The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

A Head off Her Shoulders

Originally published in Dime Mystery Magazine, August 1949.

Maxie Bemelmens’ penthouse was like a huge nerve center in a state of morbid, quiet excitement. Atop a fifteen-story apartment hotel that Maxie owned, the penthouse was everything a penthouse should be, down to the last shrub growing on the terrace. I stood at the French doors, listening to myself breathe. Now and then the phone tinkled and Leon Myart’s smooth voice murmured into it. He was talking to the nerve-ends, men out scouring the city, putting little pieces of information into a pattern.

Myart said, “He want to see you, Hilliard.”

I looked at the closed door across the room. “I hate to go in there.”

“I know, but you’d better go on in.”

I went in the room. It was a kind of den. There was Maxie pushed back in a big club chair with that sad, sour, dead expression on his face. His thick lips looked grey. I wanted to yell at him to snap out of it. I have never seen anything like it happen before.

Right near Maxie’s chair was a large plush couch. On it lay a figure. The silk dress clung enough to show the lines of the body and the hands were at the sides in calm repose. But Melissa’s face was missing. In fact, her whole head was missing, severed just above her shoulders.

“Steve,” Maxie said, “get Cecil Calhoun. Bring Calhoun here for the job.”

“Calhoun, the sculptor?”

“That’s right. He’s one of the best in the country. Promise up to fifteen grand if you have to.”

He reached for a bottle. I saw that he was blind drunk. “Here’s the address, Steve.”

I took the piece of paper and went out. Men were on guard at the top and bottom of the elevator shaft. Archie was the one on guard at the front entrance to the building. While I waited for the car to pull around Archie chatted with me. “Nothing showing down here,” he said.

“Myart’s narrowing the time element down fast now,” I said.

“I don’t like that Myart,” Archie said. “Colder’n a snake’s belly in zero weather.” He rolled his eyes up. “Maxie still in there with her?”

When I nodded, Archie looked worried. “It ain’t right,” ‘he muttered. “It ain’t normal. Couldn’t you talk to him, Hilliard? Get him to tell the cops about this thing, the way he should?”

“He’d let the cops dog Melissa’s murder the way he’d give his dough to charity.”

“Nothing good’s going to come from it,” Archie said. “Somebody is really gunning for Maxie this time, sending him that trunk with Melissa in it that way. Maybe,” he added hopefully, “it ain’t Melissa after all?”

“It’s Melissa, all right. Whoever did it wanted Maxie to know right off that it was Melissa. The shoulder of her dress was pulled down enough to show that birthmark.”

Archie fogged smoke out of his nose and shook his head. “Somebody sure hates Maxie!”

“And Melissa,” I said.

Oldham pulled the car up to the curb then and I crossed the sidewalk. I got in and handed Oldham the piece of paper with Cecil Calhoun’s address.

The address turned out to be an old gingerbread house. A card on the bell button read: “Out of Order.” I knocked.

When nothing happened I knocked again. A woman’s voice, husky and impatient, called out, “All right, all right. I’m coming!”

The door was jerked open. She was very good looking in a tall, rangy way, the kind of dame you imagine on an archery range or gracing a sleek saddle mount or floating down in a perfect swan dive from a high board. She had long auburn hair that glinted in the sunlight. Her mouth was red and wide, and her eyes were a liquid brown, capable of great expression. She was wearing a smock stained with clay and paint, and there was a clay smudge on her cheek where she’d brushed the back of her hand.

“The Calhoun residence?” I said.

“I’m Cecil Calhoun.”

“I hadn’t expected to find a woman.”

“Neither did my father,” she smiled, “and unfortunately named me before I was born. Would you come in?”

She closed the door behind me and crossed the room to get herself a cigarette. The flash of her bare calves and ankles was easy to watch. When she turned she caught me peeking. It didn’t fluster her.

The living room was filled with old furniture and cluttered to the point where you knew she didn’t care much for housework, or for a lot of servants getting in her way. She cleared away enough magazines from the sofa so I could sit down.

“My name is Steven Hilliard,” I said. “I represent Mr. Maximillian Bemelmens. There is a job of sculpting he wishes you to do. But it must be done immediately. You’ll work in his penthouse. Anything you need will be supplied.”

“Well, really, I—”

“You can check Mr. Bemelmens in Dun and Bradstreet. He wants only the best, but there can be no delay whatever. A certain young lady will have to take a trip shortly, and Mr. Bemelmens wants—”

“A keepsake? A reminder?”

“You could put it that way.”

“A bust?”

“Just — the head. But you’ll have to go see Mr. Bemelmens now. He instructed me to offer fifteen thousand.” I wondered why I’d quoted that top figure right off the bat.

Those eyes of hers expressed pleased surprise. She gave me a careful scrutiny, seemed to decide that I was not too long out of college, one of those young men in a solid business firm who wore a Windsor knot in his tie. It was evident she didn’t read the papers too much or she’d have known a little something about Maxie.

“I’ll shuck out of this smock,” she said.

I relaxed. I had thought I would have more trouble. I watched her leave the room. The smock couldn’t quite hide the rhythm of her hips as she walked.

When we got back to the apartment hotel she didn’t notice the guards scattered through the building. I wouldn’t have noticed them myself if I hadn’t known where to look. We rode the elevator up to the penthouse.

Myart was over at the cabinet that unfolded into a bar, gesturing and mumbling at Dominick and Todd when I ushered Cecil Calhoun in. I wondered what Dominick and Todd had found out.

Myart spun at the sound of our entry. His narrow eyes pulled together, and I said, “Cecil Calhoun.”

He looked as if he didn’t much like the idea of a girl, but he said, “Maxie’s waiting.”

I crimped my lips tight on a breath and steered Cecil into the room where Maxie sat. She looked at him and at the thing on the couch and turned back toward the door fast. She looked a little green. She said, “You’ll pardon me.”

I caught her wrists, my back against the door. Her gaze flashed up into mine. I could feel the warmth of her, the lithe strength of her body. I wondered how expressive those eyes would get in soft darkness alone with some guy she thought a lot of.

“I really am in no serious need of fifteen thousand dollars,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me...”

“Sit down!” Maxie said.

She gave me an angry look and sat down.

“Can you sculpt a head from photographs,” Maxie asked.

“I suppose, with enough shots from enough angles.”

“You’ll have enough. I’ve got dozens of them, from all angles.” For an instant Maxie’s sour, dead gaze lingered on the thing on the couch. “I won’t bury her like that,” he said. “She’s got to have a head. You make a head of wax and I’ll pay you fifteen thousand and then you’ll be free to leave.”

She looked about the room as if seeking a way out. “I suppose this is one job any sculptor would never forget,” she said at last, squeezing a wry smile across her lips.

“Give her the rumpus room,” Maxie said. “Get it cleared. Bring in whatever she wants.”

I steered Cecil into the rumpus room. She saw me looking at the darts in the large cork board on the wall. She said, “You don’t think I’m a fool, do you? What good would a few darts do?”

“I’ll send the photographs in. Make out a list of things you’ll need.”

She dropped in a modernistic leather chair. “It’s driven him crazy, hasn’t it, that thing in there?”

“It hit him very hard,” I admitted. “When you think of Maxie you think of a guy with steel in his guts, slapping backs, laughing, taking what he wants. When he opened that trunk that she came in, it aged him a thousand years. He’s sitting in there like an old, numbed man.”

“More like a plotting, insane spider,” Cecil suggested. “She must have been quite a gal.”

“Honey, I wouldn’t even attempt to describe Melissa.”

“She was beautiful?”

“More than just that. Not the intellectual type. I guess the animal type would fit her. She was catty, mean, vicious. She’d fly into a rage and throw things. She’d pout. She’d sell you out without batting an eye, see your soul in hell, and suffer acute self-pity if you even suggested she had anything to do with it.”

“Some fools go for that type,” Cecil conceded.

“Not me.”

“What’s your type?”

“You.”

“That’s flattering, considering the source. You must have had a lot of experience with women.”

“Not so much so as you’d think.”

“This Melissa — where’d she come from?”

“I don’t know, before she came to the city. But she cut a wide swath here. First she married a cheap little bookie. He made the mistake of introducing her to Augie Feldman, who was the biggest bookie in town. After Augie there was a millionaire playboy, an aviator who got famous during the war, and then Roy Meek, who dealt in narcotics. None of them ever stopped loving her.”

“She didn’t marry them all?”

“No.” I laughed at the expression on Calhoun’s face. “Only one or two of them.”

“After this Roy Meek came your boss?”

“Look, why all the questions?”

“Just interested — and if I’m going to do a head of her I have to know what she was like. There must be some character in the head, mustn’t there?”

“Well, after Roy Meek came the boss,” I said.

“And what happened to the men who loved her? I mean, she must have left her mark on their lives.”

“The millionaire ruined Augie Feldman,” I said. “Then the millionaire took to drink when she was through with him. The aviator cracked up — it might have been suicide. Roy Meek landed in prison.”

She cut me a look out of the corners of her eyes. “Your boss’ doing?”

“You’d better not ask any more questions,” I said. “I’ll get those photos. You’d better list the things you want.”

When I went out Myart was talking excitedly with Fisk. A tall, lean, grey man, Fisk was mopping his face. They turned as I entered the sunken living room.

Myart said, “Roy Meek is out.”

I drew up on my toes, remembering. The day Meek had gone to prison. The poisonous hatred Maxie Bemelmens and Roy Meek felt for each other. I could still seem to see Maxie standing in the courtroom, laughing, Melissa on his arm, when sentence had been passed on Meek. Meek had turned and his eyes had sought Maxie and Melissa out and he had given them a look. That’s all, just one long look out of those washed-out cold blue eyes.

“When?” I asked.

“Two days ago. A parole.”

“I’ve been on it all day,” Fisk said. “I finally found the rooming house where he checked in when he hit town. But after that first night he hasn’t been back there.”

“Get back on it,” Myart said. “I’ll send Oldham over to help you.”

When Fisk went out, Myart paced briskly back and forth, stopped before me, rocking on his toes, hands clasped behind him. In the tone of a man delivering a lecture, Myart said, “The ramifications of this thing can be far reaching and charged with disaster, Hilliard. No one outside the organization must know Maxie’s real condition. This, Hilliard, is all the work of someone gone mad with hatred for Melissa and Maxie. I doubt that Roy Meek would have the cold nerve to do it.

“But most important — to me — is the organization. The work must go on. Maxie is expending a hundred dollars an hour, bending every effort of our team to track down Melissa’s killer. Dozens of people have been questioned, watched, traced. We’ve examined her movements in detail until one-twenty-five this morning. There we have hit a dead end, a blank wall.

“In the meantime, doubts and wonders about Maxie will be rising all over the city. I want you to go down to the offices. You’ll know what to do. Keep things running. Put up a front for at least today.” The phone buzzed. Myart went to it.

I stuck my head back in the rumpus room. “I’m going to be out for a while,” I said.

Cecil Calhoun looked up from the table where she was jotting on a note pad.

“Just stay in here and you’ll be okay, I promise you.”

“And I believe I can believe you, Steve Hilliard,” she said.

“Calhoun, I like you.”

As the afternoon wore on, an air of dread and doubt, like fingers of darkness, stole across the underworld of the city. I knew it from the people I talked with in the offices, the phone calls that came for Maxie that I had to cover. No one outside the organization knew what had really happened, but you can’t turn loose a score of human hunters asking questions without causing people in dark places to talk and wonder.

Calhoun was still in the rumpus room when I got back there. I had a tray of food in my hands. I kicked the door closed with my heel. “Your dinner,” I said.

“Is it that late? I hadn’t noticed.”

She had the face of the dart board covered with glossy photos of Melissa, mostly close-ups of Melissa’s soft, golden face. She had ruined the ping-pong table with a clutter of tools and plaster of paris scattered everywhere. Midway down the table what looked like a lump of plaster of paris was showing the outlines of a human face. “I hope you like chop suey,” I said.

“Adore it.” She sat down to eat. “I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon, Steve.”

“That’s flattering.”

“I’m really serious. You don’t belong here. This Maxie is a crook, isn’t he?”

“Let’s say the average man has ten fingers. Maxie has a hundred with each finger in a different place. He can push a lot of weight around, Maxie can.”

“But you don’t belong with him,” she repeated. “You need to put that good-looking, smiling kisser in a brokerage office.”

“And get up every morning at seven-thirty, jostle my way through the mob to get home at five, read the paper and go to bed? Set myself up so that a Saturday night bridge game is a big celebration?”

“I wish I knew your early environment,” she said. “Something has twisted you up. How did you ever get hooked up with Maxie?”

“I inherited it,” I said. “An old uncle raised me. He was a side-kick of Maxie’s. Maxie has always regarded me as a son. That’s why I have the run of the place, why I’m one of the few people he can trust.”

She was looking at me with a world of expression in her dark brown eyes. I leaned over and kissed her. She didn’t move.

When I took my lips away from hers she said, “I’m sorry you did that.”

“Would slapping my face help?”

“Not that kind of sorry. Get out of here, will you!”

I went back in the living room. Myart was on the edge of his chair at the phone. Beads of sweat stood out on his narrow forehead under his patent-leather hair and his waxed mustache had got a little limp. He was saying in agitation: “No!.. Really?... Wonderful!”

He slammed the phone down, turned to me. “We pushed through the blank, Hilliad.” He laughed in that way of his, that dry, mirthless sound that wasn’t real laughter at all. “Until one-twenty-five this morning we had connected Melissa with no one who might have had a motive to kill her. But Boudreau has found a cab driver who remembers taking her to Augie Feldman’s place about two this morning. She wasn’t seen after that until she showed up here — in the trunk. Get Feldman, Steve. Boudreau says he just went back to his rooming house after eating in a hash house. Boudreau is watching the place. Dominick is downstairs. Take him with you.”

Augie Feldman’s rooming house was on the lower side of town in a neighborhood of 1890 houses, huge, gloomy old hulks, that had been converted from once magnificent private homes. I rolled the car to a stop. Beside me, Dominick stirred ponderously, breathing through his adenoids. “There’s Boudreau,” Dominick said.

We got out of the car, drifted to the shadow at the far side of the sidewalk. Boudreau said, “He’s still in there. Room 10. Upstairs.”

“Cover us from here,” I said.

The front door creaked and the stairs sighed. Dominick and I stopped before the door of Room 10. We each put a hand under our coats against the pressure of our guns, and I palmed the knob and slammed the door open.

The room smelled. It looked fly-specked and scaly in the light of the one naked bulb. Augie Feldman reared up on the bed, a racing form and pencil in his hands, a cigarette dangling from the middle of his mouth.

I looked at him and remembered him as he had once been, prosperous, sure of himself, heavy on the dough. This quaking, gaunt hulk with the thinning grey hair, slack jowls and fear-haunted eyes was certainly a different man. The big-time bookie was long gone.

He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the overflowing ashtray from the straight chair beside the sway-backed bed and made haste to wipe the ashes, with his palm, that had spilled on the hard bottom of the chair.

“Hello, Steve. Sit down, sit down.” He pushed the chair toward me. I pushed it back. I watched a nervous tic develop in his left eye as he sat on the edge of the bed and stared up at us. The room was hot, close, unpleasant. I said, “What was she doing here in the early hours of morning, Augie.”

“You mean Melissa,” he whispered.

I waited. He said, “She was around here asking about Roy Meek. She knew how it had been between me and Meek once.”

“And how long was she here?”

“Not long.” The pouches under his eyes looked heavy and purple. He looked; at his hands. “She left about three o’clock this morning, said she was going home.”

“You’d better come along and tell it to Maxie.”

His gaze darted from Dominick to me. He licked his lips. “I’ll get my hat.”

We went out of the house with Augie between us. I put him in the back seat of the car between Boudreau and Dominick. When we got back to Maxie’s apartment building I got out of the car with Feldman and prodded him across the sidewalk. I would take him up alone. Dominick and Boudreau were both good men, but in a case like this Myart said you could never know for sure, you couldn’t be too careful who came into the penthouse.

At the top, Feldman slouched out of the elevator like a man sapped of strength and will. Myart met us in the living room. He looked at Augie with those narrow black eyes and said, “Take him in to Maxie.”

I opened the door to the den, shoved Augie in. Maxie was standing beside the couch, spread-legged, face slick, a near-empty rye bottle in his hand.

Augie stopped at the sight on the couch.

“Melissa,” Maxie hissed.

Augie’s face seemed to crumble and freeze that way, a thing of grey disjointed angle and shadow.

He stumbled across the room, mouth working, and slipped to his knees. A dry sob racked at his throat.

“You did it!” Maxie said.

Feldman didn’t say anything, just stayed there with those dry sobs tearing at him.

“Damn you, talk when I speak to you!” Maxie said. He swung the rye bottle. It hit Augie across the bridge of the nose, brought blood, knocked him over on his back.

I bent over him. “You knocked him out, Maxie.”

Maxie wiped his hand across his slack lips. His eyes were burning. Swaying on his feet, he said, “Drag him out in the living room. Then go down and bring up Georgie. If anybody can make him talk, Georgie can. And I want to watch it.”

I dragged Feldman out, Maxie shuffling along after me. He closed the door to the den. Myart’s gaze flicked at Maxie, darted to me. “He wants Georgie,” I said.

“Georgie’s covering the service stairs,” Myart said. “In the basement.”

I rode the elevator down, all the way to the basement. I stepped out in the warm, dry, heavy shadows. My feet scraped and sent echoes over the cement floor.

I moved back toward the service entrance. “Georgie?”

He didn’t answer, and I didn’t see him. I opened my mouth to say his name again; then I saw him. Georgie was a big mass of flesh near the dark yawning mouth of the service stairs. I dropped to one knee beside him. He was breathing, but as unconscious as a guy could get, a lump like a golf ball on the side of his head. I felt it then, the faint, cold draft of an open window.

I spun around fast, wanting to get the wall at my back, my hand dipping toward my gun.

“Do it and die,” a voice said.

I saw his face, hovering there in the shadows beside a boiler. He came toward me, a big gun stuck out in his fist. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. I tried to tear my eyes from his face and couldn’t.

“You’ll take me up, Hilliard,” he said, mouthing the words thickly. “You’ll take me right up to Maxie.”

“Listen, Meek, you can’t do it! You’ll never get out of the building alive.”

“Do you think I care?” Roy Meek said. He was doped to the gills, the rims of his eyes like frozen trickles of blood. But maybe he wouldn’t have needed the drug anyway.

“Do you know what it was like?” he whispered. “The same cell every day, every night. I had given her everything, my money, my very life, everything! I lived only to get out, to come back! No other man would ever have the pleasure of looking at that angel face and tawny hair again!”

Roy Meek looked at my face and laughed, so softly it was a bare whisper of sound in the stark basement. “Just take me to Maxie,” he breathed dreamily. “One minute with Maxie — and then I’ll never be sad again.”

He herded me with the gun. I was breathing hard. My collar was limp with sweat. Into the elevator.

The elevator rose slowly. The fifteenth. Maxie’s floor. “Open the door,” Meek hissed.

I opened the door. He slammed me with the gun, and I stumbled out into Maxie’s living room and fell to my knees.

Feldman wasn’t in the same place where I’d left him. And I saw that Maxie’s knuckles were covered with blood, and dimly I knew that Cecil Calhoun had crept out of the rumpus room. There must have been another tussle between Maxie and Feldman, and she had heard it, heard Maxie knocking Augie unconscious for the second time.

I tried to crawl to my feet. I got one glimpse of Maxie’s face, like a blurred, frozen thing. Behind me, Meek was sobbing out laughter. “It’s me doing it, rat! Me — Roy Meek!”

Then he began shooting. He shot Maxie four times. Myart had dived behind a couch. I had rolled out of the way, yelling to Calhoun to get down.

Then everything was silent. Meek whirled, leaped into the elevator, slammed the door, and the cage dropped away.

Myart came crawling out from behind the couch. Calhoun was helping me to my feet.

I stood up, shook my head to clear it. Myart snarled, “Get him, Steve! Get the stinking, hopped-up rat!”

Calhoun grabbed my arm, her face very intense. “Have you ever done anything like that before? Like killing a man on Myart’s orders?”

“No,” I said.

“Then it’s not too late.”

Staring into her face, thinking of all the blood and violence, I realized what she meant.

I said, “Myart, if you want Roy Meek go get him yourself.”

I took Calhoun’s arm, and led her out.

A week later I was in Calhoun’s house, showing her how to grill a steak.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“I’ve quit fighting the alarm clock every morning.”

“That’s fine. One of these days you’ll own that brokerage house.”

After we finished off the steak, she said, “I want to show you something.” I followed her into her studio. She turned on a white, bright light. My heart skipped a beat as I looked at the waxen head on the table. “Melissa!” I said.

“I had to do it,” she said. “It was inside my mind. It kept bothering me. I had to get it out.”

I looked at the head a long time, thinking of Maxie who was dead and whose organization had ruptured at every seam like a rotten apple bursting. And I thought of Augie Feldman and of Roy Meek, whom the cops had cornered after he’d killed Maxie.

I saw then what Calhoun had done with the head; after a few minutes the head seemed to change, and beneath the soft oval face and tawny hair it seemed I could see the real Melissa, a death’s head, a grinning skull. I don’t know how Calhoun managed to get that in her piece of work, but I knew the head would be around a long time, to remind us, to make us remember...