Mickey Spillane - The Big Bang

"Any dough in the thing?"

"There were bills in it when I stuck it back in his pocket, yeah. You got any witnesses?"

He smirked without humor. "You kidding? Right now, you'd think that corner last night had been as deserted as Sunday morning. Nobody saw a damn thing, and the girls who work that block must be working some other block today." Then he shrugged. "But just as soon as we let a little heat loose, we'll get it put together."

"You're giving this that kind of priority?"

"I am now that I know you were on the scene." He crossed his arms and glared at me, tiny lines showing at the corners of his eyes. "So—what's your angle, Mike?"

"Quit playing the heavy," I told him. "All I did was protect myself."

"That's all you ever do," he said sarcastically. "Why did you lift his IDs?"

I got up, walked over to the mini-refrigerator, took out a can of Pabst beer, and popped it open. Hadn't had time for breakfast. Pat waved it off when I offered him one.

"You didn't answer me," he said.

"Because," I said, settling back behind my desk, "if there was another reason for the attack, besides a mugging, I wanted the bum to know I could finger him."

"Don't give me that mugging crap, Mike. You're not exactly the kind of target those guys pick on. They go after little old ladies or rabbity tourists who won't fight back. Most of these muggers have a habit, and they don't want to do any cold-turkey time in a jail cell."

I leaned back in my swivel chair. "Okay, so there's only one angle left—somebody had to be tailing me."

"And the great Mike Hammer didn't notice?"

I batted that away. "Hell, Pat, I didn't have any reason to sweat it—I wasn't on anything active. Only you and Velda knew I was going to be at the Blue Ribbon last night, so they had to pick me up someplace before I got to the restaurant."

He was frowning. "Why would they bother tailing you? And if this wasn't a mugging, who wants you dead? Scratch that— plenty of people want you dead...."

"It's bugging me, too," I said, ignoring his last statement. "I'm going to have to think about it."

Pat and I had been friends too long for him not to know when a conversation of ours had come to the end of the line. The gray eyes narrowed and he was very likely still considering putting a hold order on me for my own good; but we were both pros, and he would hold the reins loose until I started to bolt. My sources of information weren't as broad as his, but sometimes they were a lot more specific when some long green was handy to grease the way.

So he nodded curtly, a silent acknowledgment that I could try to satisfy my curiosity just a little bit. A very little bit. He plucked his hat off my desk, put it on, and headed out.

At the door, though, he stopped, turning around and saying, "By the way, Mike, where were you before we met up at the Blue Ribbon?"

I made a face and shrugged. "Pat, believe it or not, I was visiting a sick friend."

"Horseshit," he said.

But it was fairly good-natured, and he even threw me a kind of wave.

I heard him tell Velda so long and, when he was gone, she came into my inner sanctum and up to my desk and handed me a memo. "You didn't exactly put a big smile on his face," she said, though she was smiling.

"He should buy me a six-pack for what I gave him. Right now he's one up on every other cop in town."

"Not on us." She flicked the memo. "I took the liberty of calling Bud Tiller to do a little work for us."

"Yeah? He does owe me a favor."

"Not anymore. Bud pried a little information out of the desk clerk at the Avondale Hotel, which is not a flophouse exactly, if only a couple rungs up."

"My mugger in the mod suit was living in less than luxury?"

"So it would seem. Russell Frazer moved out of that place six months ago after a two-year stay. Apparently he never bothered changing his address on his driver's license. Anyway, he moved someplace up near his job and gave his work as his forwarding address, in case he got any mail." She gave me a look that said another shoe was about to drop. Then she dropped it: "Russell Frazer was employed six blocks from Dorchester Medical College."

I let out a low whistle. "Isn't that interesting? Where exactly did my well-dressed attacker work?"

"It's a ceramics shop. Apparently he drove the delivery truck, but we'll need to do some more digging. And you'll want to do some digging, because I've got a connection between Frazer and one of the freaks who jumped Billy Blue."

If I had straightened any more, I'd be standing. "Spill it, sugar."

"Before Frazer moved to the Avondale? He lived on the same street as the Brix kid—just a few blocks away."

My eyes tightened; so did my hands. "What a cute little play this is...."

She cocked her head. "Mike—if they were friends, hitting you could have a revenge motive."

"Naw, it's thin."

She arched an eyebrow. "People have been known to kill other people, over revenge, you know."

I gave her a look. "Sarcasm doesn't become you, baby."

She was smiling. If I weren't preoccupied, I would have smashed her in that mouth. With my mouth.

"So," I asked her, "were they friends?"

"Bud didn't get that far. But it's possible. Frazer was three years older, and that's roughly the same age bracket."

"It could make sense," I said, and sighed. "But where could he have picked me up? Nobody knew I was going to the hospital. Not even you. Not even me."

Her smile had settled on one side of her face, and she shook the dark tresses again. "You're not exactly hard to find, Mike. The papers didn't carry your address, but we're in the book. It wouldn't have been tough. He could have tailed you all day, waiting for the right opportunity, and you wouldn't have known it."

"He'd have to be good for that."

"Not necessarily. You weren't expecting anything."

I'd made the same point to Pat. "You'd like it that way, wouldn't you? Just somebody settling a score?"

"Well, if it were a simple revenge factor, it'd all be over now."

"Unless there are some more out there who'd like to try their hand at the same game."

"What happened to Frazer," Velda said with an eyebrow high again, "wouldn't exactly encourage them to try again."

"Maybe ... but I think I'd better emphasize the point a little."

She smiled at me and went back to the outer office and her desk, leaving the door open. I sat there and stared at her legs and she parted them to give me a better view and then stuck out her tongue at me, in that taunting, tantalizing way of hers.

She was damn lucky I was preoccupied.

I flipped a paper clip at her, but it only made half the trip. Then I got my .45 out of the top desk drawer and checked the clip, and shoved the rod in the holster and got up.

Outside it had started to rain.

The state of mind called Greenwich Village had gone through another of its periodic shifts, though you would find the same zigzag streets and street-corner poets and shaggy-haired oddballs selling canvases that would make Picasso say, "What the hell?" But the beatniks were gone and the hippies were here, the folk music electric now, and the shops had tourists in mind, not the local populace.

Both large windows facing the street read VILLAGE CERAMICS SHOPPE in Old English lettering, the rain hitting their surfaces and blurring the multicolored pieces on display behind them. It was a three-story renovated building tucked between two newer, higher ones, faced with stucco and stained timbers like an old London townhouse. A pair of young housewife types, heads tucked under those silly mushroom umbrellas, ducked around me, went inside, and I followed them in.

The interior was bare brick walls and a hardwood floor with aisles of pine shelving displaying glazed pottery, mostly in shades of green and brown but with the occasional more colorful item. The feeling was of spare simplicity and, for a few minutes, I just went up and down the aisles, looking at the finished pieces with price tags that landed somewhere between reasonable and outrageous. A few aisles were devoted to the practical—vases and bowls, plates and cups and other dinnerware—but the majority were decorative pieces, cats and leopards and female nudes as well as abstractions.