Микки Спиллейн - The Delta Factor

When it was over they let me get up and leave just like that.

Crazy, I thought, crazy. All that time on the wanted list; now I walk out on my own and hope I don’t get spotted and gunned by some observant cop who doesn’t know about the deal. And they trusted me. That was the damned stupid part that choked me. Old Morgan the Raider on the other side of the fence and that little thing inside me wouldn’t let me buck the traffic. They did that to old Sir Henry Morgan, too. The Crown gave him a commission and he got rid of their enemies for them. He strung up his old buddies to become a governor… but for him the end was different. At least he lived a while to enjoy the fruits of his trickery.

There was only one ironic part to the whole thing. The forty million bucks. They could have nailed me on a dozen different charges but they picked that one to hit me with.

And I didn’t have it.

But somebody did and sure as hell they were going to get raided for it.

Mrs. Gustav Timely was affectionately known as Gussie in the trade and had been harboring fugitives at a price for over thirty years. Her operation was neat, but not gaudy, just a mediocre rooming house on the West Side of Manhattan in the middle forties. She kept her mouth shut, asked no questions and had never taken a fall even though a dozen arrests had been made on her premises. In that neighborhood a lot of undesirables had holed up and nobody bothered to stick an elderly widow because a wanted person had checked in under an assumed name.

I rapped on her door and Gussie opened it, her heavy body wrapped in the same cotton bathrobe I had seen her in last. “Morgan,” she said.

“Hello, Gussie.” I stepped inside without being asked and pushed the door shut.

“You ain’t being too smart, Morgan.”

“They got you staked out here?”

“Like you wouldn’t know.” She grunted and made her way to the couch and sat down with a wheeze. “Since you got picked up here I’m marked lousy. I get roused regular and none of the crowd uses the place. I got to depend on them stinking transients or the bunch from the ships.”

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

She lit the stub of a butt and blew a cloud of smoke my way. “They all come back sooner or later. Only you ain’t staying, Morgan. This time they’d really bounce me.”

“No sweat, Gussie.”

“So why’d you come?”

“Information.”

“I ain’t got any.”

“Nobody gets hurt and if it pans out you’ll make a bundle,” I said.

Her massive shoulders heaved in a shrug and she waved one pudgy hand at me. “So ask. It ain’t saying I got to answer.”

I pulled up a straight-backed chair with my foot and sat down. “Who had my room before me?”

Gussie frowned and said, “Before you got nailed here?”

“Yeah.”

“Hell, Morgan…” She frowned at me and shrugged again, then reached over into a cracked wicker basket beside the couch and pulled out a ragged ledger. She thumbed back through it until she found what she wanted and nodded thoughtfully. “Character named Melvin Gross. He was a waiter on a ship. Spent his shore time here twice. Kind of a…”

“Before that, Gussie.”

She poked a couple more pages over with a moistened forefinger then poked at a name. “Mario Tullius. He came here sick, spent three days in bed, then they took him to Bellevue where he died from pneumonia. Dockhand, I think he was.”

“Try another,” I told her.

“Gorman Yard. He was here three weeks. Joey Jolley called me to take him on account they had a warrant out on him in Syracuse.”

“What for?”

“Hit-and-run. Tagged some pedestrian up there. My money is that he was paid to do it. Looked like that kind. I don’t know where he went to after he left.” She glanced up at me suspiciously. “What’s this all about?”

I didn’t answer her. “Try the one before that.”

She didn’t bother to look it up. “Bernice Case,” she said. “Cute little hooker who kept the room three years. No trouble at all. She never brought her marks here with her and slipped me some extra dough whenever she landed a real live one. She did real well, that girl.”

“Why’d she stay in a place like this?”

Gussie let out a little grunt that was supposed to be a chuckle. “Sentiment, that’s why. Even a prostie can have that, Morgan. She was born here, right up on the top floor. If it wasn’t that she found a guy who wanted to marry her she’d be here yet.” She squashed the butt out in a wet saucer on the arm of the couch, then let her eyes roll up to meet mine again. “You ain’t said what you wanted.”

“Guess,” I said.

Old Gussie nodded sagely. “You figure one of ’em came back to get something they stashed up there, spotted you and put the squeal in.”

“Something like that.”

“You’re tagging Gorman Yard, ain’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“He might be the kind if he wanted an in with the cops. A little grease helps out when you got a warrant on you. Want me to check it with Joey Jolley?”

“Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”

“Go ahead.” She grinned through her layers of fat and added, “When you gonna give me a slice of that forty mil, Morgan?”

“Later, baby.”

“Well, I know it ain’t around here. I like to tore that place apart after the cops got done with it just to make sure you didn’t leave it lying around.”

“Suppose you found it?”

“Man, would I still be here in this dump?”

Joey Jolley ran a gin mill on the edge of Greenwich Village and dabbled in fencing jewels to keep his hand in. He was an old-time thief who could be counted on to come up with a contact if the price was right.

He met me in his private office that had a side entrance onto the street, a tall lanky guy with a few fronds of hair covering a bald head disguised with a sunlamp tan. “So,” he said, “the legendary Morgan. I was beginning to wonder if you ever existed.”

“You can’t kill a legend, Joey.”

“Perhaps not,” he smiled. “Now. The point of business. I expect you want to dispose of those forty millions you so carefully kept out of circulation. Unfortunately, they were in serial order, but fortunately of small-enough denomination to pay off, say… one for ten?”

“Skip it, Joey. I can get better offers than that.”

He stared at me a moment, puzzled, then made a gesture of resignation. “In that case, I’ll just raise… it is the disposition of the money, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Strange. I never heard of you operating through a contact before. I thought you were a loner.”

“Where’s Gorman Yard?”

For a second his mind ran over the name, then he nodded. “I see. You both lived under Gussie’s roof a while, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Any connection I should know about?”

“Not specially,” I said. “He might be able to give me a hand in something.”

“Trouble?”

“Nothing that will involve you.”

“Can’t touch me anyway, Morgan. Yard’s doing time at Elmira. They proved a hit-and-run on him a couple of years ago. He’s still got another five to do.”

“That was a hard fall, Joey.”

Jolley shrugged indifferently and said, “Apparently there was some premeditation involved. He had made a deal with the guy that went sour and Yard didn’t like it. It’s all a matter of public record if you want to look it up.”

“Maybe I’ll do that. How’d he contact you?”

“I knew him when he was pushing black-market stuff during the war. He had taken a couple of tumbles back then for small stuff before he widened his horizons. He wasn’t much good at anything. Whatever he made he always blew on the nags, but he was good for a tab if he ran one up. Not a bad sort at all, if you like rats. Now, may I make a point?”