"I've saved yours three times."
"Who's counting?"
He grunted. "The two lobby stiffs have been positively identified as a pair of contract hit men from St. Louis."
They were importing help to deal with me. I felt complimented.
Pat was saying, "Even though the slugs, the prints, and the paraffin tests for gunpowder tell the story of an angry shootout between the pair, nobody in their right mind's going to believe it."
"Why not?"
"Two reasons—first, why would they come all the way from St. Louis together just to shoot each other? And second, how did this falling-out between a couple of St. Louie hard guys just happen to happen in Mike Hammer's lobby?"
I spread my hands. "The things some people will do to rub up against a celebrity."
He didn't even smile at that. He just got up and went to the door, where he stopped and glared at me.
"You may be a celebrity, Mike. But you're going to look like just another dead nobody wrapped up in a rubber body bag."
He went out quickly, not shutting the inner-office door.
Velda ambled in, in her catlike way, and asked, "What's his problem?"
"Ah, he's just pissed because we set him up with that broad Helen."
"Why would that make him mad?"
I pawed at the air. "The sap just can't handle the steep banks and the dark tunnels."
That got a nice purring laugh from her, and she dropped off the notes of the Traynor meeting, already typed up.
"You're fast," I said.
"Took you long enough." She perched on the edge of my desk, plucked the Lucky out of my mouth, and sucked on it. She let the smoke curl out and I gave her a don't-start-with-me look, and she said, "So why the charade?"
"Huh?"
"Don't play dumb. That lobby bit was self-defense that you rigged to stay out of it. Why did you bother? You could have walked away clean."
I waved that off. "So soon after nailing Billy Blue's attackers? That clown Traynor would have kept me downtown forever. Might have charged me on manslaughter or even murder. At the very least, I'd have had my P.I. ticket suspended and my gun permit pulled."
"I'd still have my ticket and my permit."
"Swell, but you're holding down the fort while I'm out chasing Indians. Anyway, I like the message it sends."
"To the cops and the D.A.'s office?"
"No. Fuck the cops and the D.A.'s office. I'm talking about whoever sent those St. Louis bozos to splatter me. I like knowing that somewhere some asshole is wondering how I pulled that off, and is coming to the realization of just how much trouble he's in."
She frowned down at me. "What 'asshole'? This Jay Wren? Or maybe Junior Evello?"
"Or both," I said.
She slid off the desk and shook her head and the dark tresses shimmered and bounced. "You need a new hobby."
"And I bet you have a suggestion."
She nodded and gave me a look that made the need-anything-just-whistle one Bacall gave Bogie seem like kid stuff. She took her feline time making her way back to her desk, leaving the door between us open so she could drive me crazy with those long legs.
No problem. I wasn't planning to hang around the office, anyway.
Old friends have other friends and, if the word is good, they can pass you up the line until one has something to say.
It had taken me three days and two hundred bucks to get to Marvin Stedman, a thirty-five-year-old heroin addict they called the Junkman.
Junkman was no ordinary heroin addict, if there is such a thing. Coming off twenty years of pulling down scores, and building a rep as a crook you could trust, Stedman had thrown in with Jay Wren to aid in the dope operation. So far so good, but the exheister made the classic dealer mistake of liking his own product too well, and he got himself hooked.
Within a period of less than two years, he'd been nailed by the narco squad on seven different occasions, and got retired out of the organization. He did not get a gold watch. Getting fired from the rackets often entails getting fired at—and the Snowbird's boys tried to liquidate him twice, not with slugs but with overdoses.
Apparently they didn't know how much immunity the Junkman had built up for himself. He'd survived both attempts and emerged with an even bigger habit. Since before he'd gone to work for Wren, Stedman had been a first-class heister, and he'd returned to his old ways. More reckless now, the Junkman still had a knack for small-scale knockovers.
The Wren outfit took him off their hit list when they found Junkman, out of desperation, overpaying for his bundle of glassine packets with two- to ten-carat chunks of jewelry lifted from show-biz personalities' hotel rooms. A junkie with this kind of initiative was rare, and he went from liability to the kind of prime customer worth keeping.
Also, the Snowbird apparently had his own uses for the Junkman's talent as a break-in artist, and kept him handy for certain delicate jobs. Junkman could plant evidence for the narcs, if a balky operator didn't like the way the game was going, or do a home invasion that was in reality a mission, Junkman checking out anybody Wren thought might be trying to work the territory.
Sweetest of all, Junkman's services came cheap. All they had to do was cut off his supply, and he was ready to do whatever it took to climb back on the Horse.
I did it the other way around.
He was hurting when I found him, and I made sure he got his fix—at least enough of one to calm him down and set me up as an all-right guy. But he was going to need more and fast, and knowing how tight the stuff was on the street, Junkman was grateful for the jolt that eased the big hurt that had him on a bare, ancient mattress, cramped up against the headboard of a metal bed in the crummy old hotel.
Funny. Around the turn of the century, these walls and halls had been filled with wealthy wastrels of the Stanford White and Harry Thaw variety, a luxurious hideaway for monied marital cheaters and other high-hat sinners. But neighborhoods change and shift, and the old hotel had long ago decayed into a way station for transients and junkies and other dwellers on the fringes of society.
I had walked a hall where paint peeled and occasional bare bulbs gave off halfhearted yellow light. You could smell the disinfectant but also the urine, mingled with the smell of cheap canned food getting heated up. The fate of the old dump might be a hot plate with a frayed cord causing a fire, or a slumlord with a can of gasoline doing the same. Either way, the terrible promise of hellish flames hung over everything.
Now I was sitting in a creaky, scarred-up wooden chair next to the Junkman's bed, as if I were visiting a patient at the world's worst hospital.
Skinny, pale, sunken-chested, Marvin Stedman was a little man made smaller by life, his face an oval of deep-grooved flesh, his thin gray matted hair as long as any hippie kid on the street, but not a fashion statement or a social protest. He wore frayed, faded long johns and no shoes—the needle marks between his toes were as obvious as on the track-marked forearm that he used to wipe his nose.
"Thanks, man," he said. His voice was a rasp crossed with a wheeze. "I was dying, man. I was really no shit dying." A shudder racked him again, and when it passed, he looked at me with bloodshot eyes, his tobacco-stained teeth clamped tightly together under gums with nasty sores. "Ain't been that close in a long time, my friend."
"Pretty bad, huh?"
"Bad don't cover it. What's your name, buddy?"
"Hammer."
"Where'd you score, man? Ain't nothin' out there. Them streets are naked as shit."
"A buddy of mine was holding a spare."
He worked at studying my face. "You don't look like no junkie, man."