Mickey Spillane - Kiss Her Goodbye

I got onto my feet without a sound. I put the plastic vial carefully on the counter without a single rattle of pills.

Somebody was out there.

I did not believe it was Angela, up and dressed and slipping out on me. No, she'd been too drunk to accomplish that quietly, and anyway she couldn't reach her purse for the precious little key, not in that handcuff. Not without my help.

Somebody was out there.

I had no weapon. The .45 in the speed rig was on the shelf in the closet. Just across the way, but it might as well have been in New Jersey. I was in my shorts and the closest thing to a weapon in here was a toothbrush.

That room out there was dark. Pitch black. If I was someone's intended target, an intruder could easily take the slumbering Angela for me. The blinds were shut, I knew, no city light to speak of seeping in. Just enough to make out the vaguest shape, like that of a sleeper, primed to be an unwitting victim.

The only weapon I had going for me was surprise.

Leaving the bathroom light on, I opened the door, stepped into the shaft of brightness, and yelled, " Hey! "

He was big, stupid big for the role he'd taken on, wearing the white shirt and black bow tie and black trousers of a room-service waiter. The sudden light had him squinting, and his whole face seemed to be clenched, his hair dark and curly with muttonchops, his nose a blobby thing, his chipmunk cheeks acned and pockmarked.

And he was at the foot of the bed with his fist raised high, a long, wide, gleaming Bowie-knife blade reflecting the bathroom light back at me.

This registered in a fraction of a second, and in the next fraction I was on him. He had two inches on me, but I was able to grip his wrist with both hands and stop its downward swing. We did an awkward, grunting dance for a few seconds, and Angela had woken up at some point, because she said "Mike!" softly and then, rattling the handcuff against the brass bedpost, trying vainly to escape, shrieked, " Miiike! "

He was strong. Cords in his neck were standing out and veins made a nasty bas-relief on his forehead as he forced his knife-in-hand down, taking my gripped hands with him, edging that wide, pointed blade toward my throat even as his arm sent one forearm after another into me, making that hot spot under my ribs issue lightning bolts of pain all through my torso.

I let the knife inch its way toward me, then pulled back, and with all my strength, brought the blade down, all right, in his hands and mine, but swung it around into his midsection. Deep—the sound like a boot stepping in thick wet mud. His eyes bulged in fear and agony as we did the final steps of our dance, face-to-face, almost nose-to-nose, his mouth moving silently, maybe in a prayer, and I grinned as his hand fell away and my two hands gripped the handle of the knife whose blade was already all the way in and jerked it upward on a terrible path and then made a circular sideways motion, taking the blade on a grim ride.

Then I stepped away.

And grinned at him some more as he looked at me, astonished, then down at the red spreading across his white shirt and the knife pitching to the floor as a flap of flesh opened and he caught the tumble of bloody slimy intestines in his fingers, though some of the scarlet-smeared snakes slithered from his grasp, and I would swear he fainted before he fell to the carpet to die.

That was when I realized Angela was screaming.

I crawled up on the bed where she was still jerking that cuff and said, "It's all right, baby. He can't hurt you. He's dead."

Only her horrified eyes weren't on the corpse, but on me.

I had Angela uncuffed, and she had padded into the bathroom, taking her clothes with her, when the phone rang. It was the front desk, complaining about noise, which was quick, because the guy had only been dead a couple of minutes. I told the desk man to tell any on-duty manager that there had been an assault on a guest, me, and that the hotel doctor should come up, and the police should be called immediately.

I hung up, got the switchboard, and gave the girl Pat Chambers's home number.

"I need you to get over here," I told him.

"Over where?" he said sleepily. "Jesus, Mike. I'm at home. I have a life, you know."

"Is there a woman in bed with you?"

"No."

"Then I'd argue the point about you having a life. There's a dead body on my hotel room floor. I've already had the desk call for the cops. But I figure you'll want to be in on this."

"Mike ... Mike. Did you make him dead?"

"I didn't shoot him."

"You didn't?"

"He had a knife."

A long pause.

Then he said "Mike" again, almost sorrowfully, and hung up.

I went to the bathroom door and knocked. "Are you all right, honey?"

"...Yes."

"I've called the police. A doctor'll be up soon to check on our friend."

"He's dead! He has to be dead!"

"Yeah, he's dead, all right, but there are procedures. Hell, I'm telling you? Listen, if uh ... if you want to slip out before anybody gets here...."

"No. No, I'll stay."

"Fine. Do you want the doc to check you over?"

"No. No."

The doctor came up, a sixty-ish gent, looked the dead intruder over, and got to his feet, a ghastly white. "This is a first at the Commodore," he said.

"Come on, doc, people die in hotels all the time."

"Not like this."

"Oh. Yeah, well I can see that."

The doc was long gone when the uniforms got there. The older of the pair wanted my story and I told him I was Mike Hammer and that Captain Chambers of Homicide was on the way. That satisfied him, and Pat made it in less than half an hour. He looked a little rumpled and he'd forgot his hat, but he made it.

Pat stood looking down at the dead guy, shaking his head, hands on hips. "This tears it. This really fucking tears it."

"You want to hear what happened?"

He grunted something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Why not?"

I told him, referring only to Angela as "a lady friend." I left the handcuffs out, too, basically starting with me getting up to go to the john.

He glared at me. "You call this self-defense?"

"Hell yes! The prick comes into my hotel room, with a goddamn Bowie knife, intending to cut me up while I slept."

"But you disemboweled him."

"Yeah. And?"

" And? How the hell do you disembowel somebody in self-defense?"

I shrugged. "He got on my bad side."

Pat closed his eyes. I thought maybe he was praying. Then he opened them, but he didn't look at me. "Well, where is she, your lady friend? I hope she makes a good witness."

The toilet flushed again. I figured the first time was her puking; the second was anybody's guess.

She came out, looking fairly spiffy in the silk blouse and short dark skirt. Not a lovely hair out of place, but her eyes were off. I don't know whether Pat noticed that, because he was just gaping at her in general.

"Angela Marshall," he said, to me, not her. "The assistant district attorney is your witness?"

"She should make a good one," I said.

Pat sighed heavily, then went to the phone and called for the lab boys. Then he gently walked Angela out to the hall, away from the body, and asked her to wait. After that, he returned to take a brief statement from me, just inside the door.

When he'd slipped his notebook away, Pat said, "I don't mean to encourage you, but I do have a couple of pieces of information you might appreciate hearing."

"Go ahead. Liven up my evening."

"Remember Ollie Joe's Steak House, where Ginnie Mathes worked? Where she talked to a patron at some length before she left and went out and got killed?"

"Uh huh."

"Well, the register girl at Ollie Joe's identified Joseph Fidello's picture as the chatty patron."