His name was Nat Drutman. He owned the Hackard Building where I used to have my office and now, seven years later, he was just the same—only a little grayer and a little wiser around the eyes and when he glanced up at me from his desk it was as if he had seen me only yesterday.
“Hello, Mike.”
“Nat.”
“Good to see you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
This time his eyes stayed on me and he smiled, a gentle smile that had hope in it. “It has been a long time.”
“Much too long.”
“I know.” He watched me expectantly.
I said, “You sell the junk from my office?”
“No.”
“Store it?”
He shook his head, just once. “No.”
“No games, kid,” I said.
He made the Lower East Side gesture with his shoulders and let his smile stay pat. “It’s still there, Mike.”
“Not after seven years, kid,” I told him.
“That’s so long?”
“For somebody who wants their loot it is.”
“So who needs loot?”
“Nat—”
“Yes, Mike?”
His smile was hard to understand.
“No games.”
“You still got a key?” he asked.
“No. I left to stay. No key. No nothing anymore.”
He held out his hand, offering me a shiny piece of brass. I took it automatically and looked at the number stamped into it, a fat 808. “I had it made special,” he said.
As best I could, I tried to be nasty. “Come off it, Nat.”
He wouldn’t accept the act. “Don’t thank me. I knew you’d be back.”
I said, “Shit.”
There was a hurt look on his face. It barely touched his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but I knew I had hurt him.
“Seven years, Nat. That’s a lot of rent.”
He wouldn’t argue. I got that shrug again and the funny look that went with it. “So for you I dropped the rent to a dollar a year while you were gone.”
I looked at the key, feeling my shoulders tighten. “Nat—”
“Please—don’t talk. Just take. Remember when you gave? Remember Bernie and those men? Remember—”
“Okay, Nat.”
The sudden tension left his face and he smiled again. I said, “Thanks, kid. You’ll never know.”
A small laugh left his lips and he said, “Oh I’ll know, all right. That’ll be seven dollars. Seven years, seven dollars.”
I took out another ten and laid it on his desk. With complete seriousness he gave me back three ones, a receipt, then said, “You got a phone too, Mike. Same number. No ‘thank yous,’ Mike. Augie Strickland came in with the six hundred he owed you and left it with me so I paid the phone bill from it. You still got maybe a couple bucks coming back if we figure close.”
“Save it for service charges,” I said.
“Good to see you, Mike.”
“Good to see you, Nat.”
“You look pretty bad. Is everything going to be like before, Mike?”
“It can never be like before. Let’s hope it’s better.”
“Sure, Mike.”
“And thanks anyway, kid.”
“My pleasure, Mike.”
I looked at the key, folded it in my fist and started out. When I reached the door Nat said, “Mike—”
I turned around.
“Velda . . .?”
He watched my eyes closely.
“That’s why you’re back?”
“Why?”
“I hear many stories, Mike. Twice I even saw you. Things I know that nobody else knows. I know why you left. I know why you came back. I even waited because I knew someday you’d come. So you’re back. You don’t look like you did except for your eyes. They never change. Now you’re all beat up and skinny and far behind. Except for your eyes, and that’s the worst part.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “For somebody,” he said.
I put the key in the lock and turned the knob. It was like coming back to the place where you had been born, remembering, yet without a full recollection of all the details. It was a drawing, wanting power that made me swing the door open because I wanted to see how it used to be and how it might have been.
Her desk was there in the anteroom, the typewriter still covered, letters from years ago stacked in a neat pile waiting to be answered, the last note she had left for me still there beside the phone some itinerant spider had draped in a nightgown of cobwebs.
The wastebasket was where I had kicked it, dented almost double from my foot; the two captain’s chairs and antique bench we used for clients were still overturned against the wall where I had thrown them. The door to my office swung open, tendrils of webbing seeming to tie it to the frame. Behind it I could see my desk and chair outlined in the gray shaft of light that was all that was left of the day.
I walked in, waving the cobwebs apart, and sat down in the chair. There was dust, and silence, and I was back to seven years ago, all of a sudden. Outside the window was another New York—not the one I had left, because the old one had been torn down and rebuilt since I had looked out that window last. But below on the street the sounds hadn’t changed a bit, nor had the people. Death and destruction were still there, the grand overseers of life toward the great abyss, some slowly, some quickly, but always along the same road.
For a few minutes I just sat there swinging in the chair, recalling the feel and the sound of it. I made a casual inspection of the desk drawers, not remembering what was there, yet enjoying a sense of familiarity with old things. It was an old desk, almost antique, a relic from some solid, conservative corporation that supplied its executives with the best.
When you pulled the top drawer all the way out there was a niche built into the massive framework, and when I felt in the shallow recess the other relic was still there.
Calibre .45, Colt Automatic, U.S. Army model, vintage of 1914. Inside the plastic wrapper it was still oiled, and when I checked the action it was like a thing alive, a deadly thing that had but a single fundamental purpose.
I put it back where it was beside the box of shells, inserted the drawer and slid it shut. The day of the guns was back there seven years ago. Not now.
Now I was one of the nothing people. One mistake and Pat had me, and where I was going, one mistake and they would have me.
Pat. The slob really took off after me. I wondered if Larry had been right when he said Pat had been in love with Velda too.
I nodded absently, because he had changed. And there was more to it, besides. In seven years Pat should have moved up the ladder. By now he should have been an Inspector. Maybe whatever it was he had crawling around in his guts got out of hand and he never made the big try for promotion, or, if he did, he loused up.
The hell with him, I thought. Now he was going wide open to nail a killer and a big one. Whoever killed Richie Cole had killed Senator Knapp in all probability, and in all probability, too, had killed Old Dewey. Well, I was one up on Pat. He’d have another kill in his lap, all right, but only I could connect Dewey and the others.
Which put me in the middle all around.
So okay, Hammer, I said. You’ve been a patsy before. See what you’ll do with this one and do it right. Someplace she’s alive. Alive! But for how long? And where? There are killers loose and she must be on the list.
Absently, I reached for the phone, grinned when I heard the dial tone, then fingered the card the thin man gave me from my pocket and called Peerage Brokers.
He was there waiting and when I asked, “Rickerby?” a switch clicked.
Art answered, “You still have a little more time.”
“I don’t need time. I need now. I think we should talk.”
“Where are you?”
“My own office through courtesy of a friend. The Hackard Building.”
“Stay there. I’ll be up in ten
minutes.”
“Sure. Bring me a sandwich.”
“A drink too?”
“None of that. Maybe a couple of Blue Ribbons, but nothing else.”
Without answering, he hung up. I glanced at my wrist, but there was no watch there anymore. Somehow, I vaguely remembered hocking it somewhere and called myself a nut because it was a good Rolex and I probably drank up the loot in half a day. Or got rolled for it.
Damn!
From the window I could see the clock on the Paramount Building and it was twenty past six. The street was slick from the drizzle that had finally started to fall and the crosstown traffic was like a giant worm trying to eat into the belly of the city. I opened the window and got supper smells in ten languages from the restaurants below and for the first time in a long time it smelled good. Then I switched on the desk lamp and sat back again.
Rickerby came in, put a wrapped sandwich and two cans of Blue Ribbon in front of me and sat down with a weary smile. It was a very peculiar smile, not of friendliness, but of anticipation. It was one you didn’t smile back at, but rather waited out.
And I made him wait until I had finished the sandwich and a can of beer, then I said, “Thanks for everything.”
Once again, he smiled. “Was it worth it?”
His eyes had that flat calm that was nearly impenetrable. I said, “Possibly. I don’t know. Not yet.”
“Suppose we discuss it.”
I smiled some too. The way his face changed I wondered what I looked like. “It’s all right with me, Rickety.”
“Rickerby.”
“Sorry,” I said. “But let’s do it question-and-answer style. Only I want to go first.”
“You’re not exactly in a position to dictate terms.”
“I think I am. I’ve been put upon. You know?”
He shrugged, and looked at me again, still patient. “It really doesn’t matter. Ask me what you want to.”
“Are you officially on this case?”
Rickerby didn’t take too long putting it in its proper category. It would be easy enough to plot out if you knew how, so he simply made a vague motion with his shoulders. “No. Richie’s death is at this moment a local police matter.”
“Do they know who he was?”
“By now, I assume so.”
“And your department won’t press the matter?”
He smiled, nothing more.
I said, “Suppose I put it this way—if his death resulted in the line of duty he was pursuing—because of the case he was on, then your department would be interested.”
Rickerby looked at me, his silence acknowledging my statement.
“However,” I continued, “if he was the victim of circumstances that could hit anybody, it would remain a local police matter and his other identity would remain concealed from everyone possible. True?”
“You seem familiar enough with the machinations of our department, so draw your own conclusions,” Rickerby told me.
“I will. I’d say that presently it’s up in the air. You’re on detached duty because of a personal interest in this thing. You couldn’t be ordered off it, otherwise you’d resign and pursue it yourself.”
“You know, Mike, for someone who was an alcoholic such a short time ago, your mind is awfully lucid.” He took his glasses off and wiped them carefully before putting them back on. “I’m beginning to be very interested in this aspect of your personality.”
“Let me clue you, buddy. It was shock. I was brought back to my own house fast, and suddenly meeting death in a sober condition really rocked me.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” he said. “Nevertheless, get on with your questions.”
“What was Richie Cole’s job?”
After a moment’s pause he said, “Don’t be silly. I certainly don’t know. If I did I wouldn’t reveal it.”
“Okay, what was his cover?”
All he did was shake his head and smile.
I said, “You told me you’d do anything to get the one who killed him.”
This time a full minute passed before he glanced down at his hands, then back to me again. In that time he had done some rapid mental calculations. “I—don’t see how it could matter now,” he said. When he paused a sadness creased his mouth momentarily, then he went on. “Richie worked as a seaman.”
“Union man?”
“That’s right. He held a full card.”
CHAPTER 5
The elevator operator in the Trib Building looked at me kind of funny like when I told him I wanted to find Hy. But maybe Hy had all kinds of hooples looking for him at odd hours. At one time the guy would never have asked questions, but now was now. The old Mike wasn’t quite there anymore.
In gold, the letters said, HY GARDNER. I knocked, opened the door and there he was, staring until recognition came, and with a subtle restraint he said, “Mike—” It was almost a question.
“A long time, Hy.”
But always the nice guy, this one. Never picking, never choosing. He said, “Been too long. I’ve been wondering.”
“So have a lot of people.”
“But not for the same reasons.”
We shook hands, a couple of old friends saying hello from a long while back; we had both been big, but while he had gone ahead and I had faded, we were still friends, and good ones.
He tried to cover the grand hiatus of so many years with a cigar stuck in the middle of a smile and made it all the way, without words telling me that nothing had really changed at all since the first time we had played bullets in a bar and he had made a column out of it the next day.
Hell, you’ve read his stuff. You know us.
I sat down, waved the crazy blond bouffant he used as a secretary now out of the room and leaned back enjoying myself. After seven years it was a long time to enjoy anything. Friends.
I still had them.
“You look lousy,” Hy said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“True what I hear about you and Pat?”
“Word gets around fast.”
“You know this business, Mike.”
“Sure, so don’t bother being kind.”
“You’re a nut,” he laughed.
“Aren’t we all. One kind or another.”
“Sure, but you’re on top. You know the word that’s out right now?”
“I can imagine.”
“The hell you can. You don’t even know. What comes in this office you couldn’t imagine. When they picked you up I heard about it. When you were in Pat’s house I knew where you were. If you really want to know, whenever you were in the drunk tank, unidentified, I knew about it.”
“Cripes, why didn’t you get me out?”
“Mike,” he laughed around the stogie, “I got problems of my own. When you can’t solve yours, who can solve anything? Besides, I thought it would be a good experience for you.”
“Thanks.”
“No bother.” He shifted the cigar from one side to the other. “But I was worried.”
“Well, that’s nice anyway,” I said.
“Now it’s worse.”
Hy took the cigar away, studied me intently, snuffed the smoke out in a tray and pulled his eyes up to mine.
“Mike—”
“Say it, Hy.”
He was honest. He pulled no punches. It was like time had never been at all and we were squaring away for the first time. “You’re poison, Mike. The word’s out.”
“To you?”
“No.” He shook his head. “They don’t touch the Fourth Estate, you know that. They tried it with Joe Ungermach and Victor Reisel and look what happened to them. So don’t worry about me.”
“You worried about me?”
Hy grunted, lit another cigar and grinned at me. He had his glasses up on his head and you’d never think he could be anything but an innocuous slob, but then you’d be wrong. When he had it lit, he said, “I gave up worrying about you a long time ago. Now what did you want from me? I
t has to be big after seven years.”
“Senator Knapp,” I said.
Sure, he was thinking, after seven years who the hell would think you’d come back with a little one? Mike Hammer chasing ambulances? Mike Hammer suddenly a reformer or coming up with a civic problem? Hell, anybody would have guessed. The Mike doesn’t come back without a big one going. This a kill, Mike? What’s the scoop? Story there, isn’t there? You have a killer lined up just like in the old days and don’t lie to me because I’ve seen those tiger eyes before. If they were blue or brown like anybody else’s maybe I couldn’t tell, but you got tiger eyes, friend, and they glint. So tell me. Tell me hard. Tell me now.
He didn’t have to say it. Every word was there in his face, like when he had read it out to me before. I didn’t have to hear it now. Just looking at him was enough.
I said, “Senator Knapp. He died when I was—away.”
Quietly, Hy reminded me, “He didn’t die. He was killed.”
“Okay. The libraries were closed and besides, I forgot my card.”
“He’s been dead three years.”
“More.”
“First why?”
“Because.”
“You come on strong, man.”
“You know another way?”
“Not for you.”
“So how about the Senator?”
“Are we square?” he asked me. “It can be my story?”
“All yours, Hy. I don’t make a buck telling columns.”
“Got a few minutes?”
“All right,” I said.
He didn’t even have to consult the files. All he had to do was light that damn cigar again and sit back in his chair, then he sucked his mouth full of smoke and said, “Leo Knapp was another McCarthy. He was a Commie-hunter but he had more prestige and more power. He was on the right committee and, to top it off, he was this country’s missile man.
“That’s what they called him, the Missile Man. Mr. America. He pulled hard against the crap we put up with like the Cape Canaveral strikes when the entire program was held up by stupid jerks who went all that way for unionism and—hell, read True or the factual accounts and see what happened. The Reds are running us blind. Anyway, Knapp was the missile pusher.”
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 3 Page 6