Микки Спиллейн - Together We Kill

“There is a listing for Anton & Porkov at 774 West Thirty-first Street, sir. The phone number is Clinton 9-5444. Also a listing for Sergi Porkov at 917 East Sixty-eighth. Butterfield 4-6793. It’s the only other Porkov in the book, so it may be the same man.”

I wrote it all down and closed the line. “I want a full report on that outfit, Eddie. They’re importers; Washington should give you a line on them. No direct inquiries; I don’t want them to know they’re being checked. You’ve got half an hour.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Yeah.” I tossed the page from the yearbook across the desk to him. “Ann Fullerton. Check the police files to learn if she’s got a record. Call Osborne at the FBI and see if he’s got anything on her. And anything else you think of.”

“Right.”

I moved my hand and the .45 was in it, pointed at him. All he did was blink. “Just finding out if I’ve still got the speed,” I said.

He nodded. “I never even saw your hand move, brother.”

“That’s nice to know,” I said. I picked up the slip with the addresses and phone numbers on it, folded it small and put it behind my display handkerchief. “I’ll call you in half an hour. About Anton & Porkov.”

“Okay.”

I gave him a brief nod and walked over to the door and out.

I stopped off at the Roosevelt Hotel and had lunch in the Men’s Grill, then supplied myself with a handful of change and entered one of the phone booths. I put through a person-to-person call to Senator McGill at the Senate Building in Washington. My father had put him in office almost sixteen years before, and kept him there. When you own between forty* and fifty million bucks in one form and another you need a loud voice where it can be heard.

His secretary told him who was calling and he came on the wire very excited. “Karl, you young idiot, are you trying to ruin me?”

“That’s what I like about you, Senator,” I said. “Always worrying about your friends rather than yourself.”

“Oh, stop it! Have you any idea what the penalty is for attacking a Federal officer?”

“How did he work it so fast?” I asked. “I figured Mrs. Morgan would be untying him about now. What’s behind all this subpoena business anyway?”

His voice was desperate. “You’re in trouble, boy. The AEC says you lied about not getting anything useful out of Africa. They have good reason to think you came out of there with some kind of gadget to do with cosmic energy, whatever the hell that is. You better get down here and straighten things out before it’s too late.”

“Nuts to that,” I said. “I got something a lot more important to take care of. Get them to call off their dogs.”

His voice went up four octaves. “You think I’m the President? Not only does the AEC want you for questioning, but you’re charged with attacking an FBI man and committing a murder! You grab a plane and get out here in nothing flat. Demarest of the Attorney General’s office called me not more than half an hour ago and said they were getting out a general alarm to have you picked up.”

“Get it canceled.”

“I tell you I can’t! What’s more, they’ve issued a subpoena for your wife. Word’s gotten around she’s the one who gave you that gadget, and this business of her going around heavily veiled, no one ever seeing what she looks like, is beginning to look mighty suspicious.”

“You think I give a damn how it looks? I’m telling you, get these alphabet boys out of my hair. Or are you tired of being a senator?”

“Don’t you threaten me, you young upstart! I was making laws in this country while you were still soiling diapers. My record—”

“Slick your record,” I cut in. “You get that general alarm withdrawn and those subpoenas held up or I’ll plaster the darker side of your precious record over the front pages of every newspaper in the country.”

He was still sputtering when I slammed down the receiver. I went into the Rough Rider Room at the Roosevelt and had a couple of bourbons to settle my lunch and get the taste of politicians out of my mouth. My strapwatch showed 2:10. I went out into the hot sun and slid behind the wheel of the convertible and drove through a blue fog of exhaust fumes until I reached the 700 block on West Thirty-first.

It was a crummy neighborhood. Ancient loft buildings and sagging tenements and flyspecked delicatessens and cut-rate liquor stores and wise punks hanging around corner taverns. It stunk of dirt and poverty, with an occasional whiff of stale water and dead fish from the Hudson River a block to the west. A puff of tired air moved through the littered gutters and blew dust in my face.

I parked behind a truck half a block from 774 and waded through dirty-faced brats and sloppy-breasted housewives until I reached a corner drugstore. There were a couple of phone booths at the rear and I called Eddie Treeglos from one of them.

“What’ve you got, Eddie?”

“A thing or two. One, Sergi Porkov, alias Sam Parks, is one of the top Russian agents in this country. At present he is reported to be somewhere in Mexico. He’s a tall blond guy, in his early forties, looks like a Swedish diplomat — at least that’s the way my source of information described him — and has three rather large pockmarks on his left cheek. Two, Maurice Anton, his former partner in the importing firm, died of cancer at Morningside General Hospital four months ago. At that time Porkov sold the importing business to a man named Luke Ritter; no record on him but he’s suspected of being a front man for Porkov. That’s it, Karl.”

I breathed in some of the booth’s odor of cheap cigars. “Anything on Ann Fullerton?”

“Yeah. Identified by a close friend as one of the victims of a fire nine months ago at a warehouse owned by the Fullbright Radio Company. Body was too badly burned for the parents to make a positive identification, but a purse under the body was hers. It was in the papers at the time.”

“Who was the friend that made the ID?”

“Nobody seems to know. I’m working on it.”

“Anything else on her?”

“Well, she was one of these college pinks. Carried banners on a couple of picket lines, belonged to several commie front outfits and so on. But right after she left school she dropped out of sight and nobody seems to have heard of her until she got too close to the fire. Except for one possible connection.”

“Let’s have it, Eddie.”

“Here about eight, nine months ago, Sergi Porkov came up with a new girlfriend a knockout of a blonde named Arleen Farmer. The similarity in initials could mean something.”

“You can bet on it,” I said. “Got an address on her?”

“She was living with Porkov at the Sixty-eighth Street address.”

“Nothing else?”

He sounded aggrieved. “My God, isn’t that enough? You only gave me half an hour.”

I cut him off, got out the list of addresses and phone numbers the girl at Eddie’s had given me, and looked up Porkov’s home phone. I stood there and listened to the buzz come back over the wire. No answer. I let it ring a dozen times before I decided that Anton & Porkov was the place to start.

I hung up and stopped at the cigar counter for cigarettes. Outside, the sun still baked the street. I walked slowly on down to 774, a loft building of battered red brick, four floors, with a hand laundry and a job printer flanking the entrance.

The lobby was narrow and had been swept out shortly before they built the Maginot Line. It smelled like toadstools in the rain, with a binder of soft-coal smoke held over from the previous winter.

A thin flat-faced kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a mop of black hair was propped up on a backless kitchen chair outside a freight elevator, buried to the eyebrows in a battered copy of Marx’s Das Kapital. I brought him out of it by kicking one of the chair legs.