Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

“It made a pretty picture for the headline hunters, though,” Gill reminded her. “There you were starring in a mob-operated showplace, dating some of the top echelon hoods, glamorizing their social events...”

“Only part of the business. There were others who did it too. I told you, my mother... ”

“People only look at what they want to see,” Gill said. “When you testified for Scobi that tied the knot in the cat’s tail.”

“But he was there! ”

Gill watched her a moment and nodded. “If you had cut loose from them after your father died he wouldn’t have been there.”

“Damn it, Mr. Burke, I needed the money, don’t you understand that? Where else could I have gotten it? Mother died two weeks after my father and left medical bills that wiped everything out.”

“Okay, I believe you.” And he did.

Her clenched fist pressed into her thigh and her breath seemed caught in her throat. When she regained her composure she said, “The night I heard them booing from the audience I knew it was over. So did my agent and the management. I took a month off and came back to New York, but it was the same here. Nobody except the scandal writers even wanted to speak to me. One day I ran into Roller...”

“Vic Petrocinni?”

“Yes. He was dice happy. They called him Roller out there. He introduced me to some people and I got the job at Boyer-Reston as a receptionist.”

“Well paid?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “They were mighty considerate of me.”

“That outfit,” Gill told her, “is one of the legitimate fronts for the syndicate operation.”

“Boyer-Reston runs parking lots, a chain of funeral parlors, dry cleaning establishments and two major restaurants.”

“That’s what I said.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Gill mused. “How well do you know Frank Verdun?”

“I met him once in Vegas. He’s a public relations director.”

“He’s a first-class funeral director, baby. He makes his own clients, or didn’t you know that?”

“Receptionists don’t ask questions.”

“But you’ve been around long enough to hear things and recognize faces. After a while facts and rumors start to make sense and you can ask yourself a question and answer it at the same time. You might not like what comes out of your mental computer and shrug it off, but don’t tell me you don’t know about it.”

“I try not to think, Mr. Burke.”

“You got emotional enough about it when you told me off.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“No need for an apology.”

“Perhaps not,” she said, “but I have a strange sense of moral values my father instilled in me.”

“That’s why you testified for Scobie,” Gill stated.

“Yes. It was true.”

“Tell me,” Gill asked her, “do you like those people?”

“Nobody ever hurt me.”

“I didn’t ask that.”

She made a noncommittal gesture with her eyes and spread her hands. “No.”

“Why not?”

After a few seconds she met his eyes again. “Because, as you said, I’ve been around long enough to ask myself a few questions.”

“Then why stay with them?”

Helen Scanlon got to her feet and tossed her raincoat over her shoulders. “Mr. Burke... there’s no place else to go.”

Gill’s expression said that it wasn’t so, but he didn’t put it into words. He got up and walked to the door with her. The sound of her heels tapping on the hardwood floor and the faint fragrance of her perfume were things foreign to the place he had lived these past years and he felt a sudden loss of wasted time.

She held out her hand and he folded his fingers around hers. “Good-bye, Mr. Burke.”

He tried to tell her good-bye, but the words wouldn’t come. Those liquid brown eyes were sinking into his and he could feel the frown knit across his forehead. There was a lightness in his stomach, a little crawling sensation across his shoulders and another person that wasn’t him at all drew her closer and closer until their bodies touched and her breasts were against his chest with the curve of her belly and thighs matching the outline of his own. Just before their mouths touched she closed her eyes slowly and made a little cat sound and he felt the tremor in her hand. It was a soft, languid kiss that only took a few seconds of time, but it was like water rushing through a breech in the dam that threatened to grow into turbulent violence.

He let his fingers slide away from hers and she let her breath out, deliberately controlling herself. She smiled, but there was a puzzle in her eyes. She had been kissed before, many times, but no kiss had ever made her react like that at all.

As she stood in the open doorway she turned, still smiling, and said, “You aren’t at all repulsive, Mr. Burke.”

Gill put the night latch on and stuck the Fox bar in place. He looked around his apartment, still aware of her perfume. “Someday I’m going to clean this dump up,” he muttered.

Stanley Holland was feeling very pleased with himself. It was raining and even though he hated rain because it made his sinuses drain and his temples pound, he still felt pleased. Even the smog and the smell that hung over Cleveland, Ohio, couldn’t make him feel otherwise. A year ago, when Papa Menes transferred him here from Los Angeles to put back together the narcotics operation the Cleveland police had broken, he was unhappy, but no longer. The new setup was structured so carefully and organized so efficiently that the roots of it would be imbedded too deeply into Ohio soil for anybody to dig out again.

And it had been all his doing. He had given his life to his work, he thought. It should have been good. Papa Menes would be grateful. The entire board would be grateful. There would be a better town now, a bigger town where his rewards could be well spent in the pleasures he enjoyed.

The organization was solidly entrenched, the new source of narcotics his own discovery and he was totally, absolutely unknown. He was a respected businessman who operated two hardtop movie houses and a drive-in, made a substantial profit with all and had a foolproof drop for his supplies.

One week ago today he had finally learned the identity of the informer instrumental in destroying the old layout and had personally taken care of him with a massive overdose of heroin on his own rooftop. Since he was a known addict, nothing was made of it. But the others in the trade got the message.

Two days later the pair of crooked cops from the neighboring city Holland had used to retrieve nine key code words from the book impounded in the police files had tried to shake down his contact man for a full grand a week apiece. The initial meet was arranged and both cops showed up in time to be dispatched quietly by his own hand via the drugged drink and garrote route, encased in a steamer trunk of cement and dropped in Lake Erie. It had been difficult, but it was done. Papa Menes and the board would have the details by now, the machinery of supply and demand could begin operating in the absolute security of secrecy he, Stanley Holland, had instituted and his star would rise another degree on the organization’s horizon.

He pulled into the parking lot behind the middle-class office building he occupied, cut the ignition and reached for his briefcase. He was about to open the door when the jungle instinct beat through his self-satisfaction and he remembered that the car in the slot beside his was not the white Caddie that was supposed to be there, but an undistinguished black Chevy. He couldn’t see the face of the person behind the wheel because a hand with a heavy caliber gun in it blocked the way.

All Stanley Holland could reflect on in that last tiny moment was that he had given his life to his work. Everything should have been perfect. But it just wasn’t good enough.