The Bedroom Bolero Read online

  I didn’t think too long. I dialed the number Flo Cooper had given me. There was a busy signal. I lit a Camel and tried again. The buzzing annoyed my ear for seven rings before I really started counting. On the stroke of eleven, the sound stopped with a click and a voice from the grave said:

  “This is Evelyn.”

  “Nice timing, Miss Eleven,” I said drily. “This is Ed Noon. I’m glad I caught you in.”

  There was a low laugh that had to have been taught to her by Bela Lugosi. But it was a feminine laugh all the same.

  “I just divested myself of the garments of sepulchral life. I am out, Mr. Noon, not in. I join the mortal coil again for my performance tonight.”

  She was talking her own language, obviously, so I cut a few corners. She sounded like something on a funny record.

  “What can I do for you, Miss Eleven?”

  “I need you. Want you, in fact.”

  “That should earn me some money then.”

  “It will.” There was a pause. “I had intended to come to your office in the morning but perhaps it will be better if you see me tonight. Are you free at midnight?”

  I couldn’t resist the opening.

  “You need a squire for the Graveyard Ball?”

  “Yes.” Her voice cut home, refusing to get annoyed. “And when I turn you into a pumpkin, you will know that you have been with The Evil Evelyn.”

  I looked at my watch. It was almost ten-fifteen.

  “Okay. You win. What’s your problem?”

  “Do you know where the Green Cellar is? I go on at midnight. Two shows until three in the morning. I want you to come and watch me perform. Then perhaps you will understand why I need a private detective.”

  “Can’t you tell me that now?”

  “If I did you might not come. Not even when I tell you the rewards will be great.”

  “Rewards. Love that word. How much?”

  “Suppose I guarantee you a hundred dollars for your services in the Cellar tonight? Then we’ll discuss further arrangements after you’ve seen my act.”

  I had a feeling the services in the cellar included digging with a spade. All through the conversation, her definitely feminine voice had still not lost one iota of its unreal timbre.

  “That sounds reasonable but you won’t tell me what your problem is?”

  “No, Mr. Noon, I cannot. But if you will forgive a mortal cliché, it is a matter of life or death. My life or death.”

  “Sold. See you at midnight. The Green Cellar.” I couldn’t resist one last parting shot. “Should I bring my own spade?”

  There was a long sigh like a banshee breathing over a plot somewhere in Woodlawn.

  “You laugh now. But you will believe. When they play the Bolero and I die before your eyes, you will believe.”

  She hung up while she was still ahead.

  I worried about the phone call over some more Scotch and a lot of lip-nibbling. I looked at the number jotted on the pad. A Chelsea exchange. I knew the Green Cellar was a beatnik club of sorts somewhere around Washington Square. When I found yesterday’s Daily Mirror in the kitchenette, I leafed through it until the Entertainment Section certified my hazy information. After all my mental gymnastics I was left with clashing notions. Evelyn Eleven was working at the Green Cellar, held over for six weeks, seemed to live close enough to the place to be there at twelve for the first show. A square, black hair-lined advertisement box was sandwiched between puffs for The Living Room and The 82 Club.

  NOW AND HEREAFTER

  THE EVIL EVELYN

  Disappearing Twice Nightly

  Fresh from her triumph at Carnegie Hall

  The Green Cellar 3rd Street & 6th Ave.

  But she had mentioned the Bolero.

  And Mike Monks had two dazzling corpses on his hands. And I, the guy who had been called in by his cop friend for help on the case had been suddenly needed by a new client who just happened to mention the word Bolero.

  I spent a half-hour checking my .45 and shoulder harness and perfecting a snap motion with my right arm that made me the Fastest Draw on Central Park West. The Boy Scouts of America are right about one thing. Be prepared.

  Another cab hurried me downtown as a light rain sprinkled the stone head of Manhattan. The rain had stopped by the time the taxi ejected me on the sidewalk outside The Green Cellar. I kept thinking about the face of beautiful Eve Ellingham as she smiled even in death with that track of running lights encircling her on the floor of her apartment on Riverside Drive.

  Would she turn out to have a bad heart too as the first corpse, Dawn Dark, had unfortunately owned?

  As they say in the confession mags and purple prose epics, little did I know.

  Even as I blankly smiled my way past a tall doorman guarding the front entrance of The Green Cellar, a third victim was listening to the murderer play the Bolero in the red room where Death in ecstasy waited.

  A lonely bell somewhere in a high stone tower of a church bordering Washington Square began to toll the hour of midnight.

  I walked into the Green Cellar just as The Evil Evelyn went into her act.

  4 — Old Man Murder

  The Green Cellar was just that.

  An enterprising businessman had sunk his hard-earned profits from the garment industry and converted a cellar into one of the best attended night spots in town. The overhead was nil and the cash was as green as the decor.

  Everything was green. From the stretch of carpeting that led you into a basement of barrel chairs and barrel tables, the grass was indeed always greener. Every shade and hue of that much-loved and much-hated color was in evidence. Emerald, lime, Nile and kelly and you name it. There was no electricity. Every table had a candle. Huge phallic thrusts of wax dripping picturesquely down the sides of thick, deep-dyed bottles. The barrel tables and chairs formed a Theatre-in-the-Round atmosphere which a sea-colored stage poked through like the hole in the doughnut.

  The hat-check room by the door was a narrow stall that shut off a view of pipes and tubing iced over with the green motif that made everything look so verdantly beautiful.

  I checked my hat with a trim, curvy thing who looked like she’d been modeled by a glass blower. Even her shaded costume reminded me of a pool table. But at least her hair was black and so were her eyes.

  The check said 13. I grinned wryly and moved to the perimeter of the tables. A long bar that was nothing more than green planking propped over several more of the artfully placed barrels was thronged with the spirit of the Village. Leather jackets, a few beards and several bizarre creations which were probably women but with the shirts and pants you couldn’t really tell.

  Nobody noticed me because the candles flickered and somewhere in the darkened area beyond the circle of stage, an unseen piano went into a sneaky approach to the Bolero. The patrons had all quieted because the afficionados and the sons of the afficionados knew what was coming. The sons of the habitues too. A low murmur of approbation had made a lot of candles look like they were going to sputter out.

  There was no emcee to hike things along. No preliminary warmup talk to give-the-little-lady-a-great-big-hand courage. She didn’t need it.

  Evelyn Eleven materialized on the circular spot of stage like the ectoplasm trick in the Topper movies.

  I was beginning to wish I had ordered a drink from the crowded bar. The atmosphere of The Green Cellar had gotten as cold as a tomb.

  Evelyn did it.

  All by her gaunt, ghastly lonesome.

  Picture the Garbo face more cadaverous than it is, hollowed out with green tinting and dollar-fresh lips which curve almost so that they seem to meet the lobes of gnome-like ears when the apparition smiles. The face was surrounded by a shroud of lank, black hair which sober onlookers will swear flows like the wind down to the shoulders. The lady’s body was a long, trailing masterpiece of contradicting anatomy which you’d insist was incapable of supporting the weird head which smiles at you. I wasn’t drunk but I had a hard time remembe
ring that the lady who had called me on the telephone was a flesh-and-blood woman who needed a private detective and probably went to the bathroom like everybody else.

  The incredibly sticklike body was shrouded in filmy, fluttering gauze that had to be the latest in dress for buried vampires the world over. Evelyn’s arms and legs were bony structures that reaped grimly about her person as she surveyed the cellar with her so-dead eyes and cabalistically gestured about the room.

  A nervous woman giggled, then stopped, as one penetrating stare from The Evil Evelyn impaled her where she sat. The stealthy approach of the opening bars of the Bolero picked up sinister cadence behind her. The unseen piano had been furtively counterpointed by a host of sighing, moaning sounds right out of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.

  It was the art of spooklore lifted to its highest, calculated level of shock. The woman was a masterpiece of the eerie and the outre.

  And then the voice I had only heard on a telephone wire spoke and imbedded itself in the wary subconscious of every human being in The Green Cellar.

  “Last night, I dreamed I returned to the House of the Fourteen Griffins again. Nothing had changed since the day when they brought my pale, so pale body, down the ancient road to the cemetery where my lover’s tears have watered the damp earth for centuries. Oh, how he cries. Poor, beloved Eric. He tried to lift the cypress-covered stone lid of my tomb to take me in his arms. But he cannot. And beneath the so cold slab, my rigid body and cold heart try to reach for him but they cannot ……”

  The music sobbed and thumped softly, a rising prayer for love. A woman’s fierce weeping trickled noisily into the atmosphere of the room. The Evil Evelyn smiled, the fantastic mouth curving into a harlequin’s awful frozen mask of mirth. She swayed on the stage, strange winds and breezes, fingering her gauzed outlines, fluttering the trappings of her costume.

  “Eric!” she called, and the graveyard beckoned through the green mist that hung about the stage. “Wait for me …… I rise from the dead …….. I come to join you in that house ……”

  She went on in that vein for all of an hour. Where it should have been silly, it was grotesquely frightening. Where you should have laughed, you would have jumped three feet into the air if someone had suddenly touched your shoulder and asked you for a match. When you wanted to turn it off by looking away, you found your mind incapable of sending any messages to your arms and legs. It was an amazing performance. The uncanny appearance of Evelyn Eleven solidly reinforced by her graveyard voice and nearly supernatural acting ability suspended every inch of disbelief in your brain.

  When the stage was barely bereft of her presence, you thought she was still standing there because you could still see the fluttering gauze leaving ectoplastic hallucinations in the green haze. Only when the thunder of applause echoed off the four walls and the hollow barrel tables and chairs did you realize you had just been sold the biggest hokum act since Tom Sawyer got his pals to paint Aunt Polly’s fence.

  The joint went nuts with the sort of adulation you hear around bull rings and the first ten rows at a championship Garden fight.

  I found myself applauding too.

  Then someone did touch my shoulder. I jumped.

  “Ed Noon?” A waiter who was more boy than man was dimpling up at me, his eyes smiling, the green sash around his waist making him seem more effeminate than ever.

  I nodded, confused.

  “Miss Eleven is waiting for you.” He jointed with an arm toward a clearing between the tables and one of the walls where a thin man might walk by. A heavy green drape closed off a view of more pipes and tubing.

  “How did you know who I was, Einstein?” I asked.

  He simpered. “I felt your gun when I brushed you before.”

  I showed him my teeth.

  “As long as you didn’t reach for anything else.”

  He giggled. He wasn’t offended. “Tiger. Her dressing room has a star on the door.”

  “Thanks. But I think I could have figured that out for myself.”

  He was still trying. “I’m Howie.”

  “And how,” I said and moved off. I felt guilty. Cutting him down to size was no triumph especially since he’d cased me and I’d never even felt his hand fanning my shoulder holster. A tribute to Evelyn’s acting magic. I found the areaway between the table and chairs and edged by a truckload of patrons who were still discussing the performance.

  A blonde in a dress that was tighter than she was sighed as I went by.

  “Imagine making love to her. It’d be like lying close to a clammy corpse.” The shudder she put on made her breasts spill over the top of a strapless evening gown.

  “You could too,” I heard a male voice snicker from the chair next to her. “She’s a lezzy. One of the worst. Guy who comes here often told me that she took two broads home with her last —”

  The rest was lost as I swept through the green curtain. But the rumor was worth knowing. Even though rumors aren’t exactly Gospel, I’m a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire thinker.

  A short, whitewashed length of wall led to a green door on which a five-pointed white star had been crudely painted. I knocked.

  It was difficult adjusting my eyes to the change from a world of subdued green to naked white. I was blinking when someone opened the door.

  I kept right on blinking when the door closed me off in Evelyn Eleven’s dressing room. It was no more than a box with a luggage trunk, one butterfly chair for visitors, and a long, cracked, bordered-with-bulbs mirror set over a cheap dressing table littered with the usual clutter of cold cream jars, Kleenex and greasepaint tubes. A tall bamboo screen rode at right angles to one corner of the small room. Evelyn Eleven’s unforgettable voice muffled out from behind it. Something about making myself at home. I sat in the butterfly chair, facing it toward the door and the high screen. Gauzelike garments began to flop over the lip of the thing with stunning speed.

  In two seconds flat, Evelyn came around the screen and sat in the one other chair, turning its wooden back to the dressing mirror.

  “So?” Her face was no realer than it had been out there under the candlelight.

  “Terrific. You make Vampira look like a kid clowning around with her older sister’s makeup box.”

  “Thank you.” The gauze had given way to a pale, paisley bathrobe whose generous folds only served to make her seem more gaunt than ever. She had scrubbed the green gook from her bony, high-cheeked face but somehow she still looked as ghostly as ever. The Garbo kisser gave the illusion of utter bloodlessness. The eyes were like no eyes that ever looked into mine. They were completely without character.

  We measured each other in a few seconds of staring. I came up with zero but I was sure she had done a whole lot better.

  “Is this the easiest one hundred dollars you’ve ever made, Mr. Noon?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what, may I ask?”

  “You called. I came. You promised. But I haven’t seen the C note yet.”

  “It will be yours as soon as I tell you what I want you to do.”

  I took out my Camels. She shook her head so I helped myself.

  “So tell me.”

  She looked at her bony hands. They were ridiculously long. Like the unreal talons they put on the ladies in the horror comics.

  “A man named Orelob comes here every night. He is out there now. He is a fat, hideous man. But he is worth a fortune. Real estate or oil wells, I’m not sure. He is in love with me. So much in love, he says, that he will kill me before I let anyone else have me.”

  I made a smoke ring.

  “He make actual threats in front of witnesses?”

  Her eyebrows didn’t move but they seemed to.

  “Yes. He has even had me followed to my home when I leave the club. And now — well, last night — he made the ultimate gesture. Stood on his two feet in this very room and swore he would have me murdered if I didn’t accept his proposal of marriage.”

  “Orelob
, Orelob,” I mused aloud. “Now where have I heard that name before?”

  “Thaddeus Orelob,” she suggested. “You look it up. Dunn and Bradstreet maybe.”

  Even the sudden usage of plain, ordinary everyday words like maybe and had me followed didn’t diminish the funereal sound of her by so much as a syllable.

  “Why don’t you call the police? They have a habit of arresting people who go around claiming they will kill somebody for love.”

  “No.” She shook her head and the lank hair danced. “He is most influential. Some of his best friends are on the police force. See what I’m up against?”

  I wanted to say a low-calorie diet but I skipped it.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Don’t you know?” The expressionless eyes were blank. “I thought you private detectives had your own methods.”

  That put her in a class with the walking jewelry store which Melissa Mercer had shoved into my new office earlier in the day. I drew on my Camel.

  I smiled. “Will he sit still for a going-over from a guy like me?” I stopped smiling. “After all if he has all the influence you say he has, he could get pretty rough.”

  “You look capable. A good beating could accomplish plenty.”

  “Then what?”

  She sighed. “I’ll give you the hundred dollars if you say yes to my offer. If it works and he disappears, there will be a bonus of two more.”

  She hadn’t fooled me for a second but I said, “Okay,” and watched her find a sheaf of ten fresh tens in the center drawer of the dressing table. They disappeared into my wallet. I ground out my cigarette on the stone floor since The Evil Evelyn didn’t smoke and there were no ashtrays.

  “What will you do first?” she asked, watching me closely.

  I shrugged. “Go back out there. Case him. If he’s fat and hideous, I should have no trouble. Maybe I can talk to him. After I do, I could make my report to you. Want me to mail it or come in person?”

  “Don’t beat him up here!” It almost blurted out of her like any schoolgirl.

  “I’m not stupid,” I bragged. “Where do you live?”