Killer on the Keys

by Michael Avallone

  "You must understand—a woman in my line of work—threats and violence are all around me—Cosmo does protect me—he always plays the butler when I receive callers—"

  "You didn't know I was coming," I reminded her, struggling erect, pushing her imploring hands away, as good as they felt. "I dropped in on you fresh out of the blue. Remember?"

  "You remember, Edward. I saw the portents, the omens. A rainbow in the sky this morning and tonight your palm proves it all—"

  "Sure. And Sinatra doesn't like girls. Where's my hat?"

  I was standing now, before her, swaying like a Methusaleh in his eight hundredth year. I felt like a bonfire underway. My jaw was blazing with puffiness, my arms and legs were knotty pine. I took a long slow glance at the tall mess of muscle spread out on the red shag. He was nose down, arms flopped out comically. He looked dead, but I took her word for it that he wasn't. I couldn't have cared less right then. All I wanted was Out With no more sleigh rides.

  She handed me the porkpie fedora. I took it stiffly, setting it at a jaunty angle. She stared up at me, frowning. I surveyed her for one more thoughtful moment. There was woman to spare in her regally ample figure and her face was still a Claire Bloom replica. It was a little sad, at that. But there would still be Cosmo to spoil things when he came around. The worried look in Madame Alarma's wide, sensual eyes mirrored some of the inner chagrin I was feeling.

  "Well, gee, thanks," I said. "For all your kindness."

  "You're not going—" She shook her head, unbelievingly.

  "You have a better idea? I don't fancy going another two rounds with your dear Cosmo. My puss hurts. Game's over, Stephanie Orodney. For tonight, that is. Don't call me. I'll call you."

  "Don't be a fool!" She hissed the words at me. Low, fiery and utterly contemptuous. "We are bound together by the stars. We were meant to be! You can't fly in the face of the Fates!"

  "I'll fly United and do whatever I damn please if I feel like it. I don't see us as Romeo and Juliet, lady. So get out of my way before I put you in the prone position. And not the way you have in mind. Don't you notice? I'm mad, sister. Good and plenty mad. And when I get that way, I start breaking things. Including lovely ladies who drive my friends up the walls. What's your partner's full name by the way?"

  I jerked a thumb at the recumbent gladiator in a flunky's suit and she was so stunned and confused by my vocal outburst that she answered almost dumbly, reflexively, before she could make up her mind about refusing, or playing more games.

  "Cosmo. Cosmo Pappas. He's a Health expert—"

  "Sure he is." I sighed unhappily. "Well, don't send him looking for me. I'll kill him if you do. Tell him that when he wakes up. I can revert to type when I'm pushed into it, Madame."

  "Edward, please don't go. Stay. I'll do something for your face and Cosmo will listen to me—"

  "No way. Ciao, sweetheart. I'll be back, never fear. When I can pin something on you. Anything at all but particularly anything that has to do with what brought me here in the first place."

  She took an arched step backward, frowning at me, shaking her unforgettable head. The lights of the room made her seem weird.

  "You'll regret this, Edward. Really you will—"

  Her voice was a low snaking whip of promise. Sotto voce, but it put nails, the rack and the Iron Maiden in my immediate future.

  "Right on. Goodbye again." I turned toward the archway.

  "Goodbye, Edward Noon."

  She watched me go, saying no more. Standing tall and wickedly gorgeous, occultly dark and sinister, almost directly under the crystal palace of a chandelier. My last impression of her was a frightening one. There was an enigmatic smirk on the lovely Bloom face, more than a hint of evil in the widely-spaced deep eyes, a staggering aura of malevolence in her entire attitude. Her mystic ambience filled the room.

  She had It, all right, whatever It really was.

  I got out of that queer domicile as fast as my battered condition would allow. Knowing I had accomplished pretty much of Nothing. There was little to show for the evening: no further steps toward the solution of Gregory's dilemma, nothing but a face that felt like raw hamburger and probably looked the same way. Oh, it was a lovely night all the way. A star-crossed interlude, filled with those wonderful events and gay happenings that make the life of a private operator so much fun and games. My mood was murderous when I hit the street below, after a somber, angry ride down in an elevator car which seemed like another leftover from those same Crawford-Turner movies. I could have kicked myself the full distance, but I didn't. I felt sorry for myself, that's why. As simple as that.

  There was still the mystery of Gregory.

  And the acute problem of Melissa Mercer, waiting in her apartment or mine right now, for the answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question. I was running out of time and excuses.

  Still, there was a time to fight and a time to lick your wounds.

  Madame Alarma, born Stephanie Orodney, in a town called Szegedd, had left several doors wide open, though.

  Doors I intended to use. If I didn't die first.

  It was something to think about, palms or no palms.

  I thought about it all the long ride home, in spite of one very leary black hackie who saw entering his flagged-down cab on the corner of quiet Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue late at night, a man with a damaged kisser. A man who might be a troublemaker, a rummy or a bigot. And maybe all three. He kept a wary eye on me even as he drove skillfully through the crowded canyons of Manhattan. He was especially watchful as we took the transverse through Central Park. I closed my eyes and relaxed against the back seat. To let him out of his lonely misery.

  Snow began to fall as the cab cruised through the massed trees and high shrubbery, finding the lighted thoroughfares and lanes, crossing toward the western side of things. Light, feathery fluffs of white downpour, gently slapping the metallic sides of the vehicle.

  I wondered if it was snowing in Highmark Meadows up around Montauk. I wondered what Gregory was doing at exactly that moment.

  I wondered about everything that had happened that terribly unsatisfying night. Curiously, the palms of both my hands itched.

  As if they had come in contact with something ugly.

  Ugly, infectious and—dirty.

  They had.

  Melissa was waiting up for me when I came in.

  Somehow I had known she would be there. It all fitted in. There was magic in the air that night. And witchcraft. And destiny.

  She sprang into my arms when she saw the condition of my face, her great eyes opening in fear and instant empathy. She was wearing the cheongsam that made her look like the Taj Mahal and the rich and warm yellow hues of it set off her beautiful blackness as if they had been made for each other. They were.

  "Ed—oh, your face—"

  "Just don't touch. Honest, I'm okay. Stack of Bibles."

  "But what happened—?"

  "You want to hear the old one about a revolving blonde or the one about getting your kisser caught between bookends—"

  "You nut—you crazy nut—"

  She hugged me then, holding me in the dimness of the foyer leading into the apartment. There were no jungle drums, no madly soaring pipes, no madness. It was all string music. Strictly string. All Mozart and Tchaikowsky and Gershwin and Rodgers and tingly and thrilling and sweet and nice. And all of it real melody for real lovers.

  She stared up into my face, searching, unhappy and happy all at the same time. The way it always is with the Mc Coy.

  "You going to tell me about it, Ed?"

  "Later. I promise. But, hey—guess what?"

  "What what?"

  "I've got a real scoop for you. The best kind, I hope. Nothing can compare to it, I think. It's a beaut of a message, I'd say."

  "You hope, you think, you'd say—oh, Ed—"

  "Yes, Mel. Yes, positively, yes, absolutely, yes, definitely. A thousand times Yes. Do you get my subtle meaning?"

  She got i
t, all right.

  And she got me.

  All she could do was hold me tighter, murmuring, sobbing into my snow-flecked coat, saying all the silly and wonderful things people will say at times like that. For myself, a crazy, climbing-high bird was flapping all over my chest, heart and lungs. I'd finally said the Magic Word. I was genuinely amazed how simple it had been to say.

  Yes, Melissa. I'll marry you. Will you be my wife?

  I hadn't said that, of course. But I hadn't had to. She knew that my answer was all about it. She had lived for the word for seven wild, heart-breaking years. And now it had broken the silence between us. Like a long overdue time bomb suddenly sounding off.

  Bang. Just like that.

  But she had to ask some questions. Any real woman would. So while she dabbed and played Florence Nightingale on my face with assorted cotton swabs, mercuro-chrome and tinctures of, I sat still for the loveliest Third Degree this side of a game show.

  "Why the sudden change, Eddie?"

  "About what?"

  "About me and you."

  "Oh, I don't know. I suppose I'm tired of contraceptive devices, I want to forget about your precious time of the month. I want to forget about a lot of things. Namely, I want to remember you."

  "You mean we're going to try for a baby, right away?"

  "Wouldn't that be something? We'd really have some suspense then, lady. Wondering whether we make a black boy, white girl or vice versa. But hey—don't rush it. I may be shooting blanks after all these years. I've gone to the well too often."

  "I'm not worried about you. Not a bit."

  "I'm not either. Be fun any way you look at it. Nice to try, too. There always was the possibility, wasn't there? Even with all the advantages of Medical Science and our willing flesh. Things have a way of happening, Mel. No matter what people try to do."

  "Ohhh—that cheekbone doesn't look too good. You may have a hairline fracture. That hurt?"

  "It hurts but it's not a hairline fracture."

  "You're a doctor now, I suppose. License and all. Damn you, Noon, for a meddling, troublesome, girl-worrying so-and-so—"

  "Hey, if you're going to be a nag, forget the whole thing."

  She came to me later, in the bedroom, as she always had, spirited, magnificent, beautiful and free. We lay in each other's arms for a long while. There was no time, actually. There never is a clock when the fix is in between two people. We had always run on the same hour and minute hands. We watched the lovely way the lights of the City and the Park below played on the ceiling of the room. In the darkness, Melissa snuggled against me, keeping me warm, protected and all together.

  "There's only one catch, Mel."

  "Oh, oh," she laughed low. "You Indian-giving, Noon?"

  "No way, Mercer. But before I trot you down to City Hall and make honest folks of us both, tomorrow we have to play detective all over again. Shouldn't take more than a day or so. Okay?"

  "I am yours to command." She blew on my battered cheek before she kissed the ache tenderly. "What do we have to do?"

  "We're going to dig out files on a lot of people. On Tadeusz Anton Gregory, on a woman-witch who calls herself Madame Alarma, then there's her bodyguard playmate who seems to be named Cosmo Pappas. I'll have to call Mike Monks for what I want to know about the deaths of Georges Valentin and Algernon Gerard—but this has to be done, Mel. I just couldn't run off with you someplace for a honeymoon, knowing Gregory is still a strait-jacket customer and there might have been something I could have done to get him out of that harness. You know how I am."

  "Don't I ever," she whispered fervently. "That bleeding heart of yours is why I fell for you in the first place. It's not just your manly body and pretty face, you know." She stopped kidding around and lowered her own to mine, placing her head below my bruised chin. "You care and that's why I care. . . . "

  I think you get the picture.

  What are you going to do with a woman like that?

  I did it. We did it together.

  Over and over again until we both fell asleep in each others arms. Loving and protecting each other against the darkness and the confusion and the uncertainty of this cockeyed caravan we all call Life and Living. We huddled like children under the covers.

  But it was Death we were united against.

  Death, most of all.

  Death, all the time.

  DIRGE IN ONE DAY FLAT

  "How do you go about exhuming a corpse, Michael?" I asked my friendly neighborhood Police Captain in the grimy cubicle of his private precinct office the next morning. It was about twelve hours after Melissa Mercer and I had exchanged midnight vows and I'd left her with enough secretarial and Sherlockana legwork to keep her hopping most of the day. "Two corpses, to be exact."

  "You can't bring Gary Cooper back, no matter how bad you want it," Monks growled amiably enough, his keen eyes twinkling in the barroom-floor map that passes for his face. "No, and not even that other boyhood hero of yours—Mel Ott. You'll have to meet them in Heaven, Ed, or wherever the hell we all wind up finally."

  "Don't clown around. It's not your speed. I'm serious."

  "What are you getting at? Level with me. You never really drop in on me just to pass the time of day. I know you too long, you fugitive from the Establishment. What gives?"

  I eyed him with the usual mixture of fondness and regret. He was the best man I ever knew, in or out of uniform, but he'd been a police dog so long he had all the virtues and all the faults. Not even a square desk, a fine record and the fact that he'd been wearing plainclothes for more than two decades had altered the most suspicious mind since Leonardo Da Vinci. Manhattan had never precisely taken good care of him. His little office was a shabby throwback to the old Roaring Twenties. It was so modern in furnishings and equipment that there still was a '40 model watercooler by the door. Pale November sunlight stealing in through high, casement windows set every dust mote in the office to dancing, exposing the steel green files and familiar department accessories for the shop-worn antiques they were. Early Lloyd Nolan.

  "I'm thinking about Gregory's two dead piano players and him up in that Montauk Happydale still cutting out paper dolls and making wicker baskets. I don't like that at all. Do you?"

  "So?" His curious scowl spoke volumes for his firm belief in the good book. The book of rules. He did everything by that book.

  "So I've had to wonder about the whole mess for too many weeks now. I was waiting until you got yourself squared away after your Chicago Convention Policemen's Ball—whatever that was."

  "It was a proper meeting of police officials from every state in the union," Monks said coldly. "And important from my point of view. We're all pretty tired of being called Pigs."

  "Okay." I slid by that because he knew where I stood on the matter. "I've come to you now asking for your help. I need just about all you can spare, Mr. Captain, Sir."

  "What corpses are you interested in, may I ask?"

  "Two fairly recent stiffs who weren't classified as homicides but might have been a little fishy all the same."

  "Georges Valentin and Algernon Gerard, specifically?"

  I frowned across the desk at him. The names had sprung far too readily to his lips and each death was a month old or more. He saw my frown and his suspicious scowl relaxed a little. He eased his massive frame back into his old-style swivel chair and snorted. Volcanically.

  "Give me credit for being a cop, will you? I don't get these tiny flashes out of crystal balls. I know all about you being with Gregory at Carnegie Hall that night. And I knew about Pittsburgh, too. The Cap down there told me all about you and that spaghetti joint where you made like Amateur Night. So the violin player flipped his lid and maybe, just maybe, you feel responsible, huh? Okay. Knowing you and what makes you tick, I'll buy that. Now you tell me what in the name of blue bananas you come asking me about exhuming corpses for? That I would like to know because I don't know what you're trying to do or to prove."

  Put that way, and coming
from a hard-nosed tough cop like Monks, the rebuke was like fifty gallons of cold water pouring over my logic. But I fought back. I had to. There was no other way. I was stuck with Me.

  "I want to know if the heart attack was on the up and up and if the iodine scene was all it was supposed to be."

  Monks' open-eyed surprise at the statement was only matched by his astounded bellow which merely lowered a portrait of the President one inch down from its position on the wall to his left.

  "After all these years, Ed," he fanned out his enormous hands appealingly, "you gotta be kidding."

  "I am not kidding," I said. "Repeat—not kidding."

  "Then you've lost your mind," he snapped. "Remember a little thing called Death Certificates? Signed by doctors? Well, there was one for the first piano player, another for the second. All proper and legal. One by the Carnegie Hall house physician, the other by the sawbones who attended Gerard in Gregory's apartment. Hell—what are you giving me? You were there, too. I'd forgotten that." His sharp eyes zeroed in on me as he rocked forward in the swivel chair. "You put me straight, Ed. What's up with you? Why are you making more of this than anybody else can see on the surface?"

  "Mike, I—" Suddenly, I was tongue-tied. Hesitant.

  "Don't stall, Ed. We are friends. If there's anything I ought to know, you'd be a damn fool to play Lone Wolf again."

  "It's just that you'll think I'm nuts."

  "I think you're crazy anyway. So what have you got to lose?"

  "All right then. I'll tell you. But answer my question first. We'll trade. My story for your answer. How do you go about exhuming a corpse? I'd like to know that before I make a complete fool of myself."

  He pressed his large thumbs wearily into the balls of his eyes, heaved a sigh and shook his head. Almost mechanically, he answered me.

  "You need a Court Order, one signed by so many V.I.P.'s it would make you laugh. But you don't get that Court Order to begin with unless you have some damned incontrovertible evidence that makes such an exhumation almost mandatory. Got that? Nobody's digging up two piano players for you until you convince the Law that there's good reason to. Now we'll kick that one around later if we have to. Right now—give."