"You seem pretty certain that one of your own people is knifing you."
"I'm positive, Ed. No outsiders, no matter how well organized, could have gotten away with so much merchandise without some help from the inside." The admission was tinged with personal sadness.
"Tenning?" I suggested, just for openers.
"Out of the question. He's a fine man, with a wife and three children and teaches Bible Class on Sunday in Spotswood."
"I knew an axe murderer once who was a physics professor, too."
Lang smiled wanly. "The same applies to Mr. Bland. He's twenty-three. A youngster with a scientific mind whose wife just had a baby boy and he's so loyal to Nichols' it's almost embarrassing."
"And you seem to believe in Larry and the stockroom, too," I said, rising from my chair and stretching. "How about the young blonde downstairs at number three cash register?"
Lang went blank for a second, then guffawed. He had small, intersticed teeth, overlapping like shuffled cards. "Dodie Rogers? Just got out of Madison High, collects Partridge Family records, and most likely is still waiting for her first love affair."
Now, I laughed. "You noticed that, too?"
"Never mind Dodie, Ed. Do you take the job and do I write out a check?"
"Yeah, Elton," I said, "I take the job. You write me out a check."
All of which was why I was not in on the ground floor of the Gingerbread-Man murders which had commenced in my own Manhattan the night before. A killing orgy that began with a striptease beauty named Heavenly Blue and turned my town upside down.
And continued the same—with wholesale slaughter and frenzy.
It was a sex-and-homicide spree in which the primary targets seemed to be strippers, exotic dancers, and all those ladies who would parade their bodies naked before a public of men for cash. And whatever else their own psychic hangups demanded. I don't really know. Nobody does, in the final analysis. Not even Freud or Hugh Hefner. Or the X-rated movie crowd.
For an operative who had known the dizzying stratosphere of top governmental employment, working directly for the President of the country, no less, and solving some of the weirdest and gaudiest crimes anyone has ever known, outside of a comic book, it may seem that I was wading in low water going out to New Jersey to figure out why some department-store manager was short in his books, but I owed a favorite police captain a favor. Mike Monks of New York Homicide. He was the best man in the world I live in and maybe the best friend I owned. I'm a loner in most things, including friendship.
Yet the night before I'd gone out to Nichols', the Gingerbread Man had announced his presence to the public at large—with blaring trumpets.
By waylaying a strawberry blonde with a golden figure to match her hair, one Heavenly Blue, an exotic dancer famous in her own circles for what she could show when she took it all off. Heavenly Blue had stripped once more, in a dirty back alley, about four-thirty in the morning, not three blocks from the high-class strip joint where she had been currently employed, just off Eighth Avenue at Forty-eighth Street. Then the Gingerbread Man had knifed her in the left breast, marked a huge, erratic S on her abdomen with fingernail polish, and then left her for dead.
Which she was, not five minutes after a drunken sailor on shore leave stumbled over her body in the dark alleyway into which he had wandered to toss his cookies in private.
When he saw Heavenly Blue, he heaved up anchor all the way.
The Gingerbread Man had done a hatchet job on her chest.
The murder had been too late in the morning for the breakfast headlines on all the dailies. The afternoon editions missed it, too.
The police really didn't know the name of the murderer until they received their first communique from him two days later. But I didn't know all that until much later in the week, when it was far too late to help the second stripper that died. In the same old gory M.O.* style. The two kills were identical.
And the third was a triplicate copy of the first two.
And then the fourth, a mirror of the first three.
By Friday morning, Manhattan was in the grip of a kill-crazy weirdo and a king-sized panic that nobody had seen the likes of since Boston and its Strangler of '63. This was especially true in the Homicide Department, which likes its murders well spaced out and not so patterned.
A nut with a knife was on the loose. A maniac first class.
Compared to which, Mr. Elton Lang and his Nichols' Department-Store crisis was very pennyante, indeed.
But I didn't know that on Monday.
No one knew anything on Monday.
Nobody, that is, except the Gingerbread Man. Whoever the crazy bastard was—or might be.
AND TAKES ITS CLOTHES OFF, TOO
Elton Lang and I handled the deception perfectly.
On Tuesday, after I had checked into the Cloud Nine Motel on Route 18, just a few minutes down the highway from Nichols', I filled out an employment-application blank in the Lay-Away Department, went through the motions of another personal interview with Mr. Lang and, a few hours later, I was on duty in the Men's clothing department. All afternoon long, I was acutely aware of being given the once-over by the rest of the Nichols' help: the part-time salesgirls, most of them middle-aged matrons, Larry in the stockroom, a heavy-set, bull-headed type who spoke mainly in grunts, and the wide-eyed blonde kid, Dodie Rogers. She turned very precise and businesslike once she learned I was to be a mere flunky like herself. I was taller, but she looked down her nose at me, as if it served me right for being so untalented.
Mr. Bland, the twenty-three-year-old Ivy Leaguer in charge of Men's, proved to be a generation-gap headache. I was obviously an out-of-step older man, even if I did wear my hair a little long, but it was the army all over again. He was a GI brat, chicken every minute, wanting to be called "Mister" in front of the customers and everybody else, and his main goal in life was for his Men's department to cut the mustard a helluva lot finer than Mr. Tenning's women's department. Bland was over six feet, with shoulders like coat hangers, and blue-eyed like Lang. Tenning was a dynamic, fast-moving older guy, more my age, and easier to talk to. I kept an eye on them all day even as I solved the simple mystery of how to sell clothing to the Jersey public that came into the smooth, air-conditioned precincts of Nichols'. I could always talk.
I didn't intend to take longer than two days to crack Mr. Lang's puzzle. I would have been ashamed of myself if it took more time. Sherlock Holmes wasn't needed at all. Just a good, tough commonsense appraisal of the whole situation. After all, if a ton of merchandise is heisted from a store, one way or another, whatever the method or the trick, it obviously had to go out the back way. The view from the loading platform of the stockroom was nothing but acres of empty real estate and a back road that connected to most of the main highway arteries.
I worked on Larry and then Dodie Rogers and, in a roundabout conversational way, Bland and Tenning. It was easy enough to make non-suspicious small talk with them all that day. When the time came around for me to punch out, after my first full eight hours of employment, I'd sold one suit, three pairs of chino slacks, and four white shirts, collar size seventeen, to a burly, gigantic truck driver. But I had accomplished much more than that. As I waltzed out of Nichols' to go back to my small motel room, I knew that Larry, though fifty-eight and married to a woman confined to a wheelchair, had the galloping hots for Dodie, who led him on and even allowed him to buy her small presents; that Mr. Bland hated Mr. Tenning with a passion that only an officious, ladder-of-success climber can have, and that Tom Tenning couldn't wait to leave this particular branch of the Nichols' tree for another limb in far-off, big-time New York. Mr. Elton Lang was sitting on a veritable stewpot of molten ambitions, individual drives, and teeming personal plots. And sex hunger.
Being a detective isn't such a hard proposition. You keep your eyes open, you pound out the right questions, and you learn a great deal in a very short period of time. All you really have to do is look and listen. Then put it all tog
ether, later on, in conjunction with the facts you already had your hands on. Thanks to Elton Lang, everything began to focus. There wasn't too great a mystery for me, as regarded the shrinkage loss. One—more likely, two—of his trusted employees was stealing his managerial delusions of grandeur right from under his nose. Or rather, right behind his back, with or without tags.
The kicker in the deck was that the guilty parties had not for a second thought that Mr. Lang would ring in a private cop on the deal. They must have thought he'd swallow his losses, as confused as he might be, and perhaps even cover up in some way to protect his own hide.
I phoned Melissa Mercer from the Cloud Nine that night before going to sleep, just to see what was new in the office and how she was. I got a mild jolt. The answering-service girl read me a message from my favorite secretary and favorite girl that her brother Leon had died and she'd had to fly right down to Mobile for the wake. Poor Melissa. She hated the state of Alabama with a vengeance that only a black woman can have, but loyalty and devotion were two of her longest suits. So she'd gone, leaving a number for me to call after she got there. Melissa was all the answer I can ever have to segregation's ugly questions. She was very black and very beautiful and my woman,
I loved her with everything I've got to work with.
Wednesday came and I was back in Men's, formulating the plan to upset somebody's shrinkage gravy train. I wanted to strike while my irons were hot. Besides which one more day in the clothing department under Bland's chicken command would have had me laying him out over the bins piled high with every kind of men's trousers in creation. I was up to here with his petty, holier-than-thou bossiness. On the pretense of laying in another stack of woolen slacks in a near-empty bin, I went back to the stockroom. Larry was my pigeon. I intended to give him the opportunity to fly—one way or the other. Elton Lang was already alerted.
It was wide and spacious back there, a huge loading platform just in front of the opened doors which let in the dismal light of a damp August morning. The weather was sultry and heavy. Larry was busy at his counter, stonily making entries in a long record ledger, with a heavy marking pen. I drifted over to him, all glib innocence and breezy New-Yorker style. Everyone in Nichols' had pegged me as a Manhattan refugee and the smattering of native-born Jerseyites in the store—with ancestries of Polish, Italian, German, and New England Protestants—was a bumper crop of ethnic clichés and prejudices. Larry was an Old-World Teuton and completely disgusted with Yankee Doodle Dandies who drove Volkswagens. Archie Bunker would have called him brother. And a dumb Kraut, to boot.
We were alone. The shelves all around us were jammed with Nichols' merchandise, Nichols' wealth and largess. I put on a foolish grin and leaned over the counter. Larry grunted and pretended I wasn't there. From out front, I could hear a cash register ring open noisily. Dodie Rogers was on number one cash register that morning. She was also wearing the set of golden earrings which Larry had given her for her eighteenth birthday. I'd found that out from Mary, the nice little lady in the lingerie section of Women's.
"You know why I'm here, Larry?" I asked, jumping right in with both feet, while we still were alone. "We have to talk, you and me. About Dodie. She's not going to be your girl any more, Larry."
The pen in his hand stopped moving. He looked up. There was an almost animal-like slowness and dullness to his face. But I wasn't fooled. He was trying to think fast, to hide his reaction while he thought. It was the cunning of the beast in the jungle.
"What?" he rumbled, low in his chest. "What you say?"
"Dodie," I came right back. "We're engaged. That's why I came here to work. I knew she'd been seeing somebody else. So I came here to keep an eye on her. Get me? There'll be no more gifts like those earrings. And no more of this other stuff, either. You think you're so smart, huh? What do you think Mr. Lang is going to do when he finds out about you and Dodie and all this stealing that's been going on?"
"Stealing?" The word was a heavy, coarse echo of my own. Larry's hands, big and powerful-looking, flattened down on the counter. He stared at me, again shaking his head in that dumb-brute routine.
"Yeah, stealing," I snapped, putting a nasty edge to my voice. "She told me all of it. How you got her to make another set of keys for this back door so you could load up after dark and take all the stuff out. Dodie's worked in every department of the store. Knows all the angles, knows about those tags. She helped you and you helped her. I know your wife is sick, Larry, and you'd like to have a young thing like Dodie sit on your lap these days, but it's got to stop. I'm not going to wait for Dodie if she goes to jail for what you and she have done. You're going to stop now and take my advice, or should I call Mr. Lang down now and you confess the whole thing—?"
I couldn't finish, because those two hands of his had flown up from the counter with lightning speed, fastened on my lapels, and jerked me toward him until our faces were inches apart. He was breathing very funny and his hot breath washed over me. His eyes were slits of fear and hatred. Being caught red-handed didn't seem to bother him half as much as what I had said about his own Lolita—Dodie Rogers.
"You lie," he rumbled huskily. "Dodie no go with you. She my girl. This all for her—we save the money—run away—tell me you are lying or I kill you with these hands!"
Maybe I would have broken his startlingly sudden stranglehold; maybe I would have drawn on him. I'd packed my forty-five that morning as a prelude to the showdown—but I never will know. For, just as suddenly, Mr. Elton Lang's crackling New England voice, octaves higher, snapped from the entranceway to the stockroom. "Stop that, Larry! Take your hands off him—my God! I really trusted you, Larry—."
That did it. The entire tableau was transformed in a few mad seconds into a mess and a tragedy faster than the air force can send bombers to Hanoi.
Larry released me, stepped back, his broad, brutish face falling apart in surprise and humility, in that age-old, nothing-will-ever-change-it, boss-employee servility. He tried to speak, his thickened, dulled tongue working for words, but he couldn't. A wall behind him stopped his retreat. Along with him, as I straightened, getting my wind back, I saw Elton Lang marching into view, his blue eyes glowing with accusation. Worst of all, a blue-uniformed policeman was at his elbow. An East Brunswick cop, so young-looking that his Adam's apple was bobbing and his hand was far too close to his holstered revolver. Elton Lang's stylish blazer, matching slacks, and neat blue tie seemed very out of place in the stockroom. Almost camp.
"Thought you wanted this kept private," I said. "You didn't need him yet." I pointed at the cop, who had rookie written all over him.
"Does it matter now? We have the proof—I heard what you said—I saw how he reacted, what it meant." Elton Lang moved forward inexorably on old Larry. He was shaking his own head like a reproving schoolteacher. "You fool. A woman. A child! What will this do to Emma, Larry?"
The young cop went around the counter, reaching for shining metal cuffs. I moved forward, seeing Larry cringe at sight of them. The pale defeat of his face was like a monumental indication of something. It was, all right, and I never got to him in time. Neither did the kid cop.
A roar came up out of Larry. A deep, wounded, angry and bellowing rumble of thunder. Thinking must always have been a great pain and anguish for Larry. Action was not. Trapped, he responded in the only way that had ever meant anything to him. It must have been like stocking merchandise, putting things away. A one-two sort of simple perfection with an easy rhythm all its own. Whatever had driven him to steal from Nichols' Department Store now became secondary to that deep-rooted desire in all animals, whether human or otherwise. Escape. Freedom from chains and cuffs. Whatever kind of slavery Dodie Rogers' plump white body had imposed upon him, with Judas hips.
A fist like a cinder block came up, crashed into the rookie cop's shoulder, and sent him flying backward like someone who had been in contact with a revolving door. Larry launched himself over the counter and bowled on by Elton Lang who was blocking any chanc
e I had of getting to Larry. The middle-aged stockroom giant, more Emil Jannings than ever, bulled for the open shipping doors, toward the gray landscape beyond. He was moving like a rocket for such a big man, leaving his own particular Marlene Dietrich and his dreams far behind, whatever they actually might have been. Nobody ever really found out.
Rookie cops must have some kind of dreams, too, as well as much quicker reflexes than older men.
Because the one on the floor suddenly rolled upward, found one knee, propped himself, and had his service revolver out seconds before I could jump him and make that first shot go wild. The poor kid was so overwrought or just plain excited, he even forgot to do it by the book. There was no warning cry, no attempt to halt the fugitive Larry vocally—no time at all for anything. Except the mistake, the kill, the tragedy.
The shot blasted with a high whine of velocity and fire power.
Larry got it just as his big body was hurtling across the threshold of the shipping doors. The heavy chain dangling vertically, a chain for running the split doors back and forth, clattered metallically as his falling figure tried to catch them for support. But he missed them altogether and slammed down to the hard ground. The kid cop was a fine shot. I saw the hole in Larry's back. Dead center on the jumper suit.
Elton Lang cried out, as if he had just seen a child run over by a truck on the highway. He put his hands up to his face and then groaned. Larry lay on the ground on his side, features collapsing as death came on, pulling him all the way down into nothing.
The rookie cop let out a deep gust of air as if some enormous weight had been lifted from his chest. He walked over to the corpse very slowly; from behind us Nichols' suddenly sounded like a boiler factory. Feet running, people shouting, salesgirls parroting. Fear and confused excitement always sounds the same. Completely violent and completely useless. Signifying nothing at all except sound and fury.
"He shouldn'ta run," the kid cop squeaked, sounding younger than he must have been. "I couldn't let him get away. He might have hurt a lot of people out there—the state he was in."
Kill Her- You'll Like It! Page 2
