Killer on the Keys

by Michael Avallone

  "I got all that," I said through clenched teeth. "Get on with the libretto. My nutty pal up in Highmark Meadows."

  She dropped her graceful hands into her loaded lap and sighed, regarding me with almost serene majesty from the depths of the chair.

  "I saw Death in his palm. As surely and as clearly as I see you sitting there across from me. I saw the deaths of two persons in his immediate vicinity. People important to his well-being and to his career. I saw that it would happen in a very short length of time. I saw that his once brilliant life would be marred and shattered into fragments that could not be put together. Like a champagne glass smashed in a fireplace, if you will. I saw all that—and because I had understood what sort of man your Gregory was—I could not tell him. I pretended that his palm had grown dark, that a veil had been placed over the lines and I was unable to go on. Yet I also saw that he did not believe me, that he knew I had lied to him, that he was pitifully aware that I had seen something disastrous and catastrophic in his hand. Oh, Lady Dunley and the other guests were quite amused at his obvious discomfort. For myself, I read no more palms that night and came home to this apartment. It is trying, at times, to know the Future and what will be. There are days when I curse this gift of mine."

  All of this she said with complete and utter conviction, each and every preposterous piece of black magic, as if it were Gospel. As well it might be. In the mouth of a Madame Alarma, it had the ring of Truth, the oratorical power of a Gettysburg Address, a Sermon On the Mount. But I was not buying any of it. I couldn't, and remain my own man. And be free.

  I took a deep breath and glared across the moody atmosphere at her.

  "Then you didn't see me in Gregory's hand, Madame Alarma?"

  "No, I did not. Should I have?"

  I ignored that. "And you didn't see cuckoo clocks and laughing academies or a nice place in the country with open grounds and pleasant buildings with bars on the windows and guys walking around with smiles on their faces and billies in their hip pockets just in case the patients get out of hand? You should have, you know."

  She stirred, a fleeting glance of distaste flickering in the pools of her eyes. "I'm afraid I don't understand you, Mr. Noon—"

  "Forget it," I snapped and rose from my chair. She watched me from her queenly seat and did not move an inch as I glided slowly toward her. I stared down into her face, her eyes, the deep cleft of her lovely bosom just above the top of the black evening gown. Not a muscle of her gorgeous self twitched as I held out my left hand, palm upward and offered her the challenge smack between the logic of both our minds. "Go ahead. Take it. Play with it, use a microscope, study it or warm those yummy mammaries of yours with it But whatever you decide, I'm hitting you where you live, lady. Read my palm. Tell me all. Don't leave anything out. I promise not to laugh in your face. All I will tell you is this. There's nothing in the palm of my hand but years of hard work, a lot of laughs and excitement and maybe a personal disaster or two but you and a whole library full of books and hoodoo experts will never make me believe that you can see anything in that mitt but the fact that I ought to wash it more often than I do. Okay? Will you read my palm on those terms, knowing I won't believe a thing you might tell me—that I don't already know?"

  She didn't take the offered hand right away. She only sat, staring up at me with some vast kind of inner disbelief of her own, working overtime. Her red mouth arced, the deep eyes knitted and a frown took over.

  "Careful, Mr. Noon. You're tampering with forces beyond both our controls. I can't be responsible if you let things prey on your mind."

  "Sans doubt, Madame," I snarled in my best High School French. "Read or get off the pot, sweetheart." A little Bogart gets results, too.

  Faint Technicolor glowed in her ivory cheeks, deep scarlet started to climb up from the beautiful infinity of below-the-top-of-the-dress. Which gave me the first real clue that she was a woman, in spite of all the staggering physical evidence available in the first place. It was nice to know and might come in handy later on.

  She didn't take me by the hand; she seized it like a lioness clawing for meat for the pride of cubs and her mate. The contact of her flesh against mine was Instant Electricity. Vibrations set up shop, in her fingers and my own. Our skin was suddenly hotter than molten lava. Something we both sensed but did nothing about.

  I didn't sit down to make it any easier for her.

  She didn't get up to make it any easier for me.

  She simply took my palm, held it out from me, leaned forward in her chair, putting delectable knees together and stared down at my life history, to hear her tell it, for what seemed like the longest time in the world. I didn't say anything. I was seething with sorrow for old Gregory, filled with scorn for all seers everywhere, confused and concerned with the fact that I had accomplished exactly nothing. I was literally no better off than I had been when I started. Also on the shelf in my thinking was the reality of Melissa Mercer, who had come all the way home from Los Angeles and was still waiting for my answer to the problem holding first place on the bulletin board. Would-we-or-wouldn't-we? Not even Nostradamus could have helped me with that one.

  Certainly not Madame Alarma. This lovely faker with a good racket going, who had gotten lucky with a very impressionable musical genius.

  I didn't believe for a second anything she had told me about the Great Gregory; for every prediction come true in a fortune teller's life, there were about nine others that never touched home plate.

  There had to be. The Law of Averages gets in its shots, too.

  That was what I thought and that was what I believed.

  With all my heart, soul and .45, which I had gone back to wearing just so I could feel normal once again. Feel safe.

  "Mr. Noon?" My name sounded alien and odd, just like that.

  All at once, she had dropped my hand and settled back in the deep chair, staring up at me with all her regal impact. The tiny smile in each dark eye was very much a twinkle. Now, I frowned.

  "Go ahead. Hit me. I promise not to cry."

  Madame Alanna folded her tapering fingers and her bared shoulders moved with the slightest indication of some inner merriment. But she kept her face sober and her voice without inflection, as she gave me the news of the day. My day and—hers. The room air hummed.

  My fingers still pulsed with the touch of her cool ones, but I was more interested in what she had to say. What she had to admit.

  She said a mouthful. Every syllable was a story.

  "There is very little to tell—you seem destined for a long, healthy life, no major accidents of a physical nature but the only important revelation I see in your palm is rather mystifying. To myself at any rate—but perhaps you will understand it or confirm its nature. It seems you are thinking of getting married. Someone very much in love with you wants you to marry her and you cannot make up your mind. The lines tell me you definitely will not marry this person. The lines also indicate she is a black woman. Very beautiful, very fine. A great person in your life. It is difficult for me to say right now what will happen to this person you do not marry. Am I correct so far—?"

  "You're telling it," I said, feeling defeated but wondering just how she could have learned about Melissa. "There must be more. You don't want to take half-measures. You're sitting there, looking all-powerful, all-knowing. Say it and make it snappy."

  "Yes," Madame Alarma said, her voice rising like a velvet cloud soaring up toward the shining chandelier. "There is more and it does confuse me because I had no intention of ever being in your presence again. But—according to the lines of your palm, you and I, Mr. Noon, seem ordained to see a great deal of each other."

  "Come again?" My hearing stalled, as if wax filled my ears.

  "Lovers, Mr. Noon," Madame Alarma smiled, showing me all her white and even teeth. Her bosom lifted on the somehow ominous word. "It seems I will be your mistress and you will become the one great passion of my life, apart from the Psychic. And moreover, our union and liaison is
scheduled to begin at once—"

  "What the—" I began, sensing all the traps in the world.

  "Tonight," Madame Alarma murmured in a faint, faraway voice. "Before either of us becomes a day older. . . ."

  "That's nice," I said, trying to think, stalling for some time I wouldn't know what to do with when I got it. "I've been propositioned a lot of cute ways before but this is the first time I've been foretold into a session in the sheets. You sure you didn't plan all this because you have lusted for me from afar and you're just trying to prove a point, dear Madame? I'm not that hard to get, you know. All you have to do is ask me. Damsels in distress are a specialty of the house."

  Madame Alarma came up from the smoking depths of her chair. The dark eyes glowed, the ivory complexion throbbed, the superb figure undulated toward me with utterly feline speed and grace. Suddenly, she was all cat, all woman, all jungle savage ready to have at me. All female.

  "You're struggling, I see," she murmured, showing me her pink tongue, the tremor of her bared shoulders and the largest eyes in the world. "You mustn't, dear Edward Noon. We are in each other's palms and there is nothing that can stop it. We are inevitable."

  She was whispering, sibilantly, each darting word flicking at me, laying the lash across my defenseless logic. She placed her long white smooth arms around my neck, drew my head closer to her own.

  There was a further hum in the dimly-lit atmosphere. The Capehart, the chandelier, the rug, the drapes, the exotically wild furnishings all carouseled, coming at me from all sides, as if collating their attack with the very frontal effort of Madame Alarma nee Stephanie Orodney. When her flesh touched mine, I seemed to explode. Kid-style.

  "Forget your Gregory," she commanded, biting my ear, bathing my neck with a soft, maddening warmth of her very breathing. "Think only of me. Tonight. Think only of—us." With that, she engulfed me.

  Unseen music thundered in the fantastic room.

  Not the crash of romantic violins, either.

  Just the pipes of Pan, with jungle drums throbbing and vibrating.

  Trumpeting and blasting all the way.

  Cosmo could not have heard the music the way we did.

  Madame Alarma and me.

  We went down to the floor together, drowning in that rolling sea of red shag carpet, pulling, pawing, digging at each other.

  The mad universe revolved.

  Taking a few more impossible, incredible whirls.

  The Madame and me were like that bad joke about the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter where the biter gets bit and the tables and beds get all turned around. I wasn't seducing Madame Alarma, she was out to get me, as if I were some virginal teenager who had strolled all innocently into her spidery boudoir.

  Give or take a few minutes, the lady was out to lay me.

  Any way, and all the ways she could.

  IS THERE A DETECTIVE IN THE HOUSE?

  Somebody stopped the world and I had to get off.

  Which seemed like a terrible idea at the time because the woman writhing and moaning low beneath me on the deep red shag carpet had already arched her tigerish hips, flexing extraordinary thighs so that the snug, black, second-skin evening gown was riding upwards. Past the ivory white flesh, toward the wonderful country. Splendid, sturdily curved legs, equally white, had scissored outward in that age-old V of surrender that bore all the promise which had crossed up Adam and sent every man since unpacking his bags. And packing them too, depending on the exact circumstances.

  Nobody knew where he was at that precise moment.

  Neither I nor the Madame. The drums were too loud.

  I'd very easily fallen from the self-made heights of cocksure bravado, allowing the exotic setting and the woman herself to practically call the shots and play the tune. I literally hadn't known what I was doing. I might have been drugged or mesmerized into playing a hot-pants jerk but I'll never know for sure. Madame Alarma's combination of glowing eyes, willing passion and vocal witchcraft—the thoughts and ideas she had planted in my brain—had been too potent to resist. The woman was a spellbinder. A spellbinder with a 38B cup, wanton hips and pure feminine savvy in the art of seduction.

  Gregory had fled from my mind, nothing seemed quite so crucial as the Here and the Now. Alarma and Noon. I'd been a fall guy who had needed hardly any pushing at all. But now—the mad scene was getting madder. This new development couldn't have been in anybody's palm.

  Cosmo had loomed all of a sudden on the threshold of the room.

  Standing in the doorless archway, glaring across the softly-lit floor at both of us. Looking as if he was about to explode.

  I could see his stormy and red-mottled face because I still had the Madame pinned to the carpet and I was staring in that direction when he made his unscheduled, untimely appearance. Or so I thought at that teetering, flashing second. But more important than all that was the shocking fact that this was a Cosmo I had never seen before.

  Maybe nobody ever had.

  He was no longer a silent old man who earlier that evening had ushered a stranger into the Madame's presence, with stooped shoulders, shuffling walk and creaking, wheezing words. Cosmo had very obviously located the Fountain Of Youth in far less time than Ponce de Leon ever did. Or anyone else, who ever went looking for that miracle spa.

  The stoop, the septuagenarian shuffle, the bumbling speech, was gone. So was the white-haired head, which had fooled me too, because I had been thinking of so many other things. Like Gregory, like Madame Alarma, like deaths from heart attacks and iodine. Like fortune-telling as the High Art of Flim-Flam.

  Flying across the floor at me now, fists doubled, face contorted with sheer venom, was an Olympic athlete, maybe six feet two, hard, bony and muscular. No old man could have moved so fast or so well. Cosmo was clearly an actor, too. Just like his beautiful Boss Lady. He lost at least thirty years shooting in my lustful direction. The old Badger Game was in full swing.

  There was hardly a second left to meet his charge.

  Madame Alarma, still crooning passionately beneath me, had her eyes shut tight, biting her lower lip with uncontrolled abandon, still hotly waiting for the patent joys of her pre-destined lover. Weighing the pros and cons of the situation, Monday Morning Quarterbacking was out of the question. Cosmo looked about ready to kill. Steam seemed to be charging out of his nostrils. He hurtled on toward us like Apollo Fifteen leaving Cape Kennedy.

  All at once, the crazy rhythmic pipes and drums shut down.

  It's always like that, too. Passion dies quickly in the face of terror. Or a plain and simple, old-fashioned beating.

  Cosmo reached us faster than the spacecraft made the Moon.

  He hit me three times before I could get off the carpet and off Madame Alarma. Three smashing, furious short jabs that landed in damaging places. The jaw, the right cheekbone and the left temple. My head must have been a moving target. Roaring express trains, clanging dinner gongs, shrilling factory whistles filled my ears. Madame Alarma added a piercing shriek and a shouted obscenity to the uproar. There was a rush of quick, spurting movement, most of it spontaneous and through a red haze of agony and thunder, I saw her sleek and lovely body barrel-roll across the red shag carpet, coming undone like a black, animated rug. I scrambled erect, hands thrown up in defense, with no offense set at all, unable to keep my footing on an even keel. Staggering blindly, skull ringing as if three movie musical scores had united to make cacaphony, I tried to find Cosmo. His face suddenly materialized, limned in the dim lighting, backgrounded by the gleaming chandelier. He looked very ugly then, his leering smile a compound of the fake wrinkles, powdered white hair and dark streaks of old man's make-up. His eyes, so very young now, somehow cobalt blue, a mocking travesty in the ancient face, was a marvel of some kind of unholy blasphemy. The whole effect and impact of his deception, plus his Pearl Harbor punches, were all that I needed to make a move. There was just no time for niceties or fancy footwork. He'd crippled me plenty and all I had left was white-hot ang
er and a drive for self-preservation that unified in one lightning jab of pure reflex action. I locked my dangling hands together, making a ten-fingered weapon and pivoted like a barber chair for the next customer. I swiveled back in a hurry and roundhoused my linked arms full into the confident face before me. Kung Fu be damned. To hell with Karate. I didn't have a grunt left in me. Just two clasped hands thudding in savage reprisal against the bobbing, leering mask before me.

  The quiet room echoed and re-echoed with the clumping, meaty, thwacking sound you would have heard in a Chicago slaughterhouse.

  Cosmo disappeared from view. Like a magic act.

  The noise his tall lithe carcass made hitting the deck was the most satisfying sound I ever heard, since Melissa Mercer said, "Yes."

  The roaring in the hushed atmosphere was a paradoxical din.

  I must have lain down somewhere alongside Cosmo. I was panting, lungs aching, face feeling like an expanded balloon. It was suddenly impossible to think. To function. Walls of fuzzy, swirling black clouds hemmed me in, crowding me. I was out on my feet.

  Madame Alarma's gorgeously weird face swam into blurred focus. Close, penitent, almost apologetic. But not quite. She was too much of a Satan to ever have to say Excuse Me for anything. Madame Alarma would never have to cry about mistakes. Least of all, spilled playmates.

  "Oh, the fool," she whispered, cradling my head, kneading my shoulders with skilled, probing fingers. "The damned jealous stupid muscle-bound fool—" The black evening gown was decently down again.

  "Is he dead?" I whispered back. "I hope."

  "No, of course not." She sounded angry at that. "That was marvelous, Edward. He's so brutal, really—he wouldn't have stopped until he crippled you. I'm so glad he didn't—"

  "What kind of racket are you two working? Playing old folks, doing this hidden boyfriend routine—" I was raveling together, slowly.

  "He isn't," she almost shrilled in my ear. "He isn't!"

  "Then you name it. Husband, bodyguard, stud—what exactly?"