Dig A Dead Doll

  BETWEEN THE SYNDICATE AND THE SAILOR

  The gangsters who chased me into the alley weren’t gentlemen enough to let me get my clothes on, so I couldn’t blame the sailor for getting the wrong idea.

  There were ten of them, close on my heels. I saw a door and, at times like this, who waits for invitations?

  I barged through it, into a small bedroom. There was a young American sailor sitting there, waiting. He looked me up and down hungrily and said, “I was getting mad because it’s over a half-hour since the woman upstairs took my money and sent me in here. But, oh, baby, you’re sure worth waiting for!”

  It took me all of a half-second to look at the bed, the gleam in the sailor’s eye and figure out what kind of place I’d landed in.

  “I’m ready baby,” he said, reaching for me.

  Now how do you start telling an eager gob that you’re not that kind of a girl when you’re standing in front of him unadorned— and outside the door an angry mob is howling for your blood…?

  G. G. FICKLING is the pseudonym for two people—

  Skip and Gloria Fickling, who jointly created Honey West, first lady private eye in the hearts of paperback readers. The scene of the Ficklings’ successful teamwork is a modern little cliff-hanging house in Laguna Beach, California. They work at a seven-foot desk against an all-glass wall facing the Pacific Ocean with a typewriter on each side. His is pink—he’s the romantic and the fictioneer; hers is gray, “practical and cheap,” because she’s the sensible one whose forte is facts. DIG A DEAD DOLL is the seventh book about the girl detective with the sleuthmanship of Mike Hammer and the measurements of Marilyn Monroe.

  G. G. FICKLING

  PYRAMID BOOKS, 444 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York

  DIG A DEAD DOLL

  This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely coincidental.

  Published by Pyramid Rooks

  First printing: November 1960

  Copyright, © 1960, by Forrest E. and Gloria Fickling

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  ONE

  In the hot airless dark he crawled after me and wound a length of blonde hair around my throat. His body was hard and trembling and sweat streamed down his massive chest.

  “Senorita, I am going to kill you, but first—”

  Thick hands tore at my dress. I clawed at his swarthy face and kicked until he fell back in the muddy ground next to the arena, groaning.

  Rolling, still groggy from my fall, I jumped up, stumbling, toes digging into the soft, foul-smelling earth. Only a wedge of light angled down from a slot above the arena fence and it did little to help me see. I ran smack into a wall, bounced off and fell to my knees.

  He was on me in a flash, fingers gouging my back, ripping the dress off my shoulders and exposing me from the waist up. He knocked me over onto the dirt and fell on top of me, pinning my arms.

  “You eat fire,” he spat. “Fire eater I I like that.”

  He was a heavy-shouldered man with thick black hair. An obvious would-be torero. A member of Zingo’s death pack. His breath, hissing from his nostrils and mouth, smelled of cheap tequilla. He rubbed his lips down the side of my cheek rawly.

  We were in a narrow, covered corral attached to a training arena for bullfighters, a few miles outside Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.

  His desire to kill me was not something new. There was practically an epidemic going on. This was National Kill Honey West Week in Mexico.

  I kicked him in the stomach and his hard eyes softened momentarily.

  “I like you to hurt me,” he panted, the stubble of his dark beard cutting my face. He reared and slapped me viciously. I stifled a cry. He tore my belt loose and flung it against the arena fence.

  “Your skin is so white,” he said, taking huge swallows of air as he struggled with me. “So white. I have not seen such white skin since I was a young boy in Mexico City and there was a place where they had only Americano women.”

  He wore tight trousers cut in the Valencia style, a shirt knotted at the waist and a scarf around his neck.

  “You are a fool, senorita,” he growled between his teeth. “You want to know who Zingo is. Zingo pays high for you. Very high.”

  He had my black sheath dress yanked down to my waist and his dark eyes feasted hungrily. I bit his cheek. Blood spurted from the wound.

  “You are like a bad bull,” he moaned, backhanding me. “You never stop bucking and twisting and swerving. But I shall plunge the puntilla dagger until you scream for mercy.”

  His name was Juanito and he was a powerful man. Much more powerful than I imagined when I first saw him in the car. His eyes glittered in the faint light. He lifted his body over me, raising his hips and his legs. My right leg doubled under him and the knee caught his full weight as he came down. A sharp cry split his lips, half protest, half pain. He straightened for an instant, mouth twisted; then toppled face first into the dirt, hands clutching his stomach.

  I scrambled to my feet and lunged away as he rolled over, one hand reaching for my ankles. He missed and swore loudly, then retched in deep racking wheezes. There seemed to be only one way out of the huge walled corral and that was on the other side of the arena. Across the arena! I had already been in that sand-covered ring at their invitation. In the huge pale dark there had been nothing but foul odors, the. glistening horns and the jarring thump of hoofs racing toward me. I had had to climb the high fence. And fallen. That was when one of them came after me. The one with the thick black hair. They had ordered him to kill me. Only he was planning to do it in his own way, and in his own time.

  “Juanito!” a voice cried from across the arena. “Have you killed her? What is all the noise?”

  “She dies now!” Juanito returned hoarsely, having recovered enough now to come after me.

  He ran with his head down, illuminated in the wedge of light above the fence, a big sweating dark figure, trousers splattered with mud.

  I reached the arena gate, gasping for breath, still hurting from the fall. A thought creased my mind as I struggled with the outer lock. If Juanito and his friends caught me again I’d never leave Tijuana alive. They’d dig a nice deep grave and dump me into it. Face first. That was their specialty. How to escape their machine gun was my big problem. They had more firepower than the whole Mexican army.

  Somewhere a man called Zingo was no doubt laughing in his teeth because he thought I was already dead. Somewhere my old pal Fred Sims was languishing in a cell, faced with a firing squad and a charge of murder. I had to get out of this.

  The lock snapped open and I pushed down the wooden handle which would open the gate into the arena. He was only a few feet behind me, running hard in the soft, evil-smelling dirt.

  “Juanito!” the voice cried again from across the arena. “Your throat will be cut if you do not kill her!”

  “She dies now!” Juanito roared, catching my bare shoulder with one of his ponderous hands.

  I swung the gate into his face hard and he fell back, blood spurting from his nose. The arena was night dark as before, but now my eyes were more adjusted and I could distinguish the bull across the sand-covered surface. I ran into the arena, staying close to the cover of the wall.

  Screaming with pain and anger, Juanito followed me inside the arena, hand pressed to his face. The noise he made was all the angry beast needed. Juanito had only enough time to look up. His cry deepened into a horrified protest, but it was all too late. The bull, already infuriated from turpentine thrown on him by Zingo’s henchmen, bore into Juanito with a furious burst, hitting the gate at the same time. Both beast and man died almost instantaneousl
y. The black animal hit the heavy door with such a tremendous impact that it flew completely off its iron hinges, toppling over on him. Under it, also, was Juanito, broken and torn.

  I waited until they came into the arena from the other side. The lop-eared one, Punta Punta, came first, slowly, testily as if he expected the bull’s horns to be thrust into his stomach. His face shone with sweat in the warm night air and the gold charm around his neck sparkled. Then came Luis, the handsome nightclub manager, and Manuel, the maricon.

  They saw in the pale light the door and the black beast lying on his side in the sand. Each of them issued a sound like the popping of a light bulb on a sidewalk. They did not see me. At least not until they were beyond where I stood in a small circular ring. I made my move as silently as possible, but a slight sound of gravel under my feet brought them around quickly.

  “It is the girl!” Manuel cried, in his high-pitched, effeminate voice.

  “Get her!” Punta Punta bellowed.

  There was not enough time to lock the heavy gate on the side they had entered. Luis was very agile and quick, obviously having developed muscular coordination from his experience in bull fighting. He caught me in the narrow tunnel leading outside the small training stadium. His hands wrapped hard around me and he slammed me against a dirty board wall, white teeth glinting maliciously in his dark mouth.

  He laughed bitterly. “You are such a beautiful blue-eyed woman, Honey, it is a shame to kill you. But it is your neck or mine.”

  His fingers locked around my throat. I looked back in the dim light at the approaching figures of Manuel, a satisfied smile on his squat red face, and Punta Punta, grinning and shaking his head at what he saw.

  That’s when I thought about Pete Freckle and the day I first saw him fight in the big ring here in Tijuana. It seemed a long way back, Eons. Yet it was only last Sunday. Four days ago. Those days flashed before my eyes with the impact of trampling hoofs thundering over the body of a felled matador. I’d accepted Pete’s invitation to watch him fight in a corrida. He’d called me at my office in Long Beach and said it was vitally important. But that’s all he’d said I figured something was up. Something more than just a match between man and toro. I didn’t know the half of it. Then. Now as Luis’s fingers tightened around my throat I knew, but it all seemed too late. Pete Freckle’s smiling, handsome face swam dizzily in my brain. I’d driven down to see him on that Sunday—along a hundred and twenty mile stretch of Pacific Coast Highway— fronted by rolling blue surf and green trees—through San Diego and across the border. I’d never seen a bullfight before. Never knew the difference between a banderillero and a picador—or cared. But in that huge, screaming stadium I learned. The hard way. And I watched, open-mouthed, as Pete Freckle, torero Americano, fought as he had never fought before. Then came that last bull of the afternoon. And Pete nearly had him… .

  TWO

  The bull came out of the gathering shadows into the late afternoon sunlight that streamed over the Western rim of Tijuana Stadium.

  He was a massive gray animal and sweat ran down his glistening flanks. The fight was nearly over. This was the tercio, or third act. When the matador takes up his muleta, a brilliant red cloth folded over a twenty-five inch stick called the palillo. and his sword. Holding these in his left hand, he removes his fighting hat, the montera, and crosses to the box of the Authority of the stadium, where he requests permission to kill his hull. After this procedure, the fighter then makes his brindis, or dedication of the toro. This one Pete had dedicated to me, grinning broadly, throwing a kiss in my direction.

  . Now the bull was near death. Blood ran from angry holes punctured by steel banderillas which glinted in his hump. He partially stumbled, hoofs kicking up white sand, as he turned sharply around toward the muscular, darkhaired matador, who stood in the center of the arena.

  Senor Vicaro, seated next to me in the Mayor’s Box, whispered, “This is the time when the bravery of the bull and the courage of the man receive their greatest test.”

  Vicaro had been kind enough to explain the terminology and ritual behind the fighting. He was a former mayor of Tijuana and an official of the plaza de toros.

  A hot breeze blowing in from the toril gate, from where the bulls were loosed, ruffled Pete’s muleta, drawing the wounded animal’s attention. The crowd tensed into ominous silence. A paper wrapper from an enchilada whirled silently in the slate blue sky. The smell of sweat and heat and cigar smoke lay heavy in the air.

  Pete lifted his sword slowly and cried, “Ea, toro! Eaaaa torooo!”

  The ponderous beast lifted his head slightly and pawed the sand, hind legs tensing.

  In that infinitesimal space of time the matador, clad in a gold and white costume, suddenly dropped his muleta, took an awkward step backward and grimaced.

  Senor Vicaro issued an oath of warning, but his words were blotted out by the pounding of hoofs and the savage roar that erupted from the crowd.

  The bull’s right horn caught Pete a little below the stomach and tossed him into the air like a straw dummy. The people in the mammoth circular arena rose in unison, faces wrenched, mouths split. A few fumbling protests lifted. The bull hooked again, raising the matador up-up-up into the sky, a red spray erupting from the horn’s puncture.

  Pete didn’t utter a sound as the angry gray beast threw him to the sand, gashing the matador with sharp hoofs as he backed away from the picador’s varas which were thrust out.

  As the bull’s attention was drawn by another torero, three men dashed from behind a burladero shield to the crumpled matador. Pete lay on his side, legs and arms askew, gold and white jacket and pants swiftly darkening with blood.

  The men lifted him gently and carried him from the ring.

  By the time Senor Vicaro and I reached the tunnel leading to the dressing rooms deep under the stadium, word was being passed that Pete Freckle was dead.

  My heart sank. I’d known Pete since I was a little girl in rompers. We’d played together in high grassy fields near where we’d been born in Bellflower, California. He’d been the first boy to ever kiss me. A shy clumsy kiss under a tree on the way home from grammar school. It had been raining that day and the grass was wet where we lay. Our romance blossomed in high school. Then Pete went into the Army. When he got out he decided to move to Mexico to live for a while. To find himself. There were no promises made. We just decided to see what might happen. And things happened fast. My father, private investigator Hank West, wound up in a rain-washed alley behind the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles with a bullet in his back. I took over the detective agency and Pete seemingly vanished in Mexico. That had been four years ago. An urgent, mysterious phone call from Pete had revived our relationship. For one day. We hadn’t even had a chance to talk. Now he was gone. In a blaze of flashing hoofs and horns.

  “I am sorry, Senorita West,” Vicaro said sadly, as we stopped outside Pete’s dressing room. “He was a good matador. One of the best American toreros ever to fight in Tijuana.”

  I shook my head grimly. Vicaro was gaunt, dark and incredibly immaculate in a blue business suit. He was in his mid-fifties and the flesh of his thin face was beginning to show wear. He ground a cigar stub into the floor and wiped his mouth with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  ‘Did the matador ever tell you about me?” Vicaro asked, surveying a group of Mexicans clustered at the end of the tunnel.

  “No,” I answered lowly. My mind was retracing the seconds before Pete was hooked by the bull. The strange way he had faltered.

  “I invited Pete to perform in Tijuana. You see I am what you Americanos call a matchmaker. I am the impresario. I arrange the show here each Sunday.” I

  A man with sullen dark eyes came out of Pete’s room, stopped for an instant and studied Vicaro, then spat on the tile floor and moved on.

  “Who was that?” I asked, noticing that the man joined a group at at the end of the tunnel.

  Vicaro smiled thinly. “Carlos Ortega. A would-be torero. He was a
protege of the matador. Pete has been staying with Carlos in a little house on the outskirts of town.” His thin mouth puckered slightly. “I do not like Carlos.”

  “The feeling seems to be mutual,” I said, glancing at the dressing room door. “Is it all right if I see Pete—?”

  Vicaro lifted his hand abruptly. “No, I am sorry, senorita, but we have a very strong rule against women seeing—” he stammered, “—well, you know what a bull can do. It is not pretty.”

  I shrugged, regarding the young men in the tunnel. They kept looking our way, faces heavy with scowls. Suddenly, a figure broke through their ranks. He was clad in a matador’s costume, silver and gray with red touches on the jacket, a handsome fellow with a deeply dimpled chin and a boyish look in his wide-set blue eyes. He laughed as he passed the group, slapping one of the men on the shoulder. The matador, a rich dress cape slung over his left shoulder, walked with a light airy step and whistled as he approached us. He wore a montera pressed firmly to his eyebrows.

  “And who is this?” I asked quickly.

  “Rafael,” Vicaro whispered. “Mexico’s top matador. Be careful what you say. He has a quick temper with women.”

  The torero’s eyes flashed as he stopped outside Pete’s dressing room. “Vicaro,” he said angrily, “you were warned not to use the Americano, Senor Freckle. He did not have enough experience. His blood is on your hands. Sleep well with, it.”

  “But, matador,” Vicaro argued, “you said yourself only last week that Senor Freckle was ready for a match here in the arena.”

  “I changed my mind,” Rafael said, studying me. “What is this woman doing down here?”

  “I must apologize, matador,” Vicaro stammered, “but this is Senorita Honey West. She is an old friend of Senor Freckle. I could not refuse her—”

  “I see.” Rafael fixed cold blue eyes on my face and then let them drift down slowly. My gray sheath, which was cut low in front, got the X-Ray treatment in no uncertain terms.