The Mike Hammer Collection

When we were walking toward the door I dropped a flyer. “Say, do you know Myra Grange?” Her breath caught and held. “Why . . . no. That is, isn’t she the one . . . I mean with Mr. York?”

I nodded. She had made a good job of covering up, but I didn’t miss that violent blush of emotion that surged into her cheeks at the mention of Grange’s name. So this was why the vanishing lady spent so many hours in the library. “The same,” I said. “Did she ever go down there?”

“No.” A pause. “No, I don’t think so. Oh, yes. She did once. She took the boy . . . Mr. York’s son down there, but that was when I first came here. I went with them. They looked over some old manuscripts, but that was all.”

“When was she here last?”

“Who are you?” She looked scared.

My badge was in my hand. She didn’t have to read it. All she needed was the sight of the shield to start shaking. “She was here . . . about a week ago.”

Very carefully, I looked at her. “No good. That was too long ago. Let’s put it this way. When did you see her last?” Legs got the point. She knew I knew about Myra and guessed as much about her. Another blush, only this one faded with the fear behind it.

“A . . . a week ago, I told you.” I thanked her and went out. Legs was lying through her teeth and I couldn’t blame her.

The water was starting to bubble now. It wouldn’t be long before it started to boil. Two things to do before I went to New York, one just for the pleasure of it. I made my first stop at a drugstore. A short, squat pharmacist came out from behind the glass partition and murmured his greetings. I threw the pills I had taken from Henry’s bottle on the counter in front of me.

“These were being taken for aspirin,” I said. “Can you tell me what they are?”

He looked at me and shrugged, picking up one in his fingers. He touched a cautious tongue to the white surface, then smelled it. “Not aspirin,” he told me. “Have you any idea what they might be?”

“I’d say sleeping pills. One of the barbiturates.” The druggist nodded and went back behind his glass. I waited perhaps five minutes before he came back again.

“You were right,” he said. I threw two five-dollar bills on the counter and scooped up the rest of the pills. Very snazzy, killer, you got a lot of tricks up your sleeve. A very thorough guy. It was going to be funny when I had that killer at the end of my rod. I wondered if he was thorough enough to try to get rid of me.

Back and forth, back and forth. Like a swing. From kidnapping to murder to petty conniving and back to the kidnapping again. Run, run, run. Shuttle train stuff. Too many details. They were like a shroud that the killer was trying to draw around the original motive. That, there had to be. Only it was getting lost in the mess. It could have been an accident, this eruption of pointless crimes, or they might have happened anyway, or they could have been foreseen by the killer and used to his own advantage. No, nobody could be that smart. There’s something about crime that’s like a disease. It spreads worse than the flu once it gets started. It already had a good start when Ruston was kidnapped. It seemed like that was months ago, but it wasn’t . . . just a few short days.

I reviewed every detail on my way to Wooster, but the answer always came up the same. Either I was dumb or the killer was pretty cagey. I had to find Mallory, I had to find Grange, I had to find the killer if he wasn’t one of those two. So far all I found was a play behind the curtain.

Halfway there I gave up thinking and concentrated on the road. With every mile I’d gotten madder until I was chain-smoking right through my deck of butts. Wooster was alive this time. People walked along the streets in noisy contentment, limousines blared indignantly at lesser cars in front of them, and a steady stream of traffic went in and out of the shop doors. There was plenty of room in front of Alice’s house. I parked the car and went into the foyer, remembering vividly the crack on my skull.

This time the buzz was a short one. I took the stairs fast, but she was faster. She stood in the door with a smile, ready to be kissed. I said, “Hello, Alice,” but I didn’t kiss her. Her smile broke nervously.

“What’s the matter, Mike?”

“Nothing, kid, nothing at all. Why?”

“You look displeased about something.” That was putting it mildly.

I went inside without lifting my hat. Alice went to reach for the decanter, but I stopped her by throwing the envelope on the coffee table. “You were looking for these, I think.”

“I?” She pulled one of the pictures out of the wrapper, then shoved it back hastily, her face going white. I grinned.

Then I got nasty. “In payment for last night.”

“You can go now.”

“Uh-uh. Not yet.” Her eyes followed mine to the ashtray. There were four butts there, two of them had lipstick on them and the other two weren’t my brand.