Raves For the Work of

  DONALD E. WESTLAKE

  “One of the great writers of the 20th Century.”

  —Newsweek

  “[A] book by this guy is cause for happiness.”

  —Stephen King

  “Brilliant.”

  —GQ

  “A wonderful read.”

  —Playboy

  “I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “Marvelous.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Donald Westlake must be one of the best craftsmen now crafting stories.”

  —George F. Will

  “Westlake is a national literary treasure.”

  —Booklist

  “Tantalizing...The action is non-stop.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Westlake remains in perfect command; there’s not a word...out of place.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Ingeniously twisted plotting.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Crime fiction stripped down—as it was meant to be... oh, how the pages keep turning.”

  —Philadelphia Enquirer

  “The neo-hero: the ruthless, unrepentant, single-minded operator in a humorless and amoral world...No one depicts this scene with greater clarity.”

  —The New York Times

  “Energy and imagination light up virtually every page, as does some of the best hard-boiled prose ever to grace the noir genre.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Nobody does the noir thriller better...His lean style and hard-edged characters, not exactly likable, but always compelling, provide a welcome return to the hard-bitten days of yore.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “Gritty and chillingly noir...[Westlake] succeeds in demonstrating his total mastery of crime fiction.”

  —Booklist

  “Among the greatest hard-boiled writing of all time.”

  —Financial Times (London)

  “A brilliant invention.”

  —New York Review of Books

  “No one can turn a phrase like Westlake.”

  —Detroit News and Free Press

  “A mystery connoisseur’s delight. His plot delivers twists and turns...A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Suspenseful...snarling and tough....As always, [Westlake] writes like the consummate pro he is.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The novel’s deeper meditations will keep you thinking long after you’ve closed the book.”

  —USA Today

  Betty Benson closed the door and turned to face me. “If you try anything,” she said, “I can scream.”

  I sat on the studio couch.

  “You wanted to talk about Mavis,” she said.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Tesselman sent you to look for whoever killed her?”

  “Right again.”

  She shook her head. “It just doesn’t seem like him,” she said. “That dirty old man.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because that’s what he is. He came here once and tried to seduce me. He knew I was Mavis’s best friend. And he was old enough to be my grandfather.”

  “He’s old enough to be Mavis’s grandfather, too,” I said.

  “She thought he could help her in her career.”

  “Did you think so?”

  “He could have,” she said. “But I bet he wouldn’t have. Mavis never learned. She kept going off and sleeping with men who promised her the moon, and they were all the same, all nothing but liars. But she never did learn. She was always sure that this was the time, this man was telling the truth.”

  “Tesselman wasn’t the only one, then,” I said. I had the notebook and pencil ready. “Who was next on the rich-man parade?”

  “You make it sound a lot harsher than it was. Mavis wasn’t a—a prostitute, or anything like that.”

  “I know. She was only mercenary.”

  “A lot of people are,” she said...

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  LUCKY AT CARDS by Lawrence Block

  ROBBIE’S WIFE by Russell Hill

  THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN by Gil Brewer

  THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN by David Goodis

  BLACKMAILER by George Axelrod

  SONGS OF INNOCENCE by Richard Aleas

  FRIGHT by Cornell Woolrich

  KILL NOW, PAY LATER by Robert Terrall

  SLIDE by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  DEAD STREET by Mickey Spillane

  DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins

  A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block

  MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust

  ZERO COOL by John Lange

  SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch

  THE MURDERER VINE by Shepard Rifkin

  SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY by Donald E. Westlake

  NO HOUSE LIMIT by Steve Fisher

  BABY MOLL by John Farris

  THE MAX by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  THE FIRST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  GUN WORK by David J. Schow

  FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai

  KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block

  THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny

  The

  CUTIE

  by Donald E. Westlake

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-053)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: March 2009

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 OUP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 1960 by Donald E. Westlake.

  Originally published as The Mercenaries.

  Cover painting copyright © 2009 by Ken Laager

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-362-5

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-103-6

  Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.hardCaseCrime.com

  For Larry and Nedra

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter One

  Ella and I went to bed at two-thirty. We turned off the light, reached for each other, and the doorbell rang.

  I swore, and Ella’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “Maybe they’ll go away,” she whispered.

  The answer was another nervous jabbing at the bell. Whoever was outside was in a hurry. I sat up, switched on the table lamp beside the bed, and Ella and I squinted at one another. She was a good-looking woman, a damn good-looking woman. Black hair falling soft to her shoulders, lips full and red and bruised-looking, eyes half-closed and waiting. She was sitting up, leaning toward me, and the sheet had fallen away from her breasts. I didn’t want to leave her, not now, not for anything. I didn’t care who it was out there, Ed Ganolese or anybody.

  The bell jangled again, and Ella smiled at me, to let me know she knew what I was thinking, and that she had the same thoughts. “Hurry back,” she whispered.

  “Two seconds,” I told her. I pushed the sheet out of the way and climbed to my feet. While I was yanking on some clothes, the bell sounded again. I stomped through the apartment to the living room, ready to punch a face in.

  Usually, whe
n the bell rings, I check through the peephole before opening the door, but this time I was too annoyed to be cautious. I pulled the door open and glared.

  It was Billy-Billy Cantell, jittering like a Model T. I didn’t say a word for a minute, I just stared at him. Of all the people I know, Billy-Billy Cantell is one of the last I’d think of as a possible two A.M. visitor. He’s a scrawny, scraggy, scrubby little bum who might be thirty or forty or fifty, you can’t tell from looking at him. He’s one of the poor clowns for whom life is spelled with a capital H, and I do mean heroin. He does everything it is possible to do with narcotics. He buys it, sells it, transports it, and takes it. He’s a retailer on the Lower East Side, and I hadn’t seen him for six months or more. The last time we’d talked, it was because he owed Ed Ganolese some money and I’d asked Ed not to send one of the regular collectors. I talked to him about it myself, being careful not to break any bones, and he paid up a couple days later.

  The point of all this is that Billy-Billy Cantell and I do not normally move in the same circles, and I wasn’t used to the idea of him dragging me out of the sack at two-thirty in the morning. So I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, and he blubbered at me. “Cuh-Clay,” he started, “you guh-got to help me. I’m in a jah-juh-jam.” See where he gets the name Billy-Billy?

  “What’s that to me?” I asked him. I wasn’t worried about this little snowbird and his little problems. I was thinking about Ella, waiting for me three rooms away.

  Billy-Billy was chattering and flinching, and his hands were jerking around, and he kept glancing in terror down toward the elevators. “Luh-let me in, Clay,” he begged me. “Plea-please.”

  “You got law on your tail?”

  “Nuh-no, Clay. I duh-don’t think so.”

  He kept shaking like an IBM machine gone crazy. He looked as though he’d fall apart any second now, and there’d be pieces of him rolling all over the hall. I shrugged and stepped aside and said, “Come on in, then. But this better not take very long.”

  “It wuh-won’t, Clay,” he promised me. He scampered inside, and I shut the door after him. Even inside the apartment, he kept looking around and shaking, and I wondered whether I should offer him something to drink. I finally decided it wasn’t worth it. Besides, alcohol isn’t his vice.

  I pointed at a chair. “Sit down,” I told him. “And quit shaking. You’re making me nervous just looking at you.”

  “Thu-thanks, Clay.”

  When we were both seated, I said, “All right. What is it?”

  “I been pat-puh-patsied, Clay. S-s-s-somebody s-set me up for a bad-buh-bad rap.”

  “How’d they do this? From the beginning, Billy-Billy, and take it easy.”

  “I’ll tuh-try, Clay,” he said. And he really did try. You could see him struggling to get himself all into one piece. He almost made it. “I guh-got a little high this after-afternoon,” he jabbered. “I muh-made s-s-s-some guh-good s-s-s-sales and give myself-myself a guh-good jolt. I wuh-went to s-s-s-sleep and wuh-woke up in this apart-apart-apartment. And there was this buh-broad there. S-s-s-somebody knifed her.”

  “You,” I said.

  He looked more terrified than ever. “Nuh-no, Clay. Honest. I duh-don’t carry no blade. I ain’t the ty-type.”

  “How do you know what you did while you were high?”

  “All I duh-do is fuh-fall asleep. You can ask any-any-body.”

  “So this time you did something different.”

  “I duh-don’t even know-know this buh-broad,” he stammered. “I wouldn’t kill-kill nobody, Clay.”

  I sighed. Ella was still waiting for me, and this—There was a pack of cigarettes on the end table near me. I shook one out, lit it, and said, “Okay. You didn’t kill her.”

  “I knuh-know I didn’t, Clay.”

  “Where was this place?”

  “I duh-don’t know. I just-just got out of there, as fuh-fast as I could.”

  “Anybody see you leave?”

  “I duh-don’t think so. Wuh-when I got duh-down to the corner, I s-s-s-saw a puh-prowl car puh-pull up in front of the puh-place. The guy who s-s-s-set me up musta-musta tipped them.”

  “You clean your fingerprints off the doorknob and everything before you left?”

  “I wuh-was too shuh-shook, Clay. I even luh-left my huh-hat.”

  “Your hat?” I remembered that hat of his. It was a little plaid cap, like the one Humphrey Pennyworth wears in the Sunday funnies. But Humphrey’s cap is too small for him, and Billy-Billy’s is too big. It’s a plaid, mainly red, and it droops down over his ears, and Billy-Billy, afraid maybe that he’d lose it while his head was still in it, has written his name and address inside, in indelible pencil.

  “I’m in a juh-jam, Clay,” he said.

  “You’re damn right you are. How’d you get into this place to begin with?”

  “I duh-don’t know. I juh-just fell asleep.”

  “Where?”

  “Downtown s-s-somewhere. This place was uptown, nuh-near the puh-park. I couldn’t of made-muh-made it all the wuh-way up there.”

  “No? You did make it all the way up there.”

  “Cuh-Clay, you got to huh-help me.”

  “Like what? What am I supposed to be able to do?”

  “Cuh-call Ed Ganolese.”

  That one set me back. “You’re nuts,” I told him. “You’re out of your head. You must still be high. It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Puh-please, Clay. He-he’d wuh-want you to cuh-call him.”

  “What do you expect Ed to do for you? If you really did leave your hat there, and fingerprints all over the place, you are now hot. Too hot for Ed or anybody else to touch. Ed can’t get you out of this like it was a user rap.”

  “Puh-please, Clay. Just call him.”

  “Why not go see him yourself?”

  “He tuh-told me not to cuh-come around. He duh-don’t want his wuh-wife or kids to s-s-s-see me. That buh-bodyguard of his wuh-would throw me out. Buh-but you could cuh-call him and tuh-tell him what hap-happened.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Juh-just s-s-s-see what he’s guh-got to s-s-s-say, Clay, please.”

  I had a feeling I knew what Ed would have to say. If somebody had set Billy-Billy up to take a bum rap, he had done a fine job of it. A murder charge isn’t all that easy to fix. And with somebody like Billy-Billy Cantell, it just isn’t worth the effort.

  Which doesn’t mean that Ed would tell me to leave Billy-Billy for the cops. Far from it. Billy-Billy was, after all, a junkie, and he was also a member of the organization. He knew too much about the narcotics business, sources of supply, delivery points, names of retailers. Put him in a cell for twenty-four hours, and he would say anything about anybody. All the cops would have to do is promise him a needle.

  So I had a feeling I knew what Ed would have to say when I filled him in on Billy-Billy’s problem. It was standard operating procedure. I give Billy-Billy a fatal accident, and leave the remains for the cops. Then John Law is happy, because a case has been closed. And the organization is happy, because things are calm and peaceful again. And I’m happy, because I can go back to Ella. Everybody’s happy but Billy-Billy, and he isn’t worried about anything any more. So maybe he’s happy, too.

  That was standard operating procedure. But I didn’t think I should go ahead with it on my own authority. Billy-Billy had been talking as though there was something between him and Ed Ganolese that I didn’t know about. Maybe it was nothing, probably it was nothing—what could Ed Ganolese and Billy-Billy Cantell have in common?—but there was no sense taking an unnecessary chance.

  I got to my feet. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call him. But he won’t be happy about it.”

  “Thu-thanks, Clay,” he said, and that scrubby little face broke out in a great big smile. “I rea-ruh-really appreci-a-a-appreciate this.”

  “You wait here,” I told him. “I’ll call from the bedroom. If you pick up the extension in here and try to listen in, I’ll hear you. And I’ll come in and take you apart.”

  “I wuh-wouldn’t do that, Clay. Honest. You know-know me buh-better than that.”