Mickey Spillane - The Big Kill

"I'm afraid of a Texas man now. I'm going to forget all about you and stop looking for a dream. I'll wait until somebody nice and safe comes along, somebody peaceful and quiet and shy, and I'll get all those foolish romanticisms out of my head and live a bored and relatively normal life."

I planted my feet apart and looked down at her with a laugh that came up from my chest. "And you'll always wonder what a Texas man would have been like," I said.

The change stole over her face slowly, wiping out the bitterness. Her eyes half closed and the blue of her irises was gray again. The smile and the frown blended together like a pleasant hurt. She leaned back with a fluid animal motion, her head resting languidly against the couch. The pink tip of her tongue touched her lips that were parted in a ghost of a smile making them glisten in the light of the single lamp. Then she stretched back slowly and reached out her arms to me, and in reaching the entire front of the robe came open and she made no move to close it.

"No," she said, "I'll find out about that first."

We said good-by in the dim light of morning. She said goodby, Texas man, and I said so-long, Texas gal, and I left without looking back because everything she had said was right and I didn't want to hear it again by looking back at her eyes. I got in the car, drove over to Central Park West and cruised along until I found a parking place. It was right near an entrance so I left it there and walked off the pavements to the grass and sat on a hill where I could see the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings in the background.

The ground still held the night dampness, letting it go slowly in a thin film of haze that was suspended in mid-air, rising higher as the sun warmed it. The whole park had a chilled eerie appearance of something make-believe. An early stroller went by on the walk, only the top half of him visible, the leash in his hand disappearing into the fog yet making all the frantic motions of having some unseen creature on its end.

When the wind blew it raised the gray curtain and separated it into angry segments that towered momentarily before filtering back into the gaps. There were other people too, half-shapes wandering through a dream world, players who didn't know they had an audience. Players buried in their own thoughts and acts on the other side of a transparent wall that shut off all sound.

I sat there scowling at it until I remembered that it was just like my dream even to the colors and the synthetic silence. It made me so uncomfortable that I turned around expecting to see the woman in black who had no face.

She was there.

She wasn't in black and she had a face, but she stopped when she saw me and turned away hurriedly just like the other one did. This one seemed a little annoyed because I blocked her favorite path.

And I knew who the woman was in the compound with me that night. She had a name and a face I hadn't seen yet. She was there in the compound trying to tell me something I should have thought of myself.

I waited until the sun had burned off the mist and made it a real world again. I went back to the daylight and searched through it looking for a little guy with big ears and a brace of dyed blondes on his arms. The sun made an arc through the sky and was on its way down without me finding him.

At three-thirty I made a call. It went through three private secretaries and a guy who rumbled when he talked. He was the last man in front of Harry Bailen, the columnist, and about as high as I was going to get.

I said, "This is a friend of Cookie Harkin's. I got something for him that won't keep and I can't find the guy. I want his address if you have it."

He had it, but he wasn't giving it out. "I'm sorry, but that's private information around here."

"So is what I got. Cookie can have it for your boss free or I can sell it to somebody else. Take your pick."

"If you have anything newsworthy I'll be glad to pass it on to Mr. Bailen for you."

"I bet you would, feller, only it happens that Cookie's a friend of mine and either he gets it or the boss'll get scooped and he isn't gonna like that a bit."

The phone dimmed out a second as he covered up the mouthpiece. The rumble of his voice still came through as he talked to somebody there in the office and when he came back to me he was more sharp than before.

"Cookie Harkin lives in the Mapuah Hotel. That's M-A-P-UA-H. Know where it is?"

"I'll find it," I told him. "And thanks."

He thanked me by slamming the phone back.

I looked up the Mapuah Hotel in the directory and found it listed in a crummy neighborhood off Eighth Avenue in the upper Sixties. It was as bad as I expected, but just about the kind of a place a guy like Cookie would go for. The only rule it had was to pay the rent on time. There was a lobby with a couple of old leather chairs and a set of wicker furniture that didn't match. The clerk was a baldheaded guy who was shy a lower plate and he was bent over, the desk reading a magazine.

"Where'll I find Cookie Harkin?"

"309." He didn't look up and made no attempt at announcing me.

The only concession to modernization the place made was the automatic elevator. Probably they couldn't get anybody to run a manual job anyway. I closed the door, pushed the third button in the row and stood there counting bricks until the car stopped.

Cookie had a good spot. His room took up the southwest corner facing the rear court where there was a reasonable amount of quiet and enough of a breeze that wasn't contaminated by the dust and exhaust gases on the street side.

I knocked twice, heard the bedsprings creak inside, then Cookie yelled, "Yeah?"

"Mike, Cookie. Get out of the sack."

"Okay, just a minute."

The key rattled in the lock and Cookie stood there in the top half of his pajamas rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "This is a hell of an hour to get up," I said.

"I was up late."

I looked at the second pillow on his bed that still had the fresh imprint of a head, then at the closed door that led off the room.

"Yeah, I'll bet. Can she hear anything in there?"

He came awake in a hurry. "Nah. Whatcha got, Mike?"

"What would you like to have?"

"Plenty. Did you see the papers?" I said no. "I'm not so dumb, Mike. The D.A.'s giving out a song and dance about that triple kill in Islip. Me, I know what happened. The rags gotta clam up because no names are mentioned, but you let me spill it and I'll clean up."

I sat down and pulled out a butt. "I'll swap," I said.

"Now wait a sec, Mike..."

"There aren't any rough boys this time. Do something for me and you'll get the story. Right from the beginning."

"You got a deal."

So I told him straight without leaving anything out and he was on the phone before I was finished talking. Dollar bills were drooling out of his eyes and the thing was big enough to get a direct line to Harry Bailen himself. I told him not to play the cops down and when he passed it down with the hint that more was yet to come if it was played right, the big shot agreed and his voice crackled excitedly until he hung up.

Cookie came back rubbing his hands and grinning at me. "Just ask me, Mike. I'll see that you get it."

I dragged in on the smoke. "Go back a ways, Cookie. Remember when Charlie Fallon died?"

"Sure. He kicked off in a movie house on Broadway, didn't he? Had a heart attack."

"That's right."

"He practically lived in them movies. Couldn't tell if he was in the classiest playhouse or the lousiest theater if you wanted to go looking for him."

I nodded that I knew about it and went on, "At the time he was either married or living with a woman. Which was it?"

"Umm..." he tugged at one ear and perched on the edge of the bed. "Nope, he wasn't married. Guess he was shacking with somebody."