Killer on the Keys

by Michael Avallone

  I couldn't but I didn't tell him that I wanted to get him out of there. Away from them, away from Madame Alarma and her crystal ball and divination of palms. Away from the sordid realities of things.

  "Gregory, for the love of God—"

  Suddenly, he frowned, suddenly he stepped back, still sawing at the thunderously loud Strad. His dark eyes popped, his mouth worked and I saw rather than heard his next words. The violin bow arched.

  "Who is that woman there, Edward?"

  He was staring, terrified, at a point somewhere beyond me. I turned around slowly. The dazzling white glare of the amphitheatre swung with me, like a tremendous searchlight, focussing on a target.

  I saw Melissa Mercer.

  Mel. My Mel.

  She was mid-way up the marble staircase, sprawled in a disorganized tangle of long legs and curved dimensions. She was naked, too. Her dark body, an adornment for anything in this world, was like I had never seen it before. She was still, unmoving, and I knew something very bad had happened. I jumped for the marble steps, my heart pounding violently. The keening violins were abruptly joined by the jarring pianos. Another insane oddity. The music was Pavane For a Dead Princess speeded up to a ragtime tempo that was not only inappropriate but obscene.

  I was crying as I raced up the marble stairs.

  Melissa Mercer remained where she was. An ebony figurine, a statue. A jet splash of lovely inertness on the gleaming marble steps.

  There was a large bullet hole in the center of her left breast. An ugly irregular splotch of unmistakable lethalness. There was no red blood around the wound. Nothing but a tiny stream of something that looked more like milk than anything else, white, creamy milk.

  Melissa Mercer was dead.

  I knew that.

  No matter how hard I ran or how much I cried out in protest I just couldn't reach her prone corpse.

  The marble steps were endless.

  The wild music was deafening.

  The whole mad tableau was a torture chamber.

  Melissa Mercer's sprawled corpse kept getting away from me.

  As did everything else.

  It was only when the music behind me, the nagging, insistent, awful melody shifted into Ravel's Bolero, that I stopped running altogether. I put both hands to my ears and screamed.

  Screamed like it was the end of the world.

  It had to be.

  A siren of some kind woke me up. A lingering, piercing cry in broad daylight. I strained from darkness, twisting on a bed of some sort. For a long second, there was nothing to remember or to think about. I was conscious of motion, a forward movement, the familiar feel of automobile tires, a dizzying sensation of shifting, pitching momentum. I rocked, rolling and shaking my head. I saw an overhead ceiling, narrow, cramped, suddenly ending in a very close wall. I sniffed the atmosphere exploratively. Antiseptic, clean gauze, medicine—a universe of sense memory odors and aromas. Tonsils out as a kid in Bellevue, bullet wound in '63, another in '67—hospitals, ambulances. The siren blasted close by again. An ambulance registered on the theatre screen of the brain. I craned, looking upward and backward. Two heads and two sets of shoulders framed in a small cut-out of a window. A driver and an interne, their uniforms shockingly white. I batted my eyes, trying to think. There was no one with me. I was alone in the rear of the machine. How bad could I be if that was true? I made an effort to examine myself. It cost me. Red-hot pain shot all over me. Blinding stabs of agony. I located the spots. My hands, my left side. I was a sewing machine going crazy. Stitch-stitch-stitch. Each stitch was a twang of pure surging reflex shock. My hands flew up to my face. I saw the heavy, thick mummy-wrappings before my eyes. My mits were like two white boxing gloves. I probed at my face, trying to keep the panic down, to sit on the terror before it could choke the heart out of me. I had to stifle a moan. Even through my muffled fingers, I could feel acres of more white gauze literally covering the left side of my face.

  For one insane minute, the mind played tricks.

  I lost my head. Completely.

  I swung off the nifty, inventive, modern design cot and began to crawl toward the cut-out window. And the two heads and two sets of shoulders. Daylight bathed those heads and shoulders in a golden, unbelievable glow. Where had last night's snow gone? Where was I? What had happened to me that I was decked out like a road company Karloff doing a stage version of The Mummy? I didn't know.

  Not knowing drove me wild.

  I began to pound on the cut-out window. It was thick glass, protective, almost like a prison routine of some kind. I kept on pounding until the two heads and double shoulders turned around. I was probably shouting too but I can't say for sure. I was still locked in my nightmare, still cemented in close with horror and fear and screaming nerve ends. My heart was a yo-yo in my chest, my blood seventeen bongo drums.

  The driver had freckles and a nose like a flat iron. The interne, years younger and somehow priest-like of feature. Both reacted the same way. I must have looked like an apparition. Their faces crumpled; they both said things I couldn't hear. I was still banging the thick glass window, still demanding something. I wasn't sure what.

  I got results, though. Up-tight results.

  Brakes slammed on, tires squealed, the ambulance pitched to a full stop and running feet ran around the side of the vehicle. I lurched to the bat's-wings doors at the rear. The leather was very modern, the contraptions were stylish and fancy but I wasn't making appraisals.

  It was too late for real estate and pricing things.

  The doors jumped open, flapping left and right before I reached them. The driver and the interne stood there, growing up from the street, blocking the way like tall trees. They were both the same height, despite their obvious age difference, and I was sure I could take them. Yellow sunshine put halos behind them.

  Backdropping their white-coated figures were the high stone canyons of New York, scurrying, gaping passersby, huge signs hanging from metal stanchions. Mid-Manhattan somewhere, the Crooked City in all its hustling glory. Not far from my office. The mouse auditorium. The business address with a Molotov cocktail in it.

  "Hey," the driver growled gruffly, extending a burly arm. "Come on, fellah. You wanta hurt yourself all over again? Lie down there and take it easy. Be at Roosevelt in no time at all—"

  "I'll ride with him back here, Sandy," the young interne said crisply, showing me a smile that everything was going to be all right. A smile that said everything was not all right. "It's not as bad as all that, you know, guy. First Degree burns and—"

  I wasn't listening.

  I didn't want to hear what either of them had to say. An unreasonable, uncontrollable, delirious sort of something had taken me over. Dominating everything, blotting all other things out. Pushing them back into the darkest corners of the human mind.

  "Melissa," I pleaded. "I have to get to Melissa—"

  "Sure you do," the interne began to clamber aboard. "We can understand how you feel—Sandy!"

  I was pushing at them, trying to smash them, trying to knock them out of the way, hungry to escape, fighting to be free, when the moving floor gave way beneath my feet and the tidal wave of nothingness and blackness overwhelmed what was left of sanity and any reason. It came with startling swiftness, with utterly unavoidable force. I swept along with the tide.

  The driver and the interne stepped back quickly to catch me as I fell out of the ambulance into their ready arms. The priest-faced medic bellowed a warning once more, matching the urgency of his brawnier partner, the driver with the flat-iron nose.

  I passed out before I could lay a bandaged hand on either of them. Passed out like that same mummy dropping out of the case.

  Passed out, fully dressed, and not in my right mind.

  One mad skyrocketing thought crossed my fading-out mental processes before I hit the bottom line and the little dark men took me under their wings again. Before I fell down all the way into nowhere. The dead center of all geographical locations.

&nbs
p; Madame Alarma and I were just never going to be lovers.

  Not in this world or the next.

  Not even in Limbo or on Mars.

  And one other thing, too.

  You're a detective even when you may be dying.

  Shane was right, bless his fast gun.

  A man can't break the mold, Joey. No matter how hard he tries. . . .

  There had been no cop in the ambulance with me.

  There should have been a cop.

  ACT THREE

  (A room like a den but containing enough official-looking appurtenances to seem like an office. There is a desk Center Stage. Two men are seated to either side of this. The older man is bald, bespectacled and wearing a contrastingly Scotch Plaid blazer. He seems to be, if not the owner of this room, the habitual occupant. The other man, across from him, has the left side of his face to the audience. It is curiously inflamed, as if he might be blushing. He is dressed far more soberly than the older man. His manner is somehow investigative, searching, probing. He has the look of the man who wants to find some answers. At Curtain Rise, the older man is filling a briar pipe from a mahogany-grained humidor on his rather tasteful desk. The younger man is placing a porkpie fedora with flat emphasis on the corner of his right knee. It is daylight, cold sunlight filtering through a bay window to the left rear of the stage. Cypress trees and a slope of brown-grey mountain are visible. We are in the country. The atmosphere is very tranquil. Time seems to have no importance at all in the scheme of things. The air almost has a sound of its own.)

  BALLAD OF A MAD MUSICIAN

  "You're making this very awkward for me, Mr. Noon. I'd hoped I'd made myself rather plain on your visit to us in the early days of the month. I see I have to repeat myself——"

  "Oh, you were very plain, Dr. Deming. And you're going to have to repeat yourself. Things have changed. The world moves on."

  "Really? Are you being epigrammatic or have the Police altered their position in this matter? I've had no word from Headquarters. As for the confinement of Gregory, that is still in our hands, officially, and will remain so until his condition improves for the better or this institution hears from his lawyers. Who up to this point seem quite satisfied that we are doing everything in our power. Whom do you represent, Mr. Noon? Is there any reason why I should listen to, if you will forgive me, a layman who can know precious litle about mental health?"

  "Everything you say is true. But I'm sure I can help Gregory snap out of it. Amateur or not, isn't his sanity worth every effort?"

  "Don't ask questions which can only have one answer, Mr. Noon. That is unworthy of us both. I merely am justifiably unimpressed by your turning up again. At this particular time. We're not out of touch that much, even out here you know. In the Wilderness, you might say. Why should I listen to a man who is himself a thorough-going neurotic, from all the evidence at hand? A man who is partially responsible for the patient's condition, a man whose office was mysteriously burned out by a fire bomb of some kind and only left a hospital bed—two days ago, was it? You see what you're up against, Mr. Noon? How could I possibly entertain the notion that you could help Gregory?"

  "You're hitting below the belt, Dr. Deming. But I'll take it from you. Right now, anyway. You don't know all the things I've learned since the last time I was here. Things that could make a difference. Whatever they could do, I think they deserve a trial. Highmark Meadows may be a nice place, but I don't want Gregory to live here."

  "Why aren't you smoking, Mr. Noon? You chain-smoked endlessly on that other visit."

  "Don't brainpick, Doctor. My hands are still healing and the fingers aren't all up to snuff yet. My left profile still puckers when I get too near a match. It'll pass. Don't fret about it. Let me talk to Gregory."

  "Not on your life. It's out of the question. Seeing you could undo all the progress he's made. I can't risk it. However, since you've come all this way and I'm not unsympathetic, I should like to hear what you have—or think you have—that might help him."

  "What exactly does he have, Doctor? What do you call it?"

  "Acute withdrawal. Total. He doesn't remember who he is, the violin, or anything that has happened. He's catatonic. These conditions take a long, long time. To cure, that is. Gregory's mind was like Rome. We can't rebuild it in a day. Maybe not even a year."

  "Then he's never mentioned anything? Like his brother Nicholas, like the War, a woman called Madame Alarma or Hungary—"

  "I've told you," Dr. Deming said with sudden, very cold, almost biting sarcasm. "He hasn't spoken a word since we took him. Really, Mr. Noon, you're beginning to tax my patience—"

  "Nobody likes taxes, Dr. Deming," I snapped, my own nerves in second gear. I stared long and hard at the smooth, complacent man across the desk. "Okay. You're a pipe smoker. Calm, controlled, never rush into things. Probably always thought twice even before you sneezed. I'll buy that. And I'll buy you. I'll trust you. The pipe convinced me, as well as all the checking my secretary has done on you and Highmark Meadows. Melissa is great and I'm going to marry her but we'll kick that around later. The point is I've been doing a lot of reading in Roosevelt Hospital. I had the time and I had the girl to bring me all my homework. So you sit still and hear me out—then you tell me what we can do."

  "You're raising your voice, Sir. Please control that hysteria—"

  "Shut up. I think better when I talk loud. I hear the words. You just sit back and let me speak. When I'm finished, you can ask me all the questions you want and then throw me the hell out. Deal?"

  "Yes," he murmured, retaining a calm I knew he wasn't feeling, as he sat back in his leather-cushioned chair and sucked on the pipe. "I will listen to you, Mr. Noon. If that is all you wish from me."

  "We'll kick that around later too. For now, just let me Begin this new Beguine in my own usual way. It will be worth it. Take my word. It's better than anything you'll find on your favorite channel."

  "If you say so, Mr. Noon," Dr. Deming released a small sigh.

  "I do say so. Now stop talking and hear me out."

  I began from the very beginning. I had to so that he could see the whole picture, so that he could understand the scenery, the props, the mood music. I didn't want him to miss a nuance or an eighth of an octave. Gregory's fate was in his minds. Mine too, in some nebulous, unfathomable, weird way. That was the only thing Madame Alarma was right about. But that's not in any palms or stars or claptrap. It's in something far more understandable and plainly dull. I liked Gregory. It was as simple as that. He was my friend. You don't quit on friends.

  If you have any say in the matter, at all.

  I got up from my chair, placing my fedora on the desk. I've never been able to get a load off my chest while parked on my fanny. That too, is occupational, and probably just as well. I had to breathe free and easy to hit Dr. Deming with what I had about Gregory.

  "Stay tuned," I launched off the pad, speaking slowly. "Start with Tadeusz Anton Gregory. Age about forty. Maybe the greatest violin virtuoso alive today. Born in Hungary during the beginning of the Hitler years. Came to America in 1948. With an older brother named Nicholas. The Gregory father and mother both seem to have died in camps of some kind. The record isn't too clear. The Gregory brothers were in slave camps. They loved America from the starting gun. Brother Nicholas liked it so much he entered the Marine Corps and rose to the rank of Gunnery Sergeant, seeing time in Korea as well as Vietnam. I'll get back to him later, Doctor. The point is, Tadeusz Anton Gregory became an America Firster and is absolutely non-violent, pacifist and a gentle soul all down the line. His folks were butchered by the Nazis; he and Nicholas suffered all the hardships we've ever heard about slave labor camps and when an infantry division swept through Oberrickelsheim and liberated a rather unknown lot of Hungarian, Polish and Russian half-deads, Gregory and Nicholas literally kissed the boots of their G.I. rescuers. But I repeat, according to the record, and everything I know about the man, he is incapable of squashing a flea without suffering remorse.
Ever see how he fondles a violin? That's important, the way he does that. For, also according to the record, Gregory has never married, never been mixed up with women, per se, and he is not a homosexual, either. To all observers, friends, critics and even jealous enemies, Gregory's first love and only love is Music. That fixation or fetish if you prefer, is his personality hallmark, and his second outstanding character trait is his almost obsessive avoidance of anything violent or brutal. The record shows he passed out once in his dressing room because he cut himself on a paper cup coffee container—and the sight of a little blood sent him into a coma. Are you following me, Dr. Deming?"

  "Interesting and worth knowing." Dr. Deming had abandoned his cold pipe and splayed his fingertips together. His eyes behind the rimless spectacles were keen. "Go on. It explains his somewhat exaggerated reactions whenever he seems to think it is going to storm very hard up here. It's about the only reaction he's ever shown during this catatonic state of his. But don't let me interrupt."

  "I won't. My point in telling you about Gregory's heart and soul is to show you a reverse truth. A man who should have been consumed with intense hatred, maybe a burning desire for revenge, evinced none of the usual signs. You can see for yourself what I mean when I tell you that I've told you all this to give you some idea what his response might be to the stupid and tragic deaths, coming one right after the other, of two fine young men he admired and perhaps loved in his own way. You can see how unbearable it must have been for him."

  "A shock, certainly. Doubly traumatic, counting two. But even so, that wouldn't trigger this condition he is now in——"

  "It would," I said, "and it might, if the very day of the first death, Gregory was walking around with a cockeyed prediction, a black forecast, shoved down his impressionable gullet by a weird gypsy so-and-so, who was reading palms at a rich lady's house the night before."

  "Your Madame Alarma, I take it."