Violence in Velvet Read online

  The distance between us was all of ten feet and I couldn’t make a move.

  Her lips settled in a pinched line and her little chin was grim. She stared at me and from the look in her eyes, I could see she wasn’t using all her marbles. She didn’t look at me as if I was the guy she had come in with. I started to age ten years.

  “Lucille,” I said it as evenly as I could. “Put that thing down. It might be loaded.”

  I wasn’t so sure that it wasn’t. Sure, I’d seen the empty magazine on the chair and a dead body and jumped to the conclusion that the .45 had shot its load. But one particular function of semiautomatic weapons is that the firing of one shot always pushes the next bullet into the firing chamber. Which meant that the gun might still have at least one last slug in the breach ready to go off and kill people.

  I was sweating now. Because Lucille was looking at me as if she’d never seen me before. Her eyes were as unfriendly as I had ever seen a kid’s eyes. I couldn’t recognize her voice either.

  “You’re a bad man—” she husked at me in a stage whisper. “You killed my Mommy—you killed her!”

  How do you handle a thing like this? I’d never run into anything like it before. And I didn’t have a bar of candy on me. Not even a stick of chewing gum. I felt something wet on my forehead. Cold. I was sweating.

  “Remember me, Lucille?” I was as gentle as a mother. “Mister Noon? You came to see me a little while ago, you paid me a dollar ninety-eight cents? To help you? I said I would and I came with you—”

  The .45 wavered in her fingers. It was too heavy for her, but she brought it erect again with a proud effort.

  “You’re lying to me—everybody lies to me. Why do they? I’m not a little girl—I’m not! Even Daddy lies to me—”

  “Why does he lie to you, Lucille?”

  Keep her talking, Noon. Keep her talking. Occupy her mind until she forgets all about that thing in her hand.

  But she didn’t want to talk about it. She wasn’t going to talk about it. She was sick of the subject. And I was out of luck.

  “No!” she flared. “I’m sick of lies—sick of grownups lying—and I’m going to do with you what you did to Mommy—”

  I saw it coming, saw it working in her crazy little face. Saw that I couldn’t so much as lift a finger to stop her. She raised the gun with an effort, pointed it high up toward my chest.

  She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun erupted in her fingers.

  THREE

  Three things happened at once.

  A .45 slug buried itself in the wall behind me, well over my head, the noise roared around the room, and Lucille shrieked—just like a ten-year-old kid.

  Just like a ten-year-old kid she had aimed the .45 for the spot she had wanted to hit me. The heart. You don’t fire .45s like that if you want to get results. A .45 bucks and rears like a horse in your hands and you have to allow for it by sighting the gun below the point you intend to hit. Even a grown man has a tough time mastering Colt’s murder weapon. Lucille didn’t have a chance.

  The five-hundred-pound force she had sent out with a tug of her little finger recoiled and dumped her back on her fanny with a thud. The gun flew up out of her hand like a magic trick. The next thing I knew she was crying.

  I walked quickly to her, picked her up and looked at her. I slapped her. Not hard. Just short and light. The tears stopped and her eyes widened. She had nearly blown my head off with her hysterics. Kid or no kid, she had to be taught a lesson.

  “Do that again and you won’t sit down for a week’s worth of meals. Who taught you a crazy stunt like that?”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yes, oh,” I rasped. “Little girls should be seen and not heard. I ought—” Using such an oldie like that convinced me I was only going to say things I really didn’t mean. That she had really upset me. Well, she had, but I wasn’t going to take it out on her.

  “Look, Lucille. Sit down on the couch like a good little girl. And just watch me, huh?”

  “Mister Noon—” she piped up shrilly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you! You’re my friend—honest. Golly, I don’t know whatever came over me—”

  “I don’t know whatever either. But we won’t talk about it anymore, will we? We won’t think about it anymore either. It never happened. When the nice men in the nice blue uniforms show up, remember we won’t say a word, will we?”

  I was prompting her and she knew it. Her kid’s face flew open in a resentful amazement.

  “The police. Are the police coming here? When?”

  I grinned. “Don’t be so thrilled about it all. This isn’t going to make them feel any too good, I can tell you. Looks like a real headache to me.”

  “You want an aspirin, Mister Noon? Daddy’s got plenty in the bathroom. You can have all you want, Mister Noon.” All of a sudden she was a kid again. A cute overtalkative kid. I grinned again. I never was the stern disciplinarian type anyway.

  “I feel fine, Lucille. Never better. What time does Daddy come home?”

  She had really settled down by this time because she made a great show of tugging a sleeve back to look at a tiny jeweled watch that ran around her thin wrist like a ring.

  “Just another half hour or so, Mister Noon. Daddy had a matinee today.” She stopped admiring her watch and looked up at me. “Do you know what a matinee is, Mister Noon?”

  “No, Lucille,” I lied. “What is a matinee?”

  Her answer was eager. “A matinee is an afternoon performance of a show that generally plays only at evening. There!” She smiled triumphantly. “Now you know.”

  “Now I know. So Daddy had a matinee today? And what time did he leave the house?”

  Her eyes fell and her lower lip puckered.

  “Do you have to ask me that?”

  “If I don’t, the nice policeman will. Wouldn’t you rather tell me?”

  She considered me seriously. Then she nodded.

  “I’d rather tell you.” She took an elaborate deep breath. “Daddy didn’t sleep home last night.”

  “Didn’t he now? And why not? Doesn’t he like it here?”

  “Well, he likes it all right I guess—he used to, until—” I could see she was playing around with the idea of some more tears. But she caught hold of herself. “Mommy and Daddy have been fighting lately. Terrible fights. All the time.”

  The cops were going to love that one. I shook my head. The kid must have been part-clairvoyant because she rose to the defense almost immediately.

  “But they loved each other—they really did. Mommy and Daddy got along fine until Miss Tucker came along.”

  I almost groaned. Homicide would hop on that in a second. I tried to be gentle in what had all the earmarks of a lost cause. Lucille I felt sorry for. The poor kid was beginning to look more like an orphan each minute.

  “Miss Tucker is a friend of Daddy’s?”

  Lucille gave me a good view of a determined little chin.

  “Miss Tucker is Daddy’s agent. Do you know what an agent is?” I nodded automatically. Lucille looked disappointed but went on. “Miss Tucker handles all of Daddy’s affairs. His business, that is. Miss Tucker is a very nice lady. Her first name is Helen.”

  “Don’t you like Miss Tucker?”

  “She’s all right, I guess,” she admitted grudgingly. “But Daddy does spend an awful lot of time with her. Gee, he used to be with us all the time. We sing together. Daddy taught me all the songs from his new show. ’Course he wouldn’t let me sing the “Mistress Song” from the show. Said it wasn’t nice for nice little girls. So we never sang that together. But one day he was away and I played it over and over in his studio room. It’s not so bad. Leastways, I don’t know why I can’t sing it. Do you know the ‘Mistress Song,’ Mister Noon?”

  Did I know it? You couldn’t pass a record shop on Broadway without it sexing up your eardrums. But Guy Prentice was right. It was no song for nice little girls. I didn’t want to hear the next
question (do you know what mistresses are, Mister Noon?) so I asked one of my own:

  “What time did you leave here, Lucille? When you met me and the fat man, had you just come from here? Think carefully now.”

  The Prentices had another actor in the family. Lucille did a Margaret O’Brien with her piquant little face and screwed it up thoughtfully.

  “Let me see. I had a cone at that nice drugstore around the corner. I stopped to watch the dogs, there was an accident on Fifty-third Street—yes, then I went right up to your place—”

  I dug out a Camel and lit it. I eyed her real close now. But catching a kid in a lie isn’t easy.

  “What made you think of me—I mean how did you know where to go to find a detective? And why a private detective? You couldn’t have read the letters on my window from the street. It’s three floors up, and you would have gotten a stiff neck.”

  She smiled mischievously.

  “I’ve heard things. About you and the bar you always drink in. I can read too. My tutor, that’s Miss Slocum, says I’m very advanced for my age. I can—”

  “Who am I to argue with Miss Slocum?” I turned away and looked at the thing under the shawl on the floor. I’m no medical man, but from my rough calculations the dame on the floor had been dead two or more hours. I looked at Lucille again. “Do me a favor, honey? See if there’s a paper in the house. It has to be today’s paper.” The ones on the desk were all old editions. “You know—the Mirror or the News. Even the Times—”

  Her eyes were saucers to put cups on.

  “You mean you’ve got a clue—you’ve found something incriminating? Already?”

  “Yeah. I got a clue. Now how about that paper?”

  For answer, she skipped out of sight into one of the other rooms. I could hear the patter of her small feet exploring. I took a tug on the Camel. Yeah, I had a clue all right. Little Girl comes home to find murdered mother. Little Girl should be grieving over the loss of a loved one. Little Girl is not grieving. You figure it out.

  I didn’t have any more time for figuring or flying guesses. Lucille came hurtling back, waving a battered morning edition of the News like it was some kind of pennant.

  “I found this, Mister Noon!” She sounded so delighted you would have thought we were playing Buried Treasure. “You want the theatrical section, don’t you?”

  The kid was three jumps ahead of me. But I was too curious to ask myself just how she’d know that. But she was right. I wanted that section all right. For a very good reason.

  I checked the page of box ads for Broadway shows that the News features every day. Musical and straight plays alike. Kick and Sing was the third show listed. I scanned the box carefully with the feeling that Lucille was peeking over my shoulder. I found what I was looking for:

  “A rousing musical!”—Atkinson, Times

  GUY PRENTICE in

  KICK AND SING

  Broadway’s musical bonanza

  53rd St. Thea., W. of B’y, CI 7-9700

  Evgs. at 8:30. Mats. Sat. and Wed. at 2:40

  The last line was all that meant anything to me.

  Today was Wednesday. Kick and Sing had had a matinee performance. At two-forty by the clocks.

  And according to my clock and my opinions on rigor mortis, Guy Prentice had been going through his paces in the season’s smash musical while his wife was getting her head blown off six blocks away, while his kid was running around looking high and low for a private detective.

  Now, if his understudy had gone on for him, then it was a different thing entirely. If he hadn’t, then Guy Prentice was the owner and sole proprietor of the most ironclad alibi since the Garden of Eden.

  Lucille was breathing excitedly, her eyes shining.

  “Did you find something, Mister Noon?”

  “Things, Lucille. Just things.”

  “You gonna tell me what? I can help, I can—”

  “Easy, honey. It’s too early yet for guessing games. Wait till the nice men from Headquarters get here.”

  She was all set on keeping after me, pumping me with questions, when a cool voice behind us said:

  “What’s going on here?”

  I spun on my heel, my hand automatically flying to the armpit holster where my only argument in life is kept. My spinning accomplished a couple of things in rapid order.

  The tall dame standing in the center of the room stepped back as if I’d hit her, one gloved hand raised in reflexive self-defense. Her stepping back brought her in plain view of the covered-up corpse on the floor. The high heels poking out from under the spread must have made the identification almost immediate. The tall dame, who was dressed as smart as a dame can dress and still manage to look soft, feminine and desirable, let out a low scream.

  And Lucille came hopping around me and yelling in her shrillest, most Junior Miss voice, “Miss Tucker! What are you doing here?”

  The sudden glimpse of the corpse, my going for my hardware, and Lucille’s tearing-right-through-you shriek performed amazing miracles. Miss Tucker went haywire.

  She fumbled for something in her bag, the something turned out to be a nickel-plated .22, she dropped it, shrieked like a frightened chicken, picked it up, dropped it again. And then she solved everything with ridiculous ease. She passed out cold. Her tall, smooth femininity took the floor like a dying swan.

  A sort of beret affair with a short black feather in it rolled off her head and settled beside her.

  I got up from behind the couch that I had used for cover and concealment feeling like seven kinds of a jackass. Between kids playing with loaded .45s and women who were well dressed with this year’s nickel-plated .22s, I was beside myself.

  Lucille was watching me in high glee. I looked at her. Oh, to be ten again. I kept my anger down.

  “Go get Miss Tucker a glass of water. She’s fainted.”

  “Why do people faint so much, Mister Noon?”

  If the kid wasn’t ten, I would have thought it was a rib. But she was ten. And it wasn’t a rib.

  “Go get the water, Gunga Din. And don’t ask so many questions. When the cops come, we’ll play all you want to. They’ll have about umpteen questions to ask your Miss Tucker. And if you want to play so bad, I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Good.” She clapped her hands. “What is it?”

  “Does Miss Tucker always come calling on your father and mother with a gun?”

  That shut her up somehow.

  “ ’Scuse me,” she chirped. “I’ll go get the water.”

  I went to the window and stared down from the little balcony. A couple of dark blue cars had slid up to the entrance of the building. The boys from Homicide.

  Guy Prentice’s apartment was getting room service in a hurry.

  FOUR

  I had about five minutes to take care of something. I took care of it. I scooped up the empty .45 that had jumped out of Lucille’s hand and mopped off the butt of the thing with my pocket handkerchief. It wouldn’t do to have the cops find her tiny prints all over it, and two to one the kid had already messed up the original set if there had been any.

  Lucille was wide-eyed at my activity. Then she only had eyes for the long-legged lovely Miss Tucker, who was spread across the floor like someone who had had too good a time at the party.

  Miss Tucker was moaning low, and Lucille was sloppily trying to revive her with a glass of water held to her lips. I shrugged my shoulders, took the glass from the kid and let Miss Tucker have its contents by slowly Niagara-ing it down on her classic features. Lucille giggled.

  Miss Tucker came erect like a shot and sputtered indignantly. I blew my cork.

  “Shut up and listen to me, Miss America. The trick with the .22 has cancelled out any nice manners I might have had. We haven’t time for introductions. The cops are about ten feet away from us now. So we’ll forget that you showed up with a gun and anything else other than who you are and what you are. Later on we’ll talk it all out. But not now. This is plain old messy m
urder. So don’t louse anything up with dead issues. Got that?”

  “Why—how dare you—” In between spluttering and blinking a pair of twin delights that passed for eyes, she was trying to act the outraged lady. “I don’t care to make any deals with you—Mister Whatever-Your-Name-Is!”

  “His name is Noon, Miss Tucker,” Lucille piped up, obviously enjoying herself immensely. “You know. Like twelve o’clock.”

  “Now you know,” I told Helen Tucker. “So dry up or I’ll strike you twelve times.”

  Steam started to charge out of her exquisitely turned-up nostrils and her close-cut blonde hair shook in agitation, but I had turned my back on her. “Oh!” flew out of her like jet propulsion but I couldn’t be bothered. The outside door had thundered open and heavy feet were murdering the floor. It sounded like a small army.

  “In here,” I called.

  They came in. A big, collective they that was about seven men in topcoats. Some of them wore fedoras, some didn’t. But they all had large shiny badges pinned to their coat lapels.

  One of the group cursed and said, “Oh, no. It can’t be. It’s a mirage.”

  “It’s me,” I admitted. “But I’m only here on a pass. An invite. Hello, Hadley.”

  Lieutenant Hadley, recently promoted, followed his prominent stomach and out-thrust lower lip to the center of the room, turned, and looked at me. He grunted.

  “You place this call, Noon?”

  “Yep. With my little bow and arrow. The kid is too young to know about places like Hell and Police Headquarters.” I grinned. “The good-looking dame just got here. Her name is Helen Tucker. And she doesn’t quite know how to act about it yet.”

  Hadley snorted and turned to his men. “Okay, get on it. I want prints, pictures. The whole works. We’ll save the carcass till the M.E. gets here.” He called two of his men to him, conferred briefly with them and soon they went out the way they had come in. He wasn’t kidding me. He was going to check with the house staff on just when everybody had come into the building. The rest of his crew started to set up shop.