Микки Спиллейн: Killer Mine

“No talk along the street?” I asked him.

“Hell, who’ll talk? The few who would, had nothing to say. But anyway, that’s your bit now. You’re real home town, huh?”

Marty looked up and grinned. “Both of us.”

“Yeah, I heard,” he said. Then he looked at me and winked through the haze of smoke. “It pays to be brass. That it does. A chick like this in the department and they yank her all the way across town to be your buddy. Cripes, you shoulda seen the partners they gave me. Old Grootz, fat as a pregnant cow... Billy Menter who could say ‘yup’ and ‘nope’ and that was all, and one time a matron who looked like my aunt in Linden, but at least that only lasted one day.”

“I’m going to stretch this one out,” Marty said. I glanced at her and grunted. So did Mack. “Why not?” she said seriously. “Until now it was all juvenile. Wouldn’t even put me out in the field where the dips were working.”

Mack and I looked at each other and laughed.

“What’s so funny about that?” she demanded.

“You,” I told her. “I can see you trying like hell to be inconspicuous. Anyway, baby, you were good enough to save for the big one.”

Mack laughed again and Marty made a face at me.

I said to Mack, “We’re going to play this one on the cool side. They laid out the pattern before they gave it to me, and it might work. I’d sooner go after this chappie through regular channels, but someplace along the line politics got involved and you know district captains can raise a stink, specially when he can pull five thousand votes.”

“Well, it happens. What can you do?”

“Marty still lives in the old neighborhood. Nobody knows she’s in the department. In that neighborhood it doesn’t make for a good rep.”

“I know.”

“So I court her.” I grinned at Marty and she smiled back.

“Things can get mighty interesting in the line of duty,” Mack said.

In a stage whisper Marty said, “I hope!” and we all laughed.

For some crazy reason all the tension was gone and I had a fat lazy feeling like I used to have back on the beat when it was a hello to everybody and the kids still played stickball and not switchblades and you liked your job, even at the end of the day when your feet hurt but you weren’t really tired,

“So what do you think, Mack?”

“It’s a toughie. There’re nineteen stoolies who put in their two bits out of which we got nothing. The only tie-in is that they were knocked off with the same gun, presumably in the same hand. All neat jobs, no stray shots and strictly big-time pro. The slugs were all .38 specials out of the same box. The lab could check the lube left on each slug.”

“That’s calling it.”

“But that’s all they’re calling, Joe. You can go through those reports all week and still be out in the bleachers.”

“It figures. That’s why they’re making a damned federal case out of it.”

Mack got up and tapped the inch of ash off his cigar into the tray on my desk. “You be careful, Joe. I don’t like this one.”

“I don’t either.”

“You know why?”

“No. Clue me,”

“Some rumbles been coming out of there lately. That Phil Borley extortion thing. Nobody knew he had left Chi until he muffed this operation here. Then that mob business. Nothing’s come of it yet, but the word is that a few of the uptown crowd have been hanging around in strange places. Those lads are working close to the politicos. The campaigning starts early nowadays.”

Across from me, Marta frowned in concentration, taking it all in.

“If these kills are inside an organization,” Mack said, “you’re pushing a big one. If they’re outside, the organization won’t like their field having a light turned on it and might try to clean up the deal themselves. Either way, you can get caught in a pocket.”

I grinned at him. “Don’t worry so much. I’ve been around some.”

Mack nodded. “Okay, you know what you can do with that reputation of yours. Always some punk ready to take you on from behind. What I don’t like is you going it alone. It just ain’t S.O.P.”

“Neither is this case.”

“You been assigned any help?”

“Just Marty. The rest gets played by ear.”

Marta leaned back and crossed her arms. “We can always call for the beat cop.”

“Great,” Mack said. “Anyway, if it gets too cozy, a few of us who know that strip can hang around in our spare time.”

“Thanks. I might need something like that.”

“Sure. You yell. Now, anything you want from our section?”

“I don’t think so.” I tapped the envelope on the desk. “Thanks for this.”

He winked, waved at Marty and sauntered out. On the wall the clock passed the midnight mark and I said, “Enough, kid. Let’s shut up shop.”

“We’re on it, then?” When I nodded she added, “Now what?”

I said, “Now the courtship begins,” and leered at her the best way I knew how.

We waited until Saturday to start the pitch. We let Marta get it going by passing the word to old lady Murphy upstairs and Mr. Clehoe who ran the corner delicatessen that she had met me near where she worked and saw me a couple of times for lunch. It didn’t take long for the news to get around that Marta had picked up the pieces with old Pig Scanlon, the cop, and already she was getting dirty looks from anybody at all who had been in the can.

Normally she had Saturdays off, but spent the morning taking a course in Spanish. But as far as the street knew she had a five-and-a-half-day week in an office someplace, so nothing was out of order when we came out of the subway and started toward her place.

At the corner where my old man was shot down I touched her arm and we stopped so I could look around. It had been a long time. Many moons. Many suns. I looked up the street and knew instinctively what lay behind every dirty brownstone front and the way the clothes looked hanging in the alleys behind and could smell the pigeons on the roof.

Resurrecting memories of youth comes easy. You can slip back fast to the old days when life was hot pavement, new sneakers and a nickel in your pocket. The guy who died on the beach at Anzio is a pug-nosed guinea again and he’s your best friend. The kid with the lisp next door died up at Ossining two years ago for a gang kill, but for the moment you’re ten once more and sharing leads in the class play. The mother of the girl whom you first loved on a sultry rooftop and fought for in the streets below sobs softly at night because the girl is rich and notorious, yet still beautiful despite the channels of whoredom she swam to reach her port of money. But you think of her as lovely, and at fifteen endowed with all those things important to men and boys. You think of Giggie and smile because she was bigger than you were and tougher than most of the kids and sure as hell slated for the school at Hudson if she got caught with you on a stamp into the Hub’s turf two blocks over. You remember old Larry whom they used to call Chief Crazy Horse and Sam Staples they called Bad Bear when the gang crawled around the eroded rocks playing Indians on the West Side of Central Park.

And I was the Pig. Big Pig they called me because I always wanted to play the cop.

Mischelle Stegman, the hood from the corner, would laugh when they hosed me about wanting to be in the blue uniform, then one day I saw him mug old Jew Jenkins and take off with his roll and I was the only one who would talk up. Two days after he was subpoenaed, Stegman’s buddies took me out of my hallway and went to teach me a lesson. The cop on the beat came along and chewed two of them up and the one who was about to belly-hook him with a switcher suddenly had his back broken by a kid jumping from the stoop railing.