Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Read online

  ARMCHAIR IN HELL

  Henry Kane

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  For

  Mr. and Mrs. J. A. B.

  because I love them

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Don’t Call Me Madame

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  THE DEVIL WAS a dentist with a drill.

  I was in an armchair in hell.

  So I woke up: but the buzzing persisted.

  The buzzing crystallized into sound with meaning.

  Someone had dug his finger into the hole around my doorbell, and it was endless, like music out of a juke box in the rear end of a gin mill.

  I worked my eyes open and I groped for the light switch and I found it. It was five minutes after midnight by my wrist watch, which wasn’t on my wrist or on the night table, but askew amongst other trinkets on top of an untidy hill of miscellaneous clothes by the side of the bed.

  I got up and I clucked at my awful reflection in the mirror.

  I went to the door.

  “Well,” I croaked. “Viggy O’Shea. A pleasure. Go home.”

  Dimly I knew that that was no way to talk to Viggy O’Shea, and no way to act. Viggy O’Shea was a natural for a private richard, and a private richard could be a very wealthy individual with only Viggy O’Shea as his entire clientele.

  “What’s with you?” I remarked.

  “Just as I thought.” He extended five fingers and he pushed, unlovingly, and I folded into a love seat.

  He closed the door and he snapped the peg, which gave us bracket lights, and he stuffed his hat and coat into a closet. He took off his jacket, carefully, and he draped it across the back of a fan chair. He took off his tie and he sighed once, but gustily, and then he did an akimbo with his hands on his broad yaller belt and he glared at me.

  I tried to glare back. I couldn’t quite make it.

  “All right. You’re here. Nice of you to drop in. So curl up on the sofa and drop dead.”

  “Plastered,” he said. “Just as I thought. Stiff as a bugle.”

  He yanked me out of the chair and he took me out of my pajamas and he walked me to the bathroom and he pushed me into the stall shower.

  2

  Coffee and more coffee. Black and Bitter.

  “We’ve got work,” he said, “chum-boy.”

  “Yes, Viggy. I lost a girl,” I said. “I suffer.”

  He tinctured a snort with a sniff and a gurgle; then he eased out of the chair and I trailed him to the living room.

  “You lost a girl,” he said. “That’s bad.”

  “Bad. The love of my life. The gracious Lolita.”

  “The love of his life. Get dressed. We’ve wasted a lot of time.”

  I went to the bedroom. I picked some underclothes from a drawer. “The love of my life,” I grumbled.

  “What?”

  “The real damn love of my life. The gracious whatever her name is. Gave me the air.”

  “That’s enough. I’ve heard that real damn love lament of yours before. You’re glad to get rid of the lollipop. But it’s another excuse for tying on a jag.”

  I sighed, one leg in my trousers and one leg out.

  I twitched a little.

  He slapped me across the face. I lost my pants.

  “Unnecessary,” I said in a surprisingly accurate tone of disdain. Then I wiped my nose and found my pants and clambered into them and went looking for a shirt; but he came after me and he turned me around and he squeezed big hands on my shoulders and he left them there.

  “Pull yourself together, for Chrissake. Please.”

  “Believe me,” I said. “I’m together.”

  He went back to the living room.

  I got into my socks and my shoes and I buttoned my shirt and put on my tie and knocked off a Duke of Windsor knot first crack, and then Viggy showed up again.

  “How we doing?”

  “Not bad.”

  “You ready?”

  “What cooks?”

  “I’ve got a dame at home.”

  “Good.”

  “In bed.”

  “Very good.”

  “A brunette.”

  “A brunette!” I yapped at him, nose to nose, and I waited

  a second and then I went away and started pulling off my tie. “For that I’m taken out of a warm bed and pushed around. Because the guy is a nut on blondes.”

  “A dead brunette.”

  Viggy put his hat on, neat and slanty over his eye.

  3

  He spread out and he sprawled in his corner of the cab, silent as the dummy minus Bergen.

  Me too. In my corner.

  The cab pulled up and we got out and Viggy paid off and we went up the four steps of a four-step stoop. Viggy lived on East Seventy-sixth Street, squash amongst the swanky-panks, in a narrow two-story house set back from the building line, fronted by a tiny grass lawn split in the middle by a sidewalk-path leading to the steps.

  He got his keys out and he opened the door quickly and we hung our hats and coats on an old-fashioned coat rack in the foyer. Light streamed through an arched doorway on the right. Farther back to the right, a steep stairway rose, gray-carpeted. Light streamed also, from behind the stairs.

  I knew the house: a cellar, a ground floor, a first floor, and a second floor (and what a cellar). The arch-way on the right was the drawing room, and the kitchen was behind the stairs.

  I edged over and peeked into the spacious drawing room.

  An intricate chandelier spread light over heavy grouped furniture and a thick Chinese rug, and light jumped back in reflected bunches from a massive rectangular thick-wood shining table in the middle of the room, topped with a long strip of white lace doily and three silver vases with artificial flowers. Ten carved-back chairs with red velvet seats surrounded the table, a chair at either end.

  Solidly, a man sat with his back to us in the chair at the foot of the table. Quietly. A man with a high proud plume of wavy iron-gray hair. I couldn’t see his face. He didn’t turn around. It wasn’t that he was impolite: it was more that a knife was in his back, high in a corner, the snub hilt pointing back at me like a stiff tongue pushed out in derision.

  Chapter Two

  IT SHAKES you up when you’ve got a dead brunette in bed on your mind and then you get hit with a guy in a red velvet seat with a knife in him.

  I waded through a lush rug and I touched him and I came back to Viggy in the doorway.

  Viggy didn’t see me.

  “Charlie,” he whispered. “Charlie Batesem.”

  I looked at him.

  “What’s the matter with you? Charlie’s bald.”

  Viggy didn’t see me.

  He turned and he ran down the hall and he ducked in under the stairs. I went after him. I collided with his hard flat back at the threshold to the kitche
n.

  I looked past his shoulder.

  There was blood on the yellow linoleum.

  There was a lot of blood. There was so much blood I felt faint, and I’m in the business. Charlie’s bald head gleamed in the midst of it like bright snow on a garbage heap, Charlie with a wide-slit gaping neck and a secret smile on his tilted face, his teeth milk-white against tight blue lips.

  My stomach ridged and I jerked when Viggy slid a cold finger along my balled-up fist.

  Spongily he said, “All right. Let’s go upstairs.” His face was the color of the linoleum and his black eyebrows were pulled together hard and his lips were dry and puckered.

  I followed him up the carpeted steps.

  He opened the first door on the left and he clicked the light on. On top of the bed, over a coral silk coverlet, a woman lay with her arms out and her palms up, supplicatingly, her legs straight and slightly parted: a small, dark-haired, nude woman, with popping eyes and a wax skin and an open throat.

  No blood. No blood at all.

  2

  I went shot for shot with Viggy, three times, from good-sized glasses on a tray with a decanter on an antique piece in the drawing room. He pulled back one of the heavy carved-back chairs and he sat down. I stayed with the decanter.

  “Nice, huh?” he said. His color was better.

  “Nice,” I said.

  The phone rang. I started for it. Viggy stopped me.

  It rang some more. Then it stopped ringing.

  Viggy rapped the middle knuckle of his right hand against his teeth. “I don’t get it. I feel like a refugee out of a bughouse. I don’t know what the hell this is all about. First there’s that dead bitch up there in my bedroom. I never saw her before in my life. That’s trouble, so I call you on the phone, and when it doesn’t answer I shoot right out to look for you like I always do when there’s real trouble. I cannot afford to wait. Charlie and this other mug are right here in this room talking when I leave. I wouldn’t send Charlie. I go myself. I always go myself. I know you. You’re hard to find or you’re hard to persuade or maybe you’re home, cockeyed. And now look what we got. Charlie and this other louse. What the hell is going on here?”

  “Who’s he?” I said, and I took another little snifter and I pointed with my thumb. My stomach was warm and I was beating a hang-over and I was ashamed of having felt faint and I was all ready to play detective.

  Viggy hardly glanced at him. “A dealer. From Los Angeles.”

  “One of your boys?” I said.

  “Not that kind of dealer. A business guy. A dealer in art stuff.”

  “Legit?”

  “Mostly.”

  “And the woman upstairs?”

  “You dumb? Or drunk? Or trying to be a smart detective? I told you I never saw that tomato before in my life.”

  Suddenly he punished the edge of the table with a handful of slapping fingers.

  “The valise,” he said, and he looked at me as if I knew what he was talking about. “The goddamn valise. It wasn’t up there.”

  He shoved back the chair and I heard him pound up the stairs and I heard the banging of doors.

  “The hell with this,” I said, and I knocked over another embracer, and another one, and I choked up and coughed and put the glass down and looked at the man way down at the foot of the table.

  He was a grave-looking chap, about fifty-five, with a smooth-salesman’s expression frozen on his dark face. It he were alive, he’d be rubbing his hands together, chummily; his thoughts had been pleasant, he had been making money right up to when he stopped thinking.

  I went over and touched his hand. It was smooth as goose grease; warm, unset.

  Viggy came back.

  “How the hell do you like that?” he said. “No valise.”

  “No valise?” I said. Witheringly.

  Ungracefully I took his lapels in my hands and I brought him over and I hoped my breath stank of whisky. “Three stiffs in the house. Assorted. And this guy is worrying me about a satchel. Let’s get normal, big shot.”

  “Let’s go in there.” He pointed across the hall.

  3

  The room was a small edition of the drawing room, antiques and all, but no decanter.

  Viggy heaved into a corner of a flowered-rust couch.

  He whisked at his curly black hair and he rubbed at the bristles of his beard and he wedged his wrist between his teeth, meditatively. He got it out. He pushed his feet out all the way and he shoved his hands into stiff-legged trouser pockets.

  Viggy was tall and dark and handsome and broad-shouldered, with a high forehead and a pointed nose and a wide mouth and excellent teeth. Right now he was ugly. The skin of his face was baggy as an old ladies’ home. Strained spread-lines from nose to mouth-edge were nail deep and brown as iodine streaks. He sucked in his upper lip and he stuck out his lower lip, fretfully and angrily, and he twitched, occasionally, underneath one eye. He said nothing for a few minutes, and then he said. “I’ll tell you a story,” and his gambler’s voice was level and conversational.

  “Not now, you won’t daddy.”

  He cocked his head. It sidled on his shoulders, sloped as a sailor’s hat. “You all right?”

  “I‘m all right. You’re the problem. You’re tired. You’ve had a deal pulled on you. So I let you rest for a few minutes, but, daddy, you just ain’t thinking right.”

  “Okay, brains. Okay and okay. That’s what I’ve got you for.”

  “Swell. There’s a lot of time been wasted around here. Dead people in the house are dangerous. Especially for you. So first you go looking for valises and then you sit and stare and now you want to tell stories. See what I mean?”

  Wearily he said, “I suppose so.”

  “You’re not an ordinary customer. An ordinary customer

  picks up the phone and he calls the cops and he says, ‘I’ve got dead people in the house,’ and he’s through. Then the dead people in the house are someone else’s headache. Not you. You’re a special kind of customer. With you we’ve got to do it arsewise.”

  “Arsewise,” he said, and he dished up a sick copy of a wan grin. “Very fancy.”

  He pulled in his feet and he got up and he ran a wet tongue across dry lips and he made a point of his chin and he started putting heel prints on the rug. “All right. Lecture period is over. Where do we go from here?”

  “Now you’re Viggy O’Shea,” I approved. “First, we get them out of here. Later, I listen to the story. After that, we measure angles.”

  Splashingly, thick streams of rain gusted against the windows. I went over and looked out.

  Rain danced on an empty street.

  “It’s marbling,” I said. “It’s a fine night for sneaking around with corpses.”

  “I wish Ma were here,” Viggy said.

  Absently I said, “Yeah,” and I looked at dripping window-panes — then I looked at him, fast.

  “What?”

  Simply, he said, “Ma.”

  “That’s what I thought. Take it easy, pal. Tighten up, for the love of Christ. We’ve got a tough night in front of us.”

  Morosely he advised me not to worry about Viggy.

  “Then what is this with Ma? You’re a big boy now.”

  He produced his sick stand-in for a grin. For a moment. Then he forgot it. “Ma is Marmaduke. Marmaduke is my butler. My butler would be a help.”

  Perplexedly I said, “You’ve got a butler?” And then blood got busy in my head like noon in the Automat. “Where is your butler?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Since when you got a butler?”

  “The last three months.”

  “Well …,” I said.

  “Well, nothing. Ma is an old Englishman who is strictly all right. Used to work for Roachie Turner. For fifteen years. When Roachie got married, Ma quit and I took him over. He’s a bachelor’s butler, exclusively. He won’t get mixed up with women.”

  “Like me.”

  “Yeah.”r />
  “Why isn’t he here?”

  “He’s had a vacation for a month.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been out of town. I’ve been in L.A.”

  “When’d you get back?”

  “Today. Couple of hours ago. I came in with Charlie and the dealer. Direct from L. A. We called up a guy on business and he came over and we had a little conference and the guy left and then I brought the valise upstairs to my bedroom and I saw that naked package someone had left for me. So I scooted out for you.”

  “Did this Ma know you were due back?”

  “Yes. I wired him. He should have been here. It would bother me, if I had the time, but I don’t have the time, not with corpses around here like confetti.”

  “It bothers me. Is this a resident butler?”

  “No. Eight o’clock to eight o’clock, unless I need him earlier or later.”

  “Where does he live? Do you know?”

  “Of course I know.”

  “I mean offhand.”

  “Lives at Eighty-three Lexington Avenue.”

  “Any more?”

  “Second floor, front apartment.”

  I went out of the room. I went across the hall into the drawing room. I didn’t look at the dealer from Los Angeles who was mostly legit. I went over and got the decanter and injected a little direct, and I brought the decanter and a glass back to Viggy. I poured a real dose for him.

  “Have a drink,” I said. “On me.”

  He drank it. He said, “I don’t get it.”

  “I’m going to Eighty-three Lexington Avenue. I’m going right away. You claim you know nothing from nothing. Maybe our Marmaduke knows the same nothing from nothing. But maybe he doesn’t. And if he doesn’t, we sort of ought to know that. And right away. So you and I split assignments.”

  “You’re boss.”

  “Do you know how to steal a car?”

  He picked up his eyebrows. He put them down. “I’ve learned a lot of things in my day. I know how to steal a car.”

  I took him by the hand and I sat down with him on the

  couch. Very explicitly I said, “These are instructions. You clean up here. You clean up that kitchen. You keep the bottle handy. You’ll need it. You clean up, all over. You get that woman down from upstairs and you get Charlie out of the kitchen and you get Mr. Dealer out of the parlor. You leave the knife in him. You don’t touch it. You assemble them in the foyer. Then you go out in the rain and you pick up a car. You’re very careful about fingerprints. You wear gloves. You think you can manage it?”