The Mike Hammer Collection (49 page)

“I've never been there either. I owe my client five bills and there's a chance he might be there. He may want an explanation.”

“Oh.”

The club wasn't far off. Ten minutes' walking brought us to the front entrance and a uniformed doorman obviously glad to see a customer for a change. It was a medium-sized place stepped down from the sidewalk a few feet, lacking the gaudy atmosphere of the Zero Zero. Instead of chrome and gilt, the wall lights reflected the sheen of highly polished oak and brought out the color of the murals around the room. There was an orchestra rather than a band, one that played soft and low, compositions to instill a mood and never detract from the business of eating or drinking.

As we stepped into the anteroom we both had a chance to look at the place over the partitions. A few tables were occupied by late diners. Clustered in a corner were half a dozen men still in business suits deep in discussion with occasional references to pictures sketched on the tablecloth. The bar ran the length of the room and behind it four bar-tenders fiddled with glasses or did something to while away the time. The fifth was pouring whiskey into the glasses of the only two patrons.

Lola went rigid and she breathed my name. I saw what she meant. One of the guys at the bar was Feeney Last. I wasn't interested in him right then. The other was the guy I had beat the hell out of in the parking lot. The one I thought
might
have been looking for his car keys. My conscience felt much better when I looked at the wreck of his nose. The bastard was after the ring.

Lola read my mind again. “Are ... you going in ... after him?”

I wanted to. God, how I wanted to! I couldn't think of anything I'd sooner do. Wouldn't he cream his jeans if he saw me and knew what I was there for! Feeney Last, right here where I could get to him. Man oh man, the guy sure felt secure. After all, what did the cops have on him? Not a damn thing ... and if anything hung over his head he was the only one that had an idea where it could be found. Except me.

And I was supposed to be dead.

We didn't go in the Albino Club after all. I snatched my hat back from the rack and pushed Lola outside. The doorman was cut to the quick yet able to nod good night politely.

On the corner of Broadway a glorified dog wagon was doing a land-office business in late snacks. When I saw the blue and white phone disk on the front I steered Lola in, told her to order us some coffee, then went down the back to the phone booth.

Pat was at home. He must have just gotten in because he was breathing hard from the stairs. I said, “This is Mike, kid. I just saw Feeney Last in the Albino Club with a guy I tangled with not long ago. Can you put a man on him? I have things to do or I'd tail him myself.”

“You bet!” Pat exploded. “I've had him on the wires for over two hours. Every police car in the city is looking for him.”

It puzzled me. “What ... ?”

“I had a teletype from the Coast. It's Feeney they want out there for that murder. He answers the description in every respect.”

Something prompted me to ask, “What kind of a kill was it, Pat?”

“He broke the guy's neck in a brawl. He started off with a knife, lost it in the scuffle, then broke his neck.”

A chill crept up my back and I was in that hallway again, feeling the cut of a smashing blow under my ear. There wasn't any doubt about it now, not the slightest. Feeney had more than one technique. He could kill with a rod or knife, and with his hands if he had to.

“The Albino Club, Pat. You know where it is. He's there. I'm going to race the patrol car and if I win you'll need the dead wagon.”

I slammed the phone back and shoved my way through the crowd at the counter. Lola was looking for me and she didn't have to be told that something had happened. When I went past her as though she wasn't there she called after me and spun off her stool, but by that time I was on the street and running, running as fast as I could go and the few people on the sidewalk got out of the way to stare after me with their mouths dropping open.

My gun was in my hand when I took the corner. My chest was a ball of fire that rejected the air in quick, hot gasps and all I could think of was smashing the butt end of the rod in Feeney's face. From far off I heard the wail of a siren, a low moaning that put speed in my feet and a craving desire to get there first.

We both lost. In the yellow light of the street I saw a car pull away from the curb and when I got outside the Albino Club Feeney Last and his friend had left.

I found out why in a minute. There was a radio at the bar and Feeney had persuaded the bartender to keep it on police calls just for laughs. He had the laugh, all right. He was probably howling his goddamn head off.

CHAPTER 13

P
at arrived seven minutes after the patrol car. By that time Lola had caught up to me and stood to one side catching her breath. As usual, the curious had formed a tight ring around us and the cops were busy trying to disperse them. Pat said, “It's a hell of a note. You didn't get the make of the car?”

I shook my head. “Only that it was a dark one. The doorman didn't notice either. Goddamn, that makes me mad!”

A reporter pushed his way through the cordon ready to take notes. Pat told him tersely, “The police will issue an official statement later.” The guy wouldn't take it for an answer and tried to quiz the cops, but they didn't know any more than the police call told them, to close in on the Albino Club and hold anyone from leaving.

I stepped back into the crowd and Pat followed. I couldn't press my luck too far. I was still dead and I might as well stay that way for a while if I could. I leaned up against the fender of a car and Pat stayed close. Lola came over and held my hand. “How's it going, Pat?”

“Not good. I'm catching hell. It's coming at me from all directions now and I don't know which way to turn. Somebody has one devil of a lot of pull in this town. They're talking, too, enough to put the papers wise. The reporters are swarming around headquarters looking for leads. I can't give them anything and they jump me for it. The publicity is going to cause a lot of eyebrow-lifting tomorrow.”

There was a determined set to his jaw anyway. Pat could dish it out, too. His time was coming. “What are you doing about it?”

His grin wasn't pleasant. “We staged a couple of raids tonight. Remember what you said about the police knowing things ... and still having to let them go on?” I nodded. “I used hand-picked men. They raided two fancy houses uptown and came up with a haul that would make your eyes pop out. We have names now, and charges to go with them. Some of the men we netted in the raid tried to bribe my officers and are going to pay through the nose for it.”

“Brother!”

“They're scared, Mike. They don't know what we have or what we haven't and they can't take chances. Between now and tomorrow the lid will be off City Hall unless I miss my guess. They're scared and worried.”

“They should be.”

Pat waited, his tongue licking at the corner of his mouth.

“Nancy had been working at a scheme. Oh, it was a pretty little scheme that I thought involved petty blackmail. I think it went further than that.”

“How much further?”

I looked at Lola. “In a day or two ... maybe we can tell you then.”

“My legs have a long way to go yet,” she said.

“What are you getting it?” Pat asked.

“You'll find out. By the way, have you got things set up for tomorrow night?”

Pat lit a cigarette and flipped the burnt match into the gutter. “You know, I'm beginning to wonder who's running my department. I'm sure as hell not.”

But he was smiling when he said it.

“Yeah, we're ready. The men are picked, but they haven't been told their assignments. I don't want any more leaks.”

“Good. They'll pull their strings and when they find that doesn't work they'll pull their guns. We beat them at that and they're up the tree, ready for the net. Meanwhile we have to be careful. It's rough, Pat, isn't it?”

“Too rough. The city can be damn dirty if you look in the right places.”

I ground out my butt under my heel. “They talk about the Romans. They only threw human beings into a pit with lions. At least then the lions had a wall around them so they couldn't get out. Here they hang out in bars and on the street corners looking for a meal.”

The crowd had thinned out and the cops were back in the car trying to brush off the reporters. Another car with a press tag on the window swerved to a stop and two stepped out. I didn't want to wait around. Too many knew me by sight. I told Pat so long and took off up the street with Lola trotting alongside me.

I drove her to the apartment and she insisted I come up for the coffee I didn't have before. It was quiet up here, the absolute early morning quiet that comes when the city has gone to bed and the earliest risers haven't gotten up yet. The street had quieted down, too. Even an occasional horn made an incongruous sound in that unnatural stillness.

From the river the low cry of dark shapes and winking lights that were ships echoed and re-echoed through the canyons of the avenues. Lola turned the radio on low, bringing in a selection of classical piano pieces, and I sat there with my eyes closed, listening, thinking, picturing my redhead as a blackmailer. In a near sleep I thought it was Red at the piano fingering the keys while I watched approvingly, my mind filled with thoughts. She read my mind and her face grew sad, sadder than anything I had ever seen and she turned her eyes on me and I could see clear through them into the goodness of her soul and I knew she wasn't a blackmailer and my first impression had been right; she was a girl who had come face to face with fate and had lost, but in losing hadn't lost all, for there was the light of holiness in her face that time when I was her friend, when I thought that a look like that belonged only in a church when you were praying or getting married or something, a light that was there now for me to see while she played a song that told me I was her friend and she was mine, a friendship that was more than that, it was a trust and I believed it ... knew it and wanted it, for here was a devotion more than I expected or deserved and I wanted to be worthy of it, but before I could tell her so Feeney Last's face swirled up from the mist beside the keyboard, smirking, silently mouthing smutty remarks and leering threats that took the holiness away from the scene and smashed it underfoot, assailing her with words that replaced the hardness and terror that had been ingrown before we met and I couldn't do a thing about it because my feet were powerless to move and my hands were glued to my sides by some invisible force that Feeney controlled and wouldn't release until he had killed her and was gone with his laugh ringing in the air and the smirk still on his face, daring me to follow when I couldn't answer him; all I could do was stand there and look at my redhead's lifeless body until I focused on her hands to see where he had scratched her when he took the ring off.

Lola said, “The coffee's ready, Mike.”

I came awake with a start, my feet and hands free again and I half expected to see Feeney disappearing around the corner. The radio played on, an inanimate thing in the corner with a voice of deep notes that was the only sound in the night.

“Thinking, honey?”

“Dreaming.” I lifted the cup from the tray and she added the sugar and milk. “Sometimes it's good to dream.”

She made a wry mouth. “Sometimes it isn't.” She kissed me with her eyes then. “My dreams have changed lately, Mike. They're nicer than they used to be.”

“They become you, Lola.”

“I love you, Mike. I can be impersonal because I can't do a thing about it. It isn't a love like that first time. It's a cold fact. Is it that I'm in love with you or do I just love you?”

She sipped her coffee and I didn't answer her. She wouldn't have wanted me to.

“You're big, Mike. You can be called ugly if you take your face apart piece by piece and look at it separately. You have a brutish quality about you that makes men hate you, but maybe a woman wants a brute. Perhaps she wants a man she knows can hate and kill yet still retain a sense of kindness. How long have I known you, a few days? Long enough to look at you and say I love you, and if things had been different I would want you to love me back. But because it can't be that way I'm almost impersonal about it. I just want you to know it.”

She sat there quietly, her eyes half closed, and I saw the perfection in this woman. A mind and body cleansed of any impurities that were, needing only a freedom of her soul. I had never seen her like this, relaxed, happy in her knowledge of unhappiness. Her face had a radiant glow of unusual beauty; her hair tumbled to her shoulders, alive with the dampness of the rain. She was a wide-shouldered woman with the high firm breasts of youth unrestrained by the artifices of a brassiere, each a soft hemisphere of beauty desiring to be touched. Her stomach rippled into a crest that disappeared between her thighs and showed again in the roundness of her legs whose contours were an artist's dream.

I laid my cup on the end table, unable to turn my head away. “It's almost like being married,” she said, “sitting here enjoying each other even though there's a whole room between us.”

It was no trouble to walk across the room. She stretched out her hands for me to pull her to her feet and I folded her into my arms, my mouth searching for hers, finding it without trouble, enjoying the honey of her lips that she gave freely, her tongue a warm little dagger that stabbed deeper and deeper.

I didn't want her to leave me so soon when she sidled out of my hands. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, took a cigarette from the table and made me take it, then held up a light. The flame of the match was no more intense than that in her eyes. It told me to wait, but not for long. She blew out the match, kissed me again on the cheek and walked into the bedroom, proud, lovely.