The Bedroom Bolero Read online

  Cast of Characters

  … according to their theme song

  ED NOON “Just in Time”

  MELISSA MERCER “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”

  CAPTAIN MONKS “A Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One”

  FLO COOPER “My Time Is Your Time”

  THE EVIL EVELYN “Witchcraft”

  HOWIE “Keep It Gay”

  FATS ORELOB “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”

  ADA GRABOWSKI “All of a Sudden My Heart Sings”

  SANDERSON, JAMES T. “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”

  MISS FENSON “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”

  DAWN DARK, EVE ELLINGHAM, ALICE ALBIN, THELMA TORRANCE HILDA HALE “And Then My Heart Stood Still”

  THE BOLERO KILLER Ravel’s “Bolero”

  … and some of them get funeral marches

  THE BEDROOM BOLERO

  Michael Avallone

  Ed Noon Mystery #13

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  BEVERLY HILLS

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 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. http://mouseauditorium.tumblr.com/

  Story Merchant Books

  9601 Wilshire Boulevard #1202

  Beverly Hills CA 90210

  http://www.storymerchant.com/books.html

  For Susan Avallone

  who makes everything perfect

  1 — The Sound of Murder

  There are many things to mark the day when the Bolero business began. It’s harder to remember the Alamo than that particular Thursday morning. It was a day when three unrelated things happened.

  A celebration.

  A mourning.

  A mystery.

  The celebration was ED NOON PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS on a plate glass door of a new office on West Forty-Fourth Street. The mourning was a long-distance phone call from Hollywood telling me that Peg Temple had married her agent, dousing my torch for all time in a three-dollar ceremony in Reno, Nevada. The mystery was why I had hired a Negress as a personal secretary. But all three things added up.

  The office was larger and more expensive than my former mouse auditorium had been thanks to an increase in my assets and a noticeable swelling of my National City savings account. The marriage came not so much as a shock but as a delayed fuse finally exploding the time bomb in my psyche. The Negress was the inevitable result of about nine interviews with beehive hairdos and painted fingernails sent over by the Yes Agency. I had said no to the nine and yes to the Negress because she had been the only one to take dictation well or strike me as a real thinker. The beehives had all looked at me with bees in their bonnets and gold in their eyes. The Negress’ mystery was really quite simple. She was the best girl for the job.

  She was a slight, miniature doll of a girl, with large eyes and a wholesome mouth that didn’t need paint. Her clothes were plain yet tasteful, fully advertising that she knew what to do with her hard-earned money. But there was a flash of disbelief in her eyes when I told her the job was hers. I didn’t like the sudden wariness I saw in her face.

  “Why are you giving me the job?” she asked curiously. “Think I’ll be easy?”

  “Melissa,” I said, “may I call you Mel? Forget all that went before. I don’t pinch, flirt or rub noses in the office. I’m hiring you to take calls, answer my mail and warn me when bill collectors are laying in wait. Nothing extra.”

  Her wariness weakened. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been had before by white men. I’ve worn myself out trying to convince them that the colored girl is not a cliché. Things are different now but the way some bosses carry on you wouldn’t think so.”

  “I’m enlightened, Melissa. Believe me. We’re going to get along fine.”

  “But I am black,” she persisted. “And you’re white. And this looks like the kind of set-up where they’ll just be the two of us together in the office most of the time. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “I asked you first,” she smiled. “I was only thinking of you.”

  “Then stop apologizing to me. You don’t owe me anything but a good performance and straight-shooting.”

  “That,” she said, taking off the green jacket of her outfit and hanging it on the old wooden clothes tree from my salad days, “is what you’ve got, Mr. Noon.”

  “Call me Ed,” I said, “and go to your desk and get organized. We need some business this month so we both can remain acquaintances.”

  The phone call from Hollywood came about an hour later while I was enjoying the stepping-up feel of the walnut-stained desk I had ordered from Macy’s. It wasn’t exactly Executive Suite stuff but it was a far cry from the old job in the auditorium on West Fifty-Sixth. I felt like burning some cigarette holes in the top just to make myself feel at home.

  The intercom buzzed and my new secretary’s voice crackled over the box. “L.A. calling, Ed. Person-to-person. A Miss Peg Temple. You in?”

  “Thanks, Melissa, I’ll take it.” My heart rolled over and stretched its toes while memory played a lot of lousy tricks on me. A soft bed, blonde hair glowing in the darkness and a fracturing whisper that said, “I love you, Eddie, but I have to be a famous actress or I’ll go nuts!”

  Fame. She’d lost herself in twelve Z movies and one foreign horror film that set her career back ten years.

  “Eddie, it’s me.”

  “Hi, you.”

  “How are you? How have you been?”

  “Living. How’s Hollywood?”

  “Just Hollywood. Eddie, I got married in Reno this morning and I wanted to tell you first.”

  “Before Lolly? I’m flattered.” The heart closed its eyes, lay still, and died. The torch vanished in a pool of mud and went gluckkkkkk!

  “Yes, Eddie. Murray Rose and me. He’s a swell guy. It’s been a long time, Eddie —”

  “Yes, Peg, a very long time.”

  There wasn’t much more after that. We talked like parrots, made noises that were all clichés and nothing about our conversation could have suggested to wiretappers that we had had one of the most gloriously intimate and woefully murderous relationships on record. When she hung up, I felt like crying. I had a glass of Scotch instead from the lower drawer of the Macy’s desk.

  Melissa came into the inner office a while later. I looked up from a stack of new mail, circulars and broadsides from liquor stores, TV repair shops and cleaning establishments in the neighborhood. The status seekers were trying to rope me in fast. Melissa looked apologetic.

  “Something wrong, Mel?”

  “Do you carry a gun?”

  I blinked. “Not religiously but I do have a .45 in the desk for which I am duly licensed, authorized and bonded to own courtesy of the New York Police Department. Why?”

  Her big eyes rounded. “You haven’t been using it lately, have you?”

  “No, not lately. I never use it unless I have to. Again — why?”

  “There’s a man outside from the Law. A Captain Monks. I just wanted to be sure you aren’t in any kind of trouble —”

  “Mel, I’m grateful. But that man out there happens to be the only really decent man I know. Show him in and don’t spare the cordiality. He’s a sweetheart and won’t bite you even if he does look like an angry dog.”

  Melissa flashed me a dazzling smile. I was on my feet as Monks shouldered heavily through the door with that Charles Bickford thrust of his big body. He tipped his hat as Melissa went out and closed the door again
. Monks smiled at me blankly, grunting a hello. His Police Academy eyes took in the new layout with one swift appraisal and then came back to me. He sat down in the new client’s chair across from me. His enormous hands remained buried in the pockets of a handsome grey tweed coat.

  “You are getting organized,” he growled. “Two rooms and a secretary. Real life is getting more like TV every day.”

  I laughed. “Anything they can do, I can do better. This official, Mike, or did you bring me an office-warming present?”

  He grunted in the negative. “Half and half, really. I did want to see the setup. Looks good. How come you picked a colored girl for a secretary?”

  “She can type seventy-five words a minute, laughs at all my jokes, and was willed to me by my rich old Georgian uncle,” I snapped sarcastically. “Mike, you surprise me. I thought you were keen on equal rights and all that jazz.”

  “Can it,” he growled. “You know where I stand at this late date. I just wonder why you always find it easier to do things the hard way. Bound to cause talk down here. This is Times Square country and everybody will lay six, two and even she isn’t only sorting your mail. Don’t you care?”

  “General Grant, my sword, suh.” I shrugged. “What was the other half?”

  Monks smiled. He has a face that belongs to the movie archetype of bartenders, ex-pugs and Marine Sergeants. But I find it pleasant like kids’ Christmas toys and big woolly bears. When he smiles, he lights up a room. When he doesn’t, you feel like putting in a call to Con Ed.

  “What do you know about the Bolero?”

  “Come again?”

  “The Bolero. Ever hear of it?”

  I composed myself. Coming from him, it was an unexpected query. Captains of Homicide Departments and the world of entertainment are uneasy bedfellows.

  “Depends on what you’re talking about, Mike. The dance? The music? Or those cute jackets that look so nice on busty broads?”

  “Music,” he muttered. “An instrumental number on a long-playing record. That Bolero. Who’s this joker Ravel?”

  I was still confused.

  “What’s the Bolero got to do with Headquarters?”

  He took his hat off, a nice grey borsalino and started recreasing it with his big hands. His face was patient and frustrated. McGlaglen reincarnated.

  “Found a stiff on the East Side yesterday morning. I’ll fill you in later. There was a record player near the body. One record on the turntable. This Bolero piece. It must have been playing over and over again. It was on when we got there and kept on going until we turned it off. I know you’re up on these things and got a noodle for screwy touches. Sometimes, I think you would have made a good murderer. If there is a good murderer. Before I can tell you anything about the case, I’d like you to tell me whatever you know, without going to the library, about the Bolero.”

  New office, marriage, colored secretary and now some obscure mish-mash about a piece of music. The day was a grab-bag.

  “Well, Mike —” I leaned back in my chair, once more regretting I hadn’t held out with the Macy’s salesman for an old-fashioned swivel. “It was composed by Maurice Ravel. He’s dead now but the Bolero made him world famous. You say Ravel’s Bolero like you say ham and eggs or Nichols and May. It’s a sort of endless repeat of one musical theme. I may be wrong but I always heard from my educated friends that Ravel composed it for one of his mistresses. Or some dame, at least. I know a lot of people who see the music as a close approximation of the sex act. The Bolero more than anything else in the world of arts. Beyond that, I don’t know much of interest. Frankly, it’s always been a favorite of mine.”

  Mike Monks swore. “Sex, huh? Damn. I knew it. Something smacked me about the whole setup.”

  “What setup?”

  “The scene of the crime. The corpse was naked and the room —” He paused and shook his head. “I might have figured you’d know something. I know I heard the record before but it never stuck with me. I’ve got no ear for music. Thanks, Ed. I think you’ve put me on to something.” He got to his big feet.

  “Slow down,” I said. “Aren’t you going to tell me the rest of it?”

  “Not just yet,” he apologized. “Let me track down a few things first. Then I’ll get back to you. Okay?

  “You’re the Captain.”

  “You said it. The D.A. wants me to get going on this one.”

  “Thanks for coming, Mike.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Noon.”

  He Bickforded out the office door and I forgot about the Bolero. There was nothing really to think about. It was Monks’ problem if it was anything. A homicide. I went back to the mail on my desk.

  Along about three-fifteen, after a break for lunch in which I had Melissa call the Coffee Cup downstairs for a salami on wheat sandwich, I had a visitor. An insufficient word to describe a walking jewelry store.

  Melissa opened my door and ushered in a glittering creation which took four gleaming steps to the chair Monks had vacated earlier and shimmered to a seat, throwing off rays of Cartier’s, Tiffany’s, Van Cleef and Arpels. The creation was blonde and man-made. Somebody’s wife, daughter, sister, aunt or niece. Circumstances had made her a lover and mistress. It turned out she was none of these things anymore. She was a thirty-eight-year-old divorcee, childless, recently returned from Mexico, whose ex-husband was taking the split the wrong way. She needed protection from his pestering phone calls, harassing mail and continual loitering on her thresh-holds in jealous moodiness. She would pay me a large sum of money to beat the poor guy up and scare him off.

  All of the jewelry was insured and belonged to her. The tribute of her married days.

  For reasons best known to myself, I sympathized with the cut-loose husband and refused the job.

  “Really,” she reallyed in a voice made unreal by the sudden acquisition of freedom and a hefty divorce settlement. “I do wish you’d reconsider. This means a great deal to me and I’d be properly grateful. You could name your own price.”

  “Sorry, Miss Fenson. We aren’t beating up any ex-husbands these days. There’s enough inhumanity in the world as it is.”

  “Really,” she said again. “Are you or are you not a private detective? I thought this was your line of work.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “But in all the movies I’ve ever seen —”

  “Miss Mercer will show you out. Oh, Melissa —”

  The turned-down client’s eyes were amused. She rose to her feet archly. “Oh, well. What can I expect of a man who hires Negroes?”

  I answered her before Melissa came in.

  “Haven’t you heard? The South is rising again. So long, sister. Don’t come back again.”

  She gathered her baubles, bangles and bitchiness about her and stormed out of the office. Melissa blinked after her.

  “Customer?” she asked.

  “Bitch,” I replied. “Forget her. She’s got the noose around a man’s neck and she’s strangling him with the complete sanction of the courts of the land.”

  “You’re in a lousy mood,” Melissa smiled. “She say anything about me?”

  “Miss Mercer, get back to your desk or I’ll fire you.”

  The first day in the new office wore to a futile close. I had tried to adjust to my new office but I was homesick for the auditorium. I missed the swivel chair, the roll-top desk, the Monroe calendar and the cockroaches. Money is indeed not everything. I had also forgotten Monks’ Bolero quiz.

  Melissa Mercer went home at five o’clock, thanked me again for the job and promised to come in at nine sharp in the morning. She was going home by subway to Harlem and I reflected that this too was an easy flaw in my own thinking. I had assumed she was one of those intelligent, emancipated Negresses who had moved to a furnished room in Manhattan because she could not endure the poorer elements in her own kind. I gave myself a mental kick in the shorts for patronizing my secretary and went back to the Scotch in the desk. Lots of conflicting things were on my min
d. The least of which was Mike Monks’ Bolero. Which is funny considering how much of my time was going to be consumed by it from that point on.

  I was only thinking about Peg Temple making love with Murray Rose and getting sadder and drunker by the glassful.

  The phone on my desk rang about seven o’clock. I must have been a little looped by then. I remember the bottle was half-empty or half-full, depending on which state of physics is the truer one.

  It was Monks. His gravelly voice was upset.

  “Ed, you busy?”

  “Just closing shop for the day. You want to bowl a few lines, old pal?”

  “No, thanks. But I want you to meet me at 77 Riverside Drive in about a half hour. Can you make it?”

  I must have been drunk. “Mike, baby. How sweet. You’ve got a blind date for me. Is she pretty?”

  “Ed, are you tight? If you are, forget the offer. I want you on your toes. This is getting pretty serious at my end and I don’t want to cloud this up more than necessary.”

  “Sober as a sermon,” I lied. “What’s that address again?”

  He repeated the number and added an apartment designation. I wrote it down on a reminder pad which was an advertising gift from the liquor store.

  “Want to tell me what it’s all about, Mike?”

  “Sure,” he sounded like he was talking with his teeth clenched. I know the sound. “Somebody played the Bolero again and there’s another stiff to match the first one.”

  “Somebody? Who?” I asked foolishly.

  “A murderer,” he said quietly. “The most fiendish bastard I’ve ever run across. You can see for yourself in a half hour.” He hung up with a crash of receiver.

  I was sober when a yellow taxi let me out in front of a four-story house on Riverside Drive.

  Number 77 was a maniac’s workshop.

  2 — Death in Ecstasy

  Monks showed me the body.

  “In here, Ed. And Sanderson,” he bellowed over his shoulder, “keep everybody out of this room until we’re finished. That includes the Lab boys and the photographers. They’ll have plenty of time later. I’ve got to do some thinking before they go through their paces. And I want to look at everything before a hundred people track up this setup.”