The Girl in the Cockpit Read online

  The once-in-two-decades blonde had said it and done it all for me. With rash and positive action, without a by-my-leave or even a Hello-is-Johnny-here. Shaking my head at the inconstancy of all things, the idiocy of life in general and the faint suspicion that I had wandered into a private garden, opening somebody else's pet can of worms, I headed back for the living room. Guns still up and ready.

  "Oh, Johnny," I could hear a throaty, gorgeously female voice crooning and murmuring. "You crazy kid—what did you want to go and do this for? You think this is going to help anything——?"

  "You leave me alone," came the answering snarl, more dry-eyed than before. "He's the sonofabitch who did it and——"

  I walked back into my own living room, where a couple of crazy and unique strangers were sharing the long sofa and I said as brightly as I could, considering the circumstances, "Well, now. Here we are, all present and accounted for. Shall we begin again before I throw the both of you out on your ears? The time has come for plain talk and plain answers. Or you're both going to spend what's left of this night in the hoosegow. As Brian Donlevy said, as the ratty Sergeant Markoff in Beau Geste—'I promise you.' Now, who's going to start first?"

  The most beautiful blonde stirred from the arms of the young kid whom she had been embracing and lending a motherly shoulder, completely belying the disparity in their ages, and started up from the depths of the sofa with all the concentrated devastating effect that stunning young beauty can have—no matter how old the man gazing upon such a miracle, or how lecherous.

  "I'm sorry about all this," she breathed in a husky sexily-aware voice. She even had the trick of wetting her cherry-red lips as she spoke.

  "Johnny just hasn't been himself since—since it happened. Please, if you'd known Dad, you'd know what his dying means to Johnny——"

  I didn't move too far from the doorway, nor did I sit down. I holstered one .45 and let the other one dangle in my hand. Bells of some kind were tingling all over me again, the sign of the beginning of something.

  Oh, not Love. Certainly not that! Just that slight but very distinct sensation that I was poised on the springboard of some new and fresh trouble. Old sensations are not easy to come by and when you earn them you know what they mean. This one sounded familiar. The trouble, not the girl. The mix-up, not the dead man.

  "Okay, then," I said. "Ladies first. Start talking, lady."

  The fundamental things do apply "as Time goes by."

  Especially crime things.

  So help me . . . Casablanca.

  And all you Bogart fans out there somewhere.

  GIRL

  "I'm so sorry." The girl said it all over again, in that kind of voice a great actress works years to perfect. "I don't know what Johnny's done but please forgive him. He's been out of his head, that's all. When I found Dad's gun missing and he didn't come home for supper and all his pals stalled me with some fish story about him being in Chinatown because he had a sudden craving for chow mein—well I had a good idea he'd gone hunting for you—"

  I held up a tired hand. She was going too fast for me, just as she had obviously grown too fast for her years. She was young in that stacked, developed, incredible way that made you know she couldn't be much more than twenty-one. But you also knew that when she'd been as young as Johnny, or even younger, she'd made every guy she ever met feel like a dirty old man. She had what every man-killer had since the day they threw away their first training bra. Sex appeal. Cleopatra had it, Liz had it and Ann-Margret has it. Built-in at birth, I suppose.

  Vera Miles certainly has it, too. In large dollops.

  "Now stop. I'm Ed Noon. This is my apartment. I'm a private detective. I feel like an alien. So help me register, will you?"

  Johnny pulled away from the girl, still glaring up at me from the sofa. His face was as drop-dead-Noon as ever. His full lower lip twitched.

  "Liar. Killer. Don't listen to him, Terry. I know he killed Papa and I got the proof that'll fry him—"

  "Sssh," she shushed him. The sound should have sounded silly but she made music with the hiss. "You don't know anything of the sort. Keep still now and let me talk to the man. That's only fair."

  "Be my guest," I said feebly, watching them both more closely.

  The girl turned from him. Her knees were now together. She looked up at me. It was too early for all essentials of her description to hit home. But I saw that the violet eyes, the cherry-red mouth and the rest of her face were right off a drawing board. The figure, decked out in a purple mini with a furry kind of toggle-coat unbuttoned down the front to reveal the apples of all men's eyes, was cumulatively staggering.

  "I'm Terry Ricco, Mr. Noon. This is my brother. Johnny. He's a good kid, really. No acid or grass for him but——You see, Dad was killed last week. Maybe you read about it in the papers. John Ricco?" The violet eyes suddenly got colder and older. Just like that, as if she had tacked on five years. "Somebody shot him in the back as he was opening the safe in his old office on Tenth Avenue. The back of the head, Mr. Noon. Giovanni Ricco—he was everybody's friend."

  I stiffened at the name. Time and memory suddenly came at me from all four corners of the room, crowding in fast, because now there wasn't a .45 and fast-moving young couple to confuse things. To mix me up.

  The past slammed me right between the eyes. Hard.

  "John Junkyard," I said very slowly. "That Giovanni Ricco?"

  "Yes," Terry Ricco said, still staring at me. As her brother was. Both of them had seen the recognition in my eyes, and responded.

  "I'm sorry, kids. I did know him. Real well. But I didn't hear about him. I just got back from Mallorca. I was on vacation and I always forget about the newspapers when I'm trying to have fun in the sun. It's a bad habit of mine. Like tuning out on everything."

  "Sure," Johnny grated. "Convenient, too."

  I ignored that. I remembered John Junkyard very well now. The man who had started a small junkyard on Tenth Avenue and built it into a million-dollar business because he was a genius at salvaging old metal and landing government contracts. World War Two had made him a big-time millionaire and he had done almost all of it without any assist from the Mafia or any other gangster affiliation. A sweetheart of an old Italian who had never forgotten his humble beginnings. The medallion of St. Jude the Obscure that had always hung about his swarthy throat—the Patron Saint of the Impossible—had been for real. John Junkyard had never screwed people on weekdays and then gone to church on Sunday. It had never been his way. He was a good man.

  John Junkyard's family was still staring at me.

  A violet-eyed angel-woman named Terry and a sullen-faced kid called Johnny. A "Junior," obviously, with all a Junior's hang-ups. A Junior who might just never grow up to be the man his father was. And maybe knew it. A kid who also wouldn't take his eyes off the .45 in my hand.

  "I'd like to hear the rest of it," I said. "From the top."

  "Dad was aces with us, Mr. Noon," Torry Ricco murmured low, holding on to her brother's hands as if to quiet him. "Oh, he had some gangster friends I didn't exactly approve of. Must have been necessary, I guess. After all, when you control a rich enterprise as Dad did, they always want to cut in somehow, don't they? It's their way of doing things. Though I'm sure Dad managed to be pretty much of a hold-out. The police always considered Dad on the square and I just know he wouldn't have gone in for anything even a shade illegal or under the table—it just wasn't his style."

  "I know all that, Terry," I interrupted, keeping an eye on her brother. "Get to the heart of the matter, will you?"

  "Dad gave us everything," she went on easily, as if I hadn't opened my mouth at all. The musical voice was as controlled as a virtuoso violin. "Our mother died a few years after Johnny was born and he's been kind of my baby ever since——"

  "The hell I am!" Johnny roared. "Cut it out, will you? Tell him what he already knows. I want to hear what his cop-out is!"

  "Yeah," I agreed, "tell me, Terry. So I'll know, too."
r />   She sighed and the toggle-coat jumped admirably. Eye-fillingly.

  "I don't know where Johnny got his wild notion about you. I'm sure one of Dad's gangster acquaintances had the killing done. You know their way: a contract man and a hit? Well, that's all I can think of. Frank Conroy was always trying to finagle his way into Dad's business. Something to do with the docks. You know, shipments of scrap metal. I'm sure the police are working on that lead right now. But Dad didn't have an enemy in the world, Mr. Noon. And last week he went back to the old junkyard where he started so many years ago . . . to take some papers out of the office safe and——" Her musical tone flatted. "They found him lying on the floor. On his stomach. Shot through the back of the head with a .45 automatic."

  I held up the Army gun in my hand and waggled it, pointedly.

  "No," she said, a half-smile etching her face. "That happens to be Dad's old gun. A buddy of his back from Europe after the war gave it to him as a souvenir. It was loaded and had not been fired in years . . . I mentioned it to the police."

  "It's fired now, Terry. Johnny tried to part my hair the opposite way with it about a half hour ago." I shrugged to show I wasn't sore.

  Her violet eyes widened and she turned to confront her brother.

  "Johnny, is that true?"

  He evaded her accusing glance and looked at me instead, eyes dead-on. "Why not? He killed Papa. The dirty, murdering bastard! Don't let him fool you, Terry! Just because he looks like a winner."

  Terry's blues-husky voice had a steel edge. "Johnny Ricco, why should Mr. Noon want to kill our father?"

  Johnny was still glaring at me. "He did it, I tell you, and I'm gonna get him, no matter what. I'll square the beef for Papa."

  "I'm waiting to hear your reasons," Terry said in a toe-tapping tone. "Just because you think a thing, doesn't make it so!"

  "Hear, hear!" I couldn't have agreed with her more. "Come on, kid. Hit me with whatever it is you think you have on me."

  Johnny bounced off the couch, away from the cool sense of his sister which he was finding unbearable. His anger couldn't live within a foot of it. But for me, he had his old fire. And rage. And hate.

  "Okay," he growled. "I'll tell you. Both of you. This Noon here knew Papa, like he said. Papa mentioned him now and then, everytime the gumshoe turned up in a headline. Big case or something like that. Well, yesterday, me and the gang were nosing around the junkyard and we came up with something the cops must have missed. It figured too—the way I look at it. Isn't Noon's office just about eight blocks from here? You just walk across town from Fifty-Sixth and you could walk into Papa's front door. Hell, it'd be about a ten-minute trip all told. And ain't it convenient that Noon was out of the country when Papa got blasted? He's even got himself a perfect alibi already!"

  "Johnny . . ." said his sister patiently, "will you please try to stick to the point?" She was being very officious with him.

  "Come on, kid," I snapped. "That kind of logic is for saps. I've got my shoes on but I'm not walking. What did you find in that junkyard that so clearly puts the finger on me?"

  Johnny stormed toward me as if he was going to hit me. I backed away reflexively. But the kid was only giving his rage free rein, and his right hand was pawing into the folds of the Army fatigue jacket. Before I could worry about him having a secret weapon, he had ripped something from an inner pocket somewhere and flung it down at my feet. Whatever it was, it bounced off the carpet with a faint thump, spun in the air a few feet, then teetered to the corner of the wing chair where it flattened to a stop. It gleamed, too.

  "That's what was in Papa's office!" snarled Johnny, like an executioner ready to drop the axe. "Right under the little throw rug in front of the safe. And don't try to tell me it's not yours!"

  I couldn't deny that, because it was. All mine and half-mine, in a way.

  Even as I picked the thing up, between my thumb and forefinger and looked at it, possession became more than nine-tenths of the law. Much more: I hadn't seen the thing in many years but it was mine, all right. In fact, its partner, its look-alike, its corresponding half that made of it a whole thing, had belonged to John Junkyard.

  Once, I had three goons in front of me because I stepped between them and John Junkyard, whom they had come to rough up as part of a union-war operation. John was in his late fifties then and too old for that sort of roughhousing. I'd stopped the goons and sent them scramming and licking bruises and lumps from myself and the older man. John Junkyard, upset because I wouldn't take any gratitude-money for the favor, took a silver dollar from his pocket, sliced it in half with a hacksaw in the workbench vise and gave me one half, kept the other half for himself and we vowed to be friends forever. He was as Italian and old-fashioned and fervid as that. He wore his half on his watch chain, slipping it on over the links right there before my eyes. Mine I put in my pocket, promising to wear it on the next key ring I bought. I never kept that vow. In a running gunfight less than a month later, with a pair of East Side triggermen, I'd lost my semi-circular coin. I never told that story to John Junkyard because he would have been disappointed. Italians are like that, too.

  How could you tell a man who wore a St. Jude medallion around his neck in all kinds of weather that you had lost a lucky charm? You just don't, that's all, because you absolutely can't. It just isn't done.

  And now—here the old, familiar, sliced-half silver dollar was. Burning a hole in my fingers, shining up at me like an old friend. It had been a 1929-minted coin, which John Junkyard had saved for years. Maybe his very first hard-earned buck. I never really knew. You can't know everything.

  I only knew that what I was holding was definitely my half of the silver-dollar pact. Mine was the half with the date on it: 1929. That most depressing of years for a lot of Americans, besides me.

  "Well?" Johnny Ricco's snarl was a mixture of contempt and satisfaction. All sneer and all conviction; he knew he was right.

  "It's mine," I said. "Your father had the other side."

  "You telling me, Noon? Haven't I seen it on his watch chain all these years? We even buried it with him last Tuesday——" Johnny's voice broke again. "How could you do that to somebody who was your friend?"

  "Shut up," I said. "Let me think. Somebody knew about these half-coins. Knew about your father's half and my half. And they wanted you to find my half of the coin. Knowing you knew I belonged to it, and knowing you'd come gunning for me just the way you did . . . come here and kill me and give the cops a ready-made murderer too dead to argue."

  "You say." The kid's sneer magnified, his dark hair dancing as he shook his head. "The coin tells me different. Your hard luck you dropped it when you were running out of the office——"

  "You chump," I grated out at him. I couldn't help it. "What do you use for a brain? If this thing was under a rug in front of the safe, why didn't the law find it the day after the murder? Before you and your gang searched the office? Does it take an Einstein to know that the coin was put under the rug after the cops stopped their investigation? For the reasons I just gave you? Come on, Johnny, you can't be as dense as you're trying hard to make me believe."

  "Mr. Noon," Terry Ricco had lost track of the whole situation somehow as Johnny and I batted the ball back and forth. "I'm in the dark right now. Why should Dad and you have half silver dollars at all?"

  "Back in '63," I explained, knowing it would help slow down some of Johnny's adrenalin, because I wanted him to do some heavy thinking about what I'd said, "I helped your father toss three hoodlums out of his office . . . I wouldn't take any money for it . . . your father insisted on this——" I held up the half-coin. "An old Neapolitan custom, he said. A sign that we were brothers and friends. I liked the idea . . . I'm a little silly myself about traditions. But I lost my half in a gunfight on Madison Avenue—which is what now brings your brother to my doorstep."

  "Yes," the violet eyes were sad and agreeing. "Dad was like that, all right. And Johnny's like that, too. Oh, Johnny. Can't you see that it's
all probably just the way Mr. Noon says it is? Somebody's trying to frame him for Dad. They expected you to behave like a wild kid and you did!"

  Johnny roared, transferring some of his white heat to her.

  "Anything in pants, huh, Terry? Why do you believe this guy? What makes him so honest all of a sudden? He's like all of them, isn't he? Always telling us things that are only half-true, always dishing out the crap about the good old days—well, he's not snowing me, I can tell you!"

  Before Terry could handle that one, I took the situation by the horns. I shot her young brother a look that would have scalded a water buffalo and twirled the .45, Gary Cooper style, for his benefit.

  "We'll discuss the generation gap another time, Johnny. That I will promise you. But for now, you go home with your sister, wherever home is. I'm going to pay a call on Frankie Conroy. We had some trouble a long time ago before he became so interested in waterfront politics. That gunfight on Madison Avenue that I mentioned was with two guns who worked for Frankie. When I lost my half-coin. Get the picture? I think Frankie might be able to tell me his ideas on how the coin wound up in front of your father's safe. Maybe he knows why the cops missed such a wonderful clue to a murderer and made such a Sherlock Holmes out of little old you."

  Johnny looked hang-dog but had not lost an inch of his fury.

  "It was wedged under the rug, stuck in the fringes. Like it got there after it fell out of your pocket, Noon."

  Terry's gasp cut through his constant assertions of disbelief.

  "It would be wonderful if you found out who killed Dad. I can pay you a real good price for your services."

  "We'll talk about that when I deliver," I said. I faced Johnny and gave him what I hoped would be the last disclaimer on the subject. "You don't believe me, kid. But I didn't kill your father. When your old man gave me that half of a silver dollar, he said it would teach me to appreciate the value of a buck. It bought him more than even he knew: my friendship. So you and your sister go on home. We'll forget tonight's rodeo. Nobody got hurt. But don't go sicking any of your wild ones on me. I'm an old neighborhood man myself—West Farms, Class Of '41—and I could treat them pretty rough."