Little Miss Murder

by Michael Avallone

  The Poe waiter lingered at the velvet rope, gazing after us mournfully as if he didn't like the dollar tip I'd left for him. I didn't figure him being in on the whole deal, though I was pretty certain Mr. Seymour Joy was. Spies move in devious ways, but he had to be part of the autographed-baseball millionth-customer ploy. Anything else was incredibly risky. And foolish.

  Elevator doors slid open, and I followed Melissa into the car. We weren't alone. Something like ten people crowded the car. A few well-dressed blondes of indeterminate age with their escorts, men of like ages and personalities. And a tall, broad-shouldered teen-ager or two, still gabbling about the Mets-Giants game. It all seemed innocuous enough, but my sixth sense was working overtime.

  The car fell, and we fell with it.

  Melissa leaned against me, smiling. She had the cigarette cupped.

  The smile didn't go away until the car grounded on the bottom floor and opened its door to let us all out. We pushed forward, and it was then that I saw the nun again.

  Melissa saw the nun first, and her mouth made a silent scream. The Sister came reeling down the left ramp that led up to the lower box-seat level. Her outfit of black robes, white collar, and swinging crucifix made her stand out like a sore thumb. She shouldn't have been in the park this late, what with the game being almost an hour over, but you couldn't tell her that. She wouldn't have been in any condition to listen. Or understand. Or care.

  When it became obvious something was wrong, and her lovely face, dead-white and puckered as if she had violent stomach cramps, recognized me, she came hurtling at me head on. Her robes fluttered, and the crucifix made a clicking sound slamming against her outstretched right hand. A woman behind me suddenly blurted a cry of fear, someone else said, "Ohmygod—" and almost on the word, the pretty nun collapsed in a headlong sprawl at my very feet. It was then and only then that all of us could see what the awful trouble really was. Melissa's cigarette hit the stone floor, showering sparks.

  The Sister from All Hallows Church was a dying woman.

  A length of staghorn, all black-enameled and somehow vulgar looking, stuck out from her back. As black as her habit was, the red flow of blood had already begun to run freely and the widening splotch of crimson was awesome. I tried to catch the nun, but I was too late, and her clawing fingers were already fastened like talons on the tips of my size-nine shoes. Before I could reach down to her to help, she had craned her agonized face up toward me, and her eyes fought to retain some sense, some last vestige of consciousness. Her lipstick-less full mouth, working against time and sudden death, managed to frame something like words, but no sound came. I bent down, trying to hear, trying to help, but I had seen it happen too many times before to expect miracles. She was already talking to me from the graveyard.

  Impressions kaleidoscoped. The ball game, the pamphlet routine, Mel Ott's picture, Melissa's lovely taut face, the press of the elevator mob behind me, the muted medley of crying, frightened voices, the sudden shouts for help of some kind, the pound of running feet and the abrupt, sharp bleat of a police whistle of some kind. Still holding on to that boxed baseball, I put my ear to the dying nun's lips. The Bergman face, contorted in a rictus of agony, felt damp and clammy, pressed to my ear. Shea Stadium was so very suddenly a remote island of fantasy and horror. And disbelief. By any yardstick of measurement and judgment, murder is nothing to find in a ball park. Twin-killings are double plays—two for the price of one. He died on third is an expression that means Agee never scored after tripling. Sudden death means a quick ending to a tied ball game.

  It doesn't mean a lovely young nun lying on her stomach on the stone floor of a stadium with a knife sticking out of her back.

  The nun's lips brushed against my ear.

  "Gotlieb—gotlieb——" she whispered. Twice.

  And died.

  With that sudden stiffening, that quick ending of breath, the half-choked rattle that is part cough and part grunt as the air is forced out of the lungs that need it so badly with one fierce, violent outgo of life. The fingertips on my shoes relaxed, and the body in the nun's habit stopped moving. Stopped living. I stepped away from her, eyes searching the empty runways down which she had come. The idea of pursuit was ridiculous. Her murderer had a dozen exits and entrances to use, a vast arena of empty seats in which to hide, a dozen disguises to mask his true identity. There was just no way to turn. The mammoth architecture of Shea Stadium was a king-sized mockery. A big tomb that had not respected the costume of a nun to ward off death. If she was a real nun—

  "Oh, Ed," Melissa moaned at my shoulder. "What in the name of God is this all about?"

  "God had nothing to do with it," I said. "The Devil is kinda more like it."

  With all the wailing and shock going full-tide around us, there was nothing to do but wait for the cops. Wait for the boys in blue and mark time wondering why a nun who slips you spy messages hangs around to get herself killed, and her dying message is a word that sounds like the name Gotlieb.

  And also to puzzle about boxed baseballs and Presidents that send you to free ball games to become a receiver of questionable goods.

  Whatever the bag was, it was now certainly mine.

  And I was holding it.

  Until further notice.

  All around me, Shea Stadium was a madhouse.

  A madhouse that had nothing to do with Willie Mays hitting game-winning homers.

  The spirited rush of the Mets to the top of the Eastern Division in the National League pennant race had suddenly taken only an Honorable Mention in the Homicide race that goes on all year long.

  3

  The Coffin Corner

  We really couldn't hang around. No matter how I looked at it, standing and waiting for park cops and the slow, weary roll of official police business, wasn't on the menu for a private detective with something to hide. Besides all that, I had nothing to offer New York law, Queens version; anything in the way of threads or clues about the murder, the nun or my connection with her. The Chief couldn't afford that, and neither could I. And there was the matter of that all-important baseball tucked in its white carton, which I was still hanging on to like it was the keys to the kingdom of Heaven.

  I might blow an entire complex of secret agents at Shea if I had to tell the story of the pamphlets, Seymour Joy, and the whole routine of winning a baseball in the Diamond Club. I didn't know whether or not such information was expendable. I couldn't afford to guess, either. So I did what I had to do.

  I took Melissa Mercer by the elbow and faded back from the shocked, foolish group of citizens who had ridden down in the elevator car with us and drifted away. More frightened, curious stragglers hanging about the big stadium, drawn from the sidewalk outside the structure, had come running in to see what was going on. That damn police whistle was still bleating. A uniformed patrolman, not the park variety, but the real McCoy had come dashing in from the concrete parking-lot area, billy swinging and gun drawn like someone easily excited. That was all I needed to make me follow my first notion. I wanted Out. And fast. The knot of onlookers had literally closed in on the prostrate body of the dead nun, and for important seconds she wasn't even visible, from the cop's point of view. Melissa said nothing but followed my lead. But with all the commotion, I still needed an extra distraction. A diversionary tactic to screen our departure. I provided one. With all that, there was a full hullaballoo of crying women, babbling men, and the pound of running feet.

  The business of investigation and spying has made this a James Bond era of technological gadgetry and highly sophisticated weaponry. Even if I had only gone to a ball game, I had come prepared with other items than the shoulder-harness .45 I have worn day in, day out, for the last twenty years. I dug into my key-chain pocket, plucked out the small marble-sized ball contained therein, and quickly flung it far up the runway over the heads of the mob surrounding the corpse. It was a harmless enough pellet, no larger than a ball of bubble gum, but it served its purpose one hundred percent


  It landed on the concrete ramp with a click of sound, bounded crazily for one second, and then exploded with a burst of ignition. Black smoke mushroomed magically, literally hiding the entire area of the upper runway, and for the next seconds, like they say in the pulps, everything turned topsy-turvy. The running cop braked to a halt, his face coming apart at sight of this sudden diversion, and the small mob surrounding the murdered nun, split up like teen-agers surprised bathing in the nude by angry parents. There was a concerted, purposeless scattering of men and women and a general disorganization of bodily motion. It was all I would ever need. I tugged Melissa's elbow and hustled her away from the scene. We didn't have far to go. Just out from under the main structure of Shea, across the sidewalk into the orderly parking area where the Oldsmobile glinted in the dying sunlight. Mostly everybody else had already driven off after the game, and no one but the attendant in his booth and the few kids hanging around to catch the ballplayers coming out were hanging around. Loitering like autograph hounds and the people-collectors they are.

  Behind us, the uproar in the Stadium was muffled but still ail-too obvious to anyone with half an ear. You'd have to have been deaf or just plain jaded to have missed it. Still, we scrambled into the Olds without interruption, and from one eye corner I could see Willie Mays standing near a long, slick Cadillac, signing autographs for a tiny army of kids, his white teeth flashing in the dark face. He looked back once toward the direction of the disturbance but then grinned again and returned to a thrust-out book, pencil poised. Any other time I might have stopped to talk to him, but not now. Melissa Mercer was panting like a puppy, her face taut and frightened. Death is not easy to take. Murder less so.

  "Someone murdered that nun—"

  "Later. We'll talk about it later."

  I put the car in gear, shot backwards, reversed and cruised toward the wire-fence exit on the Van Wyck Expressway. It wasn't going to be easy to quit the vicinity of Shea Stadium. The gigantic ball park is set down like a feudal castle smack in the center of a maze of highways and ramps and buslines and subway lines. The Grand Central Parkway, the Long Island Expressway, as well as the Van Wyck, and the Flushing subway terminal, fairly bracket the four sides of the Shea real estate. That means nothing but arteries coming from all four directions, choking the lanes with cars, trucks, buses, elevated subway stations, and the entire amalgam of motor madness in a city just too small for the ten million people who live in it. Still, I did the best I could, and maybe it was the unusual lateness of leaving the park after the game, but I managed to feed the Olds in less than five minutes onto the Long Island Expressway, joining up with the steadily racing vehicles zooming toward the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan, where the Tunnel lets you out, is the shortest, closest way back to the office on West Forty-sixth Street. I concentrated on the wheel, thinking about nothing else, not even pursuit, until the outline of the stadium was left behind in the dimming sunset. Melissa had composed herself sufficiently to light up cigarettes for both of us. She folded her arms and stared silently through the front window. I kept the Olds at fifty, my hands full, with the Expressway resembling the Indianapolis Speedway with all its shapely arcs and curves and every driver under the sun making like Stirling Moss. The race was to the swiftest motorist.

  "You going to tell me about it?" Melissa asked softly. Blankly.

  "No."

  "That's what I figured."

  "Sorry. What happened is over my head right now. I won't do any guessing until——" I stopped talking. It's hard to keep secrets with someone you like. Like a lot.

  She sighed. "More red-white-and-blue phone hanky-panky, huh? Oh, Mr. Noon, you do try a girl sometimes."

  "Sorry about that, too. But you just do your thing and let me do mine. If you knew all about that phone—you wouldn't sleep so good."

  "Always thinking about me—" She broke off. "That poor nun. That—knife. Dying like that—" She shuddered and drew shakily on her cigarette. I knew she was spunky in a pinch, but she was still a woman.

  "I think maybe she wasn't a nun. Though that doesn't change the horror of it, does it?"

  "No," she agreed. She cocked her head toward me. "She whispered something to you. What was it?"

  "A man's name." There was no point in keeping that from her. I eyed the rear-view mirror. Behind us, an armada of cars of all kinds were bearing down on us ominously. "I think it was a man's name. It sounded like she said 'Gotlieb.' She said it twice."

  "Gotlieb," Melissa said dully. "Think that's the name of the man who killed her?"

  "Maybe."

  Melissa Mercer laughed abruptly. A short, harsh laugh.

  "What's so funny, Mel?"

  "Oh, nothing."

  "Come on. Something's eating you."

  "It's just that you're so unpredictable. I never know what's coming next. That little smoke bomb of yours. You're so full of tricks. One bright day I'm going to wake up and find out I've been working for a Commie agent all these years. Stranger things have happened."

  "You're getting hysterical, and that is not funny."

  She squeezed the bicep of my right arm.

  "Sorry, Massa Ed. Guess I got the willies seeing that poor——" She shook off her own private devils and took the cigarette from my mouth. "You smoke too much. That's another thing that's wrong with you, Edward Noon."

  It was while she was grinding out the butt in the dashboard ash tray that I knew our troubles weren't over. It happened fast, like those things always do, but suddenly I knew for a fact that we were being followed. One of the cars behind us, a fast-moving Mustang with streamlined contours, had neglected several opportunities to bypass us. That bothered me. I adjusted my speed, letting myself drop back. Again the Mustang didn't follow up on me the way any sensible motorist on a freeway like the Long Island Expressway might have done. Also, it gave me a chance to get a good look at the occupant of the Mustang. I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. It didn't add up.

  Behind the wheel of the Mustang was a hunched, gnarled old lady with a Robin Hood-type hat riding jauntily on her gray head. The face was puckered and withered like an old prune. The hands glued to the steerage were clawed and taloned with incredible jutting joints. The hat had a feather sticking up and a tweed coat with flaring lapels. Imagine a Dame May Whitty or Margaret Rutherford on lend-lease from a Hitchcock movie. The doyenne looked seventy if she was a day.

  And she knew how to drive like a maniac.

  I kept my eyes on her, navigating the Olds into the next lane. Sure enough, as expected, she followed. Again she had not made up the intervening space and passed me, as she should have. Melissa had noticed my preoccupation and recognized the source.

  "That old woman in the Mustang?"

  I nodded. "It's nuts, I know, but she's following us. I've never been tailed by a septuagenarian before."

  "But why? You must be mistaken—"

  "Can't afford to think otherwise. Maybe she's a baseball buff and thinks I'm Tom Seaver and wants my autograph—"

  "Stop clowning. If she wants anything at all, I'd say it was that baseball you won in the Diamond Club."

  "Maybe. Anyhow, let's try her on for size."

  I accelerated, going dangerously over the sixty-mile limit. The doyenne didn't let any grass grow under her wheels. She stepped up the speed rate, too. I kept it up for about a mile, and she was still tail-gating me. So I dropped back down to normal, and she did likewise. There was no mistake now. The old doll with the Robin Hood hat was plastered on our tail. Like that bad penny that always stays with you no matter where you go or where you turn in this life.

  And I couldn't shake her off, either. Not on the Expressway with no place to go but forward. When the Queens Midtown Tunnel loomed in the window of the Olds, I slowed down for the toll booth. Melissa almost smiled delightedly when the Mustang fairly ran up our rear bumper. A long line of cars were backed up almost to the exit from the Expressway. It had gotten hotter even, with the sun faintly bathing the hor
izon with golds and yellows. I looked at my wristwatch. It was bearing down on seven, which meant that the President had phoned the office and gotten no reply. I was sure he'd call back. I could always call him, too. You see, the wire is scrambled and electronically gauged to register only mine and his speaking voices. Which was why Melissa Mercer got a Donald Duck squawk when she had accidentally picked it up the first time. Any other voice threw the whole balance-of-registration out of kilter. I had never explained that to her. I couldn't. What she didn't know might never hurt her. I hoped.

  I paid our fifty cents to the green-uniformed attendant in the box and crawled on through the Tunnel. The Mustang crawled right after us. When we broke out once more from the lighted, tilted maze of smooth walls—so much like the bore of a mammoth cannon of some futuristic development, I swung right onto Thirty-fourth Street and launched the Olds into the friendly, familiar environs of cross-town traffic. Now I was in my element. Like any incredibly opportunistic cabdriver, I zipped and dashed and dodged and careened until the Mustang was lost in the rear-view mirror. The day I can't dodge a seventy-year-old shadow, I will go into retirement willingly without a murmur. Melissa hung on as the Olds swayed, squeaked, and reeled in and out of another Manhattan armada of General Motors products. Somehow, the boxed baseball on the front seat between me and Melissa was as potent and deadly as a thing alive. It had to mean something. Anything. Or there is no accounting for the peculiar tangents the spy profession takes.