The Mike Hammer Collection

The flunky barely glanced at the pasteboard. “I’m awfully sorry, sir, but Mr. York is temporarily indisposed.”

When I shoved a cigarette in my mouth and lit it I said, “You tell him it’s about his kid. He’ll un-indispose himself in a hurry.”

I guess I might as well have told him I wanted a ransom payment right then the way he looked at me. I’ve been taken for a lot of things in my life, but this was the first for a snatch artist. He started to stutter, swallowed, then waved his hand in the general direction of the living room. I followed him in.

Have you ever seen a pack of alley cats all set for a midnight brawl when something interrupts them? They spin on a dime with the hair still up their backs and watch the intruder through hostile eye slits as though they were ready to tear him so they could continue their own fight. An intense, watchful stare of mutual hate and fear.

That’s what I ran into, only instead of cats it was people. Their expressions were the same. A few had been sitting, others stopped their quiet pacing and stood poised, ready. A tableau of hate. I looked at them only long enough to make a mental count of a round dozen and tab them as a group of ghouls whose morals had been eaten into by dry rot a long time.

Rudolph York was slumped in a chair gazing blankly into an empty fireplace. The photos in the rags always showed him to be a big man, but he was small and tired-looking this night. He kept muttering to himself, but I couldn’t hear him. The butler handed him my card. He took it, not bothering to look at it.

“A Mr. Hammer, sir.”

No answer.

“It . . . It’s about Master Ruston, sir.”

Rudolph York came to life. His head jerked around and he looked at me with eyes that spat fire. Very slowly he came to his feet, his hands trembling. “Have you got him?”

Two boys who might have been good-looking if it weren’t for the nightclub pallor and the squeegy skin came out of a settee together. One had his fists balled up, the other plunked his highball glass on a coffee table. They came at me together. Saps. All I had to do was look over my shoulder and let them see what was on my face and they called it quits outside of swinging distance.

I turned my attention back to Rudolph York. “No.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Look at my card.”

He read, “Michael Hammer, Private Investigator,” very slowly, then crushed the card in his hand. The contortions in his face were weird. He breathed silent, unspeakable words through tight lips, afraid to let himself be heard. One look at the butler and the flunky withdrew quietly, then he turned back to me. “How did you find out about this?” he charged.

I didn’t like this guy. As brilliant a scientist as he might be, as wealthy and important, I still didn’t like him. I blew a cloud of smoke in his direction. “Not hard,” I answered, “not hard at all. I got a telephone call.”

He kept beating his fist into an open palm. “I don’t want the police involved, do you hear! This is a private matter.”

“Cool off, Doc. I’m not the police. However, if you try to keep me out of this I’ll buzz one of the papers, then your privacy will really be shot to hell.”

“Whom do you represent?” he asked coldly.

“Your chauffeur, Billy Parks.”

“So?”

“So I’d like to know why you put the finger on him when you found out your kid was missing. I’d like to know why you let them mangle him without a formal charge even being lodged, and why you’re keeping all this under your hat. And by damn you better start speaking and pretty loud at that.”

“Please, Mr. Hammer.”

A hand hit my shoulder and spun me, another came up from the side and cracked across my face. The punk said, “How dare you talk to Uncle like that!”

I let him get it out then backhanded him across the mouth with all I had. This time the other one grabbed my coat. He got a short jab in the ribs that bent him over, then the palm of my hand across his puss that straightened him up again. I shoved him away and got the punk’s tie in my hand. When I was breathing in his face I twisted on the tie until the blue started running up his neck, then I smacked him on each side of that whiskey-sodden face until my hand hurt. When I dropped him he lay on the floor crying, trying to cover his face with his hands.

I spoke to the general assembly rather than to him. “In case anyone else has ideas like that, he’d better have more in his hands than a whiskey glass.”

York hadn’t missed a trick. He looked old again. The fire left his eyes and he groped for the arm of his chair. York was having a pretty rough time of it, but after having seen Billy I didn’t feel sorry for him.