The February Doll Murders

by Michael Avallone

  The cabby growled, spelling out his fear in large capital letters. “What the hell is this, buddy? You know these people? Pay me my money and lemme get outa here —”

  “Shut up,” I said, finding my .45, “and don’t do anything stupid. We’ll find out soon enough. We can’t start making change now.”

  Lola Langdon moved like a startled fawn, huddling against me as if she wanted to disappear.

  I was beginning to ask her if she knew the three strangers when the one at the door facing the building jerked on the handle. The door flew open.

  “Climb out of there,” a voice barked. A face lowered to where I could see it, but it was a new face to me. I knew the voice, though. It was tough, curt, and used to dishing out orders and having them obeyed. The voice of authority.

  “Lousy manners for a guy who should know better,” I ventured. Pushing him aside gently, I stepped out of the cab and handed Lola to the sidewalk. The man before me showed his teeth and a gleam of metal to match from a black billfold whipped up in one deft flash.

  “F.B.I., Noon. Any complaints?”

  “About five hundred by actual count. What’s this all about? And please ask your fullbacks to come in from the gutter. They might get run over standing out there, and taxpayers have enough to do without paying for funerals for government employees.”

  “Up front,” the man said in a quieter voice. “We’re going upstairs with you, Noon. And Miss Langdon. Don’t ask me for a warrant, either. I have one if you really have to see it.”

  “I always cooperate with Uncle Sam. If the price is right. Easy, Lola. He only does this routine to frighten women.”

  The government man looked sour. “My name’s Lynch. We have to talk to you and the lady. Right away. The sooner the better.”

  I paid off the goggle-eyed cab driver and hung on to Lola’s hand. She was badly in need of a bracer.

  “Wasn’t there a better way of doing this, Lynch? You jumped us like an old Capone get-together. I could have started throwing lead. I’m the highly excitable type.”

  “Sorry. We do things our own way.”

  “Get a better way. You could have gotten one of us killed.”

  He clamped his teeth together and spoke through them as the cab meshed gears noisily and shot away from the curb, heading back downtown. “Let’s talk about it upstairs. Right now.” His two partners — tall, silent shadows — flanked him like matching bookends.

  “Sure, sure. Upstairs. Come on, Lola. And guests. Everything will be straightened out upstairs.”

  I sincerely hoped so. Everything was beginning to take on the aspects of a three-ring circus in technicolor. With a cast of thousands.

  We rode up in the small elevator, hardly talking. Pete, the night man on the desk, caught my warning look and said no more than hello. Lola hung on to my arm in the car, and Lynch and his two shadows pretended it was all orderly and untroublesome. Just a pleasant social call. Only they were from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and J. Edgar Hoover’s boys never pay social calls.

  Going down the carpeted hall to my apartment, I was conscious of the fact that Lynch practically led the way, with his subordinates boxing off retreat by marching behind Lola and me.

  I dug out my keys and found the right one.

  I needed a drink. A Beefeater martini was what I had in mind. I debated whether or not to treat the G-men. They had to be who they said they were, but that didn’t mean I had to act like Toots Shor, either. I wasn’t running a nightclub for thirsty federal agents.

  Lola Langdon, for some reason, was stiff-legged with fright. It was getting harder and harder to believe she was what she said she was. After all, a trained nurse, used to emergencies, ought to be able to handle a simple thing like an interview with policemen. Of course, she could just be worried about Kyle Crosby. Bing. I was getting madder at him by the second.

  “Nice place,” Lynch offered, as we strode toward the door in a medley of slapping heels and scuffing soles.

  “A regular joint,” I agreed. “Dancing girls come out of the walls, the faucets drip champagne, and the ashtrays are cluttered with priceless emeralds.”

  “You’re a bitter man, Mr. Noon.”

  “You made me that way, Mr. Lynch.” I started to poke the key into the lock.

  We were jammed at the threshold like the fifth car of the IRT express on Times Square at five fifteen any weekday.

  “Just a second,” Lynch said tightly. “There’s a light coming from under your door. You always leave a light burning?”

  “No,” I said, the news throwing me. I’d been too busy being mad to notice. “But it could be the landlord waiting to catch me. I get behind in the rent now and then.”

  “Wait a minute.” Lynch plucked at my sleeve, whispering now. “You going to walk right in cold? It could be a trap.”

  “Lynch,” I said sourly. “Would anybody advertise with a light if they were up to no good? Act your age.”

  He shook his head wonderingly. “How have you stayed alive so long?”

  I didn’t answer. I keyed the lock and kicked the door inward. It fell back, met the wall and vibrated a little, but stayed open. The light that Lynch had seen was the overhead fluorescent in the living room, which faced the front door with a six-foot-long foyer in between. Anyone standing behind the door would have had a flattened profile now.

  But — I could see into the living room.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  Kyle Crosby was sitting in a chair facing the door. He was smiling as if everything was going to be all right.

  Lola Langdon gasped behind me. “It’s Kyle — He’s come back —”

  Lynch started to push past me, his men moving up with their T formation. I fanned out my arms to check them. They came up short, and Lynch’s face reddened. He began to snarl something very official when I cut him off with a look. He knew that look. He’d been on the manhunt as long as I gave him credit for.

  “Easy, men. We’ll just walk in and close the door,” I said. “Come on, Lola. Easy, now. We don’t have to run anymore.”

  She blinked at me, her eyes puzzled. “What is this, Ed? Let me by —” She flung a look past my shoulder to where Kyle Crosby was sitting, waiting for us. Staring open-eyed at the doorway.

  “Kyle! Say something … what is — Kyle!” she shrieked, her eyes coming back to me. “He’s … he’s —”

  “Dead,” I said.

  We all moved into the apartment. Somebody closed the door. Kyle Crosby had taken root at last, had stayed long enough in one place for us to have our get-together.

  Some reunion.

  The apartment air was lousy with the smell of dying.

  5

  Exit the Legend

  Kyle Crosby stared at me from the chair.

  This time I got a good look at his new face. It wasn’t going to matter anymore whether I liked it or not.

  None of us had much to say. Death is the great silencer, all right. We all froze like grown-ups playing Statues.

  Kyle was planted in the red butterfly chair in the living room. Melissa had helped me pick it out when we decorated the apartment. But Kyle would never know that. He was sitting back stiffly, legs crossed, eyes opened, mouth fixed in a smile, arms folded, as if he were ready to confront a two-timing wife coming home at four in the morning.

  He was also as dead as the knife jutting from the heart area could make him.

  “Oh, Kyle,” Lola Langdon said in a strangled whisper that was hardly human.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Lynch rasped in my left ear as he barreled around me.

  “You stupid bastard,” I rasped right back. “Did you think I was going to polish the furniture?” But I didn’t move. I stood there, striving for a shade of common sense. Anything that added up. This time Kyle wasn’t going to rabbit in and out of my life with phone calls and disappearances. He was as immovable as rigor mortis could make him. He wasn’t going to go anyplace now but the cemetery.

  Lynch
and Company circled his chair like buzzards. I groped for a cigarette. Lola Langdon stared at me, her red mouth trying to make noises. Her eyeballs rolled. I reached her with a quick bound as she collapsed in the middle like an accordion.

  She was heavier than she looked. Carrying her to the long couch just two yards from the corpse was definitely work, considering the circumstances. I laid her down none too gently and got back to my cigarette.

  Lynch straightened with a grunt. His two cronies were still making like Sherlocks around Kyle’s chair; they had paid absolutely no attention to Lola’s faint.

  “This kind of crowds things, Noon.”

  “Do tell.”

  “This Kyle Crosby like I think it is?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Listen, Noon,” he rumbled. “I don’t have to take this from you.”

  “Forget it,” I snarled. “That’s Kyle. And don’t waste my time and or yours. I’ve been away from this palace since I got shot. You can check with Pete downstairs, the hospital, my secretary at the office, and Captain Mike Monks of Homicide. Or would you rather beat a confession out of me?”

  Lynch surprised me. In spite of my begging for a kick in the teeth, his eyes softened and his tone got fatherly.

  “Tough to lose a friend, I guess.”

  It was a perfect squelch. I nodded, fuming smoke. Lynch jerked a hand at Kyle’s chair.

  “That knife’s gone in up to the hilt. Not much chance of him having time to wonder how it felt. And he didn’t sit down in that chair like that after it was all over to think about it, either. You got a sadistic killer laughing at you, Mr. Noon. Don’t ask me why. But somebody arranged his body in that chair like that, after they knifed him.”

  I was staring down at Lola Langdon’s kneecaps. Her dress had run halfway up her thighs. I lowered the skirt modestly. Lola, nurse to the living and God only knew what else.

  “That’s good thinking, Lynch. But don’t expect any fast answers from me.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I came originally to talk to you. But like I said — this fouls up the detail. What was that captain’s name you just mentioned?”

  “Monks. Mike Monks.”

  Lynch barked some orders crisply to one of his boys, who answered to the name of Brad. Brad found my telephone with quiet speed and dialed police headquarters. Lola Langdon stirred soulfully on the couch, her eyelashes fluttering like tiny black flags. Her long pale legs gleamed with an invitation that was strictly out of time and out of place.

  Kyle Crosby stared silently across the room. I looked at Lynch, and he shrugged an okay. I moved to Kyle and closed his eyes gently with my two thumbs. His flesh was still slightly warm. Maybe an hour warm. Maybe two.

  “Well, Noon. Give.”

  “Give what?”

  Lynch’s smile was almost heroic. “We told you about us. F.B.I. We told you we came to talk to you. It was too much of a coincidence to find Kyle Crosby here, since he was what we came to talk to you about. So now he’s dead. Murdered in your own apartment. But we can still talk about him when he’s gone, can’t we?”

  I managed a sneer. “How long were you on stake-out in front of this building?”

  “Two hours. What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?”

  “Kyle’s still warm, Lynch. Chances are very good that the M.E. will tell us he was chopped sometime in the last two hours. Chances are colossal that you and your boys watched the killer walk in and walk out of this building. Unless he had a helicopter on the roof, which isn’t likely even in this James Bond age of ours. I do hope you guys still take home movies of all persons entering a building under investigation.”

  That got a flinch from Lynch.

  “Lloyd Nolan,” I said, “does it a helluva lot better in all those movies on the Late Late Show.”

  There was a growl of anger from the other agent, the one who wasn’t called Brad. “Shut up,” he said coldly. Lynch shook him off, being extremely patient with me.

  “Look, Noon. Cut the funny talk. I know you were Army buddies with Crosby, and maybe this is harder to take than I know. But forget that civilian chip on your shoulder. We have to cooperate with each other. I don’t want to wave any flag in your face, but we’re both American citizens, and our trip here definitely concerns the subject known as patriotism.”

  “Sure. The Government is finally going to get around to handing out the bonus to all war veterans, is that it?”

  “Am I getting through to you, Noon, or are you going to act like an overgrown jerk? This is important.”

  “Okay, okay.” I relented. “You tell me first, huh? I came into this mess around the middle of the picture. I don’t even know what the movie is about.”

  Lynch took all of a minute to consider which one of us should sound off first. His rough face was thinking it over with frowns, grimaces, and lip biting. I won.

  “Deal. But answer one question first, Noon.”

  “Shoot.”

  “What about her?” His thumb bulleted at sleeping Lola Langdon.

  “I can’t really tell you. She said Kyle was an epileptic and she was his nurse. He told me on the phone, which was the first time I talked to him in twenty years, that she had something to do with what brought him to town looking for me. That’s as far as I got with both of them until I ran into the hospital and you ran into me and we both ran into him.”

  “I see.”

  “You do? Congratulations.”

  He smiled bleakly. One of his men spoke up. “Nothing in Crosby’s pockets, Lynch. Not so much as a comb. The killer cleaned him.”

  It figured. If Kyle had had the dollar bill, chances were it was what he was killed for in the first place. It all had to be about my little short snorter, didn’t it? Or did it?

  Lynch shrugged, as if answering my thoughts. “It’s not as Chinese as it must seem to you right now. That’s one thing you’ll learn about Commie agents. No matter how complicated the design may seem from your point of view, it all makes sense if you know where to start from.”

  I must have looked at him like an owl. “Come again? Commie agents?”

  Now it was Lynch’s turn to look dumbfounded. He shot a glance at the other agents. He came back to me with fresh appraisal. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said.

  I braced myself, knowing he was about to say something I wouldn’t like. His face wore a now-it’s-your-turn-to-flinch expression.

  “You suppose what, Mr. Lynch?”

  He let me have his answer with obvious relish. I could tell by the way he pronounced every syllable of the smear.

  “Kyle Crosby was probably the dirtiest traitor who ever graduated out of the American Army into a Communist agent. And he did it all without being brainwashed.”

  Brad and the nameless F.B.I. man both jumped me, pinning my arms, before I could get a good crack at Mr. Lynch.

  6

  Give Me Your Brain, American

  “Let him go, boys,” Lynch said evenly. “I don’t think he’ll want to throw any punches when he hears what I have to say. Let him go, I said.”

  “Behave, Noon,” Brad muttered in my ear. “No matter how good you think you are, there are three of us.”

  “Okay.” I flung them off, staring at Lynch. “Start saying what you have to say.”

  He nodded and opened the folds of his dark topper for comfort. The room had begun to get warmer. Kyle was still sitting in the butterfly chair and Lola Langdon was still out for the count. I held my ground, fighting the nearly uncontrollable anger Lynch had started with his damning remarks. A man who gives half of his face to his country, unintentionally or not, deserves some white heat from his friends.

  “Noon,” Lynch began, as though addressing a brand-new bunch of rookies ready to take the F.B.I. pledge of allegiance, “I could weigh you down with file card and book on Kyle Crosby. If you buck anything I tell you that’s your business. But it’s all in the records. Kyle Crosby won a Silver Star and came back to America to have his life save
d and plastic surgery performed on his face. The operation was a miracle, but when it was over and Crosby was convalescing before his discharge from veterans’ hospital, something must have happened to him. Because he never went back to Wisconsin, the state he was drafted from. He went to Russia, as a visitor, and never applied for reentry into this country. Fact is, the U. S. embassy reported him missing after enough time had passed to make officials wonder what had happened to a citizen of the U. S. A. The Russians seemed to help in the search, but now we know for a fact that Kyle Crosby defected. All of this, mind you, was sometime in forty-seven. A long time ago. Before Korea, before the Red Chinese came into power, and long before Vietnam. Crosby has no family in the States. He was only eighteen when he was drafted. You get the picture, Noon? An embittered young kid, face all changed, looking for something that had nothing to do with the American way of life. A perfect sucker for the Red line of living.”

  “He said he was married,” I croaked. “Wife, three kids. She said so, too.” I pointed a forefinger at the prone Lola Langdon.

  “I’ll get back to her later,” Lynch said mildly. “I want you to understand that Kyle Crosby, willingly and without pressure, joined the Reds. Naturally, we don’t know exactly what he’s been doing all these years behind the Iron Curtain. We have to guess about a lot of it. But there isn’t much to wonder about, is there? The use they must have made of him politically. Oh, not in the papers or the world headlines. I mean in villages and towns and places where the local peasants might be inspired by the sight of an American war hero, decorated and all, embracing the Communist world in all its glory. As an ex-military man and an expert on guns, he might have had other uses, too. But all this adds up to the present. Kyle Crosby had not set foot in this country until one day two weeks ago when he showed up in New York. We let him run free, even though the Government had plenty of questions to ask him, so we could see what he was up to. He’s been one step ahead of us until he was stopped tonight.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute —” I shook my head angrily. It was too much too soon. I didn’t mind swallowing, but it was all so hard going down. “The next thing you’ll tell me is that the man that blasted me on the roof was an F.B.I. man and I owe this hole in my side to the Government.”