“Don’t you see it, Velda? It figures right in. He’s dying. I’m guessing in a matter of weeks, the serious Phasger’s stuff starts kicking in. Well, before that ignoble ending, he wants to go out on a high goddamn note. He sees me as the only other killer around worthy of that honor.”
“If you’re right,” she said, “maybe... maybe he wants you to kill him.”
“If so,” I said, “he came to the right place.”
Before I left Valley Vista, I stopped by Billy’s bedside again, with Velda opposite me once more.
“Bill buddy,” I said, “is there anything you can think of, however small, that might be of help? Maybe something you mentioned to the police and they didn’t seem excited, so you forgot about it?”
The wrinkled face wrinkled further. “You know, there is something. Not something I ever told the cops, ’cause I didn’t know what it had to do with the price of beans. But there was this girl, this kind of... hippie chick. Glasses, short black hair, nice build, though.”
Velda smirked at me. “Sounds like your kind of lead.”
I ignored that. “What about this hippie chick?”
“She came around to the newsstand, a day or two after the hit-and-run. She wanted to know anything at all about how this Blazen guy died. How the damn thing happened. I asked her why I should tell her anything — I mean, she was nobody to me.”
“And?”
“She said she’d been working with Blazen. Sort of his legman and, you know, researcher, helping on the writing. She does freelance for that giveaway rag, the leftie thing... what is it?”
“The Village Voice?” Velda asked.
“That’s it. She was sad. She’d been crying. You could tell she really liked the old boy. A week later, she come back with a bunch of questions written down, but I didn’t have any more for her than I did the other time.”
I leaned in. “She ever give you a name, Billy?”
“Yeah. She did. Marcy. Never got a last name, or if so, I forgot the damn thing. But she, you know, looked like a Marcy, so I remembered it. Does that help, Mike?”
“It just might,” I said.
Chapter Twelve
The state of mind that was Greenwich Village was changing, beatnik black giving way to rainbow tie-dye, finger-snapping egocentric poetry getting drowned out by clap-along protest folk songs. Other things stayed the same, like the zigzag streets, art-gallery sidewalks, espresso joints, intimate jazz clubs, and theater ranging from Circle in the Square respectability to strip-joint sleaze.
There was also no shortage of bookshops, running mostly to secondhand, and that’s where I asked about a girl called Marcy with short black hair and glasses, who might be doing research on the history of show business in the city. I got nowhere on this sunny but cool afternoon until I tried the Paper Book Gallery on the corner of Sullivan and West Third, a Beat Generation landmark still advertising poetry readings even though the kid at the register had long hippie hair and little square-lensed glasses.
“You might mean Marcy Bloom,” the kid said. He wore a black vest over a paisley shirt. “That sounds like the project she’s been working on. I delivered her some old magazines she ordered, like a couple of weeks ago.”
“Then you know where she lives,” I said. Not a question.
He frowned. “I can’t give out a customer’s address, if that’s what you’re after. Would you want me giving out your address, mister?”
I dug out my wallet and he was shaking his head.
“Save your bread, man. I’m no sell-out.”
But he was a weed smoker, judging by his dreamy eyes and the pungent scent clinging to his clothes.
I flipped the wallet open and shut, just long enough for him to glimpse the badge there. That it went with my P.I. ticket and not a job on the PD was a distinction I didn’t figure he would make.
He had to look it up in a card file, but he got me the address. He was shaking and afraid.
“She’s not in any trouble, son,” I told him, taking the scribbled-on slip of paper he handed me. “And neither are you. Appreciate the help.”
He nodded and started working up his story for his pals about how he’d been hassled by the man.
Marcy Bloom’s building was a white-washed brick three-story that looked like a strong wind might crumble it. Green shutters and black ironwork dressed it up, and some of the city’s few remaining gas lamps lent a certain charm. But I wondered how long the quaint buildings on these cobblestone side streets could stand up against the intrusion of the world of commerce.
On the second floor landing, I knocked at 2B. As I waited, the door across the way opened, and I turned. In the half-opened doorway, a skinny guy with a shoulder-length pile of curly brown hair was giving me a what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here look. In his mid-twenties or so, he wore a faded maroon T-shirt with a cracked white peace symbol, and his jeans looked older than he did.
I gave him a smile that wasn’t pleasant. “Something I can do for you, man?”
He retreated and shut the door, hard.
I shrugged to nobody, turned back and knocked again on the paint-blistered door. I was just getting ready to knock a third time when a girl answered so suddenly I almost jumped back.
“Sorry,” she said chirpily, as if we were old friends, “I had to throw something on.”
She was petite but curvy, with boyishly short dark hair and big dark blue eyes that the black-framed, big-lensed glasses perched on her pert nose could hardly contain. She had a brightness and energy about her that came across right now, and was at least as cute as her navy white-polka-dotted mini-dress. She was maybe twenty-three and made me wish I was.
“Say,” she said. “You’re Mike Hammer!”
Surprised to be recognized, particularly by someone her age, I admitted it nonetheless. Was she Marcy Bloom? She was. She seemed not at all surprised I’d come calling.
Looking past me, her cuteness took on sharp edges, and she said, “Shack! Quit that! Be good!”
I glanced behind me just in time to see that door across the way slam again.
“Don’t mind Shack,” she said, her smile dimpling one side of the adorable face. “He’s harmless. Poor puppy dog’s just in love with me.”
“But is he house-broken?”
She smiled at that and took me by the elbow like I was her father giving her away at a wedding. She ushered me not down the aisle but into her apartment.
“You saved me a trip,” she said.
“How did I do that?”
She asked for my hat and coat, which she promptly dropped onto a chair. Then she led me past an odd work area on a braided throw rug in the center of the living room, with a table whose legs had been sawed off to put it a foot-and-a-half off the floor, a typewriter on it, and a throw pillow for a chair. The table had stacks of manuscript paper and various research materials, books, magazines, notebooks, all in cheerful disarray.
My hostess deposited me on a threadbare couch while she sat on the floor like an Indian, giving me a glimpse of white inner thighs and dark panties. Well, more than a glimpse.
She looked up at me like I was a guru and she was ready to learn the meaning of life. The way she was sitting, I could have told her.
“I’ve been trying to get the nerve up,” she said, “to come see you at your office.”
The couch, like the other furnishings in the Early Salvation Army decor, sat well out from the wall, which like the others was consumed by bookcases. Some were homemade concrete-block affairs, plus thrift-shop shelving she’d scrounged. She had built an enviable library, no doubt as secondhand as the furniture, the fiction running from Pride and Prejudice to Peyton Place, the nonfiction heavy on journalism and film and theater criticism.