Mickey Spillane - The Body Lovers

"But there's a pattern," Pat insisted.

"Sure, if you look at it like that."

Pat swung around and looked straight at me. "Which brings us straight back to you, friend."

"Now you're sweating me."

"Nope. That'll come later, old pal. Right now I'm just wondering about one thing. That business with Orslo Bucher. Did it happen the way you said it did?"

"Funny, Hy asked me the same thing."

"What did you tell him?"

"Does Macy's tell Gimbel's?"

Pat threw his half of the lunch money on the bar top. "Don't get too deep, Mike. You don't go solo in this world very long. We've played a lot of games together. Let's not quit here. I know how you think, so I'm going along with you for now, but remember that upstairs, people are after your neck. If you fall, I can too, so stay loose."

"I'm so loose I jingle."

"Just one more time. For me. And off the record. The bit with Bucher... did it happen like that?"

I shook my head. "Nope."

"You know what you are, don't you?"

"I've been told often enough," I said.

Orslo Bucher's neighborhood wasn't new to me. It lay in the fringe area adjoining a slum section that was marked for urban renewal when they could figure out where to put the people that were already there. You could feel the depression that hung over the buildings like an emotional smog, see it in the gray wash that dangled from the clotheslines between the buildings and in the restless hostility of the inhabitants. It was a place that existed on the gratuity of the city's Welfare Department, but the bars were filled and the curbs lined with an assortment of misused cars.

Two years ago we had mopped up a bunch who had peddled home-made booze that had killed off fifteen people at a party, and there would still be some around who liked the feel of the cash I had laid out to get a line on the slobs. The police would get a few reluctant facts, a squeeze on their informers might get them a little more, but when they saw the long green and knew I wasn't submitting official reports they'd lay it out for me.

Max Hughes was the night bartender at the Seville, a grungy corner slop chute. He had just come on the shift when I walked in, mopped the bar top down with a dirty rag and gave me the barest glance of recognition. Without being asked, he slid a beer in front of me and changed the twenty I put down.

"Orslo Bucher," I said. I tapped the ten-spot on the counter and watched it disappear under his fingers.

He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the mahogany. "You the one who bumped him?"

I nodded.

"Thought it was you. Hell, he was asking for it."

"Why?"

"Petty crap. He was always pulling something."

"Alone?"

"Strictly," Max said. "Nobody much wanted him around anyway. Kind of a mean one. I tossed him out a couple of times when he was loaded and he looked like he wanted to kill me."

"He make any trouble around here?"

"No...but I'd lay odds he was the one pulled that armed stickup on Annie's liquor store last month. I felt that iron he carried when I heaved him out."

"Who'd know about him, Max?"

"Like I said...nobody. He was either in his pad, one of the joints or gone. Nobody cared." Max squinted and rubbed his chin. "Funny thing though, once I seen him getting into a big new car over on Lenox Avenue. He got in the back and the car had a chauffeur. I didn't see who he was with, except the guy wore a homburg and seemed to know him. It wasn't the kind of company Bucher usually kept."

"Sure it was him?"

"Positive." He frowned again and tapped the back of my hand with his finger. "Come to think of it, old Greene said he seen the same thing once. I didn't believe him because Greenie's bombed out on booze and can't think straight. He kept telling me it was a dipple car, whatever the hell that is, but he's always got a screwy name for everything."

"Suppose I talk to Greene."

Max grunted and said, "You'll have to go six feet down to do it. He got clipped by a truck two months ago and died in Bellevue."

I was getting nowhere in a hurry. When Max couldn't supply any answers there weren't any to be had. I said, "What about that whore Bucher used?"

"Rosie? Man, that one's on the last time around. She'll bang for a beer or a buck and lucky to get either. The only ones she gets is the bums the other hustlers won't touch. Lucy Digs and Dolly gave Bucher the brush when he tried to warm their pads, that's why he wound up with Rosie, and when them two turn anything down, it got to be pretty sad. Nope, old Bucher wasn't too popular around here. He ain't going to be missed none at all. Not none. If it wasn't for the cops nosing around nobody would have given him a thought."

"Okay, kid, if that's the best you can do."

"Sorry, Mike. That's the way it is. Suppose something turns up?"

I took out a card and wrote the name of the hotel on it. "Call me here if you think it's important." He looked up at me with shrewd eyes. "I'll mail you a check," I said.

Hy was just getting ready to leave his office when I reached him. He had been trying to get me for the past hour and was about to give up. Too many people were around for him to talk, so he told me to meet him at Teddy's place as fast as I could. I walked up a block, grabbed a cab and gave him the address of the restaurant in the lower end of Manhattan.

He was waiting for me in a private section and he wasn't alone. He pointed to a seat and indicated the tall lanky guy next to him. "You know Al Casey?"

"I've seen you around." I held out my hand and he took it "Biff told me about you going over the morgue files. Come up with anything?"

"That's what we wanted to talk to you about," Hy said. "Sit down."

I pulled out a chair and he nodded to Al, "Fill him in."

Al eased back in his chair and had a sip of his coffee. "First, we think we found Mitch Temple's last contact. He was in a woman's clothing shop on Broadway asking about those damn negligees and finally bought one. He had given his name and the office address to the salesgirl and laid down twenty bucks for a twelve-dollar item. The girl left to ring up the sale and when she came back he was gone. Now on Broadway, people don't just leave tips like that, so the girl remembered the incident after a little bit of persuasion. She hadn't mentioned it before because she didn't want the manager to know she had taken any cash on the side. The second thing she remembered was that while she was writing up the sales slip, Mitch kept looking at another customer down further in the store who was poking around a clothes rack and was preoccupied enough so that she had to ask him twice about the address before he gave it to her. She never saw either one again."

"What did Mitch buy?"

"A black nylon shortie outfit. Real sexy, she said. What we figure is, he recognized the other guy and followed him out. The date on the sales slip tallies with the day he first started to go through the morgue files."

"Anybody else recognize the other one?"

"No. There was one new girl who might have waited on him, but apparently he didn't buy anything. If it was the one she thought she remembered, it was just a man who asked if that were all the colors they had in stock. She said that was it and he left. What was peculiar about it...there was a complete color assortment of new stock that had just been put out that morning."

I looked at the two of them and felt my mind fingering out the bits and pieces until there was only one little piece left.

"Complete except for one," I said.

Al Casey shook his head. "Every color. I even checked their stock records."

"Not white," I told him.

Both of them looked at each other and a frown began to form between Al's eyes. "That's right," he said. "There wasn't any white. But how would you know?"