The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [61]
I didn’t answer him. I nodded, but that was all. He looked at me a moment, scowled, went to say something and changed his mind. He told Laura good-bye and walked to the door.
Fresh drinks came and I finished mine absently. Laura chuckled once and I glanced up. “You’ve been quiet a long time. Aren’t we going to do the town?”
“Do you mind if we don’t?”
She raised her eyebrows, surprised, but not at all unhappy. “No, do you want to do something else?”
“Yes. Think.”
“Your place?” she asked mischievously.
“I don’t have a place except my office.”
“We’ve been there before,” she teased.
But I had kissed Velda there too many times before too. “No,” I said.
Laura leaned forward, serious now. “It’s important, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get out of the city entirely. Let’s go back upstate to where it’s cool and quiet and you can think right. Would you like to do that?”
“All right.”
I paid the bill and we went outside to the night and the rain to flag down a cab to get us to the parking lot. She had to do it for me because the only thing I could think of was the face in that picture Pat had showed me.
Rudolph Civac was the same as Gerald Erlich.
CHAPTER 10
I couldn’t remember the trip at all. I was asleep before we reached the West Side Drive and awakened only when she shook me. Her voice kept calling to me out of a fog and for a few seconds I thought it was Velda, then I opened my eyes and Laura was smiling at me. “We’re home, Mike.”
The rain had stopped, but in the stillness of the night I could hear the soft dripping from the shadows of the blue spruces around the house. Beyond them a porch and inside light threw out a pale yellow glow. “Won’t your servants have something to say about me coming in?”
“No, I’m alone at night. The couple working for me come only during the day.”
“I haven’t seen them yet.”
“Each time you were here they had the day off.”
I made an annoyed grimace. “You’re nuts, kid. You should keep somebody around all the time after what happened.”
Her hand reached out and she traced a line around my mouth. “I’m trying to,” she said. Then she leaned over and brushed me with lips that were gently damp and sweetly warm, the tip of her tongue a swift dart of flame, doing it too quickly for me to grab her to make it last.
“Quit brainwashing me,” I said.
She laughed at me deep in her throat. “Never, Mister Man. I’ve been too long without you.”
Rather than hear me answer she opened the door and slid out of the car. I came around from the other side and we went up the steps into the house together. It was a funny feeling, this coming home sensation. There was the house and the woman and the mutual desire, an instinctive demanding passion we shared, one for the other, yet realizing that there were other things that came first and not caring because there was always later.
There was a huge couch in the living room of soft, aged leather, a hidden hi-fi that played Dvořák, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and somewhere in between Laura had gotten into yards of flowing nylon that did nothing to hide the warmth of her body or restrain the luscious bloom of her thighs and breasts. She lay there in my arms quietly, giving me all of the moment to enjoy as I pleased, only her sometimes-quickened breathing indicating her pleasure as I touched her lightly, caressing her with my fingertips. Her eyes were closed, a small satisfied smile touched the corners of her mouth and she snuggled into me with a sigh of contentment.
How long I sat there and thought about it I couldn’t tell. I let it drift through my mind from beginning to end, the part I knew and the part I didn’t know. Like always, a pattern was there. You can’t have murder without a pattern. It weaves in and out, fabricating an artful tapestry, and while the background colors were apparent from the beginning it is only at the last that the picture itself emerges. But who was the weaver? Who sat invisibly behind the loom with shuttles of death in one hand and skeins of lives in the other? I fell asleep trying to peer behind the gigantic framework of that