The February Doll Murders

by Michael Avallone

  “You do know Kyle, Mr. Noon?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you are a detective, aren’t you?”

  “Does it show that much, Mr. Glass?”

  “Can’t fool an old dog, Mr. Noon. I’ve had investigators around me all my life. You get to know the look of them. You have that look. Tell me, what’s happened to Kyle?” He leaned forward in his chair. “Is my nephew in some kind of trouble?”

  That was it. Three dolls. Chatty Cathy, Tiny Tears, Poor Pitiful Pearl. An old warhorse of an uncle to help out just once in a nephew’s lifetime. And it was done. There was no more to be learned from Kyle’s uncle. Amos Glass was a dead end; a loose end neatly tied up and now to be dispensed with. I wondered how he would take the news. He looked like a man who had never cared very much about people for any single day of his life.

  “Kyle is dead, Mr. Glass. He was stabbed to death by an unknown murderer just yesterday.”

  He had nothing to say to that. He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and went rigid, as if that would make what I had told him go away.

  I said no more to him.

  I left quietly, leaving him sitting in the chair to think about his securities, annuities, and millions. I hoped he might wonder eternally about the three dolls that his nephew had asked him to ship to a stranger. But I didn’t think he would.

  He was a very old man who had walked out on the human race too many years ago ever to make the long trip back to caring, feeling, or even wondering.

  I took another cab back to the office. The day was sun-washed and bright. February had taken on some of the deceptive tinges of an early spring.

  I called the answering service when I got in. Poor Pitiful Pearl and Tiny Tears were still strewn on the floor where Samarko had left them. The answering-service girl told me there had been calls from Monks, a Mr. Lynch, and a lady who had not left a number to call back. I thought about that while I got myself organized behind the desk. It had been a morning of no mail, either. Just a few tired circulars offering TV set repairs and fun in the sun in Happy Hawaii. Yeah. I’d leave in five minutes if I could.

  Monks was my first return call. His booming voice thundered a good morning.

  “Where did you stay last night, Ed? You weren’t in the office. I called at four this morning, expecting you to be sleeping it off there.”

  “None of your business. What’s up?”

  “Report on my desk. Fire in a shop on Third. Exotica, Unlimited. Smoked out through the underpass in the tunnel. Firemen found two stiffs. Now, it seems they were poisoned.”

  “So? What’s it to me?”

  “Dear Ed” — his voice rose to its familiar sarcastic pitch — “one of your personal possessions, namely your wristwatch, was found near one of the stiffs. How do I know it was your watch? Because I gave it to you for your birthday about five years back! Remember?”

  “Ouch,” I said. He was right; I had forgotten that.

  “I want more than that. This Samarko and the other stiff, what happened last night? Give, now.”

  “Right on the telephone? It’s too long and too unsatisfying. How about lunch?”

  There was a pause. “Okay — I’m nuts, as usual, but I’ll pick you up at twelve. And be there, will you?” His tone was almost pleading as he hung up.

  Next I called Mr. Lynch at the number he had left with the answering service. He, too, was in. It seemed as if none of them were going to budge from their desks until they heard from me. It gives you a great feeling, being so important. I kept my teeth together when Lynch’s bright, bland voice came over the receiver. It was the voice of the casual, self-assured F.B.I. agent ready to serve his country and its citizens, come hell or atom bomb.

  “Lynch, it’s Ed Noon.”

  “Oh, the busy young investigator.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I read my morning papers. I see that Samarko and his playmate Rollo are no longer with us. I would be an idiot if I didn’t realize that you had a hand in last night’s fire.”

  “You didn’t give me a watch for my birthday, so how do you know I was on Third Avenue?”

  “You just told me,” he said quietly. “I’m not surprised. Samarko was Crosby’s contact here in New York. I wondered when he would make a move toward you. Seeing as how this dollar bill of yours is such an all-fired attention-getter. What happened?”

  I sighed. You can’t win them all. “What are you doing for lunch today? I’m breaking bread with Captain Mike Monks. He’s picking me up here.”

  “Sounds fine. I’ll tag along. Okay with you?”

  “I have a choice?”

  “Not really, but cooperation helps.”

  “Come ahead. And Lynch.”

  “Still here, Noon.”

  “What was the bomb that Miss Langdon left on my late lamented premises?”

  “Oh. A plastic compound. Called Aunt Jemima by the explosives experts because it is kneaded as easily as making flour for a pancake.”

  “So how did we miss it?”

  His laugh was brittle. “This’ll kill you. She worked it flat against the underside of one of the cushions she was lying on.”

  “And how did it ignite? Blasting cap?”

  “She left a timer no larger than a marble buried in it. After so many minutes — pow!”

  “You learn something new every day. See you at twelve, Lynch.”

  That time I hung up first. I drummed the black receiver, wondering if the anonymous lady phone caller would ring back. It had to be Lola Langdon. No girl I know personally makes anonymous calls. Only thing was, I didn’t want to be kept on tenterhooks all day wondering what such a lady was going to do next. When you’re dealing with a dame who can mix pancakes that blow up apartments, you don’t like to be kept in suspense about what she’s going to do next.

  For no good reason other than orderliness, I picked up Tiny Tears and Poor Pitiful Pearl from the floor and set them on the desk. They flipped and flopped as if they had a life of their own. Then I went to the windows and looked out. Across the way I could see the office girls in the photography place going about their morning chores. One of them, the girl with the very prominent chest, waved to me, the same way she always did. I waved back.

  Overhead a jet plane thundered across the skies, filling the air with sonic boom. The windows shivered. I went back to my desk.

  The phone rang. I scooped it up. “Ed Noon, here.”

  “Oh, Ed.” It was Melissa. “The bad penny’s back.”

  I misunderstood her. “Now, Mel.”

  “You have to come right now, Ed. Without anybody else. Miss Langdon is holding a gun to my head, and she isn’t kidding.” There was no fright in Melissa’s voice. Just weary resignation.

  “Hold still,” I said quietly. “Say that again.”

  “Lola Langdon is here in my apartment, and she says you have to come here quick. And not to try anything. Or she’ll kill me.”

  I frowned. The whole situation was so weird that my brain stalled.

  “Okay,” I said with an air of finality. “I’m leaving now.”

  “One more thing, Ed.”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “She wants you to bring those other dolls with you. You know, Tiny Tears and Pearl.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Hurry, Ed, that’s all.”

  “All right. Listen carefully now. Sit still, do everything she asks you to, and don’t be a lousy heroine. She’s nuts, and she’d kill you, too.”

  “Yes, Ed. Good-bye.”

  The phone went click in my ear. I couldn’t think straight anymore. I scooped up the two dolls, hugged them to my chest, and headed out the front door.

  Dolls. If I didn’t make sense out of this mess real soon, I would wind up cutting out paper ones.

  Something awfully peculiar was going on; something that in my wildest guesses I hadn’t really thought of till now.

  I did one sensible thing before I left, though. This despite Lola’s
reported injunction not to try anything.

  I left her name and address, with a message for Monks and Lynch, on the desk blotter. When they showed up at twelve, I wanted them to know exactly where I had gone.

  Even though I might not still be there at twelve. By then, I could be in the graveyard.

  14

  Up in Melissa’s Room

  What a difference a few hours can make. Good can become bad, night turn into day, and truth reshape itself into the biggest lie of all. Life is like that. Man arranges things and life rearranges them. Or what was it that someone once said? “The only consistencies are the inconsistencies.”

  All I know is that Melissa’s apartment was now a different row of petunias. The love rooms had metamorphosed into something out of bad serial television.

  It didn’t take me long to get there from the office, maybe twenty minutes, which was time enough to make enough plans to take the city of New York. But I didn’t make any plans. I was too busy wondering about Lola Langdon and her fantastic peregrinations. She had more moves than a chessboard.

  I must have been a funny sight at that. A grown man with an armful of children’s dolls. The cabby, the doorman on the building, and ordinary sidewalk strollers all gave me an amused double take when they saw me clutching Tiny Tears and Poor Pitiful Pearl.

  The ride up in the elevator paired me off with an elderly woman in a vinegarish mood. She looked the other way as though I might be an idiotic drunk. I ignored her. She got off on the floor below Melissa’s.

  My preparations for the coming interview with Lola Langdon included my .45, which was in its usual holster bed, and Rollo’s Luger, which I had tucked in the waistband of my trousers at the small of my back. The cut of my jacket would conceal it if I didn’t bend over real fast.

  I was playing it the way Melissa said Lola wanted it, but I wasn’t planning on dying easily, either.

  They were both waiting for me when I rang Melissa’s doorbell. In no time at all, we were all in a huddle in the living room. Melissa registered extreme tautness of manner and voice. The strain was beginning to tell. After all, she’d been on the brink coming and going since late last night. Lola Langdon wasn’t exactly the picture of executive calmness, either. The gun in her hand, a long-nosed .32 revolver, was jiggling nervously, like a fish on the line. She said nothing at first, waving me to the couch behind the coffee table. Apparently by prearrangement, Melissa was seated at the far end of the divan. Like I said, it was a nice day. Bright sunlight flooded the back of the room, entering through large windows opening on West End Avenue. You could hear the traffic going by. A peaceful sort of all’s-right-with-the-world symphony of everyday life in a big city.

  I hugged the dolls, feeling mean and foolish. “Well, here they are. Sorry they aren’t gift-wrapped, Miss Langdon.”

  She stood off from us, some five feet away, well out of my reach. There was electricity in every line of her body. The striking high-caste face and bronzed coloring of her skin were augmented today by a wool-knit two-piece beige suit. I could see she was under a great strain. Her lips were working, her glance darting about the room as if she expected men to come popping out of all the hidden corners.

  “I wouldn’t have harmed Miss Mercer,” she said suddenly. “Believe that or not — but I had to get you to come here. I wasn’t sure how you would react because of what happened yesterday in your apartment.”

  I raised my eyebrows. She wasn’t threatening me, which was odd. “I’ll buy that. For now. You want to talk, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? You have all the cards now. Here are the dolls. You must have my dollar bill. Though why you want these two pretties is over my head. The one you took from Samarko and dear Rollo has all the information you need. What are you stalling around for?”

  “Please, Mr. Noon —”

  “My, we’re formal again. Maybe I should call you Lola like I did when I thought you were sincere about helping Kyle Crosby.”

  Her response to that surprised me. She didn’t get angry. A total weariness seemed to drain her before my very eyes. But the .32, tremble and all, remained leveled at my midsection.

  “Stop it, Ed,” she said, low. “You can’t be as stupid as all that. If you think I have all those things — the doll, the bill — and that I am responsible for Samarko’s death, then you are not the man Kyle said you were. Are you really just a brass-tacks sort who can only see what is in front of his face?”

  I growled at that. “What am I supposed to believe of a dame who blows up my own little nest on Central Park West?”

  “That was necessary.”

  “It was? Good. Then you can tell me why.”

  She bit her lip. “Old habits are hard to break. I have been trained to kill, to destroy, for more than half my life. The first edict of the practice of espionage is thorough ruthlessness. With Kyle dead and all of you standing around his corpse chattering like monkeys, I saw a way to obliterate all the evidence against him and myself. I loved him too much to want to see his corpse fingered by so many strangers. In addition, there was a more practical reason. I thought you might have brought the dolls to your apartment. Since Mr. Lynch had unfortunately interrupted my private tête-à-tête with you, I gambled on that. The explosion and fire would have destroyed the dolls. And one more horrible Communist plot would have vanished. I have seen and been part of enough of those. I meant to thwart the people — my employers — who had caused Kyle’s death.”

  I looked at Melissa. She shook her head. There was nothing she knew that I didn’t. Lola had obviously said nothing to her while they waited for me to get uptown. I stared at Lola Langdon.

  “Wait a minute, lady. Slow down. You’re losing me. I seem to hear the sound of recanting and defecting in your voice, or is it just wishful thinking? I got a million questions that need answering, but I will sit still if you start from the beginning. Remember, you have one thing in your favor. I’m the guy who refuses to believe that Kyle Crosby sold his full interest in Yankee Doodle.”

  A low tremor coursed through her body, but she laughed mirthlessly. Her coppery hair flicked at me as she nodded her head slowly.

  “No. You are wrong. You know about Kyle. What happened to his face. He went behind the Iron Curtain sometime in 1947. I met him then. I was also like him. An American turned sour. My history is unimportant. But the Reds made the maximum use of both of us. No, Ed, I cannot lie about that. It is useless to deceive you now. We were both members of their espionage organization. Highly rated members. In the beginning it was the excitement, the thrill of being different, somebody special. Long before that feeling palled, we had become executioners for Stalin. Then came the new purges and new leaders. Through it all, we retained our specialist ratings. There were always people who needed us. Yes, Comrades Crosby and Langdon were well known in Soviet Russia.” She stared at me coldly. “I have killed many men, Ed. I was a child of my time. And like a child, I suddenly found the woman in myself. I fell in love.”

  “With Kyle?” It was hard not to believe her, this woman who looked like a movie queen, whose aristocratic face and slender hands would seem more at home with cocktail parties and social functions. Which was probably exactly where she operated. I heard Mel murmur something. It sounded tearful.

  “Yes. We were both sick. Of killings, blood. We schemed to get away. To leave. It was impossible. We were too valuable, and we knew too much. And then the day came when Kyle remembered something about his Army service.”

  “The bill, you mean.”

  “You have guessed, perhaps?” Her eyes smiled. “He said you had that sort of peculiar mind. Yes, his one association, his one excuse to be able to come to this country himself would have to amount to something fantastic. So he told our party leaders that he had marked on your bill the location of a cache of Nazi war prizes somewhere in the Hartz Mountains. But he had been wounded, shipped back to the States, and had lost contact with you. He said you were the sort who would save souvenirs, a
nd that the bill was necessary to locate the hidden supply of money, jewels, and other valuables. He estimated the loot at more than three millions. Naturally, our leaders were interested. They allowed him to leave the country. It looked like the answer to his dreams. Once back in America, he would slip away and lose himself in the vast multitudes of people. But they were thorough. They always are. They sought to kill two birds with one stone. Kyle was given three dolls to bring to America, with instructions to ship them to Mr. Samarko at his rug shop on Third Avenue. They did not even tell Kyle that one of the dolls contained complex instructions for a plot to sabotage the U. N. Building. The other two dolls were just for cover. The dolls would pass customs very easily. I understand they can be purchased anywhere in the world.”

  “Go on.” I was fascinated. “I take it they let you come along to hold his hand.”

  “Yes. I was his cover. A nurse — for the reasons I told you. They helped a great deal. Fellow passengers and officials were most solicitous and kind. But our leaders were not as charitable as all that. In reality, I went along as Kyle’s executioner. Yes, I. Were he to betray us, I had specific instructions to kill him, take the dolls to Mr. Samarko myself. I told you they were thorough, but they had slipped up on one minor detail. They were assigning me to the man I loved, and I was in with him on his scheme.” She closed her eyes briefly. “Is Wisconsin as lovely as he said it was?” The .32 had lowered appreciably, but it was still aimed at me.

  “Like a picture postcard, Lola.” I was fitting pieces into the puzzle. “They sent Max Arnoff in your wake as a further precaution, I take it?”

  She shuddered. “Yes. I told you. Thoroughness and ruthlessness, the twins of espionage. We were aware of Arnoff. A large, gross man. Their number one executioner. We were able to lose him when we reached Times Square. Kyle called you then. But Arnoff spotted us, and we had to run. And then the R.C.A. Building — we saw that on a souvenir postcard in a drugstore. It seemed a perfect place. We were sure we had shaken Arnoff. But we hadn’t. He found us on that roof, and you know the rest.”