I was halfway done before Shorty said, “What are you after, mister?”
“You tell me.”
Both of us looked down at the paper at the same time.
“You’re a copper, ain’tcha?”
“I carry a badge... and a rod.”
“A private snooper, eh?” He was going tough on me.
I laid my fork down and looked at him. I can make pretty nasty faces when I have to. “Shorty, maybe just for the hell of it I’ll take you apart. You may be a rough apple, but I can make your face look like it’s been run through a grinder, and the more I think of the idea the more I like it. The name is Mike Hammer, chum... you ought to know it down here. I like to play games with wise guys.”
He was white around the nostrils again.
I tapped the picture, then let my finger stay on the question underneath. Shorty knew damn well I wasn’t fooling around any more. I was getting mad and he knew it, and he was scared. But just the same he shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know who she is.”
“It wasn’t the first time she had been in here. Quit holding out.”
“Ah, she came in for about a week. Sometimes she tried to make pickups in here and I threw her out. She was Red to me and everybody else. That’s all I knew about her.”
“You got a record, haven’t you, Shorty?”
His lips drew back over his teeth. “You bastard.”
I reached out and grabbed his shirt and held him against the counter. “When a guy gets out of stir he goes straight sometimes. Sometimes he don’t. I’m betting that if the cops decided to look around a little bit they could find you had a finger in some crooked pie, and it wouldn’t take them a week to put you back up the river.”
“H-honest, Mac, I don’t know nothing about the dame. Look, I’d tell you if I did. I ain’t no troublemaker and I don’t want no trouble around here! Why don’t’cha lemme alone?”
“There was a greaseball in here that night. His name is Feeney Last. How often has he been in?”
Shorty licked his thick lips nervously. “Hell, maybe twice. I dunno. He went for the redhead, that’s all. He never even ate in here. Lay off, will ya?”
I dropped the handful of shirt. “Sure, pal, I’ll lay off.” I threw a half buck on the counter and he was glad to grab it and get over to the register away from me. I swung off the stool and stood up. “If I find out you know any more than you told me, there’s going to be a visitor in here looking for you. A guy in a pretty blue uniform. Only when he finds you he’s going to have a tough time making any sense out of what you tell him. It’s not easy to talk when you’ve just choked on your own teeth.”
Just before I reached the door he called, “Hey, Mac.”
I turned around.
“I ... I think she had a room someplace around the corner. Next block north.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He got real busy swabbing the broken egg off the floor.
Outside I started for the car, changed my mind, then walked up Third to the street corner. It would have taken a week to comb the dingy apartments that sprawled along the sidewalks and I wasn’t in the mood for any legwork.
On one corner was a run-down candy store whose interior was obscured by flyspecked signs, but for all its dirt it served as a neighborhood hangout. In front of the paper stand were three young punks in sharp two-tone sports outfits making dirty cracks at the girls passing by. A husky blonde turned and slapped one across the jaw and got a boot in the tail for her trouble. This time she kept on going.
I angled across the street and walked up to the kid holding his jaw, trying to rub out the red blotch. I opened the button on my jacket and reached back for a handkerchief, just enough so the sling on the shoulder holster was visible across my shirt for a second. They knew I was carrying a rod and looked at me as if I were a tin god. The kid even forgot to rub his face any more. Nice place to live.
“There’s a cute little redhead who has a room around here. Buster. Know where I can find her?”
The kid got real important with the man-to-man line I was handing him and gave me a wink. “Yeah, she had a place upstairs in old lady Porter’s joint.” He jerked his head down the street. “Won’t do ya no good to go there. That little bitch got herself killed last night. All the papers got her pitcher on the front page.”
“You don’t say. Too bad.”
He edged me with his elbow and slipped me a knowing look. “She wasn’t no good anyway, buddy. Now, if you want a real woman, you go up to Twenty-third Street and....”
“Some other day, feller. While I’m here I’ll look around this end of town.” I slipped him a fin. “Go buy a beer for the boys.”
I walked away hoping they’d choke on it.
Martha Porter was an oversize female in her late fifties. She wore a size dress that matched her age and still she peeked out in places. What hair wasn’t yanked back in a knot straggled across her face and down the nape of her neck, and she was holding the broom ready to use it as a utensil or a club.
“You looking for a room or a girl?” she said.
I let a ten-spot talk for me. “I saw the girl. Now I want to see the room.”
She grabbed the bill first. “What for?”
“Because she copped a wad of dough and some important papers from the last place she worked and I have to find it.”
She gave me an indifferent sneer. “Oh, one of them skip-tracers. Well, maybe the papers is there, but you won’t find no dough. She came here with the clothes on her back and two bucks in her pocketbook. I took the two bucks for room rent. Never got no more from her neither.”
“Where’d she come from?”
“I don’t know and I didn’t ask. She had the two bucks and that’s what the room cost. In advance, when you don’t have no bags.”
“Know her name?”
“Why don’t you grow up, mister. Why the hell should I ask when it don’t mean nothing. Maybe it was Smith. If you want to see the room, it’s the next floor up in the back. I ain’t even been in there since she got killed. Soon as I seen her face in the papers I knew somebody would be around. Them broads give me a pain in the behind.”
The broom went back to being a broom and I went up the stairs. There was only one door on the landing and I went in, then locked it behind me.
I always had the idea that girls were kind of fussy, even if they were living in a cracker barrel. Maybe she was fussy at that. It was a sure thing that whoever searched the room wasn’t. The bed was torn apart and the stuffing was all over the place. The four drawers of the chest lay upside down on the floor where someone had used them as a ladder to look along the wall molding just below the ceiling. Even the linoleum had been ripped from the floor, and two spots on the wall where the plaster had been knocked off were poked out to let a hand feel around between the partitions. Oh, it was a beautiful job of searching, all right. A real dilly. They had plenty of time, too. They must have had, because they would have had to be quiet or have the young elephant up here with the broom, and the place wouldn’t have looked like that if they had been hurried.
One hell of a mess, but I started to grin. Whatever caused the wreckage certainly wasn’t found, because even after they had looked in the obvious places they tore apart everything else, right down to the mousehole in the baseboard.
I kicked aside some of the junk on the floor, but there wasn’t much to see. Old magazines, a couple of newspapers, some underwear and gadgets that might have been in the drawers. What had once been a coat lay in strips with all the hems ripped out and the lining hanging in shreds. A knife had been used on the collar to split the seams. On top of everything was a film of dust from a spilled powder box giving the place a cheaply perfumed odor.
Then the wind blew some of the mattress stuffing in my face and I walked over to close the window. It faced on a fire escape and the sash had been forced with some kind of tool. It couldn’t have been simpler. On the floor by the sill was a white plastic comb. I picked it up and felt the grease on it. A few dark hairs were tangled around the teeth. I smelled it.
Hair oil. The kind of hair oil a greaseball would use. I wasn’t sure, but there were ways of finding out. The hag was still in the corridor sweeping when I went down. I told her somebody had crashed the place before I got there and liked to knock it apart. She gave one unearthy shriek and took the steps two at a time until the building shook.
It was enough for one day. I went home and hit the sack. I didn’t sleep too well, because the redhead would smile, kiss her finger and put it on my cheek and wake me up.
At half past six the alarm went off with a racket that jerked me out of a wild dream and left me standing on the rug shaking like a kitten in a dog kennel. I shut it off and ducked into a cold shower to wash the sleep out of my eyes, then finish off the morning’s ceremonies with a close shave that left my face raw. I ate in my shorts, then stacked the dishes in the sink and laid out my clothes.
This had to be a new-suit day. I laid the tweeds on the bed and, for a change, paid a little attention to the things that went with it. By the time I had climbed into everything and ran a brush over my shoes I even began to look dignified. Or at least sharp enough to call on one of the original 400.
I found Arthur Berin-Grotin’s name in the Long Island directory, a town about sixty miles out on the Island that was a chosen spot for lovers, trapshooters and recluses. Buck had my car greased up and ready for me when I got to the garage, and by the time nine-thirty had rolled around I was tooling the heap along the highway, sniffing the breezes that blew in from the ocean. An hour later I reached a cutoff that sported a sign emblazoned with Old English lettering and an arrow that pointed to Arthur Berin-Grotin’s estate on the beach.
Under the wheels the road turned to macadam, then packed, crushed gravel, and developed into a long sweep of a drive that took me up to one of the fanciest joints this side of Buckingham Palace. The house was a symbol of luxury, but utterly devoid of any of the garishness that goes with new wealth. From its appearance it was ageless, neither young nor old. It could have stood there a hundred years or ten without a change to its dignity. Choice field stone reached up to the second floor, supporting smooth clapboard walls that gleamed in the sun like bleached bones. The windows must have been imported; those on the south side were all stained glass to filter out the fierce light of the sun, while the others were little lead-rimmed squares arranged in patterns that changed from room to room.
I drove up under the arched dome of a portico and killed the engine, wondering whether to wait for a major-domo to open the door for me or do it myself. I decided not to wait.
The bell was the kind you pull; a little brass knob set in the doorframe, and when I gave it a gentle tug I heard the subtle pealing of electric chimes inside. When the door opened I thought it had been done by an electric eye, but it wasn’t. The butler was so little and so old that he scarcely reached above the doorknob and didn’t seem strong enough to hold it open very long, so I stepped in before the wind blew it shut and turned on my best smile.
“I’d like to see Mr. Berin-Grotin, please.”
“Yes, sir. Your name please?” His voice crackled like an old hen’s.
“Michael Hammer, from New York.”
The old man took my hat and led me to a massive library paneled in dark oak and waved his hand toward a chair. “Would you care to wait here, sir? I’ll inform the master that you have arrived. There are cigars on the table.”
I thanked him and picked out a huge leather-covered chair and sank into it, looking around to see how society lived. It wasn’t bad. I picked up a cigar and bit the end off, then looked for a place to spit it. The only ash tray was a delicate bowl of rich Wedgewood pottery, and I’d be damned if I’d spoil it. Maybe society wasn’t so good after all. There were footsteps coming down the hall outside so I swallowed the damn thing to get rid of it.
When Arthur Berin-Grotin came into the room I stood up. Whether I wanted to or not, there are some people to whom you cannot help but show respect. He was one of them. He was an old man, all right, but the years had treated him lightly. There was no stoop to his shoulders and his eyes were as bright as an urchin’s. I guessed his height to be about six feet, but he might have been shorter. The shock of white hair that crowned his head flowed up to add inches to his stature.
“Mr. Berin-Grotin?” I asked.
“Yes, good morning, sir.” He held out his hand and we clasped firmly. “I’d rather you only use the first half of my name,” he added. “Hyphenated family names have always annoyed me, and since I am burdened with one myself I find it expedient to shorten it. You are Mr. Hammer?”
“That’s right.”
“And from New York. It sounds as though one of you is important,” he laughed. Unlike his butler, his voice had a good solid ring. He pulled a chair up to mine and nodded for me to be seated.
“Now,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
I gave it to him straight. “I’m a detective, Mr. Berin. I’m not on a case exactly, but I’m looking for something. An identity. The other day a girl was killed in the city. She was a redheaded prostitute, and she doesn’t have a name.”
“Ah, yes. I saw it in the papers. You have an interest in her?”
“Slightly. I gave her a handout, and the next day she was killed. I’m trying to find out who she was. It’s kind of nasty to die and not have anyone know you’re dead.”
The old man closed his eyes slightly and looked pained. “I understand completely, Mr. Hammer.” He folded his hands across his lap. “The same thought has occurred to me, and I dread it. I have outlived my wife and children and I am afraid that when I pass away the only tears to fall on my coffin will be those of strangers.”
“I doubt that, sir.”
He smiled. “Thank you. Nevertheless, in my vanity I am erecting a monument that will bring my name to the public eye on occasions.”