Mickey Spillane - The Big Bang

"You're wrong, Susie."

"Am I?"

"I was never nice."

That caught her by surprise and made her laugh. It was a childish giggle, but appealing.

"Understanding is one thing," I said. "Toleration is another, Susie. And some things just can't be tolerated."

She had her chin up. "If we ever made it, Mr. Hammer? And you didn't ring my bell? I swear, I'd go right ahead and hurt your feelings."

"I might hurt more than your feelings, kid. But let's get back to Russ."

"All right," she said with an agreeable shrug. "I've known him for over a year—ever since he began working at the Village Ceramics Shoppe. He liked to show a girl a good time, and didn't mind spending money. He had ... well, ambition. Someday he was going to be somebody big, he always told me."

"You kidding? Working in a ceramics shop?"

"He had other interests, and real possibilities, big opportunities."

"Such as?"

"Oh, he didn't tell me about them, but I believed him, all right."

My face said I didn't believe her, and she frowned indignantly.

"Well, I did believe him!"

"Why, Susie? You said he was all show and no go."

"In the bedroom. But when somebody gets calls from Hawaii and Rome and has Cadillacs sent around to pick him up, it's because he has some kind of potential, right?"

"Right," I said pleasantly. "But it depends on who's making the calls and driving the Cadillac."

Her smirk was supposed to put me down. "This Cadillac had a chauffeur, Mr. Hammer—an Oriental chauffeur in a proper uniform."

"Careful, girl. You're cultivating Establishment tastes."

She let another giggle escape her lips and her shoulders moved in a childish gesture. "It was cute, though, getting the limo treatment. My roomie, Elsie, was real jealous. Before then, she thought Russ was just a big-mouth drag."

"All show and no go again."

She smirked and nodded. "Like, I been flapping my lips and what you wanted was a character reference for Russ. I guess I haven't done him any favors."

"Depends on how you look at it."

"How are you looking at it, Mr. Hammer?" She lifted the Coke again, slurped the last dregs down in the ice, and put it back on the table.

"Through a Coke glass, darkly," I said.

She let half a minute go by while she made designs on the damp table with a fingertip. "Lay it on me, Mr. Hammer. What's this really about?"

"Russell Frazer is dead," I told her flatly. "Last night he tried to stick a knife in my back."

There was no doubt about her believing what I said. It was there in the dull shadow of her eyes and the tight lines around her mouth. Her voice was a bare whisper when she said, "And you... you killed him?"

"No, I didn't kill him. I knocked him on his ass, into the gutter, and left him there. Later, somebody rolled him for his loot, and stuck Russ's own shiv through his heart in the process."

She blinked at me, as if in time with her brain processing the information. Then she blurted, "I saw something about that incident ... in the papers? But it don't show the man's face, or—"

"Papers called the victim an unidentified man this morning. They know who he is now. Later you'll probably get some visitors from Homicide."

"Are you one of them?" Her expression had turned nauseated. " You're not a... pig? "

"I oink in a different tone of voice, Susie." I gave her a business card. "The others who come around will have a little more pork behind them."

She started to change somehow, like the slow cracking of an ice floe. Her tongue made a nervous pass over suddenly dry lips and she shook her head in bewilderment. "But Russ was never ... I didn't know ... didn't see anything that..."

"Everybody hides things," I said. "You're a hip chick, not some teenybopper, even if you like to act like one. You didn't notice anything hinky when you were at Russell's pad?"

"I ... I just didn't think much about it."

"About what?"

"Like ... well, his apartment. He made over the loft in that funky old building, and laid out a lot of bread on it. The big stereo with the record collection, and the tape recorders and the big color TVs—all of that was awfully expensive. You can buy toys like that on time and all, but he bragged about paying cash. I thought it was more of his big talk, until, you know..."

"The phone calls and Cadillacs?"

Susie nodded, her eyes worried. "One time I answered his phone and got an overseas operator."

"Remember the conversation?"

"No. Russell took the call in the bedroom. I was in the living room."

"When did you see him last?"

"Just two nights ago. He was going to take me to that new 'in' place—the Pigeon? Then he called it off because something came up."

"What?"

"He had to meet somebody."

"Who?"

"Russ didn't say. He was all excited and sort of, well, secretive. Like, I offered to go with him but he didn't want me along."

"He say why?"

"No." She stopped and looked down at the table again and the watery designs she'd made. "I broke it off right after that. Funny. You know, before that? I was set to see him tonight. He was taking me to a ball game to celebrate."

"There aren't any ball games in town tonight, Susie."

Her eyes came up expressionlessly. "Not that kind of ball game. I mean, the swinging kind we played at his apartment—you've really got to stay with it, Mr. Hammer, the new culture, the new language."

"I'll try to catch up with you kids. Susie, you've obviously been to Russell's place lately—I was told he moved out."

She shook her head. "He had a hotel room somewhere, where he'd been staying, but I think that was for business, mostly."

"Were you ever at this hotel room?"

"No, and I don't know what hotel or even what part of town. I do know, with his loft pad? Russ had some troubles with the neighbors, and stopped having parties there, and kept a way lower profile. I gave him a bad time about having to sneak around going into his own place."

"You have a key?"

She nodded, fished in her little purse, and held out a key in her palm.

I didn't make any move to take it. "Susie, you can hold that for the cops or give it to me. Your choice."

Her hand stayed outstretched. "Why break the door down? Besides, whatever you are, you're not exactly an Establishment type."

"That's a character reference I can appreciate, sugar."

That made her smile a little. I plucked the key from her palm and dropped it in my pocket.

When I paid the bill, and walked her to the door, she stopped me with her hand on my arm. "I feel awfully funny, Mr. Hammer, now that I think back."

"About what?"

"Having balled a dead man."

"He wasn't dead then."

She took her hand away and let it drop at her side. "Yes he was," she said.

RUSSELL FRAZER'S APARTMENT was everything little Susie had said, and more.

She had apparently never opened the mahogany box with the heavy-duty diamond cufflinks and the Cartier jeweled watch. She had not found the two packets of fifty-dollar bills, or seen the empty wrappers for three others, because they were tucked in back of a bottom bureau drawer otherwise occupied by black silk socks, the kind worn by guys with dough or as the primary costume of some stud in a stag reel.

Frazer hadn't lied to Susie when he said he'd paid cash for everything. His receipts were all filed in one compartment of a black-lacquered wall unit with built-in storage cabinets and shelves for his hi-fi components and enough electronic gadgetry to make NASA turn green.

The living room motif was black and white, from the thick white pile wall-to-wall carpet to the black couch and stacked black cushions and white ones that apparently took the place of chairs for guests. The walls bore black-lacquer-framed black-and-white nude female photos that must have been art because the pubic deltas weren't airbrushed out, and the built-in bar in one corner was mirrored where it wasn't a black-and-white checkerboard design.