The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [21]
“Nat.”
“Good to see you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
This time his eyes stayed on me and he smiled, a gentle smile that had hope in it. “It has been a long time.”
“Much too long.”
“I know.” He watched me expectantly.
I said, “You sell the junk from my office?”
“No.”
“Store it?”
He shook his head, just once. “No.”
“No games, kid,” I said.
He made the Lower East Side gesture with his shoulders and let his smile stay pat. “It’s still there, Mike.”
“Not after seven years, kid,” I told him.
“That’s so long?”
“For somebody who wants their loot it is.”
“So who needs loot?”
“Nat—”
“Yes, Mike?”
His smile was hard to understand.
“No games.”
“You still got a key?” he asked.
“No. I left to stay. No key. No nothing anymore.”
He held out his hand, offering me a shiny piece of brass. I took it automatically and looked at the number stamped into it, a fat 808. “I had it made special,” he said.
As best I could, I tried to be nasty. “Come off it, Nat.”
He wouldn’t accept the act. “Don’t thank me. I knew you’d be back.”
I said, “Shit.”
There was a hurt look on his face. It barely touched his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but I knew I had hurt him.
“Seven years, Nat. That’s a lot of rent.”
He wouldn’t argue. I got that shrug again and the funny look that went with it. “So for you I dropped the rent to a dollar a year while you were gone.”
I looked at the key, feeling my shoulders tighten. “Nat—”
“Please—don’t talk. Just take. Remember when you gave? Remember Bernie and those men? Remember—”
“Okay, Nat.”
The sudden tension left his face and he smiled again. I said, “Thanks, kid. You’ll never know.”
A small laugh left his lips and he said, “Oh I’ll know, all right. That’ll be seven dollars. Seven years, seven dollars.”
I took out another ten and laid it on his desk. With complete seriousness he gave me back three ones, a receipt, then said, “You got a phone too, Mike. Same number. No ‘thank yous,’ Mike. Augie Strickland came in with the six hundred he owed you and left it with me so I paid the phone bill from it. You still got maybe a couple bucks coming back if we figure close.”
“Save it for service charges,” I said.
“Good to see you, Mike.”
“Good to see you, Nat.”
“You look pretty bad. Is everything going to be like before, Mike?”
“It can never be like before. Let’s hope it’s better.”
“Sure, Mike.”
“And thanks anyway, kid.”
“My pleasure, Mike.”
I looked at the key, folded it in my fist and started out. When I reached the door Nat said, “Mike—”
I turned around.
“Velda . . .?”
He watched my eyes closely.
“That’s why you’re back?”
“Why?”
“I hear many stories, Mike. Twice I even saw you. Things I know that nobody else knows. I know why you left. I know why you came back. I even waited because I knew someday you’d come. So you’re back. You don’t look like you did except for your eyes. They never change. Now you’re all beat up and skinny and far behind. Except for your eyes, and that’s the worst part.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “For somebody,” he said.
I put the key in the lock and turned the knob. It was like coming back to the place where you had been born, remembering, yet without a full recollection of all the details. It was a drawing, wanting power that made me swing the door open because I wanted to see how it used to be and how it might have been.
Her desk was there in the anteroom, the typewriter still covered, letters from years ago stacked in a neat pile waiting to be answered, the last note she had left for me still there beside the phone some itinerant spider had draped in a nightgown of cobwebs.
The wastebasket was where I had kicked it, dented almost double from my foot; the two captain’s chairs and antique bench we used for clients were still overturned against the wall where I had thrown them. The door to my office swung open, tendrils of webbing seeming to tie it to the frame. Behind it I could see my desk and chair outlined in the gray shaft of light that was all that was left of the day.
I walked in, waving the cobwebs apart, and sat down in the chair. There was dust,