The Girl in the Cockpit

by Michael Avallone

  "Wow! Is he going to be sore at me when he comes to. Maybe I ought to go into the bedroom and make out like I've gone home. I'm not kidding, Ed. I don't want to see him or hear him when he gets up."

  "I don't want you to. He might make another crack and I will forget my good intentions and clobber him myself. Sorry about all that, Melissa. That kind of talk will just never go away."

  "You didn't invent the words," she said lightly, bending to kiss me before going into the bedroom and closing the door. "And you've never used them, either. Nice guy. That's why I love you so."

  "Remember. You have to tell me all you found out today about the Riccos. Before we do anything else." I blew her a kiss across my palm.

  "Sure." She winked, hand on the knob of the bedroom door. "Want me to pour you a cup of coffee before I stay out of sight?"

  "Okay. That might not be a bad idea. I'll take it black."

  "What about Fargo? It might wake him up faster——"

  "To hell with him," I said emphatically. "Let him make his own coffee."

  Melissa Mercer laughed very softly and suddenly it was very swell to be alive again. To be in love again.

  After all the shooting and shouting dies down, what can be better than that? Considering what all the odds are these days?

  Nothing, that's what. Nothing at all.

  The darkened bedroom was a haven. Not a sound of gunfire, no ugly words, not even a whisper of cruelty. The early traces of oncoming dawn barely touched the windows facing Central Park. Out in that other world, a jetliner boomed in the darkness then ebbed away into nothing. There was so little sound anywhere, it was like we could hear our own hearts beating. A lovely time glided on, slowly. With nice, blessed serenity and an utter sense of careless rapture.

  She lay in that hollow of my body that seemed planned long ago.

  "Was he very mad, Ed?"

  "Couldn't you hear through the door? He was fit to be tied."

  "I didn't want to. I shut him out. I don't want to remember him."

  "He's gone now. With his tail betwen his legs. Back to Conroy. I think he understood. I didn't turn him in and even if he'll never be grateful, he'll get my meaning. What he tells Conroy is anybody's guess."

  "As long as he's gone—— You want to hear what I found out today?"

  I couldn't bring myself to tell her the filthy, abusive things that Carlo Fargo had muttered as I steered him out of the apartment, with both .45s leveled at his back. I hadn't even given him back his .32 pistol. I wanted him to report back to Frankie Conroy thoroughly humiliated.

  If he didn't learn the lesson, then so much the worse for us all.

  "Yeah. Please do. We have to get some kind of sleep. Though we don't have to check into the office at all, if it comes to that."

  "I don't care what we do," she murmured, pressing her mouth against my shoulder. "As long as we do it together."

  I smiled at the darkness. "Okay—so tell me."

  "Well, there's a stack of data and bio material on my desk for you. Age, weight, schools attended, background history. The mother died long ago and Mr. Ricco never remarried. Brought the kids up himself. You can see it all for yourself when we get in. What is really pertinent, and what you might really want, is the following: I got the Ricco lawyer's name from that fellow Tim Evans who works on The Times, as you suggested. So I phoned his office, asking to talk to him. His name is Walter Hinton. I told him you were representing Miss Terry Ricco in a private capacity, as per your special talents, and that you wanted to know something about the estate and the details of the will. It was just a hunch, Ed, but it certainly dug up some pay dirt. Mr. Hinton hit the roof and started to bluster. I thought most lawyers kept their cool on the phone but this one didn't. And the cat came out of the bag. A cat I don't think he realized was getting out."

  I heard her take a deep breath and I felt her bosom move.

  "Do go on. This sounds great."

  "It is. Hinton told me in so many words he couldn't see what Terry Ricco was making waves about because the will hadn't been changed and the police were certainly doing their best to locate the murderer. Are you tuned in on this, Mr. Noon?" She had stopped calling me Massa Ed because we didn't want to play that game anymore. The gag had died when our love had come to stay. "Maybe John Junkyard went down to his office that night to either prepare a new will or put a new will in that safe of his—"

  "And he got killed for it," I said slowly, "because he was either cutting Terry or Johnny or both right out of everything. Mel, you're a wonder. It's a possibility, no matter how way-out. Right out of a Gothic novel but people are still killing people for the inheritance. What else did this Hinton say?"

  "That was all. He wouldn't talk any more so we ended the call."

  "If there was a new will, it's gone now. The killer got it and destroyed it. And if there wasn't a will, then it's just bad blood on somebody's part for old Giovanni. The kids or Conroy or someone from the past. But it's good, Mel, it's good. Opens up a brand-new angle."

  "Then I'm glad," she said in a low, different voice, snuggling in closer than ever, "Now how about me and you—you and me—opening up some brand-new angles of our own? Miss you, you crazy goof and I don't want to wait another second more. . . ."

  "Oh, Melissa. . . ."

  "Oh, what?"

  "Nothing I haven't said before. A thousand times."

  "Then say it again. I want to hear."

  "Again?"

  "Again."

  "But it's old stuff."

  "Stuff like that is never old. No way."

  "Now you sound like Johnny Ricco and the Hawks."

  "I don't look like them, do I?"

  "No way," I laughed, hugging her long and limber body, "no way."

  We found it again in the dark.

  The magic and the wonder and the spark.

  That private flame that I would have had to talk myself blue to make a Terry Ricco understand—that she might never understand.

  Considering the kind of woman she was.

  Melissa, she would never be.

  The darkness kept on dying, disintegrating into early morning slices of light, and Melissa and I kept on integrating. The way we always had, the way we always would.

  Love still beats anything I know. But anything.

  And junkyards, teenage gangs, swinging new-generation gals, and old-generation gangsters all stayed put. And hand grenades quieted.

  For a little while longer at least.

  To hell with all revolutions, everywhere.

  But moles never sleep. And they always work underground, behind the scenes, while the rest of the world marks time. Maybe it's just New York and its crazy, complex, melting pot of people with conflicting life styles, principles and self-motivated drives. I just don't know. But whatever it is, and whatever it was, something happened in that huge, sprawling, darkened junkyard lying beneath a Tenth Avenue moon.

  It went up in smoke. Suddenly, mysteriously.

  In a blazing, roaring conflagration of red-orange flame and consuming fire. The heaps and piles of refuse, debris and decay literally became a small Dresden and, for anxious moments, that entire block on Tenth was threatened with a miniature version of the Chicago fire. But there was no Mrs. O'Leary and there was no cow. Somebody had deliberately put the torch to Giovanni Ricco's old business address. There was no guesswork about that. It would have been too coincidental that a junkyard which had survived the years and all kinds of weather should abruptly be destroyed not more than a week following the murder of the old proprietor. The Ricco bad luck was galloping along, steadily.

  And Johnny Ricco and the Hawks had just as suddenly lost their clubhouse, their playground and their entire sense of togetherness. Kids always need something like that—a place of their own where they can feel free and breathe the atmosphere they like.

  I didn't learn about the fire until later that day when I went down to the office with Melissa, finally deciding to catch up on things in general, to find the
Hawks camped on the office doorstep. All of them: Little John, Winchester, Tally, Willie and Gus. Their faces were grim, unfriendly and even hostile. Melissa blanched a little at sight of them and their attitude but I made introductions all around and then ushered the boys into my private sanctum. They trooped in sullenly, defiantly, but it was obvious they had come to ask my help.

  Actually, I was very glad to see them. It made things easier.

  The feeling I'd had when I'd sent Carlo Fargo packing, with Melissa's information about Walter Hinton and last wills and testaments, merely reinforced the sensation I had that things were coming to a head. In a way, I think I knew who had killed John Junkyard.

  All I needed that sunny afternoon was a little assistance, a lot of luck and good timing. And a workable deduction about the half of a silver dollar that was still burning a hole in my pocket.

  The half-coin Giovanni Ricco had given me a thousand memories ago.

  "Take some chairs," I told the Hawks, parking myself behind the desk. "Sit on the floor if you like. I'm glad you came. This fire puts a new light on everything. And, among the six of us, I think we can make like detectives. Especially if you all stop behaving like the Dead End Kids. I want you all to help me do something tonight."

  Johnny Ricco, long hair crisp and shining, motioned his crew to get settled. They squatted, lounged and sat all around the office, again looking like a Central Casting call for the chorus of West Side Story.

  "Do like he says," muttered Johnny in a funny voice. "He's the man on this gig. If he's foxing us, we'll do something about that later. Anyway, let's hear his thing."

  "My thing is simply this," I said drily. "Tonight we're going to put a tin can on the one who killed your father."

  Johnny's eyes glittered and the Hawks all murmured their surprise.

  "That," said Johnny Ricco, "I wanta see. I gotta see."

  It was a bombshell of a sort, and the hush in the office was now like those few seconds just before they throw the switch at Ossining.

  That's a thing of the past, too, but the analogy applied to the wild young man and his restive squad of followers, all strung about my own mouse auditorium on West Forty-Sixth Street. The homeless Hawks.

  Winchester, Tally, Willie, Gus.

  And above all, Johnny Ricco.

  It was as if the Hawks were surely going to rumble that night.

  SINGER

  "First, you have to level with me, Johnny. And that goes for the rest of you, too." I sat back in my chair, keeping my eyes on all of them. Afternoon sunlight was behind my back, washing into some of their faces. It made the blondness of Winchester's U. S. Grant beard gleam like gold. "Cards on the table all the way."

  "Shoot," young Johnny snapped. He was in the client's chair across from me where some of the screwiest people in the universe had sat, hiring me to iron out the wrinkles in their loused-up lives. "We got nothing to hide. We're clean."

  "Then tell me about the gun."

  He blinked, his dark face frowning. "What gun?"

  "The .45 you used on me as a calling card. The one you said was your father's. A present from an old buddy of his? A war souvenir? That gun. I'm thinking now it was the gun that killed your father and you know it. The gun the police are still looking for. You would have saved Homicide a lot of trouble if you left it where you found it. I'm thinking you found it lying on the floor, near your father's body, when you went to the junkyard that night and——" I paused, because his face had tightened and his eyes nanowed. That old look of rebellion and hatred almost made him look unhandsome. "Come on, Johnny. We're pals, I told you. So give it to me straight."

  "You been talking to Terry?" he rasped. "She doesn't know a thing. Whatever she might have said, she guessed at."

  "Maybe," I said, not agreeing with him one way or the other. I could see what I was saying was news to the rest of the Hawks, because they were all staring at Johnny now as if he was a stranger. "But I want to know about that .45. Before I hand it over to the cops and Ballistics. You know what you could get for concealing such important evidence?"

  "Johnny—" Tally started, awed, his Hair face wagging in disapproval. "You didn't pull a rock like that, did you?"

  "Shut up," Johnny barked, still looking at me. He let out a deep sigh, shrugging. "Okay. Like you said. I found my father. The gun was right there. Like the killer left it on the floor. I took it, all right, and hid it out in the yard until the cops came and left. One slug was fired. I had a box of shells stashed in the yard. I was crazy mad. I was gonna kill who did it with the same gun. I didn't want the cops to square things. It was my job—me—Johnny Ricco Junior! That make sense to you, mister? Can you understand a thing like that?"

  "Yes," I said, slowly. "I can. We'll leave the merits of it until later. Right now, I want to hear the rest of what you should have told me last night. Before the fire messed things up."

  He made a waving gesture with his hand, refusing to look sheepish.

  "You know the rest. I stewed around, thinking maybe it was Frankie Conroy or the rest of the Mob. Papa never made any deals with them but he was always a marked man, because he refused to join up. Always doing his own thing, his way. Then I thought maybe it might have been a bum Papa caught sleeping in the junkyard. I was off my nut trying to pin it on somebody. I hated Terry for being on her own, being away in her own place. That killed the old man long before the bullet. Dames! But—then we found that half-coin under the rug near the safe. That was enough for me. I knew about you and Papa. Terry must have, too. Hell, Papa's worn that coin thing on his key chains and watch chain for years. And—well, you know the rest. Do you think the cops burned the yard?"

  "Be yourself," I poured cold water over that idea. "That kind of city cleaning they don't go in for and they certainly don't need. Think how mad the Fire Department would be at them. Fires are no joke."

  "Then why bum the junkyard?" Lanky Willie offered from his corner of the room. "We never bothered anybody."

  "Yeah," Gus seconded that thought. "You think we were doing something wrong. All we did was meet there and rap a lot."

  "The fire," I said, "had to be for a good reason. Right now, I'm thinking that because the yard was the place your father hung onto like life itself, his murderer wanted to destroy it for a good reason. Maybe to make sure that whatever your father owned, in the way of papers, records or documents, was wiped out in a fire. Hunting for something in a junkyard can be a lifetime thing. It could take years."

  Johnny Ricco's eyes swept over my face. He was puzzled.

  "You're getting at something, Noon. What are you getting at?"

  "Wills. Last wills and testaments."

  "So what?" The puzzlement in his face didn't evaporate.

  I took a deep breath and sailed in, hitting him right between the eyes with what I thought and what I believed.

  "Did your father ever talk about changing his will?"

  "No. Why should he?"

  "Do you mean change his will, or talk to you about it? There's a difference, you know."

  Johnny Ricco looked around the office at the rest of the boys and then his eyes came back to me again. He seemed angry, as well as bewildered. As if I had called his father a dirty name.

  "What are you yakking about? Papa's will always was made out. Years ago. Me and Terry. Terry and me. So what's the big deal?"

  "Terry's older and you're still a minor. You haven't achieved your majority yet. Twenty-one in this state. Remember? So that means she'll have the say in all the financial matters from now until then. According to what I know about that particular will."

  "Noon," he put his teeth together. "What are you trying to say?"

  "Did you get along with Giovanni Ricco?"

  "He was my father——" It was a bleat of loyal protest.

  "I know that but how did he feel about you hanging around junkyards, running a youth gang? Instead of being in college and amounting to something. You tell me about that, huh?"

  Johnny Ricco was so angr
y now that a hint of moisture welled in both eyes. The Hawks, feeling somehow included in the diatribe, began to stir. Several very solid glares centered on me. But I waited, holding my position. I had to know more before I gave anybody the score.

  "All right," Johnny Ricco murmured in a low voice. "I wasn't all the old man bargained for. But he understood. We dug each other. He said I was still feeling my oats. Growing pains, like he said. But I wasn't going to let him down. In the fall, I was going to CCNY, to take a shot at an art career. I like to draw. Okay? That say anything good for me, Noon? I'm no Michelangelo but I can draw."

  "It's a start," I agreed. "And what about Terry and the old man. How did they make out as a father-daughter combination?"

  "Terry—ahhhh." Johnny made a gesture of dismissal with his hand. "Miss Independent. The high and mighty Mod dame. You know Terry. You've seen her. All right and proper. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, huh? Well, she doesn't fool me! In her own territory, she's a bitch. That's why she cut out on me and Papa. Wanted to be by herself. Well, how do you think he took it? He was Italian. Just like I am. We like our women old-fashioned—it's in the blood, I guess. You get it from the cradle. Church, Holy Communion, girls in white dresses—we look up to our women. We don't like to see them out on the town, up for grabs. Is that so awful?"

  I shook my head. "Not if you don't make a prison out of it with your own self-righteous attitude. I see you've done some kind of thinking, at that. Good man. Then, in a nutshell, Papa was very sorry about Terry. But did they get along?"

  Johnny Ricco did grin, then. A boyish grin, all teeth. All young.

  "Like cats and dogs. Mamma Mia! Ever seen an old guinea and his daughter have a difference of opinion? They ought to sell tickets."

  The Hawks laughed at that too but my own smile was rueful. It wasn't really funny at all. Such arguments and fights can be the death of love. The death of a lot of things. People never will learn.

  Winchester suddenly stopped laughing. He pushed up from the floor where he had been squatting like a Navajo and put his bony hands on the desk. He stared down at me. His beard shone.

  "Okay, Spade," he said tightly. "Johnny's leveled with you. Now, you level with us. What's this about tonight?"