The February Doll Murders

by Michael Avallone

  THE FEBRUARY DOLL MURDERS

  Michael Avallone

  Ed Noon Mystery #16

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  BEVERLY HILLS

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Susan Avallone and David Avallone. 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 storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

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  For my brother Jerry

  who never cried, God bless his eyes

  THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

  … according to the way they wind up

  ED NOON taking a case

  KYLE CROSBY calling an old Army buddy

  LOLA LANGDON tagging along

  MELISSA MERCER paying a sick call

  CAPTAIN MONKS listening to the crime

  AMOS GLASS answering a phone call

  SAMARKO collecting curios and antiques

  LYNCH staking-out an apartment house

  ROLLO reaching for a knife

  BRAD AND CLYDE moving in T formation

  MAX ARNOFF stepping out of an elevator

  … and some of them pop their springs

  1

  They All Wore Combat Boots

  I hadn’t seen Kyle Crosby since the day we blew up the south wall of the S.S. barracks outside of Munich. He’d operated a .50 caliber machine gun like a typewriter, and I’d pushed through the hole with the rest of the squad to round up some leftover supermen. When the smoke cleared, Kyle was hanging over the turret of the armored car with half the side of his face blown away. The medics took Kyle in, and I’d never seen him again. We heard through the troop grapevine he’d been sent back to Wisconsin with a Silver Star and a new face.

  That was in ’45, and now, in ’66, I wasn’t exactly prepared for the country sound of his voice over the office telephone. With a handle like Kyle Crosby, he’d naturally been called Bing, even though his voice couldn’t have carried “Three Blind Mice.” I wondered what he looked like now. A surrendering Nazi had gotten off one more hand grenade before I’d stopped him with my carbine.

  “Bing! How the hell are you?”

  “Fine, Ed. Just fine.”

  “You bring it all back, you old —”

  “Looky here, Ed. You a real private detective for sure like it says here in the telephone book?” His voice was just as froggy as ever.

  “Have been a long time. Where are you calling from?”

  “Right here in town. Got in from the farm just now. Been doing fine with livestock and produce. Got me a wife and three kids. But shoot — can save all that for later. Fact is, I want to see you. That’s why I come in the first place.”

  “You name it, Bing.”

  “Now,” he said. “Quick as we can make it.”

  Funny the things you remember when the grave calls you. It was after five o’clock, and the sun was dying in the office windows. Melissa Mercer had gone home like a good secretary should, and I’d been toying with The New York Times crossword puzzle, too tired to move, when the phone had tingled. Bing’s voice had all the reality of the past. It was fuzzy, strange, and more than a little weird.

  “Where are you right now?”

  I could hear him consulting someone away from the receiver. “Forty-second Street and Ninth Avenue. I guess that’s near Forty-sixth?”

  I laughed. “You could drop-kick a can of C rations right through my front window. Look, you come on over, and I’ll hunt up a bottle. We got a lot to talk about. You alone?”

  His own laugh was nervous. “Uh-uh. Lola’s with me.”

  “Fine. Who’s Lola? The missus?”

  “No. That’s just one of the things I wanted to see you about.”

  “You’d better get over here in a hurry, Bing.”

  He agreed with that and hung up, and I leaned back in my swivel. The office was darkening with the winter night coming on. It helped my trip down Memory Lane. “Bing” Crosby, not the Hollywood one, was coming calling, and bringing with him Camp Dix, overseas service, Munich, battle stars, and combat fatigue. I realized suddenly how swiftly twenty-one years had fled. Where was the smiling, lighthearted, carefree Ed Noon of yesteryear? The one without the scars, the cynicism, and the private detective agency? I didn’t know, so I busied myself looking for the bottle I’d promised Bing. The mystery of Lola could wait until we all had a reunion toast.

  I was thinking more about Bing’s new face.

  It’s a weird sensation meeting someone you know who is physically changed. Once, a husband-wife acting team I knew decided to get nose jobs at the same time. I didn’t see them for six months while they were in hiding. Then one day they called, asking me to meet them in front of Hector’s on Broadway. They were late, as actors usually are, and I stood in front of the place for an hour wondering what to say to them and just how they would look with their new noses. You couldn’t ignore the change; not to comment would have been ridiculous. Still, there it was. The nose jobs had altered my actor pals considerably. Kyle Crosby certainly wasn’t going to look like the man I’d known before the hand grenade.

  Nearly half an hour had passed with me burning mental wood before I realized that Kyle and his Lola were late. Even crawling, they should have reached the office in fifteen minutes. I fumed a little, smoked a cigarette, and watched ten more minutes tick away. I began to worry a little. In my racket, which cannot be graced with the title of profession, delays usually mean bad news.

  The phone didn’t ring again.

  Impatiently, I flung into my hat and coat and went out to the elevators. Country boys can get lost in big cities. I rode down in a silent car and stepped out to the sidewalk to wait.

  The office crowds were going home, shuffling by. An army in galoshes and raincoats. It had snowed a lot the day before, and the sun had come up warm today, making a sloshy mess of Manhattan. A warm wind washed down West Forty-sixth Street. I lit another Camel, staring toward Broadway. Bing and Lola were nowhere to be seen, although I was almost convinced I wasn’t going to recognize him anyway.

  I was mixed up now. He might call back, and here I was in front of the building. I consulted my watch again. It was now a good fifty minutes since his surprise call.

  I decided to do my waiting in the bar near my building, where I could watch the street. I ordered a martini. A Beefeater standing up, very dry, very cold, is the poison I always name to bartenders.

  Fifteen minutes later I gave up.

  I went back upstairs and posted myself by the phone. I had to admit I was stymied. And my evening was ruined. If Bing never called back, I was going to spend one sleepless night wondering what the hell had happened to him. And Lola.

  Being a detective didn’t help as much as the Sherlock Holmes crowd would like you to think. For instance: A stranger in town tells you he’s at Forty-second and Ninth. You think: He came in on a bus to Port Authority, natch. But would you take a bus all the way from Wisconsin? I didn’t think so, somehow, and I wasn’t going to walk over there on the million-to-one chance of meeting him en route. I could just as easily miss him in a mob scene like Times Square. And maybe Bing had come to New York from another direction, anyway. Maybe Lola lived in Brooklyn, and he’d shacked up with her before subwaying in to call up good old Ed. Three kids, he’d said, but he’d also said Lola was one of the things he wanted to talk to me about —

  By the time I had another cigarette, I
was ready to eat nails. I decided to have still another cigarette instead.

  And still the phone was as quiet as if the company had discontinued the service. I would have been happy to get even a wrong number at that point. I felt all alone in the world, sitting with a time bomb in my lap. A time bomb I hadn’t even built.

  When the phone did ring, I practically broke a knee jumping to answer it.

  It wasn’t Bing. It was a woman, speaking low and very fast.

  “Is this Ed Noon?”

  “Speaking. Are you Lola, by any chance?”

  “Yes, but there’s no time for explanations. Bing asked me to call. We can’t come to the office. He’ll explain later. He needs your help, Mr. Noon.”

  I bit my lip, but I could tell by her voice she wasn’t going to sit still for a quiz program. She sounded smart and quick on her toes.

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “Come to the R.C.A. Building. Take the elevator to the top. We’ll be there in exactly one hour —”

  That did it. “Look, lady. Don’t you think —”

  “Please,” she whispered, almost as if she was going to cry. She hung up. I sat there looking at the dead telephone until I was ready to scream myself. I counted to one hundred, replaced the receiver, and had another drink. It was a great way to go crazy.

  First, the voice from the past.

  Then the appointment that never came to pass.

  Then the delay.

  Then another mysterious phone call. And now a peculiar spot like the top of New York for a rendezvous. And still no Kyle Crosby, with half his face blown away and probably wonderfully rebuilt by the wonders of medical science. My day wasn’t ruined. It was ridiculous.

  It was now six thirty. At seven thirty, Kyle Crosby and friend Lola wanted me on the top floor of the R.C.A. Building. Seventy floors above a concrete street on a cold, windy night. I began not only to get really confused but also extremely worried.

  I opened the lower left-hand drawer of my desk and unearthed the harness belt and holster with .45 caliber Colt to match. Old friends and old times be hanged. I hadn’t been a private detective for fun and games without knowing that the curl of my nostrils signified the smell of trouble.

  It’s never a very sweet smell, either.

  The gun felt good all the way up the seventy floors of the stone giant. Rockefeller Plaza was lit up like a Christmas tree. My ears popped, but my brain was clear now and I knew where I was going. Nothing like a little direct action to clear away the cobwebs. There were a few people in the plushy confines of the car, but fortunately we had missed the guided tour crowd, complete with uniformed pretty girl and wide-eyed out-of-towners. All I was interested in was the man from the past and the girl from the present I was about to meet.

  There was a shuttle elevator that took you the last lap to the seventieth floor. I was alone in that one. When the doors parted on the wide open view of the world, I was ready.

  I saw them almost immediately.

  A man and a woman standing at the parapet facing the vast, yawning wilderness of Central Park at night. From this high up your eyes leapfrogged over about nine blocks of rooftops to meet the broad plateau of black that is the park. The lights of the avenues laid the city out like an illuminated map. But I hadn’t come for the view.

  I moved toward the man and woman, waiting for the familiarity of Kyle Crosby’s body and face to hit me. But it couldn’t. The man was heavily muffled in a salt and pepper overcoat and tugged-down fedora. The woman was just as anonymous in a sloppy trenchcoat and purple babushka.

  They saw me coming; they, too, seemed to be waiting. There was no one else on the building top but us pigeons.

  “Bing?” I said.

  The name triggered responses and reflexes. The next few seconds were a haze of handclappings, shoulder pumpings, and froggy mutterings of pleasure. Kyle Crosby’s face was half him and half a stranger. But it was Kyle Crosby if you bypassed the frozen, mechanical plasticity of the left side of his face. The false eye shone unnaturally. The woman said nothing.

  “Ed, this is Lola. Lola Langdon. We gotta talk to you in a hurry —”

  “What’s this all about, Bing? I feel like a Hitchcock movie.”

  He didn’t know what I meant. I could see that, too. But he shook his head, looking over his shoulder like a kid watching for the cop.

  “Later, Ed. I’ll tell you later, honest. Right now, let’s get outa here and hide someplace. I shook them off after I called you, and Lola figured this spot would be good, but now we’d better be getting inside somewhere and lock ourselves in —”

  That time I shook my head. “Okay. You’re getting a divorce and Lola’s kinsfolk don’t want her messing around with a married man, but please stop acting like you were on the lam from Russian spies or something, will you? It’s creepy enough up here.”

  “Dammit, Sarge —” The old title blurted out of him as if he were a helpless kid. He turned to Lola Langdon.

  She moved forward, her face still in the shadows and partly hidden by the babushka. She put her hand on my arm. It vised like steel.

  “Ed, Bing’s in trouble. Real trouble. I have nothing to do with it.”

  “That’s a fact, Sarge,” Bing croaked, appealing to all our old relationship. But he was still shooting nervous looks over his shoulder. “Let’s get someplace and I’ll tell you all about it —”

  I gave up then. “Okay, okay. I’ve got an apartment on the West Side. You can tell me all about it there. Follow me.”

  That’s about all I can remember of my meeting with Kyle Crosby and Lola Langdon. That and the high wind shrieking over the R.C.A. parapets like the score of a suspense movie. Hitchcock. It figured. Even the elements were getting in on the mystery act.

  That and the night and a million stars. And all those lights dotting the city below.

  That and the next few dozen things that seemed to happen all at once.

  “Ed,” Kyle was mumbling in my ear as we headed for the elevators. “You remember in the ETO when we turned in all our American money for francs, and you hung onto that last dollar bill of yours for a keepsake? Remember, you had all the boys autograph it. The whole squad. Well, that bill is mighty important, and you wanta know that somebody is —”

  I was trying to follow his words when a man stepped out of the elevator. A man in a dark coat and a slouch hat, pulled down all around the brim. Something flashed, and memory of a thousand such flashes rioted through my mind. I flung Lola Langdon to one side and shoved Kyle Crosby against the nearest wall. I clawed for the .45 on my shoulder. Whatever the score was, the man from the elevator was loaded for bear.

  The flash in his hand made a lot of popping noises that ran together like a string of firecrackers. Someone behind me cried out in pain and terror. It sounded like Kyle Crosby. But I was too busy trying to keep alive to pay attention. The firecrackers had to be stopped.

  I never did reach my own gun.

  Something lanced into me, searing my ribs and slamming me down to the cold, hard floor. Lola Langdon shrieked. A red haze descended rapidly over my vision. The world of the seventieth floor kaleidoscoped into a rocket of darkness and color. I was launched into the infinite. And before my hearing left me, I could still hear the slam and bang of the elevator doors closing and Lola Langdon’s fierce sobbing.

  She couldn’t have been crying for me. We’d just met and I hardly knew her. All I did know was that I wanted to close my eyes so the pain would go away.

  It did.

  And so did I.

  I’ve been under before. Lots of times. Too many times to count. I knew I was hurt, but how hurt was the question. I couldn’t open my eyes, but my ears were working again. And they told me a lot of things, which only a careful reconstruction of the facts could shape into a house that made sense.

  And it was cold. Very cold. That was the shock, I suppose. But somewhere in the freezing and the shocking and the bleeding, the words jumped down at me and planted both fee
t. Who said them or why they were said wasn’t important. I was sitting in on my own wake, sort of. As if the angels had joined me or me them and we were all having a good laugh at human beings trying to understand what had happened.

  “… this one’s dead, Buzz. Stopped three in the chest. Never knew what hit him, I guess.”

  Me or Kyle Crosby? And how the hell did this guy know nobody ever knew what hit them?

  “… the dame’s all shook up. Won’t stop crying. Can’t they give her a shot or something?”

  I could use one, friend.

  “… there’s the ambulance now. What a racket. Keep that crowd back, can’t you?”

  “What about the dick?”

  “He’ll live. Caught one in the side. High up. Knocked the wind out of him. These damn divorce dicks. Five will get you ten this is one of those.”

  Says you, you bastard. Kyle wouldn’t do that to me. Didn’t he say so?

  “You’d lose, Red. You didn’t check his cards. This one’s Noon. Ed Noon. Captain Monks’ own favorite private cop.”

  Somebody was doing a lot of swearing and cursing when I went to sleep again. All I could think of was a single American dollar bill with a lot of G.I. Joe names written across it, short-snorter style.

  How could one Washington greenback make so much trouble?

  2

  The Vanishing Short Snorter

  Mike Monks is a very level-headed cop.

  For a captain of Homicide, he’s a revelation. While other police veterans can become incensed in equal parts over reports of senseless family shootings and stories of police brutality, Mike always presents the same facade to the world. He does all of his teeth-gnashing and soul-searching in private. All of which makes him one helluva fine policeman. And generally speaking, makes it possible for him to bear the distinct cross of having for his closest friend a private detective with a knack for getting into official hot water.

  He was the only cop I saw at the hospital. My first official visitor, not counting the Kildares and young nurses running in and out attending to the gunshot wound in my right side.