Talmage Powell
The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer
Cast of Characters
Nick Martin — The rangy ex-Marine had steadily battled his pain with the bottle since Okinawa, until yesterday’s hero was today’s number-one murder suspect
Ed Rivers — The beer-chugging gumshoe for Nationwide Detective Agency had all the grace of a tired bull elephant, and like his animal double, he never forgot a buddy — or a punk
Lieutenant Steve Ivey — The clean-living, hard-working cop was the ideal man for a long-drawn-out manhunt, but his talents became a liability when the higher-ups told him the case was closed
Helen Martin — The auburn-haired, long-legged Mrs. Martin had kept her faith in Nick for fifteen years, but this time her courage failed her. She knew her husband was being framed, but the only person who could prove it was wanted for murder
Victor Cameron — The graying, well-tailored businessman was just too tired to hold the edges together — when he was sober he couldn’t face his memories, when he was drunk he couldn’t handle his daughter
Rachie Cameron — The lazy-voiced daughter of Victor Cameron had the lithe body of a female panther and the morals of an alley cat, with claws kept sharp to grab her prey — whoever he was
Prince Kuriacha — The bowlegged, gorilla-bodied wrestling champ looked about as peaceful as a Tartar tribesman, even in his Brooks Brothers suit, and when Ed Rivers surprised him, his veneer of civilization vanished entirely
Sime Younkers — The sallow disbarred private eye lived with death, and knew where to find it — what he didn’t know was how fast death could come
Tillie Rollo — The copper-haired, cultured madam looked like a lady through and through. She lived for the day she’d have enough money to get out of the trade, and the death of three people couldn’t delay her
Chapter 1
Let’s get one thing straight at the start. He was a prince among men.
The guns are silent now. Their days of blood sacrifice are history. The world has moved on, and in great part it has forgotten.
The dead on the islands cannot remember. The living wanted to forget. The half-living will never forget. They are the gray shadows of that army that bought with its living flesh the luxury and freedom you take so much for granted.
They returned. They were carried back. Living, they are of the dead, shut away in government hospitals or in private homes. They are the shattered.
Nick Martin was one of these. He was born, he grew up, he became a Marine private after Pearl Harbor. He was a corporal when he went ashore on Iwo Jima. As a sergeant he went in with the assault waves on Okinawa.
There his luck ran out. He might have stretched it a little, but he knew what the cost would be to his company.
To him there was no decision to make. Sick as he was of the whole business, he stayed where he was. His platoon was wiped out. He held the position for another twenty minutes. It was time enough for Baker Company to get into position.
It was a little action, lost in the greater action-except to the men in Baker.
They found him with a burned-out submachine gun and grenade pins littering the ground around him. They thought at first he was dead. He had taken a machine-gun burst in the midsection as he threw the last grenade.
Nick would want you to enjoy your dinner. So I won’t go into detail about what those slugs did to his guts and spine. A case-hardened medic vomited as he loaded Nick onto a stretcher.
The years have passed now, a pleasant haze of memory for most of us. We’ve had to look for and dream up most of our troubles. We’ve worked, played, groused about bills, eaten like sultans, traded our shiny cars because there was a newer model.
For Nick the years have been about eight million minutes never far from pain. His calendar has been operating-room schedules in government hospitals. His country has never ceased trying to work a miracle over him. He was patched, pieced together, carved, remade. He came to dream of gleaming scalpels, the nightmare of sleep no more horrible than that of waking reality.
He was helped. He could use his hands. Later he learned to walk. Somehow, he endured.
Maybe it was because he was never completely alone. There was always Helen, his wife, living her own eight million minutes.
I hadn’t slept much since Nick and Helen Martin had disappeared day before yesterday. I wasn’t feeling kindly toward the world. The end for Nick looked as if it would be the final cruelty, the ultimate irony.
It had been a scorching day, such as you find only in Tampa. I’ve been in Florida nearly seventeen years, and
I’ve never got used to the heat. If you asked me why I stay, I guess I couldn’t give you a reason.
The lettering on my office door reads NATIONWIDE DETECTIVE AGENCY, SOUTHEASTERN OFFICE, AGENT IN CHARGE: ED RIVERS.
I was on the skids when I wandered into Tampa years ago. Nationwide gave me a break, a chance. So maybe there is a reason after all.
I’d looked everywhere for Nick. I don’t know what I hoped to do for him. Protect him somehow. Reach him before the cops did. Stop him from doing anything more foolish. The cops wouldn’t take chances, and I couldn’t blame them. You don’t take chances when you’re looking for a man who apparently has taken a souvenir samurai sword and chopped a whole family of Japanese-Americans in little pieces.
I came back to my apartment on the edge of Tampa’s Ybor City, the Latin quarter. In an old building spiced with the Spanish language and the lingering smell of Cuban sausage, the apartment is just a place to flop and eat. There is a day bed where I sleep, boiling in my own sweat, a second-hand TV I don’t watch very much, a kitchenette where I can cook a little, and a bathroom with gargling plumbing and an old-fashioned tub that’s big.
I ran the tub nearly to the brim with water from the cold tap, stripped off my baggy slacks and sweat-stained sport shirt. I’d left my lightweight jacket and the .38 in the bed-sitting room. I finished undressing by taking off my shoes, socks, shorts, and the knife I wear in a sheath at the nape of my neck. I’ve had need of the knife about once every five years. On each occasion, I’d have lost five years of living if the knife hadn’t been handy.
With sweat rivuleting down the creases in my face and through the heavy brush on my chest, I grunted my nearly two-hundred-pound bulk into the tub. I didn’t get a chance to soak out any of the heat. Somebody began banging on the door.
I yelled that I was coming. I dressed quickly and opened the door.
The caller was Lieutenant Steve Ivey. He was a quiet, clean-living, hard-working cop of middle age. About my size, though he didn’t have the slope shoulders, and he gave the false impression of being taller.
In the department set-up, Ivey had replaced a knife blade named Julian Patrick, who’d thought more of his personal ambition than of his city. A patient city had finally got rid of Patrick. Ivey was less brilliant, but his integrity made up for it.
Ivey had never dealt directly with me before. Now he studied me for a moment; the apartment that was my background; then me, personally and coolly, his eyes starting at my shoes, moving up the bearishness of my body, coming to rest on my face. My face usually gets a reaction. I’ve seen it fire the eyes of women with feelings ranging from acute distaste to hot hunger. It’s brought caution to some men, and a bristling, instinctive challenge to others.
Ivey was a man who was certain of himself, his strength, his capabilities. He accepted my face with a pleasant smile.
“Mind if I come in, Rivers?”