The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [132]
“Not too bad. I can get around.”
“Swell. You go downstairs and tell the super that a Geraldine King and Sue Devon are to be admitted to my apartment. Nobody else. Let him keep the key. Then you get down to Sim Torrence’s headquarters and check up on his movements all day yesterday. I want every minute of the day spelled out and make it as specific as you can. He got a phone call yesterday. See if it originated from there. I don’t care if he took ten minutes out to go to the can . . . you find out about it. I’m chiefly interested in any time he took off last night.”
“Got it, Mike. Where can I reach you?”
“At the apartment. When I get through I’ll go right there. Shake it up.”
“Chop chop. Love me?”
“What a time to ask.”
“Well?”
“Certainly, you nut.”
She laughed that deep, throaty laugh and hung up on me and I had a quick picture of her sliding out of bed, those beautiful long legs rippling into a body . . . oh hell.
I put the phone back and went back to Pat.
“Where’d you go?” he said.
“We got a killer, buddy.”
He froze for a second. “You didn’t find anything?”
“No? Then make sense out of this.” I pointed to the picture of Sim Torrence in the window.
“Go ahead.”
“Sim’s on the way up. He’s getting where he always wanted to be. He’s got just one bug in his life and that’s the kid, Sue Devon. All her life she’s been on his back about something in their past and there was always that chance she might find it.
“One time he defended a hard case and when he needed one he called on the guy. Basil Levitt. He wanted Sue knocked off. Some instinct told Sue what he intended to do and she ran for it and wound up at Velda’s. She didn’t know it, but it was already too late. Levitt was on her tail all the while, followed her, set up in a place opposite the house, and waited for her to show.
“The trouble was, Velda was in hiding too. She respected the kid’s fears and kept her undercover until she was out of trouble herself, then she would have left the place with her. Hell, Pat, Levitt didn’t come in there for Velda . . . he was after the kid. When he saw me he must have figured Torrence sent somebody else because he was taking too long and he wasn’t about to lose his contract money. That’s why Levitt bust in like that.
“Anyway, when Torrence made the deal he must have met Levitt in this joint here thinking he’d never be recognized. But he forgot that his picture is plastered all over on posters throughout the city. Maybe Kline never gave it a thought if he recognized him then. Maybe Kline only got the full picture when he saw Levitt’s photo. But he put the thing together. First he called your department for information and grew suspicious when nobody gave him anything concrete.
“Right here he saw Torrence over a barrel so yesterday he called him and told him to meet him. Sim must have jumped out of his skin. He dummied an excuse and probably even led into a trip to Albany for further cover . . . this we’ll know about when I see Velda. But he got here all right. He saw Kline and that was the last Kline saw of anything.”
“You think too much, Mike.”
“The last guy that said that is dead.” I grinned.
“We’d better get up there then.”
New York, when the traffic is thick, is a maddening place. From high above the streets the cars look like a winding line of ants, but when you are in the convoy it becomes a raucous noise, a composite of horns and engines and voices cursing at other voices. It’s a heavy smell of exhaust fumes and unburned hydrocarbons and in the desire to compress time and space the distance between cars is infinitesimal.
The running lights designed to keep traffic moving at a steady pace seem to break down then. They all become red. Always, there is a bus or truck ahead, or an out-of-town driver searching for street signs. There are pedestrians who take their time, sometimes deliberately blocking the lights in the never-ceasing battle against the enemy, those who are mounted.
In the city the average speed of a fire truck breaks down to eighteen miles an hour with