"No," I said, "maybe not. Maybe this time I'll do it differently. Just for the fun of it."
Velda's hands were drawn= tight on the arms of the chair. "I don't like you this way, Mike."
"Neither do a lot of people. They know something just like their own names. They know I'm not going to sit on my fanny and wait for something to happen. They know from now on they're going to have to be so careful they won't even be able to spit because I'm going to get closer and closer until I have them on the dirty end of a stick. They know it and I know it too."
"It makes you a target."
"Kitten, it sure does and that I go for. If that's one way of pulling em inside shooting range I'm plenty glad to be a target."
Her face relaxed and she sat back. For a long minute neither one of us spoke. She sat there with her head against the cushion, staring at the ceiling, then, "Mike, I have news for you."
The way she said it made me look up. "Give."
"Any shooting that's to be done won't be done by you."
A muscle in my face twitched.
Velda reached in her jacket pocket and came out with an envelope. She flipped it across the room and I caught it. "Pat brought it in this morning. He couldn't do a thing about it, so don't get teed off at him."
I pulled the flap out and fingered the sheet loose. It was very brief and to the point. No quibbling. No doubting the source. The letterhead was all very official and I was willing to bet that for the one sheet they sent me a hundred more made up the details of why the thing should be sent.
It was a very simple order telling me I no longer had a license to carry a gun and temporarily my state-granted right to conduct private investigations was suspended. There was no mention of a full or partial refund of my two-hundred-buck fee for said license to said state.
So I laughed. I folded the sheet back into the envelope and laid it on the table. "They want me to do it the hard way, I said.
"They don't want you to do it at all. From now on you're a private citizen and nothing else and if they catch you with a gun you get it under the Sullivan law."
"This happened once before, remember?"
Velda nodded slowly. There was no expression at all on her face. "That's right, but they forgot about me. Then I had a P.I. ticket and a license for a gun too. This time they didn't forget."
"Smart boys."
"Very." She closed her eyes again and let her head drop back. "We're going to have it rough."
"Not we, girl. Me."
"We.,,
"Look . . "
Only the slight reflection of the light from her pupils showed
that her eyes were open and looking at me. "Who do you belong
to, Mike?"
"You tell me."
She didn't answer. Her eyes opened halfway and there was something sad in the way her lips tried to curve into a smile. I said, "All right, kid, you know the answer. It's we and if I stick my neck out you can be there to help me get back in time." I picked the .45 up off the floor beside the chair, slid the clip out and thumbed the shells into my palm. "Your boy Mike is getting on in years, pal. Soft maybe?"
There was laughter in the sad smile now. "Not soft. Smarter. We're up against something that's so big pure muscle won't even dent it. We're up against a big brain and being smart is the only thing that's going to move it. At least you have the sense to change your style."
"Yeah."
"It won't be so easy."
"I know. I'm not built that way." I grinned at her. "Let's not worry about it. Everybody's trying to step on me because they don't want me around. Some of em got different reasons, but the big one is they're afraid I'll spoil their play. That happened before too. Let's make it happen again."
Velda said, "But let's not try so hard, huh? Seven years is a long time to wait for a guy." Her teeth were a white flash in the middle of her smile. "I'd like him in good shape when he gets ready to take the jump."
I said, "Yeah," but not so loud that she heard me. "Where do we take it from here, Mike?"
I let the shells dribble from my fingers into the ashtray. They lay there, deadly and gleaming, but helpless without the mother that could give them birth.
"Berga Torn," I said. "We'll start with her. I want those sanitarium records. I want her life history and the history of anybody she was associated with. That's your job."
"And you?" she asked.
" Evello. Carl Evello. Someplace he comes into this thing and he's my job."
Velda nodded, drummed her fingernails against the arm of the chair and stared across the room. "He won't be easy." "Nobody's easy."
"Especially Evello. He's organized. While you were under wraps in the hospital I saw a few people who had a little inside information on Evello. There wasn't much and what there was of it was mostly speculation, but it put the finger on a theme you might be interested in."
"Such as?"
She looked at me with a half smile, a beautiful jungle animal sizing up her mate before telling him what was outside the mouth of the den. "Mafia," she said.
I could feel it starting way down at my toes, a cold, burning flush that crept up my body and left in its wake a tingling sensation of rage and fear that was pure emotion and nothing else. It pounded in my ears and dried my throat until the words that came out were scratchy, raspy sounds that didn't seem to be part of me at all.
"How did they know?"
"They don't. They suspect, that's all. The federal agencies are interested in the angle."
"Yeah," I said. "They would be interested. They'd go in on their toes, too. No wonder they don't want me fishing around."
"You make too much noise."
"Things happen, don't they?"
Velda didn't answer that one either.
"So now it makes sense," I told her. "They have the idea I'm in the deal someplace but they can't come out and say it. They play twenty questions, hoping I do have a share of it so they'll have someplace to start. They won't give up until the day they die or I do because once the finger touches you it never comes away. There's no such thing as innocence, just innocence touched with guilt is as good a deal as you can get."
Velda's mouth moved slowly. "Maybe it's a good thing, Mike. It's a funny world. Pure innocence as such doesn't enter in much nowadays. There's always at least one thing people try to hide." She paused and ran her finger along the side of her cheek. "If a murderer is hung for the wrong killing, who is wrong?"
"That's a new twist for you, kid."
"I got it from you."
"Then finish it."
Her fingers reached out and plucked a cigarette from the pack. It was a graceful, feminine motion that spoke of soft girlishness, the texture of her skin satiny and amber in the light. You could follow the fingers into the hand and the hand into the arm, watching the curves melt into each other like a beautiful painting. Just watching like that and you could forget the two times that same hand held a snarling, spitting rod that chewed a guy's guts out. "Now innocence touched with guilt pays off," she said. "You'll be one of the baited hooks they'll use until something bites."
"And in the end the public will benefit."
"That's right." She grinned, the corner of her mouth twisting upward a little. "But don't feel badly about it, Mike. They're stealing your stuff. You taught them that trick a long time ago."
My fingers went out and began to play with the slugs that squatted in the bottom of the ashtray where I had dropped them. She watched me from across the room, her eyes half closed in speculation. Then she uncurled, tossed my deck of smokes into the chair beside me and reached for her coat.
I didn't watch her walk away. I sat there dreaming of the things I'd like to do and how maybe if nobody was there to see me I'd do anyway. I was dreaming of a lot of fat faces with jowls that got big and loose on other people's meat and how they'd look with that smashed, sticky expression that comes with catching the butt end of a .45 across their noses. I was dreaming of a slimy foreign secret army that held a parade of terror under the Mafia label and laughed at us with our laws and regulations and how fast their damned smug expressions would change when they saw the fresh corpses of their own kind day after day.