Микки Спиллейн - The Delta Factor

Those slanted eyes gave me a curious glance. “What do you mean?”

“Our impending marriage. Is it to be consummated?”

A slow flush burned its way past her shoulders and throat into her face. “When I have a man,” she said slowly, “I’ll do the choosing.”

“Smart,” I said. “The agency is really thinking. Non-consummation of a marriage is grounds for a divorce action. You get off the hook very nicely, don’t you?”

“Yes, really I do.”

“Only they forgot something.” My grin got bitter.

This time her voice was unexpectedly small. “What?”

“There’s no law against a man raping his own wife,” I said as I went out the door.

I had conformed to the ground rules they had laid down for me by registering at the hotel, but for three days the course of action was my own. If I needed security I wanted to make it myself. Before I had gone into the deal a few loners and a nicely organized bunch had tried to tap me out for the big bundle they thought I had cached somewhere and it took plenty of slipping and sliding with a bullet crease along my hip and some broken heads on the other side before I set up a cover they couldn’t penetrate. I didn’t want it to start again. This way was bad enough.

The hotel I picked was a commercial-residential type on Sixth Avenue where your business was your own and the surroundings common enough to lose yourself in. I paid in advance, got on the phone and by two-thirty I had located Bernice Case and got back into the night world where I belonged.

André’s was a far-out kind of bar that serviced the office crowd during the day, the weirdos until midnight and the odd breed until he closed. His specialty was chili if you had the stomach for the firepower he could lay in it and being a two-bowl man myself, he always had an appreciative grin for my patronage.

She was sitting in the last booth dipping her chili out with Ritz crackers, absorbed in the early edition of The News, and when I sat down opposite her she gave me a strange little glance and said, “Hungry?”

In a funny way, she was like a friendly kitten. She had siezed me up, figured me to be broke, and knowing she was always good for a touch, was ready to share her plate.

I had seen a lot of hookers in my time. There were prostitutes in the trade because they didn’t know any better, some because they were forced into it and others because they liked it. But the mark of it was always there. It showed in their eyes that reflected the tired worldliness of a sordid life or in the expression that was disgust at themselves or the ones who used them, and sometimes in the early age lines that stamped years instead of days on their faces and bodies. The strange thing about Bernice Case was the curious lack of any of these things. If there was anything there it was compassion. Her eyes had a happy smile in them and her mouth was a red bloom of pleasure. Her blond hair had a silk-shine to it and was a dark enough blond to be real. She still had a young-girl freshness in the tilt of her breasts and the naturally indolent way she made her body move.

“No. But thanks anyway, Bernice,” I said.

Her head tilted at the mention of her name. “Do I know you?”

“Not personally. We have some mutual friends.” I grinned at her and folded the paper shut.

Even white teeth bit into her lower lip and she let out a small chuckle and wrinkled her nose at me. “I wish my friends would observe my working schedule.” She reached out and touched my hand. “Look, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings or anything, but it’s been a long evening and…”

I shook my head. “You and me both, Bernice. Let’s say I don’t want to see you, ah, professionally.”

“That’s a nice way to put it,” she laughed.

“And I don’t need a handout,” I added.

“At least you’re different.” She scratched one manicured fingernail along the back of my wrist and took her hand away. “These mutual friends…” she began.

“Old Gussie, Ma Toppett.”

Her eyes squinted slightly, then she leaned back and looked at me with interest. “You’re not from the neighborhood,” she stated.

“Since your time. I boarded with Old Gussie until the fuzz nailed me.”

The recognition came into her face slowly and she pursed her mouth and nodded sagely. “You’re Morgan, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re crazy coming around here, you know. I didn’t spot you right off, but some of these characters will turn in their own mothers for drinking money. Maybe I don’t have a memory for faces that looked at me from the front page, but they have.”

“I’ll worry about that.”

Bernice gave me a gesture of mock astonishment and learned her chin on her hands. “Swell, big friend, but what about me? In come the bluecoats, you get nailed and I get tagged as an accomplice. I have a reputation to protect.”

“So we’ll go somewhere else.”

“Like my place, maybe?”

“Suits me.”

Once again she studied my face, drawing on all the things she had learned from life and experience, then said quietly, “This is serious, isn’t it?”

“Very serious, kid.”

“And I can help?”

“Maybe.”

“Then let’s go to my place.”

The building was old, but remodeled, and her apartment was a three-room affair furnished with taste and simplicity. She had indulged herself in an oversized stereo set with a rack of at least a hundred classical records and three paintings by well-known contemporary artists. While she built us a drink she saw me staring at the pictures, and said, “I didn’t buy them.” She grinned and added, “It wasn’t an even trade, either.”

“They’re worth a bundle, you know.”

“Now they are. At the time they were starving artists who needed rent and refrigerator money and I liked their work enough to grubstake them.”

I tapped the smallest of the three frames. “This guy’s last effort just went for over a hundred G’s.”

“Uh-huh.” She handed me a rye and ginger in a tall glass.

“Why don’t you sell them?”

Very simply, she said, “I like them.” She walked to the record player, pushed a button, then sat down and crossed one lovely leg over the other. “You had something to ask me, Morgan.”

I took the chair opposite the strange little blonde and sipped at my drink. “How much do you know about me?”

“As much as the papers said.” Her eyes twinkled over the glass at me. “I know they didn’t get the rest of that money you… appropriated.”

“Why don’t you say ‘stole’?”

“Because it was government money. Hell’s bells, they take enough away in taxes and blow it on a bunch of nitheads in places you never heard of to make it easier for people to hate us, so I’m damn glad to see them get nicked for a change. Boy, I bet they were mad.”

“They were furious.”

“You going to give it back?”

“Should I?”

Bernice giggled like a childish conspirator and made a screwy face. “Not yet. If it’s too hot to spend, make them hurt a little bit, then maybe send it back in an old beer carton or something. Can you imagine their faces? Maybe they’ll think it’s a bomb and dunk it in oil like they do and ruin the whole batch themselves.”

I took a long pull at the drink. “You’re crazy.”

“It’s a crazy world. At least you can have fun.”

“Are you?”

For a moment her eyes took on a soft expression. “Let’s say I like people.”

“Then you’re better than I am, kid. I can’t be that generous.”

A little twitch of sympathy touched her mouth. “We were talking about something, Morgan.”

I eased back in the chair and spun the glass around in my hand. “You knew Gorman Yard, didn’t you?”