Killer Mine by Mickey Spillane

of.”
    She frowned and nibbled at a fingernail. “But Hymie Shapiro…”
    I cut her off with, “I’ll have to go back to when we were kids. Hymie and Noisy were a couple of sharpies who stuck together. Hymie used to plan little chintzy jobs and leave them up to Noisy to pull off. Could be that Noisy didn’t want to move in on this by himself because he knew he wasn’t capable of pulling it off alone. He always was a lippy guy with Hymie. Suppose he talked it over with Hymie and they laid it out together. Our guy would have moved out after he killed René, but they found out where he was holed up and Noisy went to see him. So the guy makes a date to pay off and instead lets Noisy have a bullet, but not before Noisy tried to insure himself staying alive by reminding the guy someone else knew the play.”
    “It sounds good, Joe.”
    “What it means is that Noisy didn’t have to tell him who it was that knew. Our guy automatically understood, popped Noisy, then went looking for Hymie and found him.”
    “And that brings us up to Doug Kitchen,” Marta said.
    “Paula Lees saw that action. Doug saw the guy and recognized him. That’s what got him killed. He started across the street to say hello, then saw what was going to happen and started to run. He was the only one shot in the back.”
    “Gus Wilder?”
    “They all knew him. Hell, everybody around here knows everybody else, especially when they’re hardcases.”
    I stopped pacing then and stared at the dark green surface of the dirty window shade. Marta asked, “What are you thinking of, Joe?”
    “There’s a hook in this someplace. I have the feeling that somebody I’ve talked to has fed it to me already and I can’t remember what it is.”
    “It’ll come.”
    “But I want it now.”
    “Relax,” she said softly.
    I turned around and grinned at her. “Sure, little Giggie. Come on and let’s try it from another angle.”
     
    When we reached the street there was a slight jolt in the air, concussion from thunder far off, and the sky over Jersey turned a momentary pink. It was cooler now, the smell of rain coming in with the west breeze.
    We turned south, reached the corner and saw Hal McNeil, the beat cop, just closing the door of the call box. He touched his cap in a salute and said, “Evening, Lieutenant. I was just going to look you up.”
    “What’s doing?”
    “Sergeant Brissom wants you to call him back.”
    “Thanks, Hal. You got anything on Loefert and his buddies?”
    The cop nodded. “They’re doing a lot of poking around. The way it looks, they’ve sectioned the neighborhood off and are scouting the areas. The only one I could reach said they were looking for a strange face. A lot of drifters come through, but they weren’t interested. It’s somebody that would be known but hasn’t been seen for a while.”
    “No names?”
    “You know these people, sir. They aren’t going to stick their necks out. Too many killings have scared them silly.”
    I left him talking to Marta and opened the call box and got the duty officer to put me through to Mack Brissom. “Scanlon, Mack. What’s the pitch?”
    “Hi, Joe. We have an opening on the action down there. Now get this bit… one of the Chicago hoods was picked up on an old murder second charge and the D.A. got some talk out of him because the guy hoped to drop the charge down to manslaughter.”
    “What’s it about?” I asked him.
    “The wheels inside the mob gave the go ahead signal to a group to set up one hell of a big heist and was going to take care of the cover and protection for a fifty percent bite if it came off. Well, it came off, all right, only the one guy who was holding the loot had it hijacked out of his hands by an outsider and broke up the whole deal.”
    “Which heist, Mack?”
    “Could be the Montreal job. How this outsider got into it is anybody’s guess. He could have known one of the boys, had a few drinks with him and the story came out. They’ll talk to