The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse

by Michael Avallone

  Monks grunted when I concluded. One of the detectives lit a cigarette for me. Monks motioned to the guy behind me and pretty soon I was a free man again. The cuffs disappeared into Allison’s pockets.

  “Stool pigeon,” hissed Holly Hill. “A regular singing canary. You bastard.”

  “At these prices, what else do you expect me to be?” I asked her. “Want me to go to bat for your butcher pal there? Or lie for a two-timing angel like you? Please, Miss Hill. I may laugh.”

  “Where’s this dollar bill now?” Monks asked.

  “I got it,” Drill suddenly spoke up. “In my hip pocket. Wallet.”

  “Get it from him,” Monks waved the other detective over. “You got a lot of explaining to do, Mr. Drill. I’d honestly like to know why you chopped him up like that and made a mystery of everything. That’s still bothering me plenty.”

  Something stirred in my brain. Something was wrong. But I couldn’t pin it down. A warning bell had sounded in my subconscious. But with all my aches and pains and all the confusion I couldn’t do a thing with it.

  The other detective moved in close to Carver Calloway Drill. It was like slow-motion championship fight films. You know what’s coming. And you can’t do a thing about it. And my warning bell had instinctively told me that you can’t ever come too close to a dangerous snake. Even if you’ve got him handcuffed. Especially one as big as Carver Calloway Drill. I started to move reflexively, but I was already too late.

  The detective had reached Drill and was turning him around to fumble in his rear pocket. That was the mistake of that particular detective’s lifetime.

  Carver Calloway Drill’s barndoor-wide shoulders revolved like chain lightning and the cuffs on his wrists flashed in the light of Monks’s office. I yelled hoarsely. But the dick was already crumbling to the floor and the pistol that had been rammed in his belt was coming away from his body in the big right hand of Carver Calloway Drill. By the window, Detective Allison swore violently but his fingers stopped reaching for his shoulder holster.

  Carver Calloway Drill was gloating above the long, shiny barrel of a .38. Now he was every inch the big bad man from Texas. Even with his flashy grey suit, the picture wasn’t spoiled. He didn’t need cowboy boots or chaps or junk like that. You would have thought he had just held up the Wells Fargo stage, the way he was waving the .38.

  But his first words were for Monks, seated at the desk, frozen into a statue by the reversal of events.

  “Hold it, Monkey Face,” Drill boomed. “Don’t reach for no buttons or press anything with your feet. You got enough on me now to string me higher’n a kite. One more dead one won’t bother me a bit.”

  Monks looked at him wearily. “I’ll take your word for it. But you don’t honestly think you can get away with this, do you? There’re over a hundred cops in this building.”

  Drill smiled. On his handsome kisser, it was ghastly.

  “It’s like poker, boy. I’m going for broke as it is.” He flung a glance my way. “Noon, take them cuffs off Holly. And just try something. I’m begging you. I’d like nothing better than to put a hole in you just for nothing.”

  I did what I was told. Meekly. As Monks had said, how could he get out?

  Holly Hill spat in my face as she came out of her chair. She didn’t miss either. Her harsh laugh rolled around the room as she went over and stood next to Drill. He nodded.

  “Come on, Holly. Let’s dust out of here. Pronto.” He started to back towards the door.

  “Ain’t you gonna tie them all up?” she demanded. “Soon as we clear that door, the copper will be pressing all those buttons. We won’t get five feet.”

  “You’re right.” His eyes gleamed as he thought it over. “Take the chink with us. He’s smaller and easier to handle.” He glared at Monks. “I hear one bell, one cop come running, I’ll blow the little guy’s head off. You’ll get us but he’ll be dead ’cause of you. Savvy, Monks?”

  “I savvy.” Monks gritted it out.

  Tom Long tried to get smaller in his chair but Holly Hill jerked him erect savagely, twisting his arm behind him. He whimpered in pain but Holly only twisted harder. Drill was right. Tom Long was as easy to manage as a child. For a tough doll like Holly Hill, he was even easier.

  They made quite a trio backing out of the room through a side door leading into the corridor – Tiny Tom, gorgeous Holly and enormous Carver Calloway Drill. They were going thataway in a big hurry. And Monks, Allison and the other dick and I could only sit and watch them go.

  But there’s a joker in every deck of cards. I guess that’s why life is the unpredictable thing it is.

  The other door to Monks’s office sudden popped open with a bang, and standing in the doorway was Tania Long. In a pretty new dress, her bangs all clean and shining, Titi’s Raggedy Ann doll still cuddled in her one good arm. The other was freshly bandaged. Right behind her was a police matron, all fat and flustered, because she had obviously been running after Tania and had just caught up with her.

  Tania could see only one thing – her beloved father being forcibly escorted through the other door of the office.

  “Daddy!” she screamed in her shrill little voice, the word cracking out like a thunderbolt hitting a tin roof.

  Tom Long whirled, saw her and lurched forward desperately, his black eyes overjoyed and frightened at the same time. The suddenness of his turn and lunge upset Holly Hill. As light and airy as his body was, Tania’s magical appearance had given Tom Long some extra glands. Holly Hill fell back into the office with him, because she had been hanging on. The motion sent her sprawling, tumbling, cursing, her skirt splitting down the side.

  The dick at the window came to life like an animated toy. He whipped out his gun and sprang around Monks’s desk, blazing away. And the quiet little office scene turned into a bloody shambles. Carver Calloway Drill opened up from the open doorway that half-hid his big football-player’s body. He had thunder in his hands. The gun in his fingers roared and rocked with explosions. Monks bellowed a warning. Too late.

  The ambitious dick fell across his desk grabbing at his shoulder as if a rat had run up his arm. And Carver Calloway Drill kept right on blasting. Tania shouted and hurled her doll at him. Her aim was bad, but she was one plucky kid.

  A disorganized Holly Hill was trying to scramble back to her shapely feet when a short-range blast from the big man’s gun blew her face apart. She didn’t even have time to scream. Her blonde head jumped on her shoulders as if somebody had hit her with a baseball bat.

  For a flashing moment of horror, Carver Calloway Drill’s brown face disintegrated with shock and bewilderment. But he wasn’t letting any grass grow under his feet – or his corpse’s. He fell back and slammed the door behind him.

  Monks was yelling and shouting, but I didn’t wait for any more messages or lectures. I vaulted over Holly Hill’s blasted body and swung the door open. Tania was crying frantically in Chinese, the police matron was wailing and Allison was hollering for me to stop. But I had reached my limit. I’d stood around long enough.

  I got through the door with a big leap and flattened against the far wall.

  Down the long hallway, heavy feet were running away. They stopped suddenly and a .38-calibre death-dealer racketed by, almost taking the buttons off my coat. I flung a glance towards the sound. I could see Carver Calloway Drill’s Mr. Universe body hurtling towards the back stairway.

  He started to clatter down it, then reversed himself as hoarse shouts of alarm came up from the floor below. His flying feet disappeared from view going like sixty up to the next landing.

  I followed right on his heels, damn sorry I hadn’t brought a gun with me but knowing damn well I wouldn’t have let it stop me anyway. Everything had gone far enough. This was the end of the line. And it was high time too.

  Drill’s feet thudded like firecrackers going off on the stairs above me. I took the stairs three at a time in pursuit. There were noises and yells all over Headquarters now. But I heard th
e roof door bang shut on its hinges and I knew I had him. There was no place further he could go. Headquarters is eight floors up with no other rooftops within easy reach.

  I mean I thought I had him.

  Sounds below faded as I slipped quietly up the last few steps to the metal door of the roof. I stepped to one side of it and kicked the metal barrier open.

  Dying daylight and bright orange gunfire filled the entranceway. The wall just in front of me flew apart in bouncing bits of brick and mortar. Carver Calloway Drill had made up his mind he would go down in the best tradition of Custer’s Last Stand.

  But one of my more practical hobbies is adding up pistol reports.

  When I’d counted seven shots all told, I stepped out on the roof. Drill was out of ammunition, all right. I ducked when I saw the .38 sailing for my head. It whizzed by my nose and dug into the chimney stack behind me.

  And then he rushed out from behind a cornice of the building and came at me like the Lexington Avenue express zooming into Seventy-second Street.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He was cursing as he came. Cursing all the way.

  “Damn tinhorn!” he roared. “You messed it all up –”

  There wasn’t time for more. His big body had reached me and his lunch shovels went for my throat. But his fury blinded him. He was like a bull in a pasture and I’d waved a red flag in his face just by showing up.

  I hit him three times before he hit me once. My left sunk into his flat, broad middle and I followed it up rapidly with a right and a left to the head. It shook him up a bit but not much. The breath charged out of him but I’d only been waving feathers at an elephant.

  I tried to move away from him with fancy footwork, but he threw a tree-sized leg behind me and blasted a meaty fist into my face. I bobbed my head but the ham that was his right hand caught my shoulder and spun me around like a top. He closed in on me, throwing his long, strong arms around me in a bruising bear hug.

  Butting with my head didn’t do a damn thing. We were too close for the butting to pack much wallop. I tried to wriggle loose, got a hand free and pummelled his brown face again. But he hung on. We shifted together, staggered a few yards across the tarred roof, but I couldn’t tear loose. He was folding me up like a pretzel in his brawny arms, cursing and panting all the time. His breath was hot and sweaty and my nose was beginning to fill with the close, stifling aroma of an animal house at the Bronx Zoo. It’s like that when you tangle real close in a fight.

  My muscles were starting to strain as he poured on the pressure. I was in a vice of plains-hardened muscle and mighty male beef. Normally, I’m in pretty good shape myself for an old man of thirty-one, but I’d been put through too many wringers on this case already. And I wasn’t half as mad as Carver Calloway Drill was.

  I lost ground steadily. My breathing was getting shorter and coming out in gasps. The darkening sky above us lent a nightmare quality to the struggle.

  Then I really had it. My feet left the ground. And suddenly I wasn’t anchored weight any more. Just a bundle of struggling, twisting flesh being manhandled by a guy twice as big as I was.

  It was the biggest scare of them all. He was moving towards the edge of the roof and his powerful arms were tensing, flexing, raising me extra inches. I tried kicking with my feet. No use. Not a kick in the carload. And slowly, inexorably, Carver Calloway Drill was reaching the very rim with me in a wrestling tailspin hold.

  I couldn’t see him any more; I only felt his steel-trap fingers sunk into my thighs and shoulders, only heard his panting curses and gritted remarks:

  “You got this coming, bunkhouse. You got this coming –”

  We had reached the edge. I could see miles of sky and empty space. I could see other rooftops, the skyline of New York. I could also see just what my body would look like lying on the pavement eight floors below.

  “Drill,” I yelled. “Don’t be crazy –”

  There wasn’t time for any more. I could feel his arms flex for the push, sensed the bracing of his legs for the mighty effort that would hurl me like a rag doll into space.

  Lots of sounds in life are very comforting. Your doorbell ringing when you’re lonely, the sound of your girl’s voice on the telephone, the tinkle of the cash register if you’re the proprietor of a small store. But high on my list is the chattering no-doubt-about-it sound of a police riot gun. Sometimes it’s the smartest music this side of murder.

  Behind our struggling figures and the pounding fright in my brain, the roof door slammed again and hard on its sound, a police riot gun blasted away with the rapidity of a typewriter in the hands of one of the hundred-fifty-words-a-minute experts.

  Carver Calloway Drill came apart beneath me. Suddenly I was falling.

  I fell heavily to the tar floor of the roof across the outstretched form of Carver Calloway Drill. Blood was running messily on the tar, fanning out in a wide, ugly stain.

  Monks’s face bobbed into view. Then blue uniforms and plain clothes. I rose to one knee before they reached me and took a quiet, last look at Carver Calloway Drill.

  The riot gun had cut him in two.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The police morgue was cold, clean and miserably antiseptic. I shivered in my thin topcoat as Monks led me over to the wall. The wall was about fifteen feet high and subdivided into a honeycomb of cubicles. Air-cooled drawers, they call them, but it’s where the department keeps stiffs on ice until they are properly identified or cleared up to official satisfaction.

  The stiff known as T. T. Thomas had been bothering the homicide boys for quite some time. But its own private, personal mystery had come to the end of the road.

  “This is it, Ed,” grunted Monks. “Hang on to your supper.” He put a hairy mitt on the drawer handle and pulled it towards him, stepping to one side.

  Monks and I were alone in the gloomy room. The bored attendant in the white jacket had gone back to his well-thumbed copy of God’s Little Acre.

  I stared down at the naked misery of T. T. Thomas.

  The photos had been one thing. Seeing him in the raw, adulterated flesh was something else again. My insides did an adagio.

  The wounds in the throat and across his dead white stomach were still ugly. And the bullet holes in his chest were like so many awful eyes.

  “Close it, Mike,” I said. “That’ll do for me.”

  The drawer rattled shut on hinges that needed oiling badly. I lit a cigarette, gave one to Monks. He looked at me over the flame of his own light.

  “You still stick to the same notion?”

  I leaned against the wall, knowing dead people were eternally asleep inches from my head. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

  “What else can it be, Mike? Drill shoots T.T. because he’s mad, then realizes he still hasn’t gotten the map he came for. So he whips up a screwy murder, a guy naked in a parked car looking as if he’d been killed three times. Knowing it will make all the headlines. Knowing he can then come forward and claim all the dead man’s possessions, just so he’ll make sure he hasn’t overlooked anything. T.T. had no family and Drill could prove they were buddies by way of Texas. The wallet was missing, thanks to Tom Long’s laundry store, so Drill knew the wallet had to be some place and just might turn up. Drill’s blowing up the store was his own brand of pressure.”

  “Screwy,” Monks muttered. “Real screwy. But then anything you’re mixed up in always is.”

  “You were mixed up in it first,” I reminded him.

  Monks exhaled. “What about that marked dollar bill? Didn’t make any sense at all to Drill.”

  I shook my head. “How could it? It was only half the story. When Drill got the bill from me and found it would set him down in Dallas, that was the tip-off. Something was missing. So T. T. Thomas had made a partner out of Tom Long. Partners always split fifty-fifty when they’re good partners, so I figured. T.T. had given Tom Long half the key to the mystery. So where do we go from there? The question is where did Tom put his bill? Tom could be cle
ver too. And seeing Tania always hanging on to Titi’s rag doll added up. Tom wanted to make big money, quit slaving for peanuts. In addition to the way he felt about the kind T.T., the pushing-around his family got made him want to hang on to it more than ever. So –”

  “So?” Monks growled.

  I shrugged and reached into my pocket and took out a folded two-dollar bill and handed it to Monks. His eyes were baffled.

  “While you were carting Drill’s carcass off the roof, Tania gave me something that meant a great deal to her. Her doll. Hers and Titi’s. Know what a present like that from a kid means? I was more flattered than if Eisenhower had made me Chief of Staff. I opened the sewed-up back of the doll and found that bill inside. And that’s it.”

  Monks was turning the bill over in his thick fingers. He squinted. “More crazy numbers,” he grunted. “How does it work?”

  I sighed. “T.T.’s numbers are on a one-dollar bill. They set you down in Dallas. Tom’s numbers are on a two-dollar bill. I may be crazy, but if you take a reading from T.T.’s numbers and go from that point with Tom’s, you’ll find the El Ombre treasure. One, two – it figures.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Monks was looking at me as if I’d spent all my life in the isolation booth on the Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question.

  We left the room of air-cooled drawers, signed out with the bored-looking attendant, and hit the street. The night air was a tonic. Stars twinkled like so many sequins on a G-string in the cold October sky. I thought of Holly Hill and shivered again.

  “Crazy case,” Monks rumbled. “Crazy corpse, crazy detective.” He heaved a sigh. “Well the Longs are okay, thanks to you. And stop thinking about that stripteaser. Maybe it’s better this way. For her, I mean. She would have rated about ninety-nine years in the jug anyway. And she didn’t strike me as the type of dame who’d grow old gracefully, or like it very much either. But do me a favour, will you –” He was all set to start on his old theme song about me getting out of the business when I flagged a passing cab.