Collection 1983 - The Hills Of Homicide (v5.0) (15 page)

“If I knew the answer to that I’d have the answer to a lot of things, and finding him would be much easier. Tom Marcy changed suddenly, almost overnight. He cleaned up, had his clothes pressed and his shoes shined. He took out his laundry and then began doing a lot of unexpected running around.”

Obviously, she was puzzled, but a sudden glance at her watch and she was on her feet. “I must go. I’ve a date with George and that means I must go home and change. If he ever guessed I had come down here looking like this, he would—”

Kip stood up. “Sure, you can go.” Before she could protest he caught her wrist, spun her into his arms, and kissed her soundly and thoroughly. Pulling away, she tried to slap him, but he blocked it with an elbow. “Don’t be silly!” he said. “I’m not playing games, but this hotel is a joint. When you leave here, you’re going to look like you should, and your lipstick will be smeared, but good!”

He caught her again and kissed her long and thoroughly. She began to struggle, but he held her, and she quieted down. After a moment he let go of her and stepped back. She stared at him, her eyes clouded and her breast heaving. “Did you have to be so—thorough about it?”

“Never do anything by halves,” he said, dropping back into the chair. He looked up at her. “On second thought, I—”

“I’m leaving!” she said hastily, and slipped quickly out of the door.

He grinned after her and wiped the lipstick from his mouth, then stared at the red smear on his handkerchief, his face sobering. He swore softly and dropped back into the chair. Despite his efforts, he could not concentrate.

He walked to the washbasin and wiped away the last of the lipstick.

What did he know, after all? Tom Marcy was an alcoholic with few friends, and only one or two who knew him at all well. Slim Russell was a wino he occasionally treated, and another had been Happy Day. Marcy minded his own affairs, drank heavily, and was occasionally in jail for it. Occasionally, too, he was found drunk in a doorway on skid row. The cops knew him, knew he had a room, and from time to time, rather than take him to jail, they’d take him to his room and dump him on his bed.

Then something happened to change him suddenly. A woman? It was unlikely, for he did not get around much where he might have met a woman. Yet suddenly he had straightened up and had become very busy. About what?

The pawn ticket might prove something. The ticket was for Tom Marcy’s watch. Obviously, he had reached the limit of his funds when some sudden occasion for money arose, and rather than ask his sister for it, he had pawned his watch.

When he failed to appear at the restaurant, something that had not happened before, Marilyn was worried.

She returned to the restaurant several times, but Tom Marcy had not showed up. When the following month came around, she went again, and again he had not appeared. In the meantime, she had watched the newspapers for news of deaths and accidents. Then she hired a detective.

Vin Richards was a shrewd operative with connections throughout what has been called the underworld. A week after taking the case, he was found dead in an alley not far from the hotel in which Kip Morgan sat. Vin Richards had taken a knife in the back and another under the fifth rib. He was very dead when discovered.

Morgan began with a check of the morgue and a talk to the coroner’s assistants. He had checked hospitals and accident reports, then the jails and the police.

The officers who worked the street in that area agreed that Tom Marcy never bothered anybody. Whenever he could, he got back to his room, and even when very drunk, he was always polite. It was the police who said he had straightened up.

“Something about it was wrong,” one officer commented. “Usually when they get off the bottle they can’t leave the street fast enough, but not him. He stayed around, but he wouldn’t take a drink.”

Seven weeks and he had vanished completely; seven weeks with no news. “We figured he finally left, went back home or wherever. To tell you the truth, we miss him.

“The last time I saw him, he was cold sober. Talked with me a minute, asking about some old bum friend of his. He hesitated there just before we drove away, and I had an idea he wanted to tell me something, maybe to say good-by. That was the last time I saw him.”

He had disappeared, but so had Vin Richards. Only they found Vin.

“Odd,” the same officer had commented. “I would never expect Vin to wind up down here. He used to be on the force, you know, and a good man, too, but he wanted to work uptown. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, that crowd.”

The pawn ticket answered one question but posed another. Tom Marcy needed money, so he hocked his watch, something he had not done before. Why did he need money? If he did need it, why hadn’t he asked Marilyn?

The news clippings now—two of them were his own idea, one he found in Tom’s room. And there was a clue, a hint. His clipping and one of Tom’s were identical.

It was a tiny item from the paper having to do with the disappearance of one Happy Day, a booze hound and clown. Long known along East Fifth Street and even as far as Pershing Square, he had been one of Marcy’s friends.

Marcy’s second clipping was about a fire in a town sixty miles upstate in which the owner had lost his life. There was little more except that the building was a total loss.

The last clipping, one Kip Morgan had found for himself, was a duplicate of one Tom Marcy left behind in the hockshop. The owner, thinking it might be important, had put it away with Tom’s watch and mentioned it to Kip Morgan. At Kip’s request, the pawnbroker had shown him the clipping. In a newspaper of the same date as the hocking of the watch, Morgan found the same item. It was a simple advertisement for a man to do odd jobs.

That Marcy had it in his hand when he went to hock his watch might indicate a connection. The pawning of the watch could have been an alternative to answering the ad. Yet Marcy had straightened up immediately and had begun his unexplained running around.

Could the advertisement tie in with the disappearance of Happy Day? A hunch sent Morgan checking back through the papers. Such an ad appeared in the papers just before the disappearance of Happy Day! Once Kip had a connection, he had followed through. Had there been other disappearances? There had.

Slim Russell, Marcy’s other friend, had vanished in the interval between the disappearance of Happy Day and that of Tom Marcy himself. Apparently, it had been these disappearances that brought about the change in Tom Marcy.

Why?

Checking the approximate date of Slim Russell’s disappearance, for which he had only the doubtful memories of various winos, he found another such ad in the newspaper.

The newspaper’s advertising department was a blind alley. On each occasion, the ad came by mail, and cash was enclosed, no check.

Morgan paced the floor, thinking. Not a breeze stirred, and the day was hot. He could be out on the beach now instead of there, sweating out his problem in a cheap hotel, yet he could not escape feeling he was close to something. Also, and it could be his imagination, he had the feeling he was being watched.

Richards, cold and cunning as a prairie wolf, an operator with many connections and many angles, had been trapped and murdered. Before that, three men had disappeared and were probably dead.

Clearing away the Marcy collection, Morgan packed it up, then shifting the gun to a spot beneath his coat, which lay along one side of the bed, he stretched out and fell into an uncomfortable state of half awake, half asleep.

Hours later, his mind fogged by sleep, he felt rather than heard a faint stirring at the door. His consciousness struggled, then asserted itself. He lay very still, every sense alert, listening.

Someone was at the door fumbling with the lock. Slowly, the knob turned.

Morgan lay still. The slightest creak of the springs would be audible. Perspiration dried on his face and he tried to keep his breathing even and natural. Now the darkness seemed thicker where the door had opened. A soft click of the lock as the door closed.

His throat felt tight, his mouth dry. A man with a knife? Gathering himself, every muscle poised, he waited.

A floorboard creaked ever so slightly, a dark figure loomed over his bed, and a hand very gently touched his chest as if to locate the spot. Against the window’s vague light, he saw a hand lift, the glint of a knife. Traffic rumbled in the street, and somewhere a light went on, and the figure beside the bed was starkly outlined.

With a lunge, he threw himself against the standing man’s legs. Caught without warning, the man’s body came crashing down and the knife clattered on the floor. Kip was up on his feet as the man grasped his fallen knife and turned like a cat. Blocking the knife arm, Kip whipped a wicked right into the man’s midsection. He heard the
whoosh
of the man’s breath, and he swung again. The second blow landed on the man’s face, but he jerked away and plunged for the door.

Going after him, Kip tangled himself in a chair, fell, broke free, and rushed for the door in time to see his attacker go into a door across the hall.

Doors opened along the hall and there were angry complaints. He whipped open the door into which the attacker had vanished, a light went on, and a man was sitting up in bed. A window stood open, but his attacker was gone.

“Who was that guy?” the man in bed protested. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Did you see him?” The man in bed showed no signs of excitement, nor was he breathing hard.

“See him? Sure, I saw him! He came bustin’ in here and I flipped the switch, and he dove out that window!”

The alley was dark and the fire escape empty. Whoever he had been, he was safely away now. Kip Morgan walked back to his room. They had killed Richards when he got too close for comfort, and now they were after him.

When the hotel quieted down, he pulled on his shoes and shirt. It was not as late as he had believed, for he had fallen asleep early. He went downstairs into the dingy street; a man was slumped against a building nearby, breathing heavily, an empty wine bottle lying beside him. Another man, obviously steeped in alcohol, lurched against a building staring blearily at Morgan, wondering whether his chance of a touch was worth recrossing the street.

It was early, as it had been still light when he stretched out on the bed. It was too early for the attacker to have expected Morgan to be in bed unless he already
knew
he was there. That implied the attacker either lived in the hotel or had a spy watching him.

Weaving his way down the street through the human driftwood, Morgan considered the problem. The killer of Richards used a knife, and so had his attacker. It was imperative he take every step with caution, for a killer might await him around any corner. Whatever Tom Marcy had stumbled upon, it had led to murder.

Back to the beginning, then. Marcy had straightened up and quit drinking after the disappearance of Slim Russell. He had known enough to arouse his suspicions and obviously connected it to the disappearance of Happy Day.

It was not coincidence that the two men who vanished had been known to him, for the winos along the streets nearly all knew each other, at least by sight. Many times, they had shared bottles or sleeping quarters, and Marcy might have known sixty or seventy of them slightly.

What aroused Marcy’s suspicions? Obviously, he had begun an investigation of his own. But why? Because of fear? Of loyalty to the other derelicts? Or for some deeper, unguessed reason?

Another question bothered Morgan. How had the mysterious attacker identified him so quickly? How had he known about Richards? Richards, of course, had been a private operator for several years, but he, Kip Morgan, had never operated in that area and would be unknown to the underworld except by name from his old prizefighting days.

Something had shocked Tom Marcy so profoundly that he stopped drinking. The idea that was seeping into Morgan’s consciousness was one he avoided. To face it meant suspicion of Marilyn Marcy, but how else could the attacker have known of him? Yet why should she hire men, pay them good money, and then have them killed?

If not Marilyn then somebody near her, but that made no sense, either. The distance from East Fifth to Brentwood was enormous, and those who bridged it were going down, not up. It was a one-way street lined with empty bottles.

Instead of returning to his room, Morgan went to the quiet room where Tom Marcy had lived when not drinking heavily. It was a curious side of the man that during his drinking spells, he slept in flophouses or in the hideouts of other winos. In the intervals, he returned to the quiet, cheap little room where he read, slept, and seemed to have been happy.

At daybreak Morgan was up and made a close, careful search of the room. It yielded exactly nothing.

Three men missing and one murdered; at least two of the missing men had answered ads. What of Marcy? Had he done the same?

The idea gave Morgan a starting point, and he went down into the street. The crowding, pushing, often irritable crowd had not yet reached the downtown streets. The buses that fed their streams of humanity into the downtown areas were still gathering their quotas in the outskirts, miles away.

The warehouse at the address in the advertisement was closed and still. He walked along the street on the opposite side, then crossed and came back down. Several places were opening for business, a feedstore, a filling station, and a small lunch counter across the way.

The warehouse itself was a three-story building, large and old. There was a wooden door, badly in need of paint, a blank, curtained window, and alongside the door a large vehicle entrance closed by a metal door that slid down from above.

Kip crossed the street and entered the café. The place was empty but for one bleary-eyed bum farther down the counter. The waitress, surprisingly, was neat and attractive.

Kip smiled, and his smile usually drew a response from women. “How’s about a couple of sinkers? And a cup of Java?”

She brought the order, hesitating before him. “It’s slow this morning.”

“Do you do much business? With all these warehouses, I should imagine you’d do quite well.”