The February Doll Murders

by Michael Avallone

  “Mr. Glass? Ed Noon here.”

  “How are you, Mr. Noon?” This with an old-timer’s joviality when his living is well assured. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  I rubbed my nose, not liking that beginning.

  “I wanted to thank you for the dolls. My girl friends will love them. And while we’re on the subject —”

  “Dolls? What dolls? See here. What are you talking about, fellah? If you’re a salesman of some kind —”

  Resigned to a dead end, I briefly explained to him what was what. When I was through, he was properly aghast.

  “See here. I don’t know what any of this is all about. And if somebody’s been using my name to play practical jokes, maybe I better talk to my lawyers.”

  “Sorry, Mr. G. I’ll track this down. You won’t be bothered again.”

  “Don’t you call me Mr. G.!” He slammed the phone in my ear.

  I called Number Five back again. The polite switchboard voice hadn’t altered one iota.

  “Tell me. Is there another Mr. Glass registered in your hotel?”

  “Why — no. We have Amos Glass. He’s the retired Wall Street broker. As for —”

  “Thank you. One more question and I’ll leave you be. Are you on duty in the lobby around ten o’clock in the morning?” The voice said yes, it was, and began to get a bit annoyed.

  “And do you see a messenger boy pick up a parcel at the desk? A large box. It’s supposed to be from Mr. Glass to a party called Ed Noon.”

  “No, I do not,” the voice said stiffly. “And the affairs of our guests are none of our business. Or yours, sir. If you will now please tell —”

  I didn’t waste any more of his time or mine. I hung up. It was something to think about, and made about as much sense as a pregnant teen-ager.

  Melissa came in a little later with two containers of coffee and found me admiring the wallpaper. “Trouble, Ed?”

  “Insanity. A guy named Glass who lives at Five Terrace Gardens, no less, is the Fast Service pickup point for their messenger boy. Glass knows nothing about it, and the desk clerk doesn’t remember any packages. You want more?”

  “Sure is screwy.”

  “Uh-huh. Bring those dolls in here, will you? If they’re ticking, I’m going to run like hell.”

  She did as I told her, and watched with more patience than curiosity as I carefully examined the three dolls. I undressed Chatty Cathy, Tiny Tears, and Poor Pitiful Pearl right down to their bare rubber hides. Cathy was the largest of the trio, about 20 inches high, but they were all alike in many respects. Foam rubber bodies, plastic coatings that made them as smooth as bananas. Detachable heads and hinged arms and legs. I checked all three of them closely, but as far as this eye could see, they were exactly what they were supposed to be. Three darling toy dolls calculated to make the small fry happy. Three toys. With no time bombs or precious jewels or rolls of microfilm hidden in their rubbery interiors.

  “What are you looking for?” Mel asked.

  “This has happened to me before,” I explained. “Dolls are great hiding places for liters of heroin, hot ice, or the map that leads to the buried treasure. I was also hoping I might find one American dollar bill. But not this time.”

  “So?”

  “So tomorrow I’ll park myself in Five Terrace Gardens sometime before ten in the morning and see what this is all about.”

  “Then what?”

  “Ask me tomorrow,” I said, pushing the dolls to one side of the desk, where they sprawled in a crazy tangle, “when number four shows up.”

  “You think it will, Ed?”

  “Let’s wait and see,” I suggested. “Meantime I want you to check out ten men for me. Nine, really. You know all about me. Get your pad out, Secretary. You’re about to earn your keep.”

  I sipped the restaurant coffee and dictated to her for half an hour, giving her the names of the second squad of the first platoon, Troop B, 33rd Cavalry, U. S. A. I spelled out the names as well as I could remember them, suggesting she check them through the V.A. I told her the states the men came from originally and what little I could piece together from their backgrounds. It was suddenly hard recalling if Farley had spelled his name with a “y” or an extra “e.”

  If Kyle Crosby had said the dollar bill was important, then it followed that the names of the men on that bill were important.

  And, putting one little mystery after the other, who had the bill now? And why?

  Time ticked away while Melissa’s typewriter and telephone counterpointed each other all afternoon. Along about two o’clock there was a mild diversion. I leaped at it because it kept me from moaning about Kyle.

  A worried-looking slender blonde came in. She said her name was Doris Riley, and she wanted a detective to track down a man named Louis Garn who had promised her fame and fortune in show biz and had fleeced her out of her Kansan life savings of five hundred dollars. Garn was a theatrical agent with an office on Eighth Avenue, but both he and the office were not there any more as of three o’clock the previous afternoon.

  I took twenty-five dollars from Doris Riley as a retainer, sent her home to her furnished room, and checked Mr. Garn out with the Vice Squad. Doris was lovely enough to be a movie star, but Garn was not the road to Hollywood. A nice copper named Ferro put me on the deadbeat in no time at all when I rang up.

  “Garn never learns,” Ferro rumbled. “Try him at the Golden on Rivington. If you need a hand, call back.”

  The Golden was a cheap hotel on the lower East Side. I put in a fast call, got the bum on the phone, and scared the hell out of him. Doris Riley was probably the first sucker with enough sense to blow the whistle on him. I told Garn I was Doris’ policeman boyfriend and he’d better stop at her flat with the five hundred or he’d spend the rest of the year in jail. He whined and blubbered, but finally agreed to do so immediately. I gave him three hours to make good, knowing he wasn’t going to run if he wanted to keep on thriving in the big city. Besides, a lot of other Doris Rileys would be coming to town soon enough. They always did, and there were always enough Louis Garns to trim them.

  I was in a lousy mood by four thirty, in spite of my good deed for the day. Monks had called once, repeating his no-luck report on Kyle Crosby. Kyle still lay unclaimed in the police morgue. The V.A. had promised to make arrangements for his burial.

  My right side was acting up again. Stiff, sore, and aching.

  The idea should have occurred to me sooner. I don’t know why it didn’t. But all of a sudden I wanted to see Kyle Crosby’s body. I had been too busy thinking about the dolls, the dollar bill, and Doris Riley. But there it was. Kyle Crosby’s body. It wouldn’t go away. Didn’t I have every right as a friend, more so as a detective, to see his body?

  During the war I had run away from mutilation. I didn’t want to see things I knew would haunt me. It wasn’t squeamishness. Enough stiffs had smacked me in the eye. But I had never been so curious as to walk over to a man who had just been blown apart by a land mine to find out first-hand what flying shrapnel can do to human flesh. I could grit my teeth and bear it, but what I could avoid I always did. Maybe Kyle Crosby’s half-face had held me back. I don’t know.

  Whatever the reason, I was on my way out of the office now, brushing by Melissa’s desk without even thinking of saying good-bye.

  “Ed?” Her fine face was surprised.

  “Lock up, honey. See you around noon tomorrow. I’ll be busy until then.”

  “You look funny.”

  “Do I? That’s why I’m a lousy poker player.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Police morgue. I want to see Kyle Crosby’s corpse.”

  “Oh.” That was all she said.

  All the way down in the elevator, I kept trying to put a few coherent notions together. Three in the chest, the detective at the R.C.A. Building had said. Lola Langdon, whose face I wouldn’t recognize either, was missing too.

  Chatty Cathy, Tiny Tears, and Poor Pitiful Pearl. Do
lls.

  Kyle, Lola. Missing dollar bill. Murder.

  The man on the roof who had stood before me for only an instant before he blasted away. The ten names on the dollar bill I had hung on to for so many years. It was all a messy jumble and distortion of pieces. But you knew, you just knew, there was one simple explanation for all of it. Some common denominator that would make it come out even. Kyle Crosby’s unclaimed corpse had to tell me something.

  February winds were buffeting New Yorkers in a westerly direction as I emerged on West Forty-sixth. Across the way, the new restaurant that was springing into commercial life with a blaze of neon lights was doing a land-office business. I looked around for a cab. My new Oldsmobile was garaged some blocks uptown, and I didn’t feel like walking. The avenue was choking with traffic, finding it indigestible, and spewing out a cacophony of horns, brakes, and mechanized thunder.

  I decided not to wait and walked toward Sixth Avenue. Catching cabs at sundown in Manhattan is usually rough.

  Walking into the wind wasn’t easy. It pulled at your hat, tugged at your collar, and made you walk with your face in a side-saddle position.

  Which was why I didn’t see her coming.

  At first I thought it might be the worried Doris Riley coming back to thank me or buy some more reassurance.

  “Mr. Noon —”

  The voice was low, hurried, and somehow immediately identifiable as the one on a telephone and on a cold roof in Manhattan. I looked into a face that was a blur of pale beauty in the night.

  The purple babushka had given way to a pillbox hat shading a triangular face that was high-cheeked as an Indian princess’ and full-lipped as a senorita’s. The sloppy trenchcoat had been fairy-godmothered into a very fashionable mink. The pillbox was mink, too. The woman was nearly as tall as I am, counting her high heels.

  “Well,” I said. “Lola Langdon, I presume.”

  We were standing in a throng of passersby, jostling along, sidestepping us.

  “Please,” she whispered. There was that vise on my arm again. “I’ve been waiting a long time for you to come out.”

  “Ever hear of the telephone?”

  “Please.” She was nearly whimpering. “You don’t know. You just don’t know.”

  “Okay. I want to know. Where do we go?”

  Her glance darted nervously around my shoulder. People were bearing down on us, their massed forms avoiding contact with us. Night was closing over the city fast.

  “You said you had an apartment, Mr. Noon. Let’s go there. But hurry. We can’t stand around like this. We just can’t —”

  I said no more, anchored her arm in mine, and hurried her toward Sixth and the first cab we could find. Her tall body fairly plastered itself to my good side, in a manner any observers would have easily misinterpreted. Fear was making her body rigid. Not my arguable sex appeal.

  “Just one thing, Lola,” I said, as a cab wheeled toward my beckoning hand. “I can’t wait until we get to my place to find out. Do you know the man who killed Kyle?”

  “Nobody killed Kyle,” she said.

  “Now look, lady. It’s all right to —”

  “Kyle is very much alive, Mr. Noon.” She said it with no joy whatsoever in her voice. “The man that was killed was the one who came out of that elevator.”

  Bing! went the strings of my brain.

  4

  Killer, Killer

  The cab steamed up Sixth Avenue toward the lights of Radio City. I settled back against the cushions, thinking. It was useless to power a barrage of questions in response to Lola Langdon’s verbal atom bomb. You have to think them over when they throw blockbusters like that at you. Kyle Crosby was not dead.

  Sixth Avenue’s world of neon glowed; two guide lines of Con Ed lighting up the February night. The sidewalks were jammed with walkers. We stopped for a light at the corner of Fiftieth Street, and an army of Manhattan citizenry marched past our windshield.

  Lola Langdon stirred restlessly. A faint aroma of some sweetly scented perfume played tag with my nostrils. My brain composed itself.

  “Okay, Kyle Crosby is not dead. Who’s lying down at the morgue? And why did the cops think he was Kyle?”

  “We don’t know who he was. But we put Kyle’s papers in his pocket.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Please, Mr. Noon.”

  “Please, schmeeze. Did Kyle kill him?”

  “Yes, but — you don’t understand.”

  “That’s a laugh.”

  She was whispering slowly, mindful of the anonymous cabby hunched over the wheel. “Can’t this all wait until we see him and talk it out?”

  I spread my hands. “You gave me a choice? At least tell me who the poor guy was.”

  Her eyes blinked. “Just one of the men sent to get Kyle. One of the men who — oh, please. I can’t say anything more, really. It’s got to come from Kyle.”

  “I see. And when do we see the tricky Mr. Crosby?” I was glad he was alive, but the screwy double switches of the whole dizzy business had made me slightly less lovable than usual.

  “When we get to your place, I’ve got a phone number where I can reach him.”

  Again the telephones. “Sweet mother of espionage,” I rasped.

  “What did you say?”

  “Forget it.” I turned away from her and reached for my Camels. I forgot my manners and didn’t offer her one.

  “Please don’t be upset with him, Mr. Noon. Or me. We have to do it this way. When he explains it all to you, you’ll understand.”

  “Sure I will.”

  The cab barged forward again, cleared a jumble of crawling General Motors products, and found the turn at Central Park South. I studied the mammoth expanse of dark green and shadows and said nothing. Mugger’s paradise. There wasn’t much to say anymore about anything. Lola wasn’t going to give me the news of the day until Kyle Crosby said so. It was that kind of game.

  My mind wandered. The dark trees and measured grounds reminded me of VJ Day and a girl named Norma who had kept me at bay until dawn in the pleasant precincts of the good earth behind Columbus Circle. Norma hadn’t given in, either. I shoved the memory away and puffed on the Camel. Nostalgia was giving me some going-over since my old Army buddy had called me up.

  Funny mystery dolls. Amos Glass and his old man’s voice. Monks’s confusion. The stiff soreness where the slug had gone in. Kyle’s vanishing acts. First he’s here and then he isn’t. First he’s dead and then he isn’t. All the weird ingredients played leapfrog in what is charitably described as the human mind.

  Brains. If I had had any I wouldn’t have been a private cop for two whole minutes of my life.

  “Lola,” I said.

  “Yes, Mr. Noon?”

  “Ed’s good enough. You could at least straighten me out on one thing.”

  “If I can — Ed.”

  “What about you?”

  Her brow showed a furrow. “Me? I don’t see what you mean.”

  “Sweetheart, is Kyle really married? Does he have three kids? Are they all back at the farm in Wisconsin?”

  The frown widened. “Of course. Kyle wouldn’t lie about that. He’s a happily married man.”

  I smiled. “And where does that leave a beautiful dame like you?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean.”

  “Thank you. Knew you would.”

  She revolved on the cushions so that she was in profile. It was a nice profile. Downright gorgeous and classic. The full lips and chiseled nose could have decorated the prow of a schooner.

  “You won’t believe me,” she said in a queer voice.

  “I didn’t believe the Beatles either, but they’re a fact of life.”

  She turned back to outstare me. Her lovely face challenged me to laugh. A sudden burst of concentrated neons threw her Indian image on exhibition. The cab darkened again. “I’m his nurse,” she said softly.

  “His what?”

  “Nurse.”

  “What does he ne
ed a nurse for?”

  She sighed heavily. “Kyle’s an epileptic.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since about five years ago. Whenever he travels, I go with him. It’s as simple as that. He gets seizures, and there is nothing anyone can do for him. Except, of course, me. He needs a fully trained registered nurse at all times, really.”

  “Anything to do with what happened to his face in the war?”

  “They can’t say for sure,” Lola Langdon said sadly. “But if you’ve been thinking we are lovers, you are wrong. He’s the kindest, nicest man I have ever known. And he would never betray his wife.”

  I smiled. “Sure. Sorry.”

  Maybe Kyle wouldn’t, but from the words and music pouring from Lola, she had certainly wanted him to try. There was no sense in talking to her anymore about that.

  I checked the windows of the cab. We were close enough to my uptown pad to hit it with a rock. The driver slowed down, reaching a grimy hand to adjust the meter flag.

  “Right side or left, mister?”

  “Left,” I said. The right side was Central Park and all that darkness.

  The driver shrugged indifferently. “Don’t be offended. You’d be surprised how many fares get out on the park side. Even in the worst kind of weather.”

  “I’m not going squirrel hunting tonight.” I reached for my wallet.

  The cabby laughed. “Squirrels. That’s a hot one.”

  I let that ride. Lola Langdon was pulling herself together. Her fingers flicked the mink pillbox hat and she folded the matching coat about her body. She shifted her legs to alight. They were cream-white and firm. Long, too. They shone like shapely saplings through invisible nylon. The cabby looked also, winking at me as though we were sharing something.

  The legs, the cabby, and the wallet routine distracted me just long enough to miss the action on the sidewalk. There hadn’t even been a doorman in sight below the ancient canopy when the cab made a U-turn to drop us off. Now it was a Mecca for tourists.

  Three men, all wearing dark toppers and wide Borsalino hats rammed over their foreheads, were suddenly filling the doorway. Before I could measure the situation they had sprung forward with a football backfield’s coordination and ringed the taxicab, one on either flank and the third parked at the hood of the vehicle.