"Which brings us to why you came up here in the first place."
I said, "Remember Harry Service?"
Pat nodded.
"He wants me to find his sister. She hasn't contacted him in a long time."
"You? He wants you to do this?"
"Come on, Pat, he isn't the kind to go to the cops."
"How'd he reach you?"
"Supposing I forget you asked that question."
Pat gave me a disgusted look and said, "Okay, okay. What do you want from me?"
"A letter from the brass getting me in to see Harry. Somebody in the front office has got to be the friendly type."
"Not as far as you're concerned."
"I can push it if I have to."
"I know you can. Just don't. Let me see what I can do." He gave me a quizzical glance and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. "One thing, old buddy. And tell me true, Harry contacted you, right?"
"If you don't believe it I can show you how."
"Never mind."
"Why?" I asked him.
"Because if you initiated the contact I'd say it was tying into my immediate business."
My laugh didn't sound too convincing, but Pat bought it. "You know me," I said.
"That's what I'm afraid of."
The attendant at the morgue file of the paper was a crackly little old guy who used to be one of the best rewrite men on the staff until the demands of age caught up with him. Now he was content to spend his time among the artifacts of journalism, complaining about the new generation and how easy they had it.
I said, "Hi, Biff," and he squinted my way, fished for his glasses and got them on his nose.
"Mike Hammer, I'll be damned." He held out a gnarled hand and I took it. "Nice of you to visit an old man," he said with a smile. "I sure used up a lot of adjectives on you in the old days."
"Some of them weren't very nice."
"Company policy," he laughed. "You always made a great bad guy. But how the hell did you always come out clean?"
"That's my policy," I said.
He came around the counter lighting the stub of a chewed cigar. "You got it made, Mike. Now, what can I do for you?"
"Mitch Temple was in the other day..."
He coughed in the cigar smoke and regarded me with amazement. "You're in this?"
"Sideways. Can you keep it quiet?"
"Sure. I'm not on a beat."
I gave him a quick picture of my meeting with Mitch Temple and the possibility that his death might be involved in something I was working on. Biff knew I wasn't putting it all on the line, but it was to be expected and he didn't mind. Let him alone and he'd put some of the pieces together himself.
Biff said, "All I can do is tell you what I told the others. Mitch came down and spent a while here going through the files. I was busy at the desk and didn't pay any attention to him. He didn't ask for anything and didn't check anything out."
"His column doesn't often carry photographs."
"That's right. When it did they were usually new ones supplied by some press agent. Then they were filed away down here."
"What section was he working in?"
"Hell, Mike, I can't see beyond that first tier. He was out of sight all the time. All the rest asked me that same question. I could hear him banging drawers, but that was all."
"Anybody else come in while he was here?"
Biff thought a moment, then said, "I know where he wasn't. All the show-biz and Broadway files are on the left there. He was back in the general news section, but they're cross-indexed alphabetically, by occupation and a few other headings. Hell, Mike, Al Casey who does the feature crime yarns even dusted around for Mitch's prints on the cabinets and didn't come up with anything. I don't know where he was poking around."
I didn't pay any attention to the other old guy in the coveralls who was pushing a broom around the floor until he said, "I sure know where he was."
Both of us turned around slowly and looked at him. He never stopped his sweeping. My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. "Where?"
"The P-T section. He left all the damn butts squashed out on the floor and I had to scrape 'em up."
"Why didn't you say, something?" Biff said.
"Nobody asked me," he growled.
I said, "Show me," and Biff led me back around the floor-to-ceiling rows of files until we came to the section between P and T.
Then all we did was stand there. There were forty separate drawers in the section, each a good four feet deep and crammed with folders. Biff said, "You know how many items are in this place?" I shook my head. "Figure at least a hundred to the drawer and each folder with at least ten photographs. You got a lot of looking to do, friend. Maybe you can suggest something."
"How do you get to the top drawers?"
"There's a stepladder down the end."
I waved for Biff to follow me and found the old guy emptying his sweepings into a trash can. "Did Mitch Temple have that ladder out when he was here?"
"Yep." He spit into the can, slid the top on and walked away.
"I know," Biff muttered, "nobody asked him. Now what?"
"Half of those files are eliminated. If Al Casey has the time he might try working over the other half."
"If I know him, he'll make the time," Biff said.
"Just do me a favor, keep me out of it," I told him.
Biff's face twisted into a puzzled expression. "You mean I'm supposed to have had the idea?"
"You've had them before, haven't you?"
"That was before."
"Well, you got one again."
I grabbed a cruising cab on Forty-second Street and had him take me back to the Hackard Building. The working crowd had cleared out an hour ago and the city was going through its momentary lull while the night closed in around it. I took the elevator up to the eighth floor and walked down the corridor to my office, my heels echoing hollowly in the empty space.
My keys were in my hand, but I didn't put them in the lock. Tacked to the frame was a white sheet of paper that covered one of the panes of frosted glass with the simple typewritten note, Back Later, across it.
I slid the .45 out of the sling, thumbed the safety off and the hammer back and moved so my shadow wouldn't fall across the door. I had had other notes stuck on my door, but this one had been written on my own brand of bonded paper in the brown typing we always used and had to come from inside the room, Only it was something neither Velda nor I would have done.
I reached over and pulled the paper away. There was a fist-sized hole in the pane right by the lock that a glass cutter had made and the note was tacked over it so nobody would notice it and possibly report it downstairs.
They didn't even bother to lock up after they had left. The knob turned under my hand and I shoved the door open. I reached in, flicked the light on, then walked inside and kicked the door shut with my foot.
Somebody had been very neat about it. Thorough, but neat. The place had been given a professional shakedown from one end to the other and not one thing had been missed. The desk drawers and cabinets had been emptied, but their contents were in inverted piles, systematically scrutinized and left lying there. Nobody ripped up seat cushions any more, but each one had been turned over and inspected for signs of fresh stitching and all the furniture had been pulled out to see if anything had been concealed behind it.
Now it was getting interesting. Somewhere out there in the maw of the city somebody was concerned about my participation in something. I sat down in my chair, swung around and looked out at the lights that outlined New York.
The possibilities were limited. To somebody, the fact that I was the one to find the Delaney girl could have seemed like more than a coincidence. With her background, she could have been involved in something heavy enough to warrant investigation from private sources and I was on her tail.