The February Doll Murders

by Michael Avallone

  Mike Monks took over after that, since Lynch and his boys were really operating out of their district. But the two of them had gotten along like lodge brothers. Lynch explained about Max Arnoff’s dead body and the blackout on all information about him and Kyle. Now that Mike knew what was what, he wouldn’t have to waste any more time tracing Kyle Crosby. He knew where Kyle was now, all right. Properly D.O.A.’d and on his way down to an air-cooled drawer in the police morgue. The knife that had killed him was kind of interesting in one respect. It wasn’t of American make, but a throwing knife of French design. No prints, of course, but there never ever were.

  After Lynch and Monks reminded me how they’d be in touch with me and everybody official had gone home, I left the apartment and took a cab for the office. Pete, the guy on the desk, had looked at me mournfully, as though he might never see me again. I knew how he felt. The landlord wasn’t going to be happy at all about the blasted apartment, no matter how first-rate a tenant I had been. I debated for a moment about phoning an actress girl friend I knew. The prospects of a warmer, more congenial bed than a hotel room might offer appealed to me. The hour was late, but the girl wouldn’t have minded too much. I had always been good for a laugh for her every once in a while. But I nixed the idea when I remembered how much she talked about the acting profession between drinks. I was in no mood for that, either. In the end I settled for the office. The mouse auditorium was also home to me. And the office couch was comfortable. There were clean shorts, shirts, socks, and what-have-you in the office, too. I needed some cleaning up.

  Oddly enough, I was thinking of my stake-out to come at Number Five Terrace Gardens the next morning. Hadn’t I told Melissa I was going to take a crack at solving the business of her famous children’s dolls?

  The building was dark when I got there. One lone light burned in the downstairs hall behind the closed glass doors. I used my outside keys, walked into the elevator, ran it myself up to the sixth floor, and headed like a second-story man for my office. Funny how gloomy and tomblike the place was. After hours, an office building is another world. No sounds of life, no voices talking, no phones ringing, just black shadows.

  No matter how old the cliché, the butt of my .45 parked in the holster under my left arm was very reassuring. I’m not exactly in the business of selling paper cups.

  The building had never had a night watchman, preferring to get its protection from one of those burglar detection services that sends somebody by once a night to check front doors to see if they are locked.

  I was moving down the darkened corridor to my office door, thinking about these things, when I heard a sound that didn’t belong in the silence. A crying sound. It was short and sudden, ending as if it had been cut off with a knife. The silence was complete again. The short hairs on my neck seemed to stand on end. The cry had come from behind my office door, where a faint, pale glow of light showed.

  There was another burst of sound. Talking this time. Unless I was losing my marbles, a thin, scratchy child’s voice had just said, “Cookie all gone!”

  I eased up to the door like an Indian, flattened myself to the wall, and placed my left hand on the knob. I didn’t want the plate glass reflecting my silhouette. My right hand was already in business with the butt of that reassuring .45.

  No time to think, really.

  There was silence again. No one was stirring or making sounds in the office. And then came the weird thin voice again. “Nice doggy!”

  I tried to think. My scalp was trying to rearrange the hairline on my neck. The pit of my stomach was a landing field for butterflies.

  The dolls were talking, of course. To be specific, Chatty Cathy was talking, and it came to me with chilling wonder that someone was sitting in my dark office in the dead of night, methodically tugging the pull cord on the back of that doll to listen to the recorded baby talk on the metal spool.

  I waited.

  “Doggy, bowwow!” Chatty Cathy said.

  “Night, night!” she giggled.

  The crying sound came again. A burst of boo-hoo-hoo. That ended that little puzzle. Chatty Cathy could cry, too.

  I dropped to my knees, remembering the keyhole. I held my breath and squinted. I couldn’t see much. A lamp was on somewhere in the room, probably the one on Melissa’s desk. It seemed to flood the tiny opening my eye was trying to see through.

  All I could see was a pair of very trim legs, smooth and shapely, the ankles bound with thick bands of something, like scarfs or belts. My view cut off at the woman’s knees. They were round and dimpled and sexy. And unmistakably cocoa-colored.

  I straightened against the other side of the door again, holding the doorknob, waiting for Chatty Cathy’s next remark. I needed a distraction of some kind for what I was about to do.

  It came.

  I stopped.

  This time it was no theater child’s voice, but the flat, nasal accents of a man, speaking smoothly and methodically as though reciting from a textbook or manual of some kind.

  “United Nations Project. Code Name: SMASH. Specifications and qualifications four-nine-oh-seven-five. All, repeat, all procedure and execution will be —”

  The voice cut off with the rapidity of a light switch, and another voice, a man’s deep, accented voice, closer to me, rumbled happily, “Good! That’s it, then! Rollo, kill the woman and let’s be gone.”

  I hit the door then with all I had, making it fly back against the inside office wall like a shooting surfboard. I poked half my body into the room, the .45 way out front like a cannon, leveled into the light. When things happen fast, lots of other things can happen. But this was one time when I had all the cards in the deck where I wanted them.

  “Up, up, up!” I yelled. “Nobody move! I’m very nervous!”

  Corny but effective. And it worked — because nobody was showing any hardware or cutlery. Why should they? They had had everything their own way up until now.

  I cannot describe the look of relief that flashed in Melissa’s eyes as I popped in like a genie from the doorway. They had lashed her to her own chair, legs as I had seen them, arms pinioned behind the back rest of the swivel. A swath of white handkerchief, doubling as a gag, covered the lower half of her face. They hadn’t had to worry about her crying out.

  The desk light rose like a halation about her lovely coppery face.

  But as much as I liked Melissa, I wasn’t concentrating on her just then. The fish I had netted, two of them, had all my attention.

  Rollo — it had to be Rollo who was poised before Melissa’s chair, his hand frozen to his belt buckle, where the blade of a knife gleamed — was the shortest, dirtiest, nastiest-looking little rat I have ever seen. His suit was dark, as were his shirt and tie, but his face looked like a pale walnut. Wrinkled, carved, and ridged, with a mouth made for spitting. His eyes were black and tiny, and his dark hair, tousled and ringleted like a girl’s, shone damply. As if all this beauty was not enough, his left ear was missing, only a hump of flesh surrounding the orifice of his eardrum.

  “Rollo, move away from her. Over to your boss. He is your boss, isn’t he?” A snarl twisted the little man’s ugly face, but he scuttled away from Melissa. I stepped behind her chair, keeping the .45 high, up front where they could readily see the enormous bore. “Easy does it, gents, while I tend to my secretary. She’s more than a secretary, you know. That’s the first mistake you made.”

  As I tugged at Melissa’s gag and bonds, I studied the other man, whose height and girth accented Rollo’s smallness.

  Seen in the daytime on a busy street, he might be laughable, he was so fat and elephantine. His costume of American brown tweed suit and red bow tie would have helped, too. A face as round and hairless as an onion bobbed whitely beneath the crowning comedy of a fez. But you couldn’t laugh at him under these conditions. Not even with his pudgy arms encircling the doll known as Chatty Cathy. There was the look of a lizard in his half-lidded eyes, which even now, having recovered some lost poise, were reg
arding me coolly from the far side of the room. Standing next to the water cooler the way he was, he looked even more ludicrous. But as I say, somehow the laugh choked in your throat. He reminded me of S.S. men I’d seen gazing without pity at the charred, naked heaps of concentration-camp dead.

  “Ed, Ed,” Melissa murmured, her voice husky. “Thank God —”

  “What happened?” I kept my eyes on Rollo and his fat boss. “Make it short.”

  “Got a phone call. Asking me to meet you here. That was about ten thirty. When I got here, these two jumped me in the outside hallway. Made me use the keys to get up here. Then they started with the dolls —”

  “I heard. Catch your breath now. Everything’s under control.” I could see the shadowy, tangled jumble of two discarded dolls on the office door. Tiny Tears and Poor Pitiful Pearl. Pearl had never looked more pitiful.

  I lowered the .45 until the muzzle was aimed at the fat man’s enormous middle. “Talk,” I suggested.

  The bare, baby-soft face creased with silent laughter. “To what end, dear sir?” His voice was a fantastically deep basso. A boom of tonal depth.

  “Truth’s a good end.”

  Rollo snarled, his hands opening and closing. The fat man, still clutching the doll as though he would never let it go, shook his head toward him. A brown tassel on the fez flicked.

  “Calm yourself, Rollo. I am sure Mr. Noon will be reasonable. I am willing to pay you a large sum of money, my friend, if you will permit me to leave now. And my friend.”

  “You haven’t got enough money, friend.”

  “Would twenty thousand dollars in cash, which is in the money belt about my waist, influence you?”

  “Not tonight, Josephine. I just want plain talk. You sent me these dolls or didn’t you?”

  His lidded eyes opened in surprise. “What an idea! Would I place myself in this foolish position of having to get them back? Come, come. You were outside the door, listening. You heard part of the recorded message on the spool. I am interested in that message. Which does not and should not concern you at all. Come, take my money, and let us go.”

  “You were going to kill my secretary.”

  His eyes almost apologized. “An expedient no longer necessary, since the thought behind it was to keep you from being aware of our identities. But now — fortunes of war — it will not change things.” His eyes glittered again. “Will you accept the offer?”

  Melissa had stood up; she was rubbing the circulation back into her arms and legs. Her bosom was heaving, and Rollo’s ugly face was dry-lipped with appreciation of her charms. I made a note of it and got back to his boss.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Do the names Kyle Crosby, Lola Langdon, and Max Arnoff mean anything to you?”

  That got more of a reaction than I had hoped for. His placid look vanished. His lips got petulant, and his brows lowered.

  “So. They, too, have approached you. Perhaps I underestimated you after all, dear sir. And as Rollo would tell you, I, Samarko, have never made that error twice in a lifetime.”

  I was confused. I had the gun and the upper hand. But what did I have? A fezzed fat man and a little wharf rat that might have climbed out from under a waterfront pier. It had been one crazy day.

  I took one last gamble, even though I knew this character was not going to tell me anything unless I really put on the pressure.

  “Okay, Samarko, I’ll make a deal. And it will cost you a helluva lot less than twenty thousand dollars. You pay my price and you can walk out of here, Chatty Cathy and all.”

  Now his eyes really narrowed. I couldn’t see them for trying.

  “I listen, sir. As I always do. What price do you demand for our freedom?”

  I measured him carefully before answering. “One American dollar. One hundred pennies represented by a paper bill. But it must have ten names signed on it. Then I’ll be happy. That’s my price, Samarko.”

  He smiled, hugging the doll. His smile was sad, pitying me and Melissa and the whole world of innocent bystanders.

  “So — you know that, too? Pity, my dear sir. For now you must be eliminated. No one can know about that bill and live to a ripe old age, as my ancestors did. In the specific area of espionage, a little knowledge has to be a dangerous thing. Both for the interested parties and the chance blunderer. I am truly sorry, dear sir.”

  “Feel sorry for yourself,” I snapped, his oily blandness getting under my skin. But he simply raised his eyebrows to the ceiling of the room and sighed.

  “Rollo,” he said softly, stroking Chatty Cathy’s rubbery face. “Now, I think.”

  His manner had so irritated me that my gaze shot toward Rollo. The little ape was grinning at me. Even with his hands held high, he was as unconcerned as a Willie Mays facing a pitcher who had nothing on the ball.

  “Ed,” Melissa said nervously at my shoulder. “Maybe I should tie them up?”

  It was a fine idea, but it came too late. And I was looking right at Rollo when it happened. I never could explain it satisfactorily to anyone. Least of all myself.

  All I can remember is that it seemed to me that two of the front buttons on Rollo’s dark suit jacket exploded with the startling suddenness of flashlight bulbs. I felt a funny sting somewhere in my chest. Before I could figure out what had happened and start blasting away with the .45, I had lost interest in everything — in staying awake, talking, finding the answers to questions about dolls, dollar bills, Kyle Crosby and friends.

  I have never lost consciousness so rapidly. Same for Melissa. We collided against each other as we swayed to the floor. The last thing I saw was Samarko’s fat face eyeing me pityingly and Rollo’s rat eyes batting with high glee.

  9

  Rats, Rats, Rats

  Speaking for all men rendered unconscious the world over, I must say I never had it so good. I don’t know how long I was under, but when I woke up it was with a complete absence of all the normal handicaps of enforced sleep.

  I had no headache, no stiff joints, no nausea, no bad taste in my mouth. It was quite as if I had closed my eyes in the office and then opened them. The lapse in between, however short or long, was completely without memory or sensation.

  Also, I woke up in a harem, fully conscious and in my right mind, although my first impression was that I was dreaming. After all, the last time I had seen so many Oriental rugs, tapestries, and ottomans was in a movie called Scourge of the Desert, or something similar. Nor could I dismiss a Turkish water pipe, and assorted brocaded doodads that made the whole room seem like something out of the diary of Sinbad the Sailor.

  With all of its velvet trappings and gauze laces, it was plainly enough a room, although gossamer silks and dangling draperies hid the walls. I also found out something else, perhaps minor, but very major in my scheme of things.

  I was naked.

  As unadorned as a chicken ready for the boiling pot. I was on my back, sort of spread-eagled among a pile of fluffy pillows and cushions. I felt fine — but I had no clothes on. And one of the necessary accessories for the civilized man is clothes. But none of the curtains or draperies could be detached to provide me with a loincloth if I had any qualms about going nudist.

  I looked around. Slowly.

  As I’ve said, I didn’t ache at all. Fact was, my senses were pleasurably lulled by my new location in life. Only that little alarm bell in my head that governs all my thoughts told me that the situation wasn’t kosher. It couldn’t be. I could still see rat-faced, one-eared Rollo popping his buttons. What kind of science-fiction trick had that been? Some kind of knockout drug administered by flying darts? There were no pinpricks on my body that I could see.

  Modern times. Ian Fleming movies. Make way for Thunderball!

  “Oh, Ed,” a familiar voice sighed behind me. “Don’t turn around.”

  Reflexively, I had done just that. Melissa’s low tone was peculiar. I caught a flash of pure feminine beauty. Shapely and dimpled loveliness. She let out a low laugh of mingled fright and regre
t, and I looked away again.

  “My, my,” I said.

  “I’m so embarrassed — I’ve never —”

  “Forget it. How do you feel?”

  “Like a naked jaybird. Otherwise I feel fine. No aches or pains. What in the world do you suppose happened?”

  I didn’t answer right away because I didn’t know. Also, I was too busy rapidly casing our surroundings. Whenever the opposition leaves you alone for five minutes, it’s sensible to do everything you can to prepare for an escape. That way, if the opportunity does come knocking, you don’t have to wait for the second knock.

  Never having been trapped in a harem before, with all my duds gone with the wind, I didn’t come up with a single idea. I was stymied.

  “Offhand,” I said dryly, wondering if I could find a fig leaf someplace in these chichi surroundings, “this is a very famous first for me.” For her sake, I was trying to keep things light.

  “Where do you think we are?” She sounded okay.

  I laughed. “If Samarko doesn’t live here, there is no accounting for types. Look, find a pillow or something. We have to talk. Being naked doesn’t bother me that much, but I will admit it’s distracting.”

  “Oh, Ed.” I heard her giggle, in spite of the situation. “Okay — you can turn around now.”

  I did, clad in some fragments of lace and brocaded linen. In desperation, I had ripped some of the covering from the fluffy cushions.

  One of the delights of life is a beautiful girl insufficiently clothed. When all the choice parts of her anatomy are enticingly and barely covered, a guy is apt to drool. Melissa was so superbly smooth and roundly figured, despite her medium height, that I had to admit to sudden notions that had nothing to do with the fix we were in. I put them out of my head fast. Whoever had left us here had stripped us for a reason, and would be back for a reason.

  “Welcome to the Adam and Eve Club,” I said, glad to see that she was still holding on to her nerve. As frightened as she was, her gaze was steady and her hands didn’t tremble. Ditto the pillows she had hugged to her waist.