The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [190]
For my little speech I had a sneer thrown at me. “All right,” I told him, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Right now you look like hell, but you’re beautiful compared to what you’ll look like in ten minutes. I’m going to slap the crap out of you until you talk. Yell all you want to, it won’t do any good.”
I pulled back my hand. Junior didn’t wait, he started speaking. “Don’t. It was nothing. I . . . I stole some money from my uncle once. He caught me and made me sign a statement. I didn’t want it to be found or I’d never get a cent. That was it.”
“Yes? What made it so important that someone else would want it?”
“I don’t know. There was something else attached to the statement that I didn’t look at. Maybe they wanted that.”
It could have been a lie, but I wasn’t sure. What he said made sense. “Did you shoot Miss Malcom?”
“That’s silly.” I tightened up on the tie again. “Please, you’re choking me. I didn’t shoot anyone. I never saw her. You can tell, the police have a test haven’t they?”
“Yes, a paraffin test. Would you submit to it?”
Relief flooded his face and he nodded. I let him go. If he had pulled the trigger he wouldn’t be so damn anxious. Besides, I knew for sure that he hadn’t been wearing gloves.
A car pulled up outside and Harvey admitted a short, stout man carrying the bag of his profession. They disappeared upstairs. I turned to Junior. “Get out of here, but stay where you can be reached. If you take a powder I’ll squeeze your skinny neck until you turn blue. Remember one thing, if Miss Malcom dies you’re it, see, so you better start praying.”
He shot out of the chair and half ran for the door. I heard his feet pounding down the drive. I went upstairs.
“How is she?” The doctor applied the last of the tape over the compress and turned.
“Nothing serious. Fainted from shock.” He put his instruments back in his bag and took out a notebook. Roxy stirred and woke up.
“Of course you know I’ll have to report this. The police must have a record of all gunshot wounds. Her name, please.”
Roxy watched me from the bed. I passed it to her. She murmured, “Helen Malcom.”
“Address?”
“Here.” She gave her age and the doctor noted a general description then asked me if I had found the bullet.
“Yeah, it was in the wall. A .32 lead-nose job. I’ll give it to the police.” He snapped the book shut and stuck it in his bag. “I’d like you to see the boy, too, Doctor,” I mentioned. “He was in a bad way.”
Briefly, I went over what had happened the past few days. The doctor picked his bag up and followed me inside. “I know the boy,” he said. “Too much excitement is bad for any youngster, particularly one as finely trained as he is.”
“You’ve seen him before? I thought his father was his doctor.”
“Not the boy. However I had occasion to speak to his father several times in town and he spoke rather proudly of his son.”
“I should imagine. Here he is.”
The doctor took his pulse and I winked over his shoulder. Ruston grinned back. While the doctor examined him I sat at the desk and looked at nine-by-twelve photos of popular cowboy actors Ruston had in a folder. He was a genius, but the boy kept coming out around the seams. A few of the books in the lower shelves were current Western novels and some books on American geography in the 1800s. Beside the desk was a used ten-gallon hat and lariat with the crown of the skimmer autographed by Hollywood’s foremost heroic cattle hand. I don’t know why York didn’t let his kid alone to enjoy himself the way boys should. Ruston would rather be a cowboy than a child prodigy any day, I’d bet. He saw me going over his stuff and smiled.
“Were you ever out West, Mike?” he asked.
“I took some training in the desert when I was with Uncle Whiskers.”
“Did you ever see a real cowboy?”
“Nope, but I bunked