Killer on the Keys

by Michael Avallone

  PRELUDE TO OPUS .45

  "Madame Alarma, I presume?" I asked, with very little originality and no brightness at all. "Do tell and pleased to make your acquaintance, M'am." I was stuck for an opening, not that sure of my purpose in coming and still very much up in the air, without a propellor to guide me. It was Investigation Time and very late in the old ball game. Life and Everything was closing in from all sides.

  "So," the woman echoed, gesturing me to one of the fantastically lavish chairs which no amount of cynicism could reduce in size or grandeur. She was flicking my small white business card in one lacquered, tapering hand. "A private detective and you seek me out. Is your business with me of a professional nature or have you come for a reading? You don't seem the sort, if I may say so."

  "I'm not," I agreed, not taking the chair. "But I do need you all the same. Very much, to tell the blunt truth."

  The supremely wealthy layout of Madame Alarma's Fifth Avenue address, like a leftover from an MGM movie of the Golden Era, was pure Early Crawford or Latter Day Lana Turner. Still, all of it, for all the glitter and the gleam, had to take second place to the lady herself. Madame Alarma was a three alarm fire of compact, concentrated Sex. I hadn't seen such a woman since my last dream of Brunette Heaven where everybody looked like Claire Bloom in her prime.

  "You need me, Mr. Noon? Well, it's always nice to be wanted. Still, I must know the purpose of this sudden entrance into my world. Professional or private?"

  Her voice was like the bass register of the piano. Low, muted and throaty but still silver bells all the way. I took my eyes off her powerfully formed feminine body, centering all attention on the cameo face riding so elegantly and perfectly under a high, shining upsweep of dark hair the color and sensual shades of charred black marble. We were alone, the rather decrepit old manservant who showed me in, having disappeared back into the woodwork. As unobtrusive as if invisible.

  "A little of both. Tell me—have you always been so young and so beautiful, Madame Alarma?"

  She didn't bat either of her gloriously wide and compelling eyes at that. Only the barest tinge of regret stippled the red bow of her carminely unforgettable lips. Very nearly a pout.

  "I beg your pardon. I do not understand that comment. I won't even pretend to. Do you tell me why you are here or shall I call Cosmo and have you shown out of my home, Mr. Noon?"

  "Nobody's called Cosmo anymore," I smiled tightly. "But then again if I really believed your name is Alarma, I'll have to buy Cosmo at that. All right, I'll behave. I'll shoot straight from now on." She had draped herself, with barely an effort, across the depths of a chair she could have had an orgy in and stared across the room, up at me. The eyes were faintly amused with me now and she didn't look like a woman about to act outraged, so I pushed on, taking off the pork-pie hat and twirling it between my fingers. "When I saw you at Lady Dunley's last month, you weren't exactly the dreamboat I see right this minute. You were old, ugly. A withered little crone of a woman who read palms. Test your memory, Madame."

  A lie has many legs but the woman in the chair was nobody's fool. Least of all mine. She sighed and her second-skin of a black evening gown made her formidable bosom rise ever so appealingly.

  "I do not have to test it. I have never read your palm in my life. As for my different appearance at Lady Dunley's—well, a bit of the theatrical is necessary with some unbelievers. You are surprised, I see. Don't be. I am approximately five feet and seven inches fall and I always weigh exactly one hundred and sixteen pounds, but it requires very little cleverness to go to the makeup box and comport myself as one whom silly little people seem to expect their fortune tellers to be. Remember Aesop, Mr. Noon. And how he dressed and walked and talked so that the people of his time would more willingly accept his wisdom, rather than from the mouth of a man in his twenties, which Aesop was when he adopted that ploy. Do you know the story?"

  "I know." I also knew where the sixteen pounds were, about eight for each superb mammary. "Forget Aesop. Drop the act, lady, and stick to the point. You're an actress, too. Okay. I got your name out of the Manhattan phonebook and I came to see you for one very simple reason. Gregory is in the hands of the Straitjacket Set. Highmark Meadows, up around Montauk. A private funny farm where they send all the rich people and the talented-with-hangups. I don't want him to stay there forever and I think you could help him walk out with a clean bill of sanity. At least, I'm pretty sure you can and to me right now that is one and the same thing. Do you read me?"

  "Gregory?"

  She murmured the name, made it sound like a vocal caress and her pink tongue touched the rim of her lower lip and her eyes roved.

  "Tadeusz Anton Gregory and stop playing games. There's only one Gregory and I'm sure you can read and write your own name and even make it to the bathroom without help from any adults. You're a big girl now. If your memory is so swell, you must remember reading Gregory's palm at Lady Dunley's. You have to. He was the star of that show."

  "Ah—of course. Our virtuoso with the trembling hands and the damp, sweaty fingers. The violinist with the unfortunate history. Two tragic deaths within the space of a few weeks. The accompanists at their pianofortes. Yes—but I wasn't surprised by what happened, you see. It was all there, in his hand. That very night at Lady Dunley's. How poor we mortals are. To be governed and controlled so relentlessly, so unfailingly, by what is in the lines and the creases of our inner palms."

  "Knock it off. Can it, label it or sing it on the radio if you want to but spare me the applesauce. No salestalks, please. I'm not here for one of your acts or routines. I want to jerk the jacket off Gregory. And you're going to help me do that, too."

  She stared at me for a long, dark, intense moment, scarcely moving or breathing. I caught a flash of laughter in her eyes again.

  "Really? In what way? Tell me how."

  "Simple." I didn't think it was. No way. "By telling me what you saw in his hand, then telling me what you told him that hyped up his imagination so very much and what in hell it was all about, in the first place. Mostly I want to know who put you up to it and what there is about Gregory or will be that could possibly interest anyone enough to go after him, with the express purpose of making him run and hide and maybe go off the rails like he did."

  She paused only a second before she answered me in a flatter voice than her usually musical tone.

  "You're confusing me, Mr. Noon."

  "If I do, then I'm glad. You've made life miserable for Gregory."

  "Have I indeed?"

  "You want an affidavit? He's hit bottom. All the way down."

  She seemed to ignore the accusation. "Tell me. How did his first pianist die?"

  "A heart attack. You know that. It made all the papers."

  "And the second—Algernon Gerard, wasn't it?"

  "He took iodine instead of his cough medicine. And you know that too. But I can't see—" I did, of course, and the air was going out of all my prosecution balloons. They couldn't get off the ground, actually.

  "You can see, Mr. Noon. Very clearly, I think. I did not give anyone a heart attack nor did I confuse the young fool into overdosing himself fatally. You reach for straws, don't you? You try to go against the immutable laws of Fate and Chance. I saw in your Gregory's palm the misfortunes to come. They came and now you hint rather directly at some vague kind of plot—some scheme. Really, Mr. Noon. Do me the courtesy of talking sensibly. Your friend's personal tragedies can have nothing to do with me. I do not control the Game, you know. The Game of Life. I can only play the Game—"

  "And Fate controls the cards." I sighed myself, knowing I'd lost ground and was ready to be pushed off into the land of Nowhere. "I know. I've heard that one before. I'm fond of quoting the same old line. It's from a classic movie. But, really, dear Madame Alarma, I'm desperate and I'm not leaving here until you tell me who you are, what you are, and anything else there is that might relate to Gregory's sad song. And don't call Cosmo, please. He's far older than I am and looks like
a nice Yes Man and I wouldn't want to put him on Medicare. I've brushed up on my Kung Fu and I could murder him."

  "I see." Her eyes glowed strangely in the pale lights of the room. "A man of honor. Anything for a friend."

  "Something like that."

  "All right. We'll talk. If that is all you want."

  "Good. That's progress of a kind."

  "Not the sort you will like, I think."

  "Just try me. I'll be the judge."

  "Strange." She was almost whispering now but her voice was so controlled and mellifluous that I heard her loud and clear. "That you should come to me this day, Mr. Noon. The signs all indicated a new influence in my life. Something or someone quite out of the usual run of things. There was a rainbow in the sky today, among other portents. I confess the last thing I expected was an up-to-date model of the ancient species homo sapiens—private eye. It's rather delightful, somehow."

  "Don't call me Sam. I don't run to type that much."

  "We shall see about that. Now—where shall I begin?"

  "Genesis. Even the Bible starts there, Madame Alarma."

  "So be it, Mr. Noon."

  With that offer too good to refuse, I finally sat down, taking another orgy chair directly across from the remarkable woman seated with regal exactness and stunningness in the heart of the incredibly luxurious lair. Madame Alarma had quite a backdrop for her tale of sophistication, money and witchcraft. The Capehart console shone like a polished meteor behind me, the overhead chandelier, a crystal palace of dangling adornment, impossible to appraise as to value, hung like a twinkling planet in the subdued lighting of the room. Add the deep red shag rug, the tall silken drapes of aquamarine hues, closing out the City and the Night, and we could have been anywhere in the universe. Not an interruptive sound or a whisper filtered in from the world outside. We were alone, intime, and the setting might have been rife with another kind of possibility. But I hadn't come to make a score in the Ego Department, not even to test my masculinity. I had come to see what I could do about getting Gregory out of Highmark Meadows, his Montauk prison.

  I still felt somehow responsible for his terrible condition.

  Madame Alarma did not offer me a drink and I did not want one.

  All I did want was what she gave me, in slow, measured, rhythmic Basic English which had the barest shade of accenting that seemed to suggest other places, other shores, other homes, besides America. There was a mild form of antiquity and too formally precise usage in her speech patterns. But I shoved that aside for the time being as I listened hungrily to her narration of her association with Tadeusz Anton Gregory.

  The key to all his trouble had to be in the facts, somewhere.

  If it wasn't, then we were all up the creek, in the hands of Madame Alarma's omnipotent Gods of Chance, Circumstance and Tragedy.

  "I am a psychic, Mr. Noon," Madame Alarma intoned without emphasis but her pure speaking voice made the pronouncement vivid all the same. "My origins I much prefer to keep shadowy but I shall tell you that I was born Stephanie Orodney to peasant parents in Szegedd, Hungary, some few months after the war ended in Europe. You may easily determine my age from that but I assure you, such normal arithmetic is useless. I am a witch, you understand, which means I have lived many lives in many other countries in many other times of history. For the present and for this world we now live in and know, I have been poor Stephanie Orodney who came to this country and made herself celebrated as a prognosticator of the Future and a prophet of some repute. You are not familiar with my reputation, I imagine, but many many people abide by all I see in the crystal ball and what I read in their hands."

  "Don't mind me," I said, without changing stride or expression. "Doll as great looking as you are, I wish I was your familiar. Or is that Cosmo's job? He change into a cat or bat at will?"

  She didn't even smile at that. She only nodded and continued.

  "Then you are not as unitiated as you pretend to be in these matters. Well and good. I won't have to stop myself and explain all that I say. I have traveled many thousands of miles, Mr. Noon, by plane, by sea, to reach those who would use my great gifts. Many thousands of your fellow Americans and people of other antecedents have gone by the word of Madame Alarma. I tell you all this merely to show you why I was invited to Lady Dunley's affair that night last month. She was more than generous in payment for my services. Entertainment, if you prefer. As for myself, I do enjoy it so when the monied people tamper with my gift. They come to scoff, to make rude remarks, to treat me as a freak. But then I display my powers and their faces change—alter to show the fear and the uncertainty. And I have my revenge. Or rather, the Fates have. Nobody can escape their manifest destiny, Mr. Noon."

  "No, I don't suppose they can. Give or take the breaks. Go on."

  "Your Gregory was at the affair. At first, he refused to let me read his palm. I saw the fear in his eyes. The superstition. He was truly the wrong sort for a reading. I could see that if anything were dire with his hands, if there was catastrophe indicated in his future, he would be prone to take it very badly. But Lady Dunley insisted and in the end, he put on a good face and gave me his hand to read."

  She paused, pyramiding her lovely fingers in a graceful apex. Her eyes, deep, stirring, regarded me very keenly for a long time. She was a witch, all right. As lovely as she was, as sexually strong as her facade was, she was making the small hairs on the back of my neck rise. Looking the way she did, the location was all wrong. Dead wrong.

  "Don't stop talking now, Madame Alarma."

  "Do you know anything about the palm of your hand at all, Mr. Noon?" The query shot up at me like a shining, pointed dirk. On target.

  "I know it's got a Love Line and a Life Line. Beyond that, I pass. Amateurs have read my hand and all I get is the usual Money, Success and Good Times baloney. Also according to my readings, I'm supposed to have been a brain surgeon or at the very least, a concert pianist. See what I mean about fortune telling? I have trouble making myself a ham sandwich and never have I been able to fix a Television set."

  Again, she refused to smile. There was a faraway look in her eyes too as if she were seeing something far off, way, way beyond me.

  "Gregory's palm told me many, many things. And nearly all of them were bad. Very bad." The musical voice rose slightly. "He was a doomed man, your poor virtuoso. Never have I seen such a palm of Trouble."

  "What exactly did you see in his hand?" I asked, trying to keep the cracks out of my voice. The damned room was like a chamber from the Spanish Inquisition, now. Which made the lair all wrong, the mood crazy. The layout was too lavish, too pleasing, to make me feel so ice cold and tensed up. I tried to rally, to hang onto my nerve.

  Madame Alarma tilted her head so that the cameo face was lifted, poised magnificently for my inspection. The impossibly divine eyes had a quality of I-Talked-With-God that was stronger than ever. Even when your cynical home is Missouri, such hypnotical fixity is disturbing.

  "It is not so simple to answer as all that, Mr. Noon. Chiromancy is rather more complex. When I take you by the hand and stare into your palm as I did with Gregory, there is far more to see, so much more to unravel and understand. It is as if a road map of a person's whole life was spread before you, with so many lanes and byways and paths, all at divergent angles and odds, crossing and criss-crossing. Interminably, without end. It is no mere trick to read a person's palm. It is a high art and one that is given only to a very select few."

  "Never mind my hand," I rasped. "What about Gregory's?"

  Now, she did smile. Genuine, almost delighted amusement, surfaced on the exquisite mask of her cream-white face. Her ivory skin dimpled.

  "Can it be that you are afraid too, Mr. Noon? The daring, strong individual who goes his own way, does his own thing? I'm not surprised."

  "I'm hysterical. You can practice on me later if that will make you happy. Please—Gregory's fortune—okay?"

  She had hardly wanted an answer from me. I could tell that by t
he way she deftly and easily continued with her saga of the benefits and beauties of the High Art of Palmistry. Chiromancy—her ten dollar word.

  An esoteric label, no matter how you looked at it.

  "Will we say, Mr. Noon, that a man's character, as well as his past and his future, can be revealed through an analysis of the lines that birth placed in his hands? There can be only one correct answer to that question. And that answer is Yes. Look—bear with me only a short while longer and I will tell you what I saw in Gregory's celebrated palm—" Suddenly, she was holding up her left hand, palm facing me, and with her right, began very nearly a blackboard demonstration of what she intended to say, using her slender, lovely forefinger as a pointer. She was more than five feet away from me, positioned in the orgy chair as if she were part of its sensual contours, but I could see what she was doing as plain as the day and as terrible as the night She began to trace and indicate with the forefinger, moving swiftly and emphatically, as her throaty voice made explanations. "See the Love Line and the Life Line, as well as the creases signifying the state of Health, Fate, Head and Heart. Key Lines, of course, but just as important are the others. Note the top of the palm, just below the finger connections—those are the positions of Mercury, The Sun, Saturn and Jupiter. So many people are unaware of the Fingers and their importance in the structure of Palmistry. Consider the thumb. Will and Logic are housed there, with Will the upper part and Logic the lower order. And the forefinger—that includes Religion, Ambition and Domination. The finger next to that—Impulse, Sport and Success. Third Finger for Optimism, Pessimism, Vanity. And the last finger—the pinky I believe you call it—Oratory, Purpose and Cunning. Oh, no, dear Mr. Noon—reading the human hand and interpreting its impressions is no mere parlor trick, I assure you. It calls for understanding and skill of the highest order."