Dead Game

by Michael Avallone

  I got to my feet and showed her my .45. I spun it casually in my fingers. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She smiled, the new spaces between her teeth making her look awful.

  “What happens now, cowboy? You going to get amorous with me in the condition I’m in?”

  “Save your breath, lady.” I stopped spinning the .45. The butt settled down evenly in the palm of my hand. “It’s your turn to tell me things. Things that will add up. Your husband didn’t kill Lake. Somebody else did. But your husband did give him the biggest frisk I ever saw when he lay dead on the ball field. He also turned Lake’s hotel room upside down after Lake was dead. That means only one thing to my limited intelligence. He was looking for something. Love letters?”

  She gave me that awful smile again. “Now you save your breath.”

  “Was Lake blackmailing your husband?”

  The smile didn’t go away.

  “I can get rough.”

  She laughed. I’m just about the funniest guy alive sometimes. I could see her point as she kept right on laughing. After what she’d been through, an atom bomb wouldn’t faze her.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “There’s always the cops. Assault and battery. This is a police rap anyway.” I was bluffing because I wouldn’t stick my nose into a police station for five years at least; but she couldn’t know that.

  “Cops” is a magic word. She paled under all the blood.

  “Give me a break, Noon. I’d die if anybody saw me like this. I’ve got to go away. Take a few weeks to fix myself up …”

  “It’s going to take more than that to fix me up, lady. I need information bad.”

  “Okay.” She shrugged and stood up. “Put that thing away. I’ll spill it. But give me another drink will you?”

  I grinned at that and turned for the bottle. It was pure reflex. Simon pure. Simple Simon pure. Dames always get me off base anyway.

  The bottle was empty and I’d known it. She’d known it, too.

  Before I could find it where I’d left it, she brought it down on my head from behind with all the force and rage she could muster in her one hundred-odd pounds. She mustered plenty. The bottle came down hard.

  I took the floor the same way.

  SIX

  One thing about floors. They’re no place to sleep on and no place to wake up either.

  The room came back in focus some time later. The first view I got of it was the ceiling. Right on top of that a dinner-gonging headache clanged away in my ears. I got to one knee like a still picture of imitation of life and stayed that way for a long time. When I was good and certain my head wouldn’t roll off into a corner all by itself when I moved again, I straightened up. Some loose joints popped like clacking dice in my body.

  I groaned and looked for my hat. It lay crushed on the floor. I picked it up and put it back gingerly on my head. I had the crazy impression it was a perfect fit on the large goose egg that was starting to push up under my scalp. I’d gotten a real bean treatment and only the hat had kept it from being a real permanent one.

  I eyed the room. Everything was as it was before with but two minor changes. The half-packed suitcase was now packed and gone. So was little Mrs. Arongio. Cute little redhead with a bottle trick all her own. I’d even that score when I got the chance.

  I found my gun on the floor. Mrs. A. had been in too big a hurry to stop for it. Either that or she was toting her own hardware.

  I stretched, letting some blood buoy me up a little. I stared at the four walls. Their chartreuse color didn’t help my head any. Besides the pain, stupidity throbbed all over me. Getting outfoxed by a little dame didn’t help my male ego at all.

  What to do next? Since ten in the A.M. I’d been everywhere, seen everything, and had had everything done to me. And all on the zero side of the ledger. I wasn’t making any more headway than a revivalist at an orgy.

  Nuts. I had to go someplace and sit down and think. My head was throbbing mad music like Powerhouse and I could barely concentrate. It was about time I was making some entries in black ink in that ledger, too.

  I went to the door—staggered was more like it—and made it out to the hall. The landing was quieter than church. The good old Village. Where you can beat a person half to death without interference from your neighbors …

  I shook myself and eased down the stairs, acutely conscious that I needed the aid of the banister all the way.

  Outside, the tiny street was just beginning to darken. The street lights had burst into life and the narrow, curving lane was like some stage setting. I half expected a line of chorines to come arm-in-arming up the block real Rockettes style. I was really feeling fine, I tell you. Mr. Arongio had toyed with me like a rag doll every time we’d met, Monks had given me the official kiss-off, and now Mrs. Arongio had gotten her bottle’s worth in. I felt about as necessary and wanted as ice in the winter.

  I made it up the block and feebly hailed the first cab I could get. I got in real slow like a man walking around an anthill. I told the driver the address of my office. I needed some whisky, some time to think, and the general atmosphere of peace and quiet that a guy can find in a one-man office.

  But you learn something new every day. The only changeless thing in the world is change itself.

  When I cut further into Mrs. Arongio’s fee and paid off the cabbie and struggled up to my third-floor Shangri-La, I got another surprise tacked on to a real chain of surprises.

  The office door was wide open. My overheads were on.

  It seemed the cyclone that had torn through Lake’s room at the Chandler Arms and howled and whipped through the tiny cell at Minetta Street had detoured about fifty blocks due south and really gone to town. If there were any mice in the mouse auditorium, the commotion would have frightened them to death.

  The office of ED NOON, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS looked like the left wing of the city dumps.

  And to add to the confusion and make my head pound even more, standing in the center of the mess, as unconcerned as Sergeant York in a turkey-shooting match, was the skinniest, sexiest brunette I’ve ever laid my private eyes on.

  SEVEN

  I stood in the doorway and looked at her. She looked right back.

  “I can’t say you keep a very clean place,” she said. She was skinny but her voice was packed with vitamins.

  I said nothing for a full second. Just walked in and slammed the door back with a rear shove of one of my size nines.

  The skinny doll who had been perched on one corner of the lopsided desk slipped off it to a standing position. Her legs and bust line compensated for the saplinglike thinness of her body.

  But I wasn’t having any more of her lip. Hers or anybody else’s.

  I scaled my hat disgustedly at the clothing tree. In proper keeping with events of the day, I missed.

  “Do you like New York?” I asked her with flat calm.

  Her eyebrows arched in surprise and two dimples popped on either side of her slow smile.

  “When you put it that way—yes.”

  “Wonderful town,” I roared, all the pent-up anger of the day spilling out of me like water. “They even got a musical uptown that says the same thing. But right now I think it stinks. I’ve been in three parts of this burg today. And three times a room was kicked to hell and gone. You can’t do that without making a racket. And not once, mind you, not even once, does a neighbor call the cops and ask ‘Please find out who’s killing who.’ Oh, great town. Wonderful town. Your neighbors love you. Philadelphia’s got nothing on us. Now, who the hell are you, sister? And what are you doing here? And did you come, before, after, or during this barrack detail on my office?”

  She laughed. She had to. During the harangue I’d scooped up the waste basket and a stack of loose sheets that were cluttering the floor.

  She caught her laugh in the middle and shook her head. The brunette short bob wiggled slightly in the negative.

  “After,” she said seriously, turning off the vitamins. “The door was open
and I was so surprised at the mess I just walked in. Naturally.”

  “Naturally,” I agreed, somewhat mollified. “Okay, start from scratch. As you may have guessed by my bad manners, I’m Ed Noon. The detective, per se.”

  “My name is Mimi Tango. Here, I can help if you’ll let…”

  “Skip it. And thanks.” I kicked at the mess on the floor until a semblance of a cleared-away area around the desk showed through. “Take that chair if you will, Miss Tango. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  I got around to the business side of the desk and settled down in the worn swivel, closing some drawers as I did so. Somebody had gone through the place with a vacuum cleaner. Somebody looking for something. Mr. Arongio, who else?, sure got around. I made a memo to leave some dead mice in each drawer after this.

  Miss Tango positioned herself in the chair facing my desk and crossed her legs. Like I say, she was skinny but she bobbed beautifully in the usual places. This plus white-like-milk skin and a mouth two sizes too large for her oval face made her appealing. Dynamite style.

  “Well, Miss Tango, we’ll skip all the spring-cleaning jokes and get down to case histories. What goes? Someone recommend me to you?”

  She smiled. She smiled easily.

  “How did you know?”

  “Standard operating procedure. I don’t run a page ad in the Times and I don’t believe in business cards. And nobody just walks past this building, looks up, and says ‘Hmmm. I think I need a private detective today.’ It’s not like being a dentist or a lawyer.”

  “I see what you mean. The fact is, Mr. Noon, you were recommended to me. In the best manner possible. The Wexler case. It was in all the papers last fall. I didn’t need a private detective then. But I do need one now. And your name is rather an easy one to remember.”

  “Mimi Tango isn’t exactly Smith or Jones either.”

  She defrosted me a little more with another smile.

  “I’m a professional dancer. The Tango was always my favorite dance.” That explained everything. “I’m not big, you understand. I get plenty of work in Jersey, some here in town. I haven’t hit the big time yet. But I hope to someday …”

  “The biography you can save for later. Why do you need a private detective, Miss Tango?”

  I checked her clothes as she reached into a square black handbag. You can tell an awful lot about a female client just by doing that. Her black skirt was pretty modest and the taffeta blouse was as demure as school days, but the tight, broad satiny belt that pinned her waist into waspy dimensions and the bit of red fluff at her throat screamed of the professional type of woman. She might just be a professional dancer. Her slender figure would have made it a breeze.

  I looked at the long, painted nails on the delicate hands that extended an envelope across the desk. They matched the rest of her. Sometimes hands will tell the truth when a person is telling the damnedest lies but hers didn’t. Mimi Tango had never worked with her hands in her life.

  “I got that in the mail yesterday.” She’d handed me a letter. I eyed the postmark. Grand Central Annex. “I’d like you to read it. Maybe you can suggest something.”

  She’d ripped the envelope down the left side the first time she’d got it. Before looking what was inside, I reached for my cigarettes, fumbling for a match after offering her my brand. She smiled again, took one, and placed it neatly between her full red lips. She dug into her black bag and produced a lighter. I watched her as she leaned across the desk and thumbed it into flame with her right hand.

  I mumbled thanks and opened the letter, which was folded in half.

  There wasn’t much. But what there was, was something to keep you up nights wondering who hated you.

  5 April 53

  Mimi Tango

  FOR WHAT YOU DID TO ME YOU WILL PAY. I’M GOING TO FIX YOU SO YOU’LL NEVER DANCE AGAIN!

  I WONDER HOW YOU WILL FEEL WITHOUT LEGS?

  A FRIEND

  That’s all there was. Just a few lines of touching sentiment crudely printed with one of those ball pens that seem to be here to stay.

  I put the letter in the envelope and gave it back to her.

  “Some friend. What do you want me to do?”

  “I guess I need a bodyguard, Mr. Noon.”

  “No dice. I’m on something now. Something pretty important. Strikes me the police are your best bet. It might be a crank letter. Somebody always finds the time to write them. Either way, you’d be much better off with police protection.”

  She got hurt-looking for the first time.

  “I’m willing to pay for your services,” she said in a high, proud voice.

  “That’s refreshing, Miss Tango. But I need a bodyguard worse than you do. Look at this place.”

  “I’ll pay as high as a hundred dollars,” she said grimly. She snapped her handbag shut to emphasize the point.

  I smiled tiredly.

  “Look, lady. The letter talks about family skeletons—’for what you did to me’—I’m too tied up right now to go into a case history like that. Call the cops in. You need a big organization for something like this. A twenty-four hour detail to make sure nobody gets to you. I’m a one-man team. I have to sleep sometime.”

  Her eyes blinked at me and the slightest suggestion of a tear poised on one lower eyelid.

  “For reasons I can’t go into right now, Mr. Noon, I can’t call the police. I’d rather it was kept confidential…”

  I rocked back in my swivel.

  “Was anybody with you when you got the letter?”

  Her head, which was just starting to lower in preparation for some waterworks, jerked up again.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  I rocked forward in the swivel, braked the wheels to the floor, and looked at her.

  “Miss Tango, I come from a long line of Sherlock Holmes fans. The letter is a phony and so are you. Maybe you dance and I don’t care, but no crank ever sent you this letter. And you weren’t alone when you rigged this up. Besides, nobody’d want to cut your legs off. They’re too pretty to hurt.”

  She pushed forward in her chair. Her eyes shot sparks at me and her tiny chin trembled with rising anger.

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  I grinned. Like most dames, she was twice as pretty mad.

  “I’m calling you nothing but right-handed. And that letter you just gave me was opened by a left-handed person. Nobody opens a letter on the left side but a left-handed person, as a rule. Not when it’s right side up anyway. And you have to put it right side up to see if it’s addressed to you. And you can’t alibi that the last thing you do is to see if there is a return address on the back to see who the letter was from. This letter is anonymous. If that’s not proof enough that it’s a phony, I’ve got some more.”

  She pouted. “Go on.”

  “Letters like that always ask for something. Money or promises. This one doesn’t. And if it’s a vengeance letter, that kind goes on and on. They go into details because the person who writes them gets all his kicks out of telling you what he’s going to do. Even if he never does them, he gets a helluva lot of fun scaring the sap out of you with the gory details. And what good is a vengeance letter if you don’t know who’s giving you the business? The letter falls down in that department, too. Even if a crazy kid wrote it, he’d say much more. No sir. That letter is as amateur as they come. Want more?”

  “I’m listening.” Her teeth were biting into her full lower lip. She dug into her handbag nervously.

  “That date line—the way it’s put down. The day, the month, and then the year. It’s the old Army way. European, really. And coming on top of what I’ve been through today, it smacks pretty strongly of a guy I’m pretty anxious to meet up with again. Maybe you know him? Big fellow. Sort of a foreign-looking Buffalo Bill. Name of Arongio. He’d be right at home on a horse, too, come to think of it. Though he’d never need one the way he gets around. Arongio. That’s his name. So help me.”

  Her big mouth curved in
a smile.

  “You figured it out so well, Mr. Noon, maybe you can figure this out …”

  I leaned across the desk in a big hurry. My hand closed on her thin wrist just as it came up out of the square black bag.

  The shiny little .32 in her fist spat flame and roared sound.

  EIGHT

  Mimi Tango’s eyes popped as I twisted her wrist. But there was more than fire in her. She went to work on the trigger and a slug spanged off the four-drawer file on the door side of the office and skipped into the wall. Plaster flew. I kept twisting the gun muzzle away from my ribs and points north, but I couldn’t overdo the pressure without breaking her wrist like an old twig. But I couldn’t make her drop it either.

  We wrestled around behind the desk like a pair of cute kids who are nuts about each other. We couldn’t keep that up much longer. So I did the next best thing. Ordinarily I don’t hit women. But this one had a gun.

  I caught her between two deep breaths while her tongue was still behind her pretty white teeth. I made it short and sweet.

  My left hand shot up, short and hard. Her head snapped back before she sagged. I grabbed her and the gun before both hit the floor.

  She was slight even though she wasn’t exactly a runt. I scooped her up and carried her over to the old leather sofa where I set her down. I smoothed out her skirt again until it was well below her knees. From what I could see of them, they were damn distracting items.

  I went back to the desk and spilled the junk that was in her handbag on the desk pad. A quarter rolled away from a pile of loose change and took the floor with a sound like a school bell. I skipped it and made a rapid inventory of her personal effects.

  It was a small handbag as handbags go, but she had managed to cram a lot into it. Keys, the loose change, a pile of rubber-banded emery sticks, the cigarette lighter, a pack of Pall Malls, a cheap jeweled compact case, a frilly handkerchief, a wallet with nothing in it but the identification card, an address book that didn’t have an entry in it, and something else that meant more than all the rest of the junk put together.