![Death of the Too-Cute Prostitute [= Man Alone] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/4/6/0/4/death-of-the-too-cute-prostitute-man-alone-download.jpg)
Death of the Too-Cute Prostitute [= Man Alone]
- Автор: Спиллейн Микки
- Год: 1965
- Язык: английский
- Год: Almay Publishing
- Жанр: Крутые детективы
Электронная книга - «Death of the Too-Cute Prostitute [= Man Alone]». Краткое содержание книги:
Stan the pencil wasn’t hard to find. Like all the rest, he had his money rounds; the habituals with the two bucks, the fivers, the ten spots who waited for him in the right places to pick up their cash and slap it on the nose of some nag running the circuit. To him it was a living, two fifty a week with a few weeks in the workhouse when the administration needed a patsy to pad the news reports.
All expenses paid and his wife and kids supported while he was staring at the bars wondering when the legislature would legalize off-track betting like the people wanted despite the pious claims of the backwards-collar gooks and the political slobs who went their way.
I found him at The Shamrock making his book in a cheap pad, his eyes too suddenly round at what he saw in my face. I said, “Talk, Stan. Let’s take a table somewhere.”
“Look...”
“I’m off the force, Stan, but I can still break you in little pieces. Here and now. Your choice.”
“So all right. Talk. It’s cheap.”
I grabbed his arm, pushed him to a table and called for a couple of beers. When the waiter brought the steins I sipped the top off mine and put it down and watched the wet circles it made on the table top. “You were there that night, Stan.”
“Was I called as a witness?”
“Nope.”
I let my eyes drift up to his, feeling the air go through my teeth again. “You’ve been around, boy. You know the ropes and the angles. Nothing gets past your kind. I thought nothing did through me, but something did. What was it?”
“Look, Mr. Regan...”
“Think, buddy. It’s your arm. Left or right first?”
Stan The Pencil was scared. His throat bobbed convulsively and a vein in his temple throbbed too damn hard. “Mr. Regan... it was like they said. You got looped. Hell, I’d do what I could if...”
“There was something. I came in that bar sober.”
“You had a headache. You was eating aspirins.”
“I’d just bought them, Stan. An unopened box at the drugstore on the corner. I had six. It’s an occupational hazard.”
“So I didn’t see nothing. No kidding, Mr. Regan...”
“Who slipped me a dose?”
He could hardly keep his hands folded in front of him. “Honest, Mr. Regan, it was like you had too much. So who was there? Them crazy artists, Popeye Lewis and Edna Rells, they ain’t done nothing. Who could louse you up? You know old Popeye. He got nothing going for him except his paintings and fifty million bucks he hates. That nutty Edna he lives with is just as bad. All that loot and they shack up in a garret even if he does own the whole joint. He won’t live off nothing his old man left him, just what they make with that crazy smear they sell. Me, so what did I do? Make a few contacts? I thought it was a good party.”
“Where did the redhead come in?”
“Who knows?” he said. “Dames were all over the place.”
“You saw her?”
“I saw plenty of broads. She latched on when you started the big pitch. Come on, Mr. Regan.”
“How long have I known you, Stan?”
“Like maybe five years.”
“Ever get yanked?”
“Hell, you weren’t on that detail.”
“Phones were all over the place,” I reminded him. “I could have assigned it anytime.”
“All right, all right. You were square. What you want from me, anyway?”
“The redhead.”
Stan The Pencil’s hands were in tight knots, the fingers twisted together. “Like she drifted over. You pitched, she caught. I cut out about then. I don’t know from nothing. I told them all that.”
“You know her?” I watched him closely.
He caught the funny look in my eyes and said, “I know her now. Not before. I seen it in the papers.”
“Let’s think back.”
“What for?”
“Leo Marcus and Hilquist.”
“Mr. Regan...”
“Stop bullshitting me.”
His face got sullen and his eyes dropped to his hands.
I said, “What’s the racket talk?”
“Some broad,” Stan said softly. “This gonna hurt me?”
“No.”
“Marcus fixed it. What difference does it make now?”
“Because I got fixed too,” I said.
Very simply he looked up and said, “I’m more scared of them than you, Mr. Regan. What now?”
“Nothing, buddy,” I said. “You can blow now.” He hadn’t told me anything, but he’d think he had and he’d be different later.
I got out and walked. My apartment was fifteen blocks away but I had to think about it. A month gone sitting on a bail bond because they wanted to get it over with in a hurry, the eyes of a guy who had been close friends looking at you speculatively, the hatred of the press and the animosity of the public because they thought a hard-working career cop took five grand instead of his life’s work. Nuts.
The rain started in a gentle mist at first, working up to a great gout that caught me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-ninth and when I walked through it, ignoring all its malicious fury, developed a rumble with heat lightning in the west that growled its displeasure at me.
I said, “Drop dead,” toward the sky and kept walking while people watched curiously. Screw them too, I thought. If they knew who I was, they’d spit. The killer cop. He had gotten away with murder.
Well, thank somebody for twelve good men and true who had bought the story.
I hoped they were right.
There was still a chance they weren’t.
I went over it again, knowing the odds I was up against. I reached the apartment and studied the old brownstone from the outside, realizing that anybody could get inside there. Hell, for a pro, you could get anywhere. A key was easy to get. I inserted my own in the lock, turned it and pushed the door open. It was only a three room flat you could expect a bachelor cop to occupy, nothing special no matter how hard you looked. The only extravagance was the wall safe with nothing in it outside a will, a birth certificate and two diplomas, compliments of the butcher downstairs who thought I needed more security. The Marcus file had been stowed in the false bottom of the rectangular bottom of the waste basket by the old desk I used, a nothing place an ordinary housebreaker would have missed and a pro looking for the right thing in the right place found. The five grand was in a new place, too damn obvious, an area above the unpainted pine that formed a ceiling in the bedroom closet.
It was newly cut and that was what had made it all the more damning.
Out of curiosity I checked the apartment. The signs of white dust from the print teams the department sent in were still showing on the furniture, wisps here and there like an untidy woman would make from powdering after a bath, the stigmata of the professionals taking care of their own. Or frying him if they had to.
I lay down on the bed, listening to the air going out of the mattress with a soft hiss and closed my eyes, thinking of how nice it was to sleep and be away from it all. There was a sweet smell of pleasure there, a sensual odor of the far-off things that could never be attained for someone like me and sleep was the utmost pinnacle of desire. It was a gentle, wafting breeze that talked to me from way down deep and out of the downy fluffiness of it all I could hear a strange voice that had turned us into the wild assed bastards they couldn’t beat with all of the Nazi deviousness and the man kept saying, “They’ll try anything. If it’s foreign to you, cut out and run. Shoot. No matter who. Blow out your breath and get away. They have chemical warfare to offset our superiority in noxious gases. They want you. Remember... YOU. You have information. They’ll do anything. They’ll do...”
My eyes opened on his words as if I were years back in a different place and I remembered the rules. I cut and ran, hit the door, opened it and lay face down in the empty doorway gasping for breath while my senses came back to me.