Pat met me in his office, his hair mussed and shadows under his eyes, looking like he had been up all night. He said, “Sit down,” answered the phone twice, then leaned back in his chair and wiped the back of his hand across his face. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.”
“Who’s on your back now?”
“You must be kidding. I told you this was an election year. Everybody’s passing the buck this time. That Temple kill really stirred the fudge.”
“Got anything on it yet?”
He shook his head slowly. “Nothing but boxes of women’s nightgowns. We hit all the stores they were bought at and most of the salesgirls remembered selling them, but that’s about all. Mitch told the girls he was trying to match one a friend bought for his wife and looked for a description of anyone who bought either black or green, but both colors were so popular the girls couldn’t come up with anything concrete.”
“Why did he bother buying them then?”
“Got me. Probably just to make it look good. Come here, take a look.”
The office next to Pat’s was empty, but the desk and chair were piled high with empty boxes and a table along the wall was covered with a mound of filmy garments. I went over and separated them, looking at the labels. None were expensive, but the designs were clearly erotic and not intended for the average housewife. Half the pile were black numbers, the rest all shades of red, green and blue with two canary yellow styles.
“Find out which one he bought last?”
“No. Four of the sales slips were dated the same day he died and all were bought in the morning, but nobody could pinpoint the time. Each one of those stores sold a bunch of these things to men and women the same day. We have a team out trying to nail something down, but all we get is a big, fat zero. Why the hell do these things have to be so complicated?”
“Wish I could help.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” Pat said. “I’m still getting nudged by the brains upstairs about how you happened to be the one to find the Delaney girl.”
“What’s new on her?”
“One thing for sure ... neither she nor the Poston girl were identified as buyers of those gowns. We got a make on the Delaney kid by way of left field. About a month ago Vice raided a pornographic photography ring selling sixteen-millimeter stag reels and she was one of the featured players. One of our guys recognized her. The ones who sold the stuff couldn’t put a finger on the ones who filmed it, but there was a scene with a window in the background that spotted certain buildings and we were able to locate the hotel they made it in. Right now we have a partial description of the ones who occupied the place and have the hotel covered in case they show again.”
“Fat chance. That bunch shift around.”
“It’s the only chance we have. Dames who make money that way don’t pay social security and rarely use their own names. We still got the body on ice. She has one distant relative in Oregon who wants nothing to do with the situation, so there we stand.”
“And the Poston woman?”
“You know that angle.”
“Don’t tell me you aren’t digging into probable sources of the poison that might have killed her.”
Pat relaxed and grinned at me. “You think too much, Mike,” he said. “Sure, we’re on it, the Washington agencies have been notified, but the possibilities of getting a lead are so remote I’m not hoping we’ll get the answer that way. The M.E. got off some letters to friends in the profession who share the same hobby. He thinks they might be able to supply the answers if anybody has imported that particular drug.”
“This deal has some peculiar sexual connotations,” I said.
“Most of them have.”
“But not like this.”
“So far nobody knows they’re tied in yet. We’re not even sure ourselves. Luckily, the papers are cooperating.”
“What happens if they break it first?”
“All hell breaks loose. Think you can use a partner?”
“Any time,” I laughed.
“Which brings us to why you came up here in the first place.”
I said, “Remember Harry Service?”
Pat nodded.
“He wants me to find his sister. She hasn’t contacted him in a long time.”
“You?
He wants
you
to do this?”
“Come on, Pat, he isn’t the kind to go to the cops.”
“How’d he reach you?”
“Supposing I forget you asked that question.”
Pat gave me a disgusted look and said, “Okay, okay. What do you want from me?”
“A letter from the brass getting me in to see Harry. Somebody in the front office has got to be the friendly type.”
“Not as far as you’re concerned.”
“I can push it if I have to.”
“I know you can. Just don’t. Let me see what I can do.” He gave me a quizzical glance and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. “One thing, old buddy. And tell me true. Harry contacted
you,
right?”
“If you don’t believe it I can show you how.”
“Never mind.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because if you initiated the contact I’d say it was tying into my immediate business.”
My laugh didn’t sound too convincing, but Pat bought it “You know me,” I said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The attendant at the morgue file of the paper was a crackly little old guy who used to be one of the best rewrite men on the staff until the demands of age caught up with him. Now he was content to spend his time among the artifacts of journalism, complaining about the new generation and how easy they had it.
I said, “Hi, Biff,” and he squinted my way, fished for his glasses and got them on his nose.
“Mike Hammer, I’ll be damned.” He held out a gnarled hand and I took it. “Nice of you to visit an old man,” he said with a smile. “I sure used up a lot of adjectives on you in the old days.”
“Some of them weren’t very nice.”
“Company policy,” he laughed. “You always made a great bad guy. But how the hell did you always come out clean?”
“That’s my policy,” I said.
He came around the counter lighting the stub of a chewed cigar. “You got it made, Mike. Now, what can I do for you?”
“Mitch Temple was in the other day....”
He coughed in the cigar smoke and regarded me with amazement. “You’re in this?”
“Sideways. Can you keep it quiet?”
“Sure. I’m not on a beat.”
I gave him a quick picture of my meeting with Mitch Temple and the possibility that his death might be involved in something I was working on. Biff knew I wasn’t putting it all on the line, but it was to be expected and he didn’t mind. Let him alone and he’d put some of the pieces together himself.
Biff said, “All I can do is tell you what I told the others. Mitch came down and spent a while here going through the files. I was busy at the desk and didn’t pay any attention to him. He didn’t ask for anything and didn’t check anything out.”
“His column doesn’t often carry photographs.”
“That’s right. When it did they were usually new ones supplied by some press agent. Then they were filed away down here.”
“What section was he working in?”
“Hell, Mike, I can’t see beyond that first tier. He was out of sight all the time. All the rest asked me that same question. I could hear him banging drawers, but that was all.”
“Anybody else come in while he was here?”
Biff thought a moment, then said, “I know where he wasn’t. All the show-biz and Broadway files are on the left there. He was back in the general news section, but they’re cross-indexed alphabetically, by occupation and a few other headings. Hell, Mike, Al Casey who does the feature crime yarns even dusted around for Mitch’s prints on the cabinets and didn’t come up with anything. I don’t know where he was poking around.”
I didn’t pay any attention to the other old guy in the coveralls who was pushing a broom around the floor until he said, “I sure know where he was.”
Both of us turned around slowly and looked at him. He never stopped his sweeping. My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “Where?”
“The P-T section. He left all the damn butts squashed out on the floor and I had to scrape ’em up.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Biff said.
“Nobody asked me,” he growled.
I said, “Show me,” and Biff led me back around the floor-to-ceiling rows of files until we came to the section between P and T.
Then all we did was stand there. There were forty separate drawers in the section, each a good four feet deep and crammed with folders. Biff said, “You know how many items are in this place?” I shook my head. “Figure at least a hundred to the drawer and each folder with at least ten photographs. You got a lot of looking to do, friend. Maybe you can suggest something.”
“How do you get to the top drawers?”
“There’s a stepladder down the end.”
I waved for Biff to follow me and found the old guy emptying his sweepings into a trash can. “Did Mitch Temple have that ladder out when he was here?”
“Yep.” He spit into the can, slid the top on and walked away.
“I know,” Biff muttered, “nobody asked him. Now what?”
“Half of those files are eliminated. If Al Casey has the time he might try working over the other half.”
“If I know him, he’ll make the time,” Biff said.
“Just do me a favor, keep me out of it,” I told him.
Biff’s face twisted into a puzzled expression. “You mean I’m supposed to have had the idea?”
“You’ve had them before, haven’t you?”
“That was before.”
“Well, you got one again.”
I grabbed a cruising cab on Forty-second Street and had him take me back to the Hackard Building. The working crowd had cleared out an hour ago and the city was going through its momentary lull while the night closed in around it. I took the elevator up to the eighth floor and walked down the corridor to my office, my heels echoing hollowly in the empty space.
My keys were in my hand, but I didn’t put them in the lock. Tacked to the frame was a white sheet of paper that covered one of the panes of frosted glass with the simple typewritten note,
Back Later,
across it.
I slid the .45 out of the sling, thumbed the safety off and the hammer back and moved so my shadow wouldn’t fall across the door. I had had other notes stuck on my door, but this one had been written on my own brand of bonded paper in the brown typing we always used and had to come from inside the room. Only it was something neither Velda nor I would have done.
I reached over and pulled the paper away. There was a fist-sized hole in the pane right by the lock that a glass cutter had made and the note was tacked over it so nobody would notice it and possibly report it downstairs.
They didn’t even bother to lock up after they had left. The knob turned under my hand and I shoved the door open. I reached in, flicked the light on, then walked inside and kicked the door shut with my foot
Somebody had been very neat about it. Thorough, but neat The place had been given a professional shakedown from one end to the other and not one thing had been missed. The desk drawers and cabinets had been emptied, but their contents were in inverted piles, systematically scrutinized and left lying there. Nobody ripped up seat cushions any more, but each one had been turned over and inspected for signs of fresh stitching and all the furniture had been pulled out to see if anything had been concealed behind it.
Now it was getting interesting. Somewhere out there in the maw of the city somebody was concerned about my participation in something. I sat down in my chair, swung around and looked out at the lights that outlined New York.
The possibilities were limited. To somebody, the fact that I was the one to find the Delaney girl could have seemed like more than a coincidence. With her backround, she could have been involved in something heavy enough to warrant investigation from private sources and I was on her tail.
Or was it Greta Service? The prison grapevine could have passed along Harry’s concern about his sister’s absence and his contact with me and if Greta had been wrapped up with the wrong people, they wouldn’t want me poking around.
Then there was Mitch Temple. A guy like that could always pop an exposé that was worth a kill if it could be kept quiet.
Somebody wanted to know how much I knew. Somebody didn’t know I knew about the thread that tied all three of those people together.
I picked up the phone and dialed Velda’s apartment. After four rings her service answered and when I identified myself, said she hadn’t called in since that afternoon. I left a message for her to contact me at the usual places and hung up.
There was no sense dusting the place down for prints; a pro would have worn gloves anyway. Nothing was missing as far as I could see and the data Velda had compiled for me would be in the safe at Lakland’s—a precaution we always took.
I used a piece of cardboard and covered the hole in the glass from the inside, then snapped the lock, walked out and closed the door.
Silence has a funny sound. You hear it in the jungles when everything is too still and you know there’s somebody in the trees with a gun ready to pick you off. You hear it in a crowded room when everybody turns off the conversation when you walk in the door and you know the hostile element is ready and waiting.
I could hear it in the corridor and before the parrots could scream with indignation of sudden movement and the monkeys jump with alarm at shattering blasts, I hit the floor and rolled, the .45 in my hand spitting back at the half-opened door behind me where the guy in the black suit was trying to bring me into the sights of his automatic and getting nowhere because his bullets were tearing aimlessly into the tile and ricocheting off the walls while mine had already punched three holes into his chest.
chapter 5