they squeaked anyway. I knocked on the door of 312, waited and knocked again. The third time I heard feet shuffling across the floor and the door opened just far enough to show wide blue eyes, hair curlers and a satin negligee clutched tightly at the throat. I jumped the gun before she could ask questions with “Hello, Marion, Juno told me to see you.”

The wide eyes got wider and the door opened the rest of the way. I closed it behind me and made like a gentleman by sweeping off my hat. Marion licked her lips and cleared her throat. “I . . . just got up.”

“So I see. Rough night?”

“. . . No.”

She took me through the miniature hall into a more miniature living room and waved for me to sit down. I sat. She said, “It’s so early . . . if you don’t mind, I’ll get dressed.

I told her I didn’t mind and she shuffled into the bedroom and began pulling drawers out and opening closets. She wasn’t like the other girls I knew. She was back in five minutes. This time she had a suit on and the curlers were out of her hair. A little make-up and her eyes didn’t look so wide either.

She sat down gracefully in a straight-backed chair and reached for a cigarette in a silver box. “Now, what did you want to see me about, Mr. . . .”

“Mike Hammer. Just plain Mike.” I snapped a match on my thumbnail and held it out to her. “Did Juno tell you about me?”

Marion nodded, twin streams of smoke sifting out through her nostrils. Her voice had a tremor in it and she licked her lips again. “Yes. You . . . were with Mr. Wheeler when he . . . he died.”

“That’s right. It happened under my nose and I was too drunk to know it.”

“I’m afraid there’s little I can . . . tell you, Mike.”

“Tell me about that night. That’s enough.”

“Didn’t Juno tell you?”

“Yeah, but I want to hear you say it.”

She took a deep drag on the butt and squashed it in a tray. “He took me home. I had a few too many drinks, and ... well, I was feeling a little giddy. I think he rode around in a cab with me for a while. Really, I can’t remember everything exactly ...”

“Go on.”

“I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I woke up in my bed fully clothed and with an awful hangover. Later I learned that he had committed suicide, and frankly, I was very much upset.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all.”

It’s too bad, I thought. She’s the type to show a guy a time if she wanted to. It was just too damn bad. She waited to see what I’d say next, and since it was still early I asked, “Tell me about it from the beginning. The show and all, I mean.”

Marion smoothed out her hair with the flat of her hand and looked up at the ceiling. “The Calway Merchandising Company made the booking through Miss Reeves . . . Juno. She . . .

“Does Juno always handle those details?”

“No, not always. Sometimes they go through Anton. You see, Juno is really the important one. She makes all the contacts and is persuasive enough to throw quite a few accounts to the agency.”

“I can see why,” I admitted with a grin.

She smiled back. “Our agency is perhaps the most exclusive in town. The models get paid more, are more in demand than any others, and all through Miss Reeves. A call from her is equal to a call from the biggest movie studio. In fact, she’s managed to promote several of the agency models right into pictures.”

“But to get back to the show . . .” I prompted.

“Yes . . . the call came in and Juno notified us at once. We had to report to Calway Merchandising to pick up the dresses we had to show and be fitted. That took better than two hours. One of the managers took us to the dinner where we sat through the speeches and what have you, and about an hour beforehand we left to get dressed. The show lasted for fifteen minutes or so, we changed back to our street clothes and joined the crowd. By that time drinks were being served and I managed to have a couple too many.”

“About meeting Wheeler, how’d you manage that?”

“I think it was when I left. I couldn’t make the elevator any too well. We got on together and he helped me down and into a cab. I told you the rest.”

There it was again. Nothing.

I pushed myself out of the chair and fiddled with my hat. “Thanks, kid. That cooks it for me, but thanks anyway. You can go back to bed now.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”

“Oh, it helps a little. At least I know what not to look for. Maybe I’ll be seeing you around.”

She walked ahead of me to the door and held it open. “Perhaps,” she said. “I hope the next time is under more pleasant circumstances.” We shook hands briefly and her forehead wrinkled. “Incidentally, Juno mentioned reporters. I hope . . .”

“They can’t make anything out of it as long as things stand that way. You can practically forget about it.”

“I feel better now. Good-by, Mr. Hammer.”

“So long, kid. See ya.”

I crouched behind the wheel of my car and made faces at the traffic coming against me. It was a mess to start with and got messier all the time. Murder doesn’t just happen. Not the kind of murder that gets tucked away so nicely not a single loose end stuck out.

Damn it anyway, where was a loose end? There had to be one! Was it money? Revenge? Passion? Why in hell did a nice guy like Wheeler have to die? Stinking little rats like Clyde ran around and did what they damn well pleased and a nice guy had to die!

I was still tossing it around in my mind when I parked along that residential street in the Bronx. The big sedan was in the driveway and I could make out the E.P. in gold Old English script on the door. I pulled the key out of the ignition and walked up the flagstone path that wound through the bushes.

This time I lifted the embossed knocker and let it drop.

A maid in a black and white uniform opened the door and stood with her hand on the knob. “Good morning. Can I help you?”

“I want to see Mr. Perry,” I said.

“Mr. Perry left orders that he is not to be disturbed. I’m sorry, sir.”

“You go tell Mr. Perry that he’s gonna get disturbed right now. You tell him Mike Hammer is here and whatever a guy named Rainey can do I can do better.” I grabbed the handle and pushed

the door and she didn’t try to stop me at all when she saw my face. “You go tell him that.”

I didn’t have long to wait. She came back, said, “Mr. Perry will see you in his study, sir,” waved her hand toward the far end of the hall and stood there wondering what it was all about as I walked past.

Mr. Perry was the scared fat man. Now he was really scared. He didn’t sit-he occupied a huge leather chair behind a desk and quivered from his jowls down. He must have been at peace with himself a minute before because an opened book lay facedown and a cigar burned in an ash tray.

I threw my hat on the desk, cleared away some of the fancy junk that littered it and sat on the edge. “You’re a liar, Perry,” I said.

The fat man’s mouth dropped open and the first chin under it started to tremble. His pudgy little fingers squeezed the arms of his chair trying to get juice out of it. He didn’t have much voice left when he said, “How dare you to . . . in my own home! How dare you . . .”

I shook a butt out of the pack and jammed it in the corner of my mouth. I didn’t have a match so I lit it from his cigar. “What did Rainey promise you, Perry, a beating?” I glanced at him through the smoke. “A slug in the back maybe?”

His eyes went from the window to the door. “What are you . . .”

I finished it for him. “I’m talking about a hood named Rainey. What did he promise you?”

Perry’s voice faded altogether and he looked slightly sick. I said, “I’ll tell you once then I want an answer. I told you whatever Rainey can do I can do better. I can beat the hell out of you worse. I can put a slug where it’ll hurt more and I’ll get a large charge out of it besides.

“I’m talking about a guy you said you knew. His name was Wheeler, Chester Wheeler. He was found dead in a hotel room and the verdict was suicide. You informed the police that he was despondent . . . about business you said.”

Emil Perry gave ,a pathetic little nod and flicked his tongue over his lips. I leaned forward so I could spit the words in his face. “You’re a damned liar, Perry. There was nothing the matter with Wheeler’s business. It was a stall, wasn’t it?”

The fear crept into his eyes and he tried to shake his head.

“Do you know what happened to Wheeler?” I spoke the words only inches away from him. “Wheeler was murdered. And you know something else . . . you’re going to be in line for the same thing when the killer knows I’m on your tail. He won’t trust your not talking and you, my fat friend, will get a nice nasty slug inbedded somewhere in your intestines.”

Emil Perry’s eyes were like coals in a snowbank. He held his breath until his chin quivered, his cheeks went blue and he passed out. I sat back on the edge of the desk and finished my cigarette, waiting for him to come around.

It took a good five minutes and he resembled a lump of clay someone had piled in the chair. A lump of clay in a business suit.

When his eyes opened he made a pass at a perspiring decanter on the desk. I poured out a glass of ice water and handed it to him. He made loud gulping sounds getting it down.

I let my voice go flat. “You didn’t even know Wheeler, did you?”

His expression gave me the answer to that one. “Want to talk about it?”

Perry managed a fast negative movement of his head. I got up and put my hat on and walked to the door. Before I opened it. I looked back over my shoulder. “You’re supposed to be a solid citizen, fat boy. The cops take your word for things. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going out and find what it is that Rainey promised you and really lay it on.”

His face turned blue and he passed out before I closed the door. The hell with him. He could get his own water this time.

Chapter Six

The sky had clouded over putting a bite in the air. Here and there a car coming in from out of town was wearing a top hat of snow. I pulled in to a corner restaurant and had two cups of coffee to get the chill out of my bones, then climbed back in the car and cut across town to my apartment where I picked up my topcoat and gloves. By the time I reached the street there were gray feathers of snow in the air slanting down through the sheer walls of the building to the street.

It was twelve-fifteen before I found a parking lot with room to rent. As soon as I checked my keys in the shack I grabbed a cab and gave the driver the address of the Anton Lipsek Agency on Thirty-third Street. Maybe something could be salvaged from the day after all.

This time the sweet-looking ‘receptionist with the sour smile didn’t ask questions. I told her, “Miss Reeves, please,” and she spoke into the intercom box. The voice that came back was low and vibrant, tinged with an overtone of pleasure. I didn’t have to be told that she was waiting for me.

The gods on Olympus could well be proud of their queen. She was a vision of perfection in a long-sleeved dress striding across the room to meet me. The damn clothes she wore. They covered everything up and let your imagination fill in the blanks. The sample she offered was her hands and face but the sample was enough because it made you want to undress her with your eyes and feel the warm flesh of a goddess. There was a lilt to her walk and a devil in her eyes as we shook hands, a brief touch that sent my skin crawling up my spine again.

“I’m so glad you came, Mike.”

“I told you I would.” The dress buttoned up snug at the neck and she wore but one piece of jewelry, a pendant. I flipped it into the light and it threw back a shimmering green glow. I let out a whistle. The thing was an emerald that must have cost a fortune.

“Like it?”

“Some rock.”

“I love beautiful things,” she said.

“So do I.” Juno turned her head and a pleased smile flashed at me for a second and disappeared. The devils in her eyes laughed their pleasure too and she walked to her desk.

That was when the gray light from the window seeped into the softness of her hair and turned it a gold that made my heart beat against my chest until I thought it would come loose.

There was a bad taste in my mouth.

My guts were all knotted up in a ball and that damnable music began in my head. Now I knew what that creepy feeling was that left my spine tingling. Now I knew what it was about Juno that made me want to reach out and grab her.

She reminded me of another girl.

A girl that happened a long time ago.

A girl I thought I had put out of my mind and forgotten completely in a wild hatred that could never be equaled. She was a blonde, a very yellow, golden blonde. She was dead and I made her that way. I killed her because I wanted to and she wouldn’t stay dead.

I looked down at my hands and they were shaking violently, the fingers stiffened into talons that showed every vein and tendon.

“Mike . . .?” The voice was different. It was Juno and now that I knew what it was I could stop shaking. The gold was out of her hair.

She brought her coat over to me to hold while she slipped into it. There was a little piece of mink fur on her hat that matched the coat. “We are going to lunch, aren’t we?”

“I’m not here on business.”

She laughed again and leaned against me as she worked the gloves over her fingers. “What were you thinking of a minute ago, Mike?”

I didn’t let her see my face. “Nothing.”

“You aren’t telling the truth.”

“I know it.”

Juno looked at me over her shoulder. There was a pleading in her eyes. “It wasn’t me . . . something I did?”

I forced a lopsided smile. “Nothing you did, Juno. I just happened to think of something I shouldn’t have.”

“I’m glad, Mike. You were hating something then and I wouldn’t want you to hate me.” She reached for my hand almost girlishly and pulled me to the door at the side of the room. “I don’t want to share you with the whole office force, Mike.”

We came out around the corner of the corridor and I punched the bell for the elevator. While we waited she squeezed my arm under hers, knowing that I couldn’t help watching her. Juno, a goddess in a fur coat. She was an improvement on the original.

And in that brief second I looked at her the light filtered through her hair again and reflected the sheen of gold. My whole head rocked with the fire and pain in my chest and I felt Charlotte’s name trying to force itself past my lips. Good God! Is this what it’s like to think back? Is this what happened when you remember a woman you loved then blasted into hell? I ripped my eyes away and slammed my finger against the buzzer on the wall, holding it there, staring at it until I heard metal scraping behind the doors.

The elevator stopped and the operator gave her a princely nod and a subdued murmer of greeting. The two other men in the car looked at Juno, then back to me jealously. She seemed to affect everyone the same way.

The street had taken on a slippery carpet of white that rippled under the wind. I turned up my coat collar against it and peered down the road for a cab. Juno said, “No cab, Mike. My car’s around the corner.” She fished in her pocket and brought out a gold chain that ran through two keys. “Here, you drive.”

We ducked our heads and went around the block with the wind whipping at our legs. The car she pointed out was a new Caddy convertible with all the trimmings that I thought only existed in show windows. I held the door open while she got in, slammed it shut and ran around the other side. Stuff like this was really living.

The engine was a cat’s purr under the hood wanting to pull away from the curb in a roar of power. “Call it, Juno. Where to?”

“There’s a little place downtown that I discovered a few months ago. They have the best steaks in the world if you can keep your mind on them. The most curious people in the world seem to eat there . . . almost fascinating people.”

“Fascinating?”

Her laugh was low, alive with humor. “That isn’t a good word. They’re . . . well, they’re most unusual. Really, I’ve never seen anything like it. But the food is good. Oh,’ you’ll see. Drive down Broadway and I’ll show you how to go.”

I nodded and headed toward the Stem with the windshield wipers going like metronomes. The snow was a pain, but it thinned out traffic somewhat and it was only a matter of minutes before we were downtown. Juno leaned forward in the seat, peering ahead at the street corners. I slowed down so she could see where we were and she tipped her finger against the glass.

“Next block, Mike. It’s a little place right off the corner.”

I grinned at her. “What are we doing.. . . slumming? Or is it one of those Village hangouts that have gone uptown?”

“Definitely not uptown. The food is superb.” Her eyes flashed just once as we pulled into the curb. I grinned back and she said, “You act all-knowing, Mike. Have you been here before?”

“Once. It used to be a fag joint and the food was good then too. No wonder you saw so many fascinating people.”

“Mike!”

“You ought to get around a little more, woman. You’ve been living too high in the clouds too long. If anybody sees me going in this joint I’m going to get whistled at. That is . . . if they let me in.”

She passed me a puzzled frown at that. “They tossed me out one time,” I explained. “At least they started to toss me out. The reinforcements called for reinforcements and it wound up with me walking out on my own anyway. I had my hair pulled. Nice people.”

Juno bit her lip trying to hold back a laugh. “And here I’ve been telling all my friends where to go to find wonderful steaks! Come to think of it a couple of them were rather put out when I mentioned it to them a second time.”

“Hell, they probably enjoyed themselves. Come on, let’s see how the third side lives.”

She shook the snow out of her hair and let me open the door for her. We had to go through the bar to the hat-check booth and I had a quick look at the gang lined up on the stools. Maybe ten eyes met mine in the mirror and tried to hang on but I wasn’t having any. There was a pansy down at the end of the bar trying to make a guy who was too drunk to notice and was about to give it up as a bad job. I got a smile from the guy and he came close to getting knocked on his neck. The bartender was one of them too, and he looked put out because I came in with a dame.

The girl at the hat-check booth looked like she was trying hard to grow a mustache and wasn’t having much luck at it. She gave me a frosty glare but smiled at Juno and took her time about looking her over. When the babe went to hang up the coats Juno looked back at me with a little red showing in her face and I laughed at her.

“Now you know, huh?” I said.

Her hand covered the laugh. “Oh, Mike, I feel so very foolish! And I thought they were just being friendly.”

“Oh, very friendly. To you, that is. I hope you noticed the cold treatment I got and I usually get along with any kind of dame.”

The dining room was a long, narrow room with booths along the sides and a few tables running down the middle. Nobody was at the tables, but over half the booths were filled if you can call two people of the same sex sitting along the same side filled. A waiter with a lisp and hair that curled around his neck came over and curtsied then led us to the last booth back.

I ordered a round of cocktails to come in front of the steaks and the waiter gave me another curtsy that damn near had a kiss in it. Juno opened a jeweled cigarette case and lifted out a king size. “I think he likes you, Mike,” she said. “Smoke?”

I shook my head and worked the next to last one out of my crumpled pack. Outside at the bar somebody stuck a nickel in the jukebox and managed to hit a record that didn’t try to take your ears off. It was something sweet and low-down with a throaty sax carrying the melody, the kind of music that made you want to listen instead of talk. When the cocktails came we picked them up together. “Propose a toast, Mike.”

Her eyes shone at me over the glass. “To beauty,” I said, “To Olympus. To a goddess that walks with the mortals.”

“With very . . . wonderful mortals,” Juno added.

We drained the glasses.

There were other cocktails and other toasts after that. The steaks came and were the best in the world like she said. There was that period when you feel full and contented and can sit back with a cigarette curling sweet smoke and look at the world and be glad you’re part of it.

“Thinking, Mike?”

“Yeah, thinking how nice it is to be alive. You shouldn’t have taken me here, pretty lady. It’s getting my mind off my work.”

Her face knitted in a frown. “Are you still looking for a reason for your friend’s death?”

“Uh-huh. I checked on that Marion babe, by the way. She was the one. Everything was so darned aboveboard it knocked the props out from under me. I was afraid it would happen like that. Still trying, though, still in there trying.”

“Trying?”

`Hell yes. I don’t want to wind up a grocery clerk.” She didn’t get what I meant. My grin split into a smile and that into a laugh. I had no right to feel so happy, but way back in my head I knew that the sun would come up one day and show me the answer.

“What brought that on? Or are you laughing at me?”

“Not you, Juno. I couldn’t laugh at you.” She stuck out her tongue at me. “I was laughing at the way life works out. It gets pretty complicated sometimes, then all of a sudden it’s as simple as hell, if hell can be simple. Like the potbellies with all the barebacked babes in the Bowery. You know something . . . I didn’t think I’d find you there.”

She shrugged her shoulders gracefully. “Why not? A great many of your `potbellies’ are wonderful business contacts.”

“I understand you’re tops in the line.”

I could see that pleased her. She nodded thoughtfully. “Not without reason, Mike. It has meant a good deal of exacting work both in and out of the office. We only handle work for the better houses and use the best in the selection of models. Anton, you know, is comparatively unknown as a person, simply because he refuses to take credit for his photography, but his work is far above any of the others. I think you’ve seen the interest he takes in his job.”

“I would too,” I said.

Her tongue came out again. “You would, too. I bet nothing would get photographed.”

“I bet a lot would get accomplished.”

“In that case you’d be running headlong into our code of ethics.”

“Nuts. Pity the poor photographer. He does all the work and the potbellies have all the fun.” I dragged on my cigarette and squinted my eyes. “You know, Clyde has a pretty business for himself.”

My casual reference to the guy brought her eyebrows up. “Do you know him?”

“Sure, from way back. Ask him to tell you about me someday.”

“I don’t know him that well, myself. But if I ever get the chance I will. He’s the perfect underworld type, don’t you think?”

“Right out of the movies. When did he start running that place?”

Juno tapped her cheek with a delicate forefinger. “Oh . . . about six months ago, I think. I remember him stopping in the office to buy photographs in wholesale lots. He had the girls sign all the pictures and invited them to his opening. It was all very secret of course. I didn’t get to go myself until I heard the girls raving about the place. He did the same thing with most of the agencies in town.”

“He’s got a brain, that boy,” I drawled. “It’s nice to have your picture on the wall. He played the girls for slobs and they never knew it. He knew damn well that a lot of them traveled with the moneybags and would pull them into his joint. When word got around that there was open gambling to boot, business got better and better. Now he gets the tourists too. They think it’s all very smart and exciting . . . the kind who go around hoping for a raid so they can cut their pictures out of the papers and send them home to the folks for laughs.”

She stared at me, frowning.

“I wonder who he pays off?” I mused.

“Who?”

“Clyde. Somebody is taking the long green to keep the place going. Clyde’s shelling out plenty to somebody with a lot of influence, otherwise he would have had the cops down his throat on opening night.”

Juno said impatiently, “Oh, Mike, those tactics went out with the Prohibition era . . .” then her voice got curious. “Or didn’t they?”

I looked across the table at this woman who wore her beauty so proudly and arrogantly. “You’ve only seen the best side of things so far, kid. Plenty goes on you wouldn’t want to look at.”

She tossed her head. “It seems incredible that those things still happen, Mike.”

I started to slap my fist against my palm gently. “Incredible, but it’s happening,” I said. “I wonder what would happen if I shafted my old buddy Dinky Williams?” My mouth twisted into a grin. “Maybe it’s an angle. Maybe . . .” I let my sentence trail off and stared at the wall.

Juno signaled the waiter and he came back with another round of cocktails. I checked my watch and found myself in the middle of the afternoon. “We’ll make these our last, ok?”

She leaned her chin on her hands, smiling. “I hate to have you leave me.”

“It’s not a cinch for me, either.” She was still smiling and I said, “I asked another beautiful girl who could have had ten other guys why she picked me to hold hands with. She gave me a good answer. What’s yours, Juno?”

Her eyes were a fathomless depth that tried to draw me down into them. Her mouth was still curved in a smile that went softer and softer until only a trace of it was left. Full, lovely lips that barely had to move to form the words. “I detest people who pamper me. I detest people who insist upon putting me on a pedestal. I think I like to be treated rough and you’re the only one who has tried it.”

“I haven’t tried anything.”

“No. But you’ve been thinking of it. Sometimes you don’t even speak politely.”

She was a mind reader like all good goddesses should be and she was right. Quite right. I didn’t know what the hell was going on in my head, but sometimes when I looked at her I wanted to reach across the table and smack her right in the teeth. Even when I thought of it I could feel the tendons in the back of my hand start twitching. Maybe a goddess was just too damn much for me. Maybe I’d been used to my own particular kind of guttersnipe too long. I kicked the idea out of my mind and unlocked the stare we were holding on each other.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “There’s still some day and a long night ahead of me.”

She was wanting me to ask her to continue this day and not break it off now, but I didn’t let myself think it. Juno pushed back her chair and stood up. “The nose. First I must powder the nose, Mike.” I watched her walk away from me, watched the swing of her hips and the delicate way she seemed to balance on her toes. I wasn’t the only one watching, either. A kid who had artist written all over her in splotches of paint was leaning against the partition of the booth behind me. Her eyes were hard and hot and followed Juno every step of the way. She was another one of those mannish things that breed in the half-light of the so-called aesthetical world. I got a look that told me I was in for competition and she took off after Juno. She came back in a minute and her face was pulled tight in a scowl and I gave her a nasty laugh. Some women, yes. Others, nix.

My nose got powdered first and I waited by the door for her after throwing a good week’s pay to the cashier.

The snow that had slacked off started again in earnest. A steady stream of early traffic poured out of the business section, heading home before the stuff got too deep. Juno had snow tires on the heap so I wasn’t worried about getting caught, but it took us twice the time to get back uptown as it did to come down.

Juno decided against going back to the office and told me to go along Riverside Drive. At the most fashionable of the cross streets I turned off and went as far as the middle of the block. She indicated a new gray stone building that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the others, boasting a doorman in a maroon uniform and topcoat. She leaned back and sighed, “We’re home.”

“Leave the car here?”

“Won’t you need it to get where you’re going?”

“I couldn’t afford to put gas in this buggy. No, I’ll take a cab.” I got out and opened the door. The maroon uniform walked over and tipped his hat. Juno said, “Have the car taken to the garage for me please?”

He took the keys. “Certainly, Miss Reeves.”

She turned to me with a grin. The snow swirling around her clung to the fur of her collar and hat, framing her face with a sprinkling of white. “Come up for a drink?” I hesitated, “Just one, Mike, then I’ll let you go.”

“Okay, baby, just one and don’t try to make it any more.”

Juno didn’t have a penthouse, but it was far enough up to make a good Olympus. There was no garishness about the place, big as it was. The furnishings and the fixtures were matched in the best of taste, designed for complete, comfortable living.

I kept my coat and hat on while she whipped up a cocktail, my eyes watching the lithe grace of her movements. There was an unusual symmetry to her body that made me want to touch and feel. Our eyes met in the mirror over the sofa and there was the same thing in hers as there must have been in mine.

She spun around with an eloquent gesture and held out the glasses. Her voice was low and husky again. “I’m just a breeze past thirty, Mike. I’ve known many men. I’ve had many men too, but none that I really wanted. One day soon I’m going to want you.”

My spine chilled up suddenly and the crazy music let loose in my head because she had the light in her hair again. The stem of the glass broke off in my fingers, tearing into my palm. The back of my neck got hot and I felt the sweat pop out on my forehead.

I moved so the light would be out of her hair and the gold would be gone from it, covering up the insane hatred of memory by lifting my hand to drink from the bowl of the broken glass.

It spoiled the picture for me, a picture that should be beautiful and desirable, scarred by something that should be finished but kept coming back.

I put the pieces of the glass down on the window sill and she said, “You looked at me that way again, Mike.”

This time I forced the memory out of my mind. I slipped my hand over hers and ran my fingers through her hair, sifting its short silky loveliness. “I’ll make it up to you sometime, Juno. I I can’t help thinking and it hasn’t got anything to do with you.”

“Make it up to me now.”

I gave her ear a little pull. “No.”

Why?” .

“Because.”

She pouted and her eyes tried to convince me.

I couldn’t tell her that it was because there was a time and place for everything, and though this was the time and place she wasn’t the person. I was only a mortal. A mortal doesn’t undress a goddess and let his eyes feast and his hands feel and his body seek fulfillment.

Then too maybe that wasn’t the reason at all. Maybe she reminded me of something else I could never have.

Never.

She said it slowly. “Who was she, Mike? Was she lovely?”

I couldn’t keep the words back. I tried, but they were there.

“She was lovely. She was the most gorgeous thing that ever lived and I was in love with her. But she did something and I played God; I was the judge and I the jury and the sentence was death. I shot her right in the gut and when she died I died too.”

Juno never said a word. Only her eyes moved. They softened, offered themselves to me, trying to convince me that I wasn’t dead . . . not to her.

I lit a cigarette and stuck it in my mouth, then got the hell out of there before her eyes became too convincing. I felt her eyes burning in my back because we both knew I’d be back.

Juno, goddess of marriage and births, queen of the lesser gods and goddesses. Why wasn’t she Venus, goddess of beauty and love? Juno was a queen and she didn’t want to be. She wanted to be a woman.

Darkness had come prematurely, but the reflected lights on the whiteness of the snow made the city brighter than ever. Each office building discharged a constant stream of people clutching their collars tight at the throat. I joined the traffic that pressed against the sides of the buildings trying to get away from the stinging blast of air, watching them escape into the mouths of the kiosks.

I grabbed a cab, stayed in it until I reached Times Square, then got out and ducked into a bar for a quick beer. When I came out there were no empty cabs around so I started walking down Broadway toward Thirty-third. Every inch it was a fight against the snow and the crowd. My feet were soaked and the crease was out of my pants. Halfway there the light changed suddenly and the cars coming around the corner forced the pedestrians back on the curb.

Somebody must have slipped because there was a tinkle of glass then a splintering crash as the front came out of a store showcase on the corner. Those who jumped out of the way were crammed in by others who wanted to see what happened. A cop wormed in through the melee and stood in front of the window and I got out through the path he left behind him.

When I reached Thirty-third I turned east hoping to find a taxi to get over to the parking lot and decided to give it up as a bad job and walk the rest of the way after one more look.

I stepped out on the curb to look down the street when the plate glass in a window behind me twanged and split into a spider web of cracks. Nobody had touched it this time, either. A car engine roared and all I saw was the top half of a face looking out from the back window of a blue sedan and it was looking straight at me for a long second before it pulled out of sight.

My eyes felt tight and my lips were pulled back over my teeth. My voice cut into the air and faces turned my way. “Twice the same day,” I said, “right on Broadway, too. The crazy bastard, the crazy son-of-a-bitch!”

I didn’t remember getting to the car lot or driving out through traffic. I must have been muttering to myself because the drivers of cars that stopped alongside me at red lights would look over and shake their heads like I was nuts or something. Maybe I was. It scares me to be set up as a target right off the busiest street in the world.

That first window. I thought it was an accident. The second one had a bullet hole in the middle of it just before it came apart and splashed all over the sidewalk.

The building where I held down an office had a parking space in the basement. It was empty. I drove in and rolled to a corner and locked up. The night man took my keys and let me sign the register before letting me take the service elevator up to my floor.

When I got out I walked down the corridor, looking at the darkened glass of the empty offices. Only one had a light behind it and that one was mine. When I rattled the knob the latch snapped back and the door opened.

Velda said, “Mike! What are you doing here?”

I brushed right past her and went to the filing cabinet where I yanked at the last drawer down. I had to reach all the way in the back behind the rows of well-stuffed envelopes to get what I wanted.

“What happened, Mike?” She was standing right beside me, her lip caught between her teeth. Her eyes were on the little .25 automatic I was shoving in my pocket.

“No bastard is going to shoot at me,” I told her. My throat felt dry and hoarse.

“When?”

“Just now. Not ten minutes ago. The bastard did it right out in the open. You know what that means?”

That animal snarl crossed her face and was gone in a second. “Yes. It means that you’re important all of a sudden.”

“That’s right, important enough to kill.”

She said it slowly, hoping I had the answer. “Did you . . . see who it was?”

“I saw a face. Half of it. Not enough to tell who it was except that it was a man. That face will try again and when it does I’ll blow the hell out of it.”

“Be careful, Mike. You don’t have a license anymore. The D.A. would love to run you in on a Sullivan charge.”

I got up out of my crouch and gave her a short laugh. “The law is supposed to protect the people. If the D.A. wants to jug me I’ll make a good time out of it. I’ll throw the Constitution in his face. I think one of the first things it says is that the people are allowed to bear arms. Maybe they’ll even have to revoke the Sullivan Law and then we’ll really have us a time.”

“Yeah, a great whizbang, bang-up affair.”

For the first time since I came in I took notice of her. I don’t know how the hell I waited so long. Velda was wearing a sweeping black evening gown that seemed to start halfway down her waist, leaving the top naked as sin. Her hair, falling around her shoulders, looked like onyx and I got a faint whiff of a deep, sensual aroma.,

There was no fullness to the dress. It clung. There was no other word for it. It just clung, and under it there wasn’t the slightest indication of anything else. “Is that all you got on?”

“Yes.”

“It’s cold outside, baby.” I know I was frowning but I couldn’t help it. “Where you going?”

“To see your friend Clyde. He’s invited me out to supper.”

My hand tightened into a fist before I could stop it. Clyde, the bastard! I forced a grin through the frown. It didn’t come out so well. “If I knew you would look like that I’d have asked you out myself.”

There was a time when she would have gotten red and slammed me across the jaw. There was a time when she would have broken any kind of a date to put away a hamburger in a diner with me. Those times had flown.

She pulled on a pair of elbow-length gloves and let me stand there with my mouth watering, knowing damn well she had me where it hurt. “Business, Mike, business before pleasure always.” Her face was blank.

I let my tone get sharp. “What were you doing here before I came in?”

“There’s a note on your desk explaining everything. I visited the Calway Merchandising Company and rounded up some photographs they took of the girls that night. You might want to see them. You take to pretty girls, don’t you?”

“Shut up.”

She glanced at me quickly so I wouldn’t see the tears that made her eyes shine. When she walked to the desk to get her coat I started swearing under my breath at Clyde again because the bastard was getting the best when I had never seen it. That’s what happens when something like Velda is right under your nose.

I said it again. This time there was no sharpness in my voice. “I wish I had seen you like that before, Velda.”

She took a minute to put on her coat and it was so quiet in that room I could hear her breathing. She turned around, the tears were still there. “Mike . . . I don’t have to tell you that you can see me any way you like . . . anytime.”

I had her in my arms, pressing her against me, feeling every warm, vibrant contour of her body. Her mouth reached for mine and I tasted the wet sweetness of her lips, felt her shudder as my hands couldn’t keep off the whiteness of her skin. My fingers dug into her shoulders leaving livid red marks. She tore her mouth away with a’ sob and spun around so I couldn’t see her face, and with one fast motion that happened too quickly she put her hands over mine and slid them over the flesh and onto the dress that clung and down her body that was so warmly alive, then pulled away and ran to the door.

I put a cigarette in my mouth and forgot to light it. I could still hear her heels clicking down the hall. Absently, I reached for the phone and dialed Pat’s number out of habit. He said hello three times before I answered him and told him to meet me in my office.

I looked at my hands and the palms were damp with sweat. I lit my cigarette and sat there, thinking of Velda again.

Chapter Seven

It took pat thirty minutes to get there. He came in stamping the snow off his shoes and blowing like a bull moose. When he shed his coat and hat he threw a briefcase on the desk and drew up a chair.

“What are you looking so rosy about, Mike?”

“The snow. It always gets me. How’d you make out today?”

“Fine,” Pat said, “just fine and dandy. The D.A. made a point of telling me to keep my nose clean again. If he ever gets boosted out of office I’m going to smack him right in the sneezer.” He must have read the surprise on my face. “Okay, okay, it doesn’t sound like me. Go ahead and say it. I’m getting tired of being snarled up in red tape. You had it easy before you threw away your ticket and you didn’t know it.”

“I’ll get it back.”

“Perhaps. We have to make murder out of suicide first.”

“You almost had another on your hands today, chum.”

He stopped in the middle of a sentence and said, “Who now?”

“Me.”

“You!”

“Little me. On a crowded street, too. Somebody tried to pop me with a silenced gun. All they got was two windows.”

“I’ll be damned! We got a call on one of those windows, the one on Thirty-third. If the slug didn’t poke a hole through all the scenery and land where it could be found it would have passed for an accident. Where was the other one?”

I told him and he said he would be damned again. He reached for the phone and buzzed headquarters to have them go through the window for the slug. When he hung up I said, “What’s the D.A. going to do when he hears about this?”

“Quit kidding. He isn’t hearing anything. You know the rep you have . . . the bright boy’ll claim it’s one of your old friends sending a greeting card for the holidays.”

“It’s too early for that.”

“Then he’ll grab you on some trumped-up charge and get himself a big play in the papers. The hell with him.”

“You aren’t talking like a good cop now, feller.”

Pat’s face darkened and he leaned out of his chair with his teeth bared to the gums. “There’s a time when being a good cop won’t catch a killer. Right now I’m teed off, Mike. We’re both on a hot spot that may get hotter and I don’t like it. It might be that I’m getting smart. A little favorable publicity never hurts anybody and if the D.A. tries to trim my corns I’ll have a better talking point if I have something I can toss at him.”

I laughed. Cripes, how I laughed! For ten years I had sung that song to him and now he was beginning to learn the words.

It was funnier now than it was in the beginning.

I said, “What about Rainey? You find him?”

“We found him.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah what. He was engaged in the so-called legitimate profession of promoting fights. Some arena on the island. We couldn’t tap him for a thing. What about him?”

There was a bottle of booze in the desk and I poured out two shots. “He’s in this, Pat. I don’t know just how he fits, but he’s there.” I offered a silent toast and we threw them down. It burned a path to my stomach and lay there like a hot coal. I put down the glass and sat on the window sill. “I went out to see Emil Perry. Rainey was there and had the guy scared silly. Even I couldn’t scare him worse. Perry said Wheeler had spoken of suicide because business was bad, but a check showed his outfit to be making coin hand over fist. Riddle me that one.”

Pat whistled slowly.

I waited for him to collect his thoughts. “Remember Dinky Williams, Pat?”

Pat let his head move up and down. “Go on.” His face was getting that cop look on it.

I tried to make it sound casual. “What’s he doing now? You know?”

“No.”

“If I were to tell you that he was running a wide-open gambling joint right here in the city, what would you do?”

“I’d say you were crazy, it’s impossible, then put the vice squad on it.”

“In that case I won’t tell you about it.”

He brought his hand down on the desk so hard my cigarettes jumped. “The hell you won’t! You’ll tell me about it right now! Who am I supposed to be, a rookie cop for you to play around with?”

It was nice to see him get mad again. I eased down off the window sill and slumped in my chair. His face was red as a beet. “Look, Pat. You’re still a cop. You believe in the integrity and loyalty of the force. You may not want to, but you’ll be duty bound to do just what you said. If you do a killer gets away.”

He went to talk but I stopped him with a wave of my hand. “Keep still and listen. I’ve been thinking that there’s more to this than you or I have pictured. Dink’s in it, Rainey’s in it, guys like Emil Perry are in it too. Maybe lots more we don’t know about . . . yet. Dinky Williams is cleaning up a pretty penny right this minute running wheels and bars without a license. Because I told you that don’t go broadcasting it around. It may hurt you to be reminded of the fact, but just the same it has to be . . if Dinky Williams runs a joint, then somebody is getting paid off. Somebody big. Somebody important. Either that or a whole lot of small somebodies who are mighty important when you lump them all together. Do you want to fight that setup?”

“You’re damned well told I do!”

“You want to keep your badge? You think you can buck it?”

His voice was a hoarse whisper. “I’ll do it.”

“You have another think coming and you know it. You’d just like to do it. Now listen to me. I have an inside track on this thing. We can play it together or not, but we’re doing it my way or you can stick your nose in the dirt and root up the facts yourself. It won’t be easy. If Dinky is paying off we can get the whole crowd at once, not just Dinky. Now call it.”

I think if I had had a license it would have been gone right there, friend or no friend. All I had was a name on the door that didn’t mean anything now. Pat looked at me with disgust and said, “What a great Captain of Homicide I am. The D.A. would give his arm for a recording of this little conversation. Okay, Inspector, I’m waiting for my orders.”

I gave him a two-fingered salute. “First, we want a killer. To get him we need to know why Wheeler was killed. If you were to mention the fact that a certain guy named Clyde was heading for trouble you might get results. They won’t be pretty results, but they might show us where to look.”

“Who’s Clyde?” There was an ominous tone in his voice.

“Clyde is Dinky’s new moniker. He got fancy.”

Pat was grinning now. “The name is trouble, Mike. I’ve heard it mentioned before.” He stood up and pulled a cigarette from my deck of Luckies. I sat there and waited. “We’re getting into ward politics now.”

“So?”

“So you’re a pretty smart bastard. I still say you should’ve been a cop. You’d be Commissioner by now or dead. One or the other. You might still be dead.”

“I almost was this afternoon.”

“Sure, I can see why. This Clyde guy has all the local monkeys by their tails. He gets everything fixed, everything from a parking ticket to a murder rap. All you have to do is mention the name and somebody starts bowing and scraping. Our old friend Dinky has really come up in the world.”

“Nuts. He’s a small-time heel.”

“Is he? If it’s the same guy we’re talking about he’s able to pull a lot of strings.”

Pat was too calm. I didn’t like it. There were things I wanted

to ask him and I was afraid of the answers. I said, “How about the hotel? You checked there, didn’t you?”

“I did. Nobody registered the day of the killing, but there were quite a few guests admitted to other rooms that same night. They all had plausible alibis.”

That time I let out a string ‘of dirty words. Pat listened and grinned again. “Will I see you tomorrow, Mike?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow.”

“Stay away from store windows.”

He put on his hat and slammed the door. I went back to looking at the pictures Velda had left on my desk. The girl named Marion Lester was laughing into the camera from the folds of a huge furcollared coat. She looked happy. She didn’t look like she’d be drunk in another couple of hours and have to be put to bed by a friend of mine who died not long after.

I slid all the photos in the folder and stuffed them in the desk drawer. The bottle was still half full and the glass empty. I cured that in a hurry. Pretty soon it was the other way around, then there was nothing in either of them and I felt better. I pulled the phone over by the cord and dialed a number that I had written on the inside of a matchbook cover.

A voice answered and I said, “Hello, Connie . . Mike.”

“My ugly lover! I thought you’d forgotten me.”

“Never, child. What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Can you wait another half-hour?”

“I’ll get undressed for you.”

“You get dressed for me because we may go out.”

“It’s snowing.” She sounded pained. “I don’t have galoshes.”

“I’ll carry you.” She was still protesting when I stuck the receiver on its arms.

There was a handful of .25 shells in the drawer that I shoveled into my pocket, little bits of insurance that might come in handy. Just before I left I pulled out the drawer and hauled out the envelope of photographs. The last thing I did was type a note for Velda telling her to let me know how she made out.

The guy in the parking lot had very thoughtfully put the skid chains on my buggy and earned himself a couple of bucks. I backed out and joined the line of cabs and cars that pulled their way through the storm.

Connie met me at the door with a highball in her hand and shoved it at me before I could take off my hat. “My hero,” she said, “my big, brave hero coming through the raging blizzard to rescue poor me.”

It was a wonderful highball. I gave her back the empty and kissed her cheek. Her laugh was little bells that tinkled in my ear. She closed the door and took my coat while I went inside and sat down. When she joined me she sat on the sofa with her legs crossed under her and reached for a smoke. “About tonight . . . we are going where?”

“Looking for a killer.”

The flame of the match she held trembled just a little. “You . . . know?”

I shook my head. “I suspect.”

There was real interest in her face. Her voice was soft. “Who?”

“I suspect a half-dozen people. Only one of them is a killer. The rest contributed to the crime somehow.” I played with the cord on the floor lamp and watched the assorted expressions that flickered across her face.

Finally she said, “Mike . . . is there some way I can help? I mean, is it possible that something I know might have a meaning?”

“Possibly.”

“Is that . . . the only reason you came here tonight?”

I turned the light off and on a few times. Connie was staring at me hard, her eyes questioning. “You don’t have much faith in yourself, kid,” I grinned. “Why don’t you look in the mirror sometime? You got a face that belongs in the movies and a body that should be a crime to cover. You have an agile mind too. I’m only another guy. I go for all that.

“The answer is yes, that’s all I came here for tonight. If you were anybody else I still would have come, but because you’re you it makes it all the nicer and I look forward to coming. Can you understand that?”

Her legs swung down and she came over and kissed my nose, then went back to the couch. “I understand, Mike. Now I’m happy. Tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know, Connie. I’m up a tree. I don’t know what to ask for.”

“Just ask anything you want.”

I shrugged. “Okay, do you like your work?”

“Wonderful.”

“Make a lot of jack?”

“Oodles.”

“Like your boss?”

“Which one?”

“Juno.”

Connie spread her hands out in a noncommittal gesture. “Juno never interferes with me. She had seen my work and was impressed with it. When I had a call from her I was thrilled to the bones because I hit the top. Now all she does is select those ads that fit me best and Anton takes care of the rest.”

“Juno must make a pile,” I said observingly.

“I guess she does! Besides drawing a big salary she’s forever on the receiving end of gifts from overgenerous clients. I’d almost feel sorry for Anton if he had the sense to care.”

“What about him?”

“Oh, he’s the arty type. Doesn’t give a hoot for money as long as he has his work. He won’t let a subordinate handle the photography, either. Maybe that’s why the agency is so successful.”

“He married? A wife would cure that.”

“Anton married? That’s a laugh. After all the women he handles, and I do mean handles, what mere woman would attract that guy. He’s positively frigid. For a Frenchman that’s disgraceful.”

“French?”

Connie nodded and dragged on her smoke. “I overheard a little secret being discussed. between Anton and Juno. It seems that Juno met him in France and brought him over here, just in time for him to escape some nasty business with the French court. During the war he was supposed to have been a collaborator of a sort , . . taking propaganda photos of all the bigwig Nazis and their families. As I said, Anton doesn’t give a hoot about money or politics as long as he has his work.”

“That’s interesting but not very helpful. Tell me something about Clyde.”

“I don’t know anything about Clyde except that looking like a movie gangster he is a powerful attraction for a lot of jerks from both sexes.”

“Do the girls from the studio ever give him a play?”

She shrugged again. “I’ve heard rumors. You know the kind. He hands out expensive presents to everybody during the holidays and is forever treating someone to a lavish birthday party under the guise of friendship when it’s really nothing but good business practice. I know for a fact that the crowd has stuck to the Bowery longer than they ever have to another fad. I’m wondering what’s going to happen when Clyde gets ordinary people.”

“So am I,” I said. “Look, do something for me. Start inquiring around and see who forms his clientele. Important people. The kind of people who have a voice in the city. It’ll mean getting yourself invited to the Inn but that ought to be fun.”

“Why don’t you take me?”

“I’m afraid that Clyde wouldn’t like that. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting an escort. How about one of those ten other guys?”

“It can be managed. It would be more fun with you though.”

“Maybe some other time. Has one of those ten guys got dough?”

“They all have.”

“Then take the one with the most. Let him spend it. Be a little discreet if you start to ask questions and don’t get too pointed with them. I don’t want Clyde to get sore at you too. He can think of some nasty games to play.” I had the group of photos behind my back and I pulled them out. Connie came over to look at them. “Know all these girls?”

She nodded as she went through them. “Clotheshorses, every one. Why?”

I picked out the one of Marion Lester and held it out. “Know her well?”

She made a nasty sound with her mouth. “One of Juno’s pets,” she said. “Came over from the Stanton Studio last year when Juno offered her more money. She’s one of the best, but she’s a pain.”

“Why?”

“Oh, she thinks she’s pretty hot stuff. She’s been playing around a lot besides. One of these days Juno will can her. She’s got a tramp complex that will lose the agency some clients one of these days.” She riffled through some of the others and took out two, one a shot of a debutante-type in a formal evening gown that was almost transparent. “This is Rita Loring. You wouldn’t think it, but she saw thirty-five plenty of years ago. One of the men at the show that night hired her at a fabulous sum to model exclusively for him.”

The other photo was a girl in a sports outfit of slacks, vest and blouse, touched with fancy gimcracks that women like. She was photographed against a background that was supposed to represent a girls’ dormitory. “Little Jean Trotter, our choice teen-age type. She eloped the day before yesterday. She sent Juno a letter and we all chipped in to buy her a television set. Anton was quite perturbed since she left in the middle of a series. Juno had to pat his hand to calm him down. I never saw him get so mad.”

She handed the pictures back to me and I put them away. The evening was early so I told her to get busy on the phone and arrange herself a date. She didn’t like it, but she did it so I’d get jealous. She did the damndest job of seduction over a telephone I’d ever heard. I sat there and grinned until she got mad and took it out on the guy on the other end. She said she’d meet him in a hotel lobby downtown to save time and hung up.

“You’re a stinker, Mike,” she said.

I agreed with her. She threw my coat at me and climbed into her own. When we reached the street entrance I did like I said and carried her out to the car. She didn’t get her feet wet, but the snow blew up her dress and that was just as bad. We had supper in a sea-food place, took time for a drink and some small talk, then I dumped her in front of the hotel where she was to meet her date. I kissed her so-long and she stopped being mad.

Now I had to keep me a couple of promises. One was a promise to outdo a character named Rainey. I followed a plow up Broadway for a few blocks, dragging along at a walk. To give it time to get ahead of me I pulled to the curb on a side street and walked back to a corner bar. This time I went right to the phone and shoved in a nickel.

I had to wait through that nickel and another one before Joe Gill finally pulled himself out of the tub and came to the phone. He barked a sharp hello and I told him it was me.

“Mike,” he started, “if you don’t mind, I’d rather not . . .”

“What kind of a pal are you, chum? Look, you’re not getting into anything. All I want is another little favor.”

I heard him sigh. “All right. What is it now?”

“Information. The guy is Emil Perry, a manufacturer. He has a residence in the Bronx. I want to know all about him, socially and financially.”

“Now you’re asking a toughie. I can put some men on his social life, but I can’t go into his financial status too deeply. There’re laws, you know.”

“Sure, and there’re ways to get around them. I want to know about his bank accounts even if you have to break into his house to get them.”

“Now, Mike.”

“You don’t have to do it, you know.”

“What the hell’s the use of arguing with you. I’ll do what I can, but this time we’re even on all past favors, understand? And don’t do me any more I’ll have to repay.”

I laughed at him. “Quit being a worrier. If you get in trouble I’ll see my pal the D.A. and everything will be okeydoke.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Keep in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Roger, ‘Night, Joe.”

He grunted a good-by and the phone clicked in my ear. I laughed again and opened the door of the booth. Soon I ought to know what Rainey had on the ball to scare the hell out of a big shot like Perry. Meanwhile I’d find out if I could be scared a little myself.

The Globe presses were grinding out a late edition with a racket that vibrated throughout the entire building. I went in through the employees’ entrance and took the elevator up to the rewrite room where the stutter of typewriters sounded like machine guns. I asked one of the copy boys where I could find Ed Cooper and he pointed to a glass-enclosed room that was making a little racket all its own.

Ed was the sports editor on the Globe with a particular passion for exposing the crumbs that made money the easy way, and what he didn’t know about his business wasn’t worth knowing. I opened the door and walked into a full-scale barrage that was pouring out of a mill as old as he was.

He looked up without stopping, said, “Be right with you, Mike.” I sat down until he finished his paragraph and played with the .25 in my jacket pocket.

My boy must have liked what he wrote because he had a satisfied leer on his face that was going to burn somebody up. “Spill it, Mike. Tickets or information?”

“Information. A former hood named Rainey is a fight promoter. Where and who does he promote?”

Ed took it right in stride. “Know where the Glenwood Housing project is out on the island?”

I said I did. It was one of those cities-within-a-city affairs that catered to ex-G.I.’s within an hour’s drive from New York.

“Rainey’s in with a few other guys and they built this arena to get the trade from Glenwood. They put on fights and wrestling bouts, all of it stinko. Just the same, they pack ‘em in. Lately there’s been some talk of the fight boys going in the tank so’s a local betting ring can clean up. I got that place on my list if it’s any news to you.”

“Fine, Ed. There’s a good chance that Rainey will be making the news soon. If I’m around when it happens I’ll give you a buzz.”

“You going out there tonight?”

“That’s right.”

Ed looked at his watch. “They got a show on. If you step on it you might catch the first bout.”

“Yeah,” I said, “It oughta be real interesting. I’ll tell you about it when I get back to the city.” I put on my hat and opened the door. Ed stopped me before I got out.

“Those guys I was telling you about-Rainey’s partners-they’re supposed to be plenty tough. Be careful.”

“I’ll be very careful, Ed. Thanks for the warning.”

I went out through the clatter and pounding beat of the presses and found my car. Already the snow had piled up on the hood, pulling a white blind over the windows. I wiped it off and climbed in.

One thing about the city; it was mechanized to the point of perfection. The snow had been coming down for hours now, yet the roads were passable and getting better every minute. What the plows hadn’t packed down the cars did, with big black eyes of manhole covers steaming malevolently on every block.

By the time I reached the arena outside the Glenwood area I could hear the howling and screaming of the mob. The parking space was jammed and overflowed out onto the street. I found an open spot a few hundred yards down the street that was partially protected by a huge oak and rolled in.

I had missed the first bout, but judging from the stumble-bums that were in there now I didn’t miss much. It cost me a buck for a wall seat so far back I could hardly see through the smoke to the ring. Moisture dripped from the cinder-block walls and the seats were nothing more than benches roughed out of used lumber. But the business they did there was terrific.

It was a usual crowd of plain people hungry for entertainment and willing to pay for it. They could do better watching television if they stayed home. I sat near the door and let my eyes become accustomed to the semidarkness. The last few rows were comparatively empty, giving me a fairly full view of what went on in the aisles.

There was a shout from the crowd and one of the pugs in the ring was counted out. A few minutes later he was carted up the aisle and out into the dressing room. Some other gladiators took their places.

By the end of the fourth bout everybody who was going to be there was there. The two welters who had waltzed through the six rounds went past me into the hall behind the wall trailing their managers and seconds. I got up and joined the procession. It led to a large, damp room lined with cheap metal lockers and wooden plank benches with a shower room spilling water all over the floor. The whole place reeked of liniment and sweat. Two heavies with bandaged hands were playing cards on the bench keeping score with spit marks on the floor.

I walked over to one of the cigar-smoking gents in a brown striped suit and nudged him with a thumb. “Where’s Rainey?”

He shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and said, “Inna office, I guess. You gotta boy here tonight?”

“Naw,” I told him. “My boy’s in bed wita cold.”

“Tough. Can’t maka dime that way.”

“Naw.”

He shifted the cigar back bringing an end to that. I went looking for the office that Rainey was inna. I found it down at the end of the hall. A radio was playing inside, tuned to a fight that was going on in the Garden. There must have been another door leading to the office because it slammed and there was a mumble of voices. One started to swear loudly until another told him to shut up. The swearing stopped. The voices mumbled again, the door slammed, then all I heard was the radio blaring.

I stood there a good five minutes and heard the end of the fight. The winner was telling his story of the battle over the air when the radio was switched off. I opened the door and walked in.

Rainey was sitting at a table counting the receipts for the night, stacking the bills in untidy piles and keeping the tally in a small red book. I had my hand on the knob and shut the door as noiselessly as I could. There was a barrel bolt below the knob and I slid it into the hasp.

If Rainey hadn’t been counting out loud he would have heard me come in. As it was, I heard him go into the five thousand mark before I said, “Good crowd, huh?”

Rainey said, “Shut up,” and went on counting. I said, “Rainey.”

His fingers paused over a stack of fives. His head turned in slow motion until he was looking at me over his shoulder. The padding in his coat obscured the lower half of his face and I tried to picture it through the back window of a sedan racing up Thirty-third Street. It didn’t match, but I didn’t care so much either.

Rainey was a guy you could dislike easily. He had one of those faces that looked painted on, a perpetual mixture of hate, fear and toughness blended by a sneer that was a habit. His eyes were cold, merciless marbles hardly visible under thick, fleshy lids.

Rainey was a tough guy.

I leaned against the door jamb with a cigarette hanging from my lips, one hand in my pocket around the grip of the little .25.

Maybe he didn’t think I had a gun there. His lip rolled up into a snarl and he reached under the table.

I rapped the gun against the door jamb and even through the cloth of the coat you could tell that it was just what it was. Rainey started to lose that tough look. “Remember me, Rainey?”

He didn’t say anything.

I took a long shot in the dark. “Sure, you remember me, Rainey. You saw me on Broadway today. I was standing in front of a plate-glass window. You missed.”

His lower lip fell away from his teeth and I could see more of the marbles that he had for eyes. I kept my hand in my pocket while I reached under the table and pulled out a short-nosed .32 that hung there in a clip.

Rainey finally found his voice. “Mike Hammer,” he said, “What the hell got into you?”

I sat on the edge of the table and flipped all the bills to the floor. “Guess.” Rainey looked at the dough then back to me.

The toughness came back in a hurry. “Get out of here before you get tossed out, copper.” He came halfway out of his seat.

I palmed that short-nosed .32 and laid it across his cheek with a crack that split the flesh open. He rocked back into his chair with his mouth hanging, drooling blood and saliva over his chin. I sat there smiling, but nothing was funny.

I said, “Rainey, you’ve forgotten something. You’ve forgotten that I’m not a guy that takes any crap. Not from anybody. You’ve forgotten that I’ve been in business because I stayed alive longer than some guys who didn’t want me that way. You’ve forgotten that I’ve had some punks tougher than you’ll ever be on the end of a gun and I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change.”

He was scared, but he tried to bluff it out anyway. He said, “Why don’tcha try it now, Hammer? Maybe it’s different when ya don’t have a license to use a rod. Go ahead, why dont’cha try it?”

He started to laugh at me when I pulled the trigger of the .32 and shot him in the thigh. He said, “My God!” under his breath and grabbed his leg. I raised the muzzle of the gun until he was looking right into the little round hole that was his ticket to hell.

“Dare me some more, Rainey.”

He made some blubbering noises and leaned over the chair to puke on the money that was scattered around his feet. I threw the little gun on the table. “There’s a man named Emil Perry. If

you go near him again I’ll put the next slug right where your shirt meets your pants.”

I shouldn’t have been so damn interested in the sound of my own voice. I should have had the sense to lock the other door. I should’ve done a lot of things and there wouldn’t have been anybody standing behind me saying, “Hold it, brother, just hold it right there.”

A tall skinny guy came around the table and took a long look at Rainey who sat there too sick to speak. The other one held a gun in my back. The skinny one said, “He’s shot! You bastard, you’ll catch it for this.” He straightened up and backhanded me across the mouth nearly knocking me off the table. “You a heist artist? Answer me, damn you!” The hand lashed out into my mouth again and this time I did go off the table.

The guy with the gun brought it down across the back of my neck throwing a spasm of pain shooting through my head and shoulders. He stood in front of me this time, a short pasty-faced guy with the urge to kill written all over him. “I’ll handle this, Artie. These big boys are the kind of meat I like.”

Rainey retched and moaned again. I picked myself up slowly and Rainey said, “Gimme the gun. Lemme do it. Goddamn it, gimme that gun!” The skinny guy put his arms around his waist and lifted him to his feet so he could hobble over to the wall where I was.

The guy with the automatic in his hand grinned and took a step nearer. It was close enough. I rammed my hand against the slide and shoved it back while his finger was trying like hell to squeeze the trigger. It didn’t take much effort to rip it right out of his hand while I threw my knee between his legs into his groin. He hit the floor like a bag of wet sand and lay there gasping for breath.

Someday the people who make guns will make one that can’t be jammed so easily. The skinny guy holding Rainey let go and made a dive for the .32 on the table.

I shot him in the leg too.

That was all Rainey needed. The toughness went out of him and he forgot about the hole in his thigh long enough to stagger to his chair and hold his hands up in front of him, trying to keep me away. I threw the automatic on the table with the .32.

“Somebody told me you boys were pretty rough,” I said. “I’m a little disappointed. Don’t forget what I told you about Emil Perry.”

The other guy with the hole in his leg sobbed for me to call a doctor. I told him to do it himself. I stepped on a pack of ten-dollar bills and they tore under my shoe. The little guy was still vomiting. I opened the door and looked back at the three tough guys and laughed. “A doctor’ll have to report those gunshot wounds,” I reminded them. “It would be a good idea to tell him you were cleaning a war souvenir and it went off.”

Rainey groaned again and clawed for the telephone on the table. I was whistling when I shut the door and started back toward my car. All that time gone to waste, I thought. I had been playing it soft when I should have played it hard.

There had been enough words. Now the fun ought to start.

Chapter Eight

I was in bed when Joe called. The alarm had been set for eleven-thirty and was five minutes short of going off. I drawled a sleepy hello and Joe told me to wake up and listen.

“I’m awake,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Don’t ask me how I got this stuff. I had to do some tall conniving but I got it. Emil Perry has several business accounts, a checking account for his wife and a large personal savings account. All of them except his own personal account were pretty much in order. Six months ago he made a cash withdrawal of five thousand bucks. That was the first. It’s happened every other month since then, and yesterday he withdrew all but a few hundred. The total he took out in cash was an even twenty thousand dollars.”

“Wow,” I said. “Where did it go?”

“Getting a line on his personal affairs wasn’t as easy as I thought. Item one, he has a wife and family he loves almost as much as his standing in the community. Item two, he likes to play around with the ladies. Item three, put item one and two together and what do you have?”

“Blackmail,” I said. “All the setup for blackmail. Is that all?”

“As much as I had time for. Now, if there’s nothing else on your mind and I hope there isn’t, I’ll be seeing you never again.”

“You’re a real pal, Joe. Thanks a million.”

“Don’t do me any more favors, Mike, hear?”

“Yeah, I hear. Thanks again.”

There was too much going on in my head to stay in bed. I crawled under the shower and let it bite into my skin. When I dried off I shaved, brushed my teeth and went out and had breakfast. Fat little Emil scared to death of Rainey. Fat little Emil making regular and large withdrawals from the bank. A good combination. Rainey had to get dough enough to throw in the kitty to build that arena someway.

I looked out the window at the gray sky that still had a lot of snow in it, thinking that it was only the beginning. If what I had in mind worked out there ought to be a lot more to come.

The little .25 was still in the pocket of my jacket and it slapped against my side as I walked out to the elevator. The streets were clear and I told the boy to take off the chains and toss them in the trunk. He made himself another couple of bucks. When I backed out of the garage I drove across to Broadway and turned north pointing for the Bronx.

This time the big sedan with the gold initials was gone. I drove around the block twice just to be sure of it. All the blinds on the upper floor were drawn and there was a look of desertion about the place. I parked on the corner and walked back, turning in at the entrance.

Three times I lifted the heavy bronze knocker, and when that didn’t work I gave the door a boot with my foot. A kid on a bicycle saw me and shouted, “They ain’t home, mister. I seen ‘em leave last night.”

I came down off the stoop and walked over to the kid. “Who left?”

“The whole family, I guess. They was packing all kinds of stuff in the car. This morning the maid and the girl that does the cleaning left too. They gimme a quarter to take some empty bottles back to the store. I kept the deposit too.”

I fished in my pocket for another quarter and flipped it to him. “Thanks, son. It pays to keep your eyes open.”

The kid pocketed the coin and took off down the street, the siren on the bike screaming. I walked back up the path to the house. A line of shrubs encircled the building and I worked my way behind them, getting my shoes full of snow and mud. Twice I stopped and had a look around to be sure there weren’t any nosy neighbors ready to yell cop. The bushes did a good job. I felt all the windows, trying them to see if they were locked. They were.

I said the hell with it and wrenched a stone out of the mud and tapped the glass a good one. It made a racket but nobody came around to investigate. When I had all the pieces picked out of the ‘frame I grabbed .the sill and hoisted myself into the room.

If sheet-covered chairs and closed doors meant what it looked like, Emil Perry had flown the coop. I tried the lamp and it didn’t work. Neither did the phone. The room I was in seemed to be a small study, something where a woman would spend a lot of time. There was a sewing machine in the corner and a loom with a half-finished rug stretched out over nails in the framework.

The room led into a hallway of doors, all closed. I tried each one, peering into the yellow light that came through the blinds. Nothing was out of place, everything had been recently cleaned, and I backed out a little bit madder each time.

The hallway ran into a foyer that opened to the breezeway beside the house. On one side I could see the kitchen through a small window in the wall. On the other side a heavily carpeted flight of stairs led to the next floor.

It was the same thing all over again. Everything neat as a pin. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, another bedroom and a study. The last door faced the front of the house and it was locked.

It was locked in two places, above and below the knob.

It took me a whole hour to get those damn things open.

No light at all penetrated this room. I flicked a match on my thumbnail and saw why. A blackout shade had been drawn over the other shade on each of the two windows. It didn’t hurt to lift them up because nobody could see in through the outermost shade.

I was in Emil Perry’s own private cubicle. There were faded pictures on the wall and some juicy calendar pinups scattered around on the tables and chairs. A day bed that had seen too many years sagged against one wall. Under one window was a desk and a typewriter, and alongside it a low, two-drawer filing cabinet. I wrenched it open and pawed through the contents. Most of it was business mail. The rest were deeds, insurance papers and some personal junk. I slammed the drawers shut and started taking the place apart slowly.

I didn’t find a damn thing.

What I did find was in the tiny fireplace and burned to a crisp. Papers, completely burned papers that fell to dust as I touched them. Whatever they were, he had done a good job of burning them. Not one corner or bit showed that was anything but black.