Mickey Spillane - [Mike Hammer 02] Read Online Free PDF Page A

face any more. Nice place to live.
    “There’s a cute little redhead who has a room around here. Buster. Know where I can find her?”
    The kid got real important with the man-to-man line I was handing him and gave me a wink. “Yeah, she had a place upstairs in old lady Porter’s joint.” He jerked his head down the street. “Won’t do ya no good to go there. That little bitch got herself killed last night. All the papers got her pitcher on the front page.”
    “You don’t say. Too bad.”
    He edged me with his elbow and slipped me a knowing look. “She wasn’t no good anyway, buddy. Now, if you want a real woman, you go up to Twenty-third Street and....”
    “Some other day, feller. While I’m here I’ll look around this end of town.” I slipped him a fin. “Go buy a beer for the boys.”
    I walked away hoping they’d choke on it.
    Martha Porter was an oversize female in her late fifties. She wore a size dress that matched her age and still she peeked out in places. What hair wasn’t yanked back in a knot straggled across her face and down the nape of her neck, and she was holding the broom ready to use it as a utensil or a club.
    “You looking for a room or a girl?” she said.
    I let a ten-spot talk for me. “I saw the girl. Now I want to see the room.”
    She grabbed the bill first. “What for?”
    “Because she copped a wad of dough and some important papers from the last place she worked and I have to find it.”
    She gave me an indifferent sneer. “Oh, one of them skip-tracers. Well, maybe the papers is there, but you won’t find no dough. She came here with the clothes on her back and two bucks in her pocketbook. I took the two bucks for room rent. Never got no more from her neither.”
    “Where’d she come from?”
    “I don’t know and I didn’t ask. She had the two bucks and that’s what the room cost. In advance, when you don’t have no bags.”
    “Know her name?”
    “Why don’t you grow up, mister. Why the hell should I ask when it don’t mean nothing. Maybe it was Smith. If you want to see the room, it’s the next floor up in the back. I ain’t even been in there since she got killed. Soon as I seen her face in the papers I knew somebody would be around. Them broads give me a pain in the behind.”
    The broom went back to being a broom and I went up the stairs. There was only one door on the landing and I went in, then locked it behind me.
    I always had the idea that girls were kind of fussy, even if they were living in a cracker barrel. Maybe she was fussy at that. It was a sure thing that whoever searched the room wasn’t. The bed was torn apart and the stuffing was all over the place. The four drawers of the chest lay upside down on the floor where someone had used them as a ladder to look along the wall molding just below the ceiling. Even the linoleum had been ripped from the floor, and two spots on the wall where the plaster had been knocked off were poked out to let a hand feel around between the partitions. Oh, it was a beautiful job of searching, all right. A real dilly. They had plenty of time, too. They must have had, because they would have had to be quiet or have the young elephant up here with the broom, and the place wouldn’t have looked like that if they had been hurried.
    One hell of a mess, but I started to grin. Whatever caused the wreckage certainly wasn’t found, because even after they had looked in the obvious places they tore apart everything else, right down to the mousehole in the baseboard.
    I kicked aside some of the junk on the floor, but there wasn’t much to see. Old magazines, a couple of newspapers, some underwear and gadgets that might have been in the drawers. What had once been a coat lay in strips with all the hems ripped out and the lining hanging in shreds. A knife had been used on the collar to split the seams. On top of everything was a film of dust from a spilled powder box giving the place a cheaply perfumed odor.
    Then the wind