Violence in Velvet

by Michael Avallone

  Bar. It made Benny’s long brown study in brass rail look like a tabletop. Every drink that had ever been bottled gleamed at me from the rear of a chrome monster that looked like something out of a science-fiction mag. A ceiling-to-floor mirror threw back a Dali picture of a thousand bottles, the paintings, and the bookshelves. I have to admit it. I was slightly awed. Awed with Helen Tucker’s living room and just how lucrative it must be to be Guy Prentice’s agent.

  Hell, Tucker must be independently wealthy. She had to be. This sort of layout made Barbara Hutton and Gloria Vanderbilt seem like poor people.

  I was working on a double shot of Schenley’s sans chaser and leafing through Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment when she came back. But what a dull way to put it.

  She didn’t come back. She revisited the earth. She was an angel who had taken off her civilized dress, and the wings that had been restrained all day unfurled and flapped in the breeze. I blinked.

  “There,” she whispered. “That’s better. Now we can talk.”

  She floated across the room, swept past me and wafted to a resting position on a shorter, furrier lounge just a dream away.

  I blinked again.

  “Tucker,” I mocked unbelievingly. “You have just come out of your shell.”

  The shell had been tailored clothes and a smart hairdo and nail polish and clipped precision. And that had been pretty impressive. But what was beneath the shell was what guys like Keats and Shelley wrote about and roamed all of their lives looking for.

  Helen Tucker had put on something that was long and filmy and gave the illusion of never staying in the same places the longer you looked at it. Her hair now lay soft and loose around her head, the burned blondeness of her tresses throwing back all the tiny lights of the room and the whole wide world. Her eyes had softness in them now and if there is anything that will make a woman look like kiss-me-and-hold-me-and-squeeze-me, it’s soft, tender, shining eyes. The red glow of her lips shone like pennants saying that the war was over. Her war and mine.

  I stared down at the drink in my hand. The Ideas that had just flashed across my thinking range were beginning to scare me. It had to be the whiskey thinking.

  Intriguing bits of white kneecaps and bared areas of soft smooth shoulder structure didn’t help either.

  I looked her right in the eye. Something angry kicked in my chest.

  “Tucker, I’m too old for this one. And just bitchy enough to get sore about it.”

  She smiled. “The most refreshing thing about you, Ed Noon, is that I seldom know what you are talking about until you modify it.”

  “Fair enough. But if you’re dangling yourself in front of me in the hopes that I’ll make a rat of myself for a piece of cheese, I got news for you. I won’t make like a rat.”

  She answered me the best way possible. She ignored my ungentlemanly slur on her behavior.

  “Have you read Dostoyevsky, Mr. Noon?”

  I remembered the book in my other hand. I put it down on the bar.

  “I was curious, Miss Tucker. You see I number some actresses and actors among my acquaintances. They hole up in studio apartments and furnished rooms all over this blighted borough of Manhattan. They collect books. All of them. And every one of them has a copy of Crime and Punishment. There must be a joke in there somewhere. Because I always get a laugh out of it. Yeah, I read it. I guess they all did too. How about you?”

  “I’m not a poseur, if that’s what you mean.” She moved a bit angrily and a bit of white kneecap 3-D’d in my direction. I got back to my drink in a hurry.

  “What I mean, Miss Tucker, is that it suggests to me that you’d make a wonderful actress. Ever try the grease paint?”

  “Of course.” She relaxed. “Every young girl thinks she might be another Cornell or Hayes. I did. I took a drama course at Columbia and hit the trail and determined to make my mark. But all I was ever offered were tryouts on office couches and disgusting overtures. I couldn’t take that.” She shuddered. Either in memory or for my benefit. “Then I discovered I had a good business head on my girlish shoulders. Presto, chango. One agent. And it’s turned out to be the best of all possible worlds. I’ve lived all of my triumphs through Guy Prentice and his success.”

  “That’s one cure. Any regrets?”

  “None whatever.” Her eyes twinkled. “Besides I had a liquid L and a sibilant S that no amount of training could ever seem to eradicate.”

  Now I was sure it was the whiskey. “Come again?” I said.

  She laughed. It tinkled in the big room like bells on a Christmas tree.

  “Liquid L. You know—like ‘I’ll killlll you.’ And a sibilant S is the nearest thing to hissing there is. It’s a terrible thing in any performer’s voice.”

  “Yessss,” I hissed. “I sssee what you mean.”

  “Exactly.” She laughed again. “You are quick, Mr. Noon.”

  “Sometimes. But we’re taking the long road around. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Oh.” She colored suddenly. It vanished just as fast. But not fast enough for me not to see. “I just felt that we should come to an understanding, Mr. Noon.”

  “The first giant step in that direction would be calling me by my first name, Helen.”

  “All right. Ed, if you like. It’s just that now that you’re working for us—Guy, that is—we both have a common interest in him. Let’s cooperate and bury the past. You’re going to need help. Lucille is a strange child.”

  “That’s kind of non sequitur, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” she declared with some of her old fire. “Lucille is moody, ungovernable at times. And she has the wildest imagination. And she’s always running off. Why, you yourself should be convinced of that. Didn’t she go into a bar and bring you running because she thought her mother was in some kind of danger? Now, how could she suspect something like that?”

  “The kid might have seen or heard something.”

  “Possibly. But she’s always running off on her own. Her French teacher, Madame La Tour, is in tears half the time. There is never any telling what that child will do next.”

  I couldn’t argue with her there. I suddenly remembered all too clearly the incident of the jumping .45.

  “What have you got in mind, Helen?”

  “Well, just that since you’re going to watch her, be on your guard. Listen to everything she has to say. She’ll talk a lot of nonsense like children will, but she’ll also say a lot of things that might give you a hint about all this.”

  “I see what you mean. Where is she now? I’d better start earning my keep.”

  “There’s no hurry. She’s probably having her French lessons and Guy is home. He’ll stay with her until bedtime. And then he’ll leave for tonight’s performance. Time enough, then.”

  “I gotta admit Guy is a pleasant surprise to me. He’s tough. I thought he’d yell bloody murder with that leg of his and pretend large quantities of pain.”

  “Guy is wonderful,” she agreed. “But I must say I was ashamed of him this afternoon. The way he behaved toward that poor Breen—” She was looking right at me. And her eyes were soft, shiny and tender.

  I stared at her not knowing what the hell to think. I wasn’t in my kind of neighborhood. This wasn’t my kind of woman by social yardsticks. But by any rule of thumb, she was one gorgeous hunk of desirable female.

  I figured it was about time to ask for my hat. I did.

  She looked disappointed. “Going so soon?”

  “I’d like to stay all night, as long as you asked, but why kid ourselves?”

  She shifted on the couch.

  “Suppose I wanted you to stay?”

  “I’d say you were just slumming. Wanting to see how the other half lives. Well, I’ll tell you. The other half lives rough. They have to. They’re grateful for small favors and they don’t look gift horses in the eye. And right now you look like one beautiful gift horse. From the Greeks of course. Helen of Troy. I didn’t even
have to reach for that one.”

  She rose from the couch and came over to me. I stayed where I was. Only a moron or a complete idiot would have insisted on his hat right then. She looked down at me from what seemed like Mount Olympus and her breasts were round and full enough to stand the comparison. She was soft all right. Really soft. Her arms strayed to my coat lapels, held them for a second, then slid past them around my shoulders. Her hands locked behind my neck. Our heads were just breathing distance apart.

  “Ed, there’s something awfully chemical about you. I get vibrations.”

  “I get them too.” Bad leg, whiskey and all, a drum was starting to kick my brains apart.

  Her mouth came closer. Her lips parted. “I should feel bad about this. I loved another man. But I don’t anymore. Right now, I feel something for you—” The motor in her voice fell away to a whisper.

  “Don’t mess with me, Tucker. I can be unforgettable.” My own pipes fell away to a stage whisper.

  Her eyes registered surprise so that her head snapped back a bit. Then her red lips arched and a low musical laugh washed down over my face.

  “You know something? I really believe you can—”

  There wasn’t time for any more. Her lips came down and caught me across the mouth. Flush. A wonderful flush. She fastened to me until something inside of me dissolved and the mutual mucilage of passion locked our faces together for those timeless raptures of a kiss that is really shared.

  My cracked lips were feeling no pain. Her mouth felt like all the balm in all the medicine cabinets in the world.

  My hand relaxed so that the only noise in the room was the sound of the umbrella cane falling to the tiled floor and rolling onto one of the knee-deep rugs. That and our breathing.

  I buried myself in yards of the filmy thing she had wrapped around herself. A melody pounded in my brain and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

  I didn’t want to either.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It seemed like years later that I caught my breath. I stared at her curved, lovely back as she mixed some drinks at the bar. The shiny chrome set a million stars twinkling in her hair and the long filmy creation she was wearing didn’t seem like anything that human hands had designed. The power of love? It’s some stuff I can tell you.

  I was that dizzy. It couldn’t be. The high priestess had tossed aside her sacrificial knife and taken me in her arms. Maybe I’d been living alone too long. I tried to fight back.

  “Talk about your about-faces,” I whispered hoarsely. “What gives, Tucker?”

  She glided back to me with the drinks, gave me one. I took it because I really needed it. My insides were soaring.

  “Don’t spoil it, Ed. Don’t talk. Don’t make jokes. Don’t preach. Just tell me you like me.”

  “Do you want an affidavit?”

  “Just say it. Say it once.”

  “I like you.”

  She sat down next to me again. Her arms looped my neck, our lips brushed. The vibrations started all over again.

  I pushed away. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do right then. But I pushed away.

  “Tucker, this is crazy.”

  “It is?” Her eyes gleamed with such naked sensuality I wondered where I’d ever gotten the idea she was a cold fish. I guess all it takes is the right kind of fisherman.

  “You’re supposed to hate me, remember?”

  “I did. But I don’t any more. And now you like me too. Don’t you, Ed?”

  Damn it, I did like her. She made me feel warm and wanted. And I was a bum with a dirty collar and a bad leg. I laughed between my teeth.

  “If all of this is for me, then it’s wonderful. If it’s all for you and that scheming feminine brain of yours, then let’s just both go along with the gag and skip the love talk. I’ve been through this mill before and I don’t want to try for the brass ring that isn’t there.”

  We hadn’t touched our drinks. You don’t need firewater when you feel like that.

  She looked at me out of her blue eyes and they were round and full and wonderful. Her lovely mouth broke into a smile and the adorable pinch of her nostrils rammed some more memories into my soul.

  “Ed, Ed—”

  “You want to tie in with me, Helen? I—”

  “Ed, Ed. You’re such a contradiction. All that glib talk and being a detective. Why, you’re just a sweet guy—”

  That did it. You pound along wisecracking like sixty, taking care of yourself and kidding yourself that you don’t need any dame to bill and coo in your ear and then bingo! Someone like her comes along and says the corny things and you’re as hungry for affection as a homeless kitten.

  I shut her up good. I sealed off her breathing, and let my lips do the rest of my thinking for me. Hers drove me crazy. My brain was all loused up with violins and piano crescendos when the phone rang.

  There are times when I absolutely hate telephones. This was one of those times. I let her slip out of my arms, watched her float over to the black beetle that nestled on a stand near the arched entrance. I listened to her answer the phone convinced she sounded like music.

  She did. But something happened to the music in her throat. It left an allegro and came crashing down on a discord. I heard her blurt something incoherent and then dazedly drop the receiver back on its black bed.

  I was on the alert instantly, reaching for the discarded umbrella cane and hobbling erect.

  “Easy, Tucker. What’s wrong?”

  She turned to stare at me. Her lovely kisser was frozen with fright. Her eyes were two numbed fires.

  “That was the Madame—it’s Lucille—she’s run away!”

  Alarm left me. I tried a grin.

  “Simmer down. The kid’s taken off before. She can’t get too far—”

  “You don’t understand, Ed!” Suddenly, she was screaming at me. “She left a note behind. Admitting everything! Saying she killed her mother!”

  That was different. Really different. Something in me went cold all over.

  “Get dressed, Tucker. We’re going places.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  It took us all of ten minutes to get out of the building. Helen Tucker changed into a black ensemble with a lot of red trimming advantageously placed that made her look like something out of a French fashion shop.

  On the way down in the elevator, she filled in some of the details. Madame La Tour had come as usual for Lucille’s French lesson and found the child in the middle of what seemed like a lot of monkeyshines to the good old Madame. Lucille had been writing a letter. Guy Prentice had gone downtown to have some professional photos made. Well, they’d had the lesson and Lucille had been in disastrous form. So much so that the good Madame was beside herself. Lucille had been so promising for a great while. Well, Madame had stormed around and Lucille had excused herself for a glass of water. It was a very long drink or so it must have seemed to the Madame. When she had worn her voice hoarse calling for the child, she had suddenly decided to look around.

  Pinned to the outside door was a note scribbled in Lucille Prentice’s tiny scrawl. A farewell note saying she was running away because she was afraid of what the big, bad policemen would do to her for shooting Mommy whom she had never liked.

  Helen Tucker had managed to get that much out of the thoroughly whipped Madame whom she had instructed to call the police and stand by. And now we were on the way.

  When we had cleared the building’s canopied entrance and were waiting for her car to be driven up, I took her by the elbows and turned her around to where I could look into her worried blue eyes. Her lower lip was trembling and small tears were trying to force their way out of the corners of her eyes.

  “Easy, Tucker.” I smiled to make her feel better. “Kids get hysterical. They get hysterical and they run away and write crazy letters.”

  “Ed—” Her voice faltered. “Suppose it’s true? God, how awful for Guy—”

  “How awful for all of us,” I said less warmly. I had just rem
embered Guy Prentice and how I’d been holding hands with his lady.

  I groped for a cigarette, hoping her car would show up and kill off the tiny hornets that were buzzing in my noodle. The world had suddenly become full of trouble. I shifted on my bad leg impatiently. And then the robin’s egg blue sedan came nosing along the avenue and slithered up before us with a gentle hiss of tires.

  I let her get in first since she was driving, expecting the garage man who had delivered it to come out on the street side of the machine. But nothing happened.

  I bent lower on the cane and peered at the driver’s seat. The world had become full of trouble all right. Trouble and grief.

  Something in black, about .38 in calibre, leveled up at my heart, and the heavy thumb that backed it up cocked it with ease and for effect.

  “Climb in, cowboy,” a man’s voice said. “In the back. And don’t be a hero.”

  I had a quick view of Helen Tucker, sitting petrified with fright, next to a slope-shouldered hulk of manhood crouched over the steering wheel. I tried to place the face. It was smooth and pleasant enough, but its expression was uglier than all the Christine jokes in the world.

  His companion and crony in the rear of the car was much smaller and much thinner. But as he made room for me, I could see they had a helluva lot in common. He had a .38 too and his smile was no prettier. He reached over inside my coat and took the gun I always carried.

  “Don’t I know you from someplace? Third floor, maybe? You specialize in bum’s rushes with chloroform as an extra added attraction,” I said.

  They laughed in harmony, and the motor raced as Helen Tucker’s sedan shot away from the curb.

  TWENTY-THREE

  My racket sure is a funny one. I get to go on more automobile rides without being asked than any five guys I can think of.

  I took a good look at my two philanthropic friends, the driver and his .38 calibre crony. They looked like they’d been taking people for a ride for the last ten years.