The Girl in the Cockpit

by Michael Avallone

  "No sweat, Noon. That's Winchester—" he pointed a thumb at the Grant kid—"and that's Tally—" that was the Hair Hawk—"and that's Willie and Gus. Boys, meet the shamus."

  "Howdy," I said, as grumbles and grunts went up all around. I was about to launch into the details of the new proposition, when there was a new, untimely, interruption. From the area close to the stockade entrance, hidden in the depths of the junkyard's gloomy recesses, two running figures burst forth. Coming on the double, hats pulled down, arms up, drawn weapons flashing as they hit the patch of moonwashed landscape, there was no mistaking the official, this-is-the-police efficiency of their movements. Monks' men, whoever they were, had finally gotten off their rusty dusties and decided to take a closer look into things. The ruckus in the tarpaper shack and the confrontation scene in the heart of the yard had probably alerted them to their proper line of endeavor. At last.

  The Hawks stirred restlessly, looking like they wanted to run. All of them were flinging accusing looks at me. Johnny Ricco's darkly handsome face pushed out that full, lower lip in undisguised contempt.

  "Fink," he said bitterly. I shook my head, to show him he was wrong.

  "Yeah. That's the law, okay. Told you I wasn't bluffing. And if you have any brains at all, you let me do the talking . . . I'll be the sponsor of the Hawks . . . your neighborhood Big Brother. Just remember what I told you: there was no half silver dollar and you never found one. I'm telling you this for the very last time, Johnny. I did not kill your Papa and I want you to help me nail the killer who did. Will you do that, Johnny?"

  He was staring at me again. And so were Winchester, Tally, Willie and Gus. I might have been a Martian from that other planet; certainly not from their world; had never been a part of their kind of universe.

  I could see Johnny's face fighting some very obvious facts. He wasn't so blinded with vengeance that he couldn't figure out some things for himself, without a roadmap. Like me not hurting him when I had the chance. Like me not making trouble for him. Or his blessed Hawks, whatever they might be. A kid can understand something like that. It appeals to that screwy sense of code all gang-leaders and gang members seem to come equipped with. The man who did not turn squealer or behave like a fink just had to have something going for him. Something A-OK.

  Something it might be worth taking the time to find out.

  "All right," Johnny Ricco muttered in a low undertone. "We're all in. What's the pitch going to be?"

  And then the Headquarters men were upon us, guns leveled, very serious about the whole thing, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

  I was going to have to do a lot of talking to keep the Hawks out of the lockup. A real sales talk so Johnny Ricco and his boys could stay free to help me. Cops and youth gangs are just natural enemies.

  West Side Story wasn't fiction—it was fact.

  My own story just had to be very good indeed, to save the Hawks.

  That is, if I was going to get the flock out of there.

  It was hard on midnight when I rang the doorbell of Terry Ricco's apartment. A lot had happened in less than two hours but most of it had been in the cards, preordained as it were. I'd sent Johnny Ricco and the rest of the Hawks home to bed where they belonged. That had been easy once I had shown my expertise and special pull with the New York Homicide Department.

  Knowing Mike Monks does have its special advantages and privileges, but what could the two plainclothesmen do, actually, when they blundered into a nice, friendly group discussion between myself and my old pals, the Hawks? Since the junkyard was Ricco property and Johnny Ricco himself was present at the conclave, no one had broken any laws, had they? Especially when I very carefully avoided all mention of the shack party that had meant to star myself as guest of dishonor. Monks' men withdrew in embarrassment, my standing with the Hawks rose about a thousand points, and Johnny grudgingly listened to the rest of what I had to say. In the end, the junior Ricco promised the full-time and complete cooperation of himself, Winchester, Tally, Willie and Gus. By the time we all broke up, even Tally was smiling at me.

  The job I had given them all to do was a real housecleaning at the Giovanni Ricco home in the Chelsea district, to see if they could come up with any leads at all as to why Papa Ricco had been murdered. As for Johnny himself, who seemed tough and able enough to handle such an assignment, I suggested that he keep very close tabs on his sister Terry, making a log of all phone calls she made and ones made to her—if he could. I didn't tell him exactly why I wanted such a job done but if such activity had seemed even remotely disloyal, he registered no complaint. Terry wasn't living with Johnny, anyway, having gone into her own apartment about six months ago, much to John Junkyard's displeasure. Johnny had stayed with his father, as I might have expected.

  On my way to Terry Ricco's, after I left the Hawks, I phoned Monks from a drug store on West Fifty-Seventh Street and Eighth Avenue that was still open. I didn't have any qualms about calling Monks at such a lousy hour. When he's working on a Murder One, his schedule is all shot too, and he keeps very late hours, like I do. The old war dog never lets up when a killer is loose in his city. The district attorney wouldn't let him. Everybody has somebody he has to answer to. Even police captains.

  He was in as I expected, and grumpier than usual, which was unexpected. He didn't even sound very glad to hear from me. So I skipped the amenities and got right down to cases. I wasn't very happy, myself.

  "What's with the Headquarters tail, Mike? Think I can't get around New York by myself anymore? Or am I an official suspect?"

  "Be yourself," he growled. "You were going into tough territory. Conroy and his people don't have as much patience with private eyes as I do."

  "You're sweet, you know that? Thanks, anyway."

  "Anything happen at The Blue Lady, Ed?"

  "Don't tell me your two ace trackers didn't report to you yet?"

  "This time of night? Nothing that couldn't wait until morning, I suppose. Anyway, if something did happen, I'm sure you'd tell me, wouldn't you, on account of us being such old, dear friends."

  "Yes, that's true," I admitted. "I would. But it was nothing exciting. I will tell you a couple of things though. Conroy swears he had nothing to do with the Junkyard kill; his pet thrush Bella Baldwin is ready to chop his head off because she thinks he's playing footsie with Terry Ricco; and for a closer, young Johnny Ricco and his teenage gang, known as the Hawks, are now on my side. Going to help me find out who killed the old man."

  There was a brief pause from Monks' end of the line. His voice came back, softer, and somewhat impressed. Ungrudging respect filled his tone.

  "You do learn a lot in a little time, damn you. All that since we had our chat this morning, huh? My, my, how you do go on."

  "Is any of it worth anything to you, Mike? That's more important."

  "We haven't been able to make any connection between the Ricco girl and Frankie Conroy. Terry's wild, all right. John Junkyard sent her to the best schools and colleges but she came out a regular rebel. Dresses the way she wants, says what she wants, and to hell with everybody else. Goes to a lot of way-out parties all over town. She's a swinger on the surface but nobody's come up with the names of any particular men . . . yet. Which means she either knows how to cover her beds or there hasn't been anybody yet. I expect to hear a lot more from that young woman. Just give her time. She was made for the front page, Ed."

  "That's not the sweet, proper-talking girl I met," I said, but I let that pass before Monks could ask me what I meant. "Who gets John Junkyard's fortune? Terry?"

  "Natch. She's the oldest. Johnny Ricco is underage so his big sister is holding the purse-strings for now. There's a lot of legal odds and ends to the estate that still have to be cleared up."

  "And what about Bella Baldwin?"

  "Conroy found her in Baltimore about three years ago; working in a grind joint. Very soon she was back in town with him and since The Blue Lady opened, she's been his Number One Thing all the way."r />
  "The jealous type . . . I've seen her in action. What about a big boy name of Fargo? He was at Frankie's elbow all night. Bodyguard?"

  "That would be Carlo Fargo. Stay out of his way. Ex-professional wrestler from out Newark way. Went to work for Conroy when his own little Italian pizza place burned down. Tough one, Ed. No convictions on him but he once cleaned out a room that had ten guys in it who he thought cheated him in a crap game. Busted a lot of heads but he got sprung."

  "I believe it. Okay, Mike. That's all for now. But tell me—what gun was Junkyard cooled with?"

  Monks' sigh was the kind only a conscientious cop can make.

  "Hasn't turned up yet. The slug the M.E. dug out of Ricco's skull is still waiting for the matching barrel."

  "How well did you fine-tooth-comb the junkyard and the office in that tarpaper shack of his?"

  "With everything up to and including a vacuum cleaner and a small bulldozer. You know there's about thirty years' worth of junk in that yard? But we found no gun." His tone changed. "You didn't find it by any chance, with your usual, incredible, horseshoe magic?"

  "I don't think so," I said, thinking about that Army .45 lying in the desk drawer back in my apartment. A gun I hadn't even checked out with Ballistics. Sure, it had been fired once. In the hallway of the building. But had it been fired before that? It stung me that I actually didn't really know. I can be a very dumb detective, at times. "Anyway, thanks for the scoop. As usual, you've been the fount of all my wisdom. Call you tomorrow. Socially, that is. Now, climb back into that feather bed of yours and dream pleasant dreams. Or don't dream at all—just get a good night's sleep. You sound as if you need it."

  His chuckle was self-effacing and entirely meant for my benefit.

  "Look who's talking. 'Night, Noon."

  " 'Night, Mike."

  Not long after that call, I found another cruising cab and rode out to Terry Ricco's East Sixty-Fifth Street apartment, and parked smoothly among the low, pretty, garden-front homes on the crosstown avenue. Terry hadn't lived with her father and brother for some time now, according to Johnny. The tired old brownstone Ricco nest in Chelsea no longer suited Terry once she came home from Barnard College. Terry had become the fashionable ultra-Mod swinging young rebel who was going to whip the world on her own without benefit of the old man's money. Again, all according to Johnny, who had told me a lot in those friendlier moments in the moonlit junkyard, after the Headquarters men took off. Knowing the Italian temperament as I do, his daughter's independence and free-living life style must have broken old Giovanni's heart before somebody blew the back of his head out. Long before. Italians want Doris Days for daughters, not Jane Fondas.

  Terry Ricco's address, as well as her unlisted phone number, had been given to me by young Johnny. A sure sign that he now trusted me.

  I hadn't phoned in advance, because I didn't want to.

  I wanted to surprise Terry as she was, whatever that could mean, or might be, or actually was—with her guard all the way down.

  She'd come on, in my office, like a perfect lady. All proper talk and nice manners and well-bred young woman. The solicitous Big Sister.

  Her brother had painted her in a far different way. His oils had her coming off as a she-wolf who wanted to be the girl in the cockpit. As a dame who wanted to rule . . . to call the shots. A man-chaser of sorts.

  Bella Baldwin had called her something indecent and unladylike.

  And now the police, in the shape of my old friend Michael Monks, had made her out to be the "swinging rebel," even though they had little proof. But I remembered Frankie Conroy's evasive answers in The Blue Lady on the subject of Terry Ricco and how he had sat still for Bella Baldwin's righteous wrath. As if he had had it coming.

  What was the truth?

  I was trying to find that out as I pushed the white-enamel of a buzzer on the cream-colored door just inside the entranceway of one of the pleasant two-story houses in the middle of the block. Houses all festooned, with single trees in front, rows of trimmed green hedges and a general, well-cared-for air of luxury and comfortable living.

  The kind of home where you're either simply independent, somebody's high-priced mistress or just a plain Jane minding your own shop. There's never any way of knowing for sure until you see for yourself. Too many pots call too many kettles black. Which is only one of the reasons I'm in the business of trying to help straighten out other people's lives. Something Melissa Mercer always understood.

  Terry Ricco answered the door after I had pressed the buzzer a second time. I hadn't rung hard. Just short, definite pressures on the fancy button. After all, I wasn't trying to barge in on her like an old Dragnet show. Not even like the new one.

  She stood in the doorway to her apartment, the door half-pulled backward, as lovely as I remembered her; but not even I was prepared for the fact that she answered doorbells half-naked.

  I caught a flash of sheer silk, all bedroom pink and diaphanous, a creamy white arm lined up with the door jamb, and her tapering right hand was like some kind of mounting on which her exquisitely sexy face hung poised like a dream from a playboy's fantasies. Her eyes barely mirrored any kind of surprise and her perfectly-shaped red mouth moved. There was a magnificent whiff of perfume in the air. It was either the lady herself or something that sold for ten dollars a drop. Terry Ricco was so golden blond and ivory-skinned and female-looking, she ought to have been against the law. Hardly anybody should ever look so good.

  "I wondered when you'd get back to me," she almost purred, in that voice so well calculated to keep any red-blooded male thinking about the prone position. "Entrez—I've been expecting you."

  With that, she disappeared again. Just like that, genie-style.

  Back the way she had come, leaving me standing on the threshold with egg on my face. I could hear her soft slippers—or her bared feet?—making small, slapping sounds in a hallway beyond the door. I should have laughed but didn't. I should probably have turned right around and gone back home to read a book or curl up in front of the tube. Maybe even taken my Ovaltine—but I did none of these things.

  I followed her into the fragrantly-exotic-smelling apartment and closed the door behind me. I even slipped the chain-latch on so that we could really keep it all private. But I didn't forget about the .45 harnessed in my left armpit. I'll say that much for myself.

  I undid my coat jacket so I could reach it fast if I had to.

  I am a big boy and I had heard the one about the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood. I wasn't going to get caught short if I could help it.

  Terry Ricco was not going to catch me with my pants down.

  Nobody else, either.

  She might have thought she was Lolita but I wasn't going to be Humbert Humbert. Not even for a nymphet like her.

  I'm still a detective, for a living.

  SWINGER

  Inside, Terry Ricco's lair proved to be the latest in deluxe apartments. Excellent taste had carpeted the wide floor, superb interior decoration had decreed that a curving staircase, without a railing of any kind, would look like a magic red carpet rising to a mysterious upper level that was probably a bedroom area. It was hard to tell. The whole damn apartment was a stage for seduction. A setting for a satyr or a nymphomaniac or any other oddball, male or female, who wants all the reddest, thickest rugs, the weirdest, most formless chairs and room accessories, and lighting that would have been better for the dance floor of a discotheque or Roseland. Crimson drapes, floor-length and curling outward along the street side of the apartment, closed off the outside world. I could barely make out the shapely lady herself, squatting on the floor in the heart of the room, Yoga-fashion, tinkling some ice in the tall glass she held between her slim fingers. The walls were a madhouse of murals, great, scrawled graffiti slogans of the times and some really way-out Oriental designs. I saw the Peace symbol, etched in yellow daubs of paint, another War Is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things poster, and a dazzling variety of occult characters and
shapes, like the warlock's pentagram, that five-pointed star encased in a circle. As I measured all the nutty and screwball features of the place, Terry Ricco remained where she was on the floor, shapely knees together in a criss-cross of beauty, the transparent folds of the silken karate-kind of half-robe she was almost wearing, revealing every blessed, beautiful curve and crest of her bountiful young body. The long, golden hair hung loose and the dim outline of her face in the pale, diffused red lighting was eerie.

  An invisible Hi-Fi was playing low, throbbing, four-four rock music, filtering from all sides of the main room of the apartment. It sounded like some of the stuff from Jesus Christ, Superstar, or maybe Hair. It was hard to tell. It all sounds the same to me, who went deaf with Beethoven, worshiped Gershwin and Raymond Scott and got along just fine with Swing and the later geniuses of movie sound tracks.

  I stared down at the creature in the center of the room.

  The silence between us was heavier than the atom bomb.

  "So, Terry," I said. I was right about her feet. They were bare.

  "So, Ed," she murmured, her face wreathed with quiet laughter.

  "Where do I sign in; or do I just take my shoes off, lie down and roll over and howl like a dog."

  "You do your own thing," she said, more seriously. "That's what it's all about, baby. I have."

  "Obviously."

  "You know it."

  I sat down on the floor without taking my shoes off. It was like floating into a bed of feathers. I was about five feet away from Terry Ricco. We were two squatting figures in the center of a wild and wacky pad, which had blended money, good taste and crazy, personal predilection into a harem or an esoteric club or, just simply, the-place-where-Terry-lives. The music rocked on, the red lighting seemed lambent and the utter atmosphere, coupled with that subtle and almost magical perfume, was about a million miles from East Sixty-Fifth Street on Manhattan Island in New York.

  "You buying me a drink, Terry, or do I need a password?"

  Wordlessly, she stretched out her hand and gave me the glass she had been holding. From somewhere behind her, she produced a matching drink. I should have been surprised that there was Scotch in my glass, but I wasn't. Terry Ricco seemed to be in on everything. Including my taste in liquor. Again, I measured her above the glass before I even sampled it. Knockout Mickey Finns are old stuff to me.