Killer on the Keys

by Michael Avallone

  I gave.

  Everything I had, all that was bothering me, including the smallest and largest suspicions planted in my story. Gregory's palm being read, his fears, Madame Alarma— the fact that she seemed to be from Hungary as he was—the whole crazy kit and kaboodle of trouble which had climaxed with a great musician's insanity and my own misadventure with a wicked woman, who went around playing occult games in old-age makeup. Cosmo Pappas I threw in for extras. The only thing I didn't tell Monks was that Melissa Mercer was at the library, checking newspaper file morgues and making phone calls to pile up all the dope she could on all the people involved. It was a bad time to mention my intended wedding. Somehow, I didn't think Monks was ready for that yet. What I wanted to know about Gregory, Valentin, Gerard, Alarma and Pappas, was also somehow my own privileged business. A private affair, too.

  Captain Michael Monks stared at me across the top of the desk when I had run down. His incredibly rugged and lumpy face almost softened paternally. For a long minute, he couldn't speak. I got the message. I rose defeatedly from the chair and put my hat on. But he wouldn't let me make the door without some stab at piety and friendship.

  "You are crazy," he blasted through his teeth in a low, incredulous roar. "Ed, get hold of yourself. You're grabbing at sky hooks."

  "Sure. Well, thanks for your help. See you around."

  "Wait a minute. Let's talk some more. Don't remind me of how many times you've been right before. I'm the first to admit it. But this—this is pure nutty, Ed. You haven't got a damn scrap of proof, not a thing to go by and you're wasting your time."

  "It's my time," I reminded him, "and nobody is waiting on me. Just yet. If I do wangle that exhumation order, promise not to laugh if I come up empty? It's just that I can't rest until I do everything I think I ought to for Gregory. You understand, Mike?"

  "I always did, Ed," he said with surprising kindness. "Why the hell do you think I put up with your nonsense all these years?" He didn't wait for an answer. But suddenly, he had a topper for me. Men like Monks always have the toppers. Exasperatedly, he picked a yellow pencil up from the desk and snapped it in half, tossing the two parts down as if they were rolling dice. "You're doing the stone wall routine, Ed. Only fair to tell you. You can't possibly get the order and it wouldn't do you any good if you could."

  That stopped me at the door. I turned to study him. He looked uncomfortable and annoyed as if he didn't want to be on top this once.

  "Why not?"

  "The piano players aren't where you can get at them. The French kid was flown back to his hometown in France to be buried. Some burg called Neufchatel. And the other one—forget it. They cremated him here in Riverside. He was a Protestant or something. Valentin's the one in France but the trip isn't necessary, Ed. Believe me. Let it lay."

  "Some detective you are," I laughed bitterly, snapping the brim of the porkpie. "You could have told me that from the start."

  The old Monks came back into his face. He hunched his shoulders and glared at me from the depths of his throne. But a faint smile was on the full slash of his mouth. He put his big hands together.

  "I could have commented on the condition of your puss too but I didn't. I wanted to wait to hear you tell it. You learn a lot by listening sometimes, remember? Isn't that one of your mottoes? Well, you listen to me good. Drop this one and stay loose. It's not your fault if the musician is loopy. Don't make yourself responsible for the whole world. Now get out of here and leave me alone. I got work to do. Just keep in touch and give my best to Melissa."

  I got out.

  There was nothing for me at Police Headquarters.

  Nothing but dead ends, lost hopes and unfulfilled leads.

  Monks' parting advice stayed with me all the rest of that morning. Knifing into my will power, shredding my determination, weakening all the arguments. Don't make yourself responsible for the whole world. Why should I when you got right down to it? The most thankless job there could be. Nobody gets medals, nobody gets paid, nothing changes. The dead still die, there's still crime and brutality and lying, robbing, cheating. And Cancer and Leukemia and Heart Disease and Blindness. It's not your fault if the musician is loopy. Of course it wasn't. I didn't control Gregory's mind. What he saw, what he imagined. I wasn't the cause of his impressionable background, his birth, his environmental training, his likes and dislikes. Just as I was in no way responsible for his brilliant violin playing, I was in no way a factor in his going around the bend, off the deep end. I told myself that over and over as I wended my forlorn way back uptown to the mouse auditorium to see haw Melissa had fared.

  I had a very bad time of it, trying to convince myself that Mike Monks was dead right and I was dead wrong. That dreams were dreams.

  The only real trouble was, I couldn't.

  Once a cop, always a cop.

  Even the most two-bit crook in the world knows that to be true.

  When it's in your blood, only Death will ever get rid of it.

  The cop inside of me couldn't get away from the shocked face of Tadeusz Anton Gregory or the wicked beauty of Madame Alarma, or any of the scenes and incidents and tangled bits and pieces that had made up the whole caper so far. The entire musical mish-mosh of lies.

  Something was rotten in Denmark. Or maybe Hungary.

  I had no proof. None at all. Monks had said that, too.

  I just knew it, though.

  Deep down in my gumshoes, where it counted.

  Melissa wasn't on deck when I returned to my own desk in the quiet, discreetly furnished inner office of the agency I had built up from virtually peanuts in the salad days of the mid-Fifties. There was a funeral parlor stillness that was unsettling. I didn't expect Melissa to be in, considering the work load I'd put on her willing back. Maybe Simon Le Gree wasn't dead and gone, after all. The thought was so foolish and unworthy, I was gnawing at my lower lip in restless confusion when I settled in my chair. I was trying to think on a straight line, trying to forget the red-white-and-blue phone staring me in the face from only a desk away and generally attempting to make some cohesive sense of what Monks had told me, what I felt about Gregory and what I was really going to do about Madame Alarma and her palmistry trouble-making. Mike was so right. I really didn't have a case at all. Not one fifth of an opening of any kind. Gregory was crazy up in Highmark Meadows, two piano prodigies were dead and so what? There didn't have to be intent and double-dealing in any of that. There was no motive. Not a reason at all.

  Depending on what Melissa came home with from the library.

  Agitated, I fired a Camel and started re-arranging the clip trays, pencils, ball pens and memo pads on my desk. I was lost.

  Talk about blind detectives.

  It was then and only then that I spotted several items which Melissa had very obviously left for me. They were all fastened together with a paper clamp larger than the usual clip and to the top of the heap, Melissa had blue-penciled a note: Ed. Read these right away. Tell you about them when I get back. Love you, M. I recognized her fine feminine scripts. She had lovely handwriting, too.

  I attacked the pile, almost feverishly, because I was aching for something constructive to do. When I finished digesting what she had left for me, I was more confused and restless than ever.

  The first item seemed to be a sheet of letter-size typewriter bond paper, torn across the middle, with several lines of black type, double-spaced. Whatever machine the words had been pounded out on, it looked as if the "e" key was very worn, indeed:

  For my brother Nicholas,

  who bought me my very first metronome

  and kept on buying them.

  There were any number of guesses about that, all right. Not the least of which was who had typed the lines. A note to be enclosed with a gift of some kind? A dedication for a book or a literary work of some sort? And maybe an epitaph, a memoriam or an inscription for a headstone or an article of mens' jewelry? Maybe just about anything.

  I held the torn sheet up to the pleasan
t overheads. The watermark, faintly visible, was Beacon Bond, which meant absolutely nothing. Not just then, at any rate, but old Holmes habits are hard to break.

  The item just beneath the scrap of typing paper was even more outlandish, somehow. I simply had no idea what Melissa was up to. No way. It was as if she was playing games with her poor, tired old boss.

  On one of his worst days, too. A day that by all odds should have been a glorious one, considering the state of being engaged.

  Item Two was a newspaper clipping, no more than 3x5 index card size. It was dated May 6th, 1971 and had been neatly scissored from the afternoon edition of The New York Daily News. The byline—it hadn't been much more than a filler—was by a stranger named Joseph Fried.

  CONGRATS FROM CONG

  Saigon, May 5 (Special)—The Viet Cong labeled today the antiwar demonstrations in the United States its "second front" and said they provide "priceless encouragement" to the Communists in waging war here. The Viet Cong's Liberation Radio said that the Communists "highly value the American people's contribution to the struggle for peace in Indochina. We consider it to be 'priceless encouragement' and a harmonious coordination of the second front with the struggle in Indochina against the aggressive policy of the U.S. administration."

  The broadcast "warmly acclaimed" the "heroic and stalwart struggle of the American people" against the Vietnam policy of President Nixon and demanded Washington immediately set a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam.

  —Joseph Fried

  All by itself, Item Two was bafflingly innocuous enough, but coupled with Item One, it made for a jigsaw puzzle. And then Item Three, the last in the little pile, reared its ugly head and I was really caught with my flaps down, and left staring over and over at the incredible heap of mismatching yet strangely related items left for me by the only girl for me left in the crazy, mixed up world.

  Item Three was a lid-raiser, a firecracker, an atom bomb.

  It was nothing more or less than an announcement, the sort of commonplace tribute undertakers and the people who deal in commercial death do by the ton. Greeting card style for the sort of tragedy that happens all the time. Everywhere, every day, all over the globe.

  Something that Gold Star Mothers never can really digest:

  In Memory of

  Gunnery Sergeant Nicholas Walston Gregory

  U. S. M. C.

  1917——1971

  Rosary

  Walker-Rogers Chapel

  Sept. 3,1972

  9:30 A.M.

  Entombment

  Hillsdale Mausoleum

  Allendale, Pennsylvania

  I sat back in my chair, brain starting to click like an IBM machine. Lights went on and off, totals flashed, conclusions swam all around, aching to be picked out and properly understood and programmed but all of it fused and collided, going nowhere. There wasn't really a thing I could think of or do until Melissa got back or phoned to tell me where in hell she had glommed onto three such unusual items.

  When a footfall sounded in the outer office, I don't know how much later, I looked up from the desk and started to sing out with glad greetings but then the step registered in my subconscious and I knew it wasn't Melissa Mercer. I sprang from the chair, hand racing to the .45 nestled against my left armpit. I was seconds too late. Sometimes, seconds are all the difference between everything there is. Life and Death, Champ and Bum, Hero and Villain, Getting Married and Not Getting Married, or even far more crucial, Winner and Loser.

  I lost.

  Somebody I couldn't see in the outer office, tossed something into my nook of the mouse auditorium. I had no time to catch it, toss it back, or get out of the way. I would have been slower than frozen molasses. Too late, anyway you looked at it. I just had time to see what the flying missile was, and then there was not time left at all. Zero Second had come at last.

  A bottle of some kind, contents spilling, with a flaming, fiery wick, came hurtling into my world of steel files, desk, cocoa-colored walls, red-white-and-blue phone and West Forty-Sixth Street sunlight. And that was it.

  The bottle hit the corner of the desk, shattered and all the flames and sailing liquid united with tremendous impact.

  There was a climbing mushrom of orange and yellow fire, a fierce, frightening stench of flooding gasoline and then very little else that I can really remember.

  I didn't hear the explosion that had to come.

  When it came, I had already taken that old familiar merry-go-round ride down into that place where it's always the darkest. Where it's always blacker than anywhere else, where no sunlight shines and all the little dark men have a whale of a time beating your brains out while they blow horns, bang on empty garbage pails and generally shoot the night full of blazing, pinwheeling comets of clamor.

  I went out the way the light bulbs do when you hit the wall switch.

  Click.

  Just like that.

  DIE, NOON

  "Molotov cocktail, Bud?"

  "Yeah. Go heavy on the gasoline, light on the wick."

  "Sure thing. You know you're the first customer ordered one of them things as far back as I remember."

  "Do tell? Things are tough all over."

  The bartender was chubby, jolly-faced, looking like a poor man's Archie Bunker. The drink when it came flaming before me was hard to get down. The gasoline tasted like a compound of iodine and cough medicine. I started to choke. The smoky, shimmering bar swirled and disappeared. I blinked my eyes and looked around.

  Suddenly, I was walking along a high, grassy ridge. The sunlight was warm, the sky blue, the clouds a lot of white schooners racing the big orange. I felt fine. I felt even better when Melissa came running toward me through the grass which seemed to grow taller as she approached. Her arms were full of flowers. The flowers were all colors. Red, green, yellow, blue and every shade of pastel. They began to bleed, as if they were dripping blood. Melissa dissolved into my arms but I couldn't feel her. I might have been clutching empty air. I glared down at her. She looked so beautiful. But her eyes were huge and swollen as if she had been crying.

  "Why are you late, Mel? I distinctly told you twelve midnight."

  "Oh, Ed. What's the matter with you?"

  "What's the mater with me? That's rich. You're a pain, you know it? And you're black and I'm in trouble. Haven't I got enough trouble as it is?"

  "You don't want to marry me, is that it? Oh, Ed—"

  "Stop it. Already you're crying. I can't stand crying."

  "Then kiss me and make me well, Ed."

  She dropped all the flowers. They drifted in slow-motion and the green grass opened up to swallow them. She tilted her mouth up to me. And I began to hit her. With my right hand and then my left. Each blow rang like a gong somewhere inside of me. And then I was crying, too. And Melissa went down. Without a complaint, without a sound. The beautiful blackness of her assaulted face began to change color. A luminous, glowing white. And that was the worst of all. It made me hit her harder. She disappeared into the green flowing grass; beneath us and the orange sun, the blue sky, the white clouds joined together and the world filled with a bursting explosion.

  My ears thundered, my eyes hurt but I was walking again. And then I was running. I wasn't wearing any shoes. The universe transformed, too. Abruptly, I was aware of the sound of violins playing somewhere. Not softly and romantically, but dryly, aridly, in the upper register. It was a crescendo of something horrible and terrible.

  The key of something for banchees, witches and ghouls.

  Magically, I was in a shining, vast amphitheatre of some kind. I walked down gleaming marble stairs, winding artfully and chromatically to an enormous stage below me. I saw a jet black concert grand piano. No, two pianos, almost touching each other. There was a man standing on top of the bridge of the instruments. Before each ivory keyboard, dark, spectral figures sat, hunched over, playing like automated demons. But I heard no piano music. Only the mad violins sawing and stringing freneti
cally. The man on top of the two pianos was Gregory. The pianists were Georges Valentin and Algernon Gerard. I began to run again, flying down the marble staircase.

  Gregory looked very happy. Not at all crazy.

  Valentin and Gerard were but shadows of their former selves. Still, the pianos remained silent, for all the busy manipulation by the two young men. And Gregory's Stradivarius sounded like a whole regiment of violins. The music had reached a shrieking, bird-like frenzy.

  I saw Madame Alarma and Cosmo Pappas, too.

  They were lying on the remotest comer of the bared stage, far from the view of any audience that might have been out front. The Madame and Cosmo were stark naked. She was writhing beneath him as he moved up and down above her as synchronized as a clock movement. The Madame seemed very happy too. Cosmo's penis was incredibly long and tireless.

  No one saw me approaching on the dead run.

  Each was wrapped up in his own thing. Her own thing. I was just a stupid fool interrupting them all with news of trouble, with evil omens of disaster, with blurted words of impending catastrophe.

  Nobody was listening to me.

  I was shouting and yelling down a long valley which had no end. Which had no walls to hold the words, to cup the warnings, to send echoes and reverberations crashing back. I was a town crier without a town. A shoe without a foot. A piano without keys.

  "Gregory—listen to me—"

  "Edward, old friend, please do not interrupt the performance."

  He beamed down at me from the monument of the twin pianos. The Strad in his skillful hands moaned mightily, mourned epically. Valentin and Algernon Gerard did not turn to look at me. It was as if I was not there. Or they weren't. It was difficult to say in the glaring light.

  "Stop being a prima donna. I know all there is to know I tell you. You're not crazy—you're not! I know about the metronome and your brother Nicholas. And Vietnam. All of it. There's no reason for you to stay in that awful place anymore. Come on. Let's get out of here."

  "Why? Can you not see I am happy here? With my proteges. See how easily they perform—how well they play! Hear them, Edward!"