Don't Bleed on Me (A Mike Faraday P.I. Mystery Book 6) Read online

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  ‘His face was as broad as the moon, pink and hairless, and his great bald scalp was like a reflection of his face. His mouth was a remorseless gap in his features. His left eye was covered by an eye patch made of some silver material which caught the light. His one remaining eye, which was red-rimmed and bloodshot, had a gold monocle screwed into it.’

  An evocative description of the mad President Trygon, Mike Faraday’s principal opponent in his sixth adventure, in which the laconic Californian private eye is pitted against a state within a state. The story moves at a rattling pace to match the machine-gun and tank finale, which surpasses spectacle in Mike’s previous cases. April Dawn is the new girl, but Stella is against firmly in control of the office.

  MIKE FARADAY 6: DON’T BLEED ON ME

  By Basil Copper

  First published by Robert Hale Limited in 1968

  Copyright © 1968, 2014 by Basil Copper

  First Kindle Edition: October 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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

  Cover image © 2014 by Rob Moran

  Visit Rob here

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One – Cardinal Bishop

  Chapter Two – A Long, Cool Drink

  Chapter Three – Man With a Tin Leg

  Chapter Four – Near-Miss

  Chapter Five – April Dawn

  Chapter Six – Dead Freight

  Chapter Seven – Bishop’s Palace

  Chapter Eight – City Dump

  Chapter Nine – Love and Hisses

  Chapter Ten – Target Practice

  Chapter Eleven – Flak in the Afternoon

  Chapter Twelve – Unhappy Landing

  Chapter Thirteen – A Summons from the President

  Chapter Fourteen – Cabinet Re-Shuffle

  Chapter Fifteen – Delayed Execution

  Chapter Sixteen – Dawn Rises Again

  Chapter Seventeen – Ordeal by Water

  Chapter Eighteen – Tank Warfare

  Chapter Nineteen – Death of a President

  Chapter Twenty – Star Witness

  Author’s Note

  The California of the Mike Faraday novels is a mythical setting, evolved for plot purposes; this includes the weather, geographic and topographical features. It hardly needs emphasizing that the characters are equally fictional. This does not mean to say that the incidents described are not highly probable; in fact many of the incidents described in the books have since come true in a surprisingly parallel manner. While this may be saddening from the point of view of human nature it goes a long way towards explaining Mike Faraday’s philosophy on mankind’s greed.

  B.C.

  Chapter One – Cardinal Bishop

  1

  It was one of those deceptively golden days in early fall when you begin to think that you’ll never again hear from the tax authorities and that human nature has abandoned graft and mayhem. You should know better but the sun and the heat-haze and the benevolent gleam in people’s eyes has temporarily conned you and you might perhaps be allowed to forget the darker side. For half an hour, that is.

  I was sitting in my office concentrating on a strenuous session of pitching paper clips into my wastebasket. Even the air conditioning was working. Which was saying something. It was around lunchtime and I was just thinking of shutting up shop when I heard the reception room door open and close softly. I knew it wasn’t Stella because she wasn’t due in until early afternoon. Business was slack and that was the arrangement while the heat was off. A shadow materialized against the frosted glass.

  ‘Come in,’ I called.

  There was a moment’s hesitation and then a short, stout party with the most insincere face I’d seen in decades oozed through the doorway. He wore a dark tussore suit that hung limply around his ample poundage; he was a great hunk of man—except that most of it was fat. A thin smear of mustache made a sneering interruption between his nose and his mouth; two gold teeth winked ingratiatingly from between his lips. His eyebrows were Mephistophelean. His close-cropped sandy hair made the top of his head look like a toilet brush.

  ‘Mr. Faraday?’ His voice was soft and womanish. He twisted his green pork-pie hat in sweating hands. I admitted it. The fat man sank into the chair I indicated; he mopped a greasy brow with a red-bordered handkerchief he took from his rear pants pocket. ‘We’re in the same line of business, Mr. Faraday.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ I said.

  The fat man blinked; he looked the type that was used to scarcely veiled denigration. He produced a dirty piece of pasteboard from a cheap imitation crocodile-skin wallet and slid it across the desk at me.

  I held it between my thumb and forefinger. It said; Cardinal Bishop; and underneath, Private Investigations —Divorce a Specialty. I’ll bet, I said to myself. I put the card back on my blotter and waited for him to speak. He didn’t so the move was up to me.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr. Bishop?’ I said.

  The fat man blinked again. He ran a blue-pink tongue round his plump lower lip. ‘I’ve run into a little trouble, Mr. Faraday. Strong-arm action. It’s a bit out of my line.’

  ‘So you farm out the muscle stuff,’ I said. ‘So long as it’s legal.’

  Cardinal Bishop lowered his pouchy eyelids over his insincere eyes and tried to look as if my suggestion had pained him. ‘It’s legal,’ he said.

  I studied his card again. ‘With a name like that you ought to be in the church,’ I said.

  Mr. Bishop went pink around his fat ears and he rolled his eyes once or twice. I guessed he had heard it all before.

  ‘No jokes about my name, Mr. Faraday,’ he mumbled. He wiped his forehead again, transferring more grease to his handkerchief.

  ‘This is serious. I thought we might do a deal. For a percentage.’

  ‘Depends on the percentage,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I’ve never taken a farmed out case before. It would have to be something pretty special.’

  ‘It is, Mr. Faraday,’ said Cardinal Bishop with just a shade too much eagerness in his tone. ‘I thought I could take care of the footwork and the office inquiries while you handled the tough stuff.’

  ‘Sounds like an unfair division of labor to me, Mr. Bishop,’ I said. ‘You’d better start talking. Then we’ll see.’

  Cardinal Bishop lit a half-smoked cheroot he took out of a battered tobacco tin. He blew out a cloud of poisonous smog and put his spent match in my ashtray.

  ‘That’s more like it, Mr. Faraday,’ he said with another burst of insincerity. He drew on the cheroot once or twice and his gold teeth flashed with enthusiasm.

  ‘I had a call from Alcazar Trucking out at Brentwood two, three days ago,’ he said. ‘One of their drivers and a truck had gone missing.’

  ‘Hi-jacking?’ I said. I took down the trucking company’s address on my scratch pad.

  Cardinal Bishop shook his head. He ran a finger stained yellow with nicotine across his cropped scalp.

  ‘Naw,’ he said with
a scowl. ‘I already thought of that. According to the sheets the truck was carrying rubble when it went. I checked the guy’s address; he boards in a rooming house with two other company drivers on the other side of town.’

  ‘So?’ I said. I swiveled in my chair and looked out to where yellow bars of sunshine made a dazzle of the traffic on the boulevard.

  ‘Let me get to it, Mr. Faraday,’ Bishop went on, still in the same whining tone. ‘I been in this game long enough to know what’s what.’

  ‘That’s why you’ve come to me?’ I said politely.

  Bishop studied the end of his cheroot and ignored my remark. Anyways,’ he went on. T sniffed around for a couple of days. I checked up where the truck had been working.’

  ‘What were they doing?’ I said.

  ‘Alcazar had a contract for a city housing project,’ the fat man said. ‘All they were doing was taking the excavated earth and dumping it outside town.’

  ‘They earn big money for that,’ I said. ‘Shift work. Two drivers falling out?’

  Bishop scowled again. ‘Maybe, maybe,’ he said. ‘But somehow I don’t think so.’

  ‘What’s the name of the client at Alcazar Trucking?’ I said. ‘The guy who hired you?’

  Bishop sighed. ‘I didn’t get to finish. Davidson owns the company. It was him sent for me.’

  I made a note of that too.

  ‘There must be more,’ I said. ‘Else you wouldn’t be here.’

  Bishop gave me another eight and a half millimeters of gold filling. ‘There is,’ he said heavily, ‘if you let me get it out. I went over the housing contract site. Nothing. Guy had left the site with a load as usual. He hadn’t turned up at the regular tipping place.’

  ‘Perhaps he found a better one.’ I said.

  Bishop nodded once or twice. ‘Bright, Mr. Faraday,’ he said. ‘Bright. My thinking was good. I done right in contacting you, I can see that. I did a bit more footwork, then I gassed up the car and went over the guy’s route.’

  ‘You haven’t told me his name yet,’ I said.

  The breath came out of Bishop’s mouth like air escaping from a burst balloon.

  ‘Kovacs. Charlie Kovacs. Now can I get on?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I filled in one or two points on my pad. ‘You can cut down on the descriptive.’

  Bishop bit on his cheroot so hard it almost broke in two. ‘A guy wouldn’t find it awful hard to dislike you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m only in it for the money,’ I said.

  ‘I was up Tintoretto Canyon this morning,’ Bishop went on. ‘There were tire-tracks leading off. I found Kovacs’ body. Looked like he’d been shot through the head. No sign of the truck.’

  He studied his fingernails and crossed his legs ostentatiously. A fly buzzed loudly in the sudden silence.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you’d find it so,’ said Bishop. His shifty eyes studied me a shade too carelessly.

  ‘You gave the law a call?’ I said.

  Bishop shook his head. His eyes fixed me with something like supplication in them.

  ‘I can’t afford to get mixed up with the law in my business,’ he said. ‘I beat it straight across to you.’

  ‘Too bad,’ I told him. ‘Homicide won’t like it, Bishop.’

  The fat man stubbed out his cheroot in my tray; he looked hopelessly at the pointed toes of his cheap shoes.

  ‘They don’t have to know,’ he said with a flash of cunning in his already insincere eyes. ‘Not if you went up there, Faraday, and made the discovery.’

  ‘After you’d already been retained by Davidson,’ I said. ‘Use your marbles. That wouldn’t stand up for five minutes.’

  ‘It might if you said I’d come to you before the body was found,’ Bishop said. ‘I thought you might do it to help a fellow operative.’

  I winced; Bishop tried not to look offended.

  ‘I’ll overlook your last remark you overfed little man,’ I said. I went over and looked down at the boulevard. I turned to face him. He looked like a bag of jelly sagged in the chair in front of my desk.

  ‘You sure you told me everything?’ I said.

  ‘Sure, Mr. Faraday,’ he said. ‘If I swear on my mother’s—’

  ‘Don’t risk it,’ I said. ‘Your mother might not like it.’

  I went and sat down at my broad top again. I frowned at Bishop through the thin streamers of smoke that still curled up from the ashtray. ‘You told anybody about this at all?’

  He shook his head. ‘You see, Mr. Faraday, I had a little trouble with the cops once before. They threatened to revoke my license if I got in any more difficulties.’

  ‘I bet they did,’ I said. I got out my large-scale map of the L.A. area and studied it, turning over a few facts in my mind. ‘You left Kovacs where you found him and came straight back?’

  Bishop nodded. ‘We could go in my car,’ he said. ‘It’s right outside.’

  ‘That would be sensible,’ I said. ‘Considering what you’ve just told me. The police may be there already.’

  Bishop looked sheepish. ‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ he admitted. ‘This party looks a bit too rough for me. I thought we might split fifty-fifty.’

  I gave him a long, hard look.

  ‘Forty-sixty,’ he said hastily.

  ‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘I haven’t yet said whether I’m interested or whether you go out that door with the toe of my brogue in the right place.’

  ‘There’s no need to get tough, Faraday,’ he said in a high, strangled voice.

  I ignored him and went on looking at the map. ‘I’ll see Davidson myself and explain,’ I said. ‘If I take this thing up. And something tells me I’d be halfway to the psycho ward if I believed more than three-tenths of what you’ve told me.’

  ‘Believe me, Mr. Faraday, if I drop dead right now ...’ he said.

  He broke off when he saw the expression on my face. I waited for him to drop dead. It surprised me when I saw him still sitting in the chair.

  ‘I’ll have a look up there, Bishop,’ I said. ‘But I’m not promising anything.’

  2

  I fumigated the office after Bishop left, scrawled a note to Stella and got down to street level. The elevator wasn’t working, so I pounded the linoleum; like always, the place smelt of stale carbolic and unredeemed hopes. I walked two blocks to where I’d parked my old powder-blue Buick convertible and slid behind the wheel. On the way across town I checked on the large-scale map of L.A. while killing time in a traffic-jam.

  I stopped at Jinty’s to get outside their blue-plate special and an iced beer; it wasn’t crowded this time of day and it was quiet in the booth. I bought a package of cigarettes at the long bar and came away just before three. Once I got on the freeway I started making mileage. It wasn’t a long run and there was a cool breeze which took some of the bite out of the smog. The Buick had just been leathered but I could see fine particles of grit powdering the bonnet like dark snow.

  The foothills were high and blue when I tooled the Buick off the highway and on to a secondary metaled road leading upwards round shoulders of green shrub and vegetation. There were some nice houses up on the heights and the ladies who were home from their shopping excursions were showing a fine acreage of tanned flesh on their pool-patios. I jerked my eyes back to the road as a redhead with a 36-18-34 figure scuttled across clean-shaved turf and took a header into a blue-tiled swim pool shaped like a guitar.

  It had a bad effect on my driving and I was glad when I left the residential section and struck the fork to Tintoretto; the Buick’s wheels made a rough song over the graveled track and walls of white limestone started throwing back the heat of the sun. The road twisted round hairpin bends for a bit and then I drew the Buick in on the verge and killed the motor. It was very warm and still up here, with only the long, high, insistent note of a bird that repeated itself every ten seconds or so.

  I got out of the car, lit a cigarette and started t
o walk quietly up, treading softly on the turf at the road-edge. The bird went on practicing its scales in the heat and the silence. I stroked out my cigarette with the heel of my shoe. This seemed like the place Bishop had described, a narrow fork that turned off the main canyon drive and spiraled farther up the hillside.

  I looked around slowly. There was a house way back off the road, set on stilts, with green wood shutters and a double carport. It had white entrance gates with a bowed white wood canopy over the top of them, like a Chinese pavilion in an old print. Nothing moved on the green turf or in the flower garden beyond. The water in the pool set in its turquoise tiled surround didn’t show a ripple in the stillness which gripped the place.

  I got off the road and went up the fork; I could see the tire-marks of a big truck in the dust of the dirt road. It died out on a stony platform over which the road ran and then went on up the canyon: I walked to the right, down a steeply shelving bank; the grass and dust had been disturbed here. It looked like something or somebody had been dragging a heavy sack down into the ravine bottom. I went down to where Bishop had told me to look. There was nothing in the grass except a heavy impression which might or might not have been caused by a man named Kovacs.

  I got down closer; the grass stems were gradually straightening upwards. The sun was very warm here, low on the ground, and I could smell the moist, good smell of earth and damp grass. I put my hand on to the ground and felt the vegetation; there was a patch of something like rust. My forefinger came away sticky and moist. I wiped my fingers on a patch of dry grass and got up thoughtfully.

  Something buzzed loudly in the dead silence. A big blowfly with a greeny-blue sheen on its wings came and perched on a twig and glanced at me; it probed delicately with its forefeet at the russet patch, looked at me hesitantly with its many-faceted eyes. The wicked thing buzzed loudly again, as though with alarm, and flew off.

  ‘You and me both,’ I said.

  I turned to go up the bank behind me. There would be plenty of time to look for the truck.

  It was only then I noticed a man’s dark shadow stenciled on the white dust at my feet.