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  ASSASSINS

  DON'T DIE IN

  BED

  Ed Noon Mystery #17

  Michael Avallone

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  BEVERLY HILLS

  2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Susan Avallone and David Avallone. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

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  FOR LEO MARGULIES

  who has watched the parade go by and is still a vital part of it

  The Cast Of Characters

  . . . according to Sigmund Freud

  ED NOON God Bless America

  MELISSA MERCER Let My People Go

  MR. PRESIDENT And Justice For All

  HENRY HALLMARK Peace In Our Time

  ESME HALLMARK The Stars And Stripes Forever

  TOM FAULKNER Watchful Waiting

  GILDA TIGER The Pursuit Of Happiness

  BHUDDA East Meets West

  SURAT SINGH Better Red Than Dead

  GAMBARELLI Que Sera, Sera

  RICHARDS & BARRONI Forewarned Is Forearmed

  THE WARRENS We The People

  . . . and some of them never go into Analysis

  CONTENTS

  1. PORTRAIT OF A DIPLOMAT WITH WHITE HAIR

  2. BON VOYAGE, PRIVATE SPY

  3. THE NOT-SO-MERRY FRANCESCA

  4. CAME A TIGER

  5. MORE THAN A SECRETARY

  6. DEATH'S NIGHT OUT

  7. HIGH CALAMITY

  8. BHUDDA AND TIGER

  9. LADY OR TIGER LILY?

  10. SOMETHING-BLUE HELL

  11. DATE WITH THE DEVIL

  12. A FINE NIGHT FOR DYING

  13. THE MAN IN THE SHEETS

  14. HALFWAY TO DOOM

  15. ARMED TRUCE

  16. AFTER-DINNER KILLER

  17. SOUTHAMPTON GETAWAY

  18. MEET ME AT THE MILLE MIGLIA

  19. FAREWELL TO THE BEASTS

  20. PICCADILLY WINDUP

  21. A TRAITOR FLIES AWAY

  1. Portrait of a Diplomat with White Hair

  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Even the red-white-and-blue-colored telephone on the desk of the President of the United States. But Bell never invented emergency, trouble, and sudden death. Nor did he ever imagine, in his most poverty-stricken dreams, that his brainchild would one day be instrumental in the field of espionage, counterintelligence, and nation-eat-nation.

  Don't call me, I'll call you. That age-old refrain of theater people to aspiring dramatic hopefuls was the one hard and fast rule I had to obey in the matter of the Presidents red, white, and blue phone. I had seen a lot of other telephones on the President's desk. A blue one, a green one, a red one, and that all-important hot-line instrument that could reach Moscow in five seconds and say, "Let's call the whole thing off."

  I don't know about those other phones. Mine was the patriotic model. A match for Mr. President's. Red, white, and blue. It could ring anytime. And when it did I had to drop everything. I was working for Uncle Sam.

  I dropped everything one fine fall day. I was in the mouse auditorium wondering what to do about a missing person complaint when the phone rang. That one. The one that Melissa Mercer never asked me any questions about. Melissa is my secretary, a lovely Negro girl who can type, take dictation, and keep her lips sealed, all with equal grace and ease.

  She was in the outer office sorting my fan mail and accompanying bills when I answered the short, urgent rings of the phone. It was a lovely day, with the late afternoon sun stepping through the high windows fronting West 46th Street. I remember thinking that it was a great summer for Dodgers. Los Angeles Dodgers. They had just won the World Series, taking Minnesota four out of seven. I had taken a scalping financially on Koufax and Company. I had bet on the Minnesota Twins.

  "Ed Noon here," I said.

  "Hello. How are you?"

  It was The Man. Sounding older and a lot more tired than at our last powwow. That had been in the summer, when a U. N. translator had needed straightening out in the not-small matter of decoding top secret messages for the Red Chinese. It had all ended in a running gun fight down First Avenue with half the police force of New York trying to get in on the act. I had dropped the translator with the best shot I'd ever made and faded into the background where I belonged.

  "Fine, Chief."

  "Good. Listen carefully. The S.S. United States leaves Pier Forty on Friday. Henry Hallmark is on board. He's ready now for his peace tour of the continent—and we feel it necessary that you go with him. In your usual capacity. I leave the details to you."

  "I could stand an ocean cruise, Chief."

  "This will be a long one, Ed. Hallmark's tour will cover London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. He'll be traveling with an entourage of family, secretary, and government agents. Maximum security conditions. I don't have to stress his importance and value to this country, do I?"

  "No, you don't." Friendly and pleasant-spoken as he was, I could plainly hear the ragged worry in his voice. There was no protocol between us. I might have been his barber or his tailor or his doctor. He always let his hair down, in fact, with me. So there had to be more. I waited for him to say it out loud.

  "The need for your services is acute. All our sources—the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and Interpol—point toward one single fact: there is a strong possibility that Hallmark is a target for assassination. Do I make myself clear?"

  "Yes—but it's kind of unthinkable, Chief."

  "I know." There was a long pause, and the weariness of the man expelled itself in a sigh. "Henry Hallmark is my friend. All that is fine in the American character is locked up in his brain and heart. As a young senator, I used to dream of fashioning myself in his image. Henry Hallmark"—the name whispered across the wire in reverence—"must be protected. I want you there with him. On that ship. An extra pair of hands and eyes to forestall any aggressor. This is of paramount importance, Ed."

  "I'll be there."

  "In some ways, this justifies your entire association with this office. I confess I had felt in the beginning that my connection with you was rather a romantic notion. Some sort of blatant throwback to the days when the White House was a rat's nest of intrigue and power plays But you yourself have changed my thinking considerably. You have proven your worth twice over. . . . My thanks, Ed" There was almost a plea in the famous voice now. "I ask you once more to come through with the bases loaded."

  "I'll do my best, Chief."

  "I know you will. I'll ring off now. You will receive the usual package shortly. Good luck."

  "Roger," I said. He hung up, far away in his troubled office in the White House. I drummed on the phone, assembling an assortment of first impressions. Henry Hallmark. Target for an assassin? A tall target. As tall as they make them.

  A sick feeling filled me, bringing with it memories of Kennedy's blasted dream lying on the bloody floor of a car crawling through the Dallas streets. No, it wasn't far-fetched anymore. It wasn't something you only read in comic books or cloak-and-dagger epics. Not when they were firing bazookas at the U. N. building, not when Saigon hospitals were being bombed and Buddhist zealots were making flaming torches of themselves to light up their ideals.

  I forgot all about the World Series. I thought about what I didn't like to think about. The power-grab nations of
the world that would never let the globe spin peacefully on its axis. The countries that were always making waves.

  I buzzed Melissa on the squawk box. She appeared in about three seconds flat. That morning she was wearing a wool-knit dress that was as green as spring grass and just as attractive. Her high-boned face, framing a fine mouth and eyes not unlike the hope of the universe, looked down at me. She read me. I had been in and out of the library of her mind too many times for her not to get my message.

  "Coffee? A letter?"

  "I'm going to Europe on Friday, Mel."

  "That's nice. Can I come, too?"

  "If I was taking anybody to Europe, you'd be the girl. It's solo flight, all the way."

  She laughed her light, easy laugh. "I won't ask you which plane, which boat, or why." She nodded toward the red, white, and blue phone. "Betsy Ross again?"

  She didn't know about the President, but she did know that almost every time the colored phone rang I was out of the office a long time thereafter. A week, sometimes a month. Once a whole summer. I liked her name for the phone. It kept things quiet and was understood only by the two of us.

  "This may take about a month," I said. "Maybe longer."

  She sighed. "I'll miss you. It's dull around here when you're gone. It's always a scream listening to you lecture the clients and stall off the bill collectors. What about this missing person thing?"

  I thought about that for only a minute. "Get Scott Jordan on the phone. He's a smart lawyer and a fine specimen. If he can't find that Stillwell girl, nobody can."

  "Will do. Want any coffee? I was about to send down for some when you buzzed me."

  "Yes. And a Danish."

  The sun had stepped out of the high windows, traveling further west, when I talked to Scott Jordan. He's one of the better legal minds in town, a great man to handle a tricky one, before the official machinery rolled over a client. We'd been friends a long time. Max Turner, another private detective, does most of Jordan's legwork, because I've never handled cases with sidelines of divorce, stock market setups, or will entanglements.

  Jordan's voice over the wire was clipped and precise as ever. "Well, Ed. No longer do I wonder if you are in the land of the living. How are things?"

  "Fine, Counselor."

  We breezed about old times for a minute or two; then he laughed dryly.

  "All right, Old Lang Syne. What do you need this time?"

  "Mind reader. No wonder your clients can never tell a lie. Look, I'll be out of town for a month or so, and I got a missing person case this morning. I'm not committed yet, and I'd like to turn it over to your loving hands."

  "Missing person?" The legal tenor of his voice was unmistakable. "A matter for the police, isn't it?"

  "Not yet. My client, H. A. Stillwell, just for an opener, feels his lovely daughter Emily doesn't want to marry a man just like the man that married dear old Mother. He slapped her yesterday in front of her beatnik friends, and she took a powder. He feels she's hiding out to hurt him."

  "You have that metaphor in reverse, Ed. And I saw that movie, too. Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, wasn't it? Stillwell, you say."

  "Stillwell," I repeated. "The fee is astronomical."

  "Give me the details. It's a slow week, you lucky dog. I'll get Max Turner to handle it. What's Stillwell's number?"

  I gave it to him, he thanked me, and I promised to split a bottle of his favorite brandy with him when I got back. I hung up, a man who'd solved one problem only.

  Henry Hallmark.

  God help us all. I made a vow to myself in the silence of the mouse auditorium. All my political savvy can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but I wasn't going to sit still for another Dallas in my lifetime.

  I spent what was left of the daylight on the ground floor of the main branch of the New York public library. No matter how good your memory is, it always pays to do a little homework. Pertinent facts and data were what I needed for this assignment.

  When it comes to statistics and bare facts, there are no better places to find them than in accredited tomes, almanacs, and newspaper files. In the hushed cathedral atmosphere of the reading room, I pored over every Who's Who, Congressional Registrar, and Famous Americans known to researching eyes. Back issues of The New York Times helped, too. When you're a celebrity in the U. S. A., they record all your triumphs and failures. As well as accidents and accomplishments. The debits and credits are all down there in cold black and white print. It developed that Henry Hallmark was news when he blew his august nose too loudly at a Senate hearing.

  In my brief notes, the man added up to quite a large portrait. Sort of an American folk hero with wings on. And a halo in plain view:

  Born in Marysville, Kansas, 1899, to wheat farmers Abigail and Lawrence Hallmark. Ambulance driver in World War I. Wounded in Nancy by shrapnel, 1917. Opened a law office in Topeka, Kansas, in 1924. Married Esme May Cody in 1925. A son named Richard and a daughter named Caroline, born 1926 and 1929, respectively. Caroline was drowned in a flash flood on the outskirts of Junction City in 1939. Richard made it all the way up to 1945. The kid had become a lieutenant before he even knew how to shave. Then he led his tank into Nazi Germany and was catapulted into the next world by a panzerfaust fired by a "surrendering" SS man. The Hallmarks received a Distinguished Service Cross posthumously, along with a Purple Heart, as a reminder of the six-foot, two-hundred-pound son they had given to Uncle Sam.

  "My son is gone," Henry Hallmark had said at the funeral services in Arlington attended by President Harry S. Truman and a host of political luminaries and dignitaries, "but his mother and I take our full measure of pride and love in the thought that he died for something he believed in. That he did not live a life of waste and careless pleasure. There is nothing greater in the world for a young man than to bear arms for his country in time of danger. God bless you, Richard, and keep you."

  Not even the cynics could take him apart for that. Time, Newsweek, and Life hailed him with countless printed words and photographs. The white mane, the broad brow, the mobile mouth.

  Henry Hallmark had come a long way from his humble origin on a tenant farm on the plains of Kansas.

  America was proud of him, revered him, and liked him.

  Wars were one thing, but Henry Hallmark had triumphed on the battlegrounds of public service, too.

  The ambulance driver and Kansan hick had graduated from the law offices in Topeka with a loud, flag-waving bounce into the ranks of public life. Congressman from the Wheat Belt. And the Corn Belt. Member of the House. United States Senator from Kansas in the troubled thirties. Presidential timber then. Presidential timber always.

  He'd never made it, but he'd never stopped trying. His party ran him twice. Twice he was clobbered, but the voters never stopped admiring him, loving him anyway.

  "America is the greatest country in the world." Henry Hallmark had said that before fifty thousand Frenchmen massed to meet him at Orly Field, Paris, in 1951.

  "We will fight along with all the freedom-loving nations of the universe." Henry Hallmark had said that, too. Right out loud, without shame or sham, before throngs of cheering, screaming Koreans who had not understood a word he said.

  "Our legacy is the protection and care of all the oppressed peoples of our times."

  He had also said that. And no one could openly disagree with him without risking censure.

  When Henry Hallmark spoke, America spoke to the world. He was the voice of the people. Vox populi, with a college education.

  The score added up to a mighty impressive total for thirty-nine years of public life. What was he? Presidential also-ran. Staunch Republican. Roosevelt's strongest opponent in the halcyon years of the New Deal. Hallmark had headed innumerable committees and organized dozens of programs that had led the country out of the woods during the Iron Curtain years. Now, official ambassador of the United States. A world leader. An adviser to kings and nations. White-haired, kindly, and challengingly shrewd, he had been calle
d by Time, "the American counterpart of Winston Churchill." The man was a gold mine of history. He had launched battleships, appointed Cabinet officials, and busted trusts, cartels, and monopolies. He was a fighter and a hard loser.

  He was also that overused cliché—a great American. The country couldn't do without him. It looked as though the world might need him, too.

  Henry Hallmark had not been fooled by Castro in 1959; he had scorned the Russian seizure of Berlin in 1945; and he had backed the Marshall Plan to the limit until he had seen the political uselessness of flooding foreign lands with American money. Yet now, at sixty-seven, he had mellowed. Peace was his major mission in life. The scheduled tour of the continent had been page one news in the Times all this week. I could see why.

  The newspaper files had some nuggets buried in their columns, too. The kind of gold that glistens when you have an inkling of what all the shouting is about. I did, thanks to my talk with the President.

  Within a short span of six months, there had been five assassinations spread out over the globe. A Black Muslim had been shot in Johannesburg. A chief of the Social Democratic party in Stuttgart had been poisoned in his favorite restaurant. There had been follow-up ugliness in England, France, and Canada. A British Member of Parliament, an associate of De Gaulle's, and one of Ottawa's ranking industrialists. The assassins had never been caught, and no connection had been established between the killings. Bullets, poison, and a hand grenade in the case of the M. P. had fashioned the assassinations.

  It might be a pattern. It might not. Perhaps it was only the disease of the times showing. Times when all men everywhere were jockeying for position, fighting for power, and using any end to justify the means.

  I was reminded of Dallas again. I discontinued my homework and returned all the books to their comfortable shelves. A cute and perky librarian, whose horn-rimmed glasses only served to accent her cuteness and perkiness, smiled at me as I walked by her desk. Looking at her braced me. Her bust line wasn't something you usually found in the New York public library.