Violence in Velvet

by Michael Avallone

  I matched looks with the cop. I could see he wasn’t going to bluff easy. But I also knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  “Show me some identification, mister. And a ticket for this show. Otherwise, move along. You’re loitering.”

  I grinned and fished for the necessary items. “The name is Noon. And I could give you a lot of arguments about this procedure, but why bother? I’ve got all the toppers. Here.”

  He fumbled through them quickly, grunted with disappointment and frowned when he saw my PI card and gun permit. I wondered if he knew about my connection with the Prentice kill. He handed the cards back to me and grunted again.

  He shrugged at Helen Tucker.

  “I can’t run him off, Miss Tucker. Unless you come down to the station with me and file a complaint that he’s been molesting you. Or the child.”

  “Oh, no!!” Lucille wailed. “Then we’d miss the show. I wanta see my Daddy again. Helen—” She tugged at Miss Tucker’s lovely raincoat. “Please let Mister Noon go. Don’t have him arrested.”

  “Yes, Miss Tucker,” I pleaded. “Please don’t have me arrested.”

  The cop growled. “Never mind the comedy, fellah.”

  Helen Tucker glared at me.

  “What do you want—money?”

  “Sure. Sixty million dollars. You got sixty million dollars?”

  The cop decided to get officious. But something in his long experience had tipped him off that it was just one of those things. A lover’s spat or some folderol like that. The kid being there took all the menace out of it for him. And one thing about cops is they hate to mess in family squabbles. You can’t be a hero in those circumstances.

  “Well, excuse me, Miss Tucker. I see the Sergeant signaling me. And you—” he flung me a loaded wink. “Behave yourself. And stop annoying these ladies. Or I’ll find a reason to run you in. I’ll be here all night.”

  He chucked Lucille under the chin and moved off. Helen Tucker stamped a high heel in exasperation.

  “Of all the stupid, silly—”

  “Don’t say it,” I cautioned. “There are children present. And I never could stand foul talk. Especially from a real lady like yourself.”

  She bit her beautiful mouth and took Lucille’s hand in hers.

  “Come on, honey. We’ll go inside and leave this clever man to himself.”

  She looked terrific when she was mad. The marble smoothness of her face was warm with anger, and the burnt blondness of her hair shone with raindrops. Her slender elegance was agitated so that her movements were swift and interesting. The right things on her body moved the right way.

  She had one last warning for me.

  She turned to me, Lucille on the other side of her, and whispered fiercely, “Why must you hound us? Haven’t we all been through enough? I warn you. If you do one thing to harm Guy—”

  I tried not to laugh in her face. “What do you think came first, Tucker? The paper clip or the slide trombone?”

  “——I’ll kill you!” The words darted out of her mouth, inches from my ear.

  That wasn’t funny. That took all the comedy out of everything. Something in her face told me not to laugh at the corn and the melodrama of the situation. I remembered her nickel-plated .22 and I didn’t laugh. But it was also the kind of talk a guy like me can understand. I felt the friendly grin on my face freeze, could almost feel the frost and snow that must have settled in on my eyeballs.

  “I can’t help myself, Tucker,” I mocked her. “I’m a member of the club now. Your club. Everybody’s in love with you. Guy Prentice, me, and——Wally Wilder.”

  The naked hate that was in her face tried to do something about coming to life, tried to galvanize into action. But before it could, Lucille’s little hand, a little hand that was bored with the prattle of grownups, had tugged expectantly and then forcefully, and Helen Tucker was dragged through the glass door into the lobby out of sight. I had a flying view of her slender magnificence in clothes before she left the corner of my eye.

  I had drawn another conclusion about Miss Tucker. She had a fanny like a proud horse.

  I smoked a couple of more cigarettes, checked my watch again and rubbed some of the weariness out of my eyes. I swept the dampness out of my fedora and walked into the plush modernity of Broadway’s fanciest showplace.

  A trim usherette checked my green ticket politely and ushered me down a country-road length of center aisle and pointed out my seat to me. I took a program from her, matched her cute smile and edged past four sets of knees to my seat. The houselights were just darkening and the dress-coated mob in the orchestra pit was just wading into the overture when a tiny voice piped out:

  “Look, Helen, it’s Mister Noon!”

  It was a wonderful seat. Nearly dead center on the curve of the apron of the stage. I was targeted in exactly above the cue-ball brilliance of the maestro’s head in the pit.

  And sitting right next to me was Lucille Prentice in a candy-striped red dress. And sitting next to her, in a lovely pea-green, bared-shoulder creation was Helen Tucker.

  The Kick and Sing overture was rousing, seat-of-the-pants music, but all I’ll ever remember about the curtain ringing up was the “really!” that exploded out of the smooth Helen Tucker.

  It wasn’t an overture. It was an outburst.

  I settled back to enjoy the show.

  But I couldn’t shake off the thousand bated breaths that surrounded me. The expectant hush of the audience that had come to watch the performance of a musical which just happened to have in its starring role the very famous actor whose wife had been brutally murdered earlier in the afternoon.

  EIGHT

  Kick and Sing was just that. Plenty of bare-leg dancing and a melodious medley of juke box hit music. The book for the show wasn’t half bad either. It was the old nut about the top-notch straight dramatic actor who was pining away for a musical comedy. His agent, his wife and everybody was dead set against it, but the Hamlet wanted to throw an omelet just once. And the way he gets around to it was tunefully set down in a very sophisticated, what the critics were calling, urbanely witty show.

  I forgot about the deep freeze that was planted two seats away from me in the person of Helen Tucker, ignored Lucille’s girlish gurgles when Guy Prentice made his first bow and really enjoyed the show. Calling a spade a spade, I practically forgot the real purpose of seeing the show in the first place. A good show can do that.

  This was a good show. I’d weathered Call Me Mister, Annie Get Your Gun, and Guys and Dolls, which are all pretty fair country musicals, but Kick and Sing was making a helluva dent in their reputations.

  The real surprise was Guy Prentice himself. The guy was really good. Aside from being able to belt a ballad into the next county, he had genuine comic timing. The book of the show gave him ample occasion to kid the pants off himself and coupled with his classic Greek look and sure aristocracy, he had a field day. I couldn’t help liking him for it even though he was probably well paid for it. Money isn’t everything, all the rumors notwithstanding, and you have to doff your chapeau to a guy who can kid himself in front of an audience. He did everything but take a custard pie in the kisser. And the audience ate it up. Especially the dames.

  The two sitting next to me sat nearly spellbound. On my right, an ancient debutante, smothered in pearls, was simply ecstatic about Mr. Prentice. I heard her tell her escort that about a dozen times.

  Lucille leaned over to whisper hoarsely, “Isn’t Daddy just swell, Mister Noon?”

  “Sure is, honey. He sure is.”

  A beautiful head bobbed past her tiny one with a pair of blazing eyeballs lighting up the semidarkness.

  “Stop talking to the child!”

  “Tucker,” I grinned. “You’re intruding on a private conversation. If you don’t mind.”

  Lucille giggled in spite of herself.

  There wasn’t time for any more badinage. A short curtain break had ended, and there was the stage all dandied up and brilli
antly fluoresced to represent a bedroom. A woman’s bedroom.

  What a bedroom. The stage designer had taken Dali and scrambled him with a million dollars, and the result had come out the richest and wackiest-looking bedroom in the history of housing. The stage lighting was sheer magic. The room looked five miles wide and that deep.

  A low, lazy throb from the orchestra pit walked arm in arm with a long, lovely thing that sashayed sensuously out from stage right. Milady, or more appropriately, the Mistress, had just emerged from her bath.

  There was a muted hush in the audience. I’d heard just enough about the show to know that this must be the Mistress Song number. The one that had been the show-stopper since opening night.

  I knew why in just about five seconds. What the lovely thing on the stage was doing and implying with slow, silken movements as the orchestra led up to her opening bars was the closest thing to Minsky’s you’d ever want to see in restriction-choked Manhattan.

  But this was Broadway and smart sophistication. It was all a very clever joke, real artistry. Subtlety. Oh, yeah. The only real difference for my dough was that this was Fifty-third Street and not Union City.

  The dame on the stage was something that stepped out of a fantasy though. Or the painting of an overly imaginative artist. No dame alive could really be that round, that firm, that fully packed. To borrow from the ad men.

  She was all long white arms and long white legs with just enough of navel showing to hammer your pulse like a Chinese gong. She sat down in front of one of those five-sided trick mirrors, turned slowly, long black tresses dangling voluptuously, opened the reddest mouth this side of sealing wax and started to sing.

  Ouch. It brought the house down. So suddenly and so hard that the lovely on the stage smiled and waited, and the orchestra halted and waited, and the laughter and the whistling rolled around and around.

  Sure, it was an old joke. An old dirty joke. But the difference was it was being sung in public in a high-class show in front of a high-class crowd.

  I looked at Lucille. But her tiny face was round and innocent. She was smiling the way a child will when she sees grownups laughing. Not knowing why. Just doing it because everybody’s doing it. Well, I was fresh out of cotton and a blindfold was old-fashioned and she wasn’t my kid anyway, but I caught myself glaring at Helen Tucker. I’m no bluenose but kids get their crack at everything sooner or later, and at this point in her life Lucille would be much better off at home curled up with some good old American history.

  The laughter had fallen off enough for Miss Mistress to go into her next eight bars. They were just as packed as the first set. And she accompanied each choice bit of lyrics with convolutions that would have seemed more normal in a boa constrictor. The audience screamed and stamped for more.

  And they got it too. From hip wriggling to more loaded lyrics and back to hip wriggling again.

  I timed her act because habit is a hard thing to break. Like a cop going for his gun when he hears a strange sound in the middle of the night even after he’s been on pension for five years.

  Counting everything, from Guy Prentice’s last appearance onstage up to the end of the first act which was Miss Mistress lying back to wait for her keeper who was Mr. Prentice, with three encores and all the interruptions of applause, the time was a good fifteen minutes. And before the next curtain rang up would be another ten at least. And maybe Prentice wouldn’t be on stage right away unless the plot demanded it.

  I looked away from my watch, the old tiny hunches and vibrations shooting up and down the million channels in my suspicious brain.

  Columbus Circle was just six blocks away. Six little blocks. And a fast-moving murderer using a dead-set timetable could skip over to the Prentice home and .45 Paula Prentice right out of this world and come right back again without ever being missed.

  A fast-moving murderer named Guy Prentice who had an iron-clad alibi. Up until a slinky dame in next to nothing on a cleverly lighted stage had put it out of business.

  The curtains closed on a thundering ovation and the house-lights went up. I uncrossed my legs and stretched. Lucille was yammering excitedly and Helen Tucker was moving her rapidly down the aisle away from bad, nasty me. The man with the lousy manners.

  I followed. Everyone was heading for the lobby and an intermission stretch and smoke. I kept an eye peeled for Hadley or any of the Homicide bunch. They were sure to be on deck.

  I wondered if any of them had caught the time grace that Guy Prentice would have had to commit a murder.

  NINE

  The Homicide Department was well represented. I was halfway through a Camel, idly counting the noses all round me and wondering when Helen Tucker and Lucille were going to come back from the Little Girls’ Room, when somebody asked me for a match. I turned to see Sanderson looking at me with badly concealed dislike. He didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth either. And he wasn’t the pipe type.

  “I thought the Lieutenant run you off this thing, Noon,” he rumbled.

  I lit a match anyway and held it up to his nose. Too close. He moved back a step angrily.

  “Sanderson,” I chided. “James T. to be specific. Hadley ran me off all right. But there’s nothing in the book that says that private detectives can’t see Broadway musicals once in a while.”

  “Not this show,” he scowled. “Still the cute one, eh? Well, I’m spelling the Lieutenant tonight. So behave. One false move—”

  “Oh, beans,” I sighed. “I’ll stay out of your way. I promise. So help me. Why don’t you go follow the suspects? I’d love to see you barge into the Powder Room.”

  The last time I had seen Sanderson, James T., was when we’d had a little shooting party in my office in the Wexler case. Through no fault of my own, I’d saved the big mule’s life. And like some guys are about things like that, he’d always resented it. You figure it out.

  His big face mottled slightly.

  “I know where they are. I don’t need any help from you.”

  “James T.,” I mocked. “Don’t you ever speak in anything but clichés? Say something human once in a while. You might ask me how I feel or if I have enough to eat these days. Or something real clever like ‘How’s tricks?’”

  He shook his head, his big shoulders heaving slightly.

  “Forget it,” he said. “The brass respects you. I gotta put up with you. That’s the way it is.” He decided to get clever. “What do you think of the show?”

  “Damn good, James T. What do you think of the show?”

  “I gotta notion. Watching it.” He looked around, an intelligent glint in his normally dull eyes. He must have been a lousy poker player. “This first act thing. Prentice’d have enough time to bump off his wife. Plenty if you ask me. Hadley has him on call for an A.M. interview at Headquarters. I wanna see his face when we spring it on him.”

  I got polite now. You learn a lot of things just by being polite.

  “Good boy. The .45. Anything come through on that?”

  His smile was official. “His gun. Picked up on his overseas tours.”

  We didn’t have time for anymore. A bell sounded and there was a mass putting out of cigarettes and a general scuttling to get back in time for the next curtain.

  I left Sanderson and went down the aisle back to my seat. I was a bit surprised to find Helen Tucker and Lucille already back in position. Lucille was toothily finishing off a chocolate bar and her tall guardian was staring stonily toward the stage. I shrugged and sat down.

  I looked around for Sanderson, James T. He wasn’t hard to find. His broad bulk was solidly planted in the first balcony on the right. A flashy blonde in a loud mink stole was hanging on his arm. Probably a policewoman or one of the Headquarters matrons. The disguise was perfect—for anyone but a guy in my racket. Police work does have its compensations. The blonde looked pretty nice.

  I watched Helen Tucker’s profile. It was a good one. The nose barely missed being straight, the lips were lush and the chin had firmness an
d character. Her forehead really gave her some class though. It was high, level and nice. That was a new one. Who was ever impressed by a dame’s forehead?

  The Kick and Sing orchestra boomed into life for the second act. And then the vibrations came at me full tilt. I’m an old dog when it comes to things like that.

  Something wasn’t right. Something was going to happen. I sensed it, smelled it, felt it. The air wasn’t quite right. Little bells of alarm were tingling all over me.

  Something was about to pop. As sure as God made little fishes.

  TEN

  Hit songs came and went, Guy Prentice had a rousing solo all by himself that was worth three encores and the audience intermissioned once again, still buzzing about what seemed to be the best musical since Show Boat. And the best murder. Rumors were skyrocketing.

  I was getting jumpy in my old age. Thinking about things happening and trouble brewing. I felt a little silly. But it might have been the kid that worried me. I’m a sucker when it comes to the small fry. So I kept a good eye on Lucille.

  The little sweetheart was having a ball. She was as proud as a kid can be about her old man. Helen Tucker let me watch her in the lobby because she had to check the plumbing in the Ladies’ Room or something. Not that Miss Tucker had changed her mind about Ed Noon. But she had breeding and some people she knew came over to chat and she didn’t want to make a scene.

  Lucille grinned when we were left alone.

  “I don’t think Miss Tucker likes you very much, Mister Noon.”

  I pretended to be hurt.

  “How can you tell, Lucille?”

  Lucille considered for just a second. “Well, she’s always biting her lips when you’re around. Like this.” She showed me by putting her top row of teeth right into her underlip. “I’ve only seen her do that when she was mad at something. Or about something. Don’t you think Miss Tucker doesn’t like you?”