Little Miss Murder

by Michael Avallone

  The old crone swung an enormous clutch bag at me as I avoided her. I could feel it cutting the empty air behind my back as I stumbled toward home plate. Now the nightmare had really encompassed all. I was plunging toward Limbo, darkest hell, and the crazily convoluted starkness of Insanity. It was like an infinity of mirrors.

  There were no ballplayers, no Mets to greet me. Not a single uniform did I see. No. At the final base, a small gathering of odd people waited to shake my hand. Behind them, the vast grandstand's field boxes, and mezzanine, filled to overflowing, were now curiously vacant. Not a soul in sight. No ball park could have emptied so fast. Heart-stopping vacancy filled my eyes. Fifty-five-thousand fans had dematerialized.

  I staggered toward home, feet dragging, arms pushed out. The people at home plate loomed larger in my eyes. Bobbing up like balloons.

  There was Melissa Mercer, vibrant dark face alive with fear. Her eyes seemed to be popping. There was the President of the United States, smiling and waving something from one hand that looked like an airline ticket. Behind his back, I saw a tall, lovely dark-haired girl trying to get past him. She was crying, her hair in disarray, her mouth making silent pleas. It was Felicia Carr, and I was surprised to see her. Two men had hold of both her arms. One was affable Seymour Joy, the phony maitre d' of the Diamond Club. The other was the Edgar Allan Poe waiter. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what they were all doing at home plate. Or why they had come to Shea Stadium at all.

  And then, even as my heavy spikes lumbered me toward them, I saw Dmitri and Aloyesha. They were standing to either side of the small crowd of welcomers. Like identical bookends, stonily impassive, waiting and ready for me. I saw their arms come up. Saw the silencer-pistols aimed at me. Nobody seemed to notice or mind that they were about to kill me. I tried to scream, tried to stop running. Neither of those acts did I accomplish. I was floating airlessly now, traveling in a fatal, slow-motion waltz that would inevitably keep me from running clear of them. Their evil faces grew bloated and loathsome, magically.

  They both fired together.

  A great mushroom of smoke enveloped their bodies, blotting out all the people waiting at home plate. In an instant, a gigantic atomic blackout hid the scene from my eyes. The rising, thickening wall of smoke and anger rushed toward me. There was no escape. No exit.

  I went down, sucked up by billowing clouds of thick, awful-smelling cordite and gunpowder. My ears thundered with waterfalls of noise and agony. I couldn't scream or cry out. My lungs filled with smoke. I was choking. My stomach churned, I felt nauseated. I gagged.

  Choking, regurgitating——

  Shea Stadium vanished, too.

  And then, as it must to all dreamers, if they are still alive to remember it, I woke up.

  There was a telephone ringing somewhere in Number Nine Sniffin Court. I lurched toward it in the darkness, unable to think, not quite capable of figuring out anything. I found the phone, feeling a surging tide of foolishness and stupidity engulfing me. My reflexes were still working. All I could think of was I had to answer the ringing phone. Part of me was dimly aware of the two, silent, sprawled male bodies strewn over the rug and the pounding silence of the room that was as palpable as a noisy house party. The phone kept on tingling until I found it on an end table close to a bookcase. Number Nine was like a morgue, once more, as I jiggled the receiver to my ear. Beyond the ten toes pointing upward, I also knew that Louise Warrington Paul had done a disappearing act, tweed clothes, Robin Hood hat, baseball and destructive clutch bag, and all. The only other coherent thought I had was wonder that I wasn't dead. The top of my head felt sticky with blood and alien with light-headedness. I felt like the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

  A man's cool, crisp voice said: "This is the Age of Aquarius. Did you know that?" The nonsensical opening was like gobbledygook.

  I tried to think. My brain was unfogging too slowly.

  "Uh?" I grunted.

  There was a pause. The cool voice repeated itself. "This is the Age of Aquarius. Did you know that?"

  I didn't know anything. It sounded like a code question that only the proper party could counter-answer with a prescribed reply. Or else it was just another goofy telephonic come-on for those quack outfits and companies that call you in the middle of the night to sell you something. Given the set of circumstances I was involved in, I bet my money on spy-shenanigans. Which left me up a tree, anyway.

  "This is the Year of the New York Mets," I said flatly. "Did you know that?"

  The man on the other end of the wire cursed and hung up. The click of the phone was like a pistol shot. It hurt my ear. I placed the receiver back on its base—the phone was an old French model—and tried to think some more. I couldn't come up with anything other than the possible fact that the employer or employers of Dmitri and Aloyesha were calling up to see what was keeping them.

  Which reminded me. Death was keeping them. Death dealt out by a double-crossing old woman with a clutch bag from hell. I shook my head and stumbled around the apartment until I found the bathroom. It was a tiny, tiled place just off the kitchenette. There was a pull-cord light just over the porcelain sink. I tugged it on and checked myself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet over the sink. I jumped.

  Louise Warrington Paul was either the world's greatest marksman—or markswoman—or I was the luckiest special agent alive. I part my thinning brown hair on the left side and that was exactly where the slug from her tricky handbag had creased my head. A long, superficial wound lay open on my scalp, sticky with dried blood, but nothing serious. The slug had merely knocked me out in its explosive passage across the crown of my skull. I stared at the wound, thought some more about an old woman who had expertly executed a couple of enemy agents and casually left me for the police and all the trouble that was sure to follow in the wake of two fresh corpses. I also thought about what Dmitri and Aloyesha had tried to tell me before Dame Paul went into her act. Was it all a lie? Had the old fox who looked like a prune sold me a boatload of fish as to the true contents of the mysterious autographed baseball? I just didn't know and looking at myself in the bathroom mirror of Number Nine Sniffin Court wasn't going to give me any fast or sensible answers. So I limped back into the living room to examine the bodies of the two twin agents. They hadn't moved at all, naturally.

  Looking at the old woman's marksmanship only justified the suspicions fermenting in my brain.

  Her first shot had splattered Dmitri's cold features somewhere between his nose and left cheek. Aloyesha had caught the second bullet directly in the heart. His chest front was a study in brownish red. I ignored the awesome wounds and examined their clothing. I came up empty. They carried neither wallets nor scraps of any kind. Each had a banded roll of bills in their coat pockets and some loose change. Which marked them for the pros they were. Pro assassins never carry identification of any kind, it has been my experience. But their clothes and weapons were something else again. Though they were carrying no keys of any kind or even so much as a ticket stub for a Broadway play, their silent bodies did provide a fount of information. Both their suits had the labels of a London tailor named Albertson, Ltd. The long-nosed pistols with the attached silencers were of foreign make, too. Thirty-two caliber Berettas of a model that had been custom-made. The barrels were at least two inches longer than the sort usually found on standard Berettas.

  Next, I unloosened their ties and probed under their shirts. I got a mild surprise. Dmitri had a Catholic crucifix on a silver-beaded chain looped about his neck. Aloyesha was wearing the new Hippie thing, the old Greek ankh, or Egyptian-type cross, favored by the long-haired love children of the world. The one that looks like the letter T with a looped oval for the top of the cross-bar. As little as I like examining corpses, I removed their shoes and socks and generally gave them both a hasty post mortem. There were no other identifying marks on their bodies. No tattoos or code numbers or anything like that. Dmitri had a very bad appendix scar on his right side. Aloyesha was as unma
rked as a new-born babe.

  No keys of any kind meant no car, which meant they had arrived by taxicab at Sniflfin Court or been dropped off by accomplices. Or had been within walking distance, which also was not likely.

  Smoking a Camel, which helps me think, I went down to the front door again. It was locked. I checked the walls along the foyer and felt justified. Several very loud gunshots had rocked Number Nine about 45 minutes ago—according to the watch on my wrist—and nobody had come running to investigate. Nor had the Law come pounding around to see what the disturbance was about. As I figured, judging by the heavy insulation of the walls of Number Nine, the spy-meeting place was soundproofed. A perfect spot to kill people in, it seemed.

  I had long lost any notion of racing down to Penn Station to catch Louise Warrington Paul making her baseball drop in a designated locker box. For one thing, she would have accomplished that singular act a half hour ago because Number Nine was a stone's throw away in terms of easy accessibility. For another and more important reason, thanks to the nagging suspicion the Brothers Karamazov had set up in my mind, the whole story could have been just that. I really didn't know what to do next. The President was unavailable—thanks to his Teheran flight, Melissa Mercer would be home by now, Felicia Carr was still among the missing, and I was stuck with two unwanted corpses. If I called Headquarters and Captain Michael Monks of the Homicide Department, all I'd be left with was the answering of a dozen questions I couldn't answer.

  My head still ached. I couldn't think or reason.

  So I went into the kitchenette, looking for the bottle of port, and/or some instant coffee to whip up. I needed time to think. To come up with a sensible plan. And soon. If the mysterious phone caller had been the boss of the murdered brothers, the chances were more than good that Number Nine Spiffin Court would resemble Grand Central Station in no time at all. Spurred on by that notion, I put some water on to boil, because there was a bottle of Maxwell House on a shelf in the pantry and because I couldn't find Dame Paul's port bottle, wherever it was. Another of her aggravating deceptions.

  I walked the cup of coffee back into the living room, took a deep wing chair facing the flight of stairs and the front door, and sat down. I didn't move the corpses of Dmitri and Aloyesha. They were lousy company, any way you looked at it. Real stiffs.

  The rooms were all quiet, and the dim illumination from the tall Tiffany lamps was kind of lulling. What with the bad bruise on my skull and my general lassitude, it would have been easy to fall asleep. The only thing that prevented that from happening was the sudden ringing of the front doorbell. It set off a series of chimes that sounded more like a cuckoo clock than anything melodic. I bounded from the chair, almost spilling the coffee, and tensed. The chimes kept up, and I set the cup down, unearthed my .45, and slid down the steps into the foyer. I went to the door. There was a Judas window just about at chin level. I eased up to it, flattening to one side. I didn't open the peep slot.

  "Who's there?" I asked in a low voice.

  For a second, there was no answer.

  Then just as I was ready to ask the million-dollar question again, I heard her voice. The one I never can forget. Whether it talked to me in a bedroom or in broad daylight at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, it set off cannon fire and skyrocketing flares in my heart and soul. There are special women with such voices.

  "Ed—thank God! Open up—it's me—Felicia—"

  I nearly sprained my wrist getting the door lock solved, and before another painful second passed, she came flying through the front door, melting in my arms. The sight, the sound, the smell of her was like it always was. What it had been from the start.

  Instant Love.

  "Geezis," I mumbled, lost in the shining forest of the dark-haired head pillowed on my shoulder, ludicrously unaware of the stiff, plaster-cast splint that made her left arm a grotesquerie not easy to understand on such short notice, "I thought I told you to wait in the car—"

  "Ed, Ed——" she whispered fiercely, her mouth coming up to meet mine. "You crazy bastard—"

  I kicked the door shut, kissed her hard, forgetting all about the corpses behind us and the possible corpses in front of us. I didn't even stop to ask her why her left arm was in a cast. When your lover comes back, what's to ask?

  My nightmare, the loaded baseball, sudden death, and Louise Warrington Paul's mysterious disappearance all flew out of my head.

  Funny how a tall, cool dame with long, lithe legs, an incredible face, and a poignant voice can make the hardboiled breed into so many two-minute eggs.

  Bogart knew what he was talking about in Casablanca when he asked Dooley Wilson to play it again, Sam. The quote was never very accurate, but the lyrics of "As Time Goes By" say it all.

  The fundamental things do apply, as time goes by.

  As crime goes by, too.

  7

  Murderers' Row

  We fell in love all over again in the bedroom. There was a bedroom at Number Nine Sniffln Court. A big, wide, curtained-off affair with a Queen Anne bed for lovers. I'm a real square. Making love on a Queen Anne is like making love on a turntable. But we managed beautifully. In the midst of all that madness and sudden death.

  I hadn't seen her in six months. It had been that long ago that we both helped save the world for Democracy by finding the missing Black Bag man who follows the President around in case of hot-line War Three. The thermonuclear one that's going to wipe us all out. Felicia Carr was Naval Intelligence and she had to be good at her job, because she never had time to stop to pick up the daisies with me.

  Her legs were as long and smooth as I remembered them, and even though her left arm was a useless implement, swathed in plaster and yards of bandage, nothing stopped us. She whimpered about the crease in my scalp, and I was careful about her arm, but we went a little crazy at that. Sex, when you're in love, isn't just a plunge between a woman's thighs. It's headlong, ultimate victory and surrender, and about as collectivistic as you can get. It wasn't what Karl Marx meant, though.

  That's the way it always was with Noon and Carr. We had been too-long away from each other. Meeting like this had to begin the way it had ended last time. With love, love, love.

  So with a million questions roiling around in my brain, with the enigmas of Blassingame, Shea Stadium, the Diamond Club, the baseball, Dame Paul and Dmitri and Aloyesha and ABM bushwah tormenting me at every turn, we took time out to get reacquainted. Dead men in the living room, broken arms, creased scalps, and the imminent possibility of a visit from the mysterious male caller on the phone didn't stop me for a second. I had to have her. Love is as totalitarian as that, too.

  I had her.

  With sugar and spice and everything nice and everything that big, lovely girls are made of. Her own yearning and hunger for me made it a rare, beautiful thing. When we reached the crest of the waves together, she subsided against the pillows, staring up at me with those damn unforgettable lights in her eyes. She blew out her soft, sweet breath and brushed a random lock of hair away from her forehead with her good hand. She felt marvelous beneath me. She had one of those bodies that was cut to my specifications, whatever the hell they were. We were the corny Oneness and Goodness that I had read about all my life and seldom found. Damn, but she had me locked up in her vanity case.

  "Time," she begged, without begging. "You did it again, Ed."

  "Did what?"

  "Took me way up there and back down again. My God, you're so good at it, sometimes I wonder——"

  "I'm wondering, too. I just showed you how glad I am to see you. Now we have to act like professionals all over again. If you know what I mean." I moved my hand away from her flat, warm stomach.

  She nodded, almost dreamily, but the intelligent eyes had lost the hearts-and-flowers expression. "Let me get organized," she said, rolling to the far side of the bed, her naked back tapering gorgeously down to the shapely hips. "I can't be an agent naked like this—"

  We got dressed. I kissed her bared shoul
der before it disappeared beneath a silken blue blouse. I helped her into her tailored jacket, which she wore over her shoulders like Catherine the Great, with the arm-in-the-cast jutting out like an airplane wing. We moved into the living room. I lit cigarettes for both of us. She stared stonily down at the corpses of Dmitri and Aloyesha. She was as trimly elegant as ever.

  "Want me to ask questions?" I suggested, "or do you have a story to tell me?"

  "Ed, Ed," she sighed, as if weary of the whole business of espionage and intrigues that ended in murders. "Those two specimens are two Red agents. Hatchet men. Killers."

  "Know their names?"

  She shook her head. "No. But they're the ones who pushed me off the subway platform this morning and gave me this." She tapped her broken arm. "The idea was for me to be crushed under the wheels of a BMT subway train. I managed to roll under the overhang, but I snapped my elbow doing it. At least, that's what the doctors at Bellevue told me when a friendly transit authority cop rushed me to the hospital. That's why I missed you at Shea. I'd already given Blassingame the message for you—"

  I swore. "Hold off. You're going too fast. Maybe you'd better start from the top. This rat race is going around in circles. I want to be sure I've got all the players in position. Take it slow, and maybe I'll interrupt once in awhile to ask a question. The main thing I have to know is all about this baseball and what it contains. And just who exactly Louise Warrington Paul is."

  Felicia blinked, surprised.

  "Just one of the ten greatest agents in the cotton-picking universe. Five world powers have a price on her head, dead or alive. Why it was her idea to——"

  "Please. That may be so. But begin from the beginning, huh? Tell me slowly so I can understand. I'm going to sit in that wing chair there, facing the door, because a man with a hotdog stand would have made a fortune with this location tonight. I think we may have a visitor or visitors. Just remember, I'm on your side, and I love you. Now be a good girl and give."