One Lonely Night

Hammer. I do have a good understanding of people and I think that you are telling me a truth that could have some very unpleasant aspects, whatever they are.'

I squeezed his hand hard and got out of there. So much to be done, I thought, so much that's still left to do. My watch said it was after ten and Velda would be waiting. Tonight we had a mission planned and after that another and another until we found the ending.

I touched the starter and the engine caught with a roar. The night had sped by and there never was enough time to do what I wanted. First Pork-Pie Hat, then those men, then Ethel. I stopped and retraced my thoughts. Ethel and those men. She was going to tell me about them; she almost did. I reached in my pocket and took out the wallet.

The card was behind some others in one of the pockets. It was an official card with all the works. The words I saw stood out as though they were written in flame. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. Good Lord, Ethel had fingered me to the FBI! She had turned on the party and even on me! Now it was clear . . . Those two Feds had tailed me hoping to be led to my apartment and perhaps a secret cache of papers that could lead to those missing documents! They tailed me but they in turn were being tailed by somebody else who knew what had happened. Pork-Pie Hat ran them off the road and came after us with the intention of killing Ethel before she could spill anything else she knew!

I let the music in my head play. I laughed at it and it played harder than ever, but this time I didn't fight it. I sat back and laughed, enjoying the symphony of madness and cheered when it was done. So I was mad. I was a killer and I was looking forward to killing again. I wanted them all, every one of them from bottom to top and especially the one at the top even if I had to go to the Kremlin to do it. The time for that wouldn't be now . . . I'd only get a little way up the ladder if one of the rungs didn't break first and throw me to my death.

But some day, maybe, some day I'd stand on the steps of the Kremlin with a gun in my fist and I'd yell for them to come out and if they wouldn't I'd go in and get them and when I had them lined up against the wall I'd start shooting until all I had left was a row of corpses that bled on the cold floors and in whose thick red blood would be the promise of a peace that would stick for more generations than I'd live to see.

The music gave up in a thunder of drums and I racked my wheels against the curb outside Velda's apartment house. I looked up at her floor when I got out and saw the lights on and I knew she was ready and waiting.

I went on in.

She said hello and knew that something was wrong with me. 'What happened, Mike?'

I couldn't tell her the whole thing. I said simply, 'They tried again.'

Her eyes narrowed down and glinted at me. They asked the question.

I said, 'They got away again, too.'

'It's getting deeper, isn't it?'

'It'll go deeper before we're through. Get your coat on.'

Velda went inside and reappeared with her coat on and her handbag slung over her shoulder. It swung slowly under the weight of the gun. 'Let's go, Mike.'

We went downstairs to the car and started driving. Broadway was a madhouse of traffic that weaved and screamed, stopped for red lights and jumped away at the green. I let the flow take me past the artificial daylight of the marquees and the signs and into the dusk of uptown. When we came to the street Velda pointed and I turned up it, parking in the middle of the block under a street light.

Here was the edge of Harlem, that strange no-man's-land where the white mixed with the black and the languages overflowed into each other like that of the horde around the Tower of Babel. There were strange, foreign smells of cooking and too many people in too few rooms. There were the hostile eyes of children who became suddenly silent as you passed.

Velda stopped before an old sandstone building. 'This is it.'

I took her arm and went up the stairs. In the vestibule I truck a match and held it before the name plates on the mailboxes. Most were scrawled in childish writing on the backs of match books. One was an aluminum stamp and it read C.C. LOPEX, SUPT.

I pushed the button. There was no answering buzz of the door. Instead, a face showed through the dirty glass and the door was pulled open by a guy who only came up to my chest. He smoked a smelly cigar and reeked of cheap whisky. He was a hunchback. He said, 'Whatta ya want?'

He saw the ten bucks I had folded in my fingers and got a greedy look on his face. 'There ain't but one empty room and ya won't like that. Ya can use my place. For a tenner ya can stay all night.'

Velda raised her eyebrows at that. I shook my head. 'We'll take the empty.'

'Sure, go ahead. Ya coulda done whatcha wanted in my place but if ya want the empty go ahead. Ya won't like it, though.'

I gave him the ten and he gave me the key, telling me where the room was. He leered and looked somewhat dissatisfied because he wouldn't be able to sneak a look on something he probably never had himself. Velda started up the stairs using her flashlight to pick out the snags in the steps.

The room faced on a dark corridor that was hung heavy with the smell of age and decay. I put the key in the lock and shoved the door open. Velda found the lone bulb that dangled from the ceiling and pulled the cord to throw a dull yellow light in the room. I closed the door and locked it.

Nobody had to tell us what had happened. Somebody had been here before us. The police had impounded Charlie Moffit's personal belongings, but they hadn't ripped the room up doing it. The skinny mattress lay in the center of the floor ripped to shreds. The hollow posts of the bed had been disemboweled and lay on the springs. What had been a rug at one time lay in a heap in the corner under the pile of empty dresser drawers.

'We're too late again, Mike.'

'No we're not.' I was grinning and Velda grinned too. 'The search didn't stop anywhere. If they found it we could have seen where they stopped looking. They tore the place apart and never came to the end. It never was here.'

I kicked at the papers on the floor, old sheets from weeks back. There was a note pad with pencil sketches of girls doing things they shouldn't. We roamed around the room poking into the remains doing nothing but looking out of curiosity. Velda found a box of junk that had been spilled under the dresser, penny curios from some arcade.

There was no place else to look that hadn't already been searched. I took the dresser drawers off the rug and laid them out. They were lined with newspapers and had a few odds and ends rolling on the bottoms. There was part of a fountain pen and a broken harmonica. Velda found a few pictures of girls in next to nothing that had been cut from a magazine.

Then I found the photographs. They were between the paper lining and the side of the drawer. One was of two people, too fuzzy to identify. The other was that of a girl and had 'To Charlie, with love from P.' written on the bottom. I held it in my hand and looked at the face of Paula Riis. She was smiling. She was happy. She was the girl that had jumped off the bridge and was dead. I stared at her face that smiled back at me as if there never had been anything to worry about.

Velda peered over my shoulder, took the picture from me and held it under the light. 'Who is she, Mike?'

'Paula Riis,' I said finally. 'The nurse. Charlie Moffit's girl friend. Oscar Deamer's nurse and the girl who chose to die rather than look at my face. The girl who started it all and left it hanging in mid-air while people died and killed.'

I took out a cigarette and gave her one. 'I had it figured wrong. I gave Pat a bum steer, then when I thought it over I got to thinking that maybe I told the truth after all. I thought that Paula and Oscar planned his escape and Oscar killed a guy . . . just any guy . . . in order to squeeze Lee. Now it seems that it wasn't just any guy that Oscar killed. It wasn't an accident. Oscar killed him for a very good reason.'

'Mike . . . could it be a case of jealousy? Could Oscar have been jealous because Paula played up to Charlie?'

I dragged the smoke down, held it and let it go into the light. 'I wish it happened that simply. I wish it did, sugar. I started out with a couple of green cards and took it from there. I thought I had a coincidental connection but now it looks like it wasn't so damn coincidental after all. We have too many dead people carrying those green cards.'

'The answer, Mike . . . what can it be?'