The Bedroom Bolero

by Michael Avallone

  Sanderson, James T. made a face but detectives first grade do not make a habit out of disagreeing with captains. I followed Monks into the room, a little curious why the front of 77 Riverside Drive hadn’t had the usual police activity lousing up the scenery. No squad cars, no patrolman on the sidewalk, no official buggers toting black bags. Not even a newspaperman to ask irritating questions.

  I had simply gone through the curtained glass door with the gilded 77 peeling with age, mounted a wide stairway that must have been ballustraded in Lillian Russell’s day and found a second floor door with the metal number “3” tacked to a burgundy-colored frame of wood. A brass name plate with a white card said Ellingham in perfect black script but that meant nothing to me. James T. had answered the door, sent me through a darkened foyer into a windowed living room that opened onto a courtyard flanked by more Manhattan brownstones and apartment houses, and called Monks in from another room.

  The captain and Sanderson seemed to be the only ones on deck, a curious switch in itself.

  “What’s all the mystery, Mike? You and Jimmy going steady?”

  “Forget the jokes,” he grimaced. “You’ve seen a lot of things I know but hang onto your dinner. This is something out of a Karloff movie.”

  Talking was obviously for later. He seemed more concerned about me getting an eyeful.

  Monks grunted, pulled back a yellow-painted door and motioned me in. His manner was a little unnerving. In two seconds flat, I could see why. The room we had entered was something out of everybody’s worst nightmare. Add large gobs of Grand Guignol and forty layers of hell and you might get the idea.

  The room was small and nearly exactly square. The ceiling and walls were a deep red of a bottomless shade that hurt the eyes. There was no illumination other than the lambent flickering of a string of cheap pinky-long bulbs like the kind you deck a Christmas tree with. The bulbs, all shapes and sizes, ran along the length of a two-ply wiring, which in itself was weird and ridiculous because the wire ran like a kid’s railroad tracks in a long oval in the very center of the room. A short length of extension cord lay on the floor, like the curl on the letter “Q,” plugging a light socket at the base of the footboards that squared the room.

  All of which would have been simply unusual except for the fact that there wasn’t a rug or a stitch of furniture in the room. There were just the deep red walls, no window, no pictures of any kind, the railroad track of Christmas lights on the floor and the single other thing that made the whole picture a gruesome leftover from the early history of the Spanish Inquisition.

  There was the naked body of a woman stretched on her back in the very center of the lighting display. The corpse was lying like a stiff on the slide of a pull-out drawer in the Bellevue Morgue. A lost Gulliver laid out neatly, surrounded by so many Lilliputians. The assorted colored bulbs that gleamed steadily in the red of the room.

  “My God,” was the best I could whisper on the spur of the moment.

  “Christmas is over,” Monks snarled in a low voice, urging me closer. “Take another look, Ed, and tell me if this isn’t the goddamnest homicide you’ve ever seen.”

  Helpless fascination is responsible for more curiosity than there are cats. I got as close as I dared and stared down at the corpse.

  Her nudity was upsetting because she had had one of those perfect figures where the stomach wall is flat, the hips taper like two halves of a medicine ball and the breasts poke confidently beautiful into the world of men. The body was white, something that may have had to do with dying, but seemed more an indication that the woman had been fair all over.

  Her throat was the topper. Fiercely gouged and fingermarked.

  The smile on Monks’ face was ghastly as the red walls of the room.

  “This makes two identical kills.”

  My smile matched his. “Quit clowning.”

  Monks raised his right hand, embarrassed. “I swear to God. The setup was just like this. A beautiful girl in an empty room. Those cheap lights. Of course, the fact that the first girl had a heart condition helps. And I’ll bet anything you care to name, we get the same report on this one.”

  “Wait a minute, Mike. I just got here, remember. Suppose you tell me this from the beginning, huh?”

  He told me. In a kitchen where there was a coffee pot and some sanity. Removed from the weird red room with the well-lighted corpse, I could at least listen to him without looking over my shoulder. When he had finished, I realized I had heard everything. I was glad Sanderson, James T. was on the door and not watching my confused face.

  Something suddenly struck me like a hammer blow.

  “And what about this Bolero. There was no record player in that room, was there?”

  Monks sighed laboriously, swiveled in his chair, and bellowed into the other room. “Jimmy! Turn that damn thing on for another second!”

  Almost on cue, the slow, undulating rhythm of Ravel’s Bolero seemed to crawl out of the walls. It pounded for a few da dadadadada da da dada and shut down almost as soon as it began. The kitchen walls went quiet again.

  “Satisfied?” Monks asked.

  I nodded. “Hi-fi. On when you came in, huh?”

  “Yeah. When you stand in the same room with the stiff, the music sounds like it’s right at your elbow.”

  “The wonders of science.” I lit a Camel. “Okay, Michael. Give. You’ve been properly mysterious long enough and I’m improperly bewildered.”

  “It’s almost a pleasure giving you a taste of your own medicine, Ed. You’ve told me some dillies in the past but this one tops anything you ever sliced for me. Listen.”

  I listened.

  It was something out of Fu Manchu this time. But even Sax Rohmer would have thought twice before setting it down.

  The first corpse had been named Dawn Dark. A showgirl, aged twenty-two, living all by her lonesome in a flat on First Avenue. A heart murmur had caused her to give up dancing for a living. An anonymous phone call to Headquarters had sent a detective and two cops to her home with drawn guns. When they walked in, they found two little rooms and a kitchenette. One of the rooms was painted a solid red, furnitureless save for a portable record player repeating the Bolero over and over again. They also found Dawn Dark straight as a naked board on the floor of the red room, surrounded by a running track of cheap lights. The Medical Examiner was clear about what had killed her. The condition of her throat plus her medical record made a positive homicide.

  So Monks had come and asked me questions. He’d sat around downtown personally, requesting any anonymous calls to be transferred to his office. A thin, dry maniacal voice had said, “Eve Ellingham is listening to the Bolero, policeman. Better hurry to 77 Riverside Drive before she dies laughing.” Monks had hurried, crank call or no crank call. He had brought Sanderson, James T., with him. Then he had called me.

  He watched the smoke rising from my burning-low cigarette.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Ed. This one is real screwy.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Okay, but I’m betting the M.E. finds another bum heart plus another orgy.”

  “It’s crazy,” I said. “No matter how you look at it. Red rooms, the Bolero and two girls going under the same way. But it is a pattern, isn’t it? A maniac’s screwy pattern. Did the two girls know each other?”

  Monks groaned. “Eve Ellingham was just an office worker as far as we can tell from papers around the house. But now all the hard work begins. We got to check, follow up, grill boy friends and acquaintances. My God, it’s going to be no picnic.”

  “The records,” I said. “What about them? Were they the same?”

  He looked baffled. “Of course. The Bolero. Is there more than one?”

  “Mike,” I said patiently. “Every conductor worth his baton has recorded the number. It also comes in three speeds and three sizes. It may or may not be important.”

  He couldn’t see where it might be. He shrugged. “The platter in the Dark girl’s place was an LP I think. It’s d
own at Headquarters now. I haven’t touched this one yet.”

  “Let’s go look.”

  The hi-fi set was worked into the wall as part of a sliding bookcase which was jammed with books ranging from best sellers like Advise And Consent to a bunch of technical titles on office administration. It looked like Eve Ellingham had been aiming to be the Girl in the White Flannel Suit. But she’d died with her clothes off.

  The player had only the one record on the turntable. I looked at it without picking it up. It was a Victor record, numbered LM-1012, with Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The flip side was Ravel’s Ma Mere l’Oye according to the album cover lying nearby. Ravel couldn’t have done much better than Koussevitsky driving the melody.

  “Well,” Monks grunted, “that looks like the other one. It was twelve inches too.”

  “I don’t know if it means anything, Mike. I’m just thinking out loud —”

  “They’re here,” Sanderson called from the doorway. Shoes pounded on the staircase. “The M.E.’s with them, too.”

  “Okay,” Monks rumbled. “Let’s get this party started.” He winked at me. “Any questions you want to ask the Doc, be my guest. This looks like it’s going to be a lulu of a murder case.”

  For once, I had to agree with him.

  The M.E. wasn’t much help. He spent twenty minutes in the red room while Monks and I fidgeted, watching the lab men and fingerprint powder boys dust off everything in sight. I had another cup of coffee before the M.E. came into the kitchen folding up his portable workshop. He was a little man with a dull, grey face and a multitude of patience behind his horn-rimmed glasses. He scowled at me because he didn’t recognize me but his tired smile was for Monks.

  “Elaborate murder, Captain. Seen a lot of corpus delicti in my time but —”

  “This one is delicious, huh?” I said.

  His cowled eyes frowned at me some more. Monks sighed. “Cut it out, Ed. Go ahead, Doc. Never mind Noon here. He makes a lot of bum jokes but he’s a good cop.”

  The M.E. shrugged. “Can’t say as I blame him. The corpse was a perfectly developed Caucasian, about twenty-two or three. Or four. Teeth haven’t got so much as a cavity. But it looks like she had a bad heart. I can tell better downtown when you boys move her. But death was due to a manual strangulation.”

  I was thinking of the maddening beat of the Bolero coming from the walls of a red room. A beautiful, naked woman with a bad heart could forget herself, everything. But a killer who knew what the score was with the victim and planned it that way, was as cold-blooded as they could possibly come.

  Monks cursed. “What a case.”

  The M.E. shrugged. “Captain, she died some time this afternoon. Say about three o’clock. That’s as close as I’ll commit myself. Now if you’re finished with me, I’ll get on home. Unless you want me to follow through on this tonight —”

  “No, Doc.” Monks looked weary. “First thing in the morning will be okay. If you can give me an autopsy by twelve, I’ll be satisfied.”

  He nodded and moved off, side-stepping the official ants scurrying all over the Ellingham apartment. The dim red glow of the painted murder room looked like a Halloween party with no celebrants. I thought about Eve Ellingham lying in there with a sheet over her outraged nudity and shivered. Sanderson came over, his big face lined and tired.

  “Cap,” Sanderson told Monks. “This is the screwiest thing I’ve ever seen. Doc give you anything to go on?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy. Three o’clock. Take Saunders and make a door-by-door check on all the other apartments in this dump. Somebody must have heard that damn Bolero going on the hi-fi. Or maybe somebody saw this Ellingham dame with some man at one time or another.” He dragged the skin of his left cheek down with a heavy hand. “I’m not hoping too hard but we have to try, don’t we?”

  “Sure, Mike,” Sanderson agreed and moved off, signaling Saunders who was gabbing with a powdering plainclothes man by the window.

  “Well, Ed. It looks like we got a Ripper of some kind, don’t it? I hope the nut doesn’t start sending in letters to the newspapers telling how stupid the police are. That’s all we need.”

  I shook my head. “Hope that he does, Mike. The only way you’re going to catch this bird is if he starts advertising.”

  “Come again?”

  “If he did a screwy thing like this twice, the chances are he’ll try for three. This must be only the beginning.”

  Monks cursed because he knew I was right. “What do we do?” he asked sourly. “Go around looking for young dames with weak hearts who have record players and a room with four red walls?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m going home. I’ll talk to you tomorrow when you hear from the lab. There’s not a dime to be made around here and I do have a business to run.”

  “Ed — try to think of something.” His eyes were almost pleading. Monks doesn’t like fancy homicides. He likes them simple. A shooting, a knifing — even poison. He doesn’t like to play Sherlock Holmes. What hard-working cop does? A job is a job.

  “I’ll try. But nothing will help until this Bolero boy makes his next move. With all this elaboration, he has to be somebody who’s covered his tracks pretty well. This is a pattern, like a carefully worked out map of battle strategy.”

  “He? What makes you so sure it’s a he?”

  “Michael,” I mocked. “These girls didn’t die from laughing too hard and your anonymous phone caller was a man, wasn’t he?”

  “You can’t tell about voices on phones, Ed. You know that.”

  “Okay. But it still takes a man to love a woman. Or doesn’t it?”

  He winced. “Call me. And thanks for coming.”

  I left 77 Riverside Drive close to nine o’clock that Thursday night. I wasn’t a block away from the place, on foot, when I realized I was trying to walk home which wasn’t exactly logical considering that my home address like my office was brand new.

  I grabbed a cab on Broadway and Seventy-Second, humming the Bolero and trying to assemble the clutter of thoughts leftover from a tumultuous day. I wondered if Melissa Mercer was snug in her bed in Harlem, if Peg Temple was saying, “Love me, Murray, love me,” in that unforgettable little-girl’s voice and if the walking jewelry store, Miss Fenson, had employed a private detective who had more business acumen than I did.

  I just didn’t know that a maniac whose identity I couldn’t even guess was setting a record on a turntable in a red room somewhere in Manhattan and walking nakedly toward a nude victim on the floor, with a mad smile on his insane face.

  While the victim with the bad heart waited —

  The killer who played the Bolero had only just begun his dizzy revolution toward a masterpiece of mass murder.

  A real gone Bolero.

  3 — The Evil Evelyn

  I called my answering service when I finally locked myself in my new apartment just a stone’s throw from Central Park. I had four rooms facing green trees a floor above the Western side of all that grass. I had wearied of furnished rooms and small offices after ten years of scratching out what they laughingly call an existence. The apartment was by no means deluxe but I’d ordered some lounges and chairs, tacked up a few pictures I liked and made myself at home. A woman would have wrinkled her pretty nose at my decor of male idiocy. But the joint was mine.

  Flo Cooper answered my call. She is a nice woman with nice nostrils who had never fallen for the Noon brand of charm. I suspected that was because there was no possibility of a wedding ring in a relationship with a guy like me. I never pressed her and a miracle occurred. We were very good friends and she was a tonic that way.

  “You had one call, Ed,” she said crisply. “Evelyn Eleven.”

  “A natural. But you are kidding.”

  “I am merely here to relay messages and calls, Mr. Noon. We add an extra charge if we have to make jokes.”

  “All right then. I’ll go along with the gag. What the clients call themselves is
their business. She leave a message?”

  “She wants to see you at ten in the morning. But she left a number for you.” Cooper read it off to me and I jotted it down. “You surprise me, Noon. Thought you got around. Don’t you know who Evelyn Eleven is?”

  In a world in which there are people called Robert Six, Johnny Seven and an actress once chose to call herself Helen Twelvetrees, I had no axe to grind. I simply thought it was a cute name.

  “No, Cooper. Who is she?”

  “Currently a craze of some kind in the Village. Works in a black gown, white face and a lot of weird hocus-pocus. Dracula’s Daughter with a night club act, if you can picture it. Gave a Carnegie Hall recital a few months ago. You know, like that Theodore. The Knight Of Evil. You must have heard of him.”

  “Flo,” I mocked. “You’ve been stepping out on me. Who’s the lucky man?”

  I heard her sniff audibly. “You should talk. Hired a secretary today and never thought of me. I could have liked a job with you.”

  “Sorry, Flo.” I was sorry. “I had to have somebody I could just think of as a secretary. With you around, I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate.”

  “Is that why you hired her?”

  “Your prejudice is showing, Cooper.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said mildly enough. “I just know you better than you know yourself.”

  When she hung up, I sat drumming the black receiver wondering if I hadn’t run and hidden like Flo had said. Had I hired Melissa Mercer to give myself an excuse for not playing matrimonial footsie with a new secretary? Was I the free-thinker I thought I was or just a bachelorial coward who wouldn’t try his luck too hard?

  It whipped me. Everything whipped me. The Bolero thing and the whole mess of euphonious handles that had popped up all over the place. Mike Monks, Melissa Mercer, Dawn Dark, Eve Ellingham and now Evelyn Eleven.