“All but one. One who knows what you are and why you’re like that and yet she loves you in spite of it. Or anyway she used to. What happened to Velda, Mike?”
“Damn it, Pat, how the hell do I know!”
I was tight as a bow string and my brain was a seething, squirming, nasty mess that wouldn’t let me think.
I gasped, “Am I supposed to keep tabs on a dame every time she walks out on me?”
“Sucker,” he said. “You’re just a stupid sucker who can’t even take his own damn advice.” He pointed a finger. “She was the only decent thing that ever happened to you and you let her walk right out without even bothering to find out what happened.”
I swallowed thickly. “Look… can it, Pat. I’ve had enough of this crap.” I wiped my hand across my eyes and the sweat was warm and sticky. “She’s a grown woman. She does what she pleases. If she wants to walk out, that’s her business and I’m not worrying about it.”
“No?” His grin was as caustic as lime. “Not much. For a guy who doesn’t give a damn, you sure can make a wreck of your life in four months’ time. Take a look at yourself, buddy, and see what’s left. Look under the dirt and the beard and see what too much booze does to a guy. Go back and take a look at what the mice and spiders are up to in your office. That travel agency next to you put in a complaint.”
“So what? I’m paid up six months in advance. The apartment, too.”
“You’re lucky you had some sense back when you were sober. That big insurance pay-off was a real windfall. Velda probably talked you into doing something smart for a change.”
“Nuts.”
“Yeah, yeah… nuts. That’s a great answer. That’s what all the bums say. Hell, that’s all they can say, and brother, you’re right there with them. You look right at home in a gutter.”
I let go of the cushion and slumped back into the couch. All of a sudden I was tired. Too tired to bother reaching for an answer. Way too tired to argue with him, and pasting him one was a wish that I couldn’t make come true. Anyway, he was right, wasn’t he?
Pat’s fingers were drumming against the fabric. He said, “I might have been able to help, you know.”
I looked at him, then looked away.
“Four months. You never even bothered to stop by. I thought we were friends, Mike. What about it?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s all, just sorry?”
“Just… sorry.”
“Well, it’s not enough. Mike. What about Velda?”
I let the breath out of my lungs and reached for a cigarette. There was one crumpled Lucky left. When I straightened it out and got it in my mouth, the match I held up in front of it shook as if a wind were blowing from two directions at once.
The smoke felt good, though. Felt like it had been days since I’d had a good pull on a butt and I held it down deep to enjoy every bit of it.
“She’s gone, Pat,” I told him, through exhaling smoke. “I don’t know where or why and you can’t help any either.”
Just that note. That terrible, so simple note in that lovely fluid hand: “Mike—goodbye. V.”
“You’re still acting like a sucker,” he said quietly.
My eyes half-way closed at the tone of his voice. “You’re starting to sound like a cop, not a friend.”
“I’m your friend, and I’m a cop, too. It seems to me that you were one guy who never played the cops down. You start forgetting that, like you did tonight with those two officers, and you’ll never be the man you used to be.”
He searched my face to see if I was still in there somewhere.
Then he got up and went to the little liquor cart and swished another drink into his glass. He didn’t sit down this time. He stood right in the middle of the room balancing on his toes with a flat expression on his face like my old man used to have when he dragged me out to the woodshed for a waling.
“I said I could have helped, Mike, if you’d come to me first.”
“How, Pat? She walked out, that’s all. No questions, no explanations.”
“Did you ever stop to ask yourself why?”
I dragged on the cigarette, avoiding his eyes, letting the smoke seep out my nose. Mike—goodbye. That didn’t seem to require much interpretation.
“I guess I didn’t,” I admitted.
“Well, I did.”
My eyes asked him what he’d come up with.
“She had your ring, didn’t she?”
I nodded. A sapphire. A sort of engagement ring.
Pat shrugged. “She wasn’t the kind of dame who’d just pack up because of a fight or some dumb thing you did. The kind to leave without a word. Was she?”
“No.” And there’d been no fight.
“So she left for a reason. She had to leave that sudden way, even though she knew you might be jerk enough to work yourself down to the gutter over it.”
For a second he studied the ice as he swirled it around in the drink, then finished it all in one pull. “That’s a hell of a funny thing for a girl to pull who’s supposed to love a guy.”
“That’s what I thought too,” I told him.
“Okay, then look at it a little while. Study it like a detective and not a big slob with his feelings hurt.”
I pawed at the air and it took damn near everything out of me. “What’s there to look at? Damn it, the thing’s over with. Like you said, I’m a jerk. A sucker. Let it go at that.”
“Right now you’re a jerk all right… but there’s room for improvement. You might even stop being a sucker.”
The cigarette was starting to taste sour. I squashed it out in the ashtray on the end table and let it smolder. “What’re you getting at, Pat?”
“You… and her. I’m interested because you’re friends of mine. You and me go way back, clear to the Pacific. You ought to be thinking, man, not just beating your head against the wall. When you didn’t show for weeks on end, I put out feelers and got wind of what happened.”
“Great to have a friend.”
“It sure is. Now… do you want to know where Velda is?”
I wanted to say no, but something wouldn’t let me. I wanted to get the hell away from there but my feet were nailed to the floor. The burn started down low and worked its way up until my head was a boiling cauldron, spilling its poison over until my face twitched, leaving my teeth bared and my mouth dry.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“While you’ve been getting plastered in this Bowery bar and the next one, she’s been down in Miami somewhere, playing footsy with the lousiest punk this side of hell.”
The heat all melted away. It fused my insides and dried them up. Where the heat had been was nothing but a sick, hollow space that echoed Pat’s words briefly and gave way to the unearthly cold that comes with the grave. All the tension in my body slackened, the rage wiped off my face with one fast backhand of a remark that was worse than a club smashing my skull in.
Maybe it was better knowing than not. Maybe it was better to have it happen this way than to walk in on her sometime and see the beast with two backs.
“What’s the score, Pat?”
“That’s up to you to figure out, friend. I found out where she is, now it’s up to you.”
I made a sad attempt at a grin. “Not me—I’m out of her life now. Seems like she made it pretty definite.”
“You might think so, but if you study the picture long enough, some very cute angles come in.”
“Tell me about them, Pat. I’m in a mood for listening. Go ahead, tell me about me and Velda and all the cute angles.”
He walked to the chair, turned it around and sat on the arm. His face still had that flat expression, his eyes trying to read things in my mind. He’d have to work at that. Whatever had been in my mind was gone now.
“Tell me,” I repeated.
“You were two people in love. In fact, she had you right on the brink of taking the big jump.”
“Wrong,” I said.
“I had me ready to make the jump. She never pushed me into anything.”
“Because she loved you too much to do that. Enough to take you on your own crazy terms. And you liked that about her.”
“I did.”
“Okay, then—for a guy who’s ready to marry a girl, what did you know about her?”
“I knew she was lovely. I knew she was smart.”
I remembered the first time she’d set foot in my office—tall, her hair black and curling down to her shoulders, those wide shoulders. Her black dress sported a low neckline before they even started making low necklines. Legs out of this world. Like she’d walked down off a calendar.
“And you knew she could qualify for a P.I. ticket,” Pat said. “You have to serve in some police or government investigative service for at least three years at a rank higher than that of patrolman. And she’d been on the vice squad, right?”
Pat knew the story—that I’d come across Velda on the street with a big guy brutalizing her. I’d had no idea that she was an undercover officer trying to bring down a particularly brutal pimp. I happened along at just the right time and saved her from the bastard, who made the mistake of pulling down on me and died for his trouble. Funny. She’d been blonde then, hair dyed for the job. Hard to think of her that way now.
“Did you ever wonder why a woman like Velda went into police work,” Pat mused aloud, “when she might have cracked modeling? Or even the movies? She was a natural for that.”
“Also a natural for vice,” I said. “What are you getting at, Pat?”
“Meeting you was strictly an accident. But maybe you fitted her purposes nicely. It gave her a chance to work under a new, perfect cover.”
“Get to it, Pat.”
“Nothing to get to. You just have all the luck even when you hire a secretary. If ever a P.I. could use a secretary who could back him up the hard way, Mike Hammer was it.”
“You’re saying she was, what? Still doing vice jobs on the side?”
“Maybe. But if she walked out when there’d been no trouble between you…”
“There wasn’t.”
“…and if she really was crazy enough to be crazy about you…”
“She was.”
“…then for her to just up and leave, there must have been a damn good reason.”
He was right. But what?
Pat sighed. “I’m all done talking, kid. I just wanted you to know where she was.”
“All right. So now I know. Thanks a bunch.”
I started to get up, but he stopped me with: “For the first time in your life, Mike, you’re afraid to face something.”
The way he said it was like getting doused with cold water.
“You wasted a lot of time,” I said, half out of the chair. Dawn was working at the windows. “I don’t know why you bothered.”
“I bothered because Velda is a friend of mine… and I thought you were too. I bothered because the guy your girl ran off with is trouble.”
I sat back down, hard. More like collapsed into the damn couch. “What the hell do you expect me to do? Go down there and drag her back? The hell with her!”
“Sucker.”
“My ass! I’m not running after any dame, even Velda. What, and beg her to come home with me? Shit. If she wants to play around with some lousy son of a bitch, let her.”
Pat’s grin was damn near as nasty as anything I could serve up. “She may have been doing a little bit of playing around even before she dumped you, chum.”
I was glad to take that one sitting down. It was one of those things no guy wants to hear. “Who the hell says so?”
“I’m a cop, remember? It isn’t hard to back-check on somebody. If you’re interested, I could tell you a lot of things.”
“Don’t bother. Maybe I wouldn’t believe them.”
“Not even the name of the guy? The one she hooked up with here, then ran off to Miami Beach with?”
“Stick the answer where the sun don’t shine, pal.”
“Oh, that was weak, Mike. Real weak.” The grin turned into a wicked smile. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“I said, stick it.”
“Nolly Quinn.”
“What?”
“Nolly Quinn, Mike. Remember him? Ran the poshest call girl ring in the city, after the war, till the reformers ran him out. Hell, he’s been on the books in practically every state in the union and never once convicted. He’s a slick, good-looking devil who knows his way around the dames and, brother, do they eat him up. His bankroll’s fatter than your head. Money, looks, mob connections—that’s a combination you can’t easily beat these days.”
“Where are you going with this, Pat? What is this, your idea of shock treatment?”
All sarcasm, all manipulation, left his voice and his manner. He was all cop as he said, “Four months ago, Velda leaves town, with no notice. A few weeks earlier, she makes contact with Nolly Quinn, in Manhattan on unspecified business. Two weeks ago, Velda’s old boss—Captain Wade Manley, remember him?—dies under highly suspicious circumstances. Is there a connection?”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
My head was throbbing like a hammered thumb. “What are you asking from me, Pat?”
“Nothing. But maybe this would be a good time for you to go down to Florida and dry out. And maybe look up your old girl friend and see what the hell is going on. She may not even know the Big Man is dead—it’s not a story that would make the Miami papers.”
I grinned at him. “You just want me out of the way. You want Manley’s killer for yourself.”
He grinned back. “Having you out of my hair during my investigation, let’s just call it a side benefit. But this may be bigger than a dame running out on a guy and an old copper getting mugged and killed near the waterfront. And me working this end of it while you check out the Miami end might tell us what that big something is.”
I made my mess of a head think about it. Then I said, “You got a contact for me down south, Pat?”
“Yeah. Captain Barney Pell of the Miami P.D. He’s the one who spotted Velda down there.” He had the slip of paper ready for me in his pocket, and handed it over.
I took it, then got up slowly. I reached for my deck of Luckies before remembering the pack was empty. The wrapper crumpled in my hand and dropped on the floor.
My voice was scratchy. “I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll get sore enough to go down there and beat the crap out of Nolly Quinn on general principles.”
Pat’s laugh had a funny sound I wasn’t familiar with. “Yeah, you do that, but first take that look in the mirror. Four months is a long time, my friend. You’re sloppy. You got rust all over you. If you don’t play it right, Quinn’ll cut you in half the first time you move in on him.”
I collected my .45 and made it to the door.
“Keep in touch, buddy,” he said.
I went out and slammed the door shut. My feet dragged me down the hall and I punched the button for the elevator. Something like urgency was building in me. I couldn’t wait for the damn thing to get there; damnit, I didn’t feel like waiting for anything.
In my mind, that beautiful face was looking at me and she was laughing and then she was crying and I wanted to smash something, anything, so damn hard it would bust in a million pieces.
My hand rolled up into a fist and I slammed it into the steel elevator doors again and again and again and then those dented doors slid shakily open and the operator inside was staring back at me with terrified eyes.
I stepped in with my hand streaming blood and said, “Take me down.”
CHAPTER THREE
You can make it from Manhattan to Miami in a day if you are clear-headed, tireless and able to grab quick bites and bathroom breaks along the way. When you are coming off of four months of boozing, the trip takes four days. You won’t even know the names of the towns where the cheap motels are where you keep showering to get the sweat and the stink off you, and the be
ds are just a this-one-sagging that-one-brick-hard blur of a rack where you can’t sleep, you can’t sleep, you cannot goddamn sleep, and when you finally do sleep, the nightmares come.
I’m back in that abandoned paint factory full of monsters in overcoats who have Velda strung up naked by her wrists, drooling creatures whipping her not for information but the sheer hell of it, only this time I don’t have a tommy gun, I have only my hands and that isn’t enough when they swarm me and take me apart joint by joint, flinging pieces of me over their shoulders in a shower of scarlet while my screaming makes a terrible harmony with the soprano wails of the flayed girl.
I’m walking down that street where the Big Man had been killed and it’s raining, raining hard, gutters overflowing, and I’m alone, so alone, until behind me suddenly comes every son of a bitch I ever killed, charging at me with demented grins and guns and knives and axes and ropes and the dead beautiful women among them are naked but wielding fist-raised ice picks and there are Japs with machetes mingling with the mobsters and they swarm me, too, all of them.
Worst of all is the bar I go to where I start drinking again, drinking hard, shot after shot of straight rye, and Pat and Velda and Wade Manley and my old man and my dead mother, too, gather around me with sorry shameful expressions, shaking their heads while I try to explain myself between swallows for falling off the wagon again, and how I’ll do better next time.
Bad as the nights are, the days are no better.
My hands shake on the steering wheel, like the car is trying to buck me off, though I barely go the limit. My eyes burn and my mouth is thick/dry and my muscles ache like they’ve taken a beating. Summer sun gets hotter and hotter. Twice a day I stop to buy new sport shirts and sometimes trousers, too—going to a laundromat doesn’t cut it because the smell of me sweating out the booze into cotton is a stench that only a garbage can could love.
Yet I am hungry, so goddamn hungry, the furnace in my belly so used to burning booze it’s demanding something, something, something, anything, and so breakfast and burgers and candy bars and beer (four times a day, strictly four times a day) go down and come back in tours of gas-station crappers where my screams of labor pain must scare off tourists and locals alike.
Kill Me, Darling Page 3