The February Doll Murders Page 8

  “Oh,” Mel said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “A fire. I don’t know if it will help, but at least it ought to make things hot around here and keep our friends busy making like firemen.”

  Again the thunderous roar of the underground railroad echoed throughout the room.

  “There’s got to be vents around here,” I reasoned. “Ducts or outlets. If the subway is that close, there’s all that wiring and electricity. Someone’s bound to notice. In any event, dear Samarko and his little murderer will have to change their plans. Come on, add some of that velvet and frilly stuff to this blaze. The bigger we make it, the better our chances are.”

  She moved fast. I didn’t have to tell her twice. And she dropped the all-concealing cushion. Like a creature out of some playboy’s wildest dreams she danced about the harem, finding pieces of satin and bits of lace to implement the budding blaze. I had never seen her quite that way before, naturally, having made her the one woman in the world with whom I didn’t mix business and pleasure. Once I had imagined it to be the safety margin of her color that had kept me back. But then I had learned it wasn’t that. I wanted to make love to her, but not as a sop to my own ego. Which is all it could have been. The one thing I owed Melissa Mercer as her boss and employer was not to take the line of least resistance. She would have hated me for that, and she meant more to me as a secretary and friend.

  The fire began to crackle and eat hungrily, racing along the fringes and tassels of Samarko’s Oriental boudoir. Small swirls and clouds of smoke rose to the ceiling, fanned out. The air began to get warm and stifling. I waved Melissa back toward the curtained entrance. We had done enough. More than enough. The fire would provide its own fuel now. Fires are like that. They don’t need any help once they get a good running start.

  Now that the work was done, Melissa was modestly hanging on to her pillow again. For one second, a flash of something naked and sensual shot out of her eyes. My own eyes must have given my admiration away. I moved to her side, kissing her swiftly on the mouth. She closed her eyes and shuddered. I could feel her lithe, slender figure vibrate against my own naked body.

  We huddled in the entranceway. “Hold on,” I whispered. “It’s time to see what’s beyond this harem.”

  “Careful,” she whispered. “Be careful.”

  I nodded, taking a handful of curtain and covering her with my own body. If any lead were about to fly from an enraged Rollo’s guns, I’d get it first.

  There was nothing to see. Just darkness and pitch-black nothingness beyond the alcove. I frowned. Which way led to freedom? Samarko and Rollo didn’t seem to have used any flashlights. Behind us the gathering heat and flame of the harem was an uncomfortable reminder that there was no turning back.

  And then I thought I was really losing my marbles.

  Because out of that inky stillness came the tiny little voices that I had begun to hear in my sleep.

  “Cookie all gone!”

  “Night, night!”

  “Doggy, bowwow!”

  Then the giggling, bursting laugh of childish pleasure.

  Then the quick, wailing cry of a baby.

  The sudden roar of the subway sound mushrooming once more from below drowned out the rest of the screwy noises. As Melissa huddled against me and the darkness vibrated with the roar and thunder of the underground express, all I could marvel at was the simple, ridiculous fact that somebody was pulling on Chatty Cathy’s ring again.

  Samarko had picked a helluva time to start playing with dolls.

  11

  Death in Two Glasses

  When the subway roar faded once more into nothing, total silence closed over us. There wasn’t a peep from the doll or so much as a whisper of air in that black void. I waited for some more noise, the sound of voices or a suggestion of any form of movement.

  The black pit beyond the harem room was oddly warm and pleasurable. Despite our nakedness, we were not cold; there was no clammy, cool underground air, as there should have been. Of course, the fire building behind us helped, but I was certain the closeness of the atmosphere was typical. Oddly, too, the stitches in my side where the fresh bullet hole was still healing had begun to ache a little. That was the first indication I had that Rollo’s euphoric drug was wearing off.

  I experimented by taking Melissa’s hand in the darkness and closing my fingers tightly. There was a surge of strength in my forearm. I hadn’t been mistaken.

  Still there was no more noise.

  But we couldn’t wait any longer. I inched forward into the darkness, easing Melissa along gently behind me. She was breathing rapidly now. We moved slowly, warily. I tried to see into the inky surroundings. No luck. We were moving in a black hole of nothing. I couldn’t measure it for width, depth, or height. The floor beneath my bare soles was warm, flat stone.

  I estimated we had gone about fifteen feet when I bumped into cold, cool metal. A bar of some kind. I felt for it with my hands, holding Melissa back. Unless I was nuts, I was holding onto the bannister of a spiral staircase of some kind. Iron swerved and curved, going upward.

  I edged up, my feet finding metal crossbars. Slats of stairs. I heard Melissa murmur “Oh!” when she realized what it was. I stared upward. A barely perceptible thin sliver of light shone. A slanting streamer of illumination, such as one might see coming from beneath a closed door.

  Now came more sounds. New ones. I tensed. I could hear the tinkle of glass. I grinned wryly in the darkness. Samarko and his little rat pal were pausing in the day’s occupation to have some of the grape. I couldn’t blame them. My mouth was bone-dry too.

  The flame and smoke from the harem room were just beginning to throw a rosy glow into the pitch blackness behind us.

  The spiral staircase was about ten feet high. Soon we were standing somewhere above the stone underground, the thin slit of light just before us. Melissa lurched against me. I held her tight. I wasn’t too sure what to do now. Rollo still had the Luger and the .45, and I had no more than my bare knuckles. That and the element of surprise would be all. Still, there wasn’t any time to lose. Though if Samarko and Rollo suddenly decided to return to see how their two pigeons were doing, that would be a break. They’d never see us in the darkness, and we could slip by them as nice as you please.

  It made sense. Trouble was, I wasn’t the patient kind. What if Samarko took all night before he made up his mind to see about us?

  Melissa tried to whisper something to me, and I shushed her. A whisper was a hiss of violent noise in such a narrow compartment. I knew how she felt. Till she got some clothes on and was out of this rat trap, she was going to be only inches from losing her nerve. A girl can take so much. Even Melissa.

  Almost five minutes had passed since the tinkling sound of glass. Now, from far below us, came the muffled subway sound. Fainter than before. A muted whisper of the solid thunder we had heard from the harem room.

  I wondered how long it might take for the smoke from our fire to attract some notice.

  I eased up to the closed door. My hand roved, found a doorknob, and clamped onto it. My lips found Melissa’s ear. I held her close. “Stand back. I’m going to open the door.”

  I felt rather than saw her nod. I moved her to the far side of the light. It was now or never. I felt sure I could handle either one of our friends. All I wanted was one of those guns.

  The door gave, and I followed through like a flying wedge, flinging myself to one side of the threshold. The sudden light was not as blinding as it should have been. A shaded lamp, a baroque ornamental doodad on a crowded table, was throwing off subdued electricity. I was ready for anything, but I pulled up short.

  There was no need for speed. Or even an attack.

  Something had gone very wrong.

  For a second all I could do was stare and try to make some sense out of what was hitting me smack in the eyes.

  Samarko and Rollo were seated about the long, cluttered table. They both looked as you’d expect two drunks to look after
a session with too many bottles. Only there was no bottle. Just a tall tumbler before each of them, amber contents showing golden in the light from the lamp. Neither of them had managed to finish his drink. It was the position of their bodies that was crazy. Samarko was sprawled back, his bloated body flung lifelessly against the back rest of his ornate maroon armchair. His fez was askew on his onion head, but some miracle had kept it in place despite the angle of his skull. His pink tongue was poking from his fat mouth. His eyes were open, glazed and sightless.

  I could feel Melissa come into the room behind me. Her soft feet made slithering noises on the parquet floor.

  “What’s happened to them?” she whispered in the awed undertone.

  Rollo was in the other chair, tilted back like his master. But the little rat had lost his beret. His walnut face was staring up at the ceiling. Saliva was visible around his leathery lips. But he, too, was long past his drink.

  I moved to the glasses and sniffed the rim of the nearest one. An unidentifiable but strongly acrid odor punched me in the nose. I shook my head, checking the room. It looked like the rear of some kind of shop. A tasseled curtain closed off the front of the place. Here in the back were the mahogany inlaid table at which Samarko and Rollo sprawled, the armchairs, and numerous piles of all sorts of bric-a-brac and objets d’art. I saw lamps, paintings, Chinese mobiles, a Samurai sword, and a small, scattered pile of Oriental daggers and assorted weapons. Beyond the glow of the lamp, there was a faint, smoky atmosphere of shaded violence and intrigue. It was like being in the rear of some opium den where you could have mad dreams about ruling the world. Exotica, Unlimited, if you please. The store proper must lie directly beyond the curtain.

  There was no sign of the Chatty Cathy doll. It seemed to have wound up its rubber legs and walked off into the night.

  “Look around, Mel. Find our clothes if you can. They must be somewhere back here.”

  “Are they —?”

  “Of course they are. Poison. Something that worked pretty fast. You heard those glasses tinkling a few minutes ago. Come on now, find those duds. We can have the post-mortems later.”

  I examined Samarko and Rollo. The fat man had nothing in his pantaloons. Not so much as a scrap of paper or a loose drachma. His gelatinous body shuddered as if alive when my hands raced over him. Rollo was a different breed of rat. Close to his horny hands on the cluttered table lay the Luger and my .45. In his taut denim pants, I located a stopwatch and a package of chewing gum. I cursed. I hadn’t found a thing that could help. I explored the cluttered table with its scrambled assortment of odds and ends. It was then that I saw the third glass. It had been easy to miss. A pile of three thick leather-bound volumes stood before it. The third glass held the same amber fluid that the glasses of Samarko and Rollo contained. The only difference was, this drink had not been touched. It was a safe guess it had not been touched at all.

  I tried to think.

  Behind me there was a low exclamation of gratification from my secretary. “Here they are, Ed!”

  “Get dressed. While you’re doing that, throw my duds on the table. We don’t know how much time we have to hang around here, but I have to do a little searching.”

  Suddenly the long, high wail of a siren sounded in the night. I waited. The sound grew louder, not fading off as it could have.

  “That sounds like our fire,” I said. “Two to one some smoke has entered the subway, and those guys in the funny hats will be axing into that harem in no time at all. The fire can’t be seen from up here, so we’re safe for a little while. Throw me my pants, will you?”

  It took just a couple of minutes for both of us to get respectable again. The clothes felt great. You never realize how much your civilized soul demands them until they are taken from you. In two shakes of a trim fanny, Melissa was dressed in her office best — a sheath dress of clinging wool, a nice blue shade with mother-of-pearl buttons in one orderly row down the front. No coat. Samarko and Rollo hadn’t been that considerate in hauling us from the office. I wondered how they had managed that. Must have had their own car, even though there hadn’t been any keys in their pockets. I hadn’t a coat, either. Or my hat.

  “Come on. We can’t do them any good now. I want to case the front of this dump.”

  She followed me through the curtained cutoff.

  Exotica, Unlimited was a showcase, all right. The rear room was a jumble. Not so the store proper. Samarko, or his interior designers, had laid out the place like an Arabian Night. It was large, uncrowded, and fashionably Oriental. Wide carpets of exotic design ran parallel on the floor. Exquisite tapestries hung grandly in place from the high walls. As we moved in the dimness, light carne from the plate glass windows facing Third Avenue. I caught a fuzzy gleam of neon from across the street. A bar of some kind. We glided through the store, stepping around vases as high as a man and wicker baskets big enough to hide a sheep in. The sirens were still splitting the night apart with shrill noises. It sounded as if the East Forty-second Street area was a madhouse of activity.

  The front door wasn’t locked. I didn’t expect it to be. It figured. That third glass had spelled it all out of me. Maybe not 100 percent, but enough of an answer for the immediate mystery.

  I checked the street. There was no telling what time it was. Little Rollo had confiscated my wristwatch sometime during the period when he had undressed me, and I wasn’t about to go looking for it. He and Samarko had changed their clothes, too, but he wasn’t going to need a watch where he was going. It’s always overtime when Old Nick is calling the tune.

  “Okay. Coast’s clear. Now, just walk out fast behind me, and try to look like an innocent passerby.”

  We managed, shutting the front door of Exotica, Unlimited quickly. No burglar alarm sounded. That, too, made sense. The third-glass party must have been to the store before.

  The avenue was lonely and still, for all the clamor of the sirens. No one had even come to the door of the bar to see what all the commotion was about. It had to be late at night. Maybe well after midnight …. Hell, I had lost track of time. It had been close to low noon when I had checked in at the mouse auditorium and found the fat man and his little pal giving Melissa the treatment. It was probably close to four in the morning by now. The bar was still open, and bars still have to close at four in the morning in New York.

  “Thank God, Ed.” Melissa drew a deep breath of the night air as we walked rapidly away from the shop, toward Grand Central. “You keep forgetting how sweet fresh air is.”

  “Ain’t it the truth. You okay?”

  “Fine, now.” She hugged my arm, her own locked around mine. “That was all pretty silly back there — and pretty scary.”

  “You were great.”

  She shook her head. “What do you think happened to them?”

  “Don’t know for sure. You remember, they left us to check on my story. Check with who? Someone who was either in the shop or could be reached by phone. But there was a third glass on that table. Which makes easy arithmetic where I come from. Three glasses, three drinkers — unless that little rat Rollo was a two-fisted drinker.”

  “Stop clowning, Ed. Say what you mean.”

  “Let’s find a cab first. I don’t want to run into any firemen or policemen.” The damn clamor had reached epic proportions now, as fire engines and equipment clanged toward the source of the alarm. I wondered just how long it would take to pin the blaze down to Exotica, Unlimited.

  A night-owl taxi bore down on us at the corner of East Forty-second and Third. We hopped in, and I was stumped. Where were we going? My apartment was a ruin, and the office was no place for Melissa to be comfortable. She solved it all for me. She gave the cabby an address on West End Avenue. The driver nodded, and the cab shot off in high gear as though anxious to get away from all the uproar.

  “Your place?” I murmured.

  “Why not?” she demanded. “Can’t you use some homemade coffee and maybe a sandwich?”

  “Yeah,” I agree
d, pleased with the idea. “How did you know I got bombed out of my place tonight?”

  “Samarko told me while he was winding up that doll in the office. He must have thought it would scare me spitless.” She blinked suddenly. “That doll — say, wasn’t he winding it up again when we were standing in all that darkness?”

  “He was, Mel. And ye olde third-glass drinker sure as hell took it with him or her when he or she took a powder.”

  Melissa Mercer sighed, her lovely face suddenly tired in the soft gloom of the rear of the cab.

  “Mr. Noon, you certainly do have a knack for getting involved in the damnedest cases.”

  There wasn’t anything I could say to that.

  Anyway, I was too busy wondering why there hadn’t been a bottle of any kind at the murder table.

  12

  The Golden Girl

  The finer things in life must be good coffee, good sandwiches, and a companionable woman. Not necessarily in that order. But somewhere in the tumbled design of memory must remain that one night I spent in Melissa’s apartment. I had never been there before. I’m not much for the employer-employee relationship. Being any kind of boss has always confused me, which is one reason why I chose the loner’s life of private detective. But modern times caught up with me, as did money, technology, and bigger and better clients. So along came Melissa Mercer, and we had enjoyed an easy camaraderie not marred by me making passes. But when a girl is beautiful, and a man is a lonely-type bum, what are the percentages for maintaining the hands-off policy?

  At the very beginning I’d wanted to be, consciously or unconsciously, a better type white man for her. I’d only been kidding myself, of course. Mel was Mel and I was I, and I shouldn’t have tried to buck the percentages. In the end, they always tell you the truth about yourself.

  Her apartment was a homey three-room place with wide windows fronting on the avenue. She kept a couple of lamps burning low and we had our snack in the living room, sharing a sofa and a mosaic-tiled coffee table. Melissa wanted to talk about the case, among other things.