Kill Her- You'll Like It!

by Michael Avallone

  The door to the room opened directly on the parlor. There was one huge single-pane window on the street side. Looking down from it could give you acrophobia. Far below, neon haze and glare saturated Seventh Avenue. There was a drawstring drape arrangement which Ada seemed to prefer closed. I checked every ingress and egress to the apartment. Except for the front door, there was no other way into Suite C. To take a fire escape, you had to go down that long corridor to a door that led out to a service stairway and the grilled balconies necessary for getting away from a conflagration. Or anything else.

  There was no way to get away from Ada Ven, though.

  As upset as she was by the Gingerbread Man's greetings, and as much as she'd been hitting the sauce while I was down in the lobby with Flatek, she was still of the same mind which had interested her in me in the first place. I was aware of Jellybean Jackson's resigned air of accepting the inevitable as Ada flung her arms about my neck and cooed all sorts of niceties which had everything to do with what a session we were going to have that night between the passionate percales. I let her ramble on, half-listening, paying a great deal of attention to my job. I had the suite sealed tighter than a drum, the door was double-locked, on the chain, too, and with my forty-five back in its leather bed, we were all set for the evening. Or at least I wanted to think so.

  We ordered a meal from room service and while food-tasting for queens isn't exactly in my line, I wasn't prepared for any kind of poison routine. Jellybean Jackson did a very odd thing, at that. For a man who loved dogs, that is. He tossed scraps of filet mignon and hamburger to little Frankie and didn't dig into his plate or let Ada start on her rare sirloin until the poodle looked okay.

  The midget manager didn't rest easy with me. It wasn't exactly fun having him in the room, knowing he was an ex-husband, now reduced to chief cook and bottle washer for Ada Ven. I was reminded of Erich Von Stroheim being Gloria Swanson's lackey the same way in Sunset Boulevard. And you know how William Holden wound up in that one—in the fancy swimming pool with about six slugs in his fair body.

  Why the lights had all gone out at the moment Jackson had had his tussle with the Gingerbread Man remained a mystery not even Ada could explain, for all her tricking up of the suite interior.

  About midnight, we all turned in.

  Jellybean Jackson, Frankie tucked in his small arms, smiled bleakly at me, winked at Ada, and disappeared into the box room and closed the door. Ada giggled to herself, still hanging onto a bottomless glass of Scotch, and sashayed into her bedroom, wriggling her buttocks theatrically, as though she was on a runway, and waved her slender hand at me in a come-ahead gesture that needs no translation the world over. I followed her into the dreamy bedroom, prepared to talk some kind of sense to her. Or at least try. I wasn't too sure myself.

  The bottle saved me. There are good things to say for hooch.

  Scotch, that is. We had cracked two of them and she must have put one away all by her lonesome. Jellybean didn't touch the stuff.

  I found her out cold on the thick rug, half-in the bed, half-out, her splendid body and flaming red hair shrouded in the filmy creation which she had worn since the moment I walked into her life.

  She wasn't snoring and she wasn't faking. She was in a dead collapse as if she'd been Mickey Finned. I gathered her rippling figure up, spread her out on the bed, and she didn't let out so much as a sigh. But she was breathing and she wasn't dead. Just dead-drunk was all. I stared down at her gorgeous body and wondered why any maniac would want to carve her up and paint a red "S" between a truly wicked navel and a pelvic cage that would have had Michelangelo doing nipups. Or the Twist.

  I didn't know so I left her there, sleeping, and went back into the parlor, ready for the night watch until morning. There was the nice floor and those stuffed ottomans and all that sense of quiet and comfort.

  I supposed I could have climbed in with her and maybe roused her for fun and games, but she was in no condition for anything. There are unwritten rules about such things, too. I don't take candy from babies. Not even six-foot goddesses of skin who must have stopped being a child a long time ago. And then there was Melissa and my uneasy conscience.

  Three cheers for me, maybe, or sympathy for a sap.

  Unfortunately, the Gingerbread Man had no such compunctions.

  He'd do anything he could to a stripper—anyplace, anywhere, anytime. And that night he did. Again. For the fifth time.

  And all of Manhattan and thousands of cops and millions of citizens wondered once again what in hell the world was coming to. That's one question nobody had the answer for. Not on this planet.

  Not even your friendly, neighborhood private eye.

  I stood watch in the red-tinted parlor, with the Queen out cold in the bedchamber and the midget and the dog closeted in a box of a room and the city sleeping all around us.

  Until someone screamed bloody murder.

  And woke everybody up.

  WHO DAT WHO SAY WHO DAT?

  I was dreaming about a man chasing a naked woman with a knife and then the woman turned into a dark alley somewhere and a great searchlight went on and it was Melissa Mercer. She was terribly frightened, looking back, and her mouth opened and nothing came out. Then the man with the knife, whose face I couldn't see, came into the light, too, and the long shining knife was now a bottle of fingernail polish. Only instead of the usual size, it was as big as a ketchup bottle. There was a label on the red cylinder and I could barely make out a huge letter "S". The curved symbol resembled a snake more than something from the alphabet. And then the man drew very close to Melissa and she tried to twist and dodge out of his way. But it was no use. The faceless man—he seemed to be wearing a thin and gauzy robe—upended the bottle and held it over Melissa's head.

  Then the dream really went the Freud route.

  The red liquid oozing down from the bottle, slowly at first, suddenly gushed and a white waterfall splashed down on poor Melissa, completely inundating her. And the faceless man seemed to be laughing his head off. And Melissa finally screamed, covering her eyes. Only the scream was soundless. And the bottleholder whirled around and I could see who it was. Only it wasn't a man any more. It was Ada Ven, with her flaming red hair and her great animal body gyrating and pumping as if she was trying to strike oil. Her face loomed closer and her tremendous mammaries and writhing flesh blotted out naked, shivering, milk-drenched Melissa. Suddenly, everything was obscene. Loathsome. The Ven face contorted, grew crimson right before my eyes, and transformed into a hideous, gargoyle caricature of what she really looked like. She was bearing down on me and the hole of her navel expanded and widened until nothing else could be seen. And the world went abruptly dark as if someone had turned out all the lights.

  I snapped erect on the floor of the room, my head propped against a high ottoman. The dream vanished. I was tieless, shoeless, and coatless and nothing in the room had changed except that the pink telephone was ringing. I stumbled for it across the thick shag rug, remembering where the instrument had been, conscious only that I had dozed off. The ringing of the phone was low and almost musical. I got to it before it could noisily wake anybody up. Ada Ven's apartment was as silent as the moon.

  The dream had already faded back into memory.

  As if it had never been. Never was. Guilt dreams can be that way.

  It was Flatek. As half-awake as I was, I recognized his bland and even voice. Maybe not even an earthquake could rattle Flatek.

  "Oh, it's you," I mumbled. "Still on duty downstairs?"

  "Negative. My shift was over at 0200 hours."

  "What time is it?"

  "Going on 5:00 A.M. How is everything there?"

  "Negative and uneventful." I woke up then, frowning. "You must be calling me so early for a good reason, Flatek."

  "You got it." A note of fatality crept over the wire. "Gingerbread had himself another stripper. I'm calling from her place now. Monks told me to. Seems like he was wrong about Ven."

  I swore bec
ause what else can you do when they hit you with bad news like that? For a long moment, the dim interior of Suite C felt like a funeral parlor. I rubbed the fuzziness out of my eyes and brain.

  "So who was it, Flatek?"

  "One Satana. A really good-looking belly dancer from Iran. Age about twenty-two or thereabout. She's DOA right about now. I'm at Beekman Place. The Gingerbread got her while she was taking a bath. We moved the body twenty minutes ago. And she was stabbed through the heart and that "S" is on her stomach. Just like all the others. She was working tonight at The Oriental. Gingerbread must have been waiting for her when she got home. We never do find the knife. He's taken it home with him each time, damn his hide."

  For the phlegmatic Flatek, that was an admission that he wasn't so thickskinned as he came on. And all I could really think of was that the mad maniac was ripping up everybody and nobody knew who he was.

  "Did Monks have any other messages for me?"

  "Yeah." Flatek chuckled thinly. "He said you should watch your virginity. You know the captain, always clowning."

  "I know him. Satana from Iran. Young, beautiful, an exotic dancer, and now she's dead because some nut doesn't like sexy entertainment. No assault at all, huh?"

  "Not the kind you mean. Just the brutal stuff with the knife in the left breast. He makes a real gouge job out of that. I imagine psycho calls that sexual motivation, no matter how twisted."

  "Check and double-check. Thanks, Flatek."

  "What for? I had orders to notify you so you'd be on your guard. The captain still wants Ven watched. My relief man is down in your lobby right now. He's Polish, too, just for nothing. Name of Lasky."

  "Where are all the Irish cops?" I said with mock despair. "See you around, Flatek. Take care of yourself."

  "Roger." We both hung up, maybe a mile or more apart, but not too separated in our thinking. I thought for a very long minute before I did some detecting of my own. I glided over to the door of Jellybean Jackson's room and inched the barrier inward. I didn't want Frankie making like a watchdog. There was a wall switch, but I had a pencil flash which I carry on some assignments. I flicked it on and saw Jellybean Jackson, garbed in polka-dot pajamas, looking more childish than ever, sleeping peacefully on the army cot. Frankie was curled underneath it, a scraggly hump of dog body, as motionless as a statue. I killed the flash, closed the door again, and walked toward Ada Ven's bedroom. I felt like Caspar the Friendly Ghost, checking tenants in a haunted house. But you have to play all the percentages, work all the angles—if you want to stay alive to read your next morning's newspaper.

  I stalked to the Queen Anne bed, noiselessly. I held the pencil flash out and aimed it at the shapeless mass dimly visible in the gloom of the room. There are surprises and there are surprises. I got a king-sized one, free of charge, and I never did flick the flash on. It was suddenly and electrifyingly—quickly—batted out of my hand. I told you Ada Ven was some kind of woman.

  She came up at me—surging, expanding, a tidal wave of warm flesh and intense inner heat and purpose. Naked arms pulled me down, closing around me, squirming insistently. There was a complete loss of time and place and yet a thoroughly stunning impact of all those things. I was on top of her because she had wanted me there and all of her incredible wantonness and fullness were like a volcano about to erupt. Only this wasn't a volcano. It was one of the biggest, lustiest, most single-minded dolls ever created.

  And she obviously had a capacity for losing the bad features of a full bottle of Scotch like no other woman could have.

  Her hot breath was sweet, as if she'd found mints somewhere and refreshed herself. And the biting, torrid fury of her mouth toothing into my defenseless neck was the open sesame to everything.

  "Come on, now," she moaned in a low almost reverential hush. "You got too many clothes on, you know that!"

  "Ada—" Maybe it was a protest, maybe it wasn't. But whatever it was, she recognized that sound. The last cry of the yielding stud to the big-buttocked filly. Samson letting Delilah cut his hair.

  "Oh, no, Eddie baby—you don't cop out any more. Ada wants you and Ada is going to get you if she has to rape you!"

  Invisible fingers tore at my belt buckle—pulled, raced, and roved. Fiery little bonfires began their fateful blaze. We churned.

  She didn't have to rape me.

  I went, maybe not quietly, but I went.

  It was damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't all the way.

  The eternal trap.

  The kind that all the great females know how to build.

  Even the not so great ones.

  But Ada Ven was a great one.

  With murder all around us, we balled.

  Far into the dawn.

  I was back in the main room, dressed and innocent, when Jellybean Jackson emerged from his box of a room, scratching his tousled hair and yawning. He was more incongruous than ever. It was the little boy's body with the old man's face that did it all the time. He had parked the polka-dot pajamas somewhere and was wearing very neat brown slacks and an open-necked gray rayon shirt. He hadn't combed his hair yet, but apart from that he seemed ready for the new day.

  "Ada up?" he piped in that thin voice of his. The arms poking out of the sport shirt were wiry and muscular and surprisingly good. I shook my head and motioned him to sit down so we could talk. I'd put my own tie and shoes back on, leaving off only the coat. Jellybean Jackson smiled at my shoulder harness and the big forty-five nestling there.

  "You heeled all the time, Noon, or only when you're on jobs?"

  "I keep it with me," I admitted. "You just never know."

  Frankie was nowhere to be seen, but I didn't ask about him. Dogs rate too much attention as it is. All bleeding hearts to one side.

  I'd drawn the heavy drapes, parting them so August sunlight was bathing the room in a nice, warm glow. The sky was cloudless and from our floor, you could barely see the tops of the lower buildings that surrounded the Alamo. The big hotel's powers-that-be had built it high, so that the only real view was the far-off, glistening Hudson with the Palisades rising like ancient monoliths. It was only about eight-thirty in the morning, but I was ready for a fresh start.

  "Let's eat," Jellybean said, brightening. "I'll order and then wake Ada. She always has the same thing for breakfast. Orange juice and coffee. Gotta watch those curves, you know. She puts it on fast."

  "Hold the phone on that," I said. "There's something you and I have to talk over while she's not here."

  Something about my face or tone halted him. He shrugged, sat down again, and stared at me. There was a guarded look around his eyes.

  "It's your pitch," he agreed. "The whole schmear. You call the shots. That's why we hired you. What's the scoop?"

  "All is not quiet on the stripper front, Jellybean. Gingerbread rode again last night and you ought to know what I think."

  I told him everything that Flatek had told me. I didn't have a newspaper nor did I turn on a radio to confirm it, but Jellybean Jackson listened to me with his face crumpling as if he was going to cry as each detail registered on him. He kept craning his head toward the bedroom door as if afraid Ada was going to come barging in on us. When I was finished, he wagged his head from side to side, the way Frankie might have done. The midget looked heartbroken by my revelation.

  "Oh, Lordy," he wailed, "Ada's gonna flip her wig when she hears about Satana. That's five, Noon! Five dames since Monday!"

  "Yes, and today is Friday and the schedule calls for one a day. All at the same time, it seems. The early morning hours of the day. But Jellybean—and this is the important thing—you have to convince Ada to go to work tonight. Come whatever time the joint closes Saturday in the A.M., I want Ada Ven doing her strip act tonight."

  "You nuts?" His tiny eyes were appalled. "Didn't we just get through counting stiffs? Don't we both know some nut is chopping the girls up? Don't you go sticking my girlie's neck in the noose, kiddo! What the hell did we hire you for anyway?"

  I stared
him down until his near-shouting manner stalled.

  "What are we supposed to do?" I asked. "Sit in this room for all eternity, sending out for our meals with you making a food taster out of little Frankie? Come on, Jellybean. Use your head. If Ada goes on, I'll be there to stop Gingerbread from taking a crack at her. But she has to be where he thinks he's got that crack. Do you understand? He's not going to come into this room to do it. Not with me here."

  He squinted at me, rubbing his tiny chin with a small hand.

  "You wanta decoy him with Ada. That's the idea, ain't it? She goes on and you'll sit there skinning your eyes for some screwball to jump at her and make a play. Or maybe while she's on her way home?"

  "Right on. And what do you think?"

  "I dunno. Let me chew on it for a while. I know Ada. She's a big girl, but she scares easier than anybody. This Gingerbread makes her want to vomit. Just the thought of him."

  "Sure, I know. But that's the only way I can help her, Jellybean. This hotel watch just doesn't add up to progress. Take my word for it. If Satana had stayed home last night, she'd probably be alive today. This nut obviously has to see them do their act before he goes after them. That's the way I have him pegged, anyway."

  "But yesterday—that guy at the door—the note! That was the Gingerbread Man, wasn't it?" He practically moaned it at me.

  "Looks like. And chances are he's seen Ada Ven in the flesh."

  Jellybean Jackson shook off a tremor that wanted to make his little knees knock together. Suddenly, he nodded. Slowly. But he did nod. "Okay. Your way. But you gotta tell her. I can't. You can make it sound better. I used to do carney, but this is something else. How can I tell a woman like her to go stick her neck out?"

  "I'll tell her," I said. "Just wanted to be sure you'd back me up when I broach the subject. I think Ada will listen to you if you give it the okay. She really cares a lot about you, Jellybean."