Killer on the Keys by Michael Avallone

Author:Michael Avallone [Avallone, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Story Merchant Books
Published: 2015-11-14T22:00:00+00:00

DIRGE IN ONE DAY FLAT

"How do you go about exhuming a corpse, Michael?" I asked my friendly neighborhood Police Captain in the grimy cubicle of his private precinct office the next morning. It was about twelve hours after Melissa Mercer and I had exchanged midnight vows and I'd left her with enough secretarial and Sherlockana legwork to keep her hopping most of the day. "Two corpses, to be exact."

"You can't bring Gary Cooper back, no matter how bad you want it," Monks growled amiably enough, his keen eyes twinkling in the barroom-floor map that passes for his face. "No, and not even that other boyhood hero of yours—Mel Ott. You'll have to meet them in Heaven, Ed, or wherever the hell we all wind up finally."

"Don't clown around. It's not your speed. I'm serious."

"What are you getting at? Level with me. You never really drop in on me just to pass the time of day. I know you too long, you fugitive from the Establishment. What gives?"

I eyed him with the usual mixture of fondness and regret. He was the best man I ever knew, in or out of uniform, but he'd been a police dog so long he had all the virtues and all the faults. Not even a square desk, a fine record and the fact that he'd been wearing plainclothes for more than two decades had altered the most suspicious mind since Leonardo Da Vinci. Manhattan had never precisely taken good care of him. His little office was a shabby throwback to the old Roaring Twenties. It was so modern in furnishings and equipment that there still was a '40 model watercooler by the door. Pale November sunlight stealing in through high, casement windows set every dust mote in the office to dancing, exposing the steel green files and familiar department accessories for the shop-worn antiques they were. Early Lloyd Nolan.

"I'm thinking about Gregory's two dead piano players and him up in that Montauk Happydale still cutting out paper dolls and making wicker baskets. I don't like that at all. Do you?"

"So?" His curious scowl spoke volumes for his firm belief in the good book. The book of rules. He did everything by that book.

"So I've had to wonder about the whole mess for too many weeks now. I was waiting until you got yourself squared away after your Chicago Convention Policemen's Ball—whatever that was."

"It was a proper meeting of police officials from every state in the union," Monks said coldly. "And important from my point of view. We're all pretty tired of being called Pigs."

"Okay." I slid by that because he knew where I stood on the matter. "I've come to you now asking for your help. I need just about all you can spare, Mr. Captain, Sir."

"What corpses are you interested in, may I ask?"

"Two fairly recent stiffs who weren't classified as homicides but might have been a little fishy all the same."

"Georges Valentin and Algernon Gerard, specifically?"

I frowned across the desk at him. The names had sprung far too readily to his lips and each death was a month old or more.

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