that the old man could get wind of what went on in a Midwest college when he was living a thousand miles away in Poughkeepsie, New York. That kind of news travels fast anywhere, though. Probably a jealous schoolgirl with a dirty mind and a poison pen. Maybe another of Hanson’s babes. I’ll bet he had plenty of them. Going from bad to worse. Not financially—Eileen was making plenty of cash even if she only got a ten-percent cut. The joint she worked in had money written all over it. A syndicated outfit with lots of the long green. For instance, this show tonight. It meant a rake-off in the thousands. And…
I was letting my mind ramble on so fast I hardly noticed the taxi that pulled up in front of the stoop. A young punk in a double-breasted suit stepped out and gave a hand to the fat boy with him. A greasy slob, coming in for the show or some fun, maybe both. I thought I recognized the kid from a bookie’s uptown, but I wasn’t sure. The fat guy I had never seen before. There were no questions at the door, so I supposed they were well known there.
Five minutes later another car drove up and a pair of dillies climbed out. The man, if you could call him that, was done up in a camel’s-hair coat, his skinny neck protruding above a flaming-red ascot. He had a marcel that was brand-new. His companion was a woman. The only way you could tell was by the skirt. The rest of her was strictly male. She walked with a swagger and he minced his way to the sidewalk holding on to her arm. Fruit.
She did the bell ringing and pushed him in ahead of her. Fine people. There’s everything in this world. It’s too bad they were hiding behind the door when sexes were handed out. They got what was left over and not enough of it at that.
I sat there a whole hour watching a cross section of humanity that came from every walk of life. If I had an infrared camera I could have made a fortune. Eileen probably wasn’t well read enough to identify persons as being important, but I was. There were four politicians from my own ward there. Plus a few who hardly skipped a week without having their pictures in the papers for something or other. Everyone was going in, no one coming out. That meant the show was on. Generally a half hour was enough time to transact their kind of business.
Twenty minutes went by and no more cars. If Jack had expected to snag somebody in there it wasn’t anyone at the party or someone whom he had connections with that I knew about. I didn’t get it.
Then I did. Or at least I thought I did.
I started the motor and pulled away from the curb, then made a U turn in the middle of the block. I tried to beat out the red lights, but the traffic got away from me. Even the short cuts didn’t help, so I cut back to the main thoroughfare and took it straight up to Jack’s apartment.
This time I went in the front door. I broke the seal and the flimsy padlock with my gun butt and opened the lock with one of my skeleton keys. Before I did anything else I went for the phone hoping that it hadn’t been disconnected. It hadn’t. I dialed my number and waited. Then, “Police Headquarters.”
“Hello, give me Captain Chambers, Homicide. Shake it.” Pat was on in an instant.
“Captain Chambers speaking.”
“Pat, this is Mike Hammer, I’m at Jack’s apartment. Listen, get a couple of men and whip up here, and if you took any books from here bring them along. One other thing. Better tell the riot squad to stand by for an emergency call.”
Pat grew excited. “What’s up, Mike, got anything?”
“I may have,” I answered, “but if you don’t snap it up I may lose it.” I hung up before he could ask any more questions. I turned on the lamp in the living room and pulled out what books were lying between cast bronze ends and stacked in the bookcase. I found what I was looking for. Three of them were college yearbooks, and they were dated from the past fifteen years. I remembered having seen them when I was in the apartment the last time. They didn’t mean much then, but they did now.
While I was waiting for Pat I scanned through them. They were student publications, all from Midwestern schools. What I was looking for was a picture of John Hanson.
It might be that simple. Jack saw Eileen after a long time and knew what she was doing. A cop wouldn’t have much trouble checking those things. He knew what happened to her and he knew the guy. On the flyleaf of each book was the name and address of a secondhand bookstore near Times Square, and the tab it was typed on was clean, so they had been recently bought. If Jack had tracked the guy down and approached him he set himself up for murder. Maybe the guy had a business or a family, but what he had could easily be wrecked by having that kind of information passed on to the wrong people.
I went through them fast, then again very carefully, but there was no picture labeled with the name Hanson. I was cursing softly to myself when Pat came in. Under his arm he had three more of the same kind of books.
“Here you are, Mike,” he said, dumping the books on the sofa beside me. “Now give.” In as few words as possible I told him where I stood. He watched me gravely and made me repeat a few things to keep track of things in his mind.
“So you think this Eileen Vickers may be the key, huh?”
I signified with a nod of my head. “Possibly. You go through these books and look for the guy. She said he was tall and good-looking, but dames in love all think their men are good-looking. By the way, why did you pick up these books?”
“Because these three were in the living room, open. He was reading them just before he was killed. It seemed funny to me that he should be going through old college yearbooks and I took them along to match the pics With some of our samples.”
“And . . . ?”
“And I found two women who had been committed for bigamy, one guy that later hung for murder, and a friend of mine who runs a hardware store downtown and I see every day. Nothing else.”
The both of us sat down and read those damn books from cover to cover. When we were done we traded and read them again to make sure we didn’t skip anything. John Hanson was nowhere to be found.
“Looks like a wild-goose chase, Mike.” Pat was frowning at the pile. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Are you sure that was what Jack was looking for?”
“Hell, yes, why not? The dates on these things tie in. They’re twelve years old.” I dragged the black book out of my hip pocket and tossed it to him. “Take a look,” I said, “and don’t tell me I was withholding evidence.”
As Pat glanced through it he said, “I won’t. I was up here the day after you. Found it under the bottom drawer of his dresser, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“At home I happened to drop something over the back of a drawer like that myself. When I thought it over, I knew it was one place we hadn’t looked. Incidentally, I found your note.”
He finished with the pad and stuck it under his coat I didn’t need it anymore. “I think you may be right, Mike. Where to now?”
“The bookstore. Jack may have had other books. I should have asked Eileen what school she went to, damn it, but I didn’t catch on until later.”
Pat went to the phone book and thumbed through it until he found the number of the bookstore. The place was closed, but the owner was still there. Pat told him who he was and to stay put until we arrived. I turned out the lights and we left after Pat posted one of his men at the door.
I didn’t bother with the jalopy. We piled into the squad car and headed for Times Square with the siren wailing. Traffic pulled off to one side to let us pass and we made record time. The driver turned off on Sixth and stopped across the street from the bookstore.
The blinds were drawn, but a light still glowed from within. Pat knocked and the weazened little proprietor fussed with the lock and let us in. He was nervous as a hen with a yardful of chicks and kept pulling at the bottom of his vest. Pat got to the point after he flashed his badge.
“You had a customer come in here a few days ago and buy several college yearbooks.” The little guy shook all over. “Do you keep a record of the sales?”
“Yes and no. We record the sales tax, yes, but the books we don’t keep. This is old stock as you can see.”
“Never mind,” Pat said. “Do you remember what ones he took out with him?”
The guy hesitated a second. “N-no. Maybe I can find out, yes?”
With the little guy leading the way, we went to the rear of the store and he climbed a rickety ladder to the top shelf. “We don’t have many calls for these. I remember we had about two dozen. Ah, yes. There are perhaps ten gone.”
