Brett Halliday: Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

The tune started once more, a little faster now, yet still without gaiety, still mournful. The slightly off-key notes cascaded down and up and down again in weird, disconsolate sequence.

For a moment longer she let her eyes follow the ballet doll in its ceaseless turning. Then, remembering, she looked at the clock on the wall. She arose, walked across the room to a table on which a telephone stood, picked up the slip of paper which lay beside the receiver and dialed a number.

“Hello,” she said, in a thin and reedy voice. “Is this the Police Station?” The tinkling notes sounded in counterpoint behind her, making her voice seem even thinner for an instant.

“My name is Betty Lorman. I live at nine hundred and twelve River Lane, River Hills.” Holding the slip of paper with one hand where she could read from it, she added, “Please send a policeman over. Someone is dead.” She hung up the receiver, replaced the slip on the telephone table and crossed the room, past the outstretched body on the floor, and back to the desk where the doll still turned.

Three minutes later, when the knock sounded, she was still watching the doll. For the third time the notes were slowing. She picked up the music box and twisted the key on its bottom a few times before she arose, and went to open the door.

Immediately the room was filled, both with the bodies of the two policemen (they were close to six feet tall) and with their involuntary recoil. One was young and one was old, but against the duality of the small child and the inert body they stood as one, aghast and incredulous, unable even to admit to consciousness, as yet, the incongruous tinkling tune to which the doll still turned in its interminable dance.

Tom Wallace, the old Inspector, pushed the child behind him, shielding her with his big body from the corpse with its bullet-pierced chest and glazed, half-open eyes. “’Phone in the report, Burns,” he murmured, and walked with her to the chair in front of the desk, sat down on it and drew her onto his lap.

The notes from the music box slowed and died. The sound of dialing scraped unevenly and then Burns’s low, almost whispering voice took over.

Betty reached toward the musical doll but Wallace stayed her hand, covering it with one of his own big ones. With the other, he stroked her honey-colored hair back from her forehead.

“Who is it, child?” he asked.

“My Uncle Bob.”

“Who killed him?”

Her eyes strayed toward the music box. He was startled to see how calm they were. “He died from natural causes,” she said evenly.

“Who told you to say that?” The words came in harsh staccato, though he had not intended that they should. “You’re only about ten, aren’t you?”

“I s’pose so. Daddy didn’t believe in counting years. He always said Mother was younger than I was.”

“All right. Even at ten you ought to realize that being shot through the heart isn’t dying from natural causes.”

He let go of her hand to remove his hat. The moment it was free, she reached out and picked up the doll.

“Put that thing down!” He snatched it from her.

“Give it back. Give me back my doll!” Tears filled her amber eyes as she lunged futilely for it, her tiny arm reaching no farther than his elbow.

“So you can get excited,” Wallace said. “Not about a dead man but about a doll. What’s the matter with you, anyway?” His voice softened a little. “Your uncle’s dead. Didn’t you like him?”

“Of course I did. We played games — Uncle Bob and Mother and I.”

“Not your Daddy?”

“No, Daddy was different. I felt safe with Daddy. Please give me my doll!”

“I found this, sir.” Marty Burns handed the slip of paper from the telephone table to Wallace.

“Lakeview five five-thousand.” The old Inspector read aloud, his voice growing huskier and more disbelieving, until finally, at the end, he was whispering in a sort of breathless protest against the words. “Is this the Police Station? My name is Betty Lorman… Someone is dead.”

“So they left this paper with you,” Wallace said, “and told you to wait a certain length of time, and then to call the police. How long did they tell you to wait?”

“Two hours.” The child’s nose twitched with the effort to keep from crying. “I wish I could hold my doll!”

She grasped it eagerly as he brought it within reach and, for a moment, let one hand lie on the stiff tulle skirt, as a blind man in a strange room might rest his hand against a wall to draw confidence from its solidity before he ventured further.

“Don’t wind it, though,” the Inspector said, holding Burns where he stood beside them with a faint, almost unnoticeable flicker of one eyelid. “Tell me about Mother and Daddy. What do they look like?”

“Daddy looks like me,” the child said. “Only he’s round and a lot taller and his hair’s thin in front. Not as tall as him, though.” She looked up at the young policeman who, even under her child’s eyes, flushed and twitched self-consciously.

“And he isn’t as tall as Uncle Bob either, or as dark,” she concluded.

“Good. And Mother?”

“Soft like a kitten. With sky-blue eyes and hair like black clouds. Curly, not ropy like mine.”

“Is that the way Daddy described her?” Wallace asked, dismissing Burns with another twitch of his eye.

“Daddy, or Uncle Bob. I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s the way she felt.”

“I guess Uncle Bob was Daddy’s brother, not Mother’s.”

She nodded, fastening her eyes again in that still, almost expressionless concentration on the doll, not seeming to hear either the rasp of the dial under Burns’s finger or the spare, pointed words, the first-fired arrow of the hunter which, even if it missed its mark, would land somewhere and so change, however infinitesimally, the pattern of things as they now existed. “All right. Where did they go?”

“It doesn’t matter. They said you’d take care of me.”

“Scheming, heartless devils!” The words burst from the old Inspector. “That’s what they are. To leave a child—” For only the second time since they had come into the room, his words were addressed to Burns.

When the call had come to Police Headquarters in the thin, child’s voice they had, of course, thought it was a hoax. But the Inspector was through for the day and so was Burns, so they rode over to River Lane together just on the one chance in a hundred that it wasn’t some teen-ager holding her nose and making her voice high and talking through a handkerchief stretched over the mouthpiece in an effort to get some friend — or enemy of the moment — into trouble.

The Inspector and Burns hadn’t yet been out on a case together — Burns was pretty new in the department — and the difference in age and rank, added to their lack of knowledge of each other, had kept conversation at a minimum.

Betty set the doll firmly on the top of the desk, turning to look fully for the first time at Wallace. “That isn’t true,” she said angrily. “You said that because you think I was scared, because you think they shouldn’t have left me with Uncle Bob. But I wasn’t scared. Death is nothing to be afraid of.”

“Who told you that?” For a moment Wallace forgot he was talking to a child. “The same person who told you to say your uncle died from natural causes?”

She nodded. “Daddy. But he didn’t say exactly that. He said Uncle Bob died as the natural result of a chain of events.”

“And did he tell you who killed him?”

“He didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew.”

“Well, who?” Wallace asked, staring hard at her.

“We all did.”

Wallace drew a deep and exasperated breath. Across the room Burns stared thoughtfully at a blue painting in a blue frame — either undersea or stratospheric — then shrugged and opened a door which led to one of the bedrooms off the living room.