The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (61 page)

“Nice of me.”

“That’s what those Washington boys thought.”

“Coincidence is out,” I said.

“Naturally.” His mouth twitched again. “They don’t know that you’re the guy things happen to. Some people are accident prone. You’re coincidence prone.”

“I’ve thought of it that way,” I told him. “Now what about the details of her escape?”

He shrugged and shook his head slightly. “Utter simplicity. The kind of thing you can’t beat. Precautions were taken for every inconceivable thing and she does the conceivable. She picked up a raincoat and shoes from the nurses’ quarters and walked out the main entrance with two female attendants. It was raining at the time and one of them had an umbrella and they stayed together under it the way women will who try to keep their hair dry or something. They went as far as the corner together, the other two got in a bus while she kept on walking.”

“Wasn’t a pass required at the gate?”

He nodded deeply, a motion touched with sarcasm. “Sure, there was a pass all right, each of the two had a pass and showed it. Maybe the guy thought he saw the third one. At least he said he thought so.”

“I suppose somebody was outside the gate too?”

“That’s right. Two men, one on foot and one in a car. Neither had seen the Torn girl and were there to stop anyone making an unauthorized exit.”

I let out a short grunt.

Pat said, “They thought it was authorized, Mike.”

I laughed again. “That’s what I mean.
They thought.
Those guys are supposed to think right or not at all. Those are the guys who had my ticket lifted. Those are the guys who want no interference. Nuts.”

“Anyway, she got away. That’s it.”

“Okay, we’ll leave it there. What attitude are the cops taking?”

“It’s murder so they’re working it from that end.”

“And getting nowhere,” I added.

“So far,” Pat said belligerently. I grinned at him and the scowl that creased his forehead disappeared. “Lay off. How do you plan to work it?”

“Where’s Evello?”

“Right here in the city.”

“And the known Mafia connections?”

Pat looked thoughtful a moment. “Other big cities, but their operational center is here too.” He bared his teeth in a tight grimace. His eyes went hard and nasty as he said, “Which brings us to the end of our informative little discussion about the Mafia. We know who some of them are and how they operate, but that’s as far as it goes.”

“Washington doesn’t have anything?”

“Sure, but what good does it do. Nobody fingers the Mafia. There’s that small but important little item known as evidence.”

“We’ll get it,” I told him, “... one way or another. It’s still a big organization. They need capital to operate.”

Pat stared at me like he would a kid. “Sure, just like that. You know how they raise that capital? They squeeze it out of the little guy. It’s an extra tax he has to pay. They put the bite on guys who are afraid to talk or who can’t talk. They run an import business that drives the Narcotics Division nuts. They got their hand in every racket that exists with a political cover so heavy you can’t bust through it with a sledge hammer.”

He didn’t have to remind me. I knew how they operated. I said, “Maybe, chum, maybe. Could be that nobody’s really tried hard enough yet.”

He grunted something under his breath, then, “You still didn’t say how you were going to work it.”

I pushed myself out of the chair, wiping my hand across my face. “First Berga Torn. I want to find out more about her.”

Pat reached down and picked the top sheet off the pile he had dropped on the floor beside him. “You might as well have this then. It’s as much as anyone has to start with.”

I folded it up and stuck it in my pocket without looking at it. “You’ll let me know if anything comes up?”

“I’ll let you know.” I picked up my coat and started for the door.

“And Mike ...”

“Yeah?”

“This is a two-way deal, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

Downstairs, I stood in front of the building a minute. I took the time to stick a Lucky in my mouth and even more time lighting it. I let the flare of the match bounce off my face for a good ten seconds, then dragged in deeply on the smoke and whipped it back into the night air. The guy in the doorway of the apartment across the street stirred and made a hesitant motion of having come out of the door and not knowing which way to walk. I turned east and he made up his mind. He turned east too.

Halfway down the block I crossed over to make it a little easier on him. Washington didn’t discount shoe leather as expenses so there was no sense giving the boy a hard time. I went three more blocks closer to the subway station and pulled a few gimmicks that had him practically climbing up my back.

This time I had a good look at him and was going to say hello to add insult to injury when I caught the end of a gun muzzle in my ribs and knew he wasn’t Washington at all.

He was young and good-looking until he smiled, then the crooked march of short, stained teeth across his mouth made him an expensively dressed punk on a high-class job. There was no hop behind his pupils so he was a classy workman being paid by an employer who knew what the score was. The teeth smiled bigger and he started to tell me something when I ripped his coat open and the gun in the pocket wasn’t pointing at me any more. He was half spun around fighting to get the rod loose as the side of my hand caught him across the neck and he sat down on the sidewalk with his feet out in front of him, plenty alive, plenty awake, but not even a little bit active.

I picked the Banker’s Special out of his hand, broke it, dumped the shells into the gutter and tossed the rod back into his lap. His eyes were hurting. They were all watered up like he was ashamed of himself.

“Tell your boss to send a man out on the job the next time,” I said.

I walked on down the street and turned into the subway kiosk wondering what the deuce had happened to Washington. Little boy blue back on the sidewalk would have a good story to take home to papa this time. Most likely he wouldn’t get his allowance. At least they’d know a pro was in the game for a change.

I shoved a dime in the turnstile, went through, pulled the sheet out of my pocket, glanced at it once and walked over to the downtown platform.

CHAPTER 6

Something happens to Brooklyn at night. It isn’t a sister borough any more. She withdraws to herself and pulls the shades down, then begins a life that might seem foreign to an outsider. She’s strange, exciting, tinted with bright lights, yet elusive somehow.

I got off the Brighton Line at De Kalb and went up to the street. A guy on the corner pointed the way to the address I wanted and I walked the few blocks to it.

What I was looking for was an old-fashioned brownstone, a hangover from a half-century past that had the number painted on the door and looked at the street with dull, blank eyes. I went up the four sandstone steps, held a match to the mailboxes and found what I wanted.

The names CARVER and TORN were there, but somebody had drawn a pencil through the two of them and had written in BERNSTEIN underneath. All I could do was mutter a little under my breath and punch the end button on the line, the one labeled SUPER. I leaned on it until the door started clicking then I opened it and went in.

He came to the door and I could almost see his face. Part of it stuck out behind the fleshy shoulder of a woman who towered all around him and glared at me as if I had crawled up out of a hole. Her hair was a gray mop gathered into tiny knots and clamped in place with metal curlers. She bulged through the bathrobe, trying to slow down her breathing enough so she could say something. Her hands were big and red, the knuckles showing as they bit into her hips.

Dames. The guy behind her looked scared to death. She said, “What the hell do you want! You know what time it is? You think ...”

“Shut up.” Her mouth stopped. I leaned against the door jamb. “I’m looking for the super.”

“I’m the ...”

“You’re not anything to me, lady. Tell your boy to come out.” I thought her face would fall apart. “Tell him,” I repeated.

When men learn to be men maybe they can handle dames. There was something simpering in the way she forced a smile and stepped aside.

The boy didn’t want to come out, but he did. He made himself as big as he could without it helping much. “Yes?”

I showed him the badge I still had. It didn’t mean a thing any more, but it still shined in the light and wasn’t something everybody carried. “Get your keys.”

“Yessir, yessir.” He reached up beside the door, unhooked a ring and stepped back into the hall.

The dame said. “You wait a minute, I’ll be right ...”

He seemed to stand on his toes.
“You
wait right there until I come
back
,” he told her.
“I’m
the super.” He turned and grinned at me. Behind him his wife’s face puffed out and the door slammed.

“Yessir?” he said.

“Berga Torn’s place. I want to go through it.”

“But the police have already been through there.”

“I know.”

“Today I rented it already.”

“Anybody there now?”

“Not yet. Tomorrow they’re supposed to come.”

“Then let’s go.”

First he hesitated, then he shrugged and started up the stairs. Two flights up he fitted a key into the lock of a door and threw it open. He felt around for the light switch, flipped it and stood aside for me.

I don’t know what I expected to find. Maybe it was more curiosity than anything that dragged me up there. The place had been gone over by experts and if anything had been worth taking it was gone by now. It was what you might call a functional apartment and nothing more. The kitchen and living room were combined with a bathroom sandwiched between two bedrooms that jutted off the one wall. There was enough furniture to be comfortable, nothing gaudy and nothing out of place.

“Whose stuff is this?”

“We rent furnished. What you see belongs to the landlord.”

I walked into the bedroom and opened the door of the closet. A half dozen dresses and a suit hung there. The floor was lined with shoes. The dresser was the same way, filled to the brim. The clothes were good, fairly new, but not the type that came out of exclusive shops.

Stockings were neatly rolled up and packed into a top drawer. Beside them were four envelopes, two with paid-up receipts, one a letter from the Millburn Steamship Line saying that there were no available berths on the liner Cedric and how sorry they were, and the other a heavier envelope holding about a dozen Indianhead pennies.

The other small drawer was cluttered with half-used lipsticks and all the usual junk a dame can collect in hardly any time at all.

It was the other bedroom that gave me the surprise. There was nothing there at all. Just a made-up bed, a cleaned-out closet and dresser drawers lined with old sheets of newspaper.

The super watched me until I backed out into the living room, saying nothing.

“Whose room?” I jerked my thumb at the empty place.

“Miss Carver’s.”

“Where is she?”

“Two days ago ... she moved out.”

“The police see her?”

He nodded, a fast snap of the head. “Maybe that’s why she moved out.”

“You going to empty this place out?”

“Guess I got to. The lease is up next month, but it was paid in advance. Hope I don’t get in trouble renting so soon.”

“Who paid it?”

“Torn’s name is on the lease.” He looked at me pointedly.

“I didn’t ask that.”

“She handed me the dough.” I stared at him hard and he fumbled with his pajamas again. “How many times do I have to tell you guys. I don’t know where she got the dough. Far as I know she didn’t do any messing around. This place sure wasn’t no office or that nosy old lady of mine would’ve known about it.”

“Did she have any men here to see her?”

“Mister,” he said, “there’s twelve apartments in this rat-trap and I can’t keep track of who comes in and who goes out so long as they’re paid up. If you ask me right off I’d say she wasn’t no tramp. She was a dame splitting her quarters with another dame who paid her dough and didn’t make trouble. If a guy was keeping her he sure didn’t get his money’s worth. If you want to know what I think then I’d say yes, she was being kept. Maybe the both of ‘em. The old lady never thought so or she would’ve given them the boot, that’s for sure.”

“Okay then,” I said, “that’s it.”

He held the door open for me. “You think anything’s going to come of this?”

“Plenty.”

The guy was another lip licker. “There won’t be ...”

“Don’t worry about it. You know how I can reach the Carver girl?”

The look he gave me was quick and worried. “She didn’t leave no address.”

I made it sound very flat and businesslike. “You know ... when you step in front of the law there’s charges that can be pressed.”

“Aw, look, mister, if I knew ...” His tongue came out and passed over his mouth again. He thought about it, shrugged, then said, “Okay. Just don’t let my wife know. She called today. She’s expecting some mail from her boy friend and asked. me to send it to her.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “She don’t want anybody to know where she is. Got a pencil?”

I handed him one with the remains of an envelope and he jotted it down.

“Wish I could do something right for a change. The kid sounded pretty worried.”

“You don’t want to buck the law, do you friend?”

“Guess not.”

“Okay, then you did right. Tell you what though ... don’t bother giving it out to anyone else. I’ll see her, but she won’t know how I reached her. How’s that?”

His face showed some relief. “Swell.”

“By the way,” I said, “what was she like?”

“Carver?”

“Yeah.”

“Kind of a pretty blonde. Hair like snow.”

“I’ll find her,” I said.

The number was on Atlantic Avenue. It was the third floor over a secondhand store and there was nothing to guide you in but the smell. All the doorbells had names that had been there long enough to get dirtied up, but the newest one said TRENTEN when it didn’t mean that at all.