She waddled out, her entire body bearing the weight of the calamity. I held the phone to my ear and heard her call the police. When the connection was through I asked for homicide and got the night man. I said, ?This is Mike Hammer. I?m in the Chadwick Hotel with a dead woman. No, I didn?t kill her, she?s been dead for hours. The D.A. will want to hear about it so you better call him and mention my name. Tell him I?ll drop by later. Yeah, yeah. No, I won?t be here. If the D.A. doesn?t like that he can put my name on his butt-kissing list. Tell him I said that, too. Good-by.? I walked downstairs and out the front door with about a minute to spare. I was just starting up my car when the police came up with their sirens wide open, leading a black limousine that skidded to a halt as the D.A. himself jumped out and started slinging orders around.
When I drove by I beeped the horn twice, but he didn?t hear it because he was too busy directing his army. Another squad car came up and I looked it over hoping to see Pat. He wasn?t with them.
My watch said twenty minutes to twelve. Velda would be leaving her apartment about now. My hands were shaking when I reached for a Lucky and I had to use the dashboard lighter to get it lit, a match wouldn?t hold still. If there was any fight left inside me it was going fast, draining out with each minute, and in twenty minutes there wouldn?t be a thing left for me, not one damn thing.
I stopped at a saloon and pulled the phone book from its rack and fingered through the L?s until I came to Lipsek, Anton. The address was right on the fringe of the Village in a section I knew pretty well. I went back to the car and crawled down Broadway.
Twenty minutes. Fifteen now, Tempus Fugit. Tempus Fugits fast as hell. Twelve minutes. It started to snow harder. The wind picked it up and whipped the stuff into parallel, oblique lines across the multicolored lights that lined the street. Red lights. I made like I was skidding and went through. Cars honked and I cursed back, telling them to be quiet. The gun under my arm was burning a hole in my side and my finger under the glove kept tightening up expectantly.
Fourteenth Street went by and two cabs were bumper-locked in the middle of the road. I followed a pickup truck onto the sidewalk and off again to get around them. A police whistle blew and I muttered for the cop to go to the devil and kept on my way behind the truck.
Five minutes. My teeth were making harsh, grinding noises I could feel through my jaw. I came to my street and pulled into a parking space. Another minute went by while I oriented myself and followed the numbers in the right direction. Another two minutes went by before I found it.
Three minutes. She should almost be there by now. The name on the bell read, ANTON LIPSEK, Esq., and some kid had written a word under it. The kid had my sympathy. I felt the same way myself. I pushed the bell and heard it tinkle someplace upstairs.
Nothing happened. I pushed it again and kept my finger on it. The tinkling went on and on and on and still nothing happened. I pushed one of the other bells and the door clicked open. A voice from the rear of the first floor said, ?Who is it??
?Me,? I said. ?I forgot my key.?
The voice said, ?Oh . . . okay,? and the door closed. Me, the magic password. Me, the sap, the sucker, the target for a killer. Me, the stupid bastard who was going around in circles while a killer watched and laughed. That was me.
I had to light a match at every door to see where I was. I found Anton?s on the top floor with another Esq. after it. There was no sound and no light, and when I tried the knob it was locked.
I was too late. I was too late all around. It was five after twelve. Velda would be inside. The door would be closed and the nuptial couch laid. Velda would know all about it the hard way.
I kicked the door so hard the lock snapped and the door flew open. I kicked it shut the same way and stood there hoping the killer would come at me out of the darkness, hoping he?d run right into the rod I held in my fist. I prayed that he?d come, listened hard hoping to hear him. All I heard was my own breathing.
My hand groped for the wall switch and found it, bathing the place with a brilliant white light. It was some place. Some joint. The furniture was nothing but wooden porch furniture and the lamps were rigged up from discarded old floodlights. The rug on the floor must have been dragged out of an ash can.
But the walls were worth a million dollars. They were hung with canvas painted by the Masters and must have been genuine, otherwise their lavish frames and engraved brass nameplates were going to waste. So Anton had money and he didn?t spend it on dames. No, it went into pictures, something with a greater permanent value than money. The inscriptions were all in French and didn?t mean a thing to me. Although the rest of the room was littered with empty glasses and cigarette butts, not a speck of dust nested on the frames or the pictures, and the brass plates had been recently polished.
Could this be Anton?s reward for wartime collaboration? Or was it his own private enterprise?
I picked some of the trash out of the way and prowled around the apartment. There was a small studio filled with the usual claptrap of a man who brings his work home with him, and adjoining, a tiny darkroom. The sinks were filled and a small red light burned over a table. That was all there was to it. I would have left, but the red light winked at me from a reflected image in a shiny bit of metal against the wall and I ran my hand over the area.
It wasn?t a wall, it was a door. It was set flush with the wall and had no knob. Only the scratch on the concealed hinge showed me where it was. Someplace a hidden latch opened it and I didn?t waste time looking for it. I braced my back against the sink and kicked out as hard as I could.
Part of the wall shook and cracked.
I kicked again and my foot went through the partition. The third time I had made a hole big enough to crawl into. It was an empty clothes closet that faced into another apartment.
Here was where Anton Lipsek lived in style. A wall had separated two worlds. There was junk lying around here, just the evidence of a recent and wild party. One side was a bar, stocked to the hilt with the best that money could buy. The rest of the room was the best that money could buy too. There were couches and tables that didn?t come from any department store and they matched the drapes and color scheme perfectly. Someone with an eye for good taste had done a magnificent job of decorating. Someone like an artist-photographer named Anton Lipsek. The only things out of place were the cheap prints that were framed in bamboo. They belonged outside with the junk. Anton was as cracked as the Liberty Bell.
Maybe.
There were other rooms, a whole lot of rooms. Apparently he had rented two apartments back to back and used the darkroom as a secret go-between. There was a hall that led into three beautiful bedrooms, each with its own shower stall and toilet. Each bedroom had ash trays filled with cigarette butts, some plain, some stained with lipstick. In one room there were three well-chewed cigar stubs squashed out in a glass coaster beside the bed.
Something was wrong. There had to be something wrong. I would have seen it if my mind wasn?t twisted and dead. The whole thing was as unnatural as it was possible to be. Why the two apartments? Why the one place crawling with dirt and decorated with a fortune in pictures and the other lavish in furnishings and nothing else?
Anton was a bachelor. Until recently he didn?t mess with women, so why all the bedrooms? He wasn?t so popular that he was overloaded with guests. I sat on the edge of the bed and shoved my hat back on my head. It was a nice bed, soft, firm and quiet. It made me want to lean back and sleep forever to wash the fatigue from my mind. I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
It was a white ceiling with faint lines crisscrossing in the calcimine. My eyes followed the lines to the wall where they disappeared into the molding. Those lines were like the tracks the killer made. They started at no place and went everywhere, disappearing just as effectively. A killer who was strong as he was vicious.
I stared at the molding some more then picked out the pictures that hung over the bed and stared at them. They were funny little pictures painted on glass, seascapes, with the water a shimmering silver. The water had tiny palms. I got up off that bed slowly and looked at the lines crisscrossing it too, reflecting the cracks in the ceiling.
My breath was hot in my throat and my eyes must have been little slits. I could feel my nails bite into my palms. The water was shiny and silver because the water part was a mirror. It made a lovely, decorative picture.
Lovely, but very practical. I tried to wrench the frames loose, but they were screwed into the wall. All I could do was swear and claw at the damn things and it didn?t do any good. I ran back through the living room, opened the door of the closet and wiggled through the hole in the wall. The splinters grasped at my coat and held me back until I smacked at them with my hand.
