Vengeance Is Mine

“Verily,” I said.

“It’s smooth, Mike. Lord, but it’s smooth. It put you on the spot because you were the only one looking for a murderer. Everyone else was satisfied with a suicide verdict.” He paused and frowned, staring at the window. “If only that damn hotel had some system about it . . . even a chambermaid with sense enough to keep on her toes, but no. The killer walks out in the hall and drops his slug and shell that we find hours later.”

“He was wearing an old suit.”

“What?”

“It must have been old if it had a hole in the pockets.”

Pat looked at me and the frown deepened. His hand fished for his notebook and he pulled out several slips of paper stapled together. He looked through them, glanced up at me, then read the last page again. He put the book back in his pocket very slowly. “The day before Wheeler died there were only two registered guests,” he said. “One was a very old man. The other was a comparatively young fellow in a shabby suit who paid in advance. He left the day after Wheeler was shot before we were looking for anyone in the hotel, and long enough afterward to dispel any suspicions on the part of the staff.”

The pain in my head disappeared. I felt my shoulders tightening up. “Did they get a description? Was it . . .”

“No. No description. He was of medium build. He was in town to see a specialist to have some work done on a tooth. Most of his face was covered by a bandage.”

I said another four-letter word.

“It was a good enough reason for his being without baggage. Besides, he had the money to pay in advance.”

“It could have been Clyde,” I breathed. My throat was on fire.

“It could have been almost anybody. If you think Clyde is the one behind all this, let me ask you one thing. Do you honestly think he’d handle the murder end by himself?”

“No,” I said with disgust. “The bastard would pay to have it done.”

“And the same thing for that deal at the arena.”

I smacked the arm of the chair with my fist. “Nuts, Pat. That’s only what we surmise. Don’t forget that Clyde’s been in on murder before. Maybe he has a liking for it now. Maybe he’s smart enough not to trust anybody else. Let’s see how smart he can get. Let’s let it hang just a few days longer and see if he’ll hang himself.”

I didn’t like the look on his face. “Why?”

“The D.A. didn’t believe my story about being with you. He has his men out asking questions. It won’t take them very long to get the truth.”

“Oh, God!”

“The pressure is on the lad. The kind of pressure he can’t ignore. Something’s going to pop and it may be your neck and my job.”

“Okay, Pat, okay. We’ll make it quicker then, but how? What the hell are we going to do? I could take Clyde apart but he’d have the cops on my neck before I could do anything. I need some time, damn it. I need those few days!”

“I know it, but what can we do?”

“Nothing. Not a damn thing . . . yet.” I lit another butt and glared at him through the smoke. “You know, Pat, you can sit around for a month in a room with a hornet, waiting for him to sting you. But if you go poke at his nest it’ll only be a second before you’re bit.”

“They say if you get bitten often enough it’ll kill you.”

I stood up and tugged my coat on. “You might at that. What are your plans for the rest of the evening?”

Pat waited for me by the door while I hunted up my hat. “Since you’ve gotten my schedule all screwed up I have to clean up some work at the office. Besides, I want to find out if Rainey’s two pals have been found yet. You know, you called it pretty good. They both disappeared so fast it would make your head swim.”

“What did they do about the arena?”

“They sold out . . . to a man who signed the contracts and deeds as Robert Hobart Williams.”

“Dinky . . . Clyde! I’ll be damned.”

“Yeah, me too. He bought it for a song. Ed Cooper ran it in the sports column of the Globe tonight with all the nasty implications.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said again. “It tied Rainey in very nicely with Clyde, didn’t it?”

Pat shrugged. “Who can prove it? Rainey’s dead and the partners are missing. That isn’t the only arena Clyde owns. It now appears that he’s a man quite interested in sporting establishments.”

We started out the door and I almost forgot what I came for. Pat waited in the hall while I went back to the bedroom and pulled out the dresser drawer. The Luger was still there wrapped in an oily rag inside a box. I checked the clip, jacked a shell into the chamber and put it in half cock.

When I slid it into the holster it fit loosely, but nice. I felt a lot better.

The snow, the damned snow. It slowed me to a crawl and did all but stop me. It still came down in lazy fashion, but so thick you couldn’t see fifty feet through it. Traffic was thick, sluggish and people were abandoning their cars in the road for the subway. I circled around them, following the cab in front of me and finally hit a section that had been cleared only minutes before.

That stretch kept me from missing Velda. She had her coat and hat on and was locking the door when I stepped out of the elevator. I didn’t have to tell her to open up again.

When she threw her coat on top of mine I looked at her and got mad again. She was more lovely than the last time. I said. “Where you going?”

She pulled a bottle out of a cabinet and poured me a stiff drink. It tasted great. “Clyde called me. He wanted to know if that was `later.’ “

“Yeah?”

“I told him it might be.”

“Where does the seduction take place?”

“At his apartment.”

“You really have that guy going, don’t you? How come he’s passing up all the stuff at the Inn for you?”

Velda looked at me quickly, then away. I reached for the bottle. “You asked me to do this, you know,” she said.

I felt like a heel. All she had to do was look at me when I got that way and I felt like I was crawling up out of a sewer somewhere. “I’m sorry, kid. I’m jealous, I guess. I always figured you as some sort of a fixture. Now that the finance company is taking it away from me I get snotty.”

Her smile lit the whole room up. She came over and filled my glass again. “Get that way more often, Mike.”

“I’m always that way. Now tell me what you’ve been doing to the guy.”

“I play easy to get but not easy to get at. There are times when sophistication coupled with virtue pays off. Clyde is getting that look in his eyes. He’s hinting at a man-and-mistress arrangement with the unspoken plan in mind of a marriage license if I don’t go for it.”

I put the glass down. “You can cut out the act, Velda. I’m almost ready to move in on Clyde myself.”

“I thought I was the boss,” she grinned.

“You are . . . of the agency. Outside the office I’m the boss.” I grabbed her arm and swung her around to face me. She was damned near as tall as I was and being that close to her did things to me inside that I didn’t have time for. “It took me a long time to wise up, didn’t it?”

“Too long, Mike.”

“Do you know what I’m talking about, Velda? I’m not tossing a pass at you now or laying the groundwork for the same thing later. I’m telling you ‘something else.”

My fingers were hurting her and I couldn’t help it. “I want you to say it, Mike. You’ve played games with so many women I won’t be sure until I hear you say it yourself. Tell me.”

There was a desperate pleading in her eyes. They were asking me please, please. I could feel her breath coming faster and knew she was trembling and not because I was hurting her. I knew something was coming over my face that I couldn’t control. It started in my chest and overflowed in my face when the music in my head began with that steady beat of drums and weird discord. My mouth worked to get the words out, but they stuck fast to the roof of my mouth.