The February Doll Murders Read online

  “Think fast, Ed. These guys have some weird ideas.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “That fat voluptuary skinned us down to confiscate our clothes. Maybe he’s looking for something. But he also knows the psychological weapon of nudity. No guy alive can ever do much with his pants off. In the nonsexual department, that is.”

  She looked around at the Oriental magnificence and shivered. “So spooky like this. And the way they got us — some kind of drug? I don’t remember a thing.”

  “Rollo’s buttons. Must have shot some kind of juice in our systems. I went out like a light.”

  “Me, too. Think this place is bugged?”

  I nodded. “They could hide a mike in a million places, and I’m too tired to look or make dull, empty conversation.” I raised my voice, looking around. “Come out, come out, wherever you are, Samarko. This routine is getting no place fast.”

  There was a long silence. Melissa stared at me, the cleft of bosom rising above her protective pillow. I tightened my bits of lace and waited for some response.

  “Two to one, Fez and the Rat were trying to find the dollar bill. That lousy buck. Everybody wants it, and nobody knows why.”

  I heard a long, low rumble from beneath us. It was a surprising sound to hear in the midst of all this Old World splendor. Unless I was really dreaming, I had just heard the unmistakable rush and roar of a subway train far underground. You can never be wrong about that noise if you were ever a big-city boy.

  “The subway,” I said. “So at least we’re still in town.”

  “Ed —” Melissa began.

  “You said it, pal. The subway. Don’t ask me what line it is. They all sound alike.”

  Melissa squeaked sharply, and I looked in the direction of her eyes. Just a few yards away, several folds of crescent-patterned curtains had swept aside, and our two most recent acquaintances were revealed in all their imperfect perfection.

  Samarko waddled into the room, Rollo trailing behind him. They were dressed to match the decor. The fez was all that remained from Samarko’s original costume. Now a short leather vest and elegant pantaloons ballooned about his bulk, ending off in curled Persian slippers. A flaming red silk shirt flowed under the vest. Little Rollo was outfitted like a French Apache. Black turtleneck shirt, skintight denims, and a small beret that rode on his skull like a pancake. From his hands jutted my .45 and a very formidable Luger.

  “You got my message,” I said. “Good. Let’s stop shadow-boxing.”

  Samarko nodded, motioning us to sit down on the pillows across from him. His beaded eyes flicked appreciatively over Mellissa’s bared shoulders. “Lady and sir, we must talk. You are only alive because we believe you still know where the — ah — dollar bill is, the one we discussed earlier.”

  “Thought you got what you wanted, Sam. That doll chorus with the taped message on the spool.” I gave Melissa another pillow to hide her from two pairs of very interested eyes, not counting mine. Rollo, guns and all, was ogling her openly, rape written freely in each pupil.

  Samarko made himself comfortable against a pile of bolsters and tasseled pillows, sitting cross-legged. He grunted with deep pleasure.

  “The dolls were intended for me in the very beginning, Mr. Noon. In the first place, as you would say. Until other misguided persons sought to enlist your aid by diverting them toward you while you were indisposed in the hospital. But more of that later. You both seem to have recovered with remarkable aplomb. Good. Rollo and his elaborate tools! You might not think it to look at Rollo, but he is quite an inventive genius. Much money and research go into the design of these devices, but in the end they prove highly worthwhile.”

  “Agreed, Samarko.” I let my eyes rove overtime, casing the curtained exit, the distance between myself and Rollo’s guns, both of which seemed permanently fixed on me. “What was it, anyway, some kind of drug? Can’t tell, I might buy some of the stuff myself.”

  “Buy?” Samarko’s eyes looked up and his little mouth puckered. “A detestable term. The lexicon of the marketplace. The true collector does not buy or sell, dear sir. He arranges transactions.”

  I studied him. “Are you a dealer of some kind?”

  “Yes, Mr. Noon, I am. You are now seated in the basement apartment below the shop that is known as Exotica, Unlimited. I, Samarko, am its owner. Do you like my humble abode?”

  “Back room, eh? So all you are is a rug salesman? Tsk, tsk. I was hoping you represented bigger game than that. Exotic rugs and drapes, magic tricks with buttons. And now you’ve taken our clothes like any Bowery swap shop. Why?”

  He shrugged. “Your clothes were searched, of course. Yours and the charming lady’s. We found nothing to warrant our interest. But our interest does not stop there.”

  “Our interest, Sam?”

  “Please call me Samarko, dear sir. I do not appreciate this regrettable Occidental habit of the nickname and the abbreviated term. Yes, I did indeed use the plural pronoun. To include myself, Rollo, and a world power that needs no discussion at this time.”

  “Sure. Why drag in the neighbors. What do you want from me and my secretary?”

  He extended a soft, fat palm toward me. “The bill. That rare and wondrous item which yourself and Mr. Crosby found so interesting more than twenty years ago in the heart of Nazi Germany.”

  “I’m clean, Samarko. I haven’t got it, no fooling. If you know I stopped a slug on the R.C.A. roof, you must also know that I was relieved of the article at that time. If Kyle got it from me, as all the evidence seems to indicate, then his killer now has that bill.” I shot a quick look at his eyes because you can always tell about a man by his eyes. “Kyle Crosby was killed in my apartment sometime tonight — yesterday, as it stands now — or didn’t you know that?”

  He didn’t. An unrehearsed expression of amazement widened his cherubic face. His beaded eyes showed a bit more iris. A low murmur of disappointment escaped him. “Mr. Crosby dead? That is unfortunate.”

  “It sure is. I think Mr. Crosby would agree with you, too.”

  “Regrettable.” Samarko was still shaking his head. The fez was doing the frug on his onion-shaped skull. “In that case, it is you and you alone who hold the key to all this.”

  “I don’t see how. I just told you I haven’t got it.”

  His eyes glittered. “True. I believe that. But since you and Mr. Crosby were both involved with that dollar bill and dear Mr. Crosby has joined his ancestors, then it follows that you can at the very least tell me the nature of the secret that the bill contains.”

  I blinked. “Come again?”

  His face wrinkled into a frown and his eyes hardened. Rollo’s twin gun points went up an inch higher, toward my face. Melissa let out an involuntary cry.

  “Come, dear sir. Am I so vague as all that? What is the nature of the information that the bill itself holds that is worth so much of a fortune from the point of view of my side?”

  He had me there, but I had to stall. “Say that again, Sam.” Bogart, forgive me.

  “Tell me now, without delay, about the markings on the bill, which you and Kyle Crosby put there.”

  “Markings?” I echoed. “What kind of markings?”

  Samarko laughed. A jolly, good-natured roar of mirth that took his two hundred-odd pounds and shook them up like Jell-O before he composed himself again. Tears glistened in his eyes.

  “You’re laughing and having a high old time,” I said, “but I don’t get it. Or maybe you don’t get it. I never did find out from Kyle what was so damn important about that old dollar bill of mine. Sure, I carried it for years as a sentimental keepsake, but I’ll be hung for a horse thief if I know what this is all about.”

  “Of course I am laughing, Mr. Noon. Look at Rollo’s face.” He gestured with a pudgy forefinger. “The most peculiar expressions cross his features when he knows I am being lied to. Look, there it is again. You see, Mr. Noon? Rollo knows you are lying, and I have only to clap my hands and he will go about his own ways of makin
g you tell the truth. Those ways, I can assure you, dear sir, will most certainly include the — ah — naked lady at your side.”

  I did look.

  He was so right.

  Rollo’s face indicated he was raring to go to work.

  Not on me.

  On Melissa.

  10

  Now, Voyeur

  Well, there it was. I didn’t have the dollar bill, I didn’t have the faintest idea about its value, and old Samarko was going to have a high old time employing his own methods of persuasion. I had a good idea by now what those methods would be. Our nudity might have been a good idea as a psychological breaker-downer of our strength, but it was more than that. Dear Samarko was a real Eastern cowboy, and the weirdos in that set have some real original notions about sex. Not so original, maybe, since nothing is really new in sexual aberrations. But it was very plain now that Mr. Samarko would get a great deal of personal pleasure watching his ugly flunky rape Melissa Mercer, thereby humiliating me in the process.

  I wasn’t sure that he would stop now, even if I blurted out everything he wanted to know.

  His little eyes were glazing over, and a pink tongue was washing over his baby-fat mouth. Rollo still had his guns up, but the show was somewhere in its opening stages. I didn’t see how they expected me to take it. My hands were untied, and even though I was using them to hold my lace and linen in place, there was a limit to my personal modesty.

  I didn’t like it, though. The setup. Samarko was too sure of himself. He didn’t take his eyes off Melissa, but his next words were still for me.

  “A charming companion, Mr. Noon. Such deep, exquisite color. A fine specimen of the Negro race. This should be most interesting. Dear Rollo can be most persuasive.”

  Melissa held her ground, head high. “That little clown comes near me, I’ll scream.”

  “Hold it, Mel,” I said quietly. “That obviously doesn’t mean a thing to him. This room is either soundproof or we’re just too far off the beaten track.”

  As if to remind me of the outside world, the muffled roar of the subway sounded again. From far off, like a whooshing sound in a big barrel.

  Samarko chuckled. “Not so far, Mr. Noon. We are on Third Avenue in the Forties. But, as you say, we are rather down below the street level. Yes, to scream would be useless. Come, Mr. Noon. The truth about the bill now. Rollo waxes impatient.”

  “If he gets any hotter he’ll melt,” I snapped. “Look, Sam. He lays a finger on her, you’ll have to kill me. He’ll have to fire those guns. Then where are you? If I do know about the bill you’d be bumping off the one man that knows. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

  His expression soured. “You would die for this black woman? You Occidentals.” He shook his fezzed head. “So weak, so sentimental. Bah, what is she? The spawn of the gods. There are others. There will always be others.”

  “I told you.” I kept an eye out for Rollo. “She’s more than a secretary. And I won’t argue about people with you. There’s no time for that.”

  Mel laughed nervously. “Ed, don’t do anything silly. I can protect myself —”

  “Shut up,” I said quietly. “Mr. Samarko and I are about to arrange a transaction.” His disappointment was enormous. I could see the chagrin in his fat face. But the businessman in him triumphed over his libidinous hobbies. He sighed, spreading his hands. “Away, Rollo. Stand to the other side and keep them under your surveillance. Well, Mr. Noon. Speak now. If you are bluffing, I can add many refinements to my original plan for you both.”

  “Sans doute, Samarko. Okay. I need a pencil and paper. I’ll draw for you what is on that bill. I don’t have it, like I said. Kyle Crosby’s murderer has it. But I can show you what it means.”

  He scowled. “Can you not put it into words?”

  “No. You couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. And while we’re horse-trading, how about our clothes? I can’t use my hands while they’re busy holding up these imitation fig leaves.” I indicated the swirls of lace and brocaded linen.

  His eyes bored in on me. He took his time weighing my promise. In the end he shifted his fat body from its cross-legged position and struggled erect. His gaze wandered over Melissa’s tempting outlines, but he made no comment. He stood up and wiped his damp palms together. Rollo growled and flung him a look.

  Some detective I am. It suddenly came to me like a bolt out of left field that I hadn’t yet heard little Rollo speak a word. His growls indicated that he wasn’t a mute, but it was obvious he wasn’t exactly gabby. Either that or he didn’t talk American.

  “No, Rollo,” Samarko purred. “I am not deceived. It is Mr. Noon who is in error. He thinks me a fool who will leap at absurdities as soon as they are presented to him.” Mel looked at me in wonder, and I shrugged slightly. I didn’t know what was on the fat man’s mind. I had turned him off the course of his own personal fetishism, but what was he up to now?

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Samarko?”

  His laugh was feline. “I have means of checking on the accuracy of what you say. Rollo and I shall leave you and the lady to count your sins. If you have lied to me, Mr. Noon, I can promise you a lingering death. And pray, do not be heartened by the simple fact that you have the free use of your arms and legs. Rollo’s drug, as you have called it, is not only swift and painless, it has the added faculty of rendering the muscles of the human body quite languid. You have been deceived because you have done nothing more strenuous than clutch pillows and lace to your nakedness. But when we leave you, endeavor to perform some simple little feat of, say, calisthenics, and you will see what I mean.”

  With that, he clapped his hands, turned, and seemed to bobble out of the harem room on the balls of his feet, the fez bobbing on his skull. Rollo favored us with one more growl and backed out the entranceway, .45 and Luger still trained on us.

  When they had gone, I didn’t lose a minute testing the truth of what he had said. I tried touching my toes from a standing position. I couldn’t. I tried making a fist. It took about five seconds longer than it should have. It was a weird feeling. I felt fine, not a nerve in my body, but it was a job making any of my muscles and tendons go rigid. I cursed.

  “Ed,” Melissa said in a little voice. “He’s right. I felt almost … weightless … just then —”

  “Damn wonder drugs. Damn modern times. I wonder how long this stuff lasts —?”

  I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t feel sleepy, or drugged, or listless. I just felt immaterial and spongy. Rollo could have beat hell out of me without working up a sweat. Now I was really worried, but I tried not to show it.

  “Who do you think he’s calling, Ed? Who could tell him what he wants to find out about you?”

  “I don’t know.” But I was thinking about Lola Langdon. She had been on deck since the beginning.

  “Ed, we’ve got to get out of here. He’s crazy.”

  “He sure is. Dollar signs are blinding him, and worse than that, he seems to be some kind of international spy. Let me think.” I looked around the harem, taking in the curtains, the pillows, the gauze, the Turkish water pipe. We did indeed have to do something. But what? As if in answer, the muffled roar of that damned subway came rumbling up from below again.

  “Third Avenue. Forties. That means we have to be somewhere in the vicinity of Grand Central. The IRT, the BMT. What I’d give for a code map of the layout now. Samarko must have built this room somewhere in the heart of the whole layout.”

  “That and twenty cents would get us a ride on the subway.” Melissa laughed nervously, trying to be funny. She kept looking at the curtains where the fat Samarko and little Rollo had gone. Poor kid. She was worried plenty. I couldn’t exactly blame her.

  I had to do something. Not just for myself. For her. She wouldn’t be in this fix if she wasn’t working for me. Like Mike Monks had always said — I had an uncanny knack for getting my friends and acquaintances in trouble.

  There was no telling how long my muscles were going
to keep on feeling like sacks of dead mice. But I wasn’t going to wait around for an emancipation declaration.

  I looked at the Turkish water pipe. It was a hookah, all right. One of those pipes with a flexible tube, long like a snake, in which the smoke passes through a bowl of water to be cooled. I looked at the water. It was clear and tranquil. But just below the glass was a brazier of sorts in which charcoal blazed on a low flame. Mr. Samarko’s smoking habit. True to the voluptuary image he so well fit, he smoked in the fashion of his ancestors, the way they had been doing since the first camel was born.

  “Ed, why are you staring at that silly thing?”

  “I have, if you’ll pardon the expression, the germ of an idea.”

  “I’m sick enough already. What is it?”

  “Mr. Samarko’s smoking habit.”

  “Huh?”

  I looked at her just once. Noted the fine, cameolike face, the delicate, firm lines of her cheeks. Her soft, warm brown coloring was all that Mr. Samarko had said it to be. But I watched her eyes.

  “Game, Mel?”

  She laughed, her naked shoulders pressing the pillow she still held hugged to her nudity.

  “What a question. You’re still the boss.”

  “Good girl.”

  Her eyes shone. “You could tell me what you’re up to?”

  “Up to?” I laughed. “I am about to kick the habit. Mr. Samarko’s smoking habit.”

  So saying, I raised my leg and poked the hookah as hard as I could. It wasn’t much. I barely nudged the bowl. But it swayed. As it was swaying I leaned on it, and down it went, spilling the water and the long, flexible tube. I jarred my foot against the brazier, which was placed on a small iron stand. It, too, toppled, but the effect was the one I wanted. I wasn’t just spilling water. Hot coals dumped from the brazier, plopped onto the satin and silk cushions around the base of the stand. Hissing noises and steaming spirals of smoke eddied up slowly as the coals burned into the material. In a magical moment, a small fire was well under way. I stepped back and admired my handiwork.