Murder Doll

by Milton Ozaki

  * * *

  Murder Doll

  Milton Ozaki

  This page formatted 2007 Blackmask Online.

  http://www.blackmask.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Golden Spoon was strictly for suckers. Located a block north of the river in a renovated three-story building, it sported a white-and-red striped canopy which stretched from plate-glass door to curb, a huge tri-colored neon sign which flashed Follies Parisienne —Twenty Beautiful Girls—No Cover Charge, and a sharp-eyed doorman with the build of a heavyweight pug and more brass buttons than a general. As I approached, he pulled back the door with his right hand and exposed the white-gloved palm of his left hand, all in one smooth synchronized movement. I ignored the hungry palm, nodded, and walked in. He let the door bang behind me.

  The joint's main floor was the standard layout: first, a plushy foyer with the inevitable cloakroom and framed, glossy blow-ups of the come-on girls; next, a crystal-and-chrome bar, at one end of which a dozen B-girls in flashy, low-cut evening dresses clustered like flies around a bruised banana; and, at the rear, for guys who were dragging their own mamas or wanted to eat and put on the dog, an elaborate, dimly-lighted dining-room, complete with tables, chairs, waiters in black ties, a Latin-American orchestra, and a ten-by-twelve dancing arena.

  A young kid was poised at the entrance to the bar, indolently balancing a tray of cigarettes against one hip. She had thin crimson lips, dark eyes, and thick black hair which had been lacquered into a shiny up-do. A rhine-stone-studded Spanish comb stuck jauntily into the air from the bulge of hair at the back of her head and a red rose emerged from a puff over her forehead, except for a black, lacy mantilla, most of the rest of her was out in the open.

  I stopped beside her and eyed the expanse of bare skin. “So this is what they wear in South America,” I said, grinning.

  Without cracking a smile, she said: “It's awfully warm down there, mister. Cigarettes?”

  “Pack of Tareytons.” I tossed her a half buck. “Where'll I find Millie White?”

  As she handed me the smokes, her lips started to open, as though to answer my question, and her eyes looked over my shoulder. Her eyes suddenly jiggled nervously and, sucking in her breath, she dropped the half buck. “Sorry!” she exclaimed. I bent, picked up the coin, and turned casually as I straightened. A tall, sad-eyed guy in a well-worn tux was lounging near the checkroom entrance, apparently gabbing with the peroxided babe on duty. He wasn't looking in our direction, but the girl's sudden alarm had a reason—and, he, obviously, was it. I gave her the half buck, waved away the change, and strolled into the bar. Except for the B-girls and a couple of early bird martini guzzlers near the center, it was deserted. I climbed aboard a stool. The girls looked up and several of them started toward me: A neat little trick in a blue satin gown got to me first.

  “Buy a girl a drink, big boy?” she murmured.

  I gave her the eye. “Why not?” I asked.

  She smiled and fitted her hips onto the stool beside me. Her perfume was sweet and cloying, almost rendering superfluous the care with which she had brushed her blonde hair into a sleek high pompadour, the artistry with which she had sketched full, promising lips over a rather thin mouth, and the skill with which she had tightened the blue satin over the pads in her bodice.

  “What'll you have?” I asked.

  “Oh—” Her eyes plucked at the lapels of my blue suit as she decided what sort of a catch she'd made. “—a brandy, I guess.”

  I nodded to the bartender. “Two brandies.”

  She fluttered mascaraed eyelashes and laid a hand on my arm. “Has anyone ever told you you're handsome?”

  I grinned at her. I've got short dark hair, features like a fistful of dough, and the beginning of a paunch. The only things I've got that are in my favor are height and broad shoulders. “Sure,” I said, “my mother. What's your name, baby?”

  “Christine. Nearly everybody calls me Honey, though, because of my honey blonde hair.”

  “Well, look, Christine—” I waited until the bartender served our drinks, then I folded a five-dollar-bill into a small square and pressed it into her hand. “—suppose you can pitch and pass the word to Millie White that I want to talk to her. It's important.”

  “Okay.” She raised her glass, moistened her lips with the cheap vermouth which it probably contained, then slid from the stool. I sipped my drink. It tasted okay. The bartender drifted toward me, emptied her glass, and polished the bar thoughtfully.

  “You ain't been in for awhile, have you?” he asked.

  “Not for awhile,” I agreed.

  “I remember seeing you.” His eyes narrowed a little. “Maybe it wasn't in here, at that.”

  “You can't remember them all,” I told him. “There's too many floating in and out.”

  “I got a pretty good memory.”

  He dropped the rag behind the bar and walked away. I watched him. He edged toward the end of the bar, ducked under, then went toward the tall guy with the sad eyes, who was lounging near the entrance now. The bartender sang his song and the sad-eyed guy glanced in my direction, nodded, and walked toward the check room. The bartender ducked back under the bar and began polishing a display of cocktail glasses.

  A hand touched my elbow. When I turned, the kid with the cigarette tray said loudly: “I forgot to give you your matches, mister.” Laying the packet into my hand, she murmured: “You're spotted. Better scram.” She strolled away.

  I tore open the pack of smokes and pushed one between my lips, then I flicked back the flap on the packet, tore off a match, and struck it. As I did so, I glanced inside the cover. Scrawled in pencil, I read: “See me tomorrow. 10 E. Wisteria.” I touched the match to my cigarette, inhaled, and dropped the packet casually into my pocket.

  A young, pretty girl in a green strapless evening gown was coming toward me. She had long reddish hair which she wore in a loose page boy, a pert nose, and gray-green eyes. I noticed that she walked in an odd way, slowly yet rhythmically, suggesting both the regal step of a legit actress and the calculated promenade of a stripper. She slid onto the stool beside me, a faint question in her eyes.

  “How about a drink?” I asked.

  “I'd like a brandy.” Her voice was cool and remote, and she held her hands primly in her lap. The bodice of the green dress was frilly and bulged pleasantly. She had nice skin, very nice skin. When I'd given the order, she smiled faintly and said: “It's kind of quiet in here tonight”

  “It'll pep up, won't it?” .

  “Oh, sure.”

  The bartender pushed our drinks in front of us. I got out my wallet, took out a fifty-dollar bill, and tossed it carelessly onto the mahogany. Her eyes flickered at it automatically, then she smiled, a little more brightly, and reached for her glass. She raised it to her red lips and drained it in an easy swallow.

  “Another?” I asked.

  “Sure.” She forced another smile, and, visibly rallying herself for the old sucker pitch, she leaned toward me a little so that our shoulders touched. I noticed
that a swarthy waiter was leaning on the far end of the bar and giving the bartender some earnest conversation. When the bartender glanced our way, I motioned to him and pointed to our glasses. He nodded, said something to the waiter, and came toward us. She adjusted the bodice of the green dress.

  “You're nice,” she said suddenly, moving her shoulder subtly. “What's your name?”

  “Good. Carl Good.”

  The name didn't impress her. Seizing on the obvious pun, she asked: “You aren't real good, are you?”,

  I grinned. “There are different opinions.” I had a feeling that things were tightening, that something was about to happen. The swarthy waiter strolled past. In the dining room, a rhumba band was syncopating loudly. I listened to it, half-consciously. The drummer was good but the horns needed less air and more lip. The bartender brought our drinks and my change.

  “Feel like dancing?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I pushed the money into my pocket and carried the two glasses into the dining room. A waiter started toward us, then turned and scampered ahead of us to a table. As he pulled back the chairs, the orchestra crashed to the end of the number, the drummer did a fancy rat-tat-tat, and the bandstand lights went off, indicating a break. The dancers clapped and began to straggle toward their tables. We sat down. She reached for her glass immediately, raised it to her lips, and emptied it. I ordered another round.

  “Look, Millie,” I said, when the waiter had left. “What happened to Orville?”

  It took a second for the name to register but, when it did, it hit her hard. Her eyes went wide and the thin stem of the brandy glass snapped in her fingers. “W-what do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Where is he? When did you see him last?”

  “Who are you?”

  “A private investigator, working for his wife. He hasn't been home, he hasn't been at his office, and he hasn't been near any of his clubs for over two weeks. I know he was paying your rent—and I know where—but I don't give a damn about that. I'm not trying to hang anything on you. All I want is information.”

  She bit her lip and her lacquered nails began to scratch deep lines into the tablecloth. “I... I don't know where he is.”

  “Like hell. The guy's got dough and he goes for you. That's okay with me. He's a sucker and I don't blame you for latching onto him any more than I blame him for stepping out on his wife. She's my client, but she's also an old buzzard with the build of a water tank. Hell, if you hadn't grabbed him one of the other babes would have. As far as I'm concerned, a job is a job and everybody's got a right to make a living. The least you can do, Millie, is give me a break and let me earn my fee. You'll be in as solid as ever. His wife might even divorce him—and then you'd have clear sailing.”

  She sat there, almost as though she hadn't heard me, staring at the broken glass and biting her lip. The waiter appeared with fresh drinks and cleaned the table. She reached for her glass eagerly and drained it, shivering a little as the liquor trickled down her throat.

  “How about it, Millie?” I persisted. “I'll keep you out of it. All I want to know is where he is.”

  “I don't know where he is.” She measured the words out as though they were diamonds she'd been socking away for her old age.

  “When did you see him last?”

  “It was a Friday. He—” She bit the sentence off as the swarthy waiter strolled slowly past. The bandstand lights came on and the orchestra swung into another rhumba.

  I said, “Suppose we dance. We can talk without anyone hearing us.”

  She nodded and got up. When we reached the small dancing area, she came into my arms like a cake of ice sliding into a wooden box. I squeezed her a little and said: “Remember, baby, I'm a customer.”

  She relaxed a little, molded her body obediently against mine, and began to swing her hips. After a while the band began to warm up—and so did she. She writhed earnestly through Yo Ta Namor a and Anna Boroco Tinde as though she enjoyed the one-two-three-wriggle. The floor began to fill and, by the end of the second number, was too crowded for honest rhumbaing. Suddenly, as though she were tired, she rested her forehead against my shoulder. She kept it there only an instant, however.

  “It was a Friday,” she murmured, talking into my collar. “He came here and picked me up. We were going to go to—”

  The number rattled to a finish just then and her words were drowned in a burst of applause. We stood there, clapping our hands like everybody else and waiting for the second set to begin. Then the drums started a soft beat and the maracca player raised his arms again and we slid into the mass of straining, laughing couples about us.

  “We were going to go to my apartment,” she said, holding her body tightly against mine. “Orville said he'd told his wife that he had to go out of town for the week-end, so we were going to... to—”

  That's when it happened. Her legs stopped moving suddenly and she fell against my chest. Her body stiffened, quivered a little, and then it began to fall away from me. I grabbed at her, trying to lift her, trying to understand what was happening...

  Wriggling couples bumped against us, then careened away. I cursed at them and struggled with the girl's sagging body. The beat of the orchestra dinned into my ears until I couldn't stand it any longer.

  “Stop!” I shouted angrily. “Stop the music! Somebody get a doctor!”

  I got the idea across, finally, but it wasn't any use. I didn't need a doctor to tell me that Millie was dead—and that she'd died while moving rhythmically in my arms ...

  CHAPTER TWO

  Take a hundred cops and strip them down to their skin —and what have you got? You've got a pile of blue uniforms, some dirty underwear, fifty pounds of nickeled stars, ninety-nine jutting bellies, and a hundred-eighty-six flat feet. They're ordinary middle-aged guys, as lazy and ridiculous and pliable as anybody. But let them get their uniforms back on, and you've got something entirely different. You've got The Law. You've got majesty behind a six-pointed star. You've got ninety-nine assertive, loudmouthed, pistol-packing big shots who'll stop at nothing to get their man. Lieutenant Frank Murray, acting head of the Chicago Avenue District, was an exception. Besides being an honest cop, he had brains. The combination made him unique—and dangerous.

  “Okay, Good,” Murray said in a deceptively mild voice, “let's hear your version of it.” It was a couple of hours after Millie's death, and, with a police stenographer in attendance, we were seated in Murray's office.

  “It was like this, Lieutenant,” I said. “An old babe came into my office yesterday afternoon and said she was Mrs. Orville Pederson. According to her, her husband had been playing around with some girl and had skipped, leaving her with hardly enough money to pay for the daily groceries. He was in the real estate business and had dough, but the bank account was in his name and she couldn't draw upon it She said they'd been married fifteen years, and, while she didn't give a damn about him, his absence was causing her embarrassment and hardship, and, furthermore, his office kept calling and asking about him and she didn't know what to tell them. She didn't want a stink raised, so she didn't go to the police.”

  Murray grunted, then nodded to indicate that I was to continue.

  “I checked, of course. Pederson, I learned, controls a considerable amount of property in this district. He's got) dough, and, like she said, he'd been running around with a girl. It looked to me like a simple skip-trace job, and, frankly, most of my sympathy was with Pederson. The old babe didn't look like anything a guy with sense would want to go home to. But a buck is a buck, so I told her I'd do what I could.”

  “Wait a minute. How much did you nick her?”

  “I told you she didn't have a dime. That's why I checked on Pederson before taking the job. I typed out a statement of my rates and she signed an agreement hiring me to locate her husband. I figured the agreement would be binding on her husband, or his estate and, once I spotted him, I'd collect.”

  “Okay, then what?”
<
br />   “Well, you know the routine. I started contacting his friends and business associates, trying to spot the girl he'd been chasing around with. I didn't get a lead on her until this afternoon, when a bookkeeper in his office let drop the news that Pederson always collected the rent from one of the apartments personally and in cash. I figured that the cash might have come out of his own pocket and that the apartment might be the nest where he kept the girl. I got the address and barged right out. The apartment turned out to be in a swanky building on Cedar Street—three rooms, elevator service, doorman, and one-hundred-seventy smackers a month—and it's occupied by a girl named Millie White. The doorman said he didn't know anything about her except that she was a friend of Pederson's and that she'd been living there about six months. I hung around awhile, waiting for her to show, but nothing happened. I gabbed some more with the doorman, and he finally mentioned that one of the tenants had seen Millie White, or a girl who looked like her, at The Golden Spoon. I was sick of standing around, so I hot-footed it to the joint to check.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “A little after seven.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “I went into the bar and ordered a drink. One of the girls came over, a kid named Christine. I bought her a drink and slipped her a five-spot, and she sent Millie White over to me. We had a couple drinks at the bar, then we moved into the dining room and had a couple more. I asked her about Pederson, but she said she didn't know where he was. The last time she had seen him was two weeks ago Friday, when he'd told his wife he was going to be out of town over the week-end. At that point, I thought the waiter was nosing around too much and I suggested that we have a couple dances and finish our talk on the floor. It was hard to talk and rhumba at the same time, though, and before she could tell me any more about Pederson, she started to sag and passed out for keeps. Period.”

  Murray looked at the ceiling. “Did you leave the table and go to the can at any time?”