Fats was sitting in a chair close to the curtain when we got there. He looked up as we went by, spreading his fat hands in a gesture of resigned despair. I patted his cheek as we went through the curtains.
He was the last thing I saw before every candle in the club went out with one mass plunge into darkness. Maybe a hundred voices were singing “Happy Birthday” and I was holding onto Thelma’s hand like my life depended on it. But suddenly she pulled it away and something came out of the darkness and thudded into my bruised face. A murderous blow. My eyes closed and spurted tears. I went down, the darkness changing to all colors. I groped for Thelma but she wasn’t there. Maybe it took only a minute but the candles flickered into light again, illumination flooded the club and I was standing on the threshold of the backstage alley, hurt, alone and confused.
Thelma Torrance was gone. Giggles and all.
15 — Thelma’s Bolero
The next half hour was bedlam with bells on. I collared Fats by the door of the curtain and tried to wring some answers out of him. By the time he was gasping for breath and hollering for help, the two plainclothesmen had collared me, pinned my arms and put me through the wringer. Their job was to keep an eye on Thelma Torrance and now she was gone and she’d been with me. When I finally convinced them I was on their side and they remembered my close association with their superior, Mike Monks, we all got organized. Fats was wailing his innocence desperately and looking for Howie to confirm his unchangeable position in the chair. The Headquarters boys and I checked the alley and the dressing room. It was impossible for Thelma’s abductor to have squeezed her out through the crowded area of tables and chairs. The alley was the only answer. We found a door in the rear wall that led to the street on the other side of The Green Cellar. The street opened on darkness, garbage pails and a considerable lack of traffic. I was buffaloed. The snatcher had moved fast. Unless Thelma had taken off on her own. I remembered the blow to my face just when the candles had snuffed out and how her hand had pulled away from me. But that was crazy. Why should she take a powder on me? It didn’t add up.
Evelyn’s dressing room drew another blank. There was no one in it but the spooky star of the show. She stood before us, still in her Halloween getup, trying to smile away our worries. The two detectives took their hats off like they were in the presence of the honored dead. I didn’t. I was scared all right but for a different reason.
“You’re sure, Evelyn? Real sure? You may be playing with a girl’s life. This is no time for games.”
She clicked her teeth. “Mr. Noon, I do not play games. I invited Miss Torrance, yes. But I haven’t seen her since I spotted her on the floor sitting with you. Now if you don’t mind —” She turned to face the mirror, her sign of dismissal.
“Lady,” one of the detectives growled. “That door that leads out of here. It’s right outside your room. The girl must have been fighting her snatcher, whoever he was. Unless he knocked her out. But either way, you must have heard something.”
“Sorry.” Evelyn indicated a portable radio mounted on her dressing table. “The radio was on then and it still is now.” In an angry silence, we all could hear the score of How to Succeed in Business …
“Come on, Evelyn. This is your last chance. Talk now and save yourself a lot of trouble. You’re in this up to your goofy eyebrows. I don’t know just how but you are.”
“Goodbye, Gentlemen,” she said coldly.
I nodded to the detectives. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sick of the smell of freshly opened graves.” They couldn’t have agreed more. The last one out of Evelyn Eleven’s dressing room slammed the door.
“My God,” he muttered. “I’d hate to meet her in a dark alley.”
“Cellars are for creeping,” I admitted. “Let’s check the club again. I’m worried about that kid.”
The other detective wagged his head. “Maybe she just got a notion to take off on you, Noon. Dames aren’t exactly level-headed and this one had been lapping up the joy juice.”
“Don’t bet on it. I wouldn’t.”
They both agreed with me. I could tell by the tight expressions on their faces. Faces used to seeing a lot of screwy things. But one of them wasn’t a run-out by a terrorized girl who was a target for a killer.
Fats wasn’t much help. All he could do was sweat, make strangling noises in his throat and worry about his dear Evvie.
“She’s all right? She isn’t —?”
“No,” I said tiredly, trying to be heard above the uproar of the clientele. “She’s a lot of things but she isn’t all right. But she’s not hurt if that’s what you mean.”
He reddened, looking at the two detectives.
“Fine thing. Letting women be kidnaped under your very nose. Oh, this madman is just too smart for you.”
“Lay off, Fats,” I warned. “The way they’re feeling right now they could step on your face and not feel a thing.” I was feeling awful. My brain was urging me to think, to do something constructive because the fact was right in front of us. Thelma Torrance had been invited to The Green Cellar and then either disappeared or run off. Why? Why — when she was being protectively shadowed by two detectives and knew she was next on a killer’s list?
“Don’t threaten me,” Fats blustered. “We’ve got friends, Evvie and I. People that outrank you all.”
“Oh?” one of the detectives stirred quietly. “Like for instance?”
“Never mind,” Fats wavered. “Just you remember who you shove around. Jimmy would —”
As soon as the name cleared his lips, he swallowed noisily and looked pained. The two detectives laughed. There were too many Jimmys for them maybe and they could have thought Fats was talking through his hat. But there was only one Jimmy to me. The Jimmy who’d been on deck since the whole investigation began. Sanderson, James T.
For some reason I couldn’t have explained, I covered up for him by laughing loudly and changing the subject. Sanderson had been Monks’ right hand for too many years to be tried on the floor of a Village dump.
“Fats, stop crowing. If your hands are clean, you haven’t got a thing to worry about.”
“Yes,” he sweated. “I haven’t. I mean. Lord, I couldn’t hurt anybody. Least of all young pretty girls. And to kill them that way in red rooms with Boleros and —”
“Fats!” I blurted. “Say that again!” The detectives looked at me. I had grabbed Fats’ full arm as if it were the last spar on the ocean I’d fallen into.
“Mr. Noon, you’re hurting me —”
“Please, Fats. Say it again. About not killing them again in red rooms.”
“Well,” he puffed righteously. “How could I make love to them and then — well, it would take a lot of carrying back and forth and all that preparation and — I love Evvie too much,” he concluded lamely.
I went cold all over. It’s a worn-out cliche, I know, but how else do you describe the sudden awful knowledge that the truth has been staring you in the face, begging to be discovered, only you’re too obtuse to comprehend?
“Noon, you okay?” the guy on my left wanted to know.
“Let’s get out here. Fast. I know where Torrance is. Where she has to be. There was only one reason for bringing her out of the house, where she was safe, to this place.”
“What are you yakking about?”
I headed for the door. “We’re wasting time. The killer wanted to get you out of the way so he could work in peace. Can’t you see that? He has to kill them one way. The only way for him. A red room with the Bolero playing. Don’t you get it yet?”
“Holy smoke!” the detective who had been worrying how I was feeling gasped. “Let’s get cracking. The car’s right outside.”
We shot out of the place. I didn’t even look around to say goodbye to Howie. Fats was left perplexed in our wake.
We raced toward Peter Stuyvesant Village where Thelma Torrance had an apartment with a room that had been painted by the mysterious salesman for Bostwick Paint.
; While we’d stood around being stupid, the killer had had nearly forty-five minutes to begin his mad turntable of murder.
The siren was wide open as Monks’ man rocketed the car through the narrow streets.
We were on time.
Somebody up there must have liked Thelma Torrance. By all rights she should have been dead. She wasn’t. I’d instructed the driver to keep the siren wide open. I didn’t want to sneak up on a murderer. I wanted to let him know we were coming. I wanted him to panic. To make the wrong move. I gambled that he wouldn’t kill any other way. I hoped to God I was right. If I’d been wrong, Thelma Torrance could have damned me eternally from heaven or hell.
Her apartment was on the ground floor, 1E. Three doors to the right of a fancy lobby that was deserted of staff, strangers or killers. We rushed the door, murdering the tiled floor with pounding heels. The door was open. We crowded in, our bodies colliding, our breaths heavy with fear and urgency. A black mark for Monks’ men if the girl they had been instructed to protect had been harmed. A cross for me to bear through my days for being so stupid for all of forty-five minutes.
The hall was dark. We smacked into furniture. A light glowed somewhere ahead. We fumbled toward it. The light was red. Somebody found a light switch before we reached it. Illumination flooded like a sunburst. Chairs, tables and hanging tapestries. There was no time to catch more than a fleeting impression. We found the red room.
Thelma Torrance lay writhing on the floor. The awfulness of the duplicate pattern hit me like a ton of the proverbial bricks. It was naked and ugly. She was lying between a running track of those cheap electric lights and she wasn’t dead. But she was alive in a way that set the nape of your neck on edge. She was contorting, thrusting her legs into rigid lengths of corded desire. The muscles on her small body knotted into straining lumps. We couldn’t hear her because the gag across her mouth muffled her moans. The room was silent save for the gagged mouthings. Only the red walls, the lights with that “Q” design and no sound of the Bolero playing. The detectives cursed and searched for getaway exits while I tried to do something about poor Thelma Torrance.
Her bad heart was all I was thinking about. But she was thinking about the thing that had set her whole body on fire. It was ludicrous when you thought about it later.
But as I bent over her to remove the gag, her eyes opened and saw me. The look in those eyes was the nearest I will ever come to understanding what they mean when they say pagan. It was a look that was a million years old, an amalgam of all the desires, wants and yearnings of centuries of female psychology. Her mouth dug into mine, biting, while her nude little body corkscrewed unnaturally, bent up toward me with a savagery she never could have achieved without the tender mercies of a maniac who knew how to administer cantharides.
I don’t know much of anything. I may have been wrong. I only knew that I had to stop her taxing that weak heart of hers with such pornographic convolutions until I’d gotten a doctor to look at her.
I hit her. A short, chopping right hook that dropped her on her back to the floor. Her head hit a bulb and it popped like a firecracker and went out. But she stopped moving. The detectives thundered back into the room, the noise bringing them with drawn guns.
“Noon!”
“A doctor. Fast.” I cradled her in my arms and held her gently. Her face was graven with agony, stiffened with muscular contraction. She was still alive but I wouldn’t know for how long. I’d never run into Spanish Fly before.
D for Dark. E for Ellingham. A for Albin. T for Torrance. But for the first time, we’d stopped the maniacal killer before he could finish his grim spelling.
Behind me, I could hear the detective on the phone barking instructions to Headquarters. The other detective was staring at me and the naked lady in my lap and the childish design of the red room, cursing his head off.
I was suddenly so tired I felt like closing my eyes and forgetting everything. I felt like crying too. Just like Ada, Thelma Torrance brought out the protector in me.
It was close to three in the morning when the M.E. drew me into the kitchen and suggested I have some coffee. The other rooms were like old Headquarters times. Activity, details and barrages of expert questions and opinions. The M.E. was the same one who’d sat in on the first kill. The little grey man with the sad eyes and the world of patience behind his horn-rims. Monks hadn’t shown up but he’d called in. Whatever he had to do or see could wait till morning. I’d given him all the details I had excluding any mention of Fats’ strange remark about a Jimmy. Tomorrow would be soon enough for that.
“Doc,” I asked the M.E., “how was this cantharides administered?”
He held up his stomach pump. Thelma Torrance was sleeping quietly in her bedroom. All the noise in the world wouldn’t wake her. The M.E. had given her a sedative.
“Internally, Noon. Maybe in a drink or — something she ate. Can’t tell unless I take a specimen of what she threw up. Offhand, I’d say it was in capsule form in a drink.”
I thought about The Green Cellar. Thelma had socked a lot of gimlets away. “How long would it take to catch hold? The last drink this girl had that I remember was about midnight. I lost sight of her about ten minutes after that.”
“Not long at all. It varies with the individual, of course. Then too, remember. Cantharides is an aphrodisiac. It simply hypoes the sex glands to a point where they demand attention and satisfaction. That too could vary in the individual. For instance, a normally cold woman would seem to “get hot” all of a sudden. Whereas a high-spirited girl would merely seem to be following her natural attitude until the drug really took hold. Then too, the amount of dosage makes a lot of difference. But in almost anyone’s case, a little would be too much.”
“And her heart?”
He shook his had. “Doesn’t sound too good. She took a beating tonight. The drinks, the drug and who knows what else.” He eyed me kindly. “There’s a bruise on her chin. Her attacker must have slugged her.”
“I hit her, Doc. She was threshing around when we got here and I figured she’d be better off unconscious.”
“You did the right thing.” He reached for the coffee pot. “Well, I’ve seen them all from axe murders to wholesale butchery but this strikes me as something for the Abnormal Psychology boys.”
“It is, Doc,” I said, thinking about Dr. Simon Mertz who was flying in from Los Angeles. “It is.”
On the record player in the red room, we found a record of Koussevitzky’s Bolero by Ravel. The abnormal maniac had never gotten the chance to play it.
Thelma Torrance slept blissfully all through the night. With two detectives in the living room and me sleeping on my hands in the kitchen.
16 — The Killer According to Mertz
Dr. Simon Mertz appeared in Mike Monks’ office the next day at one o’clock sharp. He was a breezy, stout man with cheery features and extrovert personality when he said good morning and made small talk. But as soon as he got down to the heart of the matter, the man of science and textbooks came out of hiding. His entire demeanor halted and shifted into gear which made Monks blink at the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, but it lent a gravity of belief to his story that no amount of records and statistical notes could have made more impressive. I listened too.
The story of Ted Crane was something that is always classified as fancy and fiction. But it underscored that old adage about Truth Being Stranger Than. What had happened to a simple man called Crane flouted all the conventions of probability. But as Dr. Simon Mertz assured us with the accent on recorded case histories, those things happened.
When he had concluded his illuminating talk, Monks asked him a few pointed questions for which he got answers he liked. Then he invited the good doctor to stay in town a few days at Headquarters’ expense and gave him the run of Centre Street as a bonus. Mertz was fascinated by a rundown of the three kills that had taken place in a red room.
“That’s Crane,” he said simply. “It has to be.”
&
nbsp; “No picture of him,” I said. “Why not?”
Mertz shrugged. “We had a fire in Administration that destroyed all our records. But I remember him. Small, slender. Blond. His face was very childish looking. Like a teen-ager’s might be. Shouldn’t be hard to get a picture of him, either. He was in the Army. Korea. With the Signal Corps. That would be 1950 to ’53.”
When Monks had thanked him again and he left to unpack his things at the hotel where he was staying, Mike looked at me.
“Why would a bunch of slobs do a thing like that to a guy who never bothered anybody? Gives me the creeps.”
I got up from my chair which Mertz’ strange story had riveted me to for an hour.
“The Army was a lousy place sometimes, Mike. Like the man said, it brings out the best and the worst in people.”
He shuddered. “I’d better get a picture of this Crane in a hurry. I think I know how he felt. No wonder he flipped his lid.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’d hate to have gone through something like that.” I was so full of Mertz’ case history of Ted Crane that I never mentioned my suspicions about Sanderson. Monks had enough to think about. Poor Thelma Torrance didn’t remember a thing after the candle blackout separated us. She’d gone into shock and Monks had to wait until she was ready to answer questions. The guard had been doubled on her and Hilda Hale was being watched as carefully as Khrushchev when he was in New York.
I went back to my office to tell Melissa Mercer all about the terrible case history of Ted Crane.
I had to tell somebody.
“Ted Crane was about twenty-two when he was drafted. He was small, not very physical and wore glasses and was always interested in electronics. The Army put him in the Signal Corps. He went to Korea and didn’t serve gallantly or win any medals. He just fixed a lot of radios, worked at communications and waited for the truce talks to end so he could go home. Can you picture him?” I asked Melissa Mercer that question in the quiet of my office.
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