The Horrible Man

by Michael Avallone

  Monks shook his head, his borsalino pulled tightly down around his ears. "You thinking Daddy Warbucks tapped your wires, sent friends around to shut you up because you happened to be working on a case that involved a woman that horsed around with Tommy Spanner once?"

  "Something like that."

  "Maybe so. Hard to swallow. He's rich enough not to have taken that hard road out. Why didn't he call you and bribe you with one of his easy million dollars? Money solves most of a rich man's problems, doesn't it? It did last time I heard."

  "You asked me to think out loud," I reminded him. I couldn't tell him about how interested a president of a country was in Tommy Spanner's corpse. Which reminded me of something else again.

  "Mike."

  "Yeah?"

  "We're alone now. Pals. What's good for you is good for me. Give."

  "Give what?"

  "The autopsy on Spanner. The statements of those three chorus girls. You said there was something—you cursed at me for guessing there was a joker in the deck."

  He was quiet for a while, eyes on the traffic, nursing the wheel, dodging tie-ups and slow lanes. He sighed again.

  "Yeah, I did. You might as well know one way or another. I think you probably would have gotten it out of Christina Ralston today if you ever got her to give you a straight answer. She's nuttier than a fruitcake now that she killed Spanner. He was tattooed, Ed. Tattooed all over the back. Ralston saw him naked and so did the other three although they didn't go into any details about whether or not he was a good lover. I didn't have to ask them. They all tangled with a pervert and now I guess they're a little ashamed. I'm not surprised. A guy dying like that changes a lot of things."

  I tried not to leap at the news. My mind was boiling over with possibilities. Tattoos. To show something, to tell a story—

  "What kind of tattoos? Naked girls, battleships, swords or what?"

  Monks chuckled. "Got the wind up, eh? That mind of yours. You never see anything for what it is. All right, Mr. Fancy Mind, what would you make of a man's back that was practically covered with all crazy lines and dots and marks like a diagram?"

  "Map of some kind?" I suggested.

  "Maybe. Anyhow, the body is on its way to Hemp-stead. As of ten this morning. Old Man Spanner pulled that many wires. But he can't win 'em all. The Lab took some photographs. You never can tell what will come up. The F.B.I., the C.I.A.—all of them could be interested."

  "Good thinking." I thought furiously. Would any of what Monks had done run counter to the President's plans? Maybe nobody should know anything about a cockamamie tattoo on a murdered man's back. "Who knows about the back of Spanner, Mike? And the pictures?"

  "The whole lab, of course. And the M.E. Why?"

  "Thinking out loud again." He knew that for the evasion it was. He knew me too well. He took a second or two to skirt a truck half-pulled out from a side-street and flung me another look.

  "Don't hold out, Ed. You know something I don't? I won't pull rank on you but you have been too damn interested in Spanner since the beginning."

  "He called me in, didn't he? I don't know what for sure but he got killed before I could help him. I feel sort of responsible in a way."

  "Like hell you do. He wasn't your kind of man—he never would be."

  "Well, thanks for telling me about the tattoo. Don't know what it means but I can't stop knocking myself out. Now I don't even have to see Ralston. That was what I was going to ask her about. I'll admit that much."

  He grunted, knowing I wasn't going to say any more.

  "Sober yet?"

  "Yeah. Now I got a hangover and it hurts twice as much because I didn't have the fun of getting gassed in my own good time."

  "Poor kid. I feel sorry for you."

  In that charitable mood, we finished the run back to Manhattan from Brooklyn. He dropped me off at Union Square, enjoining me to catch a cab home while he went back to headquarters. He didn't have the time to run me all the way to Central Park West. I thanked him for his help, and he growled something about being responsible for me now and to stay out of trouble. He'd square it with Brooklyn and the hanging judge. I started to thank him again but he pulled away from the kerb, leaving me with my mouth open.

  Still smelling like a brewery and beginning to feel the delayed aches and pains from the wild ride and the knockout gas, I crawled into a fresh taxi and went home.

  There were no little guys with big guns on the floor to give me orders.

  For which I was thankful. I felt terrible.

  There was a package for me on the downstairs desk in the lobby. It was the parcel from the Daily News. There was a note attached to it from Melissa Mercer. She had checked the package out, there were no dead cats in this one and it was on the level. If I wanted to call her at home, she'd like to hear from me. Pete the doorman grinned at me when he saw my bedraggled condition. I couldn't ignore the wrinkled nose he turned up at me.

  "You wouldn't believe me, Pete."

  "Try me," he laughed, knowing what insane situations I had gone through in my brief three years at the address.

  "I fell into an open beer barrel. In front of witnesses."

  "Sure. And I'm really Richard Burton in disguise and I do this for laughs." He thumbed a thumb at his blue uniform with the gold buttons. I winked to show him how funny I thought that was and crawled into the elevator and went up to my apartment. I'd been crawling since I left Mike Monks. Lassitude had set up a home in my brain and legs. I was tired. Dead tired. The perpetual stink of my alcoholised clothes didn't help at all.

  I locked the door behind me and didn't turn on a light until I reached the living-room. The parcel from the News felt like a ten-ton snake under my arm.

  I never did smell Mady Lopez's cheap perfume. The whisky-treated clothes took care of that. Why a woman her outlandish size had to advertise any further was something I could never understand. But then I have never understood everything. Nobody does.

  Which is why even the most cynical of us believe in some kind of heaven or hell.

  She had been in the bedroom. She must have been flaked out on my bed taking a snooze waiting for me to come home. The first indication I had was the light going on in the living-room.

  For one long unbelieving second I was staring at her, poised half-nakedly in a silk half-slip and bra of black-as-ink texture. Her baby face was flushed from sleep and her bangs were untidily curled about her broad forehead.

  I was so beat I flung my hands up protectively, expecting her to rush me. The parcel from the News hit the floor with a dull thud.

  "Hi, Noon," she said, yawning. "What kept you?"

  NINE

  TEN AND BINGO!

  □ She hadn't come wearing war paint. That was obvious in the tantalising stance she had assumed in the doorway to the bedroom. The pale white of her flesh, accented by the stark dark of the slip and panties, sent out messages of seduction and give it to me, baby.

  "Two questions," I demanded, not moving from the centre of the room or bothering to pick up the fallen parcel. "What cat-house did you just crawl out of and how did you get in here?"

  It was her day for being nice. She just wasn't going to get mad. She yawned, stretching her big arms. Her lashes fluttered at me.

  "Make nice, Eddie. I wanta be friends."

  "That's a laugh. Answer the questions."

  She blinked. "I got here a few hours ago. You think you're the only one who can use a skelteon key. I wanted to talk to you. We could get a good thing going—"

  "Where's Garcia Lopez?"

  "Is that all you do, Eddie? Ask questions? How's your love life?"

  "Great. Fifteen dames want to marry me and I don't need fifteen more rolled into one like you. So please beat it. I want to get some sleep."

  She stalked from the dimly-lit bedroom. Damn but she filled the room. I backed up, getting a wide winged chair between us and putting a hand close to my shoulder holster.

  "Cut it out," she rasped. "No more of that. Listen�
�I'm on the level with you. Arnet and me are through. He's been wetting his pants since you roughed him up. I walked out on him. I don't like chicken men. As for Gar—well, now that he knows about Spanner's will, he'll let me call the shots. You should know about Gar, Eddie. He's a nice little guy but being a midget bugs him more than he lets on. He hates being a freak—he hates me! Which means he'll do anything for a buck. He wants to retire, get out of Show Biz, stop being a freak. You get me, Eddie?"

  I thought fast, still keeping an eye on her.

  "You telling me Gar knows you're here, wanting to make nice with me and he's sitting still for it? That he's not going to use the hot pictures to lord it over you?"

  She smiled her vacuous, but ugly smile. "You got it. 'Course I haven't seen him since he went to your office. That was this morning, wasn't it? He's been out all day." She arched her boom-booms at me. "I got this idea all by myself thinking about you. About us."

  "You kill me."

  "I could. In bed."

  "I'll buy that. But what is there about me that's so extra special? I'd really like to know." I was stalling her, wondering how to brush her off without wrestling or calling for Pete downstairs. Also I was trying to make some sense out of Garcia Lopez pointing a .357 Magnum at the detective who had tried to help him be his own man. Money didn't seem like the proper answer.

  Mady Lopez drew a little closer. Her height and all the amazing equipment was more fantastic than ever. She wet her lower lip. Right out of the book. Tease Number One. Her answer was also out of the same book. It usually came with an accompaniment of violins in a soppy movie about amour.

  "We tangled yesterday, Eddie. And you dished it out to me. You didn't handle me with kid gloves. I liked that. Most of the slobs I know drool over me, making like dogs at my feet. I wondered—what you would be like making love to me. I've come a long way to find out."

  "I suppose I should be flattered." I tried a different tack. "Can you make coffee?"

  That did surprise her. "Try me."

  "Good. I guess you know where the kitchen is. Go make a pot. I want to wash my face and slow down. Then we'll talk about your mad passion. Deal?"

  "Deal." She waltzed around me, patting my face with a big hand as she thundered into the kitchen. I restrained a shudder, hearing her bustle around, opening drawers and rattling pots on the stove. Coffee was a good idea. I wasn't ready for And. Her And might be frightening, especially since she didn't turn me on in the first place. She wasn't a woman. She was fifteen tons of beef. And just as sick as Christina Ralston obviously was. She might have to spend the rest of her life looking for a man to satisfy her.

  With my own safety involved, I went into the bedroom and unearthed a box of knockout drops from beneath a bunch of socks and handkerchiefs. One Mickey Finn in her coffee and she would never know what hit her. I'd figure out how to ship her home later. First things first.

  I stuck the parcel from the News on the secretary in the corner of the main room overlooking Central Park West. Time enough to get to my homework later.

  "Eddie!" She was calling from the kitchen, sounding like a trumpet.

  "Yeah?" I stashed the knockout drop in my side pocket.

  "Think you'd want anything with it? There's some crullers out here. Found them in the refrig."

  "Bought them the other day—yeah. Good idea." I wasn't hungry but it seemed like a fine notion to keep her drinking and eating with her mind off the bedroom.

  "Are you going to Spanner's funeral in Hempstead, Mady?"

  She appeared at the entrance of the kitchen, looking puzzled.

  "You think I should?"

  "Could be. Maybe they're reading the will tomorrow. That way you'll find out quick whether you're in for some loot. Either way it can't hurt. Maybe the old man should see you on deck, know you have a stake in things. If you do go, take a lawyer with you."

  She marvelled at that. "Hey, that's good thinking. I never would have thought of that. I knew I was right about you—"

  "Of course, if you are in the will the family lawyer would have gotten in touch with you anyway. Still, can't do any harm."

  She clapped her big mitts together. "I'll do it. Damn my ass, I will. Who knows— Tommy coulda left me a fortune—"

  "Yeah. Tommy coulda." I parked myself on the lounge, undoing a tie that was beginning to feel like a noose. The aches and bruises from the Belt driving spree had tightened up. I felt wound up and all bunched together.

  Mady drifted out of the kitchen and wandered over to the lounge, ready to weigh me down with her size. I motioned her to the far corner of the thing, telling her to be patient and wait. She shrugged and reached for some cigarettes I always left on the coffee table in a jazzy pearl inlaid box that was a gift from a countess in Majorca. She willingly complied. I couldn't exactly blame her. She figured she'd won the first round and the second one was technically a clinch knockout. How right she was.

  "Let's talk while the coffee's cooking," I said. "I want to ask you about Tommy Spanner's backside."

  Her face crumpled into a weird smile.

  "His what?"

  "I'll re-phrase the question. When he was running around naked on the floor of that hotel in Lake Placid, shooting champagne corks at you, you must have seen his back. You know." I touched myself between the shoulder blades for emphasis.

  "Oh, that." Her face re-righted itself. "You had me there for a minute, Eddie. Yeah. Damn back of his looked like a waffle iron. You just couldn't believe— all lines and criss-crosses. I thought he might have been in a screwy accident at one time. I remember a dame I knew in Newark. Got smashed in the kisser with a wire screen of some kind. You know she's carrying that mark around on her face to this day?"

  "You ask Spanner about it?"

  "Sure I did. He told me what it was. I didn't pay no attention though. What with him being such a weirdo, I figured he made it all up."

  I took one of the cigarettes, lighting it, pretending real casualness. Oh, yeah,

  "Made all what up?"

  "The story to cover the back. Know what he handed me as straight-faced as a judge?" She snorted, a blast of sound. "He said it was a present from his Uncle Sam and his Uncle Sam would probably give him a medal when he saw him. Tie that one. I let it go at that. I guess he was ashamed and I didn't want to make him feel any worse. He probably had some of his fairies give him the whips once, like those clubs they got down in the Village where they do that kind of queer junk. Poor little jerk. All the dough he had, he had some problems. Oh, well—as long as it comes out good for me, I should care."

  "Yes, I suppose he could have belonged to a Flagellation Cult. He tried just about everything else."

  "Is that what they call it?" She shrugged, her mountainous mammarics rolling. She leaned back, unhooking her bra and taking it off, making herself comfortable. The sea of flesh subsided about where her navel began. "There. That's better. Damn bras strangle me."

  So Mady Lopez had seen Tommy Spanner's grilled back too. That confirmed Monks' account of the statements of Christina Ralston and the three chorus girls. And the entire Police Lab. But Monks had said tattoos.

  "Why don't you take your shoes off, Eddie? And the jacket. Want me to do it? I like to undress a man . . . make him comfy . . . you look so dressed . . ."

  "I'll do it," I said. "Go and see how the coffee's coming. I'll make myself at home."

  She sprang with elephantine alacrity to do my bidding. I saw her disappear into the kitchen. She had told me all I needed to know. I knew what I had to do now, if I'd had any doubts at all. Tomorrow meant a trip to Hempstead, to the Faraway Hills of Rest. Tonight meant disposing of one gigantic girl who wanted to be one gigantic playmate.

  The telephone rang. I frowned at it before I scooped it to my ear. It was Melissa Mercer. She sounded relieved to hear my voice.

  "Stinker. Why didn't you call me?"

  "Sorry. I was busy. Anything come up?"

  "Are you alone, Ed? You sound—funny."

  "Yes, I'm
alone," I lied. "You checking up on me, Mel? Tsk, tsk. A fine thing when—"

  "Okay, okay," she said, a note of irritation in her voice. "Forget I asked. Look, I spent some time in the Public Library reading old newspaper files. Just in case the News didn't send over a full coverage. Tommy Spanner spent a full six months behind the Iron Curtain last year. And then the U.S. Embassy stepped in and asked him officially to come home. Seems he was chasing after a ballerina who was a notorious Lesbian. She had a circle of artistic homosexuals and friends that Spanner dug. Old Man Spanner put up a big beef, claiming the government was hounding his son. But back he came. Russia, get it? Also, it seems that the playboy millionaire spent all of '63 in a private mental hospital. No word on what he had but it could have been alcoholism—the acute kind. You sure you're not with somebody?"

  "I'm as alone as I'll ever be. Thanks for the extra homework. It ties in with something I'd been doing a lot of thinking about. You're a sweetheart—even if you did sound like a nagging girl-friend."

  There was a beat of time.

  "I am your girl-friend, Ed Noon," she said quietly. "You don't imagine I work for you because you pay the best salary in town?"

  "Love me?"

  "Deed I do, Massa Ed."

  "Then go back to bed. See you first thing in the morning. We'll take the day off, drive out to Hempstead and go to a funeral."

  "That is some offer. But I'll take it. You're so romantic."

  "Ain't it the truth, Beauty? Good night."

  "Good night, Ed," she said softly and hung up.

  It was something to think about. Spanner in Russia. Behind the Iron Curtain. A grilled back that looked like a map or a diagram. Government interest in this corpse. In an era of espionage where they are shelling the UN building and trying to steal a march in international chess, anything is possible—

  There was no noise from the kitchen. For a big girl, Mady Lopez had suddenly gotten as quiet as a cat. The quick image this gave me set the small hairs on the back of my neck straight up in alarm. I headed for the kitchen.