The Walking Wounded Page 5

  Without peer. Nobody like Ed Noon, they say. Okay. I'm sold. So you can stop doing

  a Bogart. You don't need it. I know all about you. I've known all there is to know for a

  very long time now. You live up to your billing. The Noon Man. Fastest Private

  Investigator in the East. Never been stopped on a case. Never lost one yet. You're even

  given the FBI and the CIA lessons. Lessons they could badly use. But---I repeat---what

  did you think of my play? My first musical."

  I took a step toward him but he didn't retreat in the chair.

  "I'll tell you what I think," I said. "You're either a devil from hell or you've been

  talking to somebody who knows me like a book. Backwards and forwards. Somebody I

  haven't seen in years. Either that or you've been talking to someone she talked to. That

  wasn't a play you wrote. It was the story of that life. And you must know that or you

  wouldn't be following me around all day---and you're going to tell me why you've done

  that, too, Buster---before either of us gets ten minutes older. Marcel Alevoinne was

  murdered today. And you must know that, too. I also want to know what that might

  have to do with the price of your eggs, Malmedy. And I'm not buying. This is a seller's

  market."

  Jo Malmedy raised his arms, pyramided his fingers, leaned forward and rested

  his blunt chin on their apex, using his sturdy thighs as a platform. His eyes studied my

  face for a long, quiet moment.

  "Then you found the play totally successful?" "If your author's ego demands that crumb---yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes,

  positively. You'll sell a million tickets. You'll make a fortune. It might even out gross

  the record of Guys and Dolls. So what?"

  "So this. It wasn't written for Broadway. It isn't ever going to be produced. It

  was written for one reason alone. For one man alone. You. The man who lived the

  whole story. The protagonist-hero."

  "Me?" I echoed. "What the hell for?"

  Jo Malmedy smiled. He wasn't wearing a crown of thorns but the image held. I

  stared down at him, utterly baffled, not knowing anything.

  His eyes were green, I saw. Vibrant, compelling green.

  "Noon," he murmured, almost patiently, "it's taken me a long time to reach this

  moment in my own life. Me and you. You and me. I've dreamed of it long enough. The

  play was my own way of opening up our relationship. I could have phoned, I could have

  written a letter. But none of that seemed appropriate enough. After all, why throw away

  a twenty-years vendetta with such an undramatic gesture? Such small potatoes

  dramaturgy? Oh, no. My creative soul demanded something more. Much, much more.

  You've been promised to me, Noon. And I wanted to savor the feast before I took on the

  main course. Appetizers, first. That was the play I sent you in the mail. No music yet

  but who needs it? You couldn't have everything. Not in this life. It never works out that

  way, does it?"

  I took a step backward. Frowning. His chatter was way out.

  "You're beating your gums, Malmedy. What twenty years vendetta? Did I run

  over your bicycle when you were a kid?" "No," Jo Malmedy said quietly. Without raising his voice. "You didn't run over

  my bicycle. You don't get bicycles in orphanages. And by the time I graduated to nice

  foster parents who happened to be millionaires, I was past the three wheeled stage and

  got a motor bike. Lucky for me, right? They even put up with my novelist's bent and

  lived to see me make it big. But there was a time when I wasn't so lucky, Noon."

  The tenor of his conversation no longer was exactly thrilling. He was beginning

  to sound, for all his deathly calm, or maybe because of it, like a man running a pipeline

  to the nuthouse. Or a guy pretending to be the famous Jo Malmedy. A guy who wasn't

  Jo Malmedy at all. I took another slow step backward and my hands hung free, ready to

  go for the .45 in case my visitor started getting acrobatic and loopy. Either/or.

  "When was that time, Malmedy?" I tried to match his quietness. With little

  success. There was a slight rise to my vocal level. Tension mounting. Hysteria calling.

  As if a May Day was imminent.

  "When you killed my mother," Jo Malmedy murmured.

  I blinked. He couldn't have said that.

  "Your mother?" I parroted, the words sounding hilarious in the midst of all that

  Essex House grandeur. With aromas of toast and coffee beginning to smell like incense.

  Or marijuana vapors.

  "Yes," Jo Malmedy said, matter-of-factly. "My mother. Dolores Ainsley. Who

  was born Dolores Brand. Whom you saw fit to label The Tall Dolores. I'm her only

  flesh-and-blood leftover on this earth, Noon. Her son. Or should I say-bastard?" "Dolores didn't have a kid," I said. It shot out of me. Quick, blurted, unreal.

  The walls of the room, like the four corners of the apartment on Central Park West had

  begun to dance and undulate wildly.

  "Yes, she did." The room gyrations didn't bother Jo Malmedy. "Me. Yours

  truly, Jo, without the 'e' Malmedy, noted American author."

  "She came to me engaged to Harry Hunter---" The words ran out screwy, all in a

  slow, tormented, baffled string. "---she was going to get married and Harry was

  missing---and---" I was shaking my head. The ceiling of my brain was blanketed with an

  armada of killing hornets. "Hold the phone. If you're telling it straight, you would have

  been about four or five when she walked into my life---she never mentioned a kid once--

  or that she had ever been married---"

  "Why should she?" Jo Malmedy said, without moving in his chair. The green

  eyes were riveted on my face, not wanting to miss a nuance of reaction to the bombshell.

  "She had abandoned me on the doorstep of the Boniface Foundling Home the year

  before. I was three then. She had slammed the iron door on me and run away. From

  dear old sun-baked Texas. Leaving me crying and cold. She never came back for me.

  Nobody did. There never was any marriage. Which is what makes me a bastard. Right?

  You ever been abandoned, Noon? Left as though you were no more than a clump of dirt

  on a doorstep? Or garbage thrown away?"

  "No, no---" Confusion clawed me from all sides. I wasn't thinking straight

  anymore. This couldn't be true. None of it. This couldn't be Dolores Ainsley's son.

  Alma Wheeler would have know about him. She would have mentioned it somewhere

  along the line. Unless---Alma---! Jo Malmedy was a mind reader, as well as a devilish ghost.

  His chuckle was as deadly as a time bomb in the plush quiet of the room. It

  washed over me like a ripplingly cold, unwanted Niagara.

  "Alma Wheeler was a fount of information. My lovely Aunt Alma. Your call girl

  inamorata. Yes, I tracked her down when I had enough money from my successful

  career to wonder what my real roots were. The Malmedys are great people, Noon. They

  had told me to go ahead and look if that was how I felt. So I looked." A stoical glare

  passed over the broad-planed face for a second and then was gone. The richly amused

  tone crept back into his young voice. Now somehow younger than ever. "Great family I

  sprung from, Noon. Right out of colorful legend. The sort of infamous background

  most writers make up. Skeletons-in-the-closet by the score. A fabulous giant of a mother

  who was a stripper and then a murderess. An aunt who was a whore. Who slept
with me

  for money. And my dear old grandfather, on my mother's side. Daniel Brand. A con

  man. A cheap swindler and two-bit crook. Something to live down, I can tell you. I

  never did find out who Dear Old Dad might have been. But that didn't matter anymore.

  And I'll tell you this. When my dead Aunt Alma recounted the details of her association

  with you and how my mother died---well, I couldn't wait to put it all down on paper.

  The whole life-and-death of my beloved mother and the saga of You. The real live Hero

  in an Anti-Hero world. Writers do that, you know. Or may not know. Exorcise all their

  ghosts, their hang-ups and hurts, in fiction form. To make it pay off. To make some

  good out of bad. To clean up the garbage left over in their minds. Oh, it felt fine writing

  about it, I can tell you. It seemed to heal all the childish wounds, the scars. But I found

  out soon enough that I needed a greater satisfaction. I learned that I had to have a greater reward. To wipe the tears off that silly, heartbroken three year old's face

  forever. Are you reading me, Noon---?"

  "Alma," I cur in. It seemed like I was talking down a long, dark tunnel. He

  loomed like something unreal in his winged red chair. "What happened to Alma--?"

  Jo Malmedy's face saddened. Just like a storyteller's who has come to the

  unhappy part of the narrative he is unfolding to children.

  "Sorry, Noon. The beautiful heroine died. There was no happily-ever-after for

  Alma Wheeler. It happened more than five years ago. During a tornado while she was

  driving cross country to California. She was opening a beauty parlor there. I thought you

  knew. I see you didn't. I'm really sorry. I did like her when I finally got to know her.

  She had class---in spite of that old life of hers. A good woman. You could have saved

  her from all that by marrying her. But you didn't. You missed your big scene. Life's not

  much like books, is it, Noon?"

  I couldn't answer him for a long, long eternity. Tears tried to fill my eyes. I

  brushed them away, glaring down at him, again.

  "Save your sermons for when you know all the facts, son. All I want from you is

  why you're telling me all this? Why you sent me that damn play. What do you want

  from me? Or are you going to sit back and play God about something you weren't a part

  of? Is that it?"

  "No, Noon," Jo Malmedy declared, lips drawing back in a tight smile. "I'm not

  going to do the Jehovah bit at all. Mis-casting for me. I'm a writer not a performer. But

  I am going to be your judge, jury and executioner. You will recognize my terrible swift

  sword when you see it. Or have you spotted the shining blade already?" "Stop it." I couldn't help it, I was snarling at him. Snarling at his blandness, his

  green eyes, his utterly cold confession. "Stop talking like a third rate cultured menace in

  a Z flick. You come waltzing into this room with three acts from Remember When?,

  throw my life into my face---expect me to believe everything you've said, without proof

  and then you do this subtle jazz. Let up and talk sense. There still is a murder in my life.

  A brand new one---"

  Jo Malmedy rose from the red chair.

  He wasn't any taller than he was when he had come in but suddenly he seemed to

  tower in the center of the room. There was a fantastic aura of unreality about him, now.

  As if he was indeed a ghost who had wandered in from the garden to join a merry party.

  If he was Dolores' bastard son, Life had skipped a generation.

  He wasn't much taller than his grandfather, Daniel Brand.

  On his mother's side.

  But it wasn't a merry party he was interrupting.

  Wake was more like it.

  "I've come to kill you, Noon," he said, quite calmly, without theatrical

  emphasis. "That's all there is to it. I just wanted you to know where the blow was

  coming from. You know your Poe?"

  "Poe?" I echoes, trying to think.

  "Edgar Allan Poe," he agreed, standing motionless as a statue, hands down at

  his sides. "'A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser'. "Well,

  that's about it. I'm going to kill you in such a way that it will never come back to me. Not in a million years. There wouldn't be any point at all in getting you if I have to pay

  the price. You do see that, don't you? The Cask of Amontillado."

  "Yeah," I said, my head clearing rapidly. Nothing like a death threat for driving

  away the cobwebs. "And you're a plagiarist. This isn't Poe, Malmedy. It's pure Dumas.

  You've practically lifted the plot mechanics of Twenty Years After. Mordaunt, Milady's

  son, going after D'Artagnan and his three musketeers---"

  "That's pretty well-read for a mere private detective," Jo Malmedy laughed,

  without begrudging the compliment. "I'm surprised. I really am."

  "You're also crazy," I said, going for my .45. "You really are, you know. This

  sort of thing went out with gaslight and men's garters."

  Yeah. Crazy he was. Crazy with memories. Crazy with hurt.

  Crazy like old Aesop's fox. With a college education. And credits.

  He was still smiling at me, shaking his head gently, as if he had all the time and

  all the patience in the universe, those green eyes of his unblinking and candidly amused,

  when something happened to my knees.

  They began to bend. Without advance warning. Or a hint of any kind.

  I tried to straighten them. They accordioned and I went down, all rubber, jelly

  and disintegrating muscle. Before they collapsed altogether, I raised the .45, sighting in

  on Jo Malmedy's wavering face. My arms got into the jello act. The Colt wouldn't

  remain on an even keel.

  It danced and jiggled like an off-register needle on a weight scale.

  My eyes were next. All two 20-20's. Brown and not green like his. The room and all its furnishings, the bed, chairs, three-mirrored bureau, walls

  and ceiling, windows, joined together in a Dali jumble of shapes and colors. Or maybe

  it was Picasso from Some Period.

  I saw sixteen versions of myself, reeling like a drunken Gene Kelly, in the three

  way mirrors. The ballgame was lost when the mirror revolved upside down. I also lost

  sight of Jo Malmedy. He vanished. In a green haze of laughter and mocking Cheshire

  Cat smiles. A Wonderland mirage. Now-you-see-him. Now-you-don't.

  He had disappeared right before me.

  He hadn't, of course. There are no real magicians left. There is only illusion.

  And the tricks the mind and eyes can play.

  And also, somebody had run around behind me and chopped me across the back

  of the neck with pure Karate expertise. Or Kung Fu or plain old rabbit punch. Either is

  just as good at times like that.

  Whatever it was, it did the job perfectly.

  As I went down, with bells tolling, doorbells chiming, trumpets blaring and

  dinner gongs clanging, I knew it had to be Jo Malmedy behind me. Only him. It

  couldn't have been anybody else.

  The room door had been locked, we were nine stories above the hard Central

  Park South sidewalk real estate and nobody could have been hiding under the bed.

  Unless it was the ghost of all the unhappy dead. Ghosts who were practically legion,

  now.

  Dolores.

  Daniel Brand. Kinney.

  Doc Clarke.

  Sam Foley.

  Billie Toy.

  Rocky.

  Reno.
<
br />   Harry Hunter.

  Alma Wheeler.

  God, Alma…

  My haunted memories overwhelmed me. Memories of a slaughterhouse of a case.

  There was no way out, anymore. From a case that didn't, wouldn't stay closed. No way

  at all.

  The last exit was barred. Last Exit to Noonville.

  Jo Malmedy had turned the key on another big iron door.

  For his own private, godless purposes.

  Whatever they might be.

  And talk about King Kong!

  "Well, Denham. The airplane got him."

  "Oh, no. It wasn't the planes. 'Twas Beauty killed the Beast…"

  "….and it was just my luck that you turned out to have brains. Like the way you

  used the old think-box when the manager phoned up about Junior. Say, how about that

  anyway? Why should he ring you just because his elevator boy wasn't to be found?"

  The dead voices went on. Thundering at me, now.

  I was really just making small talk. But I got a reaction out of her. She got very

  pale. Very suddenly. Then two balls of red filled her checks.

  "I was wondering…" Her voice choked. Like when you've got something in your

  mouth and you're trying to say something. "…when you'd start wondering…"

  "Talk sense, Baby."

  "Ed, please understand."

  "Alma, what's eating you?"

  The years dissolved. Rolled back.

  Her arms went around me suddenly. I felt myself pulled toward her lips. Her

  face brushed my cheek and the smell of her warm curls was in my nose again.

  Something was wrong. A gentle tremor ran through her but the sensation went through

  me, as slight as it was.

  Some detective, I am, I thought. I'll bet I sounded like I was third-degreeing her.

  Or maybe rubbing it in. Apologies rushed to my lips.

  I held her off and looked at her. There was ragged worry in her blue eyes and her

  lovely mouth was pinched.

  I couldn't figure it out. She was crying.

  "Alma, Alma----what's wrong, honey? I didn't mean anything by all that gab.."

  "Oh, Ed." The words tumbled out of her. "I can't go through with it any more---I

  tried but I can't--Dolores is my sister….."

  Eternity howled.

  And Dolores laughed from the graveyard.

  "…critics? Critics are for killing. Can't

  think of anything else to do with them…"

  Marcel Alevoinne