Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

At the post office in Homestead, Florida, Artie Meeker picked up the single letter addressed to Mr. John Brill, care of general delivery, got in the two-year-old blue Ford sedan and drove back to the small cottage on the south end of Plantation Key. He parked, carried in the carton of groceries, handed Papa Menes the letter and went back to the kitchen to make a lunch for the two of them.

In the shade of the porch the old man stopped watching the sports fishermen in the gulf pulling in the thrashing dolphin and ran his finger under the flap of the envelope.

Ordinarily, the Frenchman would take care of details himself, but this one he wanted Papa to know about. That former cop who had raised so much hell had been poking around. Somehow he had come up with a badge and it was a good guess that despite his past record, somebody needed an old time heavy hand and talked him into the job. In a way, it could be a good thing to have the public authorities pushing the hunt for whoever was pulling the raid, but if Papa didn’t like the smell of this particular authority because he was close to breaking them the last time, it could be taken care of on order.

Papa Menes didn’t like the smell of it at all. Even less, he didn’t like the smell of having to take care of anybody carrying a badge. Cops were funny people, loyal to their own. That crazy man Burke hadn’t been a bad cop. He had been too damn good a cop and had to be squeezed out. Maybe the public thought he was a rotten apple, but all the other cops knew better and even on the outside Burke would be one of their kind. But with a badge again it was different... he was one of them.

Maybe the Frenchman was right, he thought. If his assignment was to nail the hit men and whoever was behind the mess, let him do his snooping. Little Richard would know everything that went on and if Burke wound up with something the organization could always beat him to it or take it away before he could use it.

He looked out at the glassy green water again where they were still boating the dolphin. A warm breeze sifted through the screen and he could smell the salt and sun-drenched air. It should have smelled nice, but it didn’t. The other smell was too powerful and he knew what it was because he had smelled it before, several times, and the strange smell of fear you never forget.

Silently, he nodded to himself, then wrote out a telegram for Artie Meeker to send to the Frenchman. They’d lay off Gill Burke until he became a threat to the organization again and this time there wouldn’t be any smear campaign... just a nice, quiet permanent disappearance that would completely eliminate the source of annoyance once and for all.

He called Artie in, gave him the coded message and instructions, then leaned back in his chair. He should have been satisfied, but he wasn’t, and frowned. That damned smell was still there.

The stiff drink didn’t do a thing to steady Mark Shelby’s nerves. His stomach was acting up again and his throat was dry no matter how much scotch he poured down it. Helga, the busty Swedish blonde he kept in the apartment on the East Side, sat cross-legged on the sofa, naked under the sun lamp, hoping he wouldn’t get drunk and start to slap her around again.

Not that she minded. He always used his open hand and it was a small price to pay for what he had given her. Most of the money was safe in the bank or tied up in securities, her charge accounts were paid promptly, the clothes and furs in the closet were all new, all expensive and all hers. Once or twice a week Mark Shelby would come up for a couple of hours of sex, be teased into arousal with the erotic love games she was so practiced in, then with five minutes of oralistic activity he would be reduced to limp impotency until the next time. He always called before he arrived, giving Nils a chance to leave and get a little stoned at having his own sex life interrupted.

Mark stood at the bar, stripped to his shorts and poured himself another drink. Helga looked at the clock, then switched off the sun lamp. She was good and tan, with no strap marks showing. She ran her fingers through the natural blond silk of her hair, then softly stroked her pubic area that was almost the same color.

“Mark dear,” she said.

“Shut up.”

She didn’t know if he was mad at himself because even the love games couldn’t get him erect, or if it was his business again. The past two weeks he had been unusually irritable and she wondered why anybody in the wholesale grocery business should be so upset. The way prices were, one would think he’d be overjoyed. Men were funny, she thought, even a solid citizen from Trenton, New Jersey, who had a frigid wife who liked to play bridge every day rather than take care of husbandly needs. She smiled inwardly. When she and Nils were married it wouldn’t be like that at all. He would never need another woman. Before he left for work she would weaken him with an orgasm, and when he walked in the door at night she would be standing there naked so that he would throw her on the couch right in front of the cleaning woman who would gasp with embarrassment and run off, only to peek at them from behind the curtains. At night they would make wild sounds and laugh at the creaking and wrenching of the bed boards and one day have the whole thing collapse on the floor as a result of their outlandish exertions.

It was either the way she was sitting, a little glistening of wet reflecting the shaft of sunlight, or the scotch that was getting to him, but Mark Shelby felt the fingers of arousal touching his groin. He put the glass down, took one moment to study the ornate candle in the jade holder that was the centerpiece ornament arranged on the back bar, then he slipped his shorts down, let them fall to his feet and walked across the room to where she was sitting. He stood in front of her and she looked up at him and smiled, knowing what he wanted.

When her mouth touched him he groaned and shuddered. Gill Burke, the incessant funerals, the awesome thing he had accomplished, the terror of Papa Menes’ almost unlimited power... they all swept away in pounding hardness and the sudden gush of manhood, leaving him soft and vulnerable once more. Before he sank to his knees in fatigue, his head resting on her bare, warm thigh, all he could think of was a small, flickering flame that could scorch whether it was lit or burned out.

The photo of Mark Shelby that Gill Burke studied was twenty-eight months old and showed him coming out of a fashionable midtown bistro, smiling at someone cropped out of the picture. It had been taken privately with a telephoto lens from the building opposite the restaurant. Since Mark Shelby had no record, there was no official police front and profile shot of him and Shelby was notoriously camera shy.

Bill Long said, “The case is closed, Gill.”

“Yeah, I know,” Burke told him. “You got the gun, the motive and the man all at one time, except the man was a corpse.”

“A police officer shot him during the course of a holdup. He was wearing Berkowitz’s gold watch and when we checked his room out we found Manute’s wallet along with a lot of other stolen items.”

“How often do chintzy holdup men keep souvenirs. They aren’t that stupid.”

“They are if they’re stupid enough to pull a robbery.” Burke glanced over another of the sheets, reading it to the end. “No track record at all on this guy. He even held down a job.”

“Part time,” the captain said.

“That’s more time than any crooks work.”

“Not always. It makes a good cover. The guy was a loner, had a drinking problem and wasn’t too bright. Check his income. He couldn’t support a drinking problem on that and eat too. He had to supplement his income. Hell, Gill, you know it’s an old story.”