The Mike Hammer Collection

Right then he was real roostery, a Bayliss Henry from years ago before retirement and top dog on the news beat, a wizened little guy, but one who wasn’t going to budge an inch. I wasn’t giving a damn for national security as the book describes it, at all, so I said, “Richie Cole was a Federal agent and he stayed alive long enough to ask me in on this.”

He waited, watched me, then made a decisive shrug with his shoulders and pulled a cap down over his eyes. “You know what you could be getting into?” he asked me.

“I’ve been shot before,” I told him.

“Yeah, but you haven’t been dead before,” he said.

The place was a brownstone building in Brooklyn that stood soldier-fashion shoulder to shoulder in place with fifty others, a row of face-like oblongs whose windows made dull, expressionless eyes of the throttled dead, the bloated tongue of a stone stoop hanging out of its gaping mouth.

The rest wasn’t too hard, not when you’re city-born and have nothing to lose anyway. Bayliss said the room was ground-floor rear so we simply got into the back through a cellarway three houses down, crossed the slatted fences that divided one pile of garbage from another until we reached the right window, then went in. Nobody saw us. If they did, they stayed quiet about it. That’s the kind of place it was.

In a finger-thick beam of the pencil flash I picked out the sofa bed, an inexpensive contour chair, a dresser and a desk. For a furnished room it had a personal touch that fitted in with what Bayliss suggested. There were times when Richie Cole had desired a few more of the creature comforts than he could normally expect in a neighborhood like this.

There were a few clothes in the closet: a military raincoat, heavy dungaree jacket and rough-textured shirts. An old pair of hip boots and worn high shoes were in one corner. The dresser held changes of underwear and a few sports shirts, but nothing that would suggest that Cole was anything he didn’t claim to be.

It was in the desk that I found the answer. To anyone else it would have meant nothing, but to me it was an answer. A terribly cold kind of answer that seemed to come at me like a cloud that could squeeze and tear until I thought I was going to burst wide open.

Cole had kept a simple, inexpensive photo album. There were the usual pictures of everything from the Focking Distillery to the San Francisco Bridge with Cole and girls and other guys and girls and just girls alone the way a thousand other seamen try to maintain a visual semblance of life.

But it was in the first few pages of the album that the fist hit me in the gut because there was Cole a long time ago sitting at a table in a bar with some RAF types in the background and a couple of American GI’s from the 8th Air Force on one side and with Richie Cole was Velda.

Beautiful, raven hair in a long pageboy, her breasts swelling tautly against the sleeveless gown, threatening to free themselves. Her lips were wet with an almost deliberate gesture and her smile was purposely designing. One of the GIs was looking at her with obvious admiration.

Bayliss whispered, “What’d you say, Mike?”

I shook my head and flipped a page over. “Nothing.”

She was there again, and a few pages further on. Once they were standing outside a pub, posing with a soldier and a WREN, and in another they stood beside the bombed-out ruins of a building with the same soldier, but a different girl.

There was nothing contrived about the album. Those pictures had been there a long time. So had the letters. Six of them dated in 1944, addressed to Cole at a P.O. box in New York, and although they were innocuous enough in content, showed a long-standing familiarity between the two of them. And there was Velda’s name, the funny “V” she made, the green ink she always used and, although I hadn’t even known her then, I was hating Cole so hard it hurt. I was glad he was dead but wished I could have killed him, then I took a fat breath, held it once and let it out slowly and it wasn’t so bad anymore.

I felt Bayliss touch my arm and he said, “You okay, Mike?”

“Sure.”

“You find anything?”

“Nothing important.”

He grunted under his breath. “You’re full of crap.”

“A speciality of mine,” I agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What about those guns? He had a trunk some place.”

“We don’t need them. Let’s go.”

“So you found something. You could satisfy my curiosity.”

“Okay,” I told him, “Cole and I had a mutual friend.”

“It means something?”

“It might. Now move.”