The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse

by Michael Avallone

  “I never saw him before. Not even a passing glance.”

  “Are you positive, Ed? It’s important.”

  “I’m positive. Who is he?”

  Monks growled again and scooped up the photos. He stuffed them angrily into the manila envelope. “Funny man. If I knew would I ask you? Nobody knows who he is. He lived two doors from you, right next to Tom Long’s store. But he might just as well have been the man in the moon for all that we knew about him.”

  That was puzzling. I didn’t understand him.

  “Are you kidding, Mike? How did you know he lived around here if you’re that much in the dark about him?”

  His expression was as quizzical as a minister at a Tommy Manville wedding.

  “Want to hear a real mystery story? Well, listen.” He rushed on without waiting for an answer. He had some audience. Tania nibbling her cookies, Tom Long sitting quietly, and me rocking in my swivel.

  “Two days before you got shot up, this corpse was found sitting in a car on Columbus Avenue. Right off the Circle and just about a spit away from the Coliseum. When the beat cop walked up to give him a ticket for parking – it was about midnight – he got the surprise of his life. This guy is parked behind the wheel, as naked as Adam and bleeding from every damn one of those marks you saw on him. He was already dead but still bleeding. The front of the car looked like a slaughterhouse after fifty cows get the sledge-hammer treatment. So the cop called the wagon. By the time this stiff got down to Headquarters and we had gone over the car, we had a real headache. We checked everything. Missing Persons, ballistics, fingerprints, the works.” He took a deep breath and looked at Tania, suddenly realizing he was telling a gory story in front of a kid. But Tania was still nibbling cookies and somehow Monks must have thought it was all Greek to a six-year-old kid.

  “So what’s the rest of it, Mike?”

  He shook his bull head and poked his fedora back with a sausagey forefinger. “Headache,” he rumbled. “All headache. A thousand things to check and every one of them a dead end. The corpse is naked and no distinguishing marks except the ones nature didn’t make. No visible scars, no false teeth. Not even a bad tooth or a filled one in his mouth. Which meant no dental records on him anywhere. And all the .45 slugs had been dug out of him by an expert. Either that or they’d gone right through.”

  “What about his clothes?”

  “Just listen. It gets cuter. All his clothes were in the back seat. Ripped, slashed and chopped up like they’d gone through a meat grinder. No labels, no laundry marks, nothing in the pockets. Not even grains of sand or residue that might have meant something. I’m telling you, Ed, I’ve never seen the lab so upset by a corpse in all my life.”

  I was interested now. Real interested. You read about cases like this but you never run into them. Talk about locked rooms and fancy puzzles. For once in my life I really felt like listening. Monks was obviously just warming up.

  “The car,” he sneered. “A thousand things to check on with a car. Licence plates, registration card, all kinds of forms you sign to get one or buy one. Well, this was a brand-new Chrysler that somebody had stolen the day before right off the demonstration floor of a store on Broadway. Anybody smart enough to pull a caper like that is smart enough to be hard to catch.”

  I whistled. “A dead man with no clothes in a brand-new demonstration model car in front of the Coliseum close to midnight. Well, that’s D.O.A. in style.”

  “Skip it,” he muttered. “There’s more. Lots more. We figured Mr. X was about thirty-one, Caucasian, genteel. His hands were smooth and his body was in good condition up until the day somebody carved him like a Thanksgiving turkey. So right away we figured he didn’t do much work while he was growing up. So I thought of playboys and rich men’s sons or actors.”

  “Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of you.”

  He ignored me. “So we checked Missing Persons. No soap. I issued bulletins to every big city in the country. He looked like a big-city boy. Well, a week went by and nothing came in. There were some leads, of course, but when we double-checked it was always somebody else. Which brings me up to last week, when you were still sleeping in the hospital.”

  I suddenly remembered something. “Wait a minute. You were coming here because you thought I might have seen this guy in the neighbourhood. What made you think he lived around here?”

  “I’m coming to that, Ed. We definitely established that he lived next to Tom Long’s. Even with all the dead ends we’d run into. It was good police work even if I do say so myself.”

  “Hear, hear! How did you do it?”

  Monks grinned. “There was one tiny thing. There always is. Now I know somebody had gone to great pains to make this a tough corpse to give a name or location to. But I thought about it. And when I was through thinking I had it.”

  Tom Long suddenly coughed and I stared in his direction. His face was proud and slightly defiant. But Monks was nodding at him.

  “That’s it. I figured the Coliseum meant something. This neighbourhood I mean. So I knew if our corpse lived in the city he had to call some place home. So right away I thought of drugstores, grocery stores, delicatessens, tailors and hand laundries. All the places a person would make use of if he lived in the vicinity. It was a long shot but it paid off. And only after I’d had twenty men walk their feet off for an area of ten blocks for two weeks. Tom Long recognized his photograph.”

  “That’s one Long shot all right,” I said.

  Monks winced. “You can’t resist those bum jokes, can you? Well, when Long here identified the photo – and remember this was after the corpse was killed – I was sure something was fishy. Also, I began to look at your shooting in a different light.” Monks looked at Tom Long. “I’m convinced now, Mr. Long, that what looked like an attempt on Noon’s life here was really aimed at you. Somebody realized that you’d be able to identify this particular dead man and didn’t want that to happen.”

  “They’re still trying,” I said. “That wasn’t a firecracker that wrecked the store.” But my mind was flying like fifty. The case was unravelling but only getting more complicated in the process. Why was a dead man’s identity so important?

  “That’s right,” Monks agreed. “But let me finish. Tom Long recognized this guy as a customer. But he didn’t know his name. Just the building where he lived. There was no name on the downstairs bell. Just Apartment Seventeen. And when we got a key from the super and opened the apartment, there wasn’t a thing in it. Oh, the furniture was there all right. And it had been lived in. But there were no clothes, no scraps of anything. And as bare of fingerprints as if someone had wiped everything off with a rag. I’m telling you, Ed, somebody’s determined that this corpse stays unidentified.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense.” I was thinking about my unfair lady, the blonde with bad manners. And suddenly the weight of the wallet in my pocket was a burning, urgent weight. If that wallet had been the corpse’s, it would certainly answer a lot of questions. But I wasn’t going to tell Monks about it. It was still my baby. And according to Tom Long, it was mine. So be it.

  Monks lit another cigarette.

  “Twenty years I been a cop. But I never ran into the likes of this before.”

  “Neither have I,” I admitted. “What do we do next?”

  Monks jerked a thumb at Tom Long.

  “The grocer never saw this corpse before. Neither did the newsie on the corner. Nor did the druggist or the bartender across the street. You know – your pal Kelly. Now they either all have lousy memories and Mr. Long’s got a good one, or I’m faced with the improbable conclusion that the only store the corpse used in the neighbourhood was the Chinese laundry.”

  “But you don’t buy that,” I suggested.

  “I don’t buy that,” he admitted.

  I smiled. “I can see that fine old Police Academy brain working. You think Tom Long is holding out on you.”

  Monks suddenly exploded. “Damn it, he has to be! It just
doesn’t make sense this way. They tried to machine-gun him, didn’t they? His kid is dead, isn’t she? And now they blow his store to hell and gone. Ed, talk to him. He’s your friend. Tell him if he’s mixed up in anything crooked it isn’t worth dying for. You know I’ll give him a fair shake.”

  He was right. He would give Tom Long a fair shake. He was the squarest cop alive. I got up from behind the desk and walked towards Tom and Tania Long. They stared up at me mutely, the little bang-haired girl as pretty as a doll, the little father no bigger than a child himself.

  “Tom, you heard him. He’s a friend of mine. If he says he’ll help you, he will. You know the murdered man, which means you must know something even more important. What do you say, Tom?”

  Tom Long shook his head. He looked beat. “Me know nothing. Me go home now.”

  Monks growled. “Okay, Mr. Long. I’ll have to take you down to Headquarters for questioning. You know something and you’re holding out. You’re under arrest.”

  I looked at Tom Long. “What do you say, Tom?” I asked again.

  Tom Long didn’t say anything. His hand suddenly came up out of his lap. Something glinted in the lights of the room. Something shiny and metallic – and ugly. In the hands of a friend, it’s even uglier.

  “No,” he said quietly. “No more talk. We go now. Stand back, please. No want hurt you. But we must go. Now.”

  I gaped and Monks swore. A loud, exasperated, unprintable oath. I couldn’t exactly blame him.

  Tom Long was holding a nickel-plated .22, and it was levelled at Mike Monks’s burly, barrel-chested body.

  And at me, too.

  Then everything went haywire.

  The phone rang. Tania squealed and slapped her father’s gun hand with a fierce swipe and the .22 whined and spat out sound and flame. And in the brief split-second interval of the gun noise and the ringing phone, Mike Monks shouted hoarsely and pitched forward on his face.

  TEN

  Everything happens for a reason. Tom Long had pulled a gun because he was frightened by something bigger than the police. Little six-year-old Tania had tried to knock that gun out of her beloved father’s hand only because it was pointed at me, a nice man who bought her lollipops and smiles, a person who had saved her from a nasty old burning building. And Mike Monks had been hit. Hit because when the phone rang and Tania did’ her stuff, he had jumped to one side and low in perfect Police Academy style. Just in time to have the .22 slug catch him in the head.

  The phone was still ringing as I whirled and got to Monks. He was sprawled across the office floor like an overstuffed bear rug. His hat had fallen off and I could see the red streaming down his lumpy cheekbone from a wound just above his left ear. I galvanized. There aren’t many people I’m nuts about, but Mike Monks is one of them.

  Tania was crying and I could hear Tom Long jabbering again, but I forgot all about them.

  I ran Monks’s sleeve up and felt his pulse. It vibrated like a plucked banjo string. The vein was throbbing. I eased him over gently and mopped away at the red on his face up towards his ear. Then I saw it. A nasty, angry furrow just above his eyebrow where the flying bullet had ploughed through flesh and hair like a miniature lawnmower. But that’s all it was. A flesh wound. I’m no doctor, but I could see it was superficial. The sigh of relief I heaved seemed to rock my insides.

  The door slammed behind me and I could hear feet running down the hall. I didn’t care. Monks needed tending to. I ran to the sink and buried a towel under the faucet and turned the hot water on. When the towel was hot and steaming, I got back to him.

  I planted it square against the wound and leaned on it. Direct pressure is always the best thing when someone is bleeding like a stuck pig. Monks groaned feebly and squirmed beneath my touch. His eyelids fluttered. Suddenly, I realized the phone had stopped ringing. I looked around. The Longs had skipped, but maybe they’d run right into the bomb squad anyway.

  A .22 going off isn’t too loud a noise, not in a busy neighbourhood, so maybe the three dicks hadn’t heard it. Maybe they were all downstairs checking on what had destroyed the laundry shop. Maybe – hell, I didn’t care about Tom and Tania Long. They weren’t dangerous. Just frightened and panicky. They could wait. Monks couldn’t.

  I looked down at his ugly mug with its lumps and gnarls. He was coming to. Slowly and painfully – but he was coming to. I shifted the towel a little and mopped his face. The wound was still wide but the bleeding had dammed up a bit. He groaned again and his eyes blinked open.

  Relief flooded through me. Sometimes people come out of a gunshot coma a little nuts and almost loco but this was the old Monks. He was all right. “Talk about me and my horseshoes. You’re pretty lucky too.”

  He stirred and shook his head. “What happened?”

  I helped him to a sitting position and showed him the towel.

  “Can you hold that against your head while I call a doctor?” He took the towel and planted it where I wanted it. “Tom Long pulled a gun on us. Tania slapped his hand. You jumped. And bingo. I don’t think he meant to shoot, Mike. The kid made the gun go off.”

  “Sure, sure,” He was feeling mean and I couldn’t blame him. “And you’re the Lone Ranger and I’m Tonto. Save the sermon. Ed. People that point guns at other people don’t deserve any sympathy. Even when accidents happen.” He grimaced. “Ouch.”

  “Hurts, huh? Well, take it easy. I’ll get on the phone right away.”

  He stayed on the floor pressing the wet towel to his head as I limped stiffly to the phone. But it rang again, loud and clanging. This time I answered it.

  “Hello,” I said. “Ed Noon here.”

  “Ed!” It was Kelly’s reedy voice. Low but excited. “Where were you? I gotta get back to my bar and here I am, doin’ the Dragnet act for you –”

  “Sorry, miss. I’m not available for any assignments today. Will you call back in the morning?”

  His snort shattered my eardrum.

  “Call back in the morning? Are you kidd – oh, I get it. Company in the office and you’re playing dumb. Okay. I’ll give it to you fast.”

  “That’s right, miss.” I said that for Monks’s benefit to explain away my remaining on the phone when there was obviously nothing to talk about. But Monks was too busy with his wound to bother. Right now, he couldn’t have cared less.

  Kelly sailed right into what I wanted to hear.

  “I tailed the blonde to West Fifty-second. You know – Strip Row. She went into the Blue Turkey. And she hasn’t come out yet. Ed, she works there. Pictures of her plastered all over the front of the building. Name’s Holly Hill. Want me to hang around? I oughtta be gettin’ back to the bar –”

  “That’s fine, miss. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Kelly was laughing when I hung up. I lit a cigarette from my crushed pack and got back to Monks. But he was already sitting up and taking notice. He was parked on the leather sofa, mopping at his head with the towel.

  I remembered about getting him a doctor and dialled Headquarters and requested the medical examiner. When I mentioned my name, and Captain Monks, things really popped on the other end of the wire. Monks was still mopping away and punching his hat when I joined him on the sofa.

  “Stop cursing and have a cigarette,” I said, offering him one. “Ulcers are bad for a man your age.”

  Monks took the cigarette and looked at me as I lit it for him. His black eyes never left my face.

  “You know something, Ed?”

  “What?”

  “I wish I could buy back my introduction from you. Sure, you help me with cases. Sure, you’re smart. But you are one king-sized pain in the neck and you never level with me until payoff day. What is it with you? You think all cops are dumb and have to have pictures drawn for them?”

  “I don’t get you, Mike.”

  His smile wasn’t friendly. “Don’t you? The Longs took off. That’s your fault as much as anybody’s. Long said a blonde with a fur coat was in his shop just before the big
noise went off. I see she was up here too to see you. Probably just before she saw Long.”

  I kept my expression frozen. “Says who?”

  “Says me, damn it. Or do you keep a fur-bearing animal around here as a pet?” He held up his big right hand. Several strands of dark brown hair were pinned between his thumb and forefinger. I had one crazy notion. It couldn’t be an expensive fur coat to shed like that.

  “Okay,” I said. “You win. And I never said you were dumb. But I don’t know who she is or what she wanted. And that’s gospel.”

  “Save it,” he growled. He was in a bad mood, thanks to almost getting killed. “You might not have known five minutes ago. But you know now, after that phone call. Remember me? I’ve been around you too long. I know how you operate. How you think. Come on. Tell me the whole thing or I’ll drive you down to Headquarters.”

  “Mike, so help me, I –”

  “I’m not kidding, Noon.”

  When he called me by my last name, I knew he wasn’t. So I dropped it. I told him the whole sad-sack yarn about my gun-toting blonde and how she had stripped me and what she had done to me and my wardrobe. I told him what was bothering me, what I knew and what I didn’t know. I told him everything but the name and location of my blonde. That was a personal rap I was going to square myself before the cops got to her.

  When I had finished my windy tale, he had finished his cigarette. He ground it out on the floor and I didn’t dare mention the breach of etiquette to him. He looked mad enough to eat nails and I didn’t feel like tampering with his foul mood.

  He shook his head slowly, still hanging on to the wet towel.

  “Me and my crazy corpse. You and your crazy cases. When this is over, I’m going to take a nice long vacation.”

  I went around my desk to sit down. I flipped the bottom drawer open and reached into a false bottom I’d had a carpenter pal set up for me. The dark P38 strapped into a bracket fell out into my hand. It felt good. I tucked it in my shoulder holster. The P38 is a direct descendant of the German Luger and just as deadly.